In Remembrance

Well, this week has been one of those weeks filled with weird occurrences and other wildly unexplainable phenomena. It also marks several anniversaries.

So, I started out the week driving around a Chevy Aveo since my car was being repaired. It was a clown car. Wednesday evening I got my SUV back and all is well. It was quick and mostly painless and I did not have to pay for any repairs. Hallelujah! Thank God the boy who hit me had good insurance.

It is official. I am now a proud, card-carrying member of the Democratic Party. Yes, I am probably going to hell now. And, no, it is not because I am an Obamaite that I joined up. I just decided to give the other side a chance for a while. I figure, I had been a Republican since before I could vote and was registered as one for 18 years, so it was time for a change, a change that I can believe in. Speaking of Obama, I read his first book Dreams from my Father this past week and it was pretty impressive. He has had a wild ride of a life with many thought-provoking moments.

I am learning at least academically what the black experience in America is like. I can never understand it as they do, but I am beginning to be more aware of the inequities that exist for African Americans. And, no matter what white folks say about everybody having the same opportunities if they just apply themselves and try hard, this is not completely true. Nobody looks at me when I go into a store and wonders whether or not I will rob them. My peer group encouraged good grades and success in school and this is usually untrue for many African Americans, especially men. God forbid anyone "acts white."

As far as memories go ~

This week marks my second anniversary in the blogosphere. My readership has skyrocketed over the last few months. I mean, golly, I think I have five readers now.

This week marks the celebration of the 20th anniversary of a youth ministry group I was a part of back in the 80s, Praisong. In some ways I wish I could be there in Oklahoma City to celebrate with the old folks who were a part of it in those early days, some of whom I actually still keep in contact with. I was there for the tenth anniversary, but I was also in a different place in my life then. I wonder what they might think of my change of life. But I do recall a moment with one of the founders in which she questioned then whether or not I might end up in places that most young Pentecostals might not want to go. Maybe she was a little prophetic.

This is also the week that I remember my mother-in-law's sudden death in 2002. It is hard to believe it has been six years since this happened, but Elizabeth was not even born yet. This is still one of the most horrific experiences of my life. I had never really lost anyone close to me, let alone in a sudden manner. None of us had any time to deal with her death. She was just gone. I have never grieved over anyone that much, and I wonder if I will ever again. It was as if I grieved for myself, for my wife and for our children who would never know a grandmother. Even when my grandmother died the next year, the loss of whom I thought might take me over the edge just a few years before, did not affect me in the same way. It is still amazing to me how much our lives have changed since that day. Unfortunately, the day she was buried was also my mother's birthday, so each year as I celebrate one I am reminded of the loss of another.

And finally, memories of my home church in Oklahoma City were at the forefront of my thoughts just yesterday as a crane lifting the steeple for the new church building toppled over onto the car of a man watching the festivities and killed him. He was the father of one of our former music ministers who was very influential in my early musical life. I grieve for the church, a church that is moving to a new location after many years, looking for a fresh start. I grieve for this family who lost so much in such a bizarre way. You can read about the accident here.

Tomorrow I have a wedding. It will be interesting. . .

Peace.

P. S.: I thought it was tacky, but someone stole Barack Obama's prayer from the cracks in the Western Wall when he visited Jerusalem this last week and published it. Ever the nosy rosy, here's a look.

News Roll, Monday July 21, 2008

You know, it is interesting how things turn out. I have had this whole struggle over the last few years with my spiritual identity, dealing with the perceived fall out over my decision to entire a new phase in my spiritual journey. Most people have been pleased with my decision or have given it absolutely no thought whatsoever. I guess it was a bigger deal to me than it was to anybody else. I guess it would have to be. My "therapist" brought out an interesting thought that I view a lot of things as failures that most people would view as just part of being human. He also said that I should be careful of perceived demons as opposed to real issues. I am working on this one. It was good to hear this from a professional counselor though.

So, I decided that I would read my Orthodox Study Bible the rest of this year. Well, I can tell you that they like their liturgy because the study notes on Leviticus are the longest I have ever seen in a study Bible. I mean, this was a book that I would gloss over each time I read through the Bible. I mean, I did actually read it each time, but I was not that interested in leprosy or menstrual cycles. Funny how they find Christ in all of the tedium. I think I could learn something from the Orthodox. To be able to find Jesus in the midst of seemingly unending rules. It was interesting that one study note said something like: "There are people who think liturgy is dead, but how can the work of the people be dead? It is only people who allow themselves to grow cold to the work within their own lives."

Sunday was good. I hardly slept Saturday night because Madeline came in about midnight and decided to sleep all over the bed as only an almost 3-year old can. But, I thought it was one of our better Sundays lately, especially the middle service. I hope the congregation is understanding this, but the Holy Spirit has been showing up to these services lately in a way that he may not have been until recently. I hope they sense the change. Maybe it is just that I am more aware of it, or that I am not as worried about what people might think anymore.

The latest news on my sad SUV ~ I took it today to have it repaired and a young woman from the Enterprise car rental place came to pick me up at the body shop. She was nice. I found out she was a member of another United Methodist congregation in the area, but that she had grown up at my church. Funny. I also found out that her mother drives her crazy and she is thinking about moving back to Maryland where she spent a few years after college. Everyone tells me everything. I am just glad that the car was not terribly damaged and I will have it back in a couple of days. The only bad thing is they put me in a compact car that reminds me of the one that hit me. No nightmares, just not used to sitting so low to the ground in a tin can.

More thoughts to come. I am waiting on a prospective student who will be singing on a cruise ship for ten months and needs a vocal coach for a few weeks before she ships out. I just keep thinking about the Love Boat. . .

Boring Was Fine

So, I made the cardinal mistake this week of telling my mother in an email that everything was fine, kind of boring really. Well, that was Tuesday. Later that afternoon, I decided to make a trip to Borders because the local Books-A-Million did not have what I was looking for. Now Borders is about 40 minutes from our house across the Hathaway Bridge that connects Panama City with Panama City Beach. Now, understand, this is not usually a story at all, but the bridge is the only way to get from point A to point B. What I did not realize was I was almost out of gas. So, I get out to Borders and it was a waste of time. So I head back towards home get to the bridge, see a lot of traffic, and find that I have almost no gas and there is no turning back. Our traffic here is a joke compared with most places, but our big bridge can cause some major frustrations. Short story, I coasted into the closest gas station and made it home. I remember praying that God would help me get to the gas station. I blamed it on the Devil, of course. It is amazing how quickly I can revert to feeling persecuted for my own lack of judgment.

Nothing else seemed to jinx my "boring" week until last night. We went over to some friends' home for a little get together. They are moving to Rhode Island to take a new assignment in the US Air Force and their oldest daughter was in Elizabeth's preschool class this past year. They wanted their little ones to see our little ones one last time and we wanted to bid them a fond farewell, since they were really active in church (she played in my handbell choir as a substitute and was on the preschool board of advisers with Misty). Well, all seemed well until our friends informed me that the young man who lived across the street had backed into my car. So, I went out to look at it and, indeed, it was damaged. It was not that bad, still drivable, but bad enough that the entire bumper will have to be replaced. He must have barrelled out of his driveway to hit me hard enough to break his tail light and dent my bumper so well (I mean, he had a little Suzuki). We called the police and they wrote up a report. I was very calm the whole time. (My psychological evaluation said I was not quick to get angry, although it did say that it is hard for me to deal with angry folks.) They were very calm. I felt bad for the young man. He had just turned 20 last week, had never been in an accident, and was on his way to church. Anyway, after about 30 minutes dealing with the police and all that fun stuff, I was pretty much partied out. So, we said our goodbyes. The parents of the young man who wrecked my RAV-4 had already called in the accident to their insurance, so this morning when I called to report it, they already knew about it. I guess that is a good thing. They will be taking care of everything and I will get a rental car to drive around until my car is repaired. Now I just have to wait until I can take my car in to be fixed. I am just glad to not have to pay for anything. Summer is always our least funded season, since I do not teach as much this time of year (and I won't get paid for the class I am teaching now until the middle of August).

As for things on the home front: Misty is doing much better. She had a checkup yesterday and all seems to be working well. The nurse practitioner told her she was the model patient.

Hopefully, I will not have anything newsworthy to report for a while. I have a date with 3 gorgeous underage women tonight while their mom has a girls night out. When do I get a girls night off?

Human Jukeboxes

Okay, so I was watching Six Degrees of Separation this afternoon. As you might remember, this was one of Will Smith's first movies. It was based on a Broadway play, and you can tell because there are few real set changes and there is a lot of very deep dialogue. The thesis of the play was that all people on earth are only six degrees away from everyone else on the planet. So, I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone else on the other side of the world.

Toward the end of the movie, Ouisa, who was played by Stockard Channing (Are you making fun of me Riz?) is at a large dinner party talking about her experience with this trickster of a young man who entered her life and ran amok with her emotions in a way she was never prepared to experience. Here is what she said:

"But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punch line you'll mouth over and over, years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time that impostor came into our lives. Oh, tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?"

How do we as Christians keep what happens to us without turning it into an anecdote. "Do you remember that time the Lord really moved in our service?" How sad it is when that is all the presence of God is to us, an anecdote, something to remember pleasantly. The truth in Ouisa's statement was that she did not want this experience to be lost. It was important to her. She did not want to become a mere human jukebox, spewing out witty stories that were interesting but not really life changing. If our experiences with God are truly significant, then they will be life changing and worthy of more than a tidy little story. I think she really did not want to go back to a time when everything made sense, everything fit into its box. She wanted to live in the change that this person brought to her life.

I want to live in the change that God has brought to my life. As much as I miss the life before, I have come to realize that by pandering to the humanity of missing the past, I am actually in effect telling God that what He has planned for me is not as good as what I had planned for myself. I cannot live like that anymore. As I continue in my quest to be ordained in the United Methodist Church, I continue to become more at home with my new church and with myself. These are all works in progress, but at the very least I feel I am making progress. And sometimes, progress is enough.

The Big Sort

There has been a good bit of coverage lately on a book published in May called The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop. As much as we like to talk about diversity and multiculturalism in the church and in the United States more generally, the findings of this book make me question just how well we are winning this war to be inclusive and understanding of other people's lifestyles, etc. In a nutshell, the thesis of this book is that there was a time not too long ago in America when people of diverse political/religious/whatever other label lived right next to each other and had to deal with each other on a daily basis. Today, this dynamic has changed. More and more people are living in clusters of like-minded people, whether this be Republican/Democrat or Evangelical/Mainline. It is moving beyond this idea of blue states versus red states to segregated neighborhoods.

One of the main proponents of this book lately has been former president Bill Clinton. In a recent speech he had the following to say about The Big Sort:

"We can maximize our impact if we reach out to people who are different from ourselves . . . I want to recommend a book . . . He says . . . we are growing more isolated in our communities because we are living more and more only with people we agree with, and we are growing more isolated in our political debates because . . . we look at the television news and we read the Web sites of people who confirm what we think already. This is not good in a democracy. And so I urge you to read it."


"I’ll just give you one little factoid about it: In 1976 when President Carter and President Ford had a very close race for president. It was close in America. There were only thirty-two percent of our counties that voted for either one of them by more than twenty percent. Everywhere else in America there was a raging ongoing debate among friends and neighbors and people who went to church or synagogue or mosque or wherever together; they were all sitting there talking about this, and they were trying to build a sense of national unity out of their genuine concerns and debates. By 2004 ... it was also very close, but forty-eight and half percent of our counties voted for one or the other of them by more than twenty points."And Bishop has got a story in here, unbelievable story, about a brilliant developer in Southern California who did a market survey, and he found that in the area where he had the property, so he had to do the development, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats were almost evenly divided, so, and he had one gated community he had to build, so on the left side he built houses that suited conservative Republicans, and on the right side he built places where you could have yoga and meditation and everything (laughter) that suited liberal Democrats, and he actually sold it out immediately, divided exactly as he had predicted, from his market surveys. Now, we’re laughing about this, but some of us are gonna have to cross the street, folks. That’s the last thing I want to say to you. I, we gotta --- "(applause)


"It was an amazing thing. So that’s the other thing I would say to young people: Do public service, not just with somebody who looks different that you do, but who thinks differently than you do. The way to --- we don’t need a phony unity in this country. The founding fathers understood that debate and differences were healthy, but you have to have them in a way that allows you to see the person who disagrees with you as a human being. Once we start doing big things together, we’ll figure out how to do it and we’ll do just fine. . . . "

I think this is significant for those of us who are trying to look past their specific demographic in order to see a more universal church rather than the white bread one I normally get. I guess the greatest concern I have is how polarizing issues tend to be. In the recent past we have seen the rise of evangelicalism in the military to a point that non-religious cadets at the Air Force Academy and West Point have brought charges against these institutions for catering to evangelicals and making it almost impossible to be successful if one is not religious in the military.

What this shows me is there is coming a point when our country will have to deal with two starkly contrasting positions: those who have grown up with no religious leanings at all, and those who have grown up with a fundamental/evangelical background. Both sides think they are absolutely right and constitutionally protected, and neither considers the rights of the other side. This alarms me because I don't think that Jesus was about infringing on others' rights. He knew what was right without having to knock people over the head with it. If this is not the case, then I cannot explain why he chose the disciples he chose or had dinner with the folks he came to call to repentance.

This has been a concern of mine for some time and is one of the reasons I left my former denomination. My biggest problem was that there was no room for dialogue on issues. There was the right answer and the wrong one and nothing in between. I am all about moderation and think it might be a good idea for us to try to come back to the center, meet people half way. But meeting people in the middle means we each have to take a step.

Catching Up With Family

So, I plan to talk about my psychological evaluation at some point in the near future, but we will save it for a rainy day.

The last week has been interesting. We played host to my mother, my sister and her two little boys this past week. We had a good time catching up, but with 5 children in our home, four of which were five and under, to say that the place was a-rockin' would be an understatement. I am really glad I had several days to myself, though you can never really prepare.

Over the week we went to the marina for the 4th of July, the beach a couple of times, to Destin to shop, etc. Of course, I had to pretend to work this past week and teach my night class at the community college, and get the big girls to their summer school (painting class and Kindergarten preparedness, not dummy training) so it was fun balancing these different parts of my life crashing together.

One thing we had not anticipated was that Misty had surgery on Friday to remove her gall bladder (see above). She had been having trouble and that was why we shortened our family vacation to central Florida a few weeks ago. But she went to Texas in the interim and we were planning for her to go to the surgeon on Thursday to set up a laparoscopic procedure in a week or so. Well, Monday she started feeling bad again and so she was able to move up her consultation to Tuesday. She went in for pre-operation blood work Wednesday and had the surgery Friday morning. The hospital actually called us two hours earlier than we had planned, so we rushed around and got ready and went to the hospital with my mom in tow for moral support. Aunt Jen stayed home with all five children. I think she had been drinking, because when we got back from the hospital about 1:30 that afternoon, she was a little glazed over. Just kidding.

Well, the middle of the story is Misty is doing as well as can be expected. She feels a little bruised, but is in good spirits. She was well enough to keep the children by herself while I did a funeral Saturday afternoon (Mimi and the rest left by 5 a. m. Saturday) and while I went to church Sunday morning. We have had a couple of families bring us food which is nice. I hate to cook, so we would have been eating out.

The last funeral I did was interesting and very short. I took it that the family was not in love with their father, or at least pretended that things were better than they had been. I am determined that by the time I die, my children will not be questioning my love for them or the example I set for them. Something about going to so many funerals makes me put my life in better perspective. Speaking of funerals, I have another one on Monday for the husband of one of my musicians. It is really sad because he was not old, just in need of a liver transplant. He was on the list a few weeks and just got too sick.

Nothing else really to report, at least nothing life changing. . . .except . . .

Personal Discovery Should Remain Personal

So, after the great success that was my patriotic musical celebration, I have had three things to look forward to this week: The beginning of my new class at the community college; My trip to Prattville, Alabama to visit with my counselor about my "psychoses;" and My family's return to Florida with Grandma and Aunt Jen and boys in tow.

Monday night I met with my new class for the first time. I have 33 students in a class that meets for 3.5 hours two nights a week. It is forever long, but I keep their attention with my winning wit and vigor. It is a good class with enough students who know something about music to make it interesting for me and enough of the rest seem interested enough to make the time go by quickly. I do not realize how much I miss teaching until I start doing it again, it comes back like I never stopped, and I become a tiny bit nostalgic. Not enough to go back to teaching full time yet (or maybe ever), but just enough to know that I need to keep doing what I am doing. Tonight there were a few girls who kept talking on and off through the third hour of the class and some students on the other side of the class kept giving them dirty looks. I thought it was funny. I guess I already have fans.

Tuesday afternoon I left for Prattville, about 3.5 hours from my house in Lynn Haven. I had a quiet evening so I would be in a decent mood the next day. I was uncharacteristically calm about this go-round with the conference counselor. This time we went over the results of my psychological evaluations that I took almost two months ago. It was amazing to hear myself described in such clinical terms, but there were no startling revelations about my inner workings. It was bizarre to hear him discuss my inner turmoil and anxiety and the fact that I was dealing with a "sad" episode at the time I took the test. Oddly enough, he was also able to determine that this was an episodic occurrence rather than an everyday event. The only thing that has bothered me about these little trips is the expense, mainly because of gas prices, but also because they have been morning sessions that have made it necessary for me to go up the night before. The getaways have been nice and quiet, but the price eats away at my pocketbook a little more than I would like to admit. Once I receive my copy of the official report, I may speak more specifically about the findings, but for now it is safe to say that things went as smooth as possible. And, I can say without reservation that I am glad this part of the ordination process is over.

Tomorrow the fam returns. I am looking forward to a full house this next week. We plan to do something fun for the 4th of July and spend the week together catching up. It will be the first time I have seen my sister or my mom since Christmas. That is the one thing I absolutely hate--living so far away from my family that I cannot see them very often. I understand it is a part of this getting to know me process that I have been on these last few years and I truly believe I have needed to do this in order to better serve my purpose for the Kingdom, but that does not make it any easier. Well, at least I will get to see them for a little while.

Peace