I can’t remember much of what I learned about Jim Bridger in school. I seem to be able to remember two things. His middle name was Felix. (How’s that for a bit of trivia that I don’t get to use very often?) And he was the first non-native to see the geysers of Yellowstone Park. I’m not completely confident in either of these facts, so you might want to look them up yourself. Some of the things I learned in grade school weren’t completely accurate at the time that I learned them and my memory has a way of twisting facts to meet the story. We learned about jim Bridger in Montana History and he was an important person in our local area because Bridger Pass and the Bridger Mountains both bore his name. So did Bridger Bowl, our favorite ski area. Bridger pass is somewhere in Wyoming and figures somehow in the process of driving cattle from Colorado to the Canadian border. I don’t think jim Bridger was much for herding cattle, but he was a famous mountain man and explorer and perhaps he scouted the trail. The Bridger trail passes through Park and Gallitan counties, just west of my home town.

When you drive over Bozeman pass, which we did frequently, the Gallatin Mountains are to the south and the Bridgers to the north.

All of that gives me no clue as to how Bridger, South Dakota got its name. I guess I assume that it has come connection with the mountain man jim Bridger, but I don’t know if I made that up because of where I grew up or if it is really true.

As towns go, Bridger isn’t one of the big ones. It is little more than a housing development with a couple of churches and a small community center thrown in. I think that it might more appropriately be called Takini, but that name is given to the school up on the hill above Bridger. The claim to fame of Bridger is that it is the place where the survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre spent the rest of the winter. Stricken with grief over the loss of their loved ones and horror over the wantonness and randomness of the killings, the Lakota survivors headed north toward Dakota country in the hopes that Sitting Bull might give them assistance to make it through the winter. They didn’t make it to Green Grass, but finally ran out of energy and the ability to keep walking near the site of present day Bridger. They had been following the Cheyenne River and after the Belle Fourche river flowed into it they kept going, a bit uncertain where they had to start cutting across ground to get the the Moreau and Green Grass. They didn’t even know if Sitting Bull was at Green Grass. But the journey was too strenuous for the dispirited, grieving, injured and nearly frozen people. So they stopped by the river. There, in the partial shelter of the cottonwood trees, they settled in to try to survive the winter. Later some food came from Green Grass and somehow they survived.

It must have been a miserable winter.

Grief and cold and poor nutrition don’t make for comfortable surroundings and pleasant dreams.

Takini school was started to provide an education for the children of the survivors. I don’t speak Lakota. I only know a few words, so I usually ask a native speaker, most often an elder, to tell me what the words are and what they mean. I get different answers when I ask for a translation of Takini. I guess that the dictionary translation is “survivor.” Byron Buffalo once told me that it has a deeper meaning than that, something like “barely surviving,” or “nearly dead.” Matt Iron Hawk once told me it means “one who has survived the worst,” or sometimes that “the worst is behind.” Another Lakota speaker once told me it means, “We’re still here!”

People have lived at or near Bridger ever since that terrible winter of 1890. Many of the people who live in the area can trace their lineage to one of the survivors.

But there are no services at Bridger. No store, no gas station, no food bank, no social services - there’s nothing except a group of houses. Folks can drive the 10 miles to Howe’s for gas and a few convenience store items. It’s 90 miles to Pierre. There’s a Walmart in Pierre. Rapid is over a hundred miles. Eagle Butte is about 80 on the paved road, less than 70 on the gravel. There are some shops and services at Faith, about 35 miles away. In the summer, folks take their kids up to faith to swim in the pool. The river is pretty muddy and often very mosquito-infested most of the summer.

Byron Buffalo is the pastor of our little church at Bridger. I think he usually drives on the gravel from his home in Eagle Butte. That’s maybe 130 miles each trip - hard on tires, hard on windshields, hard on the driver, too. But they have an active and growing ministry down there. It seems to me as if the church always has some special project going each time I visit. They have a wind generator so they can provide heat and shelter and hot showers when the electricity goes out in the community. They raise chickens. They garden. They have a few horses. They provide a place for people to gather and community to grow. And Byron speaks Lakota. He has listened first-hand to the stories of the elders in their own language. He can preach in a language they understand.

So today we get to drive up to Bridger and meet with Byron. We’ve got a little convoy of trucks and trailers hauling firewood. It is good to get the wood to those who need it. It is even better to meet our friends and partners in a pace of deep spiritual meaning and memory.

It is, as they say, a good way to spend a day.

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The last couple of days have been crazy busy for us. Our congregation has been experimenting with changing small parts of our worship this fall. We are seeking a more “blended” style of worship that respects tradition, honors those who have a long history in the church, but also has something for newcomers and is inviting of children and their parents. Like other congregations, we are finding that this is a huge juggling act. Some people like parts of what we are doing and don’t like other parts. There is no common agreement in such a diverse congregation. Because of this, I have been putting in a lot more effort and thought each time I plan worship. This Sunday is especially important and the service is complex: communion, children present for the entire service, our first service with both the choir and the new music group, all saints recognition, and more. I always want worship to be just right, but for this service I really want things to “shine.”

And it is newsletter week.

And we are in the midst of our fall stewardship drive.

And there was a special event for children at the church last night.

And the capital funds drive needs attention right now to keep it on schedule.

And so on and so forth.

Throughout the afternoon, however, when I looked up from my work out the window of the church, i could see a very small crew of Woodchucks working very hard. There weren’t many volunteers for the project, but they kept loading trailer after trailer. It was impressive how much they got done.

It was obvious whenever I lifted my eyes that I wasn’t the only one working hard for the church yesterday. I wasn’t the only one who was putting in long hours. I wasn’t the only one who is passionate about the ministry of the church.

There are some parts of the ministry that can feel a little lonely. Since we aren’t primarily motivated by recognition or reward, we often need to work in the background. Worship on Sunday, if it works right, will make a lot of other people look really good. The Woodchuck deliveries this fall help build a network of relationships between our congregation and other congregations. It isn’t only about firewood. It is about fostering deep and lasting relationships.

But making all of those things happen requires a lot of work. My dad used to comment, “You have no idea how much work is required to make this look effortless!” Some days just slogging through the chores and doing the work is pretty tiring and it can be a bit lonely.

I wanted to go out and just say “thank you” to those hard workers, who were investing so much time and energy working with such a small crew, but I was juggling the newsletter, which goes out on paper, by e-mail, and is posted to our web site. It has to be converted for computers, smart phones and tablet readers. It has to be checked for errors (though we never catch them all) and omissions (and we always forget something!). I needed to discipline myself to staying at my desk with my nose to the grindstone just to get everything done.

It was only after getting home after a long and tiring day that the obvious came to me. Those faithful Woodchucks don’t need me to say thank you. They don’t work for recognition. But they would appreciate it if I could put in a little time to work side by side with them. And that I can do. This morning I can do it. Even if I can’t give an extra day, I can give an hour or so.

Faithful workers in the church aren’t really alone.

The office where I work has been the work place of five standing ministers and at least thee interim ministers. Before the current building was constructed, 21 pastors served this congregation working out of a variety of offices. The place where I do my work could never be completely lonely. It is filled with the memory of the faithful service of so many others. In my office pastors have strained to find the right words for sermons and the right hymns for worship. In that office, pastors have counseled those who were grieving and those who were intending to marry. In that office, lives have been shared and faith has been nurtured. If the walls could speak they would give witness to the faithfulness that has been acted out in that place.

Even late at night when I walk around the building locking doors and checking windows I am never alone in the building.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

Loneliness may just be the state of mind that occurs when one forgets that God never leaves us alone. It might be a description of what it means to forget that even when we aren’t consciously praying, God is always listening. God is always working alongside us whether the task be Gospel preaching or firewood hauling.

Here is the thing. It is not so much the past ministers who are with me when I work as it is those who are yet to come. I really have never had to prove myself to those faithful servants of old. What I do need to do is to make my contribution in such a way that when I leave the office, it will be a warm, loving and supportive place for the ministries that are to follow. I’ve figured out how to balance the budget and keep up with at least part of the work. What I need to do now is to figure out how to create a place for ministry for years to come.

It is good work. It is meaningful work. And when I think it is lonely work, I just need to remember all of the others who are invested in what we do.

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The things I remember most about Halloween from my childhood are carving pumpkins and trim-or-treat. Pumpkins were a special treat for our family. Like many families with several children, there were plenty of things that we shared. At Halloween, however, we each got our own pumpkin. I don’t remember much of the process of selecting the pumpkins, and I suppose that they were probably selected for us by our parents. We knew that there were larger pumpkins that existed and a few families in our town would sport jack-o-lanterns carved from bigger pumpkins, but we each and a pumpkin a foot or more in diameter, large enough to make a good jack-o-lantern.

We had to cut the top out at the right angle so it would go back in without falling through. Then came the chore of removing the seeds. We’d set out newspapers to receive the gloopy mess of seeds and strings. It was a chore to scrape the inside of the pumpkin and get everything cleaned out. Then came the fun part: carving the face. I put my efforts into the mouth. A little smile wasn’t bad, but the important part was to leave a bit of pumpkin in the cut out mouth space to resemble two or three teeth. Somehow a smile without any teeth didn’t look quite as good. Circles are hard to cut, so noses usually were triangles and sometimes the eyes were too. If you were really careful you could leave a small circle attached in the bottom of an eye to resemble a pupil. Next, you had to cut a chimney in the pumpkin to let out the smoke and drip wax from the candle onto the bottom to hold the candle upright inside the pumpkin.

My mother was a stickler for proper food and nutrition a long time before it was popular. We often had what we kids considered to be rather strange treats at our house. One year it was pencils. A new pencil is a nice thing, I guess. And they were orange. And my mom did make little pumpkins to attach to the eraser end of the pencils. But still, you can’t eat a pencil. The year she did toothbrushes wasn’t a hit, either. The trick for us as trick-or-treaters was to share notes on who was giving out which treats. You wanted to make sure you got your share of candy bars and hard candy, but cookies and brownies weren’t bad, either. If someone was giving out apples, which was common, you wanted to get that in the bag before the cookies, or the cookies might crumble when the apple was dropped in. Caramel apples were a special treat. Popcorn balls came in a variety of recipes. Some were better than others. We quickly rated the treats from various houses and shared information with siblings and friends as we cruised up and down the streets. Our town wasn’t all that big and we didn’t really have any neighborhoods that kids had to avoid.

Back in those days, people didn’t go in for outdoor decorations much. If it wasn’t too windy, we’d put our pumpkins on the front porch. If it was windier, we’d set them up in the windows. Sometimes we made paper jack-o-lanterns at school and hung them in the windows as well.

Some kids in our town had store-bought costumes, and I think that we had them once or twice. Store bought costumes usually consisted of a plastic mask, held in place with an elastic string and a cheep plastic smock that pulled on over all the rest of your clothes. There were some halloweens when I was a kid when it got pretty cold. Mostly we made our own costumes out of old bed sheets. Ghosts were popular in our town. Sometimes we experimented with some one’s old make up. The ever popular hobo costume consisted of clothes with holes in them, an old hat and whiskers drawn in with black - regardless of the color of the hair on top. It never occurred to us in those days that it might be strange for all of those blond haired kids to have such black beards. Our town was rather strong on persons of Norwegian heritage. Some years we got fancy and tried to make animal costumes, but the year we made the two-person horse costume, we fell short of our design goals. And it was really hard to follow someone around all evening bent over at the waist hanging on to the other person’s waist.

I was thinking about all of this because I read somewhere that Americans are expected to spend a whopping 7.4 billion dollars on halloween this year. Plans at our house include some treats for the neighbor children. We live on the edge of town and don’t get too many trick-or-treaters, but we like to see the kids in their costumes and like to have something to share with them. That’s about it. Even with the predicted 7% to 8% increase in chocolate prices this year, I’m thinking we’ll spend less around $5 between the two of us in our house on halloween this year. If I did my math right, to get to 7.4 billion the 316 million people in the United States have to spend an average of $25 per person. That puts us at about 10% of average. Someone else has to be spend a lot more than we do in order to bring the numbers up where they are.

Of course, we aren’t investing in adult costumes, a big slice of annual halloween spending. And our cat isn’t much for clothes - pet costumes amount of $350,000,000 of sales annually in the U.S. We’ll spend $0 on pet costumes this year, the same as our budget has been for all of our married life.

It is possible, however, that the statisticians haven’t considered all of the costs of the holiday. We always keep our cat inside and safe just in case there is a less than kind prankster out and about, but I’ve heard that halloween can be stressful for pets. I know it was for my brother’s cat the year we put it in a paper bag and took it with us. As soon as the bag was opened, the cat shrieked and ran for home as quickly as possible, but not before drawing blood on my hands. Did they figure in the cost of band-aids in their estimate of Halloween expenses?

I wonder how much Americans spend on pet psychiatry following such stressful experiences. We’ve never invested much in that field, either.

Hope you have a happy holiday.

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There is a small change in today’s blog. I doubt that even my most dedicated readers will notice it, so I’ll tell you what it is at the very beginning. I’ve removed the word “copyright” and the copyright symbol (c) from the tag at the end of the blog. While I would like to get credit for my ideas and for my writing, I have never had any intention of suing anyone or going to court over a quote lifted from something that I wrote. I’m not sure how original my ideas are in the first place. I am a fairly voracious reader. Although I don’t keep my books blog up to date very well, I am constantly reading words that others write. I read books, magazines, scholarly articles and journals. Increasingly I read online. I read the blogs of several other writers. I read scripture every day.

More often than not the ideas that are expressed in this blog come from my brain, which is filled with words that came from others. Although I’d like to think that I am an original thinker, the truth is that my ideas are deeply influenced by what I read and by the conversations I have with others. I’m pretty sure that the members of the pastors’ book club in which I participate can recognize the influence of the books we read together on my preaching.

While I try to acknowledge the source of my ideas, I don’t always know where an idea came from. I understand the technical definition of plagiarism and I try my best to avoid it by writing first thing in the morning without having others’ words in front of me while I write. I try to give credit when I am aware that something I am writing comes from another source.

So I’ve decided that any ideas that appear in the blog are going to be offered freely to whoever wants them. I doubt if I will ever attempt to publish in printed form the essays of the blog, but if that happens, I’ll deal with copyright issues at the time. For now, these are my thoughts. They have been heavily influenced by the thoughts of others. Fell free to play with these ideas in your own thinking.

Here is a story that has gotten a lot of attention. Back in 1996, in a big Apple product announcement presentation, Steve Jobs said, “Picasso had a saying - ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” There are two big problems with this quote. The first problem is that there is no evidence that Picasso ever said those words. Similar words have been attributed to Oscar Wilde who is reported to have said, “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Again, however, there is no documented evidence that Wilde said the words. The closest to a source for the quote comes from “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism” by T.S. Eliot, published in 1920:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. (p. 114)

And that brings us to the second problem with the quote, one that is more serious in my way of thinking. I’m not sure that Steve Jobs really meant it when he said it. At the time, Apple had been very successful in defending itself from patent infringement lawsuits. Many of the ideas incorporated into the early Lisa and Macintosh computers had been developed by research facilities like Xerox PARC and SRI. In 1989 Xerox PARC sued Apple for copyright infringement, but the lawsuits were unsuccessful. Perhaps it was the failure of those lawsuits that brought the quote about borrowing and stealing to Jobs’ mind and public speaking at a time when the company was in the process of developing wildly successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

By 2009, after he had been struggling with cancer, Jobs seemed to have taken on a different attitude:

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

I’m a pretty big fan of Apple products. I use them every day. And I followed Steve Jobs’ life and career since the mid 1980’s. I even met him face-to-face on one occasion when I officiated at a wedding that he attended. He complimented me on my leadership of the ceremony at the reception that followed. It was an event he soon forgot, but that I keep remembering. That said, I’m not in love with the attitude conveyed by his anger over his competitors’ products. It seems that he wanted to set up some kind of a double standard: When Apple steals, it’s creative. When someone else steals from Apple it is horrible and we will destroy them.

I’m not convinced that ideas are commodities that can be bought and sold like copyrights and patents. At least I’m not sure that it is good for the process of creative thinking for us to tread ideas like commodities. Sharing and adapting and borrowing and changing are the way our minds work. In an open society with lots of free-flowing ideas creativity increases not decreases.

I’m not a fan of high fashion, but I do happen to know that in the fashion industry it is not illegal to copy a design. It is only illegal to copy the label. And there is plenty of creative thinking going on in fashion design.

Maybe my words never belonged to me in the first place. I play with the order of words on the page (or on the screen in the case of my blog), but I’m using words that have been used before and will be used again and again. They aren’t mine.

Feel free to quote me on the topic.

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Yesterday I had a short break between events and I had a few minutes to sit in the church parlor with a friend. It has been 5 months since that friend was widowed and he continues to work through a journey of grief. One of the things that he has often said to me over the months is that he didn’t have experiences to prepare him for this loss. Both of his parents are still living. The death didn’t occur in the order that most of us experience such things. Since my friend is a musician he thinks in terms of practice. For this major life event, there was no practice. He has been just thrown into the depths of grief without a guide.

Of course that is the case for everyone. You can anticipate the death of a loved one, but there is no way to prepare. What is more, each situation of grief is unique. What you have learned by going through the journey of grief over the loss of one loved one is not the same experience that you will have when another loved one dies.

For my friend, one role that I play is to remind him that it is going well. He is doing a good job with his grief. It is OK to still feel sad sometimes. It is normal to have something unexpectedly set off a flood of tears. His emotions are not out of control. It seems to reassure him just for him to know that he can discuss the process with others.

One of my mentors from an earlier stage in my life used to talk about all of the little griefs that we experience. He had a rather silly presentation in which he would talk through the stages of grief over a lost sock. When he first looked in the drawer and the sock was missing, he immediately went into denial: “It isn’t really gone. It has to be here someplace!” After denial, there was anger: “Who stole my sock!” Next comes bargaining: “Let me find that sock and I’ll be more careful to pick up my clothes and keep everything neat in the laundry.” Bargaining is followed by depression: “I feel like just going back to bed and giving up on this day.” After those stages comes acceptance: “I guess I’ll have to wear a different pair of socks today.”

The point of his presentation is not that we should get emotional over a lost sock, but rather that we have lots of small losses in our lives and if we are observant, it is possible to learn from small losses some skills that can ease the process of grief when a really big loss occurs.

It is easy to think about the little losses in the Autumn. One of the losses I notice most is the loss of daylight. In the summer I can paddle in the wee hours of the morning and still have a pleasant evening sitting on my deck the same day. These days when I do get up and go paddling before work it is still dark when I’m taking the boat out of the water. And if we get lucky enough to have dinner outdoors we don’t linger very long because it is starting to get cool before we finish our meal. In Autumn we notice the leaves turning color and falling from the trees as the trees prepare for an other winter of survival in the face of the storms. Even though we have had exceptionally pleasant weather this fall, we know that winter is coming and we can see it in the animals and plants that surround us. And each autumn is the reminder that another year has passed and we are another year older than the last time we experienced this season. In several North American tribes, one’s age and maturity was measured by counting the number of winters one had survived.

One of the blessings of having lived a few decades is that one begins to collect experiences that inform other things that happen in your life. In my family I have been through the death of a sister, my father, a brother and my mother. We have seen the deaths of my wife’s mother and father. We have walked the path of grief and at times known the journey of multiple griefs playing out at the same time. Three of those deaths listed above occurred in the same year. I isn’t that I am an expert in grief, but I have learned that I can survive and that grief is a journey that moves towards a sense of healing.

Then on this last Saturday I stood by one of the elders of our Dakota Association at the burial of a great grandson. The elder is one of the best funeral pastors I have ever met. He has a way of officiating at a committal that helps the mourners move on from this incredibly difficult experience. Over the years he has officiated at a lot of funerals. I doubt if anyone has a count of the number of times he has stood at the head of a grave and delivered words of committal and prayers for the grieving family members.

But there were no words for what we were experiencing on Saturday. Even a respected elder with years of experience and mountains of wisdom can be thrown by life’s unexpected twists and turns and the crushing reality of the death of a child.

Maybe my old mentor is right: little losses prepare us for the big ones. But maybe he is only partially right: there are some experiences for which there is no preparation.

What I do know is that we are not alone. Ours is not the first generation of our people to have know incredible loss and grief. We aren’t the first ones to feel like shaking our fist at God and questioning what has happened. This isn’t the first time our people have tried to bargain in the face of grief.

And it isn’t the last. We will go on. And going on means that there will be other occasions of grief.

Which brings me to another thing I know. We are survivors. Even though each of us will one day die from this life, our people go on. God isn’t finished with the journey of our family of faith in this generation.

And some days, just surviving is enough.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Today is Reformation Sunday. It is a holiday observed primarily in congregations with Lutheran backgrounds. The tradition is to wear red. to mark the occasion. Our congregation has deep roots in the Reformation, but we have not made a practice of doing much in observation of Reformation Sunday. Unlike other reform movements in the church, the Protestant Reformation not only precipitated a split within Christianity, it created a tone and a mood of dissension that continued with additional splits and divisions into a wide variety of different expressions of faith. Once the Protestant Reformation got going there were a lot of differences of practice and belief. One of the big divisions in the community was over the practice of baptism. Many Protestant congregations continued the practice of the Roman Catholic church, baptizing all who were presented, regardless of age. The practice of baptizing by pouring or sprinkling water as a symbolic gesture was the most common form of baptism long before the Reformation. The new Testament reports baptism of entire families as they enter the church.

Some people developed a strong attachment to the making of a commitment at the time of baptism. From their point of view, baptism required a decision and a commitment and therefore should not be offered to children who are not yet old or mature enough to make their own independent decisions. In general the same congregations that opted for adult-only baptism also preferred full immersion. They became known as anabaptists. The name didn’t come from the practice of immersion or from the practice of baptizing only consenting adults, but rather from the practice of baptizing someone who had already been baptized. In other parts of the church (and in the tradition where our church stands), there was an adherence to the conviction that baptism, as a sacrament, was beyond human control. Once baptized, always baptized was the point of view and the practice of re-baptizing someone who had already been baptized demonstrated a lack of faith in the power of baptism. The argument was intense and there are still those who can take sides in the debate that continues to be divisive in some corners of the church.

What is clear in contemporary Christianity is that people of good faith and deep commitment live our their lives of faith on both sides of the debate. While it is easy for me to see where our congregation lies in the historical stream and I am very comfortable with the practices of our church. I am also deeply aware that there are good people of faith practicing their faith in a different context. A good example is our sister congregation in Costa Rica. In that church the practice is a dedication of infants to God without baptism and then the baptism of young teens when they are able to make their own decisions and commitments. I have participated in the deeply moving baptism ceremonies of our sister church.

What I have not knowingly done is to re-baptize someone who has already been baptized. In or corner of the church, the repeatable rite is confirmation. The confirmation of a baptism with the laying on of hands is our rite for the entrance into adult membership in the church. We repeat that rite at significant moments of recommitment to Christ and the church. I have participated in such a ceremony at the time of a change of name, or a fresh discovery of God’s call for an individual.

One church with its roots deep in the anabaptist tradition is the Mennonite Brethren Church. Members of this church attempt to live simple lives of faithful service. The name comes from Menno Simons, a Dutch priest who adopted anabaptist beliefs and led others to follow. Early in the history of the church, there was a split over the degree to which the faithful should embrace modern technologies and ways. Those preferring the most simple of lives have become to be known as Amish while those who prefer the name Mennonite tend to adopt more modern technologies and conveniences. There are plenty of conservative Mennonite congregations who require members to dress simply and require women to cover their heads, but in those corners of the church there would not be the rejection of modern conveniences such as telephones, automobiles and modern farming equipment.

In recent years, conservative Mennonites, primarily with roots in congregations located in southern Manitoba, have been sending missionaries to serve on the Cheyenne River reservation in central South Dakota. Their presence has been loving and caring for the indigenous people of the area. It is hard to tell if this is simply another wave of missionaries - which have had both positive and negative impacts. Part of my reaction when I first encountered them was to wonder if they are simply so conservative that they are attempting in the 21st century what our church attempted in the 19th century. As our church has learned from its history of mission work, we have tended to do less sending of our people with their cultural ways into other communities and more developing partnerships with the people who live in those communities and encouragement of local leadership. Regardless of these differences, the Mennonites have been good partners and have provided significant ministry, especially in the Cherry Creek area.

Yesterday, however, was not a day to look at theological differences, or differences in mission approach. It was a day of grief. We gathered for the funeral and burial of a 20-month-old child who had died in tragic circumstances. While we might not be able to come to agreement about theology or practice, we certainly could gather in our grief to worship God. And that is what we did. To an outsider it might have appeared to be a strange gathering of Native Americans, those of us with European backgrounds and ways of dress, and Mennonites with stricter forms of dress who have arrived very recently. As I drove home, I decided that it was my first Dakota/Mennonite funereal.

It was the right ceremony for the community on that day. The Mennonites brought their beautiful and simple a cappella singing. We from our church background brought a rich tradition of preaching and biblical interpretation. Our Dakota partners brought their prayers and deep spirituality. We all brought our grief and offered it to God, who is not troubled by our differences.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

As I drove through Isabel South Dakota yesterday, I had about 50 miles left to go to get to highway 12 just across the river from Mobridge. Going through Timber Lake saves a few miles given the direction I was going, but you can also cut straight north of Isabel to Highway 12. It’s about 40 miles to the US highway that way.

I remember the first time I drove that road. We had gone to Isabel from our new home in Hettinger, North Dakota. We were occupying a 3-bedroom parsonage with a finished basement after having spent the first five years of our marriage in furnished student apartments. When we accepted the position in Hettinger, our furniture amounted to a small metal desk and a table for a sewing machine. We did have enough books and miscellaneous household items to fill up a few boxes.

After seeing the parsonage and accepting the job we started to look for furniture to fill our new home. We got a sofa and a chair from Susan’s folks. We found a bed somewhere and a chest of drawers. Susan’s folks picked up a small kitchen table and a couple of chairs at a garage sale and we had found a washing machine and a dryer that were used but nearly new. The parsonage was furnished with a stove and a refrigerator. I built some bookshelves and we were in business - sort of.

The house looked pretty empty. There was nothing in the dining area in the corner of that large living room and there was plenty of open carpet between where a dining table could have gone and the small sofa and chair. Our stereo was set up on some block and board shelves, but that was it.

After visiting with family, we were offered a dining room table and six chairs from Susan’s Aunt and Uncle, who lived in Isabel. We were eager to accept. I managed to borrow a Ford Ranchero for the trip of about 100 miles each way and we arranged to meet the relatives at the farmhouse where they hadn’t lived for nearly 20 years. They had rented the place to others, but it had just become unoccupied and they had decided to remove their things from the house.

We looked a little bit like the Beverly Hillbillies with that table, a sideboard and six chairs in the small box of the Ranchero. I had plenty of rope and made a male of lines across the box, but everything was secure.

Before we left, we heard the story of the first 40 years or more of the life of that table. It seems that Susan’s aunt and uncle married during the ’30’s and those were hard times in that part of the country. They moved into a humble farm house and survived by mining coal, raising sheep and doing a bit of farming as well. It was a hard existence. One of their entertainments was looking through the Montgomery Wards catalogues. On one of those fantasy shopping trips, they discovered a wooden dining room table with six upholstered chairs. They set their sights on that table and began saving. It arrived by train and they went to town to pick it up. It had served them and their guests until they moved from the farm in 1960 and had been part of the furnishings for renters until we arrived to take that table to the next phase of its life.

That table lived with us in Hettinger, North Dakota for seven years and then moved with us to our home in Boise, Idaho for a decade and was loaded up and moved to Rapid City when we moved into our present home. It was the table where our children did their schoolwork and where we ate family dinners. It was the table of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter feasts. It was where we entertained guests and where our children did their artwork. The chairs dried out and were re-glued several times and re-upholstered once.

After our children were raised, we came into possession of a round oak dining table that had been in Susan’s parents’ home and the old table went into storage for a brief time.

These days, it has taken another big trip. A couple of years ago, I loaded it into a trailer with some of our daughter’s other things and hauled it to Missouri, west of Kansas City where it became part of the home that she was furnishing with her new husband. They spent hours refinishing the old table and bringing it up to its present beautiful state.

It never was an expensive piece of furniture. It never was valuable. It was pretty close to the least expensive option in the catalogue from which it was first purchased. Whatever value it has for our family comes from the experiences we have had with it. It brings back memories for all of us. Most of the heirlooms that will be passed down to the next generation are not objects. Although we have furnished our home with hand-me-down furniture for most of our lives, the next generation is less likely to want the same items we had. We still have that storage unit and it still has some extra furniture in it. I’m thinking that it won’t be long before the items in storage will need to find new homes. Most of it will be distributed through thrift shops. We don’t have any valuable antiques, just some old furniture.

But a drive across the prairie today brought a smile to my face as I remembered our first trip with that table.

Susan’s mother was born at Isabel. Her father had been a pharmacist, jeweler, undertaker and jack of all trades. Her mother had taken in washing to help make ends meet. They raised three daughters and a son in that place. There aren’t any family members living in Isabel these days. We don’t know any of the residents. There is no family property remaining.

But there is a table. And there is a story. And I know the story. And that’s a treasure worth passing on.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Later today I’m heading up to Mobridge. I don’t go up there very often these days. To get there, I’ll drive up and cut through the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Reservations. Years ago, when I lived in North Dakota, I spent more time in Standing Rock Country. We had a small church at Cannonball, which now is part of the Dakota Association and served by a South Dakota pastor, but at the time was served by a North Dakota Pastor. These days people think of it as Dakota country. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe has a long and influential history. Among the last of tribes located in the US to be confined to reservations, Lakota and Dakota people were known for their military expertise. They demonstrated significant military savvy before settlement and that prowess was demonstrated in many conflicts, though the Battle of the Little Big Horn is probably the most well-known.

Much less known is the long period of time when the Mobridge area and many points north and south of there were in the heart of Mandan country. The Mandan were traders and had the most powerful economic network of the upper plains country. At one time their trading network stretched from the Spanish settlements of early Mexico as far east as the Lake of the Woods and north into what is now Saskatchewan and Alberta. They were a plains tribe that was far less nomadic than others, living in permanent earth lodges. They ran a sophisticated business operations including fairs with fancy dancers and special bargains. They exerted a lot of control over the trading of many valuables including horses and pipestone. It was not uncommon for horses to be traded by the Crow from the Shoshoni to the Mandan at a 100% markup. The Mandan would in turn sell them to the Cree at a price that was at least doubled from what they paid. Pipestone from Minnesota made its way throughout the Mandan trading network. The Mandan held a virtual monopoly on pipestone throughout the plains.

One of the reasons that the great Mandan trading nation is less known by some students of US history is that the Mandan nation didn’t fall to the forces of military defeat as was the case with other tribes. The Mandan were near the height of their power when Lewis and Clark made their way up the Missouri in 1804. They reached Mandan country in early October after having rather pleasant contact with the Yankton Sioux in August and a somewhat scary encounters with Lakota and Teton Sioux in September. The Mandan showed great interest in forming radian alliances with the Corps of Discovery and the expedition wintered with them near the present day site of Mandan, North Dakota.

Thirty years later there were almost no survivors of what had been the largest economic powerhouse of the upper plains. Following Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River were expeditions of US Calvary and eventually steamboats on the river. Both groups brought smallpox to which the Mandan had no natural immunity. The ensuing epidemic nearly wiped out the entire tribe. By 1837 there were less than 100 survivors.Many of the modern day descendants of the survivors live as part of the United Tribes’ Fort Berthold Reservation, where Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Sioux share common land.

Maybe today is a good day to remember the power of an epidemic and the ways in which history has been shipped by illness. With deaths from Ebola in West Africa nearing 5,000, the illness has been altering the populations of Libera, Guinea and Sierra Leone. And the fear and panic is radiating out from Africa around the world. Recently, when a Nurse from Texas flew on US domestic airlines before being diagnosed with Ebola there was widespread fear that human to human spread of the disease would break out across the United States. A coordinator of hospital emergency preparations in Seattle - about as far away from the area the nurse had traveled as you can get in the continental US - was receiving over 60 phone calls per hour from worried people within the hospital system.

The disease is definitely serious. The mortality rate is high, especially in areas where there is a shortage of care. And the disease is spreading in geography, primarily traveling with health care workers who have been on the front line of fighting the disease in West Africa and then return to their homelands. New York City confirmed its first case yesterday: a doctor who recently returned from Guinea. Dr. Spencer is a fellow of international emergency medicine employed by New York Presbyterian Hospital. He showed no symptoms of the disease upon leaving Africa and it wasn’t until about ten days later than he developed a fever. Since Ebola is primarily spread by droplets through coughs or sneezes, it is unlikely that Dr. Spencer infected others during his travels.

Still, there will be widespread fear. And a certain amount of fear is warranted. Disease can be deadly. It can change the course of history.

Irrational fear, however, can be paralyzing. Too much fear can cause resources to be invested in wasteful ways and actually divert funds from treating disease where it really exists.

Still, it is good for us to take this disease seriously in our country. From the perspective of those who are attempting to stem the epidemic in West Africa, the United States’ reaction to the outbreak has been a case of “too little, too late.” They would argue that we have suffered from a failure of empathy - simply not making the human-to-human connection between our lives here in the US and the suffering of those on a different continent.

So today I will drive. It will give me a few hours to think and sort out my mind - always a good thing. And as I drive across the now somewhat empty and open spaces, I’ll be looking forward to my first glimpse of the mighty Missouri river. As the name implies, the bridge itself is pretty spectacular. The town serves a rural area filled with ranches and pheasant hunters at this time of the year. But as I make my way down the breaks into town, I’ll be remembering the days when it was the heart of a huge trading empire and how much has changed since the Mandan controlled the area. I will also remember how the area was gripped by a devastating epidemic two centuries ago.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I’ve been nearsighted for most of my life. I don’t remember exactly when I got my first pair of glasses, but it was early in my elementary school career. I required thick lenses and in those days there was no way for my correction to be made with plastic lenses. The lenses often fitted poorly in the plastic frames. The frames were fairly fragile. I went through much of my grade school years with a wad of electrician’s tape across the bridge of my glasses and there were more than a few pair that were lost in the river, broken beyond repair and otherwise damaged or destroyed. My parents were very patient with me, and I got replacements quickly, but it was 80 miles one way to the place where we got our glasses and it took a week or more to get new glasses once ordered.

I know what it is like to experience the world out of focus.

These days I always have a spare pair of glasses and I am much less likely to break or lose a pair, but occasionally I’ll walk around the house without my glasses. I remove them frequently for cleaning and they get fogged up when I ski and sometimes when I paddle, so I have a pretty good sense of what the world looks like when I’m not wearing them.

Yesterday I had an out-of-focus experience that didn’t involve my glasses. I attended the funeral of a 24-year-old who died by suicide after a very turbulent time in his life. He was in trouble with law enforcement, though not something that couldn’t have been worked out. He had made some poor choices in the period of time after graduating from high school and college, but he was young and we all make mistakes.

Of course no one knows what happened in the final moments of his life. No one knows what he was thinking. It is likely that there was undiagnosed mental illness that had gone untreated. What we do know is that he died and that the news of his death was sudden and traumatic for his family and friends.

A large group of people assembled in a gymnasium for the service. There were several tables of displays of his life and achievements. There was a slide show of pictures of his childhood and teen years, with lots of pictures with friends. There were several other pictures from his young adult years, some taken at parties and other special events. His obituary described him as “the life of the party.”

The officiant at the funeral began by acknowledging the pain of loss. Hs spoke in some very general terms about “a life of eternity,” though he avoided specific references to heaven and hell. He said, “If you believe the Bible like I believe the Bible” multiple times but never quoted the Bible and never read from the Bible. He stood behind a table with no notes speaking into a microphone. There was a brief prayer.

Then he asked for people to share. There were plenty of people who spoke. Mostly they were friends of the young man and they spoke of what a good person he had been, how he made others feel, how brilliant he was as a student, and how much fun he was to be with. Both of his parents spoke and told brief stories from his childhood. A friend sang three different songs as prompted by the officiant. After about 50 minutes of this “open microphone” sharing, the officiant invited people to share a lunch and the family was escorted from their seats by the funeral home staff.

Like I said, the entire experience seemed to me to be out of focus.

The majority of the mourners were under the age of 30. Some of them had young children in their arms. They were very emotional and tearful. The sadness and the trauma of the day were never addressed in the service. There was no hope offered for the grieving persons - no comments about how a community gets through such a loss.

There is something cathartic about gathering together. It is good to give people permission to remember. The young people at the service were showing genuine concern and support for one another. But they were offered little in the service itself to help them sort through their experience. No mention was made of the cause of death or of the resources that are available in our community for those who suffer from depression. Nothing was said about what we can learn from this tragedy and how a future tragedy might be avoided.

I have no doubt that the young man who died had many friends. I know that he was a brilliant student and a very personable companion. I know that he will be missed. I knew all of those things before the service began.

A funeral service is a critical element in the process of communal grieving and it can be instrumental in enabling the community to come together and move forward. I invested a lot of energy in academic study and preparation before I began officiating at funerals. Among the resources that I got to know thoroughly are the historic liturgies and prayers of the church. I do a lot of public speaking without notes, but I always work from a full manuscript at a funeral. The words are too important. A funeral is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for those who gather. The individual whose death we mourn is unique in all the world.

Grieving people need to be reassured that we are not alone and that this is not the end. Sharing the scriptures of our people is one way of offering comfort and the simple reminder that we have experienced loss and tragedy before and we have lived with our grief and discovered hope.

I left the auditorium sad yesterday. I had been called to assist with the notification of the family on the night of the death. I had witnessed the tragedy of their loss. It seemed to me yesterday that I witnessed a second tragedy when an out of focus funeral service failed to give them the hope and assurance that is available. Not just the family, but also a room full of young adults with very little experience with death and loss and grief were left without the resources that are available.

It was the second tragedy in a week to fall upon the community.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The press release from the Rapid City police department was brief and didn’t contain many details. Police have confirmed that a body was found under a bridge the night before last. It was about 5 p.m. and two people were walking in the area under the West Chicago bridge. They investigated a pile of blankets and clothing that was lying under the bridge and saw what they thought were human remains. They were right. But the remains were fairly badly deteriorated. Initial investigation indicates that the death may have occurred as long ago as last winter.

I guess we know how often we get around to cleaning up the litter beneath our bridges.

More seriously, I can’t help but wonder at the story of the person who died beneath that bridge. Apparently no one went looking for that person. No one filed a report and got the police to go out and cover the territory searching for the person. You read of masses of volunteers who turn out to assist when someone goes missing. But it appears that there is at least one person who can go missing and not be missed - not for a long time.

Somewhere, sometime that person was really something. The moment of his birth must have been as powerful and miraculous as the birth of any human baby. That is the way we come into this world. There must have been a time in that person’s life when she or he was loved and treasured.

I know it is silly, but somehow, since I officiated at a funeral yesterday, I got to thinking about what I might say if I were asked to officiate at a funeral for the person who died under the bridge. What stories could I tell? What lessons could we learn? What of that person remains in the lives and memories of others?

God knows.

Seriously. God does know. Whoever it was that died there, probably alone, in a place that could have been very chilly and dark and dirty and lonely, it is a person who is known and beloved of God. It was a person who was created, as we all are, in the image of God.

But I don’t want to think of the image of God deteriorated and beset with insects and scarcely recognizable under a pile of blankets and old clothes under a bridge. It seems such a long way from the posters and paintings that we put on the walls of our church. It seems so long a way from the sanitized images of God that we form in our mind. The tears that were cried by that particular person have long ago disappeared into the ground and into the air around us. Do you suppose that they were mixed with God’s own tears on that fateful night when death came? And I don’t even know if death came at night. I suppose you could die under a bridge during the day and not be discovered, if you could lie in the place of your death for months without anyone noticing.

Our community is truly a lovely place with many deeply caring people. I have witnessed great acts of generosity and outreach to others. I know that there are many who devote much of their lives to feeding and sheltering those who do not have sufficient resources to provide for themselves. I have eaten with the people served by the mission and visited the rooms of those who are temporarily sheltered by its walls. And I have met some of the people who find it harder to obtain services. I’ve shared lunch with people who were too intoxicated to be served anywhere but city/county detox. I’ve wandered about our city, walked under its bridges and looked at the piles of rags and blankets.

But I wasn’t there for this particular victim. I didn’t look at the right place at the right time. And the same is true of a whole lot of other caring and understanding people in our community.

I wonder how many other people walk in our midst every day that we are unable to see. I wonder how many become so invisible to us that we wouldn’t notice if they were taken from us. I wonder how many deaths go unnoticed.

It is an unsettling thought.

And all we really know is that there was a body under the bridge and it appears it had been there for some time.

So, once again we will say what we believe:

“We believe that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and we know that in everything God works for good with those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose. We are sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, no things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (from Romans, adapted by the UCC Book of Worship)

Of course God doesn’t need us to read the familiar lines of scripture. Neither does the man who once walked our streets, who died under a bridge and who now rests securely in the arms of a loving savior. But we need the scriptures. We need the prayers. We need the understanding. For one day, through the grace of God, we will be reunited not only with those we have known and loved in this life, but with all of God’s children.

Anticipating that day, we pray:

“Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your child, the man found under the bridge, unknown to us, but known by you. Acknowledge we humbly pray, a sheep of your own flock, and a son of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the company of the saints in light.” (also from the UCC Book of Worship)

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

For now I’m not doing much paddling in the dark. It isn’t that the cold has stopped me. In fact it has been unseasonably warm for most of October. But it is quite dark. In the time slot where I used to watch the sunrise now I get on the water in the dark and get off the water in the dark. It is part of the routine of the seasons around here. I row on a machine in my basement to keep up with my exercise during the winter.

There are days, however, when I can still sneak away to the lake in the middle of the day. Yesterday was one such day. I had a funeral to write and a bit of other work to accomplish, but those things could be set aside in the mid morning so that I could head off to the lake.

It was a perfectly calm lake and paddling was like taking a journey on a mirror. The sun was bright, the air was warm and I had the lake to myself. Most of the boats have been pulled form the water for winter storage. The docks have been pulled up onto the shore and the buoys have been put away for the winter. There were several clusters of mallards on the water, but they could see me coming from a long way off and so gently paddled away from my route without much fuss.

It was a good day for quiet on the water.

I am very familiar with Sheridan Lake. I paddle there dozens of times each year and I’ve been paddling on that lake for a couple of decades. I have paddled in dense fog, in low light and in the dark of night. I know the shoreline and my way around the lake. As such, it is strange to paddle on a perfectly calm day with nearly unlimited visibility. The reflections in the water are so realistic that it seems as if there are two sets of trees and mountains: one reaching up and the other reaching down. The lake appears to be as deep as the sky is high. Of course I know that this isn’t true. Like all mountain reservoirs, the lake is silting in. It gets shallower each year. And there are lots of places where the underwater plants are so tall that they touch the bottom of my boat as I pass. Were I in a motorboat, the weeds would surely clog the propellor. Where I paddle isn’t really deep at all. The reflections are an optical illusion.

The flat lake also does something with perspective when it comes to distances. Something about the reflections in the water or the way that doubling the appearance of the height of the hills makes it more difficult to judge distances as I paddle on the calm. The distance from one side of the lake to the other appears to be larger than it is, but the distance between two points on the horizon appears to be smaller. It is difficult to explain, but it can be mildly disorienting.

There aren’t many deciduous trees near the lake, so the color is pretty much evergreen, but you can tell it is fall by the colors that surround the lake. The cattails are mostly golden and some of the grasses near the shore have turned dormant. Even though the weather seems very much like summer, hints of fall are all around.

The mallards’ heads appear to be iridescent green above the surface of the water and stand in stark contrast to the shore weeds. It is an amazing feat of nature that at one moment the ducks seem to disappear against the background. Then, suddenly, they stand out in stark contrast. Perhaps they rely on the shifting perspective as a form of keeping themselves safe from predators.

Sometimes when I paddle I get a sense of connection with the generations of mariners who have inhabited this planet. There have been so many who earned their living by going to sea or plying small boats on rivers and lakes around the world. We humans are fascinated by the water and are drawn to build boats and venture out onto its surface. But as far as I know i have no sea captains in my lineage. My mother’s people were settlers and farmers and homesteaders for many generations back. My father’s people had a similar heritage. I grew up near the mountains, far from any large bodies of water. The river that ran by our place was considered to be unnavigable. You can float it with a modern creek boat or whitewater canoe, but when we were growing up we never saw a boat any larger than the inner tubes we used to float down the stream. My uncle had a place on a lake and had a series of small boats over the years, but we saw the lake as a place for an occasional vacation, not a place to live and work. My cousin lived right on the Missouri and had a lot of adventures with ferries and water craft of various sizes. To hear him tell the stories these days, most of his adventures had a bit of danger, if not of drowning, then at least of getting wet.

Still that urge to get out on the water is deep within me. Often, when I am not paddling, I am dreaming of boats. I’m preparing my garage for another boat building adventure. Before long I will have a new boat emerging from the sawdust and shavings.

Kenneth Grahame put it so well in “The Wind in the Willows.” Mole and Rat are rowing in Rat’s boat. They are discussing nautical matters, when Rat makes his famous declaration:

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing... about in boats — or with boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not.”

Some of my best days are messabout days.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The Protestant Reformation brought with it a wave of what is called iconoclasm - the destruction of images. Both Calvin and Luther, in their speaking against the excesses of the Roman Catholic church, criticized the elaborate statuary, paintings, and other images that were used to adorn churches and cathedrals. Some of their followers went to great extremes, destroying valuable artwork and seeking to create churches that were stark and bare and devoid of any kind of images. Even musical instruments were banned in some congregations. The attempt was to return to a form of worship that was seen as more pure - closer to the origins of the church and with fewer images and other things between the worshiper and God.

At the core of the conflict was the identification of certain religious symbols as idols. On one side of the conflict were those who argued that for the masses of people who in that time were not able to read, pictures and images provided a way to access the stories of the Gospels and understand the historic faith. On the other side of the conflict were those who said any images were in effect idols and that the people couldn’t tell the difference between the image and the reality of God.

An icon is, at its core, a symbol that points beyond itself. The purpose of the icon is not to be God or to take the place of God, but rather to point towards God. In a sense an icon is supposed to be transparent so that a person can look through it and beyond it to see part of the nature of God.

The concept of “seeing” God is something that needs to be continually challenged. God is transcendent - always beyond human capacity to visualize or imagine. Our imaginations are rich resources for thinking about God and talking about God, but the reality of God is always beyond - always more than what we are able to describe with words. God always extends beyond the limits of ordinary experience. This does not mean that God is inaccessible, only that our perception of God is always incomplete. We can have deeply meaningful and very real experiences with God, but we cannot claim to fully know God.

In interpreting the significance and religious value of any image, painting, piece of music, sculpture or other item, it is important to always keep in mind that the item is not God. Though it might inspire an experience with the transcendent, the item itself is neither good nor bad. It is simply one way of reaching out for an experience - an item that points beyond itself. It is that “beyond” which holds the experience of the holy.

We humans, however, do have a tendency towards idolatry. Even a cursory read of the stories of the people of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures or the conversations between Jesus and the Pharisees in the Gospels reveal the story of people again and again mistaking idols for the reality of God. We have a religious experience that involves some special item and immediately expect the item to possess magical powers. We confuse the item to the transcendent to which it points.

In practical terms, we run into this confusion in the church all the time. People have deeply meaningful and sacred experiences in a building and they assume that the building itself is sacred. They hear a touching and moving hymn and want to return to the same song over and over again in search of the experience of that song that invited them to reach beyond. Churches are filled with items that one or more people find to be deeply meaningful. It isn’t the meaning that is the problem. The problem arises when people mistake the item for the meaning.

It is possible to be a church without all of the trappings of church. God can be worshiped without buildings, musical instruments, sound systems, hymnals, stained glass windows, and other items. Faith is not dependent on the institutional church. Churches, however, can quickly become institutions. A group of people gather. They have a significant religious experience. They want to repeat the experience. They gather again and again. Soon they want to establish a regular meeting place and sometimes a regular meeting time. Then they begin to add elements that they find meaningful - perhaps a candle, a special song, a style of prayer. The experience ceases to be a one-of-a-kind and becomes a ritual.

Ritual itself is not bad. It can be a way to bring people into contact with the transcendent. But it can become stale and so intent with preserving the experiences of the past that it is not open to the power of the Holy that is beyond the words and actions.

We are quick to point out the tendency to transform icons into idols in the religions and practices of others. In fact one of our terms for an icon that has become an idol is “sacred cow.” That term arises from the elevated place of cows in Hinduism and a lack of understanding of western observers.

We affirm that God is the creator of everything that is. That means that there is a spark of the divine in every thing. It is possible to recognize God in each creature and each item. But that creature or item never can contain the whole of God. Recognizing God is a powerful experience. Seeking to possess God is a form of insanity.

It is not the item that is the problem. It is our attitude toward it.

The invitation of our faith is to continually seek that which is beyond. When an experience of the holy occurs, we are admonished not to rest in that place, but to look beyond that experience for new and different ways to encounter God. When we think we’ve found the formula for a life of faith, we are challenged to study more, pray more, reach for that which is beyond our grasp.

Icons can be great aids in seeking that which is beyond - as long as we don’t treat them as idols.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Around the time of the Protestant Reformation faithful Christians began to discuss what has become known as the doctrine of two kingdoms. Lutherans and Calvinists developed a theological theory that God rules the world through secular governments. This is the worldly kingdom and faithful people are bound by the rules and laws of this world. Christians, however, are also a part of a new kingdom - a heavily kingdom to which they are called by grace. Martin Luther and his followers were especially inspired by the book of Romans, in which Paul makes the distinction between flesh/body and soul/spirit.

The doctrine of two kingdoms was further supported by Jesus answer to the Pharisees reported in Mark and Matthew when asked about paying taxes. Jesus asked to be shown the money used to pay the tax and, noting that the coin had Caesar’s image on it said, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

But there is a problem with dismissing Jesus’ answer so easily. There is no record that Jesus ascribed to a doctrine of two kingdoms. Certainly the Pharisees didn’t think that way. Concepts of secular vs religious simply weren’t a part of their thinking. Neither Greek, the language of the Gospels, nor Latin, the language of the Roman authorities has a word for religious. To the Pharisees, everything belonged to God. Psalm 24 declares, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” From the perspective of faithful Jews of Jesus’ day, there was no distinction between that which was sacred and that which was not because everything was sacred. Everything belonged to God.

The interpretation of the discussion over paying taxes might come down to something that isn’t in the written record: Jesus tone of voice. Do you suppose he was dismissive of the coin? Did he take a look at it and basically say, “This isn’t what is important. Give it to Caesar and give a real offering - an offering of yourself to God.”

Sometimes when we think of Jesus and his message, we think in a sort of backwards way. Since we have defined beliefs and traditional doctrines, we assume that Jesus was about creating doctrine. But there is no evidence that this is the case. Jesus was about building relationships, not creating a systematic theology. Jesus lived his entire life within the context of his Jewish faith and background. The concept of starting a new religion grew out of changes and conflicts among the faithful hundreds of years after his death and resurrection.

All of this is to say that i’ve never been particularly moved by the doctrine of two kingdoms. I am more intrigued with the power and presence of the holy in the midst of this life we now know. I have encountered the sacred in many places that are far from religious institutions. I don’t believe that we have to wait until we die to experience the presence of God.

I have been in the home of a family as they receive the news of the sudden and traumatic death of a loved one. I have watched as their faces turn from surprise to shock and fear and grief. I have witnessed a mother collapsing onto the floor upon the news of the death of a child. But I have also watched the gathering of the community in love and support. I’ve seen the stream of food offered, hugs given, genuine care and concern outpoured as the slow process of grief and healing begins. Surely this is a holy event. Surely the grieving family doesn’t have to wait until their deaths to know that God is with them.

I have held a newborn baby and gazed into the eyes of its mother and sensed the overwhelming awe and slender of the moment. Words fail to express the experience, but there is no one, not even the most jaded of hospital employees who has witnessed hundreds of births, who isn’t moved by the sacredness of the moment.

I have stood in front of hundreds of couples as they made genuine sacred commitment to one another. Some have been able to keep their vows over decades of loving living together. Some have fallen short of the intentions of their wedding day. But There is no question in my mind about the presence of God in the process of making promises. There are moments in this life when we don’t have to wait for God to come to us.

I have no doubt that heaven has its glories, but so too does the life we are living right now. I can lean back in my little boat and look up at the moon and stars above from the surface of the lake and know that i am beholding glory. I have watched enough sunrises from enough different perspectives to know that there are no two alike - the process of Creation that was a part of the beginnings of everything continue to be a part of each day in the present.

If there are two kingdoms, the line separating them must be pretty thin, because the sacred keeps being fully present in our everyday world. From my point of view it seems as if this life is pretty sacred the way it is.

When tragedy interrupts the joy of this life it is genuine tragedy in part because what has been lost was also sacred.

I suspect that we will never fully understand all of the nuances of Jesus’ teachings. I suspect that we will never fully grasp the fullness of God’s glory. I’m pretty sure that we will find plenty of topics about which faithful people disagree and enjoy the entanglement of argument. I’ve no particular need for resolution of every mystery and answers to every question.

Maybe the two kingdoms can be compared to the wedding ceremony, where two become one. Or maybe, the wedding ceremony reflects the glory of God who never saw the separation in the first place.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The stories we tell about ourselves are deeply influenced by the stories that our people have been telling for millennia. We do not live in a vacuum. Our lives are shaped by events that happened generations before we were born. And our way of telling stories is shaped by the stories we have heard. For many of us this never becomes a problem. We go on with our lives and we tell our stories in ways that fit our lives. The stories are told mostly to family and friends and the ones we tell the most are shaped by the process of telling. A detail is added here or there, a mood is altered, some parts of the story aren’t told. We become aware that our stories don’t all line up only on the rare occasions when we run into the stories of others who were there. I notice this sometimes when I am with siblings and we tell stories of our growing up years. Sometimes I barely recognize the stories that I am hearing. I go away from these times of meeting with a sense of wonder about how children could have grown up in the same household with the same parents and have such divergent memories.

Again, it isn’t a problem. I am often not completely clear about my memories. It is not that I have fabricated my story from untruth, it is that there are many details that I have not included. Some of those details have been forgotten. We all can remember that our mother painted every room in the interior of our house the same color of yellow, but I’m not sure that I can remember the colors the rooms were before they were painted. The older kids in our family can remember when the living room was two rooms, a parlor and a dining room with a set of french doors between them. But did the doors run the entire span of the room, or was there a partition with doors in it?

The details I have forgotten are, for the most part, inconsequential.

I suspect that the stories I tell vary from the experiences in another way, however. We are trained to tell hero stories. In the stories we tell adversity is often exaggerated. Growing up with “Greatest Generation” parents and their friends, I remember being surprised when I learned that it was less than four years from the Pearl Harbor attack to VJ Day. Somehow World War II loomed so large in the stories that we heard that I assumed it took much more time.

When we tell hero stories we have clear delineation between the good people and the bad people. When we tell our own story, we emphasize the good decisions we have made and downplay the mistakes and poor choices. Telling our story, we usually come off as some kind of hero. That’s the way we tell stories in our culture. Think of the movies you have watched or the novels you have read. We love the stories of heroes. And when we tell our stories, we often tell hero stories.

For most of us, it is convenient to tell our stories as hero stories. And most of the time those stories.

But when one publishes a story, it’s best to have a good editor to help you check your facts and temper the natural exaggerations if you want to claim that your story is true. Failure to do so can create some really big problems.

Remember “Three Cups of Tea?” Many of us read the story of Greg Mortensen back in 2006 or 2007. It was an amazing story of how one man developed a vision and undertook huge projects, like building schools, to promote peace. I remember being moved by the story. Then came the questions of the veracity of the story. By 2012, most of the public had found out that large portions of the book were fabricated. Some of the schools that were built had no students. Some might have never been built at all. Worst of all, we found out that Mortensen had used some of the money donated to his charity for personal expenses. John Krakauer wrote an e-book called “Three Cups of Deceit” that accuses Mortensen of lying about practically everything. It turns out that Mortensen was more human than hero. His noble deeds, his risks and even the people he had met were all exaggerated in his book.

It would take more than this blog to analyze what happened, but one of the problems came from the way in which Mortensen’s original book was written. Mortensen, it turns out, is not much of an author. He told stories to David Relin, who wrote the stories up into the book. I don’t know how the process went. Some say that Mortensen was lying through his teeth when he told the stories and Relin was an innocent victim, who simply wrote up as true the stories he had been told. It is also possible that there was some embellishment in the way Relin organized and presented the stories in the book. Whatever happened, the disgrace brought on Mortensen when his story and organization were investigated was large enough to cast its shadow on Relin, He suffered from depression. On November 15, 2012 he was killed as he knelt on the train tracks near Portland, Oregon. His death was ruled a suicide.

Whoever was at fault, we all were taken in by a hero story and the results of the fabrications in that story were tragic.

Mortensen is still trying to start and support schools in Afghanistan. His charity, the Central Asian Institute, is still in business. The accounts have been audited, the funds have been repaid and the work goes forward. It is impossible to say what would have happened had the book never been published. On the one hand, we wouldn’t have been duped by the lies it contained. On the other hand, the cause it promoted wouldn’t have received the attention it got, the charity wouldn’t have received the donations, many of which were invested in the cause of girls’ education in Afghanistan.

For the rest of us, the story of how the false story grew a life of its own is a cautionary tale: Don’t be like Greg Mortensen. Don’t let the false story distract from the real problem.

It serves as a reminder to all of us who tell stories.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

In Old French, the word “limon” referred to all citrus fruits. According to the English Language and Usage website, the word has Arabic roots and was once the term for citrus in general. The would explain why if you ask for a lemon in Costa Rica you are as likely to get a lime as a lemon. Both lemons and limes are useful in cooking and have health benefits. But somehow along the line the word “lemon” has gotten a bad reputation.

In used car deals, a lemon is a car that might look good, but is mechanically defective. Selling a lemon implies trickery or unfairness in the transaction.According to the Oxford English Dictionary we have been using the word lemon as slang for something worthless for a century or more.

Maybe it is because lemons look so good and so inviting and have a distinctly bitter taste. Maybe it is because the skin is so thick and there is less pulp and juice inside than one might expect. Whatever the reason, there are a bunch of associated terms that have less than stellar reputations in popular slang. Tart can be a description of a flavor, but it is not a kind word when applied to a woman. Sucker might be descriptive of one who gets the juice out of a piece of fruit, but it is not a compliment when applied to anyone. I’ve often heard it remarked that P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The phrase probably didn’t originate with Barnum, in fact it most likely was first offered as a criticism of the showman by David Hannum. The meaning is clear: most people are gullible.

Despite its reputation, I like lemons. The other day the grocery store had bags of lemons on sale for a reasonable price and I bought a bag and stuck it in the refrigerator. I’ve been taking the juice of half a lemon and adding it plain water to drink every day. It makes a refreshing drink. I know some people like it with sparkling water, but I’m fine with just lemon juice and water. I don’t need the sugar of lemonade and I don’t find the taste to be bad at all. Some people like the fire of peppers and I don’t mind that flavor either. Bitter is an equally pleasant sensation once you get used to it.

I’ve read that pepper and bitter are among the slowest taste sensations to develop. Very young children often can’t distinguish those flavors until their taste buds have matured. When our son was very young he used to beg for the slices of lemon when we ate in a restaurant. He’d fuss enough that we would give them to him, at first expecting to use natural consequences to teach him that everything that is pretty doesn’t taste good. To our surprise, he enjoyed the lemons and even though we occasionally got a strange look from other patrons in the restaurant, we started letting him suck the juice out of the lemons. He grew up into a very prudent adult who does his homework before making purchases and is far less likely than the average person to get involved with a shady or questionable deal.

Pleasure from eating comes in part from contrasts. I like the contrast of sweet and sour. I don’t mind the “zing” that comes from a dash of lemon juice.

Turning back to the English Language and Usage website, there is the story of the phrase, “to give someone a lemon and pass it off as a nugget of gold.” The original saying was later shortened to “handing someone a lemon.” I guess that it would be a bad deal if you were expecting a gold nugget and what you got was a lemon. But there are plenty of scenarios in this world where food is worth more than money. And some of us will never collect a significant amount of wealth, but will enjoy sufficient food every day.

I’ve never been a person who put much stock in money for money’s sake. I’m not much for balance sheets and bank accounts and reserves and investments. In our church we recruit people with more passion for and skill with money to manage our small amounts of finance. What interests me is what can be done with money. With a little fundraising, we can build a Habitat for Humanity home. The generosity of our people helps us maintain our church building and extend our ministry. It is a very pleasant thing to have enough money to share when I run across someone who is hungry or has a special need.

But the truth is that given the choice, I think I would be just as happy with the lemon as a nugget of gold. Maybe I’m one of those suckers who is born every minute.

When I read in the Bible, “REnder unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” I don’t immediately think that Jesus is trying to establish a complex theology of two kingdoms. There are some very good Lutheran theologians who have developed that theology, but my initial reaction is to read Jesus’s words as a kind of contempt for money. He asks his questioner to show him a coin and then dismisses it as of being of so little value that it is fine to give it to Caesar. It is as if he is saying, “It’s only money.”

There are a few things that money can buy that are nice. And I use money every day. It is fine as a medium of exchange. But having a lot of it has never been among my goals. Over the years, I’m pretty sure that i’ve made some pretty poor financial deals. And I have not always managed my money as well as I might have in part because managing money doesn’t hold much interest for me. And that makes me very happy in my life and my work. I don’t have a job that is noted for large salaries and I have no need of a large salary. What I do have is a wonderful family and a church dedicated to serving others. I wouldn’t trade them for all of the nuggets of gold in the world.

I have a preference for lemons.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Some have claimed that Thomas Merton was the most influential Catholic writer of the 20th century. I am certainly in no position to argue with that assertion, not being an expert in Catholic writers, and not even being very well-read in the field. I discovered Merton through Henri Nouwen, whose diaries and other reflections on the nature of ministry have been inspirational to me throughout my career. Nouwen’s letter to his father on the anniversary of his mother’s death is a powerful reflection on the interplay of faith and grief. His book The Wounded Healer is an important study on the nature of Christian ministry. His choice of living and working with adults with developmental disabilities after a brilliant career as a teacher and academician has been a model for some of the choices in my life.

Nouwen frequently mentioned Merton, especially in his journals and it was after reading one such entry that I obtained and read a copy of Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain. Actually, the autobiography was written comparatively early in his life and there was much more to his tory than that book. Merton was a Trappist monk, a peace activist, and an author of many other books and articles. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander was written fairly late in his life, I think. it may even have been published after his death in 1968. It is a collection of notes, short essays, opinions and reflections on topics as wide ranging as the so-called death of God, racism in America, values and politics.

Recently I was reminded of Merton when reading a blog by Parker Palmer. Palmer offered this quote from Confessions of a Guilty Bystander:

"There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist...most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work... It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)...work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

The passage strikes me precisely because it so well states a confession that could be mine. My life seems to contain a cycle of allowing myself to “be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns.” I am prone to passionate concern. Each time I am involved in providing care for grieving families after a death by suicide, I dive deeply into suicide prevention work. I come back from visiting a grieving family and make lists of people that I need to call and check up with to make sure that they are OK. Outside of my regular work, that has been my focus this week. Today i will go from a lunch I set up with a sometimes-depressed teen to the viewing of a 20-year-old who died by suicide in our community. On my list for the day is a phone call that I must make to set up a visit with a retired person who is struggling with depression.

What the grieving family needs most is the gift of calm, peace, and time. Grief cannot be rushed and the ministry with that family is one of patience and presence. Just being their is perhaps the most important thing that I can do today. Praying with those who have no words for their prayers is a gift that I can offer.

But I am not content with just being. I am compelled to dive into doing. I know that when I sit with this family for an hour or two today, I will find myself making a mental list of others I should call and checks I should make.

I have an image of myself as a person of peace. I don’t like the image of the frenzied activity that often sweeps me away as a form of violence. But Merton is right. There is a form of violence in the urge to engage in over work.

The challenge of every person of faith is not just the work we do, but the source of that work. I need to pause at regular intervals and ask myself, “What am I doing to nurture the Spirit within myself?” How do I remain deeply aware and motivated by the spark of the divine that has been given to me? Am I nurturing my inner wisdom so that it will be the source of my strength and work, or am I simply working myself to exhaustion and depleting the strength that is within?

Today as has been the case many days in recent years I am up before most of the neighborhood. But I am not the only one who is up. Our neighbor has a small dog that doesn’t seem to fit very well into their active lifestyle. Many days of the week, the dog is put out in the evening and the exhausted owner falls asleep without letting the little one back in the home. The dog gets lonely and scared in the darkness of the night and yips and yips at the door. If I venture out, I scare the animal and the barking gets worse, not better.

Sometimes I feel like that little dog, running from door to door and yipping and accomplishing nothing. If the dog would simply curl up on the door mat and go to sleep it would get into the house just as quickly as it does with its fear and barking. But it cannot do so. It has to keep trying, keep yipping, keep working, even when its efforts are fruitless.

I don’t want to be a little dog wasting my time and annoying the neighbors. I want to be a productive member of my community. I need to avoid giving in to the frenzy of over work and instead turn to the silence, solitude, reflection and prayer that nurture the inner wisdom that makes the work I do fruitful.

Anything less is to commit an act of violence. And our world does not need more violence.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I think it happened to me when I was younger, but I don’t have much memory of the days when I was less productive than others. Occasionally these days, perhaps once a month or so, I find that I have a day when I am less productive than others. I have long had the ability to imagine that I am able to accomplish more than I really am able, so the sensation of accomplishing less than I intended is rather common for me. But some days it feels like I’ve gone through the whole day without accomplishing any of the tasks that are on my list.

Of course, it is important to note (and to remind myself) that my job is often the interruption, not the scheduled work. It is right for me to respond to the needs of the moment, to listen to the person who is in my office and to place the ebb and flow of the lives of the people in the church above a list of tasks to be accomplished. We are in the business of serving people and, as such, their plans often take precedence over our own.

In a nod to age, however, I think that it does actually throw me a bit more when I have to get up in the middle of the night to respond to a crisis than once was the case. These days if I miss too much sleep, I will need to figure out how to do a little make up. And if I push really hard one week, I know that I will accomplish a bit less the next week. It isn’t that I lack energy or enthusiasm for work. In some ways I am as excited as ever to begin each new day and discover what it may hold.

Years ago, when I was doing quite a bit more youth ministry than I do these days, I used to pride myself on being able to be the last one to bed at night and the first one up in the morning and still have the stamina to “out last” the youth. I don’t know how many trips I have made with a van full of sleeping teenagers when I was awake and alert and ready for what was coming. The event had won the teens out, but I had been energized by it. I might take the next day off and take an extra nap, but in the midst of the event, I managed my sleep and energy so that I was equal to the task. Were I to step back in to that role these days, I would be careful to make sure I got enough sleep the night before I was expected to drive. I might delegate “cabin check” on the last night to another responsible adult.

I think that part of what is going on is that I have learned a few things about myself and about the process of ministry that make me more effective. These days I don’t apologize or even attempt to explain if I need to sneak away from the office for a couple of hours for a nap in the midst of a few too many back-to-back 12 and 14 hour days. Although there is not enough time in the week (or the year) to take “comp” time off after a midnight emergency or a run of very long days, I have been able to identify in myself the signs that I need to head home early from the office on a light day.

I have never made a distinction between serving the church, serving the community, or simply responding to a need that that has arisen and is going un met. My call is to serve. Sometimes I reach beyond the congregation because it is what they expect of me. My church wants to serve others and to reach out. Sometimes I do so because it is my internal nature - I belong to the community as much as any other member. Sometimes I reach out because the need is staring me in the face and it would be wrong to ignore it.

Experience has taught me how to listen and respond to genuine need.

Over the span of my career, I have taken the sad news of the death of a teen or young adult to parents too many times. I know that when a teen has the courage to let me know that he is hurting and depressed, I need to respond immediately. I’ll trade a hundred “false alarms” if it might prevent a single suicide.

They say “don’t sweat the small stuff” and follow up with “and it is all small stuff.” The world of ministry doesn’t work that way. Things that seem small can take on really big meaning. The person who stops by office and says, “do you have a minute?” might be the most important conversation of my day. The person who asks “Did I call at an inconvenient time?” might not be albe to wait until it is more convenient.

Experience has also taught me not to waste my time and energy on things that can be handled simply. I feel no obligation to explain myself to those who are calling for political polling or to sell me whatever it is that they are selling. As soon as I identify a “robo” call or get on the end of a sales pitch, I simply hang up these days. No wasted effort. No attempt to change the world, just a quick click and I move on to more important things.

There are great advantages at both ends of the age spectrum. Youth and enthusiasm are great qualities that can be channeled to accomplish wonderful things. Creativity and the willingness to risk are things that are much needed in the church. But wisdom and experience also have their place. And, like every other person of faith, what I have to offer is a product of who I am. May I make a gift of my experience without fear of showing my age.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I got my name from my great uncle Ted. His story has never been written up. I doubt if his biography would be interesting to those outside of our family. He didn’t every become rich. He wasn’t famous. Still, his life was remarkable. And our family has a lot of “Uncle Ted” stories. We’ve been telling them for years and, hopefully, will be telling them for generations to come.

Edward Spencer Russell was one of the first generation of settler children to be born in Montana. His father, Roy Russell had come up the Missouri River by steamboat with his wife Hattie Eldora Coon Russell. Roy was a court reporter by training and came up the river to Fort Benton and then traveled overland to Virginia City to serve in the newly-formed territorial government. His brother, Ed, for whom my great uncle Ted was named, was a somewhat rougher character was a mule skinner who drove freight out of Fort Benton to mining camps for years. According to family legend, Roy is the man on a horse leading an ox train up the hill from Fort Benton in a Charlie Russell paining. Charles Russell, who was famous, was of another family according to Hattie, but that is another story entirely.

Roy, in addition to being a court reporter was an avid bicyclist. Among the family archives are photographs of him with his bicycle in what is now Yellowstone National Park and also in Glacier National Park. His sons Edward and Giles picked up his flair for things mechanical and both became part of the automobile industry as it grew and spread. Giles was a car dealer in the state capital, Helena. As the depression tightened its grip on Montana, Ted headed for California, where he worked as a machinist and as a parts man for a Chevrolet dealer.

We got to know Uncle Ted when he and his wife Florence moved to our town. Ted became the parts man at the John Deere dealership that our father had just acquired. For many years, Uncle Ted was the first face customers saw when they entered the place and he was the organizer of the huge inventory of parts that we kept in the days when such things where shipped by motor freight and we had to have what the farmers and ranchers needed to keep their equipment in the field and working.

Of course there are far too many Uncle Ted stories for one blog and it is likely that there will be other blogs.

Uncle Ted lost his wife Florence suddenly. A heart attack took her in the middle of the night. It was my first experience of the death of a family member. My grandfather had died when I was a toddler, and though I have memories of him, I do not have any memories of his death or funeral. Aunt Florence was a different matter. She was just down the street and around the corner. And then she was gone. And I knew how incredibly sad our family was. I cried without really understanding why I was crying.

From that time on, Uncle Ted lived in that little house alone. And he set about inventing ways of making the home work for him. He wore dark green John Deere uniforms to work and he sorted his washing only once: dress clothes went to the cleaners. Everything else was washed in the same load in his clothes washer. It was more efficient that way and it worked for him. We noticed that the small bit of his undershirt that showed in the collar of his work shirt began to take on approximately the same color as the shirt, but it wasn’t a big deal.

Uncle Ted invented his own form of instant coffee. He’d take a can of coffee, dump it into a big pot, fill the pot with water and boil the whole mess down until it was a quart of sludge in the bottom of the pan. The sludge he’d put into a mason jar and stick in the refrigerator. When he wanted a cup of coffee, he’d take a teaspoon of that sludge from the jar, add boiling water and he was set. He served the same to his guests. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker in those days, but my memory of the stuff was that it was downright difficult to get it down. It didn’t encourage caffeine addiction.

Among the hundreds of “inventions” that our family credits to Uncle Ted, he was known for his winter boots. One day it was quite icy and Uncle Ted took a fall when walking. He came into the shop and headed into the back. Standing in his stocking feet, he set up the drill press to drill exactly 1/2 inch into the heels of his shoes and then proceeded to take the tool for inserting steel studs into tires and install studs in the heels of his boots. he also made himself a walking stick with a wicked steel tip. With his walking stick and studded boots he was ready for the iciest of conditions. The boots were not allowed in the house, however.

A young man during the depression, Uncle Ted learned to keep whatever might have a future use. And that was a lot of stuff. He was an accomplished sheet metal worker and it seemed that no piece of sheet metal was too small to keep. He added a single-stall garage to his house that already had a small garage. The old garage became a shop and the new garage home for the car. The shop soon sported floor to ceiling shelves on all the walls except where there was a window or door. The shelves were lined with boxes, mostly boxes in which parts for the shop had been shipped. The boxes were labeled with grease pencil in Uncle Ted’s neat printing.

The shop also had a small work bench with a vice and a few hand-made tools for bending mental, setting rivets and other jobs. Soon there was need for a shed in the back yard and then another and finally a third. There were simply too many good things that needed to be saved in case they might later be needed.

And all i really wanted to say in this blog is that if I have a few extra boxes of bits and pieces in my garage and shed, I come by the tendency to keep such things naturally.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I went to the hardware store on Saturday. It is a trip about which I occasionally get teased at my house. I guess I go to the hardware store a lot. I like going to the hardware store. One of my favorite places in the store is the row of bins of open bolts and nuts. There was an aisle like that in my father’s store when I was growing up. Rows and rows of bins, each with its own diameter and length of bolts. The hex bolts are separate from the carriage bolts and there are places for lock washers and flat washers and fender washers. There are regular hex nuts and locking nuts and wing nuts. We had rows of galvanized bolts, which these days are pretty much gone from hardware stores, replaced by a lot more stainless steel than we ever had in our store.

But hardware stores have more than just the bolts. I’m a fairly regular customer of tools and tie downs and buckles and cables and wire and harness rings and paint and countless other things that are found in a good hardware store.

Saturday’s trip was to pick up a small container of broadleaf herbicide. I’m not a big fan of herbicides, but sometimes the weeds that invade the lawn get beyond the pulling and digging stage. Even though we live in “Countryside” and I’m not into the kind of competitive lawn keeping that is a part of some neighborhoods, Canada thistle is not my idea of a lush lawn. And if you don’t control the weeds you end up sharing them with the neighbors, which is why I have the problem in the first place, but that is an entirely different story.

My father was a licensed chemical applicator and applied various chemicals with airplanes, ground spray rigs and hand-held sprayers. I learned quite a bit from him and one of the things that I learned is that the most effective season for applying broadleaf herbicides is the fall. Warm and sunny September and October days give you the best results. October 11 seemed like a good day to me.

Anyway, I walked into the lawn and garden section of the store to find it populated by outdoor Christmas lights. There were some ornaments that were still in boxes and some shelves that were empty, but the Christmas theme was definitely a part of the store. And the shelves were bare of fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, hand tools, garden hoses, sprinklers and the usual items you would normally find in a hardware store. I strolled up and down the aisles, hoping that they might have forgotten a single bottle of Ortho Weed B Gone.

Now there is a principle in all hardware stores. When you know what you want and need a little time to think about which way to solve a particular problem and which bits and pieces to purchase, there will be a clerk who will hover and ask you, “Can I help you?” or “Did you find what you are looking for?” every few minutes. It can be a bit embarrassing to admit, “I’m not sure what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.” Then, when you have something specific in mind, but don’t know where to find it in the store, there are no clerks to be found. It was the latter situation on Saturday. It was obvious that they were in the midst of stocking shelves with Christmas items, but whoever was doing the job had abandoned the work. Perhaps it was coffee break time.

When I finally located a clerk, he made a half-hearted attempt to look for a little weed killer for me and then said, “I guess we don’t have that any more.” I asked him if there might be a bottle in the back, in storage, where they must have just taken the stock that was on the shelves a few days ago, but he didn’t have any idea where to find it.

The scene was nearly the same at the second hardware store I visited. Fortunately they had the end of one shelf with some late fall gardening supplies and there on the shelf was what I needed. But most of the aisle was being devoted to artificial Christmas trees and outdoor lighting displays.

As I checked out, I mentioned to one of the clerks, “I thought for a minute that I had wandered into the wrong time zone.” When questioned, I commented further, “Out here it isn’t even Halloween yet, but back there, it seems to be Christmas.”

I didn’t make any trips to the big box hardware and lumber stores in our town. I avoid them unless the smaller hardware stores don’t have what I want. But I’m willing to bet that they are all decked out with Christmas items as well. In fact, I suspect that the pressure for the local hardware stores to make the switch in merchandise so early comes directly from those big box stores.

Now I understand that some of my neighbors like to put up their Christmas decorations on Thanksgiving weekend because they have some extra time off from work and it can be a big job to do all of that decorating. Our family has never gotten into the lighting displays and outdoor decorating, but I don’t have anything against it.

But are there a lot of people who go shopping for their Christmas decorations in mid-October?

Actually, if you have the storage space, I’m told that early January is the best time to purchase Christmas decorations. That probably won’t work at our hardware stores. I wouldn’t be surprised if they switch over to Valentines Day before Christmas arrives.

There are some jobs that I am simply not cut out to perform. Retail sales isn’t my cup of tea. I think I would like visiting with people. I know I would like finding just the right part to make that home repair. I know I would like talking about tools and how to care for them.

But for me there is no joy in setting up Christmas decorations in October.

I don’t even have my yard work done yet.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

It seems that the people of God have struggled with how to live as free people for as long as we have had the taste of freedom. From the first moments after Moses led the people of Israel though the Red Sea waters, there were voices among them who advised turning back and returning to the land of slavery. Even when the young community was well into the desert, there were those who wanted to abandon the life of freedom and imitate the ways of their neighbors. And all of that is ancient history, but our people continue to struggle with the basics of the life of freedom, frequently choosing paths that enslave them. The slavery isn’t often in physical bonds, but rather in psychological bonds and mixed loyalties.

Just one of the ten commandments continues to be a challenge for many in modern society: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the sevent day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work - you , your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.”

It seems pretty clear. Everyone should take a day off from work every week. The commandment suggests that all take the same day off from work each week. It has been quite a while since blue laws were common in the United States. These days we believe that we need to have all of the stores open every day. Many retail stores are open on holidays as well as every day during the week. Of course the owners of the stores would speak of the necessity of competition and they would point out that the employees who work on the weekends get a different day off each week. In fact, many contemporary establishments are dependent upon part-time workers, not because of the needs of the workers, but because of reduced costs when fewer benefits are paid.

And the majority of people would agree that there are certain essential services such as law enforcement, fire protection, and healthcare that need to be provided at all times.

But even when we do take a day away from work, we have trouble defining what are the appropriate activities for that day. For many of us, whose daily jobs involve more sitting and less physical labor, a day off can mean getting some exercise. Some of us undergo more physical exertion in our recreation than we do in our work. The very nature of work has changed in a world where we are less dependent upon physical labor and more dependent on a large array of services. I suppose that all of this can be seen as a series of excuses for not obeying the commandment, but our lives really are more complex than those of nomadic tribes wandering in the mid eastern deserts. By the time of Jesus, the people were already arguing about the nature of the Sabbath. Jesus’ critics accused him of breaking the Sabbath when he healed or gathered food for people.

In our complex and fast-paced world, people often don’t know how to relax. They rush from event to event, appointment to appointment, obligation to obligation. Often the activities that are labeled “recreation” are as strenuous and filled with the same dynamics as that that are called “work.” Yesterday, I went paddling, split wood, mowed my lawn, and did some other yard work. None of it was “work” per se, but I was more stiff and tired at the end of the day than I am when I spend a day at my office or visiting people in the nursing home and hospital. I find myself looking forward to a day off from time to time in order to catch up with physical exercise. It all seems a bit opposite of the lifestyle of a subsistence farmer.

Here is one thing: we all need to be reminded that we are not God. I know that sounds a bit silly on the surface, but the bottom line is that we often behave as if we have no need of God. We act like we can take care of everything all by ourselves. In my observance of the people in my community, I would say that the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” is the hardest for people.

It is too easy to make a higher priority of earning money, having a nice home, having lots of possessions, being respected by others, having position in the community - and the list goes on and on. Even when it is clearly pointed out to us that things like car loans and mortgages and seeking the approval of others can enslave, people choose to pursue those very things.

Like the people of Israel, we seem to flirt with slavery instead of choosing the path of freedom.

So today is the day that many of us have agreed upon to set aside as the Sabbath. Of course part of the setting aside means that we want to gather for worship, so some of us will lead worship - a task that involves a bit of work. And when we gather, our community will be far from complete. The average attendance in our congregation, like many others, is less than 30% of the membership. We rarely have an occasion where a majority of us gather for the same event. There will be members who are getting in a last weekend at the lake, and others who are traveling with children’s sports teams, and others who are getting in a weekend of shopping in a city.

And some will just sleep in because they are tired. If you haven’t gotten enough sleep, perhaps catching up is a way of observing the sabbath. I really don’t think it is as simple as saying that those who are in church are observing the sabbath and those who are not present are not.

It is a continuing struggle. And perhaps one of the good signs is that we are thinking about it and taking it seriously. God never demanded perfection from our people. But paying attention is a good idea.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I don’t know if I would have thought of the title for today’s blog had I not read Steve Chapple’s 1993 book, “Kayaking the Full Moon.” In my own defense, he may have a pretty good title, but he didn’t write much of a book. It is number 2,562,491on the Amazon list and used copies are going for 1 cent, so I’m not the only one who thinks that the book isn’t going to make it to the rank of the classics. I’m not sure you want a book review, but here goes anyway.

After the intriguing title, Chapple had a subtitle that intrigued me and got me to buy the book: “A Journey Down the Yellowstone River to the Soul of Montana.” I’ve paddled the Yellowstone. I grew up two miles upstream on one of its tributaries, and I’ve been interested in the soul of Montana for all of my life. In Chapple’s case, however, the subtitle is merely presumptuous. A guy from San Francisco who comes to Montana with a couple of plastic sea kayaks and floats the Yellowstone from Gardiner to the state line, spending his nights in motels and doing a little bit of drinking in bars and local dives, doesn’t give himself an opportunity to get to know Montana, much less journey into its soul.

Within a few pages, most paddlers will discover that Chappel is no kayaker. They start their floating in the most challenging part of the Yellowstone. There is a little whitewater in the canyon, no big deal for a creek boat, but a bit rocky for a long boat. Still, it would have been no problem in the plastic boats they were using. But they were afraid of the river. And they were inexperienced paddlers. Had they learned to handle their boats before launching them in the rapids, they might have learned to love the river. It is a gorgeous float, and not very strenuous.

They survive the first few hours of the float and downstream from that point the entire river is an easy trip in a canoe, but they continue with their kayaks except for a single float near Billings that they take with a newspaperman in his aluminum canoe. So they took a risk and got away with it. No one had to call out the search and rescue folks. The description of the river as dangerous and challenging probably is a good thing if it keeps other inexperienced boaters off the water. The Yellowstone can get downright crowded on a warm August day.

What drives me up the wall about the book, however, is the way in which he thinks that he has somehow captured the culture of Montana by talking with a few drunks in a few bars. No disrespect for those who drink, but the twisted version of a very tragic death that occurred not far from my home made me sick. I knew the victim. I know more of the story. It isn’t funny. The pain of loss felt by her family will never go away. Chappel’s reporting of something about which he didn’t know is made worse by the fact that he didn’t even take time to look up the story in the newspaper archives.

So all in all, he missed the soul of my beloved home state. He missed the joy of paddling. And, in my humble opinion, someone who doesn’t know a sea kayak from a creek boat shouldn’t be allowed to use the word Kayak in a book title.

Still, it is a cool title: Kayaking the Full Moon. I’ve been trying to do just that this week. Yesterday, I was on the water just before 5 am. The moon was nearly full. I had a kayak. I paddle kayaks after it starts to get cold. There is no need for a decked boat on the lake, but it is simply warmer than an open canoe. Alas yesterday clouds obscured the moon from sight all of the time I was on the lake. By about 7 a.m. the clouds had blown away and the moon set in full sight, but I had to be off of the lake by then in order to make it to the office by 7:30.

Nonetheless, even with the clouds the full moon made the night a lot more light than usual. I could see to navigate my way around the lake without any light and without any problem. i paddled across the lake and into a cove where I sat for a little while and listened to an owl calling from a nearby tree. The ducks grumbled a little. A few fish rose to meet the drops off of my paddle. Mostly I had the lake to myself. Mostly I had the quiet to myself. I just didn’t have a view of the stars above and the nearly-full moon.

So, I’m after it again today. I’ll be able to spend a little more time today. I don’t have to be at the church until 9 a.m. and I don’t have to shower before going in because I’ll be helping with wood splitting and showering afterwards will pretty much be in order.

I’m lucky to have warm clothes. These days, with a nod to safety, I paddle with a dry suit in chilly weather. Were I to fall into the lake, I have enough warmth to swim to shore if I need to. With a lifejacket, self rescue is pretty much assured. Over the dry suit, I have a paddling jacket and I can add lots of other layers as needed. And, as I mentioned, a kayak with a spray skirt is nice and warm for feet and legs. The kayak I paddle for these outings is one I made myself, a cedar-strip boat that is durable, good looking, and a design by Nick Shade that is a kind of hybrid. Technically a sea kayak, it is only 12 feel long and very beamy. It is stable, and not too quick, but has enough rocker to handle easily. It would be a great boat for the Yellowstone. In fact, it has quite a bit of Yellowstone experience, from about Springdale to Reed Point or so.

And unlike the guy with the catchy title, I really do paddle under the full moon while he made his trip in broad daylight.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

OK here is a story that is at least third generation - perhaps more. I heard the basic story from a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson. The story is about Dame Gillian Lynne. Dame Lynne is now in her late ’80’s and still a force to be reckoned with in the world of dance and theatre. She is a British ballerina, dancer, choreographer, actress, and theatre/television director, noted for her popular theatre choreography associated with the musical Cats and the current longest running show in Broadway history, The Phantom of the Opera.

Hers it is a story worth re-telling. Let me see if I can get at least part of it right.

When she was a child of about ten, back in the 1930’s her mother was exasperated with a child who simply couldn’t sit still. Her restlessness was disrupting her schooling. Her teachers were frustrated. Her mother didn’t know what to do with her. I’m sure that today they would have diagnosed her with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But they didn’t have that diagnosis in those days, so that wasn’t an option for her. Her mother just couldn’t figure out what to do with her. Seeking some kind of solution to the problem, her mother took her to an eminent British physician who was a specialist in pediatrics. Her mother was hopeful that she might find some diagnosis that would explain why her daughter wasn’t learning at the same pace as her peers.

As I heard the story, the mother and daughter were escorted into a plush office where the eminent doctor sat behind the desk and interviewed them. Gillian was told to sit still in a large leather chair. And she tried so hard to sit still. After what seemed to her to be a long conversation, the doctor said that he needed to step out into the hallway with to talk to her mother. He instructed Gillian to sit still in the chair and on his way out of the room he turned on a radio tuned to a music channel.

What Gillian didn’t know is that he took her mother out into the hall and instructed her to look through the slightly open door. As soon as they left the room, the girl got up an danced around the room. Then she stood on the chair and danced. She stood on the desk an danced. She twirled and kept and pirouetted all around the office.

Her mother was slightly embarrassed and began to apologize to the doctor for her daughter’s behavior. The doctor interrupted her and said, “Don’t you know what you are seeing?” There is nothing wrong with your daughter. She was born to dance. Go get her dance lessons and everything will be fine.

The rest, as they say, is history. Gillian is one of the grand dames of dance, world famous, a millionaire and fabulously successful. The way I heard the story she is quick to say that she simply cannot think sitting still. She has to dance to think.

I knew that story before I ever heard it. I knew it because I am the father of a dancer. When teachers told me that she was having trouble with arithmetic, I knew that she could dance from a 4/4 rhythm to a 6/8 rhythm and back again without missing a beat. When I was told she couldn’t focus her attention, I knew that she could identify composers of classical music by their pieces before she went to school. When she was only 2 years old we moved into a neighborhood where there was a small dance studio at the end of our street. We used to walk past the studio as we walked her brother to and from school. She was attracted to the window in that small shop like steel to a magnet. She asked us to sign her up for lessons. We told her she was too young. They didn’t have classes for girls her age. She campaigned to have dance lessons and as soon as she was old enough she got them.

She danced her way through school and into her college years. A couple of knee injuries kept her from pursuing a career in dance, but there is no doubt in my mind that she was born to dance.

And if she was born to dance, I know kids who were born to play the piano and others who were born to play soccer and others who were born to go fishing. Maybe there are kids who were born to play video games, thought I have no expertise on how you would identify that child.

The point is that when we aren’t careful, we run the risk of labeling someone as unable to learn when all that is going on is that the person thinks differently than we do.

I’m pretty sure that none of my high school teachers would have identified me as a good student. I did get an A in geometry. It was the year I was studying for my private pilot’s license and geometry and navigation had a lot of the same principles. After high school, I still didn’t know that I was a good student. I was admitted to college on academic probation. It took me a while to discover that I was a pretty good student. By the time I made it to my senior year in college, I was hooked. I loved college. I loved graduate school. I love reading and researching and studying to this day. The best thing about college for me was discovering that I was a good student and that I never have to quit studying. Maybe I was born to be a student.

I will forever be grateful that I didn’t get labeled as a poor student when I was in high school.

I remain forever committed to not labeling the high school students with whom I come into contact. Even when they are in their twenties, many young people haven’t yet fully discovered who they are and what they are called to do with their lives.

When they seem to be a bit confused, lost and uncertain, I try to remember to tell them the story of Gillian Lynne and hope that they can see a bit of themselves in the story.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

It has been said that Robert Michael Ballantyne had printer’s ink in his blood. His father, Alexander was a newspaper editor and printer, but the book printer in the family was his uncle, James, who was the printer for the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. But it might not have been the printing business that launched RM’s career.He grew up at the tail end of a large family. There were ten children and RM was number 9, the last son. His father’s newspaper went broke during the bank crisis of 1825 as RM approached his teens. At 16 he found himself apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company for five years as a junior trader.He traveled by canoe and dogsled to some of the most remote country in northern Canada. He learned some of the ways of the indigenous people. He learned the rigors of travel in isolated locations, he felt hunger occasionally.

And he got homesick.

To deal with his homesickness he began to write long letters home. In his 1893 memoir, “Personal Reminiscenses in Book Making,” “To this long-letter writing I attribute whatever small amount of facility in compassion I may have acquired.”

He was being modest when he wrote “small amount of facility.” RM Ballantyne was the author of more than 100 books. His genre was juvenile fiction. He wrote adventure stories for teens. The seeds of a lot of those stories came from the adventures he had as a teen.

I guess I had a few adventures between the ages of 16 and 21. I was a year older than RM when I moved away from home. My trip was only 80 miles rather than across the ocean. I went to college while RM went to very hard labor. I was still going to school five years later.

Along the way I did take a few backpack trips to remote locations. I did paddle a few strokes in a canoe. I got married. But I didn’t spend any amount of time trading with Indians, mushing dogs, surviving -50 temperatures, sitting around the campfire with voyageurs listing to their tales while sipping the day’s dram of rum, or waiting out the wind and weather on a remote island in a huge lake.

On the other hand, RM Ballantyne’s most famous story is called “The Coral Island,” an adventure perhaps roughly based in Ballantyne’s ship travels, though he didn’t sail southern seas. The story is famous for two things: First, Robert Louis Stevenson was inspired to write his novel, “Treasure Island” by reading the tale, and second, he got the thickness of a coconut shell all wrong. It is that second little bit of trivia that is most inspirational to me. He was writing from his imagination and it is that imagination, I believe, that is most critical for a writer and teller of tales.

Now I’m a firm believer in telling the truth. I think it is a good idea to do your research. But there is something about a well-crafted story that gives it the ability to at least stretch and bend the truth, to create its own world separate from the world of the listeners, that invites one into the tale. Garrison Keillor has told a lot of truth and shared a lot of wisdom by talking about a town that has never existed. Lake Woebegone has become the hometown of countless people who grew up in and left small towns. Its characters have become believable enough to serve as models and mentors for others. That is what happens when a story is well-told. The “facts” might all be wrong, while the underlying truth continues to be true.

Jesus was that kind of storyteller. When he told about a man who fell into thieves on the road, his listeners understood that it was a lesson in neighborliness and never thought to question whether the story was fact or fiction. When he spoke of a sower tossing seed in the weeds and on the road, they never questioned his agricultural expertise or experience. They allowed themselves to become involved in the stories he told and to be transformed by the lessons therein.

It is a challenge for a preacher seeking to be a disciple of Jesus. Making up stories for sermon illustrations isn’t encouraged. Then again, many of the stories that a pastor knows first hand aren’t his or her to tell. A minister who builds a career by going around and telling stories about other people won’t be long in the pulpit.

Then again, some of Jesus’ stories are complex enough that you don’t get them on the first read. Many contemporary ministers follow the Revised Common Lectionary, a pattern of scripture readings that follows a three-year cycle. I’ve been preaching from the lectionary since my ordination in 1978. That means that I’m on my 13th trip through that cycle of stories. Since there are four readings for each week, (Hebrew, Psalm, Epistle and Gospel) it is possible to go through the cycle and still avoid some texts by preaching on another of the texts. I’m pretty sure I haven’t preached on this week’s parable 13 times. In fact I can distinctly remember focusing on the Hebrew lesson for the day 3 years ago in 2011. I know that we were focused on the Moses stories of the Hebrew lessons in 1999 and I probably didn’t mention the parable. I’m pretty sure I avoided it in 1981, and again in 1984, when I was a bit sleep deprived with babies in the house and a bit distracted in some of my preaching. In fact though I can remember studying the text, I can come up with no memorable sermon I’ve ever preached on the parable.

Like RM Ballantyne writing about Coral Island, I’m going to need a bit of imagination to craft a sermon for this week. I had originally planned to preach on the Hebrew Text. It’s a good one. Its lessons are pretty straight forward and simple.

But the parable won’t let go of me. I’ve been thinking about it all week. It is one of my “Come to Jesus!” moments when I become aware that the simplest course of action isn’t the one to which I’ve been called. So it is Thursday and I know what text I should address, but I don’t know what I will say. It is not a comfortable position for me to be in. I like to have a clear sense of my sermon by about Tuesday so I can spend the rest of the week polishing.

Sometimes the creativity comes out when the pressure is on. I pray that will be the case this week.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I have been blessed in my life to have excellent mentors and models. My parents taught not only by the words they said, but also by the lives they lived. My father taught me the joy of work and the joy of the outdoors. He had an attitude toward challenges and problems that I have sought to imitate when I encounter obstacles. He understood that one needs to live for others and to build the capacity to share into everything that you do.

I grew up among dedicated pastors who showed their love for the church and their unique styles of leadership in an institution that could be at the same time frustrating and inspiring.

In my school years, I had excellent teachers who demonstrated the value of careful research, thinking before speaking, and the art of writing. I was privileged to walk and work alongside dedicated scholars who were willing to tackle really big projects and invest in connecting with those who lived beyond the span of their physical lives.

Over an over again in this life - in parenting, in pastoring, in scholarship, in work, in living - I have been able to think of the models and mentors who have influenced my identity. I feel as if I have been sustained in this life by those who have gone before and generously shared their wisdom and experience with me.

But now my life is flowing into an area where I seem to have no mentors and few models. This should be the beginning of a season of transition of leadership in the church. I have reached the age where I should be dedicating a portion of my time and energy to encouraging younger leaders and creating space for them to assume responsibilities. Our church has come to a point where it is obvious that if we don’t develop a style of managing transitions of leadership the transitions will be forced upon us. None of us will live forever. The change has to come.

In this arena, as I just wrote, I am decidedly short of mentors. My father died when he was a younger man than I. Although he had made some excellent preparations for his family after his death, there were more than a few loose ends that had to be tied up. There were business properties and equipment that had to be leased and later sold. There was an unfinished project of developing a vacation property for our mother. There were details of joint projects with children that were unresolved. And there was the matter of personal property that still is being sorted through more than three decades later.

One of my most respected and honored teachers was forced out of a teaching position at the age of 74. The school never replaced him and his absence left a hole in the curriculum. The school later headed in new directions, but still hasn’t quite figured out how to balance its faculty. The professor moved on to another graduate school where he taught until a stroke forced him to finally stop. It was a less than graceful retirement, if you could call it a retirement at all. He had mentored countless pastors, but left the institutions he served without qualified teachers to replace him.

A favorite pastor friend of mine began his retirement with a heart attack that put most of his retirement plans on hold and was the beginning of a short struggle with health issues that defined the years after he retired. He was only a few years older than I am today when he died.

Another pastor friend of mine began to suffer from a degenerative memory disorder while still serving the church and after he was forced by the illness to retire his life was a maze of dementia and confusion, sprinkled with what may have been an additional major mental illness.

I once commented about Tom Brokaw’s book, “The Greatest Generation,” that with all of the greatness demonstrated by the generation, the one thing they weren’t great at was sharing power. In institution after institution, the members of our parents’ generation assumed responsibility and took the mantle of leadership and then just kept it. They didn’t turn it over to those who were the age they had been when assuming leadership. When they would grudgingly step down, they hung around and told the next genreration how to do the job. They had great life and vitality and vision and were unwilling or unable to allow the life and vitality and vision of the next generation - or perhaps the next could of generations - to shine.

I feel like I am entering into new territory as I begin to think and dream about the best ways to enable new leaders to arise in the church. Beyond that, and more alarming to me, I feel like I can’t find anyone who is willing to talk about the subject. I made an appointment with a Conference Minister to discuss transitions in leadership. I was clear about my agenda when I set up the meeting. The person arrived late to the meeting and then proceeded to dominate the conversation with discussion of other topics. It was clear that transition of leadership was not on his list of things to discuss. Then I realized that he, more than a decade my senior, is still working and doesn’t have a plan for transition of leadership in his position.

More than a year ago, I asked a committee in our congregation to make transition of leadership a priority topic for its deliberations in the year to come. A year has passed and 2014 is in its last quarter and no discussions have been held. I haven’t even been invited to any of the meetings of that committee since I made my request.

Whenever I try to speak with individual members of the congregation about transition of leadership they make comments about not wanting me to leave and the conversation turns from the needs of the church to my personal life.

There are a few good books on the topic, but if you look in the retirement planning section of a bookstore you will find books on financial management, not the dynamics of transition of leadership. I can’t help but think that the over $40 price of “The Nonprofit Leadership Transition and Development Guide” is part of the author Tom Adams’ own financial planning for retirement.

Like many other areas of my life, the next decade may be a season of muddling. Sometimes you just get through the challenge with as much grace and dignity as you can muster, looking and feeling awkward, but continuing to move forward.

If anyone has wisdom or insights, I’m really ready to listen.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I had a day off yesterday and had time to paddle at the lake. That’s quite a change from a year ago when we were digging out from under a blizzard and cutting up the trees that were felled by the storm in our yard. Yesterday the temperatures made it into the seventies and we were outside in our shirtsleeves. I paddled up the creek that empties into the lake to check out the beaver lodges. The beaver built two new lodges this year and although I didn’t seen any of the elusive creatures, there is a lot of evidence that the number of beavers in the immediate area is increasing.

It was breezy at the lake and the winds were swirling about. At one point I made a run across the lake and in less than 15 minutes I felt the wind blowing from every quarter as I paddled in a straight line. The lake is a bit small for sailboats, but it would have been an interesting day for sailors with the way the winds were shifting around.

Having been paddling, and enjoying a bit more relaxed day than some, I decided to make a voyageur dinner. I mixed up a bannock. We have a good supply of local apples, so instead of raisins, I chopped up apples and kneaded them into the bannock along with a handful of dried blueberries. I baked the bannock in a dutch oven, which isn’t quite the way the voyageurs made theirs. They used a frying pan and after browning the mixture, set it at an angle near the fire for the bread to bake in reliant heat. I had plenty of applewood for my fire, so I put on a pot of beans and a little pork shoulder to complete the meal. Voyageurs traveled with both dried beans and corn and so a small pot of beans was fairly authentic. They probably didn’t have a nice cut of pork shoulder. It wouldn’t have traveled well. They traveled with salt pork and pemmican. When there was fresh meat available they added that to their diet. The voyageurs were often called pork eaters, so the meal was vaguely in the spirit of the ancient paddlers and adventurers.

Our grocery store doesn’t carry caribou tongue or brisket of musk ox, so a bit of creativity in the menu was in order.

We were treated to a lovely sunset and a gorgeous moonrise. The moon is nearing full. In another day or so it will be there.

Given the way I expect my week to turn out, it was good to have a bit more laid back day yesterday. Tending towards a type A personality, I often charge into my days with a pretty intense pace. Mostly that doesn’t make for too much stress, and I have learned to exercise for endurance and take my days with a healthy dose of prayer, study, writing and devotion to manage the stress and clear my vision. Still it is nice to have a day when I am less focused on goals and lists of tasks to accomplish.

When they were on the move, the voyageurs were incredibly focused on goals. They were expected to work at least 14 hours per day, paddle 50 strokes a minute and be able to carry two packs of 90 pounds each across the portages.They were moving freight and their season was short. That short season was another, and often untold, part of the voyageur story. The demanding pace of freighting usually was a third of the year or less. Some years some of the voyageurs stayed int he back country over winter. If the distance was great, it took one season to go out and another to come back. They formed relationships with the indigenous people with whom the traded. They made clothes, carved, repaired canoes and undertook a number of other chores in the off season. The distinctive sashes worn by voyageurs were usually finger-woven or woven on hand looms. Many of the voyageurs were of mixed heritage. Colors had different meanings for different groups. The modern blue and white Metis flag and the red and white hunting flag were not used before the 19th century, though the colors may have been associated with the people prior to the adoption of flags. Green and gold were signs of fertility and prosperity. Black was a remembrance of hard times.

I didn’t wear a sash when I was paddling yesterday. I don’t paddle for 14 hours. and I’m not sure that aI could even stand up with 180 pounds and I’m sure that my neck muscles aren’t strong enough for half of that weight to be attached to a tumpline across my forehead. I’m not much for spending months at a time away from my family. I wouldn’t make a very good voyageur.

But we had a fine voyageur dinner last night, and as was the case with the voyageurs, we have bannock leftovers for another day.

Now it is time to refocus and turn my mind to the tasks of a busy day. We launch our annual stewardship drive this week and there are materials to prepare and get ready for distribution. We have a full agenda for our Department of Worship meeting this week and the United Church Youth are going on a “Destination Unknown” adventure tomorrow. That should keep me busy and demand focus for the rest of the week.

If things become a bit too stressful, I can tear off a piece of bannock and munch it to remind me not to take myself too seriously.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

A question to begin today’s blog: Why is there so much bad writing in our society today? You don’t have to look far to find examples of really poor use of the English language in writing. Some days there are plenty of examples right in this blog. If you need to look farther, check out any daily newspaper, or the papers high school and college students are turning in. Check our the reports that members of organizations make or the minutes of virtually any public meeting. Read any legal document. Try to follow the instructions for the use of any computer, router, printer or other modern technology. There are no shortages of examples of misuse and outright abuse of our language in contemporary writing.

It is a topic that that we frequently address when I am talking with my colleagues about the task of teaching. Two theories about the reason for so much bad writing in our society are most prevalent. The first is that people write poorly with the express intent of misleading others. Legislators believe that they might later be held responsible for the laws they write, so they use a lot of jargon and obfuscation to intentionally make the legislation subjects to interpretation that might later be used to justify a change in position. Engineers intentionally hide behind poorly written documents because they want to maintain a body of private information known only to engineers, thus assuring their elite status in society and their continued employment. They want to live in a world where some things are easy to them and a mystery to the general public.

The problem with this theory is that I know too many people who don’t fit into that example. I know lawyers who want to make things clear and who are interested in increasing understanding. I know engineers who write beautifully and who are interested in clear, concise communication.

The second theory about why there is so much bad writing is that modern technologies are somehow subverting the language. Twitter makes us think that you might be able to express a complex thought in 140 characters. Texting with phones encourages misspelling and grammar mistakes. Smart technology is making us dumber, if you follow this theory.

The problem with the second theory is that there is nothing new about bad writing. I read a lot of poorly written papers when I was a college student. My colleagues handed in papers in graduate school that were abysmal. Teachers and scholars have been complaining about bad writing for decades. I remember a game that my family got when I was a kid with instructions on how to play so poorly written that we couldn’t figure out the rules of the game and ended up making up our own game and rules. If modern technology was the source of bad writing, why was there so much bad writing so long ago?

Here is my operational theory for today. I believe that the source of bad writing is that people don’t read enough. I’m sure that it takes more than a voracious appetite for reading to make a good writer, but there is something about reading well-crafted sentences and wondering what it is about that sentence that makes it so engaging that inspires one to work harder at one’s writing. I know that a stint as an editor made a better writer out of me. I do not claim to be a good writer, but I do think that reading is critical to the formation of good writing.

My theory was strengthened by a meeting I attended yesterday. It was a church meeting (surprise! surprise!). One of the questions raised at the meeting was something like this: “Why do we have to ask permission from others in the church? Why can’t we make our own decisions?” I was trying to bite my tongue and not be argumentative at the time, but the answer is so clear to me. It is right in the Bible: 1 Corinthians 12: “But now there are many members, but one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’”

We are all members of the same church. We all have the same Bible, but we don’t all spend much time reading that book.

Actually, I think that there are a lot of people who don’t do much reading at all.

I love oral language. I speak in public for a living. I have spent decades crafting the ability to speak clearly and to discern the differences between effective speech and effective writing. I have been known to chide my colleagues for trying to confuse the two modes of communication. I’m no fan of listening to someone who poorly reads a written document.

But make no mistake about it, I believe that written language also has its place. There are times when writing is the best way to communicate. There are times when writing has qualities that speech cannot imitate, not the least of which is that people can and may read something you have written long after you have died. Writing has a permanence that is a value. When you commit words to paper you really are making a commitment.

I am convinced that writing is not dead. A few great words will survive this generation and the way they will be accessed by future generations is by reading. And the words of our scriptures that have informed generations of faithful people will continue to inspire and inform long after the span of our lives is finished. There are yet many more generations who will appreciate the great words that have been written.

So I keep writing.

And I keep reading.

Sometimes it frustrates me a great deal to have to wade through so much bad writing. But when I discover that single sentence, perfectly crafted, filled with depth of meaning and weight of purpose, everything else fades away and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to read.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I caught an article in our local newspaper about Ryand and Rebecca Means, who with their daughter Skyla, have been seeking out the most remote location in each state. Their project, began several years ago, is to locate the spot in each of the 50 states that is farthest from any road and then to hike to that place. They invest their vacation time, usually in the early autumn, in their treks. They have been in South Dakota recently where the most remote spot, by their definition, is in Badlands National Park, where you can hike to a place that is 3.7 miles from the nearest road. That’s not a real big distance, compared to some other parts of the United States. We used to hike in what is now the Beartooth-Absaroka Wilderness Area north of Yellowstone Park where every step we took led us farther from the nearest road. We didn’t venture too far, but I’ve definitely been more than ten miles from the nearest road. The couple’s formula led to them to a place in the Bob in Montana where they got about 18 miles from any road.

They didn’t have to worry about grizzly bears in Badlands National Park. I’m guessing that when they get to finding the place most distant from a road in Alaska, they’ll travel most of those miles by airplane.

Of course, there are many different ways to define remote. You can be many places in South Dakota where you are on a road, but a lot of miles from any other people. And then there is the matter of the definition of “road.” I know some things that they might call a road where you could sit for a whole year with no cars coming by.

In some states, the place that they defined as farthest from a road was close enough to a road that they could hear the cars passing by. Here in South Dakota we have some paved state highways where you could stand for several minutes without any cars passing by.

There is something that just feels right to me about their quest, however. I like remote places. I like hiking and paddling and just trekking to get away from other people from time to time. It isn’t that I’m anti-social. It’s quite the opposite with me. I work with people in my daily life and I enjoy the people with whom I’m blessed to live and work.

Despite my grousing about it, yesterday was a pretty good example of my life. I started out in the dark from my home. I was hardly alone on the streets of Rapid City, however. I find that no matter what time I’m out and about, there are always a few others awake and traveling. By the time I left the Interstate highway just east of Wall, however, there was a glorious sunrise and not too many cars passing by. At one point, I carefully pulled over and stopped to take a picture, but no one passed my car while I was stopped. It was a brief stop, but there was probably 5 minutes or more between cars on that stretch of road for a little while.

I spent the middle of the day in meetings, listening to presentations by other people and making a brief presentation myself.

Then I got into the car for 2 1/2 hours to myself driving home. There was more traffic on the drive home, but nothing so frustrating that I was bothered by the others with whom I shared the road. And I was home for an intimate supper and conversation with my wife.

I’m not the kind of person who would thrive in a remote cabin all by myself where I didn’t have contact with others for days at a stretch. I might call that a vacation, but it isn’t the way I want to invest the bulk of my time.

Remote, however, doesn’t scare me. The family in the news article, aren’t traveling solo - they have each other. They have company for every step of the way. Now that is a very good way to travel, even if their daughter needs to be carried some of the time. I have carried both of our children up to the top of Bear Butte when they were tiny. They seemed to enjoy the hike as much as i did.

I collect things, but have never needed to have a complete set. I joke that the ideal number of canoes for a person to have is n + 1, with n being the number of canoes you currently have. There’s always one more that is interesting and worth considering, no matter how many you have. The Means family, however, has a specific number for their quest. When they have reached the most remote location in each of the 50 states, they will have achieved their goal. Assuming that they can add multiple states in one vacation, it will still take them several years. When they finish I suppose they could add Canadian Provinces or Mexican states.

I don’t feel any need to have a full collection of states visited. We like to travel and have visited a bunch of states, but I doubt if my life will lack any meaning if there are a few that I miss.I have no particular need for a complete set.

And there are plenty of places where I have been to which I would enjoy returning.

Perhaps that is why I’m such a big fan of sunrises. I have a lot of pictures of sunrises, but no two are the same. We are given a unique sunrise every day and the image is continually changing. Depending on your location and the time you’ll get a different view than anyone else. Each sunrise gives me the feeling of a unique view of the world. And I can watch a sunrise from the deck of my home or from the seat of my canoe.

This world is a fascinating place, full of great views. May the Means family continue to experience remoteness in their way and may I have a few more sunrises in which to experience God’s glory.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I’m off to Pierre this morning. For a few years, the South Dakota Conference of the United Church of Christ has held an “Emerging Ministries Summit” in the fall. There was a time when Conferences were units of programming for churches. As recently as 15 or so years ago I invested many days traveling around the state each fall, taking programs to local churches on behalf of the Conference. For a couple of decades, I served as an educational consultant for our church’s national setting. I went to many local churches and associations to introduce several different generations of educational resources, promote publications of United Church Press and hold teacher training workshops. I still have boxes of sample resources and workshop materials stored away.

But the life of the church has changed. Local congregations rarely turn to denominations for resources. They use the Internet to access the resources they need. And denominations don’t have the financial resources to offer programs in local congregations. In the midst of all of these changes, our memories continue to be active. And there is still some sense that the South Dakota Conference ought to be at least a place of coordination of programs to resource local congregations.

The Emerging Ministries Summit was envisioned as a gathering of congregations to share new ideas and new ministries that are part of life of some congregations and might be shared with others. In practice, however, the events have turned out like the old programming modules that we used to present. There are a series of workshops and participants choose a couple of workshops and try to find resources and ideas that they can take home.

Maybe it is just my old age, but this year’s roster of workshops seems to be almost completely devoid of new ideas. If this is what is “emerging” than the future will look a whole lot like the past.

Of course there are places in the church where I am excited about emerging ministries. I am enthralled when I speak with my friend Ryan, who is pastor of a brand new congregation that is very different from traditional congregations. I am energized by a couple of new publishers who are specializing in ministry books and books of new ways of thinking. I am fired up about our Woodchuck program and the emergence of stained glass arts as in our church. When I invest a day in suicide prevention I end up more excited than tired.

But the Conference seems to act like a giant sponge that absorbs my energy. I find myself dreading the meetings of the conference and enduring them rather than becoming edited and participating fully.

It has not always been that way.

I can remember being a new pastor when getting together with other pastors was one of the high points of my life. I can remember when I was excited about Conference meetings and couldn’t wait for those days.

Most likely what I need is an attitude adjustment. You get out of these events what you put into them. I am traveling today because I am a workshop presenter. I was asked to present on church copyright law - not a subject that is one of my favorites - but I have the opportunity to make my corner of the program a time of high energy and present some ideas and resources that might be of use. Of course a lecture on the nuances of law probably won’t even interest a lawyer. But when I think of the story of the use of arts in worship and the way that the church once was a source of drama, fine art, music, literature and other artistic expressions, I know that part of the solution to current copyright dilemmas is for the church to return to the role of being a prodder rather than consumer. Maybe I can turn a rather dry topic into a source of new ideas about how the arts might revive worship and breathe new life into our communities.

At a bare minimum, one of the gifts of this day is an opportunity to drive across the prairie and to look down on Ft. Pierre and Pierre, our state capitol. The name itself, though pronounced in a distinctly South Dakota, not-French way, reminds me of the story of our state. There was a time when this was the land of indigenous tribes and the only Europeans who came to the area were here for the purpose of trading with the natives. There was, to the north and east of South Dakota a huge competition that often looked like war over control of the trade of furs from North America in the European Market. While the British seemed to have the upper hand when it came to navies, shipping and military might, the French had more contacts within the native communities. French traders and trappers tended to live with their trading partners, speak their language, use their modes of transportation, and get along. The British seemed to be afraid to go into the woods and get away from the coasts. Too often they never even learned the languages of those with whom they wanted to trade. Brute force only goes so far in building an economy.

More than 300 years later, we have inherited place names with French spelling even if we have our own way of pronouncing those places.

I doubt if Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye ever set foot in South Dakota. If either he or any of his four sons did so, it would have been only in the extreme northeast corner. They explored and opened up the area west of Lake Superior to the fur trade and may have followed the Red River up the eastern side of what is today North Dakota in search of a route from the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Winnipeg and the northwest fur trade area. Somehow, we got his first name for the fort and later for the capital of our state. It is is a good location at the center of our state and right along the Missouri River.

The drive from here to there and there to here is beautiful.

If nothing else, I have the drive home to look forward to.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I am not a member of the Roman Catholic Church. But I am a Christian and I am well aware of how much the Roman Catholic Church influences the perception of what a church is around the globe. And the members of that church are our sisters and brothers in faith. We believe in the same Christ. The things that divide us into multiple communions are far more minor than the things we share in common.

So, like many other protestants, I am a watcher of Rome and especially of the Pope. And Pope Francis is probably the pope of my lifetime who is most loved by Protestants. He has brought a breath of fresh air to an institution that seems to be so steeped in tradition that it was struggling to maintain relevancy in a rapidly changing world.

This Sunday marks a very important occasion in the papacy of Francis and an event that may one day be known as the most important (and perhaps most startling) change in the Roman Catholic Church of a generation. On Sunday, Cardinals, bishops, priests and lay Catholics from around the world will arrive at the Vatican to consider how Church teaching on the family relates to the reality of modern life.

But before I get ahead of myself, recall with me, for a moment the previous change in the Roman Catholic Church of our lifetime.

It wasn’t that long ago that the gulf between Roman Catholics and Protestants seemed to be too wide to bridge. My uncle refused to attend my cousin’s wedding when he married a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Families were torn by the differences between Catholic and Protestant Christians. And no one my age will ever forget the troubles of Ireland.

So it was a big deal back in 1962 when Pope John 23 (oops! It’s the Roman Church - Pope John XXIII) convened the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II. The world’s 2,800 Roman Catholic bishops gathered in St. Peter’s Bascillica four times in the autumn of four consecutive years for a council that concluded in 1965. They instituted changes in the language of the Mass, from Latin to common languages; the direction that the priest faces when conducting the mass; and, most importantly to we Protestants, changes in the church’s approach to non-Catholic Christians.

It was as if a breath of fresh air had blown through the entire church. The changes in the Roman Catholic Church inspired changes in all of Christianity. We Protestants took another look at the ways we celebrated Holy Communion. We engaged in conversations leading to the Revised Common Lectionary. And we began to have regular conversations and ecumenical gatherings that included Roman Catholic priests and laity.

The process of reform started by Vatican II, however, seemed to stall as the Church moved into the 21st Century. Some of the most conservative voices in the Roman Catholic Church gained control of many of the official offices of the church and while Catholic laity seemed to be embracing progress, the hierarchy of the church seemed to be backtracking.

The topics proposed for this Synod of Roman Catholic leaders are possibly more dramatic and more far reaching than those of the 1960’s. Among the topics to be studied, discussed and reviewed include contraception, homosexuality, and whether Catholics who divorce and then remarry civilly should be allowed to receive communion.

There could be some heated discussions over those topics among the bishops and other church leaders.

The Pope has not promised change in church doctrine. He has hinted that new practices may emerge from the conversations.

So here is my take on the debate soon to spread around the world, for what it is worth.

I think that Pope Francis is right - new doctrine is unlikely to come from these conversations. First of all Pope Francis isn’t primarily a theologian. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI was a theologian and a leader in strengthening and proclaiming doctrine. I don’t see Pope Francis as the same kind of theologian.

And I also don’t expect the kind of radical changes in church practice to come from this Synod that came from Vatican II. Pope John XXIII was a very shrewd politician who understood the nuances of Vatican politics and knew how to count the votes and persuade people to change their positions. I can’t see Pope Francis as the same kind of politician.

I think that Pope Francis is, first and foremost, and always, a pastor. He simply loves and cares about the people that he serves. He doesn’t have a position to assert theologically or politically as long as the church can continue to express love and concern for all of God’s people. After all, he is the Pope who is known to make personal phone calls to respond to inquiries from non-Catholics. He is the Pope who expresses his desire to live a life of poverty in order to live amongst the people Christ has called him to serve.

This is the Pope who carries his own luggage, is happier in a motel room than a palace and can’t see why anyone would want to ride around in a limousine. This is the Pope who says he believes that everyone (not just Roman Catholics) has a guardian angel who protects and helps with making decisions.

Maybe that is what makes Pope Francis so interesting to me. I have invested my life in theological study and disciplines, but I am no theologian. I don’t think systematically. I’ll probably never write a book that arranges beliefs into a logical structure. I have lived in the midst of church politics. I have attended more Conference Meetings and General Synods and participated in more debates about church resolutions than many other faithful Christians. And I’ve been a member of the minority more times than I have been a member of the majority when it comes to taking a vote. I rarely can persuade others to my point of view.

But I love being a pastor. I love the people I have been called to serve. I grieve when they become angry with one another and say hurtful things. I mourn when they stay away from worship or leave the church.

So I think I understand much of Pope Francis. He’s simply in love with the church and beneath all of the theology and doctrine, beneath all of the institutional politics, the church is people.

My prayer is that the theologians and politicians will allow him to continue to be a pastor to the people of the world.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

In the fall of 2006, Susan and I had the opportunity to make a visit to the historical archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg, Manitoba. These days HBC is a major retailer across Canada with department stores and an impressive online marketplace. Our journey to the archives, however, had little to do with the wonders of the modern retail store. We were participating in a class at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre that focused on the history and culture of Canada’s Metis people. Our initial attraction to Sandy-Saulteaux was its unique, listening-circle style of theological education for indigenous leaders of churches in Canada’s remote north country. We were there as much to study the methods of teaching and learning as we were to study the content of the particular class. Still, the subject was engaging and the HBC archives were a treasure trove of maps, photographs, historical artifacts, trade items, beadwork, leatherwork, and other things with unique historical significance.

The Hudson’s Bay Company was not always very public with its archives, nor with its history. In fact for more than 200 years the company didn’t allow members of the public access to any of its collection of historical items and often kept those items in England, rather than in Canada, from whence they had come. Douglas MacKay’s 1937 history of the Hudson’s Bay Company was one of the first documents written by someone who was allowed access to the company’s records, photographs and other historical materials.

An employee of the company, working at its Canadian headquarters in Winnipeg, MacKay spent his evenings and days off reading through company documents and correspondence to produce what has long been recognized as a definitive history of HBC. “The Honourable Company” is mentioned in the footnotes of countless books about the north country.

As a confirmed bibliophile and a student of the north country, it seemed lucky to me when, a few weeks ago, when looking through books on the Internet, I chanced on a used copy of the original 1937 edition of The Honourable Company. It turned out that the book was both in very good condition and affordable. It isn’t a rare book - probably most libraries in North America owned copies of the book when I was growing up. But still it isn’t quite the thing that you will find in your corner bookstore unless you happen to live near Powell’s City of Books on Burnside in Portland.

Reading through the volume, it has been fascinating to find myself swept up in the intrigue of the profiteers and scoundrels who, motivated by the possibilities of huge profits played King Charles II of England off against King Louis of France. There is more than a bit of intrigue in the way they coaxed investors to put down sizable amounts of capital fo underwrite questionable and risky expeditions into predominantly unknown territory in such of what seemed to them to be a vast and inexhaustible supply of fur for the European trade.

The parallels with those who go north in the search of oil today are striking - and frightening.

Add to those sketchy, somewhat conniving early days three centuries or so and you come up with an institution that is a venerable as any other. These days, it is hard to imagine Canada without HBC. Reading MacKay’s now dated history of the company, one cannot help but wonder what those two Frenchmen, Groseilliers and Radisson, would think of our world where a simple HBC point blanket sells for nearly $400 and the Bay website advertises clothing that is far from practical in the cold weather of the north.

I’m not sure you can even buy a wooden or bark canoe from HBC these days. I suspect not.

For the first 250 years of the company, a letter of credit for HBC was the way that outdoorsmen traveled in the wilds of Canada. They didn’t carry cash with them. It would be destroyed by the conditions they faced. They carried letters of credit and introduction that could be used to purchase supplies at the outposts of the HBC. Raisins, flour, baking powder, ammunition, axes, tobacco, tea and mosquito netting were staples that one could expect to obtain from the company no matter how remote the trading outpost. By the 20th century, gasoline was added to the list of supplies that could be obtained.

What interests me as I read the history of the company is how it was transformed from the wild and speculative adventures of a small band of people into an institution upon which an entire nation has leaned on more than one occasion.

On that score, ours is a similar institution. Jesus did not come into the world to found institutions with budgets and buildings and endowments. He came to bring God’s message of salvation to human beings. What would those original disciples think of the institutional church that we so treasure in our generation? How would the respond to the thoughts of payrolls and investments and online payment structures? Would they be impressed by pledge cards and annual reports and newsletters?

Would the work I do be significant to them?

If I, who would be a disciple, find myself too often caught up in the business of institutional maintenance and afraid of taking risks, who is calling the contemporary church to genuine faithfulness? Perhaps we’ve become to afraid of losing our status or position to dare to take risks for our faith.

It is a matter worth pondering in these days.

I remember the reaction of the disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus after their eyes were opened. “Did not our hearts burn within us?” they asked each other. I know what inflames my passion: Bible study and worship and mission. None of those things require an impressive building or boilers or elevators or new roofs.

Still, I have been entrusted with stewardship of an institution with a building and a history worthy of respecting and maintaining. We’ve only got 135 years under our belt as a congregation. I hope that when another century has gone by our history focuses more on the adventures of faith and the mission we’ve shared than on the institution we built.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There is a conversation that we have over and over in the church: What do the young people want? The question is asked in a wide variety of different ways. Sometimes it is an expression of a very genuine desire of church members to have a church body that includes people of all ages. The intergenerational nature of the church is very appealing. So much of our society is divided by age that an institution that welcomes and embraces all ages together is very appealing. On that score most conjugations fall short of our vision. We would like to have more balance in the age makeup of our congregations, but most congregations are heavily weighted in one age group.

Sometimes the question is discussed in an attempt to get others to assume responsibility. Church leaders who have dedicated countless hours and plenty of their own dollars to institutional maintenance wonder who will pay the bills and do the work when they are unable to do so.

Sometimes it is simply wondering about the decline in church participation and trying to figure out what provides meaning and community for a generation that is conspicuously absent from church life.

Sometimes it is the simple fact that sharing power is difficult. Those who had very little authority and power in the church when they were young want to have a younger generation of followers, but are not as sure about sharing power and authority. It is not at all infrequent that we hear complaints about the lack of young people from the ones that make young people want to stay away.

Mostly, however, it is a confession that there is much about what it means to be a young adult in today’s world that we don’t understand. There has been a lot written about “Generation X,” “the millennials,” “post-moderns,” and other terms that have been applied to the current generation of 20-30-year-olds. It true that their world is very different from the way the world was when we were that age. There is great anxiety about employment. High costs raise the question of the value of a college education. Young lives are filled with stress over relationships in a culture where people have many significant relationships before marrying and first marriages are taking place at an older age.

I can remember conversations with parents who felt that if they could help their children navigate their teen years and make it to their twenties they would have avoided some of the biggest risks faced by young people. These days, being the parent of a twenty-something is as stressful, if not more so, than being a parent of a teen.

Many of the questions about young adults and their culture are expressions of anxieties that those of us who are older have about the future. It seems that some of the current trends are not very encouraging. We can tell that the future will be vastly different from the present, but we don’t know what the future will hold.

One of the shapes of the conversation about what young adults want and need that occurs in our congregation has to do with investments that we are making in our building. 55 years ago, our forebears designed and built a new church building. It is beautiful and was very well-designed. It has served our congregation very well. There are some major systems that have outlived their useful life and need to be replaced. We need new boilers to replace the single, inefficient boiler that now serves our building. The time has come to replace our roof and we need to consider additional insulation as part of that job. Although most of our building is accessible to those with disabilities, our choir loft is not. We don’t have enough bathrooms and we need at least one bathroom where one family member can assist another with privacy. Our building ls not air conditioned. As we sort out the costs of the various investments that need to be made and try to prioritize the expenses, we keep asking ourselves if we are being as visionary as were our forebears when they designed the building. Are we thinking of those 50 years from now? What will they need? What will they want?

The truth is that we can’t imagine the world or the needs of the church 25 years from now, let alone 50 years from now.

The good news is that neither could our forebears. Their vision of the future was not completely accurate. They designed a building with conventional graded classrooms. In all of the years we have had the building, the age profile of the church has not filled those classrooms and the way that we teach and share the faith is very different than was the case in the 1950’s. They couldn’t have imagined the great increase in the number of churches and para-church organizations in Rapid City. They tucked the church into a neighborhood with little visibility to the wider community. The building is hard to find for those who don’t know where it is. They didn’t come close to understanding the spiraling increases in energy costs and the way that utility costs would drive the entire church budget a half century later.

Still, our church building works well for us today. What we won’t have as we go forward is guarantees. There are no crystal balls that predict the future. There is no magic formula that will guaranteed that those who will be in their 50’s and 60’s a quarter of a century from now will find our particular building to be the right home for their church.

It is important that we remind ourselves that the church is much more than a building. The care we provide to the community and to the relationships within our community is far more critical than the investments we make in our building. This is not to say that we shouldn’t invest. It is simply to remind ourselves that having the nicest building has never been the goal of the church of Jesus Christ.

It is the community.

It is the mission.

It is the faith.

These are the legacy we leave behind.

Copyright © 2014 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.