Kobayashi Maru

I apologize for the lack of substantial postings for the past little while. I’ve been busy sure, but so have you and yet you’ve found time to come here and look for something…so what’s my excuse. I’d love to tell you that I have been dealing with writer’s block. That’d be easy and mostly reasonable to believe, cause hey, it’s not like I’m a professional writer. A blog is a great place to learn to write afterall, and for all you know that’s what I’m doing here.

Unfortunately, that is less than true. (well, maybe the learning to write part is true…especially if you give me credit for being a slow learner.) I haven’t had writer’s block. I haven’t had a tough time coming up with ideas or life experiences. In fact, I have recently been inundated with life experiences that would probably be good fodder for freaking books. Tomes of less than fascinating reading. In fact, they would probably make for a great seminary paper for post doctoral studies in modern north american church culture. (Which is right up there with “piercing tender body parts with a rusty awl” on my list of things I have no desire to do.)

This Sunday will mark the last service for my home church. After 11+ years, it will be closing its doors. That is a very surreal thing. I have only been at this church for about 7 years give or take, but my life has been deeply impacted by it and those in it. It was there that we celebrated the birth of the Muppet. It was there that we established the greatest youth sponsor team in the history of the modern church and I worked with a team that included a Q-Tip, a Dogger, a BMac and a Hotrod. All men who have played significant roles in my life and who allowed me the priviledge of doing the same for them.

It is a very strange thing thinking about a church closing. From the outside, it almost seems morally wrong. Like you just can’t close a church. Churches are meant to be planted. Then they continue on forever. People come and go (hell, these days pastors rarely stay at a church past 5 years, much less the people. Yeah, “the people”. Forget members…those are even more of a dying breed. People don’t bother with membership anymore. Membership implies some form of expected responsibility and God knows we don’t want that - pun intended.) Sorry, I don’t really mean to be flippant in this post. But it’s in me to be a smartass when I am struggling emotionally with difficult things. Where was I? Oh yeah, churches continue on forever…or at least they are always on going when I leave them. I remember when I first went to college, through a weird confluence of events I met a guy who was an associate/youth pastor at this church in a “bad part of town.” It had once been a good part of town and the church (called a Baptist Temple believe it or not) had been filled to the brim with middle to upper class white Christian folks. There were pictures in the foyer from years before showing the sanctuary filled with well dressed people. Faded pictures from literally 50 years before. I know this because they were written on with felt pen showing the date it was taken. It had this eerie feeling when you stood there looking at pictures of past elders, deacons and pastoral staff. Old photos that stared out at you. It always reminded me of that scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams takes the students out to the hallway where pictures of old classes are in showcases and he stood behind them and told them to listen to the whispers of them and then in a throaty voice he murmurs Carpe Diem…seize the day. When I started attending there the 500 seat sanctuary had maybe 50 butts in the pews each Sunday. And those butts were every racial color except white. In fact, I was the only white guy to be seen in the neighborhood, much less the building. Over the course of the years, the neighborhood went through the awful historical realities of block busting, racial mixing and eventually the community crumbling that comes when the fabric of the society comes unwoven. The pictures on the wall showed faded glory while open drug deals took place everyday 20 feet from the front door of the church. The people who reverently and religiously attended the church every Sunday were almost all grandmothers. Very few men and almost no middle aged people. There were a good number of youth who came, but they were mostly very young children whose parents were either in prison or missing in action. The grandmothers came every week to pray for their children and their grandchildren. The music was atrocious every week, make no mistake. There was a 50 year old pipe organ played by a 70 year old woman who had played a keyboard of some kind in a church service of some kind for the last 52 years and had literally only missed 4 times in that span. (She could literally name the dates and the reasons for those 4 weeks in a way which suggested, that even after all those years, she still carried a lot of guilt about it.) And they had a choir (oh yeah, the full length robes and all) that sang out the old hymns each week – ALWAYS the first, second and fourth verses.

I have never really understood why God hates the 3^rd verse of Christian songs, but I swear Baptists never, ever sang the 3^rd verse of any song in a Baptist hymnal. Yeah, we sang from hymnals too. This was way before video projectors and PowerPoint and “worship choruses”. I think we did either Amazing Grace or Old Rugged Cross every week. We didn’t even have an overhead projector and a blue pen. I was the first new person to start coming to the church (who wasn’t a staff member) in many many years.

Why do I share all of this? Because even that church didn’t close. I always wondered how the place stayed open, but for the 18 months I was there (before I changed schools and moved away) they never even mentioned the fact that you could hear the few coins in the offering plate echo off the walls of the mostly empty sanctuary walls each week. This was a place where all the widows gathered to give their mites each week. And they stayed open. In fact, they are still open (I found them online – well, the Google map reference for them, they don’t have a website of course). Now I have no illusions about how many gyrations and manifestations and expressions they must have gone through even since I left. But it is still there – even if only the name is still the same.

I also have a memory from when I was in high school. I attended a HUGE church (15,000 members) but it was way across town and I was overjoyed when I found out that they had planted a church right near my neighborhood. It was an intimate church (read: small). I loved the pastor and had some great friends there. But about 5 months after I started going there, I found out that the “mother church” was closing down the church plant because after a year of existence, the little church had not become financially viable and they were tired of subsidizing a “losing” project. I was 16 at the time and was really pissed off. Some piss-ant minor pastoral staff member from the big church came and told us that they were closing us down, but that they were transferring our memberships over to the big church. (WooHoo! That was simply thrilling to me let me tell you.) I remember being so angry at those self-righteous pigs with bags of money who were simply too tight to keep the coffers open and allow us to do our God thing. I was young. I was brash. I was arrogant. I was idealistic. I was naïve. I was me just younger. And I thought it showed a huge lack of faith to close a church. In fact, I was sure that somebody (whoever was really responsible) was going to hell for this. I have this vague memory of suggesting openly that the pastor sent to close us down had no real faith and was in the employ of satan. And I remember meaning it. I also remember my pastor (a real pastor who actually believed in God, and so I wasn’t sure why he was allowing this to happen without waging holy war) calming me down later and putting his arm around me and telling me that my passion was admirable and God given, but that what he would pray for me was that God would hone it with wisdom, understanding and grace. He told me that while we might have been caught off guard, God was not. He wasn’t out shopping only to come home and be shocked at events going on here. He had been with us from the beginning and He would be with us at and through the end. God wasn’t coming to an end in our neighborhood. He had simply decided to work a different way.

I think what makes this now so hard for me is that I am living a bad memory over again, but this time I’m not a 16 year old blaming the leadership. I’m on the freaking leadership. The worst part is that maybe, just maybe, God has given me the temperance of wisdom, understanding and grace that come with age and experience. And having talked and prayed and cried and talked and argued and yelled and talked and prayed…I think I might owe those guys from all those years ago an apology. They might not have been the agents of the anti-christ that I accused them of being. They might not have been the very hand of the devil sent to destroy the faith of the remnant who gathered at our small neighborhood location. In retrospect, I think I might have been a bit quick to convict them and suggest medieval forms of punishment to God for retribution.

I don’t say this simply because roles are reversed and I am now in leadership. I say that because church is a unique place. We put our time into church. We invest our money into our church. We take our families there. We raise our children within our church and watch them grow up hoping like everything that they catch our faith. We experience joy there. We experience pain there. We celebrate births and weep over deaths there. We give everything we have to church. There is no other place that accepts so much of us. It is an emotionally loaded place. Our hearts and spirits are there. Often our histories are there. For many of us, our whole world revolves around our church – this was my family experience as a child. Everything we did involved our church – even our education, as the church had a school in it. We were emotionally vested in the place. We deeply cared about what happened there. We were passionate about the place and what happened therein.

All of this, and all of the rest of my life plays a part in how I feel about my church closing now. (I use past examples and emotions not because I have none more current, but because they are too fresh to pick at yet.) I believe that this is the right decision for us as a church. I stand resolutely by the difficultly articulated belief that faith requires us to hold things open handed – and that God will at times take things out of open hands. I think that God has a different way this time. I think that the most difficult calling is to step aside and to allow God to do things in a way that you might not have chosen if you were God. That is the worst form of faith. I personally prefer the faith where in the midst of all evidence to the contrary you keep moving forward and fighting in firm belief that God will come to the “rescue” in the midst of our situation. That is the more typical North American evangelical definition of faith. And one I am more comfortable with truth be told - mostly because I also believe in myself pretty strongly. I know it was Ben Franklin who said, “God helps those who help themselves”, (okay he acutally stole it from Aesop who wrote it about 500 BC) but so often I wish that were Scriptural. I think that is what is so difficult about this now. There is a part of me that wants to fight against this and simply say “I don’t care what we think God is saying, I am going to saddle up and carry everything and everyone until it’s all good again.” I realize exactly how arrogant that sounds but that part of me doesn’t care becuase that part of me is arrogant and is disturbingly comfortable with that.

I think that I am in that place where my heart aches because of this end of a season, while my mind knows it is the right thing. I am one big ball of internal conflict, but that is the place where faith dwells. It’s the places and times where we have no control that God really loves to get involved. Someone told me the other day that God spends our entire life putting us in difficult situations, while we spend our entire life trying to get out of them. So far the apostle Paul is the only one who has ever seemed to get the concept of “learning to be content in all situations”, but honestly, I think he was overstating his capacity. There are days where I feel like I have that nailed down too, but those days are few and far between. Of course, maybe Paul wrote that epistle on a good day…

All I know is that the day your church closes is not a “good” day.  It’s a hard day.

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I challenge everyone to do this in their hometown…wherever you are in the world!

Let me know how it goes, or at least your thoughts on the concept…[youtube]4X8BkuFQBOo[/youtube]

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Sorry folks, but I had to do it. I (and by “I” I mean Badger) had to install the plug-in that requires passwords to post comments. I know, this affects fewer of you than it should because of the lack of posters among my loyal readers, but still, in the spirit of transparency (because I have always wanted to be see-through) I thought you should know.

Heck, maybe you’ll even post a comment just to see what it looks like…

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Sure those of us who are married / engaged / seriously dating / in a committed relationship / trying to impress some hot girl / in grade school and required by cultural obligation call it Valentine’s Day. It reminds us of how much we love our significant other or how much we would like to if they are not yet significant. It brings up memories of Hallmark moments in our lives or evokes connections to cultural history lessons like Valentine’s Day Massacre. But to those folks who have no significant other and no real opportunities for convincing some girl to go out with them on the singularly most emotionally loaded day on the calendar, it is nothing more than Single’s Awareness Day.

The one day of the year where marketers, card companies, makers of chocolate, florists, restaurateurs and other normally integrous folks combine their powers to:

A) Make all women feel that love is measured by a man purchasing something for them on this day (even if they have already blown their paycheck on her every 2 weeks for the last 6 months AND gone in hock for some must have Christmas present that she no longer remembers). And have them believe that the depth of said love is also gauged by the creativity, of as well as the price of, said gift.

B) Convince men that this is true and good as well - or at least that their women actually buy into it, so that makes it true whether it is or not.

C) Make otherwise contented single people feel like their lives as a single person are exceptionally worthless and humiliate them by forcing them to reply over and over again to the uniquely exploitive question, “What did you do/get for Valentine’s Day?”

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that I yearn for the days of yore when I was single. Yes days…if my record keeping is accurate, I was single for a total of 27 days. What do you want..we were in a baby-sitting co-op as kids and the Lepetska family had this totally hot girl April and I am convinced that she seriously dug me. In fact, had we stayed in touch after our first 12 months of life…who knows…

But I digress. I love being married and being loved. Yes, by the same person. Heck, I even partly buy into the whole marketing scheme that changed Feb 14th from a random day in the shortest month of the year into a mandatory prove your love by spending money on this particular day on very particular and therefore price gouged items day. And by that I mean that I will do something prefunctory to celebrate the day. (umm but I’ll do it with all my heart Ferf…I’m kidding about all of this really. please don’t make me sleep on the couch)
That being said, I find it somewhat marginalizing to a section of the population that they are required to either justify their singleness or dodge culture bombs all day long. Shoot, even on TV there will be Valentine Specials on, or Valentine’s themed episodes of otherwise non-topical shows. I bet Jack Bower gets lip on 24 because of this pseudo “holiday”. I mean, sure, he’ll have to kill her because she’s really a terrorist, but he’ll get some lip first - you watch. Or worse, we’ll have to watch Chloe kiss Morris. Nobody wants to see that - nobody is believing that plot line anyway. No man in his right mind would be romantically involved with Chloe - Valentine’s Day or not.

I’m digressing again…why is it that we feel the need to comercially ostracize a percentage of people? Why isn’t there a Single’s Awareness Day wherein people who are single (by choice or not) / alone / lonely / wish they were single buy things for themselves to enjoy by themselves? Yeah, I know - they can do that everyday (and most do). But come on - us married folk CAN do it everyday too (but most don’t). Maybe if we got off our collective butts and got a little more romantic every day, bought pointless but emotionally touching stuff with a little more consistency, got a bit creative on our own without the coaxing and cajoling from Hallmark about how to say “I Love You” to folks who really deserve to hear it, and celebrated our relationships more, then maybe, just maybe, all these people would leave us alone.

And more importantly, we would not make a large segment of the population feel bad about how pointless and lonley and worthless and demeaning and hopeless and futile and meaningless and inane and hollow and empty their lives are. I mean seriously, that’s just mean. Why do that to them. It’s not like their “lives” aren’t hard enough…

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Welcome back home to the frozen north. I was growing weary of that “sunny, balmy, sit outdoors and drink refreshing beverages on the patio overlooking the sailboats coming in and out of the harbour” weather anyway…

Who needs that crap?? I’ll take my beautiful British Columbia anyday!!!

This is much more January like don’t you think? Aww who am I kidding… I ’bout froze my nipples off when I got off the plane last night. Dang ice and snow. I am so over winter. LA was blissful to say the least. And that picture of the lighthouse is Queensway Bay and it was the view I looked at while partaking in a lovely lunch with Merf, ScottyBear and Yoda (cue the ear wiggle) at the Yard House in Long Beach. They have like 200 beers ON TAP. It’s amazing to even look at. All those choices and Merf got some sissy cider. Oh sure, Yoda said it was a beer. But I am telling you it was a cider. Yoda swore it was a fruty beer, but I said “Zima is fruity beer (not that there’s anythign wrong with that) this is a cider!” We were never really able to settle the argument, but I can say with much confidence that if you ever walked up to your drunk uncle at a family reunion when he was slumped in a lounger wearing a dirty wife beater and sluring the words to a Jimmy Buffett song that is only playig in his head, he would not hand you the “beer” Merf was drinking and say, “here kid, this’ll put hair on your chest.”

So I actually got to see the triplets twice while I was there. Wednesday night for supper at a Mexican place called Panchos. Truly glorious Mexican food. And I don’t juat say that because I live in a city where there is no such thing and so anything resembling good Mexican cusine would be great to me. No, this was truly satisfying Mexican food. Evidently it was so overwhelming that ScottyBear felt compelled to compliment Yoda on her ability to order by “speaking Mexican.” I didn’t hear her speak “Mexican” but that could simply be because I have been speaking “Canadian” so long that I have lost the finer nuances of other languages - like “American” for example. To be fair, Panchos is known for having the best margarita in Southern California - and by best I mean STRONGEST. And by the time Yoda finished hers, she might well have been speaking Mexican. Merf tells me that they weren’t all that strong because she vividly remembers the first 45 minutes of the evening…the rest, not so much. It was an intellectually streching evening. Our conversation ran the gambit from hooker boots to stories from Nepal to Jews for Jesus (Messianic Jews). It was a great night of family.

The second time I saw the triad was Saturday. We had Luner (lunch/dinner) together. I thought we were gonna have lunch, but I forgot about the time change from PST in Canada to PST in California. So we actually ate at 3pm California time - which it turns out in Canada is 3 in the freaking afternoon. So they helped carry my emancipated body into the Yard House restaurant. I was fortunate enough that the sight of 200 taps encompassing the bar in the middle of the room was enough to bring me back from the precipice of starvation. (Ok, maybe I gave up on the suckers for a little while and ate the wittle bag of trail mix that I was given with my conference registration. But you know it’s bad when I voluntarily consume trail mix - what am I, a freaking squirel?) Anyway, so maybe I was able to walk from the car on my own to the restaurant. But one of the best moments of the trip was when Merf picked me up to bring me to the others for lunch on Saturday. She had only recently woken up and when I got in the car (and moved the 6 inch spike heel leather go-go boots that were in the floorboard) she gives me a hug and then apologizes for looking like a “hootchie mama.” Because she likes to drive comfortable. Which, hey, I am all good with that concept. But when we get to their apartments, we park in a back alley off the street. I get out and walk around to her side where she begins to pull clothes out of the back seat and put them on. A second shirt and then a cute little jacket and then she has to put her boots on. And she looks up at me and says, “wow, this looks suggestive to people watching.” I told her that I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I slipped a $20 under her shirt collar and kissed the top of her head and said, “thanks for everything” and winked at her. I got slapped. But I was laughing when it happened so that took the sting out of it. That was one of the times that she told me, “right now, I 10% hate you and 90% love you.” And hey that’s better percentages than I get anywhere else but home…

After that meal the triumverate split up and ScottyBear and I were left alone for male bonding. Saturday night was a really good time. It was like work, but it was fun. Fun in the sense that ScottyBear’s boys came over and we played hours and hours of Texas Hold’em. It was like work in that I GOT PAID FOR IT!! We played 2 games and I won both. $220USD later, we closed the book on the poker game. Good times were had by all, and I am officially uninvited to any further Long Beach poker games. The first game was a $20 buy in - with buy backs for the first 2 hours. The second game was a $5 buy in and no buy backs. The guys were awesome. Rarely have I had that much fun with a group of guys just sitting around playing cards and shooting the proverbial poop. Thanks ScottyBear! He did say that I forgot to give the house a cut of the winnings. But it should be noted that I came home and “the House” immediately took ALL of the winnings and put them in her purse. So much for a cut…

Here’s the amazingly strange world that my bro-in-law lives in though. At some point during the first game of poker - after the first couple of guys got knocked out, but before the pizza (that no one was really hungry for but was gone within 4 minutes of hitting the table) arrived - the front door to his apartment got stuck. Literally we were locked in. Very strange indeed, but honestly no one was really that concerned about this until someone noted that pizza had been ordered and we couldn’t answer the door if it wouldn’t open. So a short break in the action and “walla” -fixed. IF by fixed you mean someone just took the door knob off the door and left it that way. Whatever, the pizza got in the door. Being in an apartment, ScottyBear has a key to the front door of the lobby because it locks automatically. This is normally not a big deal because one can buzz the resident with the system at the front door. It becomes a little more of a deal when that intercom system does not work - which it doesn’t. Again, not as big a deal to me because I do not battle the internal urge to go outside in random intervals, light fire to dried flora and suck on it. But to those guys at the table who somehow find enjoyment in this activity, being systematically locked out each time was sucking some of the joy away. SO ScotyBear kept handing his keys off to people in some weird keymaster/gatekeeper parallel so they could get back into the apartment and continue donating U.S. currency to me.

This is only of interest to this post becuase at the end of the night, the keys had gone walkabout. No one seemed to know where they were. We looked everywhere and ScottyBear called al of his buddies who had left to gently ask if they had inadvertantly stolen his keys. (Keep in mind that the fact that he no longer had a door knob on his apartment door mitigated the desperate need for them - but his car keys were attached to said ring o’ keys as well and that was problematic). Finally it was suggested that his buddy who lives down the hall might have hed them in his pocket when he staggered home and collapsed in his bed. So, while his personal keys were missing, my bro-in-law did have access to keys to his buddy’s place and they did a quick illegal search in hopes of a seizure. They keys were not in plain sight and in a universally understood show of homophobia, no one volunteered to stick their hands in the front pocket of another man and wiggle around “looking for something.” So as of yet, I do not know if the keys ever showed up - or if they are lost forever in the front pocket of a pair of jeans by now on the floor of a bachelor pad. But if you ever find yourself in Long Beach and have some time, stop by and see my brother-in-law, his apartment is the one with no doorknob. There is no secret password, but you will have to do the univesal sign for Yoda to gain entrance.

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