Travels

This has been a summer of travels. I left Southern California on May 24, after spending two days with friends celebrating their 60th birthdays at Disneyland. That night I was in the Grand Canyon watching the sunset and two days later, checking into a cabin at the Flagg Ranch in Grand Teton. It was snowing, and continued to snow throughout my two days in Yellowstone Park. I spent a night with the family of Lara Janssen, a friend from seminary, in Volga, South Dakota. Never having seen the prairie, I was enchanted with the open skies, endless stretches of tall grass and open highway. I arrived in Champaign IL on June 2, in time for the wedding of friend from Portland, Mittens (Eileen Gebbie) and her partner Carla. I was able to spend a few days visiting before driving to Chicago to visit long-time friend D'On Voelzke. D'On's father, my former pastor, was also visiting her family there and we had opportunities to take an architectural tour, hang out in the city and catch up on life.

During my visit to Chicago, I flew back to Southern California to follow up on an interview with the call committee of Central Lutheran Church in Van Nuys. I met their church council and preached on Sunday morning. The congregation's vote the following week was not to call me as their pastor. I had a sense that it was not a good match, and once I got past the old ego need of having everyone love me, I was actually relieved that they had made the decision for me. I am sure they were right, I was not the pastor for them. After a short visit with SCal friends and with my kids, I flew back for a few more days with D'On before heading for Louisville KY. I had a chance to tour Churchill Downs, the Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg KY (Four Roses Blended Whiskey was in my maternal grandmother's favorite whiskey sours), and then the Museum of Applachia in Clinton TN, before driving to Columbus GA to spend a few days with Mary Carlton Lull and her mother. Mary Carlton is the widow of Timothy Lull, who was our seminary president. He died suddenly following successful surgery. It was the same week in May 2003 that my mother died.

At the suggestion of Mary Carlton's friend Alice Ruth, I drove to the Florida Gulf Coast for a few days at the beach before arriving in Biloxi MS to work for a week with Lutheran Disaster Response, out of Bethel Lutheran Church. My brother, John, had been in Biloxi in December, following Hurricane Katrina, (Aug 2005) which destroyed somewhere between 80% and 90% of the homes and businesses in the area between Biloxi and New Orleans. John and his friend, Glenn Harris, who had been an insurance adjuster during Hurricane Camille (1969), met me there and we spent the week sleeping on mattresses on the floor of the church classrooms with 100 other volunteers who had come to rebuild homes, staff the free medical clinic and distribution center for clothes and household items for people who are still unable to gather the resources for living in the aftermath of the biggest hurricane on record. Katrina will be the standard by which to measure storm disasters for a long time, and the LDR expects that reconstruction of the Biloxi area, the hardest hit of all, will take at least 8-10 years.

It has taken me weeks to process and reflect on the Katrina relief week. We talked everyday about where we had seen the face of God that day. Sometimes it was in the stories of the people whose lives had been destroyed, who refused to give up hope, and who treasured the efforts of those volunteers who came to share their work of rebuilding. Sometimes it was in the faces of those who gave up time with family or at work to spend a week sleeping on the floor with a bunch of strangers and working in the miserable heat to do what they can to help rebuild homes and lives. It was an astonishing week, filled with people and stories that will live with me forever. It was joyful and heartrending at the same time, and a lesson in what community can be, knitting together the lives of strangers who share a life and hope through the love of Jesus Christ. Those who came as strangers are strangers no longer, they have become the face of living love to each other and those they came to serve. It was hard to leave such a community.

After a week in Lewisville TX (outskirts of Dallas) with brother Richard and sister-in-law Dianne, and children and grandchildren filling the house with noise and delight, it was off to Guatemala for three weeks of Spanish and a week of vacation. Not having used any of the Spanish I studied in January, I have spent the last two weeks reviewing, reviewing, and reviewing -- and feeling like an idiot because I can hardly remember my own name anymore. But this week is vacation again, and I wanted to spend my time somwhere hot and sultry after the weeks of cold and rain in the Guatemala highlands. So I have been in Rio Dulce on the shores of a beautiful tropical river and ecological preserve in Eastern Guatemala, having cruised down the river to Livingston, a tropical port on the Caribbean Sea, and am now at the beach in Placencia Belize, steps from the beach on the Caribbean. I have enjoyed the heat, cooling off in the sea or the shower several times a day, living in a sarong or shorts, sitting on the porch or in a hammock with a book. It is lobster season in Belize and so I have had lobster with every meal but breakfast, just as in the Mississippi Gulf Coast we ate shrimp every day. Life is sweet.