Here Kitty Kitty

She was a beauty!  And I’m pretty sure that  she licked her lips just to make us think she was seeing us as some big ole juicy steaks! 

(Here Kitty Kitty (One), originally uploaded by Blah Blah Blog)

This picture was taken on our “Sort of Safari” in Zambia this past summer.  We saw only two lions…this lioness and a big male, but they were fenced in.  Thus reinforcing the “Sort of” in “Sort of Safari”.  But it was pretty amazing to be able to get this close to big cats.  There was only a rickety chain link fence between us.  At one point this little lady tired of us and charged the fence.  I was filming at the time,  and she spooked me and the footage is terrible.  But here it is anyway.  Willie (on Orphan Angels – not my team -from Malibu) kept trying to get her riled up by making Wookie noises.  Not sure what that was about!!

Time To Listen to Church Again!

Okay, folks, my pastor, Matt Heard, is doing a short series on “Expanding Our Borders”.  I have recommended a sermon or two of his in the past and have a link to Woodmen Valley Chapel’s “Listen On Line” in my blogroll, but this latest series is really fantastic, and you should click and listen.  This series is about the heart.  It’s about engaging with life.  It’s about awakening.  It’s about learning to live from the heart.  It’s about God’s vision for us and His goal for us.  I was out of town for part two and just listened to it this morning. 

Set aside some time and listen to “Expanding Our Borders”, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.  I haven’t heard part four yet.  I’ll be hearing it tomorrow, but I’m sure it’ll be well worth the listen as well.

“Expanding Our Borders”

No Energy!

Sorry folks.  Not much blogging energy these days.  Perhaps tomorrow!  I’ve been working full time and (how sad is this?) I am pooped! 

I Need Some Technical Advice!

I have started to utilize Flickr.com.  Does anyone know how to import more than one photo into a single blog posting??  I can’t find any instruction on how to do that.  Perhaps it’s not even possible…but that can’t be.  There must be a way….

Anyone???

Graffiti

(Graffiti1, originally uploaded by Blah Blah Blog)

Because I am getting old, today I dictionary.commed “graffiti” to make sure I was spelling it correctly. It looked wrong somehow.

And I learned that graffiti is a plural word. I thought it was one graffiti, two graffiti. Nothing more than that. Nope! The singular form of graffiti is graffito. Graffito! Imagine that!

You learn something new everyday! But it begs the question…How much exactly IS one graffito??

(This picture is of a graffito we found in a sort of underground and unsanctioned skate park in London.  See us phooning by another wall here.)

Ah, The Singing!

More from church in Africa!  This was a different church than Millan’s.  Here are three little videos taken at the Kapala Baptist Church in Lupya, Zambia.  The children’s choir sat on the ground near the front of the church.  In the churches we attended in Zambia, there was no children’s church, or nursery.  All the children, even the newest babies, attended church.  I sure liked it that way.  In this church the woman in front of me had a small infant secured in a chitenge on her back.  He slept almost the entire time waking only once to make a tiny fuss and reposition his head.  One of my favorite things about church anywhere is the music.  I don’t care if it’s hymns or “worship music” or contemporary music, or what.  I just like it.  I LOVED the singing in church in Zambia.  You couldn’t help yourself but to clap and move!  You’ll see why when you listen and watch!   

I have more “music videos” that are coming!  Hope you enjoy these (and those!)….

“God Cannot Lie”

Pastor Millan (sorry, I never heard his last name!) speaks to us at church on our Sunday in Kansoka.  I only had a small amount of time left on the SD card that was in my camera, so this is truly just a snippet of his teaching.  But trust me, we all knew we’d been churched at the end of this service!  We (Christians) are taught that God is the same before, now, and forever.  It becomes very obvious that Christians all serve the same God when you go to church in other countries; when you go to church in countries that are completely unlike your own.  His Word, whether spoken by Rick Warren or Millan (I don’t even know his last name) is the same Word.  Christians here and Christians ”there” (where ever “there” might be) share the same Christian experience.  It’s a wonderful thing to see and hear.  We speak the same language “so to speak”, and we speak it in English, and in this case, in Bembe.  Millan does his own translating.  He is a charming, well dressed, and well spoken young man who seems like he should have congregation in a nice little suburb of Minneapolis or Seattle, not in the dark and witchcraft infused area of Kansoka. 

Enjoy your brief time in church, on a rough log bench, surrounded by elephant grass walls in the middle of Zambia! 

Regrets (?)

I want to do the right thing, but often I don’t know just what the right thing is.  Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done.  Yet as the years pass, and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart.  Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at tasks undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with freshening hopes.  Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don’t worry about my destiny. 

Carl Sandburg

Never heard of such a thing…

Here’s something a little bit lighter for you to “chew on” today.  Now, I am off in search of autumn colors in the Rockies!   

From AskMarilyn and the September 10, 2006 edition of PARADE Magazine:

“I’ve heard that food tastes a little different when eaten with the hand opposite the one usually used.  My friends and I tried this, and it’s true.  Why? — Reggie Mechulan, Miami, FL”

“Taste Receptors are arrayed symmetrically, with certain areas sensitive to sweet and salty flavors while others are tuned to sour and bitter flavors.  When you use your favored hand to place food inside your mouth – especially with a utinsel such as a fork or spoon – you do it the same way again and again.  But if you use your other hand, the food arrives from an unfamiliar angle and traverses a somewhat different path of taste buds.  The change is unimportant but noticeable.”

That is so odd.  Try this out and tell me if you find it to be true for you!

Malaria – Plasmodium Vivax

Three weeks ago I drafted, but didn’t finish or post, this: 

I first contracted malaria back in 1986 when I spent the summer (with Teen Missions) in the Arkosame area of Papua New Guinea (PNG).  I had to take high doses of chlorquine for days before I started to feel significantly better.

I got malaria again this summer in Zambia.  The incubation period for p. vivax is about 10 days.  I came down with the symptoms on day 12.  (I don’t know for sure I had p. vivax, there ARE other strains).  Mosquitos love me.  Even though there were very few mosquitos out as it was winter, I guess the right one found me shortly after my arrival.  I’m told that once you’ve had malaria, you get it easier than someone who has not had it.  I was the only person on my team (on any of the three Zambia teams actually) that got it.  However, many of the rescue unit facilitators showed up at the base in Ndola over the next few weeks also sick with malaria.

I hadn’t been feeling myself all day, but didn’t think much of it.  I was really tired, but why shouldn’t I have been?  It only made sense given my schedule and my general lack of sleep.  But as I collapsed onto my air mattress in my tent before the sun was down and laid there with my feet hanging out of my tent, boots still on, feeling like I was paralyzed I was so weak, I knew something was truly amiss.  I fell asleep there, feet hanging out and all, and woke up about an hour later shivering uncontrollably.  I crawled the rest of the way into the tent and slid into my sleeping bag, boots still on.  I curled up in a ball, and fell asleep again.  The shivering woke me again shortly thereafter.  Malaria.  I just knew it.  But I didn’t want to say it out loud.  I didn’t have time to have malaria.  I had Christina take my temperature, and it was just over 96, but my pulse was in the hundreds, so I knew I was cooking up a big fever.  She got Abner, and he took one look at me and said he thought I had malaria.  That was a consensus of two, both of us having had malaria before, and having seen the face of malaria before.  

Read About Malaria 

I cried.  I didn’t want to have malaria.  I didn’t even have any malaria meds with me.  I didn’t want to take those meds for a week before I felt better.  I had heard of a medication before I left that worked really quickly, but it was like 200 bucks, so I didn’t even consider buying any. 

The medication is call Arinate.  And Abner had some.  He started me on my loading dose.  I would only have to take it once a day for the next four days, a total of six pills.  And it was going to cost me less than ten bucks. 

Wait a minute.  Ten bucks?  Are you kidding me?

After sleeping for two days, I felt pretty well, except I was really tired and had very little energy.  That ten dollar medicine was like a miracle.  And I’m thinking…..people die here (in Africa) from malaria.  By the tens and hundreds of thousands.  How can that be?  A person dies because they can’t afford a ten dollar course of medicine???  (And it’s even cheaper in other areas in Africa and the world!) 

That’s so not right.

How many more people die from malaria each year than die from AIDS?  Malaria is completely treatable with a ten dollar dose of medication.  You don’t have to take expensive drugs every day for the rest of your life to stay alive if you get malaria.  What is the excuse for people dying from malaria???  If everyone in America donated ten dollars a year for this drug that would be 300,000,000 cases of malaria that could be treated and cured.  Did you catch that???  THREE HUNDRED MILLION CASES.  Why aren’t we doing something to stop people from dying from malaria?  People dying from malaria is just plain stupid and a waste.  And there’s no behavioral component to getting malaria.  You can’t avoid all the mosquitos that are out to get you.  There’s no good explanation for this and shame on us for letting it go on as it does, day after day, week after week, and month after month.

I used to be irked because we (the west) didn’t spray for mosquitos with cheap and effective DDT because it gave environmentalists a rash, and it’s better to let Africans die from a completely treatable disease than it is to put evil DDT into the air and soil (uh, yeah, that was sarcasm).  Be that as it may, though it still bothers me, I am now calling for the west to stop letting people die for lack of ten dollars.  I will be working on a solution to the problem that is cheap to institute and effiecient to put into action.  I have absolutely no idea how this is going to work or how it will look, but how can I just do nothing?  I still believe that we need to haul DDT out of mothballs and start the widespread use of it again.  The widespread use of DDT in the past resulted in the widespread eradication of malaria!  Stand up to environmentalists who think that people aren’t worth saving and let’s get to spraying.  And until we can get mosquitos under control, let’s cough up ten bucks and save someone who already has malaria. 

Fast forward to today:

Today I found a blog called “Sociolingo“.  Though I have not yet had the opportunity to read in depth what sociolingo has to say on topics in genenral, this site deals with issues in Africa from the perspective of one who lives there.  I don’t know if sociolingo is male or female, I don’t even know if sociolingo is white or black or brown.  But I look forward to reading more.  I have added sociolingo to my blogroll as a site that perhaps can help us all expand our world view and perhaps encourage us to start to adjust our thinking about what we should place on the top of our issues of importance list.  When you read about what the average African deals with daily, perhaps the cost of gasoline here in the states will become a little bit less of a hot issue with us.  Perhaps.  In today’s posting by sociolingo I learned that the WHO (World Health Organization) has FINALLY lifted the ban on the use of DDT.  Finally.  And thank God.  I am in the process of investigating just what the plan is for instituting the spraying, but just the lifting of the ban is great news.  I know that “eco-activists” aren’t through with their fight, so it is with deep concern that I anticipate their next moves.  Here are a couple of links for you to peruse:

Read About DDT

Fox News Story on Lifting of Ban

Sociolingo’s Malaria Post

I still don’t know how to solve the malaria problem.  I think that the problem of malaria is symptomatic of a greater problem.  The problem of indifference to the plight of others.  As a human being I am appalled by our apparent lack of interest in people who are suffering.  As a Christian I am ashamed that I don’t do more.  I look at the depth, and height, and breadth of the physical and the spiritual suffering of so many people in the world, and I am nearly paralyzed.  It’s bad enough that people needlessly die from preventable and treatable diseases.  How much more tragic is it that they do so without the knowledge of a loving savior?  And, while I sort of stand on my internet soapbox here, I am sitting on my comfy couch in the middle of my cushy life in America. 

How do we affect any real change in this world, in the suffering of millions?  The problem is so complex.  It’s geographical, it’s political, it’s spiritual, it’s sociological.  How do we effectively cross all these barriers to meet the immediate needs of a hurting world? 

Any ideas??

Moon Over Kansoka

(Moon Over Kansoka, originally uploaded by Blah Blah Blog)

I have been trying to sort out all my pictures from my summer. Some of my “kids” are asking me to send them cds of my pictures, and I don’t want to send them all the junky ones, just the good ones.  I came across this one and thought there was something fantastical about it.  And I thought I’d share it!  It was taken at our last rescue unit location, in Kansoka, Zambia.  And in case you were wondering, it was taken with a little digital camera on no special setting and without a tripod.  I just held the camera, pointed, and shot.

Krista

If I thought it was a challenge to earn the respect of 23 kids, how much more so was it a challenge for Krista to do it?  But she did.  Krista was one of my assistant leaders this summer in Zambia.  She was, well IS, only 18 years old!  She wasn’t even older than all the team members, and yet she was placed in a position of authority over them.  I have decided to write about her because of Teresa, her mom.  Teresa found and reads my blog.  She recently left a comment asking for more Africa stories.  I have dozens of them started, but it’s difficult to get a complicated life story posting just right!  However, Krista stayed in Africa (she went on to Mozambique) instead of coming home and Teresa is missing her and I think she needs to hear stories about her!  So, here you go, Teresa.  I hope you enjoy this a tenth as much as I enjoyed Krista!

Krista is as sweet as she is lovely.  She has a heart of service.  She loves the Lord (Jesus).  She is laughter and energy and light (welllll, most of the time!). 

(Trying to be glamorous, originally uploaded by Blah Blah Blog)

“For Lunch Today, We’re Having……!”

Before each meal was served, Krista would go out to where the kids were all lined up and announce the menu.  And the kids would cheer after each dish was announced.  Didn’t matter what it was, she belted it out like it was gonna be the best meal that we’d eat in our life, and the kids would cheer.  Let me tell you what that did for the morale of the woman behind the spoon.  I felt good about what I was doing every single meal of each day.

“The Lion Pig”

One morning, as I exited my tent at 5:30ish, I was startled to see Krista standing nearby waiting for me.  “Mama Lou, I need you to check the kitchen for lions before we go in there.” she said quietly and somewhat nervously.  She’d heard animals outside her tent that night and dreamed that those animals were lions.  I had made cinnamon rolls the previous evening that we’d have for breakfast that morning before church.  Making cinnamon rolls anywhere is a labor intensive process.  Making them in the bush in Africa?  Forget about it!  Hard work!    Well!  When we moved the door (it wasn’t attached or on hinges or anything) from the doorway to our kitchen, there, on the floor, were two of the four big pans of cinnamon rolls…one of them upside down, the other obviously had been eaten away at by something.  As the windows in the kitchen had no glass, we only speculated at what sort of animal the perp had been.  We knew it wasn’t lions, but off in the bushes we did spy a couple big black pigs.  That  was probably what we’d heard snufflin’ around outside the tents, but no way could pigs get into the kitchen.  I prefered not to think about what actually got at the rolls.  But that was the beginning of the legend of the Lion Pig.  Sometimes, at night, when I am missing Africa, I can almost hear it eating cinnamon rolls in the kitchen. 

“Sheema”

Krista learned how to cook sheema to perfection.  (An expanded posting on sheema is in the works).  I remember my own mom’s skill at making cream of wheat without any lumps.  Something about adding the powder at the right speed and keeping it stirred.  Sheema’s no different.  You have to add the mealie meal (finely ground corn) to boiling water very slowly and stir, stir, stir.  We cooked it in five gallon pots.  And used big HUGE carved wooden spoon paddles to do the stirring.  That’s a lot of HARD work.  Krista’s Sheema never had any lumps.  Even more impressive was that her porridge (also made of mealie meal and a more runny version of sheema) didn’t have lumps either.  We had sheema and porridge often.  It was cheap and filling, and because Krista made it so well, the kids all loved it.

“More Lemon Pepper!”  

Krista sought to do as much as she could to help me in my endeavors to “feed the multitudes”.  She had a knack for seasoning.  Watching her shake this and that into whatever pot was steaming on the brazier was like watching a conductor at the symphony!  One of our favorite seasonsings was lemon pepper.  Everything always needed more lemon pepper.

“The Best Pancakes Ever, TWICE!!!

We had moved to Lupya the day before.  Moving always made the next day in the kitchen somewhat chaotic.  We never had quite enough time to completely organize before it was time to get up and make breakfast.  The plan was for baked oatmeal. We had all the ingredients together and ready to go but couldn’t find the oatmeal.  It was somewhere, to be certain, but we couldn’t find it and time was getting short.  So, after a quick discussion on what we could turn the very sweet and very eggy mixture we now had on hand into, it was decided we’d do a quick turn and make pancakes.  Krista dumped this and that into the bowl and we started to fry up the cakes.  And they were AWESOME!  And from that we learned that pancakes are really good with more sugar and more eggs.  Soooooo, the next time we made them, we altered the recipe again, and Krista, unbeknownst to me added her new favorite seasoning, pumpkin spice (!) to the mix.  WOW.  I haven’t had the opportunity to try to recreate those amazing cakes here in the states, but they were just about the yummiest thing I’d ever eaten.  We had lots of them leftover and we served them later cold (with peanut butter if you wanted) and they were just as good like that as they were steaming hot with margarine and syrup!  Perhaps I’ll try dinking with the recipe and if the results are nearly as good as they were in Lupya and in Lufwanyama, I’ll pass it along to you.  Kudos Krista for the the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten, twice!

“A Hot Bath For Mama Lou”

In Lufwanyama there was actually a small room off the squatty potties where you could bathe.  We only bathed once a week and I was looking forward to using that room.  But I was recovering from malaria and didn’t have much energy.  Lifting a bucket of water was hard work as I was left pretty weakened.  So I had pretty much decided the bath wasn’t worth the effort of getting water.  It was sheema day in the kitchen and since the work load was less, Krista sent me off to take a nap.  I slept for an hour or so, and when I woke up, I found that Krista had set up the bathing room for me, complete with water she had warmed up for me on the brazier.  It was the best bath I had all summer. 

“Where In The World Is Krista’s Luggage?”

All of the people on our team had to really pare down what we brought.  It had to fit in a carry-on.  As Krista was to stay on in Africa for some time after our summer, she was allowed to pack a duffel bag.  She had joined our team just days before training in boot camp, and so her plane ticket had her traveling at a different time with different team.  We caught up with her at the airport in Lusaka, but her duffel bag was no where to be found.  Krista pretty much had just the clothes on her back.  She never complained.  Eventually her bag was found.  It had been sent on to Mozambique where it would be waiting for her arrival in five weeks.  She had packed wet and dirty clothes in it, expecting that she’d do the laundry when she got to Zambia.  (Note to self:  Ask Krista what the bag looked and smelled like by the time she got there!)

More later.  Must post now!

Thanks, Krista, for all the dimensions you added to Zambia Foot Washing, 2006.  And thanks to God for giving her to us instead of sending her to Mozambique right away!

 

New Look…(Same Great Blog???)

I figured it was time again to change the look of my blog.  I shopped through the available options that WordPress has and found a new format that allows for a customized header.

So, what’s up with “ubiquitous mouse”?

Well, while at the Paddington station when I was lately in London, I came across a big ole statue of some artist I’d never heard of.  It had a quote at the bottom.  These two words in conjunction with each other caught my eye.  So I took a picture.  I probably should have written down the whole quote, or at least who said it, or AT LEAST whose statue it was under, but alas, I did not.

Ubiquitous is one of my all time favorite words.  And I had just returned from Zambia where, though the mice were relatively fewer in number than I was expecting, they were always there.  (Oddly, we’d find crushed mice under at least a couple of the tents each time we’d move.  You’d think ubiquitous mice would be able to avoid a fate such as that.)

It wasn’t until I put the picture in my header that it dawned on me that there was a computer application for it that plays nicely with the whole this being a blog and all thing.

So, I get a little double entendre chuckle out of it as well.  Double entendres are another favorite of mine.

I’ve been working and busy since I got back from LA.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll write something that’s actually worthy of the time you take to read it.

PS…because of my schedule I was not able to participate in today’s Round Robin Challenge “Dream Homes”.  But feel free to check out the entries of the other Round Robiners!!!

Linking List:

Karen
Outpost Mâvarin – Posted!
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com/

Carly
Ellipsis…Suddenly Carly – Posted!
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot/

boilyou
Percolation
http://boliyou.blogspot.com/

Suzanne R – Posted!
New Suzanne R’s Life
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com/

Nancy
Nancy Luvs Pix
http://journals.aol.com/nhd106/Nancyluvspix

Maryanne
Inside The Gilded Cage – Posted!
http://insidethegildedcage.blogspot.com/

Steven
(sometimes) photoblog
http://sepintx.blogspot.com/

Patrick
Patrick’s Portfolio – Posted!
http://patricks-portfolio.blogspot.com/

Gina
Gina’s Space – Posted!
http://journals.aol.com/rbrown6172/Ginasspace/

Update:  6/2/2010

This post no longer makes sense as the header which feature the words “ubiquitous mouse” has been changed!  Sorry!  :-)

…

OI

Optical Illusion. My sister sent around an e-mail that had some pretty cool mind’s eye benders.  Check this one out!

Amies et Chiens

I had breakfast today with my friends Susan and Brian.  She’s a nurse.  He’s a paramedic.  We went to a little french bistro and ate outside.  I had a lovely little tomato, swiss, and avocado omelette with baby greens and a baguette.

We shared lots of stories.  Got all caught up on life.

“I told you about when Cole went into full arrest, didn’t I?”, Susan asked?

No!  She hadn’t.  Cole is one of her two adorable Shih tzus (Allie is the other, and they are sisters).  Here’s how the story went….

“The girls” as S and B call them, were spayed.  No problems with the surgeries.  They brought them home.  Each of them sported a Fentanyl patch (that’s a narcotic, in the codeine and Vicodin and heroin family) for post-operative pain management.  Susan recalls that she commented that she wondered if the dosage seemed high for a six pound dog (remember, she’s a nurse).  But Cole did fine for the next three days and the patch was subsequently removed.  Later that night, Brian picked her up and she was breathing really fast and really shallow with her tongue way out of her mouth.  He brought the dog’s condition to Susan’s attention, and they immediately headed out to the nearest 24 hour vet.  It was past 10:00 pm.  They didn’t get far.  Before reaching the car Cole stopped breathing.  Susan started rescue breathing and while she was holding Cole, she felt the heart stop beating.  The nearest vet was now too far away.  So Susan made the decision to take the dog to her work which was only a mile or so away.  Susan works in the emergency department.  She ran up the ambulance entrance, put in the emergency code for the door, and took the dog into “Room One”, which is the big resuscitation room.  She screamed for the nurses and asked that Dr. “S” be sent in right now.  Dr. “S” is a lover of dogs, and had no problem with trying to revive her.  Susan had already determined that Cole was suffering from a narcotic overdose, probably from licking the skin where the drug patch had been applied.  The nurses grabbed Narcan (a medicine that reverses the effects of narcotics) and gave Cole a shot.  Within moments, her heart began to beat, she started to breathe, and she looked up at Susan just like nothing had ever happened!  Though she was clinically dead for nearly 10 minutes, she suffers no long term impairment.  That must have been some gooooood CPR Susan gave her.

This is not a story I tell you to encourage that pets “in extremis” be taken to the local emergency department.  Your animal will not be seen, evaluated, or treated there unless you are lucky enough to work there.

But it’s a great story, doncha think?  One that should be retold in TLC’s “Untold Stories of the ER“! 

Divine Appointment?

I am in California. I came out here for the primary reason of spending today, September 17th, with my big brother. We will be commemorating this day as his second wedding anniversary without his wife. Last year we decided to spend this day each year together. As many of you know, his wife is (death didn’t change it) my best friend who happened to marry my brother. We will drink a bottle of Dom together and toast love and life and loss and tell stories, and laugh a lot and probably cry plenty.

The trip is a week long one, and I am trying to fit in family and friends as well as I can. The first part of Friday was spent hanging out with my little brother, Low, and the second half with the Goulds. The Goulds are Koni, Dan, and their three kids. I met Koni and Dan before they met each other. We all used to attend the same church in Orange County, Mission Hills Christian Center (now called Mission Hills Community Church), when we were in our early to mid-twenties. I stopped attending there shortly after moving from OC to LA. Life (marriages, colleges, jobs) took many of our group and flung them over the US and the world. Though this group was pivotal in helping me to define myself in Christian community and in teaching me about life and love and acceptance, I stayed in contact with very few of the other “members”. Koni was one with whom I had (remained in contact).
So, there I sat, on the beach in San Clemente gettin’ all caught up with my old friend Koni. And I see a very familiar form walk past us not fifteen feet away. “Is that MW?” I ask Koni? She wasn’t certain, but I was sure that’s who it was. “M..W…!!!” I called out, and he turned around. It had been nearly twenty years since I last saw him, but he really hadn’t changed all that much. Even at that first moment I wonder why it was that God had him walk past Koni and I. She who lives in Arizona and just happened to be in town for a wedding at the same time that I was in town visiting from Colorado both sitting on the same beach at the very time that he wandered down to the exact spot we were.

We chatted for about twenty minutes before we had to go and before he had to run down the beach to retrieve his son. Though we didn’t ask, he offered up that he was no longer involved with the church or with evangelicalism or really all that much with Jesus or even with God. “I’m pretty much a deist” he said. He had been one of the unofficial leaders of our group. He was a couple of years older, a lot wiser, smart and funny, and pretty much most of us looked up to him. Oh, he was also the lead singer of “the band” (called The Claim) so that position gave him some cachet as well. I guess I wasn’t too surprised to learn that he’d abandoned his faith. I don’t know why I wasn’t surprised. But it made me really sad nonetheless. I pretty much just smiled and nodded as he spoke and told me all about his pains and his frustrations in his relationships and about his failures and his successes. It was strange. It had been nearly two decades and here was this old friend of mine who was now pretty much a complete stranger telling me all about his life’s pains and failures and about his successes and how he is keeping himself in really great shape. I dunno.  I felt like he was trying to convince me of something. Or he just really needed a friend, someone to listen to his stories. So I did that and then off we went our separate ways.

And I am wondering what the point of that little meeting was. It was so incredibly random that it must have been a “God thing”.  All I did was stand and listen and respond “appropriately” to him. I don’t think I told him anything except that I never married, had no children, and that I lived in Colorado.

So, MW, if you ever stumble across this blog (which I doubt, cuz you seemed pretty granola and not like you even own a computer) know that though I’m not sure what the point of that weird coincidental meeting was, that I will pray a little prayer for you when that meeting comes to my mind. And I’ll pray a little prayer for your boys, too.

Survivor!!

It’s that time again! 

Can hardly wait to see what Jeff Probst and the folks at CBS have in store for us this season! 

Pitiful, aren’t I??? 

Watch with baited breath to see what I thought of the premier this evening.  It starts in fifteen minutes…..

Argh!

Well, I am in Los Angeles, and my brother’s internet service is out.  Don’t know when it’ll be up again, so I am finding myself unable to post entries for the past couple of days.  At the moment fate finds me able to use another computer to check my e-mail and I am taking this opportunity to post, even if briefly.  Sooooo, thanks for your patience.  This was definitely worth waiting for, I promise.

Seen on a bumper sticker:

GRAVITY…Not just a good idea…It’s the LAW.”

 

Reflections on 9/11

Tomorrow America and the world will remember one of the most horrifying and well executed terrorist attacks ever perpetrated.  It is the single most horrifying and well-executed terrorist attack that America has seen, and the only one that has deeply affected me personally.

Five years ago tonight I was flying an American Airlines DC10 home to Los Angeles from Orlando, Florida after the very fun and exuberant wedding of a friend.  I fell into bed in the early morning hours still “flying” from a great trip.

My phone rang just shortly after 7:00 on the morning of 9/11.  This was a huge breach of my “don’t call me before 9:00″ rule, but I answered the phone anyway, in case it was an emergency.  Despite being a mid-September day, the sun was already very bright in my bedroom and its light streamed across my bed.  I could tell that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, without even having to look out the window.  It was a perfect day.

The caller was my sister, and she told me that “America was being attacked”.  Huh?  Attacked?  What did that mean?  “The twin towers have been hit and so has the Pentagon”.  Hit?  With what?  “Turn on the TV”.  I did.  Just in time to watch the first tower fall.  I thought that it must be the 21st century equivalent of “War of the Worlds” and not a real event.  Obviously I was wrong.  I watched my TV, riveted by the incomprehensible events I saw unfolding before me.  I don’t think I turned my TV off for the next two weeks. 

The world experienced a revival of sorts after America was attacked.  America, defender of nations, was in need of defense and support.  Even if all that meant was to light a candle in the darkness in Warsaw or London.  In those days and weeks the world reflected on what an Americanless world would look like, and I believe they trembled at the thought.  How many nations exist because of the largesse of America?  How many nations exist because America opened its wallets and sent its sons and daughters to their defense when they were under oppression, and under foreign rule, and being crammed into death camps?  How many nations “owe” America money and how many nations’ soil has soaked up the blood of America’s best?  But that support was fleeting.  People really prefer to dislike America.

So, five years have passed.  America no longer enjoys the support of the world that rallied to her side in the days and weeks that followed.  It really doesn’t have anything to do with the war in Afganistan, the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “global warming”, Cowboy Diplomacy, or anything like that.  As I said before, people really prefer to dislike America.  All those “reasons” are really just excuses for the dislike that already exists.  I recently travelled on British Airways with 70 American kids.  All extremely well-behaved, quiet, and respectful kids.  There was no reason for the English flight crew to openly dislike them, to treat them rudely and to call them “bloody American kids” to their faces, but they did.  They didn’t call them that because our president didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty, or because not enough WMD have yet been found in Iraq.  They openly displayed their dislike of these young kids (who were more well-behaved than the rest of the paying passengers) because they dislike AMERICA.

By and large, America now stands alone.  We have been blessed these past five years that we have not suffered another serious attack on our own soil.  But it isn’t because we all take our shoes off and run them through an X-ray machine at the airport before we fly.  I don’t kid myself that any of those security measures stops any sort of terrorism.  A determined terrorist will figure out a way to kill us if he/she has a mind to do so.  It is only a matter of time.  And when it happens, it won’t be because our president wasn’t alert, or because our immigration laws aren’t strict enough or enforced well enough, or because there isn’t enough funding to put air marshalls on every flight.  It’ll be because there are people out there that simply hate Americans because they live in America, and they hate America. 

Friends, it goes way deeper than politics, and we need to start accepting that.  We are fighting an enemy we cannot see.  An enemy that has no country of its own.  And by not calling that enemy by its real name, we let it live in the shadows and we delight it by fighting the symptoms of the sickness instead of the sickness itself.   

BACON!

I was lamenting to a friend earlier today about having nothing specific I was really wanting to blog about today.  I have lots of posts started (seventy plus, actually), but none of them are calling to me to finish them.  So, almost without hesitation, he suggested that I write about bacon.  Bacon?  Why Bacon?  Because that’s what came to his mind.  So, I accepted the challenge, and will write about…bacon.

In a future post or two I plan on sharing my “loaves and fishes” experiences from this summer.  There are so many times that God provided in the arena of food for my team that it’s been a daunting prospect to get it all down into one cohesive story.  There are the “miracle barrels”.  There’s the money that never ran out even though it probably should have.  There’s the bread that never went bad.  The bananas that only went bad when there were just enough left to make banana bread.  So many truly miraculous things.  And then…there was the bacon!  No, really!  I am going to be able to share a moving tale about bacon even though this was a topic challenge off the top of my friend’s head!

Bacon.  Most TMI teams take the majority of the food they’ll need for the summer from Florida.  And they haul it all the way to wherever the team will spend the summer…the Ukraine, Wales, Brazil, Camaroon, etc.  And they do that because it’s cheaper and you’re guaranteed the food to feed your team.  My team would be taking lots of supplies (shoes and other items) which are not readily available in Zambia.  So, in order to make room for these supplies, it was determined that my team would purchase its food when we got to Zambia.  Having never been to Zambia, I didn’t have any idea what it would mean to “shop for food” there.  I had learned that food was extremely expensive, especially meats.  So, I talked with the woman in charge of the food warehouse at “boot camp” in Florida.  We decided that I’d take 70 pounds (one large duffel bag) of meats and other things that would be nice to have in case staples were hard to come by (like some cookie and cake mixes – I had SEVEN birthday girls that were going to need something special on their special days!).  So we set about deciding what to bring.  I loaded up cans of chicken, and beef.  Some vacuum packed bags of tuna.  Some pepperoni and salami.  Some (gag!) SPAM.  A few freeze dried chili mixes and some freeze dried cheese sauces since they were lightweight).  AND I threw in three boxes of pre cooked bacon.  They, too, were fairly lightweight.  I’d never really seen pre-cooked bacon, but I’d heard it was good.  So I figured it might come into good use.  The boxes measured about 16″ X 10″ X 3″.  I figured there was probably enough bacon in a box for 30 people to have 2 or 3 pieces each for a good two meals!  I WAS WRONG!

 

(Not a picture of bacon I cooked.  A picture I borrowed from a guy by the name of Lenn Thompson which I found searching by Google for “bacon”.  Thanks Mr. Thompson for the photo.  And the recipes and cooking tips at www.lennthompson.typepad.com are certainly worth checking out in the future!)

As I was saying before I digressed onto Lenn Thompson… I was WRONG!  Those boxes didn’t just hold a few servings of bacon!  Those boxes held seemingly endless amounts of bacon!  And it was AWESOME good bacon, too, mind you.  You just quickly fry it up over a brazier, or put it in a big baking pan and bake it until crispy in the oven!  Tastes as good as the stuff you cook “from scratch”!  We had bacon for breakfast at least three times a week (3, 4, or more pieces!).  We had bacon, tomato, and cheese melts.  Bacon found its way onto pizza, into sandwiches, and into sauteed green beans.  Sometimes I thought my kids would get sick of bacon.  But they didn’t.  And those three boxes of bacon lasted us FIVE WEEKS.  It was crazy!  I never counted up just how much those boxes held, but I’ll bet if I did it wouldn’t equal the amount of bacon we actually ended up eating.  I’ll bet that we ate enough bacon to have filled six of those boxes. 

He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to the sky, he blessed them, and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the multitude.
They ate, and were all filled. They gathered up twelve baskets of broken pieces that were left over.  Luke 9:16 and 17
 

Addendum 10/26/07:  Not that I needed the confirmation, but I got confirmation that the bacon boxes were a miracle.  This past summer in Sicily, I took more of the same bacon.  We stayed right down the road from a grocery store and I had access to a vehicle, so the getting of food wasn’t such an issue as it was in the Zambian bush.  There were 27 of us on my Zambia team and three boxes of bacon were way more than enough.  In Sicily there were only 15 of us.  And I had to feed them for a week less than the Zambia team.  I took two of the boxes of bacon.  And I had to ration it.  We ate it only occasionally.  And we ran out at the end!  So there!    My Zambia bacon miracle was truly a God given miracle…

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