called to stand here

Two young men were sitting outside on the ground 20+ feet away from their residence hall exit on this beautiful autumn afternoon. They casually passed each other the business end of the hookah they were sharing, looking for all the world like their indulgence was the most mundane, average, typical event taking place at this quiet little university that is looking forward to announcing a homecoming king and queen tomorrow. I'm feeling like the foreigner here. These two defied my reaction that they were doing something odd or unusual. I've heard that this is becoming a trend , and now I've seen it with my own eyes. After a dozen or a hundred sightings, I'm sure I won't give it a second thought. The United States has a long history of adopting diverse cultural phenomena and making them its own. It's a good thing the guys were sitting more than 15 feet from their door--the new smoking policy went into effect last month.

Last week I got a phone call from someone who identified herself as a Republican seeking my donation to her party. I told her I hate political parties and choose to vote for individuals rather than party tickets. She asked, "What if the Democrats win?" Evil can come from either side of the fence. Our Republican brethren are self righteous in some categories, and our Democratic brethren self righteous in others. Each is wrong on several planks of their platform, in my opinion. The Republicans are, however, the only major political party that gets my "yes" on the their stand on abortion . They're also right on the marriage and family issues, for the most part. And the Democrats are unfortunately the advocates of a social reengineering effort that I think is misguided and destructive. These efforts aren't mentioned on their website , for some reason. Alexis de Tocqueville said "There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no pa...

A good friend of mine bruised his heel last week, and had to go to the ER to get it looked at. It made him wonder about the prophecy in Genesis where Yaweh tells the serpent, "...I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (Gen. 3:15). Paul works from this when he prophesies that God will crush Satan's head under our feet. I wonder if it's a sign? What if he asked for a sign? Is that ok? We often ask for a sign ... there's some similarity between asking for a sign and asking the Lord to tell us something clearly. Others dear to me have been asking the Lord to give them clear indication of what direction they're supposed to take, and have been really frustrated when the answer hasn't come with the clarity they hoped for. The connection between that first sin and and our desire to know is something that I've been mulling over for the last week or tw...

We're at Life Light Music Festival this weekend. Over 250,000 people over three days listening to around 100 different bands. Too bad it rained. But it was wonderful to be in a large field surrounding the main stage and be part of well over 75,000 singing praise to the Lord--jumping, clapping together. The sense of community was wonderful, and the Church grew for a moment as we joined together in one spirit. After the Jeremy Camp set on Saturday night, we wandered over to the smaller Firehouse stage in a smallish circus tent; big, but not too big. It had a coffeehouse at the opposite end with sofas, easy chairs, and tables. I was looking forward to Jason Upton's set at 11pm. When Jason's band began, he introduced a sense of intimate worship in his unique style, and scores of people entered into that holy place together. Within 30 minutes or so, the other two large outdoor stages emptied out, their scheduled acts done for the night, and most of the people filed past the ...

Last week we marked the beginning of the new academic school year with the University Convocation . Then Margy and I looked at the house we decided to buy --and seven or eight others later in the week! Next, we made an offer on it, and after enough negotiation, we arrived at a deal. The good Lord willing (and the creek don't rise), we'll move at the end of September. There really are lots of things to do before we close on the 15th of September. One of the issues we're up against is the fact that Margy's not going to be permitted to lift anything over 10 pounds until she's made progress toward healing--something that's not coming quickly enough for either of us. But apart from prayer and obeying the doctor's prohibitions on lifting, we're in limbo. She's not ready to give into the surgery option. Not yet. And life goes on. It's amazing how quickly things can move--despite our fear/belief that we were going to be stuck for awhile. But just like t...

Yesterday I drove home from work and saw a "SOLD" sign on the For Sale sign on our house. What an amazing transition from the discouraged place Margy and I were at only two weeks before. She was in the hospital with terrible back/neck pain, and the prospect of cleaning up the house for showings at the drop of a hat stirred up even more pain. So we agreed we'd just take the house off the market and wait until we did all those things on our "to-do" list that was nagging at us. We got the deck done (thanks to Nic), and cleared out the storage room in the basement so it wasn't wall-to-wall junk (thanks to Josh--and us!), but the list included painting, recarpeting the family room, etc. Lots of work. And now we don't have to! But we do need to find another place to live. This weekend we'll start a marathon of looking at other people's houses in the vicinity of the university. Open doors... soon one of them might be ours.

Well, Margy got out of the hospital after only three days. Not that she was well. She'd gotten rehydrated, the pain was more or less under control, and she was eating again. That's a lot to be thankful for; and we were. Today, almost two weeks after her release from the krankenhaus, she had her first real treatment of her back/neck problem. She went to Dr. Jeff, a doctor of osteopaty in Madelia, who put her on a monster machine called a DRX9000 for about 30 minutes. Her head was placed in a special molded form connected to a strap that exerted up to six pounds of pressure designed to decompress her herniated discs. When we drove home, she said she was free of pain in her left arm for the first time in three weeks. Praise God! If she continues to improve with this treatment, she'll probably be visiting Madelia twice a week for the next eight weeks. And then we hope she never has to return again!