To adapt the common phrase, “You can take the kid off the Rez, but you can’t take the Rez out of the kid.” When Sherman Alexie tells stories and reports what his mother, sisters, uncles, or brothers said, his accent is pure Rez. Last night we enjoyed listening to the famous author, poet, and storyteller at an intimate gathering at our favorite independent bookstore. Village Books scheduled a conversation with Alexie about his 2017 memoir, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” for this evening. Available seats sold out so quickly that they added a second opportunity for last night. We were lucky to get seats at the second sold-out gathering.

The bookstore has a space for public gatherings, but can accommodate only about 100 persons, even with overflow seating. Sometimes the store sponsors events at local schools and other venues to allow more people to participate, but the smaller crowd was just right for an evening of storytelling. The first story we heard was from one of the store’s owners, Paul Hanson, who recounted how the store was set to host Alexie during his book tour after the memoir's publication. However, the tour was too emotionally taxing for Alexie. Speaking about his complex relationship with his mother night after night exhausted him, and the tour had to be canceled. Then the COVID-19 pandemic came, and other things came up, and it took until this week to get the event rescheduled. It was worth the wait.

One of the gifts Alexie brings is his incredible ability to share Rez humor with white folks. I remember watching the movie “Dances with Wolves” in a theater with several Lakota people. The movie is an adaptation of a novel by Michael Blake. I missed all of the laugh lines. The natives laughed at points that didn’t seem funny to me. I didn’t find much humor in the movie at all. But we all laughed together when I watched “Smoke Signals,” based on a Sherman Alexie story with a similar audience. Alexie has a gift for sharing stories across cultures in ways that bring people together. In his memoir, he tells the story of addressing a white, upper-class audience in Bellingham and winning them over to his sense of humor by calling his mother on his cell phone and putting the phone up to the microphone for the audience to hear what she had to say.

One of the ways that Alexie talks about the experiences of American Indians is by using the term diaspora. A diaspora is the spreading or dispersing a group of people from their homeland. It is generally applied to spreading those people over a much larger area than the place they came from. It has been applied to the experience of Israel during the exile and the subsequent spreading of Jews far from ancient Israel. The term was also often used about the boat people who fled Vietnam and Cambodia following the wars that devastated those countries. I have also heard the term applied to the migration of Latin Americans across the United States. However, I hadn’t considered the term with Indigenous Americans before reading its use by Alexie.

It is true that part of the migration of people following the creation of reservations has been spreading folks off of the reservations. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Reservation in the town of Wellpinit. He attended elementary school on the reservation, but went to high school off the reservation in the town of Reardan. From there, he went to college and never returned to the reservation to live. Moving away from the intense poverty of what he calls “Pre-Casino Reservation life” brought him academic, sports, and career success. He has lived in Seattle for many years and raised his family there. A lot of other native people share his story. We had next-door neighbors who had grown up on reservations: he was from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, and she was from the Navajo Reservation. They became medical doctors and researchers with the National Institutes of Health. Though they lived on the traditional land of the Lakota People, it was off the formal reservation. The US city with the largest Lakota population, however, is far from the traditional lands of the tribe. It is Oakland, California. We have a Lakota friend who lives here and began her life on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The American Indian diaspora has spread people with indigenous heritage all across this land. Often, their ethnic and cultural identity is not recognized by their neighbors. Some of this process is the result of intentional governmental programs of cultural genocide in which language and culture were suppressed. Some of the process results from intense poverty, forcing people to resort to desperate measures to survive. Part of the diaspora is what happens in all diaspora situations: people meet and marry outside their group. Traditions and languages blend. Histories are adapted and forgotten.

I am not a cultural anthropologist and have no expertise in human migration. But I am so grateful for all of the Spokane stories and traditions Alexie has kept alive by writing. By publishing those words, he shared those cultural stories and traditions with those from different backgrounds. Our communities are richer for knowing the many stories of the people who have come to live here. I belong to another type of diaspora. The migration of Europeans to this continent was the result of colonialism, with no small amount of theft and violence.
Along with the colonists were folks who had been forced out of their homelands in Europe and landed on the shores of this continent. They came not to conquer, but to survive. Our heritage is mixed.

Sharing our stories strengthens our community, and I have been blessed to hear the stories of others, including those whose people were here long before mine arrived. Sherman Alexie has given us the gift of stories that enrich our community. Hearing him tell them is precious indeed.

Symbols are important and carry powerful meanings. Many symbols are important to me because they have meanings that are shared by a lot of people. The rings my wife and I exchanged at our wedding nearly 52 years ago are signs of the love and commitment of that day and each day that followed. We have been happy to proclaim our commitment to others. When a stranger sees the ring on my finger, that person may not know all of the depth of meaning or the details of our life together, but that person does know that it is a sign of my commitment to another person. Since our rings match and are unique, it is easy for a close observer to see that we are connected. On the rare occasions when I have had to remove my wedding ring for medical procedures, I have missed it and felt incomplete without it, even though it leaves a mark on my finger that shows where it has been. I know the commitment remains even when the ring is removed, but I feel better when it is returned to my finger.

The cross is another important symbol in my life. Once a symbol of the oppression of the empire and a cruel method of torture and execution, the empty cross has become the dominant symbol of resurrection. A cross proclaims the core message of Christianity. Several crosses have carried deep meaning for me. The freestanding cross in the sanctuary of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Rapid City, South Dakota, was a central focus of my devotion for decades. It was the central symbol of so many worship services that we shared. We looked at it during weddings, funerals, and baptisms. We looked at it when we shared prayers for those who were ill and far away. In addition to its role in communal worship, it symbolized private devotion. There have been countless times when I sat in the sanctuary alone or with one or two other people and prayed about the worries and concerns of life. Sometimes I sat facing that cross as I pondered consequential decisions. And it isn’t the only cross that carries significant meaning for me and others. I have a pocket cross hand-made by a church member and given to me nearly ten years ago. I had that cross in my pocket when I visited people in the hospital, responded to sudden and traumatic losses, and preached my last sermon before retirement. I carry it as a personal symbol. It is often unseen in my pocket, but I can feel its shape with my hand and be reminded that I belong to the people of resurrection.

Flags are important symbols. Many different governments have flown portable banners with many other associations. Some, like the swastika of Germany’s Third Reich or the Confederate battle flag, have come to represent oppression, authoritarianism, and white supremacist ideologies. Others, like our national and state flags, symbolize our shared history and our commitment to the principles of democracy. Flags can be carried in processions and parades and raised on poles as important symbols.

I was taught respect for our nation’s flag as a young child. My father loved flags and felt they should be flown. He received a flag flown over the United States Capitol as a gift from a US Senator and insisted on raising it up the flag pole, saying that it would be a waste to keep it hidden in its fancy presentation box. He asked us to fly the flag that he knew would be presented at his funeral because of his service in the United States military. I have raised that flag several times, but confess that I have frequently kept it hidden. I learned to properly fold the US flag as a scout and ensure it is folded into a triangle when not being flown. I have not chosen to fly it as an everyday symbol. I’ve lived too many years in windy places where flags become tattered and worn. I learned flag etiquette and know about the disposal of flags that have become torn. We have taken several flags to be burned in ceremonies conducted by veterans when they have become worn.

Last week, when the flags in our country were lowered to half staff, I looked at them and thought of Pope Francis, in whose honor they had been lowered. I read the direction of the President about lowering flags at the White House and Federal facilities, and the proclamation by our state’s governor ordering them to be lowered. The lowered flags reminded me of the humble person who dedicated his life to service, choosing to live in poverty despite having access to wealth. Pope Francis died with a personal estate that was less than the cash I have in my wallet. Since I choose never to carry more in my wallet than I am willing to give away, it reminds me of the purpose of the cash in my pocket and inspires me to think of ways it can be invested in serving those living in poverty.

However, when I saw some flags at half staff and others raised yesterday, it also reminded me of how casual and careless some have become about that symbol. Depending on the flag's specific location, the flag was to be raised to full staff at sunset on Saturday or at the start of business on Monday. Seeing that some had been careless and forgotten to raise the flag was sad because it showed a lack of attention to a powerful symbol.

I have also witnessed people who claim to be patriotic and love the flag, but are careless in handling it. Attaching a flag to the back of a pickup truck and driving down the Interstate until the flag is torn and tattered is more of a sign of disrespect than commitment to the principles the flag represents. Using the presence or absence of a flag lapel pin as a test of party loyalty is a desecration. The meanings of symbols can change, and I fear that some have forgotten the meaning of our nation's flag and the sacrifice of so many who have defended the Constitution and laws of our nation.

Symbols and their meanings are important. May we respect those meanings when we display them.

The bees are active now. The fruit trees are blooming, and there are plenty of bulb flowers to provide nectar. The bees head out from the hive and return with pollen and nectar. The entrances of the hives are hubs of activity with bees coming and going, and during the day, there is a continual cluster of bees around the hive. At first glance, it seems chaotic. Some bees are leaving the hive, others are heading toward the hive. There is so much activity at the hive that one might expect midair collisions between bees. However, they are graceful flyers and don’t run into each other. At the entrance to the hive, they are close enough to be touching as they go in and out. The bees returning have pollen attached to their legs, so they can easily be distinguished from those departing.

Once away from the hive, a bee generally flies straight to a particular tree or flower, often returning repeatedly to the same destination. The bees communicate information about pollen and nectar sources by performing waggle dances. The direction the bee moves in relation to the hive indicates the direction to a tree, flower patch, or water source. The vertical motion of the bee indicates distance. The bees use the sun as a standard to orient their navigation, so they only forage during the day.

Humans have used the sun and other celestial bodies for navigation. Ancients learned to use the sun and the stars for navigation across seas and oceans, which resulted in successful trade with others and was a factor in human migration. Phoenicians, Polynesians, and Early Vikings mastered the ability to journey at sea and return to the point of origin, and became able to travel long distances successfully.

European explorers developed systems of navigation that enabled them to know their location on the Earth's surface through a system of imaginary lines of latitude and longitude. Latitude, the area north and south, can be determined by measuring the angle between the horizon, a plumb bob, and the sun. At noon, the sun is directly overhead at the equator, in line with a plumb bob or at a right angle with the horizon. Using a protractor to measure the angle allows a traveler to determine the distance from the equator. A similar process can be used at night by measuring the angle of the North Star.

Measuring longitude, or east or west location, is a more complex challenge. The Earth makes one complete turn each day. The system navigators use has 360 degrees of longitude, so the Earth rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours. That works out to one degree every four minutes. If you know the time at a fixed point, and compare it to when the sun is highest at your location, you can determine how many degrees of longitude separate you from the fixed point. Navigators have used Greenwich, England, as the fixed point for naval navigation. This system was developed in Europe in the 16th century.

Knowing the time at the fixed point required accurate, portable clocks. Such devices began to appear in the 17th century, and with the development of that technology, long-distance navigation and exploration expanded greatly.

People accepted that time was measured in relation to the motion of the Earth relative to the Sun. Noon was when the sun was at its highest point in the sky, so the noon time was unique to each location. As clocks became more sophisticated and accurate, each town or village had an official clock set to noon at that location. Each location had its own time. However, the advent of railroads meant that timepieces had to be continually reset as the trains moved east or west. This proved impractical, so in 1847, Britain established Greenwich Mean Time and had all clocks in that nation set to the same time. This concept was applied to the globe, resulting in the creation of time zones.

I have been particularly aware of time zones, as I spent most of my career in a different time zone from my conference office. Therefore, I had to account for the change in time zones when planning travel to meetings. Our church's national offices are four time zones away, so when I participate in discussions over Zoom, I have to adjust my schedule. For example, a 9 a.m. meeting in Cleveland starts at 6 a.m., where I live.

When we think of the Earth, we have become comfortable with the relationship between time and space. However, when cosmologists observe the more expansive universe, the challenges of time and space are much more complex. Observations of distant bodies in the universe challenge our understanding of time and distance. Albert Einstein proposed a general theory of relativity that gave a mathematical description of the relationship between time and space. He observed that the rate at which time passes differs depending on relative motion.

In the 1990s, using ever greater telescopes and more accurate measurements, scientists observed distant supernovae that allowed them to calculate their distance from Earth. Their observations didn’t quite match predictions based on the theory of a big bang, resulting in an expanding universe that would gradually slow down as gravity took over. Direct observations showed that this slowing was not occurring in objects at extreme distances. Scientists began to incorporate “dark energy” into their theories. This energy is a force that pushes against gravity to expand the universe at an ever-increasing rate.

A few decades later, scientists began to question the explanation of dark energy. The irregular distribution of distant objects in the universe leads some to conclude that the universe is not uniform but rather has greater and lesser density areas. Their mathematical predictions don’t quite match their observations. Some cosmologists have begun to develop timescape models that describe the universe as having giant cosmic structures with areas of void between them. According to this theory, the universe's age depends on where it is measured. While we estimate the age of the universe to be around 14.2 billion years, in the middle of a giant void, the universe might be observed to be 21 billion years old.

Like bees, humans have become proficient in navigation within our area. We can even successfully navigate and travel within the solar system. However, we still have a lot to learn before we can successfully navigate the distances of the cosmos.

Those who drive north from Mount Vernon to Bellingham, WA, on Interstate 5 will likely notice a huge boulder painted with graffiti alongside the road. The rock is frequently repainted, and the messages on the rock change, so those of us who travel the route regularly are used to looking for the rock to check which colors and what messages it will carry. Locals have dubbed it “graffiti rock.” It has garnered enough attention that someone keeps up a Bellingham Rock page on Facebook and updates it with photos of its most recent paint jobs.

According to the Bellingham Herald, the massive boulder was blasted out of Chuckanut sandstone when the Interstate Highway was built in 1966. The rock proved too large to be easily moved and has remained safely off the edge of the highway ever since. The Herald also reports that during the summer of 1969, the rock was painted for the first time. Since then, it has had messages of love, of grief, and occasionally expressions of dislike or hate. Every March 11, family members paint the rock in memory of two brothers who disappeared while kayaking in Bellingham Bay.

The rock is in the news because the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) has announced that it will be removed as part of a series of bridge and culvert construction projects to improve the Interstate highway. The exact date of the removal has not yet been announced, and WSDOT officials have not yet said where the rock will be located after removal. The removal will be documented according to state and federal rules regarding impacts on historic properties.

The announcement from WSDOT about removing the rock has sparked conversations about the nature and place of graffiti. Depending on perspective, graffiti can be vandalism or high art. Painting a huge rock is different than taking a can of spray paint to a railroad car or the wall of a private building. While the rock is a natural feature, it was removed from its natural setting. Its current location is not the result of natural processes, but of construction that needed to be accomplished within a limited budget. Because the rock is located on public property in the highway right of way, it generally belongs to all citizens. Painting it has probably been done with limited environmental impact. It has been painted so many times that the paint is inches thick, and probably some of the chemicals from the paint have leached into the surrounding soil, but there are no apparent effects of the decades-long practice of painting the rock. Highway officials have been concerned about the safety of those who paint, as it is often done at night, and accessing the rock means either parking alongside the Freeway or parking at an exit and walking back to the rock, both of which pose safety risks.

An English-based street artist, Banksy, creates street art, often by illegally painting structures without permission. His identity remains unconfirmed, but he has assumed the name. Banksy's works of art have become popular and valuable. Some property owners even insure the unsolicited paintings against being painted over or damaged. The works frequently provide commentary on serious social issues such as child labor and domestic violence. Signed prints of Banksy artworks can sell for six figures in art galleries.

The works of artists such as Banksy have elevated graffiti to an asset class. There are other examples of graffiti moving into mainstream acceptance. Many cities and towns boast graffiti alleys or walkways where walls are painted within rules that allow artists to express themselves legally and have their art viewed by others. Graffiti rock has gained enough meaning and recognition that the state department of transportation understands that it is more than just another rock, and relocating it from its present location will involve careful thought about where it will go and whether or not people will have access to it in the future. It could be placed in a location with safe access where it will continue to be seen by many, and the tradition of painting it will continue. It is equally possible that its relocation will mark the end of that particular rock painting tradition.

Painted rocks have become accepted symbols. We have rocks in our garden that were painted by our grandchildren and placed carefully. At our church camps, painting rocks and putting them in creeks, walkways, and other locations has been a tradition for many years. People sell painted rocks on Etsy. I don’t know where the practice started, but it isn’t something I was aware of when I was growing up. People hiding painted rocks to become surprise messages to strangers has become so common that state and national parks have created laws to prevent hiding them. Leaving painted rocks in such locations is considered littering, and the rocks are removed as trash.

There is a county park a short walk from our home, and next to one of the buildings, there used to be a box filled with painted rocks. Children were encouraged to leave painted rocks and take rocks from the box home. Our grandchildren used to check the box each time we visited. The box has been removed recently, and the painted rocks are also gone. I do not know the reason. Perhaps more rocks were taken than left behind. Possibly maintaining the box and keeping the rocks contained became a problem. Maybe the tradition of painted rocks is beginning to fade for a while in that park.

Not all artwork must be displayed in galleries and exchanged for large amounts of money. I like the idea of art that can be viewed without payment, but I am also concerned about art that disrespects property owners and damages the environment. Some things, including rocks, are beautiful in their own right and do not require human enhancement. Not everything is improved with a coat of paint.

I will continue to notice graffiti rock whenever I drive north from Mount Vernon, but I don’t feel the urge to paint it myself. I’m quite at home with plenty of unpainted rocks and have no plans to start painting them.

As the world gathers for the funeral of Pope Francis, there is a lot of speculation about the next pope. I don’t keep up with Roman Catholic politics and do not know the names of potential candidates, but I do understand how the choice can have significant consequences. Pope Francis’ humble lifestyle choices made him an influential leader. He signaled that his papacy would be different by choosing to live in simple accommodations and drive an old car instead of accepting all of the trappings that some popes have enjoyed. He spoke out in the face of injustice and called for the Roman Church to become more inclusive. While his papacy did not see revolutionary changes in centuries-old policies and traditions, significant changes in the mood and culture of the church occurred.

On the weekend of the Pope’s funeral, the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ has gathered for its annual meeting. As has been the case for most of my life, I look to our Conference meeting for signs of how our church will move in the coming year. There are a lot of meetings ahead of us, but so far, it is fair to say that I am disappointed. I have been looking for bold and specific leadership in the church. This is a critical time in our country's and the world's history. The church needs bold leadership unafraid of proclaiming the truth in the face of oppression. I attended a workshop on advocacy that featured information about Washington’s Faith Action Network. None of the information was new to me. I’ve gotten much more detailed information from meetings at our congregation and my Internet research. Last night’s sermon in our conference meeting focused on being widely inclusive and inviting others to the table, with special attention to those oppressed and silenced. It was a reasonable interpretation of the Gospel message, but lacked specificity about any actions congregations or individual church members could take.

I’m open to discoveries today, but so far it doesn’t seem as if the Conference Annual Meeting will be the source of the urgency needed leadership for these times. I shouldn’t be surprised. The structure and nature of the United Church of Christ are such that authentic leadership does not come from the top down, but rather from the ground up. Local congregations lead the church, and Associations, Conferences, and the national setting of the church often follow behind. Our church is very different in its organization from the Roman Catholic Church. Our General Minister and President, and others who serve the church in its national setting, are often less relevant to the direction of the church than local congregations.

A spiritual and moral crisis in our country's leadership threatens the world's stability. It is critical that churches find their voices and provide leadership not just at the local level, but also in statehouses and the federal government. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel of radical liberation for all of God’s people and stands in stark contrast to oppression. National leaders have distorted the truth, diminished the image of God in others, and abused the language of the church to promote their wealth.

Faithful Christians need to speak the truth to power. Voter suppression bills are not “election integrity.” They are systematic and continuing efforts to erode democracy and disenfranchise specific members of society. “Anti-woke” legislation is not removing barriers for businesses. It is an attempt to erase the history of African Americans and Indigenous people in this country. It is a direct attack on the truth. When government policy serves to cover up the truth, the church needs to speak truth to power. Anti-immigrant policies that treat asylum seekers like invaders, separate families, and deny people due process threaten not only newcomers but also all citizens. Book bans that fear the power of children’s imaginations are attempts at controlling the thoughts of future generations. Cuts to essential support programs for those living with disabilities devalue human lives. These issues are spiritual, and the church needs bold leadership to address them.

Ours needs to be a church that reads the signs of the times and speaks in love in the public sphere. We must refuse to be neutral when laws strip people of their dignity and when public leaders spread lies about our neighbors. We must weep with children separated from their parents and stand with workers demanding living wages.

We have tools that other social reformers lack. We have the power of prayer. When we understand the essential spiritual nature of the struggle, we gain access to the power of the Gospel. We have the example of Jesus. Genuine discipleship chooses courage over comfort and exodus over empire. The bible teaches how Moses stood up for liberation, and how Jesus overturned tables. Disciples are liberators, not bystanders. And we have the power of resurrection. We are resurrection people. We belong to God, who breaks chains, levels mountains, and sets captives free. We confront those who seek oppression with love that refuses to quit.

Most of all, we are people of faith, hope, and love. We are people who believe that these never die. We hear the voice of God calling us to a better future, proclaiming release to captives, health to the injured and ill, and justice to the oppressed. The power of faith, hope, and love that never die is that we are in the struggles of this world for the long haul. We will not turn back. Our courage will not fail. When it appears that injustice and oppression are winning, we will continue to speak the truth and work for justice. We know that our God will be with us no matter how much sacrifice is required or how long it takes.

Justice will come for those who have suffered, liberation will come for those held captive without due process, and the truth will prevail. We are called to bold action in prayer, discipleship, faith, hope, and love.

I learned lessons in church politics by watching my parents. They were active in our local congregation. Both served on boards and committees in the church, and we attended congregational meetings as a family. In our congregation, children did not vote, but were welcome to speak at congregational meetings, but I don’t remember ever doing so before I was confirmed. I was 14 when I officially joined the church, voted at meetings, and served on committees as soon as I joined. One of the lessons I learned before I was a voting member of our congregation is that things don’t always go your way at congregational meetings.

Our church remodeled its sanctuary when I was a child. The church was strong and growing in those days. They had added classrooms and a new fellowship hall to the building when I was very young, with much of the work done by congregational members. They had built a cabin at our church camp, and members had done the work again. The sanctuary remodeling involved installing paneling on some walls, lowering the ceiling slightly, and installing faux beams with indirect lighting. While the work was being done, they removed the pews. We worshiped sitting on folding chairs during the work, sometimes with the chairs set up in the fellowship hall, but usually with them set up in the sanctuary. Our father was active in the work. He stored most of the pews in a building at his business while the work progressed. He provided a truck to haul some materials to and from the church. When the pews were in storage, there was a congregational meeting about remodeling details. A motion was made to purchase new pews for the sanctuary. Our father rose to speak against the motion. He said the existing pews were made of hardwood and could be easily refinished and last for decades. Others argued that the old pews were uncomfortable. He quipped that we don’t go to church to be comfortable. When the vote on the motion was taken, it was clear that the majority wanted new pews. My parents and one other couple were the only ones to vote against the pews.

My father was disappointed in the vote and reacted by grabbing the catalogue of new pews circulated around the meeting. He looked at the price list in the back and made a motion to purchase the most expensive pews in the catalogue as a protest against the decision to buy new pews. He didn’t expect his motion to pass. He just wanted to demonstrate how foolish purchasing new pews was.

That is how our church got padded pews with gold brocade upholstery. My father was the first member to write a check to purchase a pew. Despite having voted against his own motion, he showed his children that we still belonged to the church, even when things didn’t go our way.

As an adult, I have often voted with the minority in church meetings. However, this didn’t happen frequently in the congregations I served, where I usually did not vote. As an employee of the congregation, I felt it was best to allow the other members to make the decisions. When it came to Conference meetings, however, I often dissented. I gained a reputation as a frequent solo dissenter when I served on the Board of our Conference. I always tried to vote my conscience and to remain loyal to the institution, whether or not I was in the majority. Like my father, I often got out my checkbook and donated to a project or cause I had opposed.

I started attending Conference annual meetings when I was still in high school and have rarely missed those meetings. Here in the Pacific Northwest Conference, attendance at the annual meeting is a requirement of ministers with standing. There is a process by which a minister can be excused due to health or sabbatical, but we have not had to use that process. When we moved to this conference, the meetings were held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the conference returned to in-person annual meetings, the first was held in our home congregation, so we attended in person. We were on the church staff then and had duties related to hosting the gathering. We have participated in the meetings online. One of the roles that retired ministers can assume is to lead worship for active pastors so that they can travel across the state to attend meetings. We had been set to lead worship at an island congregation on Sunday and planned to participate in this year’s meeting online. Then the ferry to the island is scheduled for maintenance this weekend, and the congregation will worship with lay leadership since we can’t get to the island except by private boat.

So today we’ll begin the first of three days of online meetings. We’ll use our computers to participate in the plenary sessions and will also be able to participate in breakout sessions via Zoom link. It is not my preferred way of attending meetings. I don’t enjoy sitting in front of my computer for hours at a time. These days, I’m pretty passive at church meetings. I don’t speak much and I usually watch. If we were attending in person, I’d probably choose a seat near he back of the room. It isn’t that I don’t care. I have strong feelings about the decisions that face our conference. However, I have had my years of being up front and leading meetings. I have served as a conference moderator and led conference meetings. It is time for new leaders, and one of the ways I encourage new leadership is to step aside and allow them to take charge.

Our conference will be making some big decisions. We are in an interim period with a temporary Conference Minister and will be making leadership decisions. We have a tight budget and must make some difficult financial decisions. There are some critical social justice issues the church should not remain silent about. So I will participate as fully as I am able. It is a family tradition. I also will probably carry on the family tradition of taking one or more minority positions in which the majority votes differently from me. I don’t mind. I will continue to belong and to support the ministries of the conference.

And when the annual meeting rolls around next year, I’ll participate once again.

When I stood in the CTS Commons in Chicago in my rented robe with three burgundy stripes on each shoulder and received my doctoral hood and diploma, I was a few weeks shy of my 25th birthday. I was proud of my academic achievements. I was proud of the single paper I had written that was published in a scholarly journal, and the poem I had written that was translated into several different languages, including braille. I was proud of my doctoral paper and defense before three of the seminary’s most learned and strident professors.

On that day, I didn’t realize how much I had yet to learn.

Through the grace of God and a beginner’s luck, I shared a call to two small-town congregations in Southwestern North Dakota with my wife, Susan. After a break and an opportunity to travel, we began our work in a place where people were not judged by their academic CVs or the references in their professional profiles. It was a place where I did not need titles, including the newly earned Dr. in front of my name. It was a place where my years of working as a deliverer of farm equipment and a summer farm laborer counted as much as my academic credentials. The two congregations gave me the gift of honest, supportive people who were gentle as they began to teach me much-needed lessons in humility.

Sometimes, now that I am older and retired, I tell people that I reached the height of my intellectual power at the age of 25. I was really smart at that age, and I knew I was smart. From there, it has been a continual downhill slide to where I am now. I can still occasionally form a coherent sentence, and with the help of my wife, I can usually recall a person’s name, just not when I need it. That usually gains me a laugh, partly because both my listener and I know that while there may be some truth in my words, it isn’t entirely true.

A mentor had warned me that I lacked experience when he advised me to seek placement in the pastoral ministry for a few years before returning to my intended goal of health care ministry. He was right, but I didn’t realize then that gaining 3 or 4 years of experience would take me 44 years. I didn’t know how much I would fall in love with pastoral ministry. I didn’t realize that my vocation did not lie in health care ministry, nor administrative ministry, but in the parish where I participated in baptisms and weddings and funerals, visited people in homes and care centers, planned and led worship every week, taught classes for people of all ages, administered a small institution with a small budget, occasionally supervised other staff members, and relished the varied tasks of my job. I didn’t realize that the title “Pastor” would become more valuable and meaningful to me than “Doctor” or “Reverend.”

I hope that over the years, I have gained more than experience. I hope that I have also gained a modicum of wisdom. Sometimes, when I remember to hold my tongue and keep silent while listening, I am at least on the edge of wisdom. Sometimes, I have learned the lessons of humility that faithful congregations have taught me over the years.

And yet, here I am, writing another entry into my journal and preparing to upload it to my website. For someone who aspires to be humble, it approaches the height of hubris to assume that I might be capable of writing words that others would want to read daily. I remember struggling with sermons and finding just the right words for the occasion. I still try to be careful with my choice of words, but I have since realized that I have delivered a lot of sermons filled with words that were not memorable.

I write a lot of words. It is presumptuous to assume that the ones I publish online are worth reading. To be sure, some of them are. But I am also sure that many of them are not. It is essential that I continually remind myself that the reason I write is because I need to write, not because my readers need me to write. There are plenty of other words, and many of them are more important than the ones in my journal. The day will come when it will not make sense to maintain my website, and when that day occurs, the archive of my journal will only exist on my computer and its backup drives. One of those backups is Internet-based, so each day’s journal exists in two online places. Both of those places are maintained because fees are paid to use them. When the costs are no longer paid, the files will be overwritten, and space will be made for new files.

If humans fail to respond to the climate crisis and continue our patterns of overconsumption, we may create conditions that lead to human extinction on this planet. If that were to occur, our words would come to naught. With that knowledge in mind, I remind myself that I do not write to create a legacy or to be remembered. Again, I write because I need to write. Writing is how I teach myself to write. Writing is how I process the experiences of my life.

I do not judge whether my words express wisdom. Unlike the degrees I earned, I do not have a certificate of wisdom to display on my study wall. If there were such a certificate, it would be of no use. Whether or not I think I have wisdom doesn’t matter. Wisdom has value only when shared.

I may not yet have learned the lessons in humility I desire. I may not have gained sufficient wisdom to discern my level of humility. I may never know my levels of humility or wisdom. Fortunately, I can leave those judgments to others.

Lots of things come in fours. We speak of four cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west. We name four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The Book of Revelation speaks of four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. There are, however, a lot of other significant numbers in the bible and life. 40 is more frequently emphasized in biblical literature: 40 days and nights of rain, 40 years in the wilderness, 40 days of temptation. 7 is also a significant number: 7 days of creation, forgiving seventy-seven (or seven times seven) times, 7 days of marching around the walls of Jericho.

I have been present when indigenous elders prayed to the four directions, but I have also heard prayers in six directions, with up and down added to the four points of the compass.

The four compass points are not specific enough for navigation, so they are subdivided into northwest, southwest, northeast, and southeast. Further subdivisions are labeled north-northwest or west-northwest, and the like. Compass readings are oriented around 360 degrees, with 0 (or 360) being north, 90 east, 180 south, and 270 west.

I’ve been thinking that we must apply a similar logic to the seasons of the year. I’m not sure why most cultures have generally arrived at four seasons. It certainly seems like there are more than just four. Another common way to think of time is the Gregorian calendar, which is based on the Julian calendar and has twelve months of varying lengths. However, our calendar is not the only way to think of a year. The lunisolar Chinese calendar, developed by a Buddhist priest from the Korean Peninsula and used in several asian countries, presents the year divided into 72 seasons, each no more than a few days long. Seventy-two seasons seem more descriptive of the experience of the seasons than just having four. I like that “fish emerge from ice” in mid-February and “rainbows hide” in late November.

Our lives are less connected to the seasons than those of hunter-gatherers. Throughout history, survival depended upon the ability to anticipate the weather and the cycles of nature. Many ancient cultures had ceremonies to mark agricultural seasons, designating the time to plant and harvest. People who lived nearer to the poles observed solar and lunar cycles and developed systems of tracking and predicting solstices and equinoxes.

Technologies have been developed to stretch growing seasons. Greenhouses allow for planting and harvesting outside of the regular seasons. Refrigeration provides food storage and distribution outside of the seasons dictated by the weather. Genetic engineering and transportation systems produce the ability to eat many foods year-round. We are less tuned into the seasons than were earlier generations.

Moving to a new climate at retirement has heightened my awareness of the cycles of nature. The weather is milder than it was in our former home. Spring comes earlier, winter is less severe, and the growing season is longer. The migration of trumpeter swans and snow geese marks summer and winter. Our lawn remains green throughout the year, but often goes dormant in midsummer. That means that I am mowing my lawn a lot more, a chore that is offset by the fact that I don’t have to shovel much snow in this place.

This spring, we have been delighted by the emergence of flowers from bulbs. Daffodils and hyacinths followed the crocus. Now the tulips are reaching their peak along with the blooming fruit trees. In our yard, the cherry trees are almost through their bloom cycle, and the wisteria is nearly ready to break into bloom. The nurseries have bedding plants available. We will soon have fresh lettuce and kale. We are already looking forward to the various seasons of berries. We’ll harvest strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and blackberries. There will be pears and apples in late summer and early fall.

With warmer temperatures, I’ll probably be putting dahlia tubers in the ground soon. We like blooms throughout the summer, and dahlias have a long blooming season. Plants that produce pollen and nectar throughout the summer are suitable for the bees, which produce variations of honey depending on which nectar sources they use. The first honey harvest will produce light-colored and fruity results. Late summer harvest will yield honey that is darker in color and a bit more savory. The honeybees are active outside of the hive for nearly nine months in this area.

Our Earth Day celebration yesterday reminded me that humans have impacted the cycles of nature. Temperatures are spiking, crops are withering due to increased drought cycles, glaciers are melting, and wildfires rage year-round rather than having a season. Earth Day also served as an invitation to spend more time outside appreciating the gifts of nature. I’m grateful for a retirement lifestyle that affords more time for walking, biking, and paddling. As I grow older, I am becoming more tuned into the cycles of nature. I didn’t farm or ranch as a vocation. I spent a lot of time indoors at a desk. Now that I am retired, I am becoming aware of the nuances and subtleties of the flow of seasons.

Four seasons work as a general framework. However, I am learning to think about other seasons and smaller units of time. Where we live now is the time to put seeds into the ground. I’ve got a few packets of seeds ready to go. The sunflower seeds harvested from last year’s flowers can go into the ground any day now. We can also start to put out bedding plants. Our region has several large greenhouse operations that provide bedding plants to big-box stores. There are plenty of bedding plants available. We know they will offer much lower prices later in the season, and there will be bargains when they get to the end of their selling season.

I am delighted to live in a place with many seasons within each of the four seasons. Anticipation of the next season adds to the joy of living.

During a meeting last evening, a friend commented on a “Post-Easter Letdown.” I didn’t respond then, but the comment made me sad. For years, I experienced being significantly tired on Easter Monday. I usually took a nap on that day. But I don’t think of Easter Monday as “post-Easter.” In the traditions of our church, Easter is a 50-day season, not a single day. The lectionary texts for the next week are filled with stories of resurrection and the process of the disciples coming to an understanding of the presence of the resurrected Christ. It is a joyous season.

News of Pope Francis's death reached Christians worldwide, allowing them to contemplate the power of resurrection. Like any other human, his death can be a source of grief. He and his presence in the church will be missed. However, it is an invitation to consider the power of resurrection. As I reflect, it seems that his death in the season of Easter is a gift of grace.

I am not Roman Catholic. My life has been lived in a different channel of the stream of Christianity. I could not have conducted my ministry in a corner of the church that does not recognize the ordination of women. A top-down church structure dominated by old men lacks the inclusiveness I need to share and celebrate ministry with others. Pope Francis, however, has sometimes been dubbed “the Protestants’ favorite Pope.” I cannot judge whether one pope is preferred over another. It is not my church. But some of Francis’ progressive ideas warmed my heart, and the impact of his leadership on his part of the church.

The image of Pope Francis that will remain with me comes from his visit to Canada in the summer of 2022. Dressed in white robes and using a wheelchair for mobility, He paused to pray at the Ermineskin Cree Nation Cemetery in Alberta during that visit. The photo of him in a field of simple white crosses is an image of pastoral leadership. The power of that image comes in part from the history behind the moment.

From the 1870s into the 1990s - for over a century - children from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Communities were taken from their families and forced to attend church-run residential schools. Those schools were designed to strip them of their native languages and cultures. Abuse and neglect were rampant at the schools, and thousands of children died from disease, malnutrition, suicide, and other causes. Not all those schools were run as Roman Catholic institutions, but many were.

In 2022, Pope Francis made a trip to Canada to repeat a statement that he had first delivered to a delegation of Indigenous leaders at the Vatican. Addressing a large group of indigenous Canadians in Maskwacis, Alberta, he made a formal apology for the role of the Roman Catholic church in the abuses of the residential schools. Among those who were listening were many residential school survivors.

It is an image of leadership not often seen in our world. The man who rose to the highest leadership level in one of the world’s most powerful institutions led that institution by apologizing for its role in the suffering of others. There are many ways in which the pope could have avoided making the statement. The history of his office is not one of apology. One of the key teachings of the Roman Catholic Church states that the Pope, when speaking Ex Cathedra, is preserved from the possibility of error in matters of faith or morals. Ex Cathedra, or speaking from the Chair of Peter, refers not to the place where the teaching is issued but to the authority claimed. A pope speaks Ex Cathedra whenever he speaks with the authority of his office. Formal papal statements are thought never to require an apology because they are never wrong. That kind of power can easily be misused, and throughout the church's history, there have been many times when it was. That teaching and others led to the division of Christianity known as the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was a much more complex dynamic, but one of its themes was the rejection of the authority of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. For millions of Christians, however, the authority of the Pope continues to be absolute.

So a pope, speaking on behalf of the entire Roman Catholic Church, issuing an apology to those who had been hurt and to the relatives of those who had died, was a moving and dramatic moment.

Residential schools were not a phenomenon of Canada only. Nor were they only operated by Roman Catholic missions. The Niobrara Indian School, situated near the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers in Northeastern Nebraska, was operated by the Congregational Church as part of the larger system of Indian boarding schools aiming to assimilate Native American children into mainstream American Culture. Part of its heritage is one of lasting trauma and loss of cultural identity. The school was closed in 1937 after 67 years of operation. Some buildings have become a part of the ISanti school system. At the school, a new cultural program immerses students in the tribe’s language, history, and customs. This innovative program helped the iSanti Community School in Niobrara hit a perfect 100% graduation rate for two years.

Resurrection can occur from a legacy of injustice and oppression. A school designed to eliminate language and culture can become a cornerstone of programs to preserve them. Such a transition isn’t automatic, however. It takes years of listening, decades of earning back broken trust, and elevating indigenous leadership. One of the starting points is a simple apology. In the traditions of the church, we call it confession.

Formal confessional prayers are common during Lent but less common during Easter in many of our denomination's churches. I don’t understand why this is the case. Faithful leaders continue to show us that resurrection begins with confession.

Among the celebrations of this Easter Season are the quiet moments when we remember those who have shown extraordinary leadership. A pope taking a moment to pray alone in the cemetery of an indigenous community is one of those moments worth remembering.

Early in our marriage, we lived in Chicago for four years. Our stay was short of four years. We attended school for four years. The first two years, we left Chicago during the summer to work in the mountains of Montana. After the fourth, we moved away as summer came. During those years, I thought of myself as a Montanan. I introduced myself that way in many conversations. We kept Montana license plates on our car, which was legal because we were students. After Chicago, we moved to North Dakota, where we lived and served for seven years. In many ways, I took on the identity of being a North Dakotan, changing the license plates on our cars and trading our “Big Sky Country” plates for “Peace Garden State” plates. I took gentle ribbing from my Montana friends about living in North Dakota, and surprised myself at how easily I took on a sense of ownership of a new place. Subsequently, I have taken on the identity of the places where we have lived. I traded my “Peace Garden” plates for “Famous Potatoes” for a decade and then went on to “Great Faces, Great Places,” and now sport “Evergreen State” plates.

In each place, there have been identities and biases that are regional as well as those that are statewide. For example, both North Dakota and South Dakota are divided by the Missouri River. East River and West River are more than just geographical locations. In both states, there are two different time zones. In North Dakota, I was from Southwest. In South Dakota, I’d say I was from the Black Hills. In both places, we made jokes about the flatlanders from the other side of our state, observing they didn’t know how to drive on winding mountain roads. With two different time zones, Idaho is divided into North and South.

Here in Washington, many geographical features identify different parts of our state. Living on the coast differs from the high desert climate of the eastern part of our state. The climate is quite different on our side of the Cascades than on the drier places east of those mountains. Another significant difference of where I live is that we are not Seattle. We don’t live in the middle of a vast urban sprawl with its challenging traffic and other urban woes. Our small town has a rural flavor, and we find that we avoid trips to Seattle more each year we live here.

There is another piece of our identity that I am only beginning to embrace now that we have been retired for five years and living in our Birch Bay Home for four. We are becoming borderites. When I first moved here, I laughed at the term. I thought that having high school teams named “Borderites” was strange. Now, however, I am beginning to embrace that identity. Insulting rhetoric from the administration in Washington, D.C., combined with unpredictable on-again-off-again tariffs, has heightened our awareness of the border. Our typically polite and welcoming neighbors have had their hackles raised by cruel and untrue statements from the president.

Living in the borderlands, however, goes beyond the day's politics. The quarrels between our federal governments notwithstanding, we are aware that the border is an arbitrary line in many ways. We live in a tourist area, and many of our neighborhood's cottages and mobile homes are owned by people who live on the other side of the border. When the Canadian dollar is strong, people from British Columbia are more likely to cross the border to buy staples like milk and gasoline. As the Canadian dollar has weakened, fewer people are taking cross-border trips. Neighborhood businesses, especially gas stations and restaurants, notice the effects of the current tensions.

There are, however, many ties that are deeper than the current tensions. We have friends who have relatives on the other side of the border. Events like funerals, weddings, and family dinners involve border crossings. Yesterday, I spoke with a friend at church who had seven guests from Canada at their Easter dinner table. Couples meet and marry across the border. We are more socially connected than the geopolitical borders might indicate. The people I talk to in the coffee shop have jobs on the other side of the border. It works both ways. We have church members who live in the US and work in Canada, and know others who live in Canada and work in the US.

The trade war and other border issues are at odds with the day-to-day realities of people’s lives. This was especially apparent when we first moved to this community. The COVID-19 pandemic had closed the border for nonessential travel. We didn’t cross the border when it was officially closed. But there was a lot of traffic despite the closure. A neighbor who delivers fuel to Point Roberts has to cross the border twice on each trip. A friend from church had to cross the border daily to go to and from work, which was deemed essential. There was a steady stream of trucks carrying goods even at the height of the pandemic.

I am starting to accept the term borderite and thinking of myself as a member of that designation. I belong to a community that stretches across an international boundary. Our local economy is shaped by trade and exchange. The economy's strength across the border affects the lives lived on this side. While both Canadians and citizens of the US exhibit nationalism at times, we are aware that sometimes what is best for one country might not be best for our local area. Our local businesses thrive when the interests of both countries align, and they struggle when national interests divide.

Regardless of national politics, we who live in the borderlands are connected. We share the same river systems. We share the same sea. We breathe the same air and view the same landscape. While others tout “America first,” we understand that we must put each other first to thrive as a community.

These days, I tell people that I live on the border. It is part of my new identity in my new home.

We were walking up the hill from the shore yesterday and greeted a woman walking down the hill. The weather was pleasant, though a bit blustery. After several days of warm and sunny spring weather, it was apparent that the weather was changing. I rode my bike in the morning, and the kite skiers were out at the State Park. That means the winds are up as the kite skiers like the wind for their kites and the waves for playing. Conditions must have been just right. I counted seven kites and one windsurf board as I rode by. By afternoon, clouds were moving in with the wind, and there was a hint that the weather was changing. The woman we met as we walked greeted us with “Happy Easter!” I wished her “Happy Easter!” in response. We were strangers to each other, but since we walk a similar route most days, there are people whom we see, but do not yet know.

I wonder if the woman who greeted us sees Easter as a generic spring holiday that encompasses Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Day, and Easter Monday. Or was she anticipating today and issuing her greeting a bit early? Of course, I don’t need to know her theology or Holy Week practices to exchange warm greetings. However, with the secularization of society in general, I wonder.

Easter is a wonderful day of celebration in the church, but it is also a season. The season of Easter is 50 days on the church calendar. Having a season makes sense for my theology and practice. The Resurrection is a challenging concept, and it takes time to understand its meaning.

There was a time when our people thought that the Empire had won. Power was concentrated at the top, and a few wealthy persons had the ear of the leader. Ordinary people were frequently the victims of injustice. The wealth being amassed in the power centers came at the expense of everyday citizens' poverty. Illnesses were common, medical attention was costly, and early death came too often. For some revolutionary thinkers seeking a way to overthrow the domination of Caesar, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was seen as a sign that political upheaval might be coming. Within a week, he had been crucified, his body raised on a cross as a sign to all that the empire held the power of life and death and could crush any movement that it saw as a threat.

Even though he had attempted to prepare his disciples for the experience, they were devastated. They were afraid for their safety. If Jesus could be crucified on charges of which he was innocent, was anybody safe? Following Jesus had been a hope-filled adventure, and now Jesus and hope were dead, laid in a borrowed tomb.

On Easter Day, we tell the stories of women who went to the tomb to anoint the body and discovered that the tomb was empty. We recall some of the earliest witnesses of the day, whose stories confused others. Over the next seven weeks, we’ll tell other stories of disciples walking with a stranger on the road to Emmaus, of Thomas who was unable to be with the other disciples when they experienced Jesus’ presence and who wanted to see with his won eyes, of followers trying to return to their previous occupation of fishing invited to breakfast on the shore. It is clear from the stories of our Scriptures that those who knew and loved Jesus had trouble recognizing and believing in the resurrection. Taking time to repeat the stories we have been telling for hundreds of years seems appropriate. Understanding the meaning of resurrection is as big a challenge for us as it was for Jesus’ first followers.

We can say several things that resurrection is not.

Resurrection is not the overthrowing of oppressive and unjust political leaders. Injustice remains. Witness is still necessary. The Roman domination of Israel did not end with Jesus’ resurrection. Injustice perpetrated upon innocents by the powerful continued.

Resurrection is not resuscitation. After the resurrection, Jesus’ closest friends didn’t recognize him. He did not look the same. The limits of the human body didn’t constrain his presence. They locked themselves in a room. He appeared. They walked alongside him and didn’t recognize him. They told stories of his presence, but not everyone shared the same experience. Jesus’ continuing presence was not restricted to the limits of the human body.

Resurrection is not the end of death, suffering, pain, or grief. Jesus’ followers are still mortal. We still mourn when those we love die. We still experience both physical and psychological pain. We struggle to interpret and survive trauma. Resurrection is not a magical “get out of death free” card.

There will be plenty of “Happy Easter” greetings today and in the future. After six weeks of Lent, I’m ready for a few Alleluias. I baked hot cross buns yesterday for our dinner today. The buns I baked are topped with crosses formed in the dough, not with frosting crosses as is common in the bakeries. As a concession to my age, I made them the day before instead of rising in the wee hours to complete baking yeast bread before time to go to church. Sweet bread, filled with raisins and coated with a sweet apricot glaze, is a rare treat in our house. They are part of a dinner that has been planned and will be prepared with care.

For me, however, Easter is much more than a day. I will still wake up in a nation gripped by a constitutional crisis. It remains to be seen whether democracy will survive in our time. The autocrats have incredible power and don’t seem to be restrained by the courts. The white house is being redecorated as a palace with unbelievable amounts of gold. The nation's wealth is being consolidated into the control of a few elites. Innocents are being killed without a sign of justice. Hope is hard to find on some days.

Resurrection is the cornerstone of my faith and theology, but it is difficult to explain or understand. I’m willing to accept its complexity for a while and allow its deeper meanings to emerge. I wish you “Happy Easter!” and pray that you, too, will allow time for life and hope to return.

My father had a pair of Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses. They were kept in his flight bag and used only when he was flying. He sometimes wore another pair of sunglasses for driving, but not often. I knew that even looking into his flight bag was entirely off limits. Even after I had earned my pilot’s license and had permission to borrow a sectional chart or use his plotter or other tools, I didn’t touch his sunglasses case.

As an adult, I’ve had several pairs of sunglasses and paid dearly for some of them because I always need prescription glasses. It was only earlier this year that I ordered a pair of Ray Ban Aviators for myself. I like those sunglasses and wear them a lot more often now that I have them. I also get some lovely comments on them.

I have never been very good at accepting compliments. I try to remind myself that one of the most polite things one can do is to say, “Thank you.” Still, I’m tempted to disagree and slough off a compliment with a line like, “I’m just another old white guy,” or “Did someone pay you to say that?” So I’ve been working on being polite when people compliment me on my sunglasses.

I’ve been thinking of saying, “They are part of my new diet plan,” and following up with a complex story that goes something like this: I have decided to wear Ray Ban Aviators because if I were to shave off my mustache and beard, I might look a little bit like President Joe Biden. Since I am not qualified to run for President and I don’t possess the skills to lead the nation, my only chance of becoming president is by deception. I occasionally get my facts mixed up, and I can ramble on and on, which is a skill all of the US Presidents possess since Obama. I am thinking about running for President, not because I want to be president, but because I’m considering the health benefits. I recently read that the 47th President completed a physical exam and was listed as 6 feet 3 inches tall, weighing 224 pounds, with a body fat of 4.8%. One article I read said that when he was booked in New York, he was 5 feet 10 inches and weighed 287 pounds. If getting elected can make a person grow 5 inches, lose 63 pounds, and go from being obese to overweight, it seems worth a shot.

Of course, the numbers in the above paragraph don’t make sense. I’m pretty sure that both sets of numbers are wrong. The body mass index doesn’t jive with any height and weight numbers. It appears to be a made-up number. The numbers reported in the article don’t seem to be authentic. His booking documents from the New York case stated he was 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 240 pounds. Three months later, he surrendered at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where he was recorded at 6 feet 3 inches tall and 215 pounds. Those are pretty remarkable numbers. I’d accept growing an inch and losing 25 pounds in three months.

Reporter Jules Suzdaltsev converted a photo of the 47th president standing next to several family members into pixels and posted the results on the social media platform X. In the photo, taken at the funeral of Melania Trump, he was next to son Barron Trump and Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs. “This pic of Barron & Trump makes it trivially easy to compare their heights. Trump is 458 pixels tall, and Barron is 508 pixels tall. If Trump were 6’3”, Barron would be a hair short of 7ft tall. But Barron is 6’7 . . .” Suzdaltsev said.

There you have it. Not only does being president make one shorter and lighter, but your children also get taller! On the other hand, the different heights and weights demonstrate either wild swings or intentional lying. Both are common among those who struggle with their weight. I confess that I’ve been on the ups and downs of diet bandwagons for decades, and I have not consistently reported my weight accurately. I’ve also been known to round up my height by a quarter of an inch. Neither my height nor weight shown on my driver’s license matches my height and weight at my last visit to the doctor.

When I go to the doctor, however, my weight is listed as greater than the number I claim, not the other way around. When I retired, I purchased a digital scale that reports in the tenth of a pound. I weigh myself daily and record that weight on a phone app. I know what I weigh. However, the scale at my doctor’s office always shows me a couple of pounds more than my home scale.

Of course, there is no magic pill for being overweight. However, a medicine called Ozempic has been approved for treating type 2 diabetes. The same drug is marketed under the name Wegovy for long-term weight management. I discussed medication with my doctor at my last visit because I am frustrated by my inability to meet my weight loss goals. I checked and I am not sure of the cost, but my insurance does not cover the medicine when used for weight management, only for diabetes. I am not diabetic, so my out-of-pocket cost would be somewhere between $150 and $450 per month were I to choose that route.

I am not overweight because of a lack of information. I understand the formula of calories in and calories out. For two years, I followed an instructional program that included daily lessons on mindful eating, controlling snacks, choosing healthy foods, and lifestyle change. Since retiring, I have achieved significant weight loss, a long plateau, and some weight gain. I currently weigh 25 pounds less than my highest weight.

I’m not willing to undergo what it takes to become a politician, especially the part about lying. I am also not inclined to pay thousands of dollars per year for medicine with long-term side effects, perhaps for life. Careful food choices and regular exercise seem to be my best plan.

My son is taller than I, and my grandson and I are the same height. I'll be shorter than both by the year's end. I like wearing my new sunglasses when riding my bike, though.

I used to tell people that I wasn’t very good at retirement. I wasn’t eager to retire. I enjoyed good, meaningful work and was in no rush to retire. For the first year of retirement, I focused on moving to a rental house in another state, helping our son and his family settle into their home on a small farm, and remaining healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic. When we were given the opportunity to return to work, I was eager to accept the position. I told people I had discovered I wasn’t very good at retirement. It was partly true. The adjustment to being retired was a more significant challenge than I expected. I hadn’t given retirement much thought during my working years. The congregations I served paid into my retirement account, and I allowed the Pension Board to manage those funds. I didn’t pay attention to them at all. The same was true of our IRA accounts. We worked with a broker to invest them in mutual funds.

Time has passed, and now, five years into retirement, I think I’m finally getting adjusted. I don’t think I’ll tell people I am no good at retirement anymore. Instead, I may mention that it took me a while to learn how to be retired.

As I drifted to sleep last night, I reflected on how much things have changed. Yesterday was a good example of how different my life is compared to when I worked as a pastor. After a light lunch yesterday, I took a short nap, rode my bicycle, and walked with my wife. As we walked, we discussed the menu for Easter dinner. After our walk, I made a shopping list, checked email, and caught up with a few items on my computer. We went out for an early supper before attending a short Maundy Thursday service. After the service, we drove along the coast looking at the scenery instead of taking a more direct route to our house. I had time to relax and unwind before heading to bed.

Today I’ll have time to be a math tutor for my grandson, shop for groceries, watch another grandson, and be at the farm when the girls get off the school bus so their mother can take their older brother to a doctor’s appointment. There will still be time in my day for a bike ride and a walk with my wife. It is an entirely different pace than Holy Week when I was a working pastor. I commented that half of my job was moving furniture in those days. That wasn’t accurate, but part of my Holy Week routine was setting up the next service as each ended. There was a fair amount of moving furniture involved. That physical work, however, was a welcome break from the intellectual and emotional work of planning and leading worship. I thrived on the pace of working and enjoyed most of it. There wasn’t time for bike rides or leisurely walks during Holy Week.

If I were still working, I would head to the church early for Good Friday. In the last years of our career, Good Friday services were held at noon and were contemplative services. The sanctuary would have been stripped of vestments, candles, and other items at the end of the Maundy Thursday service. The Good Friday service was a series of readings and prayers. We prepared a bulletin that could be used for personal devotion for those who couldn’t come to the church at noon. The day was usually a bit lighter duty than earlier in the week when we were preparing bulletins for all the extra services and ensuring everything was in place.

I haven’t forgotten the meaning of Holy Week. I haven’t lost the sense of using the week to practice and prepare for the seasons of grief that will come in my life. I am, however, able to release the need to be in charge. I’m not the leader at the worship services I attend. I don’t have to prepare in advance. I don’t have to be the last to leave the church when the service ends. I’m not going through the days of the week short of sleep.

Like other things in life, it takes me time to adjust. I’m still new to being retired. There are times when I am frustrated with the church's leadership. There are days when I say to myself, “I could do that better.” When those times come, I remind myself that I have had my time and that emerging new leadership requires stepping aside. I’m learning to relax and participate in worship, allowing others to lead.

I still have work to do. I serve on committees and boards. I volunteer with several organizations. I am working on my writing and meeting deadlines with my publisher. I care for colonies of honeybees and harvest and bottle honey. I help provide childcare for our grandchildren. I plan menus and cook meals. I do light maintenance around our house. I have lists of tasks I want to accomplish and stacks of books I want to read. I’m never fully caught up with yard work and chores around the house.

I still live my life and organize my devotions around the seasons of the Christian calendar. Holy Week is still important and meaningful to me. However, I have time to go out to dinner with my wife, take long bike rides, and observe the beauty of the natural world. As I go through my days, I feel more rested. I am learning a new pace of living.

I know that more changes are coming. I am blessed with good health and energy, but I will face new challenges as I age. There will always be things I miss from the days I was a pastor. There will be grief that I carry. There are people I miss. Learning to live with loss is one of the necessary skills of aging. Being retired gives me time to face the realities of aging with a bit of grace and for that I am grateful.

Despite the preaching you might hear in some churches, Jesus wasn’t big on issuing rules and commandments. The Hebrew scriptures, often called the Old Testament by Christians, have a lot of rules and commandments. The rules are frequently referred to as “The Law.” In Jesus’ time, there was constant debate about the law's intent. Does the commandment to observe the Sabbath preclude healing a sick person on that day? Is it lawful to harvest grain for food on the Sabbath? Is calling God “Abba” taking God’s name in vain? Jesus often found himself on the opposite side of the argument with the strictest Pharisees who took a narrow view of the law. However, Jesus did issue one commandment, often called the mandate. It is recorded in John 13:34: “A new commandment I give to you: that you love one another, just as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

Today, Maundy Thursday is the annual observance of that commandment. Christians worldwide gather to observe Maundy Thursday with various traditions, including foot-washing ceremonies, communion services, and special prayers and readings. Some congregations follow the communion service with Tenebrae, a gradual extinguishing of lights as a symbol of Jesus’ suffering.

An increasing number of congregations, however, have dropped Maundy Thursday services. Holy Week is marked in those congregations by Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter. That is how it is in the congregation to which we belong. One of the things I miss about my working career is leading Holy Week services. I invested a lot of energy in the week's services and couldn’t imagine skipping Maundy Thursday. Although Maundy Thursday traditions shifted over the years I served, the service always included communion.

We will join a small United Church of Christ congregation with a Maundy Thursday service near our home. Christians believe communion is a sacrament that transcends time and space, connecting us with Christians in all times and places.

As a pastor, I have shared communion in many ways with many different foods. There were formal occasions with public prayers, private ceremonies in hospitals and homes, and informal times for sharing food and beverages. In the words of the institution for the sacrament, Jesus urged followers to remember this whenever they eat and drink.

Others might not consider it communion, but I shared food with a special ceremony and with the remembrance of Jesus during what has been called the coffee hour following worship. I have special memories of times when the food offering included Oreo cookies. I would gather a few cookies and sit with children at a table. I would take a cookie, carefully twist the two chocolate parts, and take them apart to reveal the cream in the middle. As I ate the cream first, I would say this is the proper way to eat the cookies. Some children would bring me Oreo cookies, and we would twist the cookies together and eat the cream. Some would bring me cookies years after our first sharing of them. It was a form of communion and an expression of the mandate to love one another. It was one of many places where I, as pastor, received the love that was shared.

However, the story of Oreo cookies has not always been a story of love. In 2018, Leaf Brands, makers of Hydrox cookies, sued Mondelez, the company that owns National Biscuit Company, makers of Oreo cookies. The claim is that Mondelez's direct-to-store marketing, where employees of Oreo stock grocery shelves, gave the giant company a competitive edge when their employees used that access to hide Hydrox cookies. The case is still in the courts.

If you aren’t a connoisseur of cream-filled chocolate cookies, the two brands are essentially the same for a good reason. In the 1890s, Joseph and Jacob Loose operated a very successful bakery in Kansas City, Missouri. Jacob became ill and went to Europe to regain his health. Joseph led the company into mergers with other bakeries against his brother’s advice. When Jacob returned, he started his own company, Sunshine Bakery. It succeeded and became second to his brother’s company, Nabisco. The smaller bakery began producing embossed chocolate wafers with a sweet vanilla filling. They called it Hydrox, a combination of Hydrogen and Oxygen, the two components of water. It was a subtle declaration of the purity of the ingredients. Hydrox became the most popular cookie of its day. Four years later, his brother’s company sought to increase their sales by experimenting with an imitation. They called it Oreo. For the rest of the brothers' lives, Hydrox outsold Oreo despite the latter's lower cost. People saw it as an imitation of the original.

Nowadays, Nabisco’s powerful marketing and distribution network has invested heavily in marketing Oreo cookies. Instead of lowering the price, they raised it to just a bit more than Hydrox. The tactic worked, and Oreo is now the most popular cookie.

I don’t bother to tell the story of the two brothers when I share cookies with children. I only ask them to check with their parents to ensure I have permission to give them a cookie. I have a slight preference for Hydrox, but without a doubt, it is easier to find Oreo on the grocery store shelves. Communion isn’t interested in brands or competition between brothers. It is invested in loving one another. It is based on love that goes both ways. Coke and Pepsi. The Beatles and the Stones. Hydrox and Oreo. You and me and all of God’s children.

In a day when political leaders collude with White Christian Nationalists to present a narrow and exclusive vision of Christianity, the celebration of communion at an open table where all are welcome is a critical act of defiance. We will join a service located less than a mile from the border. Those whose paperwork isn’t all sorted out will be welcome. Those whose gender identity doesn’t conform to standards set by others will be welcome. Those whose families are different from other families are welcome. The mandate leads us to affirm that all are welcome. “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”

We will share communion despite the government leaders, despite the whims of politics, despite the attempts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And I will continue to share cookies with children.

Eggs are associated with spring festivals in many traditions. One of the liturgies for the celebration of Passover says that roasted eggs have been part of the Seder plate since Roman times, though documented use of eggs in that role dates back only to the 16th century. The custom was observed earlier, perhaps in the 11th or 12th century. The egg represents the holiday offering brought to the Temple and also serves as a reminder of the destruction of the Temple. It is traditionally dipped in salt water to remind observers of the tears of the Israelites.

The practice of hiding eggs dates back to the 16th Century. Several sources attribute it to Martin Luther, who promoted it during the Easter celebration.

In Jewish and Christian traditions, the use of eggs as symbols likely has roots in cultural traditions celebrating fertility in the spring. Eggs are a traditional symbol of fertility, connected to the pagan spring goddess Eostre. Stories of the Easter Bunny also have pagan roots. Rabbits give birth to large litters and are seen as a symbol of new life. Christians celebrating resurrection appropriated symbols of new life from earlier sources.

When I was dating my wife, their family organized a small Easter egg hunt in their backyard, hiding colored eggs that had been dyed. Their pet Scottish terrier found several of the eggs and decided to bury them in the garden. When the girls searched, they couldn’t find all the eggs and a couple weren’t found until later in the spring when their father was working in the garden.

One of my fondest memories of an Easter Egg hunt is when My sister’s three oldest children were toddlers. The twins were a year older than their sister, but the little one was surprisingly able to keep up. On the Easter Egg hunt day, the twins ran off to collect eggs. Their sister was puzzled by the practice. Organizers of the hunt noticed her and put eggs on the ground right in front of her for her to pick up. She watched for a while. A couple of adults put some eggs in her basket. Her siblings returned and shared some of their eggs. Then she, having observed the adults, proceeded to empty her basket, leaving the eggs for other children to find.

In my career as a pastor, eggs, rabbits, and the like were not the focus of my attention during Easter. We had small gifts for our children at Easter but played down stories of the Easter Bunny. Coloring eggs, however, was a tradition in our home. Cups of colored dyes were set out on an old tablecloth, and the whole family joined in the fun of making brightly colored eggs.

That tradition might be restrained in some homes this year, with the price of eggs at an all-time high in the US—well over $6 per dozen. Social media posts have suggested alternatives to coloring chicken eggs. Videos readily available with an Internet search promote coloring potatoes, marshmallows, and even egg-shaped brownies. Another video promotes selecting rocks to color. Despite the high prices, officials have announced that the chicken eggs will be used for the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House.

However, many Easter egg hunts will use plastic eggs, which are considerably less expensive. You can get four dozen for around $2 and ten dozen for about $7 at markets and discount stores. I even saw an advertisement for plastic eggs pre-filled with candy treats priced at $8.46 for 50. Plastic eggs can be saved and reused several times before they become broken. Most, however, are made of plastics that are difficult to recycle. Those placed in home recycling bins will likely end up in a landfill where it will take centuries to break down. Microplastics pollution from landfills is so widespread that most people have detectable amounts of microplastics in their bodies.

Since we retired, it has been our tradition to host our family for Easter Dinner. We prepare our favorite foods and make a feast of them. Eggs, however, are not currently on the menu. Deviled eggs are an option, as we have access to plenty of eggs from the chickens at the farm. They produce well and sometimes get ahead of our consumption. Somehow, deviled eggs haven’t become part of our family traditions, but starting new traditions can be meaningful.

Our week is pretty laid-back, unlike the intensity of Holy Week when we were pastors. We’ll attend a Maundy Thursday service at a church led by a student preparing for ordination. I probably won’t get up for the sunrise service, preferring to make a single trip into town for the regular worship service instead. Perhaps there is some room for new traditions in our household.

We have planted more bulbs each year since we lived in this house. Our hyacinths and daffodils are ending their bloom cycles, but the tulips are spectacular. We have beds with mixed colors and places where we have planted only scarlet tulips. Our cherry trees are in full bloom. The wisteria is a bit slower in blossoming but will show off purple blooms soon. All the blossoms attract pollinators, and we enjoy looking at the bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds visiting our yard. Over at the farm, the honeybees are being especially active. I’ve been checking hives and seeing a lot of activity after a winter that was harder on the bees than in previous years. I’m unsure what the problem was, as the weather wasn’t overly harsh. However, spring has come, the bees are stretching their wings, and I’ve been able to assist with some cleaning in the bee boxes. I offered supplemental feed over the winter, but they are now bringing plenty of pollen and nectar to the hives.

Spring is here, and Easter is coming. Resurrection and new life are worth celebrating!

I’ve had the good fortune to have been surrounded by brave and capable women. When our daughter and her husband were dating, he was deployed to Korea. They maintained a long-distance relationship during the time he was overseas. His next assignment was to a base in England, where he served for two years. While she couldn’t join him in Korea, she could in England, and they decided to work it out. Before she left for England, I listened as my mother told our daughter how much she admired her courage. Mother said, “I would never have been so brave.” I didn’t want to interrupt the precious conversation between grandmother and granddaughter, but later, I told my mother that I thought she had been equally brave.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, my father enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. He entered the service as a 2nd Lieutenant because he was already a pilot with an instructor’s rating. He served his enlistment as a service pilot in several roles, including training new pilots in the transition from single-engine to multi-engine aircraft, flying missions for training bombardiers, and transporting dignitaries. He served his enlistment based in Victorville, California. Before his enlistment, my parents had met at a college play. When my mother was six years younger than our daughter, when our daughter went to England, she traveled alone from Montana to California. She and my father were married in the home of an aunt and uncle. Her parents and sisters could not attend the wedding because of wartime travel restrictions. From my point of view, she was equally brave as our daughter.

After the war, my parents lived in Oklahoma for a while as my father completed his education and earned his airframe and engine mechanics ratings. They then found an airport to establish their business. They started with a single airplane in Big Timber, Montana, when the airport was little more than a rotating beacon in an empty field. They picked rock, mowed runways, and worked to install lighting. My father flew charters, instructed, bought and sold airplanes, and provided fuel and maintenance. Early in their marriage, my mother earned her private pilot’s license before they had children. She was the first to take the pilot’s check ride at the Big Timber airport. I have a newspaper column reporting her accomplishments. She continued to be a full partner in the family business operations for the rest of her life.

After being widowed, she enrolled in the Adult Advanced Space Academy at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. The Center is located in Huntsville, Alabama, on the U.S. Space and Rocket Museum campus. Its address is 1 Tranquility Base. She spent six days and five nights in the intensive training program, which involved multi-axis training, neutral buoyancy training, engineering training, and more. The program demonstrated a small slice of the training astronauts receive before traveling to space.

My mother didn’t live to see the advent of space tourism, but she would have loved to have the opportunity to go into space. I do not doubt that she would have closely followed and cheered yesterday when the Blue Origin rocket took a short up-and-down trip to the edge of space with an all-female crew. She might not have been familiar with the music of pop star Katy Perry. Still, she would have celebrated the crew that included a television host, the fiancée of Jeff Bezos, a film producer, a former NASA engineer, and a scientist.

While my mother was a pioneer in civil aviation after World War II, she would not have had the chance to travel to space even if she had lived several decades longer. Although the prices of space tourism are not disclosed, and the Blue Origin company would not say how much the mission costs, only those who are very famous or well-connected have been able to travel to space as private citizens. Jared Isaacman, appointed to become NASA administrator pending Senate confirmation, is a billionaire who has traveled to space twice. He was the first private citizen to perform a space walk. His trips were on SpaceX, a company controlled by Elon Musk.

For now, being a billionaire is the leading qualification for private citizens to travel to space. Short of that, you must be famous enough that billionaires know your name. Other famous people traveled to West Texas to witness the launch and return of the space travelers. Oprah Winfrey, Kris Jenner, and other members of the Kardashian family were among the celebrities who attended the event.

Nonetheless, an all-woman crew is a milestone worth celebrating. It is hard to say how space travel will unfold with the development of advanced robotics and other ways of exploring space that don’t involve humans on board spaceships. A lot can be learned without subjecting humans to the rigors of space travel. But there is something in humans that compels us to seek new challenges and explore new places. Plans are being laid for additional human visits to the Moon and a human expedition to Mars.

There is a big difference between Jeff Bezos’s fiancée riding on a rocket controlled by a ground-based engineering team and my mother flying solo in an airplane over which she had complete control. Flight into space requires an extensive team of engineers, and astronauts are, for the most part, passengers. The skilled piloting involved in the first moon landing and the landings of the Space Shuttle are quite different from the computer-controlled trajectories of contemporary rockets. Nonetheless, an all-female crew is a milestone worth noting.

Perhaps it isn’t accurate to say yesterday’s flight was the first with an all-female crew, as Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova launched solo for a three-day mission in 1963. Still, space travel has been chiefly reserved for males. Of the approximately 700 people who have launched from this planet into space and returned, only 15% have been female.

We have a long way to go before women have equal opportunity. Each step on that journey is worth celebrating. I am fortunate to have brave and capable women in my life.

We are members of First Congregational United Church of Christ of Bellingham. Our church building is also home to Garden Street United Methodist Church. Among the things the two congregations share is a bell choir. As a member of the choir, I rang in two services yesterday. The first was the 10 am service of First Congregational. The second was the 2:30 pm service of Garden Street. It was a beautiful day, so Susan and I walked downtown for lunch between the two services. The walk and the lunch offered good opportunities to people watch, something we both enjoy.

The mayor of Bellingham has described it as a small city in the process of becoming a mid-sized city. the population is just under 100,000 people and growing. That is roughly double the number of people who lived in the city in 1990. Bellingham has its share of problems. There is a housing shortage that has driven up the cost of living in the city. When we were shopping for a house, we looked win Bellingham, but didn’t find what we were looking for in our price range. Homes are a bit less expensive in the smaller town where we live. There are a number of people in Bellingham who don’t have anyplace to live and who survive on the streets with the assistance of the services of various agencies. Our church participates in several outreach programs to assist those with no homes including housing a day shelter for homeless youth in our building and a partnership with a tiny homes project.

We walked a bit less than a mile from our church to the restaurant. Along the way we saw several people who appeared to be homeless. There was a small gathering of folk in the parking lot of an accounting firm with several shopping carts and other items spread about. I suppose it is possible they had camped in the parking lot overnight, but it is also possible that they were simply using a space that is vacant on weekends but full on weekdays as a gathering spot for the day. The weather was beautiful and it was pleasant to be outside, so they did not need to seek shelter and an open lot worked as a place to be for a while.

We greeted a few folks as we walked. Bellingham is a friendly place and people often say “Hello” to strangers. One person asked us if we wanted to buy some flowers, but we declined. Others simply greeted us as we walked.

We had lunch in a popular bagel cafe and there was a steady stream of customers. We had to wait for a table to become available. Our table was near the line of people waiting to place their orders. Some people were waiting for orders to carry out and were standing. We had a good view of all of the action from our small table.

I saw an older gentleman wearing a silky black shirt over mis-matched shorts above his feet adorned in socks and sandals. Casual wear is common, and this gentleman seemed to be taking advantage of that custom. It looked like he had gotten up from sleep and slipped into his sandals without bothering to get dressed before heading to the cafe. A family of four went through the line. One of the boys had long hair like the father. The other had short hair like the mother. As I looked at them, thinking that the hair styles would have raised eyebrows in my hometown, I wondered if that is still the case. Times have changed since I was growing up. Maybe the town where male students were suspended from school for wearing their hair long enough to touch their shirt collar has changed its attitudes towards hair length. At any rate none of the members of that particular family were wearing shirts with collars, so technically there was no hair on collars.

I observed people with a variety of tattoos and piercings in some places that looked to me like it would have been painful to get them. I joked to Susan that I was being really counter cultural. I was dressed for church with a dress shirt and slacks and a bow tie. I was the only person we saw in the cafe wearing a tie and I suppose that other customers who enjoy people watching might have commented about how I didn’t fit into the crowd with my unique choice of clothing. “Who wears a tie these days?” One other member of our bell choir wore a tie yesterday and I think we were the only ones in both services who were so dressed.

The employees of the restaurant all wore t-shirts with the name of the restaurant silk screened on them. The shirts came in different colors and different lengths. I didn’t see any tucked into pants and some of the women wore shirts that were cropped. Perhaps they chose those short shirts to show of their belly button piercings.

I never know whether or not it is impolite to comment on a tattoo that is partially covered by clothing. Does the person want me to notice and ask about their body art, or are they covering part of it because it is none of my business? I usually don’t mention tattoos and piercings in casual conversations with strangers.

There were many groups of people who came into the restaurant whose relationships were unclear. Couples could have been just friends or they might be romantically involved. There is no way to tell from casual observation of them eating lunch. People seemed to be enjoying a relaxed day. I didn’t see anyone working on a laptop or groups that might have been business lunches. Even though most people do not attend church, Sundays are still days of leisure for many people.

Because Susan was not staying for the second service, we had arrived at the church in two different vehicles. I wonder what a stranger might think of a couple of people in their seventies, both over dressed for casual Bellingham, who arrived at church in separate vehicles, worshipped and then walked to lunch before leaving in their individual vehicles at different times. It might not be obvious that we have been married for more than 50 years.

I hope they had as much fun making up stories about us as I did making up stories about them.

I grew up in a small town on the eastern slope of the Rockies in Montana. Although now most of the working ranches are owned by people who have multiple homes and have built mansions in the center of what used to be various working ranches, in my childhood days, we were a community of sheepherders, ranchers, small farmers, and people who provided services to the agricultural community. We were also a community of relatively recent immigrants. Some folks still spoke Norwegian and ate the foods from the old country. Others spoke German, though not in public in those post-World War II days. Others had migrated from other places in the US or countries in Europe. A few Indigenous folks remained, but not many after the area around our town was removed from the reservation and the agency was moved 100 miles east.

The folk in our town were practical folk, and the sight of a convertible was rare. However, somehow, convertibles were found for parades. Some were driven down from the city 80 miles to the east. When we had a parade, there would always be a convertible for the Parade Marshall. In the Rodeo parade, there would be another for the Rodeo Queen. Other parades might feature dignitaries such as a US Senator, a member of the House of Representatives, or the Governor. Local politicians also appeared in parades, often riding horses or just walking. On Memorial Day, Veterans led the parade in an honor guard with flags and guns. Others followed in their uniforms or wore American Legion caps with collected pins. A few of the oldest veterans, the World War I guys, rode on a flatbed trailer pulled by a pickup truck or a tractor.

As we watched the parades, our parents pointed out the dignitaries and reminded us why they were in them. On television, we watched ticker tape parades for astronauts, politicians, and others honored for their feats.

Years have passed, and I live in another small town. I take our grandchildren to the parades in our town; their experience is quite a bit different. Our grandchildren will bring a bag with them when they go to a parade. They expect participants in the parade to throw candy and small gifts, and they run into the street between floats to pick up the scattered goodies. Last July 4, they collected a haul of candy that rivaled their Halloween takings. They tend to stockpile candy at our house because the amount of candy consumed at their house is more strictly regulated. We dole it out little by little when they come for visits.

I don’t think our grandchildren could name any dignitaries in any parades they have seen. Perhaps our 14-year-old grandson will recognize State Representative Alicia Rule in the next parade he sees. She sponsored him as a Page in the State Legislature this year, and he has a photo of himself in his tie and Page blazer with her on the House Floor.

When we stage a Palm Parade at our church, people my age think of the event differently than the children. We naturally look to the person playing the part of Jesus. We need to have a dignitary for our parade and understand Jesus's presence as sufficient for a significant procession. Our grandchildren are wondering why there is such a fuss over an indoor event with a few fronds from the florist and no candy. They are more interested in the candy they will harvest from the church Easter Egg hunt or the baskets they will receive the following Sunday.

The reality, however, is that most of us, whatever our age, have an inaccurate picture of what Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was like. It bore little resemblance to the Memorial Day parade in my hometown or the July 4 parade where we now live. It bore little resemblance to what comes to mind regarding parades and processions. A better image of Jesus coming to Jerusalem would be last week’s Hands Off protests, the largest one-day, nationwide display of public resistance against the second administration of the current US President.

Jesus’ entry was seen as an act of political dissidence by the Roman authorities that oversaw Jerusalem in his day. It was seen as an incident that might bring down increased oppression by the religious leaders of his time. There was an effort to suppress the crowds' enthusiasm for the makeshift procession of gathered branches and coats scattered on the street. When the crowds became boisterous, some Pharisees asked him to calm them. Jesus responded, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19:40)

Jesus’ palm procession into Jerusalem, celebrated worldwide today, was not an event featuring prominent politicians. It probably wasn’t impressive by Jerusalem standards, where Romans staged parades with matched white stallions, armored soldiers with their weapons, and chariots. The makeshift gathering was a bit too close to a riot for the comfort of political and religious leaders of the day. The tumultuous week that followed ended with Jesus’ crucifixion on charges of insurrection against the government.

As a working preacher, I threw myself into Holy Week, fasting, praying, and leading worship daily. I also moved furniture, reset rooms, and wrote services all week long, in addition to keeping up with other duties such as visitation, funerals, and the like. Our church was usually a hub of community activities, with meetings, concerts, and other events, but during Holy Week, we reserved the building for ourselves and our activities. We ate together, celebrated communion together, and prayed together. I would arrive at the church early in the morning and be the last to leave late in the evening. At the end of the week, I would be exhausted.

Now that I am retired, I’ll probably attend only one extra worship service this week and will likely see no parades beyond the procession. However, I will try to remember Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as accurately as possible. As I watch the events of our communities unfold this season, I will look for signs of the message he carried and its meaning to the gathered crowds.

Recently, I read that tourists from the United States traveling in Europe had told their hosts that they were from Canada. There is a fear of a cold reception or outright hostility in response to the confusing on-again-off-again tariffs and shifts in US international policy, especially the abandonment of Ukraine in its struggle with Russia. I don’t know how common it is for US tourists to feign being Canadian, but I suspect that most of them might not be capable of doing a good job. Despite their Quebecois accent, many Canadians speak passable French, which stands out when visiting Paris. I took French in college but am not fluent in the language. I think I’d come off as from the USA whether in Quebec or France.

I’ve never tried to represent myself as anything other than what I am when traveling abroad. I haven’t made many trips outside of the US, but when I do, I think it is pretty obvious where I’ve come from. I have tried to be careful in my behavior not to be traveling as an “ugly American.” I try to be open to learning about the culture, language, food, and customs of the place I am visiting.

Still, I wear my national identity and origins wherever I go. When I travel in Central America, it is obvious I’m a gringo, even before I speak. Before my hair turned white, I was a redhead. I have pale skin and sunburn easily. When I go to Japan, I enjoy being taller than many locals. I’m not a tall person in most of the places I regularly go.

However, I don’t think of crossing the border into Canada in the same way I feel about traveling to other countries. I’ve lived in states bordering Canada for most of my life, and before the 911 attacks, passports weren’t required for travel to Canada. We crossed the border without much thought or hassle. Of course, there are a few places where I stand out when I go to Canada. I’ve never ordered a double-double at Tim Hortons. I don’t drink coffee these days; when I did, I usually drank my coffee black. However, at least I know what a double-double is (two creams and two sugars). And I know that donut holes in the US are Timbits in Canada. I remember times when the exchange rate was nearly even and when Canadian and US currencies were accepted in border towns. Those days, however, are long gone. The exchange rate is significant enough to require the use of local currency. However, with credit cards automatically making the conversion and being the standard way of paying these days, we rarely use cash. We keep forgetting to bring our Canadian currency when we cross the border. We don’t have much and it wouldn’t go far unless we were buying a dozen eggs.

Despite the bragging of the current US Administration, the cost of eggs continues to rise. The U.S. egg prices reached a new record-high average of $6.32 per dozen. That’s up from $5.90 per dozen in February and $4.95 in January. Across the border, they sell for $4.91, around $3.50 US. However, don’t expect us to start driving across the border to buy eggs. Eggs are one of the things about which the importation rules keep changing. According to the Customs website, it is legal to bring eggs purchased for consumption into the US. However, eggs are an agricultural product that must be declared. When certain diseases show up, eggs are temporarily banned. We were crossing back into the US a while ago when the ban was in place and were advised by the customs people that we could either have our eggs confiscated or cook them since only bringing raw eggs into the country was deemed illegal. Although we had our camper, we surrendered the few eggs we had. We were waiting for a ferry and had our propane shut off and tagged, so cooking them would have been a hassle.

We have a shared park at the border in Blaine. It has been a place where people could meet friends from across the border without going through the official border crossing. Since the recent rise in tensions, it is advisable to make sure you are carrying your identification with you as there are lots of border patrol agents roaming the park, but people still meet family and friends in the park. In the center of the park is a large arch. Across the top of the arch is inscribed “Children of a common mother.” Inside the arch is carved a message: “May these gates never be closed.” Even when the border was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, people from both sides could meet for family gatherings and picnics. The peace arch is the official symbol of the Blaine High School, where sports team members call themselves “Borderites.”

There are lots of references to the border in town. Many businesses display both Canadian and US flags. One of our local roads is called Portal Drive, a reference to the border crossing. In the city of Blaine, the road's official name is Peace Portal, which refers to the Arch in the park—many people who live on one side of the border and work on the other. Cross-border marriages are common, and lots of our friends have relatives who live on the other side of the border. When the border was closed, family weddings and funerals were disrupted by being unable to cross freely. And, as I’ve mentioned many times in my journal, Point Roberts is a US community that can be accessed only by going through Canada unless one flies or takes a boat.

In recent weeks, hundreds of people have gathered at the border, usually on Saturdays, for Solidarity with Canada rallies. The local chamber of commerce supported the rallies and issued a statement saying, “In times of uncertainty or challenge, our communities have always found a way to unite. These rallies reflect that resilience. It is a symbolic and meaningful reminder that no matter what policies or politics may suggest, the people of Blaine and British Columbia continue to stand together.”

Despite the goodwill of locals, border crossings from Canada are down 40%. It is one of the very few places where the number of federal employees has gone up while, at the same time, the workload has gone down. Local businesses are hurting, with some cutting back on staff hours. Gathering at the arch and maintaining friendships is a good practice while we wait for political rhetoric to calm down. And we have no intention of decreasing our trips to Canada. I might even stop by a Tim Horton’s and order a double-double with some Timbits to see if I can pass as a local.

Today’s journal entry is a bit tongue-in-cheek. It contains a series of complaints about yesterday. However, I have little to complain about. I am incredibly blessed with a good life surrounded by good people. The news is filled with victims of injustice, those who have suffered sudden and traumatic loss, people who have been oppressed, racism, war, and tragedy. I am not a victim. It is just that some days don’t go the way I had hoped.

Have you ever had one of those days? I have.

By the end of yesterday, I was in a funk. I was ready for the day to end and hoped for a better day today.

Have you ever begun your day by writing a couple of apologies when you had done nothing wrong? I have.

Sometimes, the best way to keep the peace is a well-timed apology. A couple of committees were caught in a lack of communication. I’m not sure why it happens, but it is common in the church for people not to share information. I guess there is some power in knowing something that others do not, but there isn’t much power in the church in the first place. I advocate openness and don’t like secrets in the church. But in this case, the way to keep people working together, in the long run, was for me to say that my lack of understanding had been the problem instead of naming a failure of communication and an attempt to keep information from others. Rather than point a finger and lay blame, writing a couple of emails in which I confessed to a lack of understanding allowed people to keep working together without conflict. It is hard to explain without making others look silly, but I had stewed about the situation the night before, and I woke up ready to write the notes and get on with business. Still, it left a bit of a foul taste in my mouth and put me in a bit of a funk for the rest of the day.

Have you ever needed to be patient when you wanted to be impatient? I have.

I do business with a small bike shop in our town. It is a new business that I want to succeed. The owner runs it without any other employees. He will go out of his way to help customers. If you have a problem, he’ll drop what he is doing to help you. The result is that sometimes it takes him longer to get tasks done than he imagines. There can be a lot of interruptions when you are running the business single-handed. I needed a minor repair on my bike, so I asked him a week ago what day would be best for me to bring in my bike. I brought it in promptly on the day he indicated. When I dropped it off, expecting him to complete the repair the same day, he said he would get to it the next morning.

I didn’t complain. I gave him the extra day and then one more. When I stopped in yesterday after he had the bike for more than two days, he said, “I’ll get right on it after I finish the job I’m working on.” I said, “No worries, and walked home because I had walked to the shop expecting to be able to ride my bike home. Later, he called me and said, “Did you know you have a broken spoke?” I had taken the bike to him for the broken spoke in December, and for various reasons, he hadn’t gotten around to making the repair. I thought he could easily make that repair on this trip and had mentioned it to him, but somehow, he forgot it. When I reminded him, he said, “O, yea, I remember. I’ll get right on it.” I didn’t get my bike yesterday and may not get it today. I know that when I do, the charge for the repair will be fair, and the work will be well done. I’ll keep from expressing my impatience. The quirkiness of the owner is part of what I like about the bike shop.

Have you ever discovered that something you wanted to purchase costs more than you are willing to pay? I have.

Earlier in the week, I made a business inquiry and received a call from the business while walking home from the bike shop. During the conversation, I discovered that something I had wanted to purchase would cost roughly three times what I expected. I probably can’t afford to make the purchase. The person who called me was honest and helpful; it was just that things weren’t what I had hoped. The item is something that I can live without, and I have time to look for alternatives. Then, to top off my day, I got a second call later in the day that was very similar to the first one. A call to determine the price of a potential home improvement was returned with an estimate about double what I expected. I’ll have to re-think that one, too.

Have you ever changed your plans because of the weather? I have.

We were in town yesterday while our granddaughters were at art class. Rather than make two trips, we decided to run a few errands and walk while they were in class. We started walking, but the wind and rain picked up enough that I decided to defer the walk to later in the day when the weather might be better. The weather never got better.

Have you ever agreed to something to end the conversation? I have.

Instead of walking, we dropped by a business to drop off some information. While we were there, we were invited into a salesperson's office. I know the salesperson, and while we are pleasant with each other, our values don’t line up at all. He proposed a deal, and I accepted it to end the conversation. It isn’t a bad deal, and things will work out well, but I’m not proud of the decision-making skills I displayed, and I’m probably more vulnerable to another of his deals in the future because I accepted this one so quickly.

Have you ever gotten to the end of one of those days and fallen asleep grateful? I have.

After a day that didn’t go as expected or wanted, I had dinner with my family and crawled into bed, especially grateful for their love and support. They are incredibly kind to me, even when I get grumpy. I woke up this morning knowing that I was loved and understood. That makes up for the day I had yesterday. Today’s bound to be better.

I was a cub scout. I remember proudly asking my mother to sew the badges on my uniform as I progressed through the ranks: lion, tiger, wolf, bear, and Webelos. I never knew why the four diamond-shaped badges all fit together and were named after animals, and the next rank was a strange made-up word. It comes from WE’ll BE LOyal Scouts. After Cub Scouts, I made it through Tenderfoot, Second Class, and First Class before I became distracted and dropped out of the scouting program. I never was much for the uniforms and paramilitary rank system. I did enjoy the camping and outdoor activities. One of the things I remember most about my years as a scout, however, has nothing to do with the ranks or even the activities. Paying my scout dues meant I was subscribed to Boy’s Life Magazine. I read a few of the articles, but the section at the back with all of the ads got my attention each month when the magazine arrived.

I poured over those ads. There were always wonderful things that could be bought by sending money to companies in other states. I was saving up for the Air Powered Hover Craft until I discovered it was a cheap plastic toy you couldn’t actually ride on. I was very disappointed in my $2.49 Pocket Spy Telescope. I sent cash, including pennies, in a regular envelope for that one. It came and was much smaller than the photo. The cheap plastic lenses didn’t work as a telescope. I never ordered the police-style chrome-plated handcuffs, the smoke grenades, or the water-powered watch, but I considered them and read their ads multiple times. For 25 cents, you could order information on developing muscles in days from the Charles Atlas Company in New York City. One of my little brothers shelled out a couple of dollars for Sea Monkeys, but I don’t think he succeeded in growing any. My father talked us out of ordering the $12.98 Chick-hatcher complete with four quail eggs. It didn’t take much because we didn’t even have the $9.95 for the hatcher without eggs. He did, however, candle a few chicken eggs, and we hatched them under a heat lamp he rigged for us. The chicks were put in with our annual order of chicks. I assume they ended up in the freezer in the fall, but I didn’t keep track of individual chickens. He also vetoed the live chameleon for $3.95.

There were pages and pages of gags, including smoke bombs, realistic-looking gross flies, chocolate bar squirt guns, whoopee cushions, handshake buzzers, magic jumping beans, exploding fountain pens, fake police badges, fake dog poop, and informative booklets on mind-reading, throwing your voice, and card tricks. Most of them sold for less than a dollar. You could buy 200 used stamps for a dollar and start your valuable stamp collection.

I wrote letters for free paper airplane, hobby, and toy catalogs to enjoy receiving mail with my name on it.

I considered responding to the ads for the “Draw Me” school. The ads featured a cartoon donkey. We raised donkeys, and I couldn’t draw a picture resembling a donkey. I wasn’t very good at drawing anything. A friend and I tried for a couple of weeks to make realistic drawings of airplanes. We walked two miles to the airport and two miles back to town several times to look at the airplanes. He produced some pretty good drawings. I tried to imitate his style, but my drawings didn’t look like airplanes. When he began sketching pilots' faces in his airplanes, I gave up. He became an excellent cabinet maker with a very artistic eye. I became a preacher who learned how to use clip art for church newsletters. I’m sure that drawing school would have been a waste of money in my case.

I'm sure that part of the drawing skill comes from practice, but the excellent artists I’ve known also have a great deal of natural ability. My sister-in-law's art inspires me. One of her paintings is a treasured item in our home. She can sit with a pencil and paper and sketch realistic people, flowers, and other subjects.

This week is spring break for our grandchildren, and we have been spending a lot of time with our granddaughters. Their older brother is serving as a page in the state legislature this week, and his mother and younger brother are in Olympia. The girls spend their days with us while their father works. Yesterday, we visited the tulip fields with them. I took my camera and took pictures of the flowers and a few photos of the girls with the flowers. The girls took notebooks and pencils and sketched tulips. The tulips were terrific. The girls’ drawings were equally impressive. They love to draw and have plenty of art supplies. I think that they also learn a lot from each other. They often draw together and talk about what they are drawing. They draw pictures in anime style and are very good at realistic drawings. The older sister has won several art contests with her drawings.

Many artists amaze me with abilities that far exceed my own. I am amazed at the skill and artistry of concert pianists. I can play the piano, but I have never gained the skill to play complex pieces gracefully. I am also amazed at many of the arts we see at festivals and markets.

However, admiring our grandchildren's art is a step beyond being impressed with artistic skill. Our grandchildren are our future. It means a lot to know that there will be art that lasts beyond our lives and that we have a very tiny part in nurturing that art. I may be unable to draw, but I’ve taken my granddaughters to the store to buy drawing paper and pencils. My tiny investment pays off with a bountiful supply of inspirational art. I hope that the girls continue to find joy in drawing and painting. They are lifelong skills that bring joy to others as well.

I read an article on the BBC website about the Dutch parliament voting to ban the purchase and use of fireworks. After the ban was passed, a separate motion postponed the ban until after New Year’s Eve. In the debate, proponents of the ban cited statistics about injuries and damage from fireworks use. Last New Year’s Eve, two people were killed, and 1,162 people were treated in emergency rooms, primarily for burns and eye injuries. Opponents of the ban, who succeeded in securing its delay, cited potentially significant compensation claims from fireworks suppliers.

Fireworks are big business. According to the American Pyrotechnics Association, consumer fireworks reached $2.3 billion in 2022, with display fireworks adding another $400 million. Fireworks have been popular in the US since the arrival of European settlers. Fireworks were part of the first Independence Day, and that tradition continues. Here on the border, we get double fireworks displays because they are popular in Canada. Canada Day is Jul 1, and we can see the fireworks from White Rock, British Columbia, across Semiahmoo Bay. In turn, Canadians can see the fireworks at Blaine on July 4.

Over the years, I have been present at some large fireworks displays. When we lived in Chicago, our apartment was across the street, a half block from Rockefeller Chapel, where large fireworks displays were set off timed to music each year. I took a photography class and purchased a secondhand camera in those years. Photographing the fireworks over the chapel allowed me to practice my photography skills. Since then, I have enjoyed using my camera to capture images. I have collected a lot of pictures of fireworks.

In 1978, we were in Toulouse, France, on July 14, French National Day and Bastille Day. The Toulouse display is not the largest in France; the fireworks show at the Eiffel Tower is the nation’s most spectacular event each year. However, the Toulouse display was pretty impressive. Fired over the Garonne River so that the bursts were reflected in the water and set to music, we were impressed with the show.

One year, we were in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 4 and could watch multiple fireworks displays from our hotel window.

However, the most extensive displays I have ever witnessed were the shows we watched at Mount Rushmore. Between 1998 and 2009, huge displays were staged at the monument. In some years, the price exceeded a million dollars. That’s a lot of cash to burn through for a half-hour display. The fireworks were set to music that was played over the sound system. In addition to enjoying the display, we enjoyed everyone who gathered. We’d arrive early with a picnic supper and find a place to put our lawn chairs. We visited with friends and enjoyed watching the crowd. Even with careful parking of our car planned to speed our exit, traffic would keep us out for hours after the end of the display.

In 2010, the National Park Service stopped fireworks displays at Mount Rushmore, citing wildfires sparked by the pyrotechnics. Contamination of drinking water around the monument was also cited as a reason to suspend the displays. However, on July 3, 2020, a fireworks display was held at Mount Rushmore. The event was a campaign event for President Donald J. Trump and was hosted by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. It was the year that we retired, and we were not in South Dakota then, but we wouldn’t have attended anyway. Our political leanings were toward President Biden, who defeated Trump in that year’s election. In addition, the event was held at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, six months before the vaccine became available. The display was a super spreader event. The US set a record of nearly 58,000 cases that day. It is impossible to estimate how many contracted COVID at the fireworks display, but 7,500 people gathered without social distancing had ripple effects, spreading the virus far beyond the initial event. That event also topped the charts for expense. A government accountability report indicates the cost of $4 million in federal funds and an additional $1.1 million in South Dakota state funds.

Many historians agree that fireworks originated in China. Bamboo stalks, when burned in a fire, will sometimes explode because air trapped in pockets in the plants expands as it heats up, causing the bamboo to split and release the compressed air suddenly. Centuries before Jesus, someone mixed potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal to produce gunpowder. Pouring gunpowder into bamboo stalks made bigger explosions. Later, paper tubes were substituted for bamboo stalks—the use of fireworks spread from China. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, fireworks were being produced in Italy, and using them to illuminate castles for celebrations was common across Europe.

In modern times, most fireworks, both for consumer and public displays, are manufactured in China. Most fireworks sold in the US are imported from China. With a 104% tariff against imports from China set to go into effect today, fireworks prices are set to double. There are several possible results from this part of the complex tariff program. One possibility is that Americans, including the federal government, will spend twice as much on fireworks displays this year. Another possibility is that fireworks displays will be half the size of previous years. Another possibility is that the tariffs will end, or an exception will be made for fireworks before importing pyrotechnics for the July 4 celebrations. A combination of all of the above will probably occur.

Around 10,000 people are injured by fireworks each year, with burns and eye injuries being the most common. Serious injuries resulting in amputations also result. In 2023, eight US citizens died from fireworks injuries. I could not find a cost estimate for fireworks injuries, but it is in the millions of dollars each year. With the Department of Government Efficiency reducing funds for medical research and support for Medicare and Medicaid combined with high tariffs, the US might be money ahead to follow the Dutch. I don’t expect that to happen, however. After all, the current president loves fireworks.

“My favorite flour is tulips!” our granddaughter declared as we fastened our seat belts. Then this is your time of the year,” I responded. We have a few tulips blooming in our gardens, and there will be many more in the coming week. We live a little north of Western Washington’s largest tulip farms, where the bloom is about 50%. Another week or two in the tulip fields will bring them to their peak.

Tulips are big business in Skagit County. The tulip fields attracted 600,000 tourists last year. Tulip Festival organizers say the economic impact of people coming to see the tulip fields exceeds $80 million. Tulips are big business for small farms in Skagit County. It doesn’t take much acreage to produce blossoms for the cut flower market and bulbs for sale. The region is responsible for about 75% of all bulb sales in the United States. The largest tulip farm in the county is about 175 acres of flower fields. A much smaller, 10-acre farm is very successful and employs several families.

For a traditional tulip farmer, there are two harvests. Tulip stems are harvested and sold to flower shops worldwide in the spring. In the fall, the bulbs are put on sale for gardeners. But for RoozenGaarde, the largest producer in Skagit County, flowers are a year-round business. In addition to tulips, they produce bulbs for daffodils, lilies, hyacinths, and peonies. However, a key to their success is the acres of greenhouses in which they control temperatures to force tulips to bloom year-round, enabling them to sell stems through stores such as Costco, Safeway, and Fred Meyer.

The Roozen family farm is in its third generation. It was founded by William Roozen, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1940s and brought the family trade with him. The family retains connections with flower gardeners in Holland. I have heard anecdotal reports of gardeners from our region purchasing tulip bulbs on trips to Holland only to discover that the bulbs they purchased were produced in Skagit County and exported.

I know nothing of the flower bulb and cut flower business. I don’t know if tariffs and a trade war will impact the industry this year. However, I know enough about world history to understand that a family emigrating from Holland to the United States in the 1940s was not an anomaly. With the rise of autocratic leadership in the United States, one wonders about the impact of out migration on our country in the next few years.

Politics aside, the tulip fields are worth a visit. So many tourists come to look at the fields that reservations are required to walk through the fields. Since it is Spring Break for our granddaughters, and they are spending some of their days with us, we plan to make the short trip this week. Both girls love to sketch and draw, and we’ll encourage them to take their sketch pads with them on the visit. I’ll be sure to take my camera. It is fun to photograph the flowers, and I’ll get to practice my macro photography skills. The opportunities to capture a few images of my granddaughters surrounded by tulips will be even more enjoyable. After all, they say that tulips are their favorite flowers.

I don’t know for sure what my favorite flowers are, but I have a particular liking for iris. Across the prairies of the Midwest, the iris often indicates the location of homesteads. There used to be a lot more people living on smaller farms. Over the years, however, more and more people moved out of the small farms and into the cities as larger farms and farming corporations took over and increased the scale of farming to match the price of farm equipment. A lot of houses were abandoned and eventually razed. However, if you drive rural back roads and walk through pastures, you will often find where houses once stood and families lived. The iris planted in their gardens sends out fresh blooms every year as a reminder of how life once was on the prairies.

I am also a big fan of roses. I’ve never been very good at raising roses. Years ago, when we bought our house, I attempted to prune a lovely yellow rose bush in our yard. I pruned too closely below the graft of the plant, resulting in a plant that produced miniature red tea roses. My father-in-law, however, was a careful cultivator of roses. The rose garden at the front of their house was a delight every summer and fall. He sought various colors and knew how to fertilize and prune the plants, and roses evoke special memories for me.

Since moving to the northwest, I’ve become a fan of dahlias. They are easy to grow here. Selecting and planting tubers is like planting potatoes; the plants grow easily. A little mulch and compost added yearly keeps the soil rich, producing beautiful blossoms that last for much of the summer.

One of my gardening successes this year has been rich purple hyacinths. Last year, I purchased the bulbs from a Skagit Valley tulip farm after being impressed with how the purple flowers contrasted with the tulips. Our hyacinths bloomed early, coinciding with the daffodils, and we still have a brilliant display in front of our porch.

The lilacs have leafed out in the last weeks but are a ways away from blossoming. When I had hay fever, lilacs weren’t my favorite plants. Their pungent aroma challenged my allergies. However, since completing desensitization, I don’t mind a few lilacs brought into the house to grace our dinner table.

I don’t know the answer to the question, “What’s your favorite flower?” Maybe, like my granddaughters, my favorite flower changes. I might choose hyacinths today and dahlias in July.

Unlike many other gardeners, however, I have a soft spot in my heart for dandelions. I dig them out of the lawn occasionally, but I love seeing the honeybees returning to the hives with dandelion pollen on their legs. The bright yellow pollen matches the color of the blossoms. Moreover, children can pick all the dandelions they want, which is not true of garden flowers. There have been days when an impromptu dandelion bouquet was my favorite flower.

Although I occasionally enjoy hearing readers' reactions to my journal, this is not a forum with a large audience. My writing has not gone viral and is unlikely to do so. I’m sure that recognition is part of my motivation for writing, but it isn’t the main reason I write. I began writing the blog that has become this journal because I wanted to learn more about the writing process. The discipline of writing every day was helpful for my professional writing before I retired and is helping me with ongoing writing projects in retirement. For now, I continue with the expense of maintaining a website and publishing my journal, but when the time comes for me to stop Internet publishing, I don’t think I will quit writing. If you are a regular reader, don’t worry. I don’t have any plans to change the format soon. I want to keep the website going in anticipation of some additional things I hope to offer on the website this year.

I have been fortunate in life to have received plenty of attention. My parents and siblings were loving and attentive to me growing up. My academic achievements gained me attention in my young adulthood. I have been blessed with a long and joyful marriage with an attentive partner. Our children are very attentive to their parents. As a preacher, I used to stand at the door to the sanctuary and greet church members every week, and nearly all of them gave me compliments and positive feedback on my worship leadership. I have received awards and recognition from the communities where I have lived and from the church in many settings. I am blessed to live near four of our grandchildren who come to my home, climb into my chair, ask me to read stories, play games around the dining table, and tell me about their adventures. I do not lack for attention.

Like others who have worked with children, I have had experiences with children who are seeking attention. When they feel they don’t have enough attention, they will behave in ways that get attention. If they cannot get attention for good behavior, some of those children will get it for bad behavior. Even the threat of punishment does not deter their behavior because it is all about getting attention. Good or bad attention is attention for them. The challenge for teachers is to make good behavior more rewarding than bad behavior. This might include ignoring bad behavior at times. Refusing to give attention can change a child’s behavior.

Much of the current US president's behavior is because he is seeking attention. It seems strange because he gets lots of attention, but because of psychological damage in his childhood, he can never be satisfied with the attention he receives. He always wants more. This is not a psychological diagnosis. I am not qualified to make such a diagnosis, and I have never met the president face to face. It is merely an observation. Just like no amount of money will ever satisfy Elon Musk’s desire for more, it seems that no amount of attention will fulfill the president’s desire for more.

Combining two forms of scarcity thinking continues to devastate many people worldwide. From that point of view, destroying the United States economy through a devastatingly illogical trade war is a “good” thing because it keeps media attention on the attention-starved president. It allows the advisor who seeks only money to indulge in a fantasy that the US could return to the 19th century and fund the federal government through tariffs instead of income tax. The enterprise is doomed to failure no matter how you view it because the billionaire isn’t paying income tax. And no amount of attention will satisfy the president, as illustrated by his four-day golf weekend in the middle of a market crisis. The golf weekends have the added benefit of allowing large cash infusions from government coffers into private businesses owned by the president. Some observers say it looks bad, but the attention-starved president doesn’t care if it is bad or good. Anything that gets him attention is a gain from his point of view.

The readership of my journal is small enough that I doubt anyone in the administration notices the attention I’m giving to the subject today. I hope not because I am not writing to give more attention to the president. I am writing partly because I grew up around farmers and ranchers and worry about my friends whose lives are dedicated to agriculture. In North and South Dakota, where I lived for many years and still have many friends, almost all of the potash used for fertilizer is imported from Canada. A 10% raise on a commodity necessary for production combined with losing a significant customer for the raised food is not a good combination. 25% steel tariffs threaten to raise the price of the equipment needed to produce crops. For example, a large farming operation in North Dakota employing the latest no-till drills to reduce soil erosion will likely be using drills manufactured in Canada. Add 25% to a million-dollar piece of equipment, and the price increase makes it impossible to profit from raising wheat.

And more family farms going broke aren’t going to garner attention. That is old news. Farms have been failing since the farm crisis of the 1980s. The attention-starved child in the white house doesn’t want others to make the news. Whether it is children dying of measles in Texas or innocents sent to a notorious Central American prison because of “clerical error,” those stories will not make it to the media the president watches most because he is willing to do everything in his power to keep himself the only story in the news. And he has a lot of power.

Meanwhile, I’m more interested in the farmers and ranchers who are in crisis and the parents trying to keep their children healthy than the insatiable appetites of billionaires.

A little over 25 years ago, a colleague told me how her employment at her church ended. I have worked with this colleague on many different projects over the years. We had chaperoned many youth events. We had traveled to church meetings together. We had been counselors at camp together. I knew her husband and her sons. I had been a guest in their home. I had visited her church and watched her at work. After college, she and her husband moved back to where she grew up. They both taught in public schools and became active in the church where she had belonged as a teen. Her parents were active in the same congregation. After several years, the church was looking to hire a Director of Christian Education, and after being urged to do so by the pastor, she applied for the job and was hired. The pay and benefits were less than she had been making as a school teacher, but the job offered flexibility, giving her more time with her young children. Her husband later switched careers and began working for a bank, which helped their family budget and supported her church work. Over the years, the program at the church grew, and her work there became full-time. She oversaw a thriving church school program and a very active youth ministry.

The senior pastor at the church changed from time to time as pastors moved on from that congregation. One or two retired at the end of their careers. I don’t know the whole story, but a new pastor was hired after she had worked at the church for more than 20 years. This pastor wanted to lead the congregation in new directions, including significant changes in education programs and staffing. My colleague was asked to submit her resignation. She did so without projecting the conflict into the congregation.

A few years afterward, I visited the town where my colleague lived. Her father was receiving hospice care, and I stayed with the family at the hospice house. When he died, I kept in touch with my colleague by telephone. I learned that she and her husband had visited several congregations after her employment at her home church had ended but had not found one that was a good match. They remained church members for a while but didn’t attend regularly. After her parents passed away, they quit going to church.

The tragedy of the situation has always struck me. The church lost a capable and vibrant educator, and my colleague lost her connection with the church. The pain of the way she was dismissed became a wound from which she could not recover.

I saw that scenario play out many times in my career. There used to be many dedicated and well-educated church educators in settings across the church. Educators served in local congregations, conference offices, and the national setting of the church. Most of those jobs have been eliminated. Some say this has occurred because fewer children and youth are in the church, which is true. However, the decrease might also be attributed to the lack of staff and support for children’s and youth ministries.

Organizations change, and their leadership changes. I understand that. However, the downsizing of church staff has been particularly painful. Dedicated employees deserve better treatment than has been the case in many of those situations.

This week, I will attend a virtual event marking the end of a long tenure of service for a colleague. This colleague has been serving as faith formation minister for a sizeable multi-staff conference in another region of the country. However, the conference has shown that it is moving to eliminate the position. Several staff members were dedicated to children’s and youth ministries not long ago. Now, the conference will move ahead without dedicated education staff.

I am aware of my bias. I have always prioritized ministry to and with children and youth in my church work, and I have always worked alongside talented and capable colleagues dedicated to faith formation work. I have also watched congregations slide into decline through the mistaken notion that the way to balance budgets is to cut staff. Since joining our church, we have made staff cuts to balance the budget at every annual meeting. They have gone from three full-time ministers to one and have also cut back on support staff. I am not in leadership, and I will not become involved in leadership, but I have serious questions about the direction in which the church is going. That experience might teach that cutting staff is not working to balance the budget. I haven’t seen any serious attempts at increasing income to support existing staff. I think some members have reacted to staff cuts by decreasing their giving.

Beyond my concerns for the church's future and its ministries with children and youth, I am saddened by how former employees have been treated. Professional ethics dictate that church leaders refrain from participating in leadership in congregations that once employed them. This boundary, however, often means that former church leaders not only lose their jobs, they lose their churches as well. After years of faithful service, these people find themselves without a church home. A few find new church homes, but many remain in their communities but no longer have a congregation to serve them.

Conferences and wider church agencies are not good at supporting former church employees. Too often former employees are left without support and nurture. They worked for years at low salaries with meager benefits and are left with retirement incomes that are much smaller than if they had worked in other vocations. Now, they struggle to make ends meet while they are left without a spiritual home and a worshipping community. Of course, this is not the case for every former church employee. Many of them have found new church homes and are supported by congregations. However, I know enough who feel that the church has thrown them away to be aware that the stories of my colleagues are not isolated. There are many other tragedies in the church.

We can and must do better. The alternative is the continuing decline of the institution we love and to which we have dedicated our careers and lives.

One of the blessings of my career as a pastor was that I served congregations that had very capable businesspeople in their leadership. One of the challenges of that career was teaching business leaders that the church doesn’t operate like a business. Profit and service are different goals. That does not mean that the church can be irresponsible regarding finances. A healthy church needs to live within its means. However, projecting income for a church differs significantly from a business's. Profit and loss statements assume that the goal is profit. Not only is a church a nonprofit, but it also doesn’t behave like a nonprofit corporation. People give when they are inspired, and inspiration cannot be manipulated by marketing and advertising. One must constantly tell good news to raise funds to operate a church. The more church leaders complain about what they do not have, the less people give. When a church chooses to live in scarcity, it declines. Church leaders must live abundantly with whatever resources they have, which can be very frightening to those whose experience is in business, where one’s eye must be constantly focused on the bottom line.

I had the good fortune to serve congregations that lived abundantly and witnessed a lot of ministry that defied business sense. We began our ministry in two small rural and isolated congregations on the eve of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. The county where the congregations were located saw its population decline more steeply than during the Great Depression and drought of the 1930s. The congregations, however, continued to grow and thrive. They were engaged in serving their communities a quarter of a century after we had moved on to other calls. Both congregations eventually closed, but not because they ran out of money. They closed because they ran out of members in the continuing population decline as corporate farming replaced family farming throughout the nation’s food-producing regions.

I had the joy of serving a congregation that had experienced two major building fires a decade apart. The first resulted in the total loss of their building. The second burned the roof off of their new building and falling debris and water damage destroyed almost all of the main floor below. Both times, they rebuilt more extensive buildings. The first fire was during World War II when labor and materials were focused on the war effort. Nonetheless, they found a way to build a modern concrete block structure with brick facing and an addition with classrooms to serve the post-war population boom. After rebuilding the second time, congregational leaders were exhausted and stopped building. When we arrived more than 30 years after the second fire, the congregation needed to expand their building but had no reserves for construction and did not own enough property to grow within the requirements of city code for parking and street and neighbor setbacks. First, we had to purchase adjacent property. Then, we had to come up with an affordable construction plan. It took us a decade, but finally, the congregation could engage in construction once again and build a future for their ministries.

In another church, we decided to fund and build a home in partnership with Habitat for Humanity when our income fell significantly short of our operating budget. People contributed to the house project with incredible generosity and gave their time and energy to finish construction and have the home ready for the family to move in by the end of the year. The operating budget of the church ended in the black that year, even though instead of asking for more support for the operating budget, we challenged the congregation to give over and above. Giving supports giving, however, and both funds grew substantially. Another time in that same congregation, we got the opportunity to purchase a new concert piano for the sanctuary when we were in the middle of a fund drive to expand the church organ. A sensible business decision would have been to pass up on the piano and focus on the organ. But churches are not businesses. The congregation voted to purchase the piano, and the funds came in to pay for both projects. Giving begets giving.

A nonprofit corporation must consider who has significant wealth. Cultivating major donors is part of nonprofit management. Church members, however, are different. Churches often have people with little wealth who are generous despite their limited means. People give to churches out of their poverty rather than their wealth. The biblical story of the widow’s mite plays out every day in the life of a church.

There are other examples from my career of churches not behaving like businesses. A church employee once confronted us with a serious addiction. The addiction continued to get worse, leaving the employee with significant legal problems and leaving him a danger to the children and youth of the congregation. A business would have fired the employee. We decided to support the employee and promise continued employment as he underwent treatment. Our intervention did not go as we had planned. The employee was unable to face the addiction. He resigned angrily, leaving us to fill his position without notice. However, the church found new leadership, and he later engaged in successful treatment and went on to a higher-paying position outside of the church.

Another time, when a congregation I was serving needed to terminate a member's employment, we managed to do so in a way that retained the member's membership. The person had served in another position for several years and remained active in the congregation after retirement until the end of his life. A business would have moved on from that person, but a church isn’t a business. Even when changes are required, churches can honor the individuals involved and find new avenues of relationship and support.

Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. I have many stories of times when the church forgot its mission and behaved like a business, often with painful results. Those stories, however, are for another day.

There is an often-told story that is a modern parable. It comes from “Dream More,” the memoir by Dolly Parton. One day, when she was on a trip to Los Angeles, she heard about a Dolly Parton look-alike contest. To her sense of humor, it would be fun to enter the contest, and that is just what she did. She exaggerated her signature on-stage appearance with more makeup and bigger hair. With a group of friends, she made her way to the bar where the contest was being held. She didn’t let on her real identity, took a number like the other contestants, and got in line. Contestants walked across the stage, and the audience voted with applause. The biggest applause would win. Not only did she not win the contest, she got the smallest applause of the contestants.

She tells the story in her memoir because she thinks it is funny. I like the story because it shows how appearances can be deceiving. People thought they knew what Dolly Parton looked like but couldn’t recognize her when she appeared in person.

I have no special knowledge of Dolly Parton. I’ve listened to her music and watched a few of her appearances on late-night talk shows. I’ve read articles about her. I haven’t read her memoir, only a few reviews and excerpts from the book. I know enough to be convinced that her life has been remarkable. She is famous as an artist. She holds three Guinness World Records: most decades on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart by a female performer, most number one hits on Hot Country charts, and most total hits on the Country charts by a female artist.

From the outside, with Dolly Parton, what you see is what you get. She is honest on stage and in interviews. She uses the name that her parents gave her at birth. They have a lot of experience naming children. She is the fourth of 12 children born to Avie Lee Caroline and Robert Lee Parton. Her mother gave birth to those 12 children in 20 years. Her tenth pregnancy was twins. They were all born before she was 35. Her father never learned to read and supported the family, working as a sharecropper, tobacco farmer, and construction worker. They didn’t have much money. Her maternal grandfather was a country preacher, and it was in church that she first began to perform publicly.

She has invested some of her earnings in buying back the family farm and reconstructing its buildings. She has also developed a theme park around her birthplace and childhood years.

The part of her story that inspires me the most is her literacy program called Imagination Library. It started as a literacy education program in the county where she was born. Being the daughter of a man who was illiterate might have been the seed of the idea. She had parents register their children for the program at birth. Those registered received a free children’s book each month until the child turned five years old. The State of Tennessee picked up on the program and partnered with a foundation Parton created to expand the program statewide. Later, the program was extended across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland.

A few months ago, I attended a book fair in our town. I was staffing a table for a local independent news organization where I serve on the board. Our table was next to my favorite independent bookstore and across from our county library system. At the corner of the library tables was a life-sized cardboard cutout of Dolly Parton. I stood next to the cutout and joked with my grandchildren. “I may be old, but I’m younger than her.” They gave me the expected reaction, and it gave me a chance to explain the Imagination Library program to the children. In 30 years, it has registered over 3 million children and given away over 270 million books. It has inspired children to love reading around the world.

Parton has written several children’s books. “Coat of Many Colors” includes the lyrics of her hit song with the same title. It is the story of a girl who needs a coat. Her mother sews her out of rags. When they see it, her classmates mock her for being poor, but the girl knows that her coat was made with love “in every stitch.” Her second book, “I Am a Rainbow,” helps children connect feelings with colors. People talk about being blue when they are sad and red with anger. Yellow is a color associated with being afraid. She has also written two books that feature a bulldog named Billy the Kid, which promotes family values.

I’ll never be able to enter a Ted Huffman look-alike contest. I’m not famous enough to make anyone want to look like me. I got a new pair of sunglasses this spring, and I’ve been joking that I could shave off my beard and enter a Joe Biden look-alike contest, but I’m not expecting to find such a contest. A generic old white guy isn’t as interesting as a famous country singer. However, I share Parton’s passion for inspiring young children to read. I love sharing read-aloud books with children and am lucky to have still a preschool grandson who loves to have me read to him. I’ll probably never write a children’s book, but I have many stories I’ve told to my grandchildren.

One of the blessings of my life is that for 25 years, I worked in a building with a preschool for three—and four-year-olds. I loved the sound of the children as they walked through the halls, the displays of their artwork in the hallways, reading their names on the posters put up at the beginning of each school year, and the questions they asked me when I visited with them and their teachers in the hallway.

One could do much worse in this life than giving books to children.

Our careers led us to move a bit during the time we were raising children. Both of our children were born in North Dakota. They were preschoolers when we moved to Idaho and teens when we moved to South Dakota. They both graduated from High School in South Dakota. The fact that we moved from state to state gave them a sense of adventure and the knowledge that they were free to roam as they moved into their adult years. Neither attended college in South Dakota, though the state university system had favorable prices and good educational options.

Our son is well-settled in Washington. They have a small farm and good jobs and are intent on raising their family where they are. Our daughter may still roam a bit. Her husband is in the US Air Force, and they have lived in several different places during his career, including stints overseas. They will likely move again with a new Air Force assignment or upon his retirement from the service.

Neither of our children is likely to ever live in South Dakota again. This is a familiar story to South Dakota parents. South Dakota is a net exporter of youth. Children grow up there, but when they seek employment, they find jobs elsewhere. Sometimes, they return at the end of their careers, but most of them move away, never to return. When the time came for us to retire, our desire to be near our children and grandchildren was strong, and we knew that it meant that we would move from South Dakota even though we had strong attachments and many friends in the state in which we had lived for a quarter of a century.

Over the years, we have had a few friends whose children are classical musicians. Jobs in symphony orchestras and professional opera companies are more abundant in Europe than in the United States, and talented youth pursuing careers in classical music often drift overseas.

In 2016, we noticed a new phenomenon. A child of one of our friends moved from the United States to England because there was more security in an academic career in Europe. As a bonus, their grandchildren were safer as gun violence against schoolchildren in the United States continued to rise. After many generations, their family is no longer solely based in the United States. We have some understanding of their situation because our daughter lived overseas during her husband’s assignments, but in our case, they came back to the US. In the case of these families, their children won’t be moving back.

This year, there is an acceleration of departures from our country. It is most visible in the research and scientific community. Experienced researchers are feeling a need to leave this country to continue independent scientific research. Young people interested in a career in the sciences have been changing their minds about attending graduate school in the US and are now looking elsewhere for their education.

The abandonment of the US by scientists and researchers is partly about money. The current US administration is slashing research funding wholesale. Funding for research is being cut across the board. Pointing to bloated bureaucracy in some federal agencies, the administration has chosen not to address inefficiencies but rather destroy the agencies entirely. Citing the political outspokenness of students, funding for universities has been threatened and, in some cases, cut off.

It is more than money. However, the administration is engaging in censorship. It is imposing ideological and political agendas that interfere with scientists' ability to investigate research questions, their methods of study, and even the words they can use to report results. Current governmental policies in the United States are destroying the vital principle of scientific independence valued by researchers worldwide.

The result is a brain drain of unprecedented proportions. The exodus is mainly silent. The destructive forces at work in research institutions and universities have imposed a fear climate. Researchers and administrators are not always speaking out. They are trying to keep their heads down to avoid displeasing the administration because administration officials are decidedly vindictive and quick to pressure universities and research institutions financially and legally. Federal agencies committed to scientific research are being defunded, and wholesale layoffs continue. Funding for biomedical research from the National Institutes of Health, which supports more than 300,000 scientists, was cut by billions of dollars. Environmental sciences have been targeted. Over 1,000 scientists have been laid off from the Environmental Protection Agency’s research office. The administration has announced plans to reduce the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration workforce by 20 percent. Mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services mean that dedicated workers who have spent their careers trying to improve the health of Americans are being sent packing.

Although the administration claims this is being done to improve efficiency, there is nothing efficient about wholesale cuts and layoffs. The destruction of research capacity that the United States has built up over decades is not making research more efficient. Destruction does not improve efficiency.

The results are not far away. This is not a remote problem in Washington, D.C. Parents can already not get the care their children need. Medical errors at hospitals are increasing because the agency responsible for improving outcomes no longer exists. The mental health crisis among American youth is rapidly rising because of insufficient funding. Our young people are dying because of weeks of government deconstruction.

Nearly 2,000 doctors, researchers, and scientists have signed an open letter calling for an end to the Trump administration’s “wholesale assault on U.S. science.” Signing the letter is risky, as the administration has demonstrated a high priority for revenge and punishment. Many will be targeted, lose their jobs, or seek to leave the country.

Destruction does not improve efficiency. Research and education are required to increase efficiency. Laying off and exporting the experts who know how to make systems more efficient will not result in savings. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the first Trump administration’s botched response to it illustrated, there are forces beyond politics that can have a devastating effect on the economy, create pain and death for millions, and result in lowered efficiency, Increased healthcare costs, lost productivity, and mortality is already costing millions of dollars in counties affected by measles outbreaks. The fear and anxiety caused by opponents of effective vaccines pose a threat not only to the children of our country but to our economy as well. There is nothing efficient about steering dollars away from disease prevention. US healthcare costs are already higher than other industrialized countries. Causing them to rise even further is the opposite of efficiency. In addition, a rapidly decreasing capacity for research and the damage caused by a few weeks of misguided policy could take decades to repair.

Scientists and researchers aren’t the only ones considering fleeing this country to places with more freedom.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the movies. My friends are always talking about movies they have seen and asking me if I have seen them, and the answer is almost always “No.” I’ve thought about it from time to time. I like storytelling. I enjoy reading novels. I appreciate the artistry and teamwork required to make a movie. However, I haven’t prioritized going to the movies in my life. While many of my friends have gotten into streaming movies to watch at home, it hasn’t been an entertainment we have pursued. My friends have large televisions and dramatic sound systems that allow them to have theatre-like experiences in their homes. Those items haven’t been priorities for us, either. We don’t own a television set, but I do have two large monitors on my computer, and we watch movies and videos on one of them. The sound from my laptop isn’t the greatest, but it isn’t the worst, either.

There are, however, a few movies that have made an impact on my imagination. I watched all three of the original Star Wars trilogy in movie theaters. The first came out just as I was finishing graduate school, and we went to it in a theatre during a visit to our home in Montana during one of the last breaks of our seminary career. The Empire Strikes Back was watched during a trip to Montana to visit my father when he was near the end of his life. He was a pilot and an adventurer who died of an aggressive cancer before he reached 60 years old. I was a new pastor, serving a congregation and dealing with my grief. The movie theater provided an escape, and the story of a simple hero was appreciated. Return of the Jedi came out after I became a father but before the birth of our second child. The second and third movies were released when we lived in rural North Dakota. There wasn’t a movie theater in our town. I watched both on visits to Montana in the city where my wife’s parents lived. At that time, there was no theater in my hometown either.

However, when I was growing up, there were two theaters in my hometown. One was a relatively small facility on Main Street. I remember watching Disney’s Bambi in that theater. Since it was released a decade before I was born, I think our little theater didn’t often show first-run films, but I don’t know much about the story. The other theater in our town was a drive-in theater that showed movies in the summer. I watched quite a few movies on the drive-in as a teen. It was one of the first destinations where I was allowed to take the family car once I got my driver’s license.

The drive-in was the location of one of the early dates I shared with my wife. It wasn’t our first date, but I took her to see Easy Rider early in our relationship. I think we went during the summer before we began college, which would have been about a year after the movie’s first release. It is the story of two young men seeking alternative lifestyles, riding Harleys, and exploring America. They experience bigotry and hatred from small-town residents and have a frightening drug experience in New Orleans.

I don’t remember much about the film, but it was part of the culture of my early college years. One of my freshman roommates took on the character of Billy, played by Dennis Hopper in the movie. He had a fringed leather jacket like the character, and he liked it when others called him Billy. For a while, he called me “Captain,” the nickname of Watt, the other principal character in the film, played by Peter Fonda. I enjoyed some role-play for a while, but it got old pretty quickly.

The thing that did have a more lasting impact than the movie itself was the song from the soundtrack. Born to be Wild was a rock anthem for my college years. It could be heard booming from the speakers of the stereos in our dormitory, and I had an 8-track tape with the song that got played a lot. “Get your motor runnin’/Head out on the highway/Lookin’ for adventure/And whatever comes our way.” We’d sing along with “Born to be wild, born to be wild.”

The song appeared in commercials, other movies, and television and continues to be heard in many different venues. It was the most famous song released by the band Steppenwolf. The band became associated with the movie. Steppenwolf eventually settled in Los Angeles, where they played alongside the Doors and other bands of the time. I don’t know how many people know how immigration is featured in the story of the iconic band. Four of the band's five members were Canadian, and two of them were German immigrants to Canada.

John Kay was born Joachim Krauledat in East Prussia. His father was killed at war before his birth. He and his mother escaped to West Germany and, from there, were admitted to Canada as refugees. Nick St. Nicholas’ birth name was Klaus Kassebaum. His family were post-war immigrants from Germany to Canada. They played together with The Sparrows, where they were joined by Jerry Edmonton and his brother Dennis. Keyboard player Goldy McJohn joined the group. McJohn was a classically trained pianist who pioneered the use of the electronic organ in rock music and is often credited as the founder of Steppenwolf.

Music and art continue to cross cultural divides and international borders. Many Canadian artists are important parts of the US music scene. Joni Mitchell, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Justin Bieber are just a few Canadians who have achieved fame in our country. I doubt that a trade war will have much of an impact on music's international appeal. Still, music can help remind us that there is more value in friendship and sharing than in animosity and competition.

Our grandchildren attend an elementary school just eight miles from the Canadian border. The school is culturally diverse, with many children living in homes where English is not the first language. English is the language of instruction in the school, and children are taught to read and write in English. Many of the children can speak more than one language. Spanish is the second most common language. Because of how the West Coast was colonized, Spanish is a more ancient language on the coast than English. Our region saw settlers who spoke Spanish, French, and English. It takes a lot of seasonal labor to support farms in our area, and there are often workers from Mexico who travel to our location to work. Some become permanent residents for various reasons, including marriages with people from other ethnic groups.

Students who speak Spanish, Ukrainian, and Russian are in our grandchildren's classrooms. Some of the children of newer immigrant families, including those who were forced to leave Ukraine by the war, serve as primary translators for their families. Bilingual children whose parents do not speak English can support their parents at medical appointments, in business transactions, and in securing proper immigration status.

Our son, who serves as a librarian in a community in a neighboring county, works to provide a wide variety of resources for the people his library serves. Among those services are bilingual staff persons. The library has significant collections of adult and children’s books in Spanish, and a Spanish-speaking librarian is available whenever the library is open to the public. Recently, the library added materials request forms in Spanish, Russian, and Ukrainian to enable patrons to request that the library obtain books and other materials they want to read.

Recently, one of our granddaughters noticed that another student riding on her school bus was reading one of the Harry Potter books. Being a fan of Harry Potter and reading books herself, she took a closer look and discovered that the book her classmate was reading was not English. It was in a language with a different alphabet. She learned from the student reading the book that the language was Russian. She looked closer and recognized that the book had been checked out from the library where her father is the director. When she reported the experience, it brought both joy and tears to us.

We have worried at times because our son commutes 45 miles one way. The commute allows him to live on a small farm with his family and work in an exciting and growing public service library. Interestingly, he isn’t the only one making the trip. Some people are driving to check books out of the library, which are unavailable at libraries closer to their homes.

Our son has taught me that the value of a library is not in the number of books on its shelves but in the number of books in circulation in the community.

One of the many attractions of living near an International border is the presence of other languages and cultures in our communities. Our border is with a country where English is an official language. Although many Canadians speak French, English is the common language in the part of Canada near our home. The province is British Columbia, and its name reflects the culture and language of the dominant settler community.

Many of us have ancestors who brought other languages and cultures to this continent. On my father’s side of the family, many ancestors migrated from Germany. Some of those lived in Russia for a time, though they retained their German language and culture during the time they lived in Russia. First-generation immigrants struggled with learning English, but their children and grandchildren became fluent. Congregations formed in German immigrant communities worshiped in German for a few years, but all of them have now switched to English as the language of worship. With each succeeding generation, American English language and culture became more dominant. My father and his father grew up speaking English as their primary language, and neither could read or speak German. A similar process will happen with other immigrant communities.

Our most rapidly growing congregations in the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ are Samoan. Immigrant communities have brought their language, culture, and church connections. Our Samoan congregations are already bilingual, and many services are in English. Like the German Congregational churches, their cultural identity will shift with time. Language and tradition will fade as new generations grow up, and their primary identity will be US citizens.

Except for our indigenous neighbors, we all have immigrant backgrounds. Many Indigenous folks, including those officially enrolled in tribal nations, have mixed ancestry. This is what occurs when people live next to each other. They make friends, form relationships, fall in love, and marry across the artificial lines of language and national identity. Learning about our ancestors' cultural and language traditions helps us identify with more recent immigrants. There are many parallels in their experiences.

We live in a world of high mobility. It isn’t just people that travel across international borders. I recently purchased a bell for my bike from a local bike shop. I try to shop locally and avoid the largest online merchants. The bell, however, had been manufactured in China. I don’t know the route it traveled to the bike shop, but it arrived with the packaging and instructions all written in English. Goods and services travel long distances. Increasingly, services ranging from health care to warranty are being provided over the Internet and across international boundaries. A person treated in a local emergency room might have their X-rays or CT scans read by a radiologist in another country. Images can travel worldwide in seconds, and access to services 24 hours a day sometimes involves communication with people in other time zones.

Yesterday, I had a meeting over Zoom that had participants in four time zones. I went directly from that to an in-person meeting. Whether it is a popular book written in one language and translated into another or a medical image interpreted by someone far away, we are connected to people with different languages, cultures, and national identities.