Arrogance and swagger

I wonder how a pastor can assert his authority these days. Tenuous ground to be sure in days when church shopping has made any one church a disposable commodity in people’s minds. Sometimes you must preach the law and instead of finding conviction, you see that backs of their heads as they leave the church, sometimes not to return.

I’m not one to mince words, conviction is conviction and most people need more of it rather than less of it in their lives myself included, and I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being too quick to pardon myself so I guess I just wish that we had a culture that respected honest debate and honesty in the service of the truth a little more. We’re too conditioned to be suspicious of each other’s motives to listen with an open mind. In equal measure, we’re too acculturated to seeking rhetorical advantage to just speak the truth in order to have it spoken.

Isn’t that what we are called to do, please comment, since I can only speak from the position of the one in the puplit, aren’t we supposed to call Bull%$#t when it truly is bull%$#t? And not necessarily just to point and blame, but to accept equal measure of culpability, mostly in the realm of sins of ommission, since they are pretty much the American way. We must have the most advanced necks in all of human histiry the way we turn away so often and so well.

Feeling a little grumpy, sorry about that. Got to get Caitlyn to Basketball, got to do Bible Study this evening, got to, got to, got to . . .

still want to though, which is a blessing beyond measure

the sounds of silence

maybe the reason that this song resonates so much is that the people who wrote it were New Yorkers.

There is no silence here. Instead of Oxygen bars there should be little places where for $5 you could just have 15 minutes of silence, pure and complete. Because there is no time at which this city even approaches silence, it’s never even quiet here.

How can you hear the Word? How can you listen for the spirit above the honking of horns and the rumbling of buses and those are just the ones that are obvious, the rumbling of the subway is so far to the background that you’d have to eliminate 90% of the other noise to even hear it, but it destroys the very possibility of quiet.

OTOH, there is a lot of cool stuff in this city. Caitlyn wants to see the statue of Liberty so we’re taking the Staten island ferry today, checking out the place where Debbie gets her flute work done and maybe have a reuben in this nice deli across the street, and then szechuan in Queens this evening with friends. All in all not bad, but this place really never sleeps . . .

Streetcorner Preacher

I remember a time when, in seminary, we had gone as a group with a professor as a facilitator into the various contexts to which we had each been assigned as students. Debbie and I lived in a challenging neighborhood called West Phillips in Minneapolis and our contextual “cluster” visited with a pastor not four blocks down the street.

We were discussing the needs of the neighborhood and where the church might fit in and somewhere in the midst of the conversation (more of a lecture really) this pastor mentioned that he had some competition in the neighborhood, (not meaning the church where I was assigned, less than a quarter-mile away, we were no competition) a street preacher named Brother Bill who preached up and down the block.

He then sighed and shook his head and said that it wasn’t really much competition, Bill didn’t have a church to call home so there wasn’t much to his preaching.

I don’t think that it occurred to me at the time what an incredibly pompous thought that this was. Looking back I have a hard time not thinking of this devoted servant of Christ as a sadly insulated soul, stuck thinking that the trappings contribute to the Word, or that their message is not valid without them. While I understand that given a replay of his comment he would deny that this was the gist of the comment, you still cannot get it back into the tube, so to speak, like toothpaste. It is the defining thing that has formed my thinking of this man and I wonder how many stupid, conceited, self-righteous things I have said that have formed the central nugget of peoples’ thoughts about me?

In any case, Debbie heard Amos Lee on NPR the other day and heard him perform his song Street Corner Preacher and it made me think of that. Nothing special, just wondering how people would react.

garden update

so we’re going on vacation in a couple of weeks, apparently just as the garden begins producing in earnest. We’ve gotten some radishes and some sugar snap peas, but now we’re getting squash, and tomatoes will be ripening soon, and tomatillos will be coming along (Yayyyy! Salsa!) it is an amazing thing to walk into every day.

here’s a peek:

quite a bit of growth since the past picture, I’m actually cutting two tomato plants back so they don’t tip over.

and these cute little variegated eggplant, aren’t they adorable?

and little, tender Mediterranean cucumbers, so tender you don’t have to peel them.

It is a wonder and a blessing amidst my fatigue and everything else, to have this little patch of wonderful to retreat to, to fuss over, to feast from.

Man is it smoky!

Caitlyn and I foolishly drove up north to try and get away from the smoke this past Monday (23rd) because the only fires on the news were in Napa and Santa Cruz.

What they didn’t mention was that there were over 100 fires in Mendocino County and so instead of driving into the clear blue sky we were driving into a scene from The Fog.

so we went, and later found out that the place we were going (Caitlyn has a favorite place to get her Carhartt overalls) was on the border of the areas being evacuated in front of the fires.

All in all a failure if the end of the adventure was to avoid the smoke, but a pleasant day with my daughter. And what could be better than that?

Each day is a blessing beyond compare. let us stop trying to compare them with other things.

Feed me!

if you want to know the kind of Land of the Lost world in which I live, check out this plant in front of a house down the street.

I think that there must be a sleestack under that tarp, torturing Marshall, Will and Holly.

trouble in paradise

so I’ve been having some struggles to get posts formatted the way that I want

hence there will be several posts here

no particular order

welcome to my world

at least my world in June.

Last day of school

many pictures of the last day

I am going to miss showing up on Tuesdays and Fridays and watching her class. We’ll try and see as many friends over the summer as possible. Maybe some of the kids from her class can come too . . .

What is it that makes us love? Is it chemistry? Is it Kismet? Is it common cause, the knowledge that we’re all in this together, striving that our children will grow strong and sure. In You, Lord, we have that common cause with all who have heard your word. Make us joyful listeners.

Garden Update

so here are two pictures, before and after, the former being just after things were planted, the latter a week ago.

and by the time you read this, I have already harvested all of the radishes and planted some more

Lord, you give the sun and the rain. Today it is cloudy and cool and the earth rests. Tomorrow it may be hot and the ground may harden in the baking heat. Between these two you will find us.

Kids, Kids and the garden (again)

So we had the last day of Sunday School and as we have done in recent years, we brought the good folks from Macdonald Ranch out for the kids to experience, petting zoo fashion. It was a great time and some of the more jaded kids, the ones normally whinging about getting back home to their Wii even seemed to find it a worthwhile experience.

How is it that we end up doing this to kids? By trying to give them everything we can, we end up taking things from them. If we give them a Wii, or a spiffy cell-phone or a computer, and they stay indoors in their safe and sanitized home, haven’t we in truth robbed them of something else? How do we weigh the things that we give and take away and how do we judge which one is more important?

New families and old in an uneasy mix. When can we get to the point where we all just trust in faith that we’re members, one and all, in the family of God. If we have a hard time teaching it to the kids, will we ever be able to get it across to the adults?

Can I portray trust enough to model it to others?

Then there’s the garden which I came home to that evening. I thought I’d give you an updated look.