The joy of teaching

Last Monday night I taught a one hour course on blogs at our local library. What fun. Three people came to the event. My wife came, not because she has much of an interest in blogs, but she was being nice to me. I like nice.

The other students were a retired couple who knew nothing about blogs other than the term. They were eager students and by the end of the hour they headed home with plans to create a blog this weekend.

Have a passion? Volunteer to teach it at your local library.

There's something deeply satisfying about teaching eager students.

What to do when you are called in for questioning

Lately I've been on the road quite a bit and I'm listening to John Grisham's The Innocent Man. A small town Oklahoma police department and prosecutor "solved" two murders back through coerced confessions. A painful, gripping book. As I'm listening I think, if you are ever called in for questioning, ask for an attorney immediately even if you are innocent and think all you have to do is tell the truth.

Sex, Money, and Power: What I'd like to say to the class of 2006

No one has invited me to speak at a graduation ceremony this year but if they did here’s what I’d say.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2006, I skipped my two college graduation ceremonies because I had already spent enough time in class being bored. I assume you too have spent enough time listening to boring speakers so I’m going to address three attention-getting topics--sex, money, and power.

Only, I’m going to reverse the order and talk about sex last because I want to keep you and the administration on the edges of your seat.

Oh, yes, and as a bonus I’m going to talk about God too. I’m not sure what’s going to make the administration more nervous, me talking about sex or me talking about God.

But first money. Money is like water. You can only drink so much water in a day and you only need to spend so much money in a day. Drink 729 glasses of water in a day and you die. My basic attitude towards money is that the less you spend the less you have to earn which gives you more time for the important things in life like smiling at people.

Of course, if you stop drinking water you die too. So make a little, spend a little. That’s all you need to know about money.

All you need to know about power you can learn by becoming a parent. Give a newborn what she needs--warmth, food, touch, drink, and a clean diaper--and she grows. Now that’s power. But it’s usually not that simple. Often your new baby screams and you have no clue why. Here is your first lesson in power: people in power often do not know what to do. You turn to your husband or wife as your baby screams and you say, “What do we do now?” Here is your second lesson in power: people in power figure it out as they go.

Parents, be sure to thank your graduates. Not for making it through school but for the 729 lessons in good uses of power that they have given you.

Moving on to God. One day in 1956 when my Grandma was 53 she was reading the newspaper when she saw a story about a young mother in Grygla, the nearest town, who had died, leaving a husband, Elton Anderson, and two young girls, ages five and seven.

Grandma turned to Grandpa and said, “Oh, Emil, wouldn’t I just love to take care of those girls.”

A week later Grandpa, who was 20 years older than Grandma, had a stroke and died. A couple of weeks later Elton Anderson called Grandma and asked her to move to Grygla and take care of his two girls, Mayvonne and Donna. Many years later when Grandma told me this story she said, “God put those girls on my heart because he knew I was going to need something to do after Emil died.”

Graduates, a higher power has need of you.

Now, as promised, here’s what I have to say about sex. In the movie, Vanilla Sky, the Cameron Diaz character says to the Tom Cruise character, “Don't you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?”

Graduates, get married and keep your promises.

Thank you very much, class of 2006, it’s been a pleasure.

A thousand mouths

This week I wrote a poem for the Easter sun rise service Erin Kindy and I lead this morning.

Here's a bit of background on the poem. This week the Plow Creek farmers planted strawberries. They order the plants from a distributor in Indiana who purchases them from a grower in California. The plants are refrigerated until it's time to plant them.

We sell a lot of strawberries each June. Last year Kevin Behrens, who does our marketing, said that by the end of the season he felt like he was pushing tons strawberries into people.

Of course, the poem has several Biblical allusions as well. Erin and I used Jesus' metaphor about his death and resurrection in the call to worship:

I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

In the last part of the poem I use the metaphor of tasting drawn the phrase in the psalm, "taste and see that the Lord is good."

A Thousand Mouths
By Rich Foss

Tender Plow Creek hands
lifted little green shoots
from a refrigerator this holy week,
hands like those of a rich man from Aramathia
tenderly wrapping a body
and hefting it into a rocky tomb.

Ah, the grief of a single grain of wheat
clinging to life.

Hand and machine ripped open the field--
now strawberry shoots dwell
in Plow Creek soil,
roots caressed by earth.

A body housed in hewn rock,
lifeless, breathless,
three days of stillness
before the startle.

June is coming when earth and plant
fling tons of strawberries into the air,
succulent to a thousand mouths.

He is risen,
tasting with a thousand generations
the raw goodness of resurrection.

Sometimes life is as brutal...

Sometimes when I need a break I wander the web. This afternoon I wandered to Kevin Rains' blog and discovered that Mark Palmer died.

I don't know Mark Palmer. I only know he's a friend of Kevin's and he had cancer. I clicked on Kevin's link to Mark Palmer's blog. Mark's last post was 3/25/06. He talked about celebrating his four year-old son Micah's birthday.

His wife has written three entries since his death, starting on 3/27/06 with: My lover is gone...

Sometimes life is as brutal as an eagle swooping over a rabbit.

Mark's last words in his blog were to his son, Micah, who is named after the prophet:

Happy birthday little prophet, may you be filled with the blessings of peace, hope, and love.

Sometimes life is as tearing and tender as the blessing of a dying man.

Laughing and weeping

Yesterday morning, as I have done for months, I prayed for the Christian Peacemaker Team members being held in Baghdad. At first I prayed for four, then three after Tom Fox's body was found a couple weeks ago.

When I was done with my quiet time I turned on my computer and my Inside Yahoo! screen popped up declaring the CPTers had been freed. What great joyful news.

Later Erin Kindy, one of our church members who is active in CPT came over and we rejoiced together that the three CPTers were released without a bullet being fired. Talk about an answer to many prayers.

As the news has unfolded in the day since they have been released the three who were from Canada and Britain indicated that they had not been mistreated while in captivity.

That likely means that Tom Fox was tortured and killed for being an American. People get upset when their country is invaded.

That reminds me of fifteen months ago when I was in the Miami area between Christmas and New Years. One day my wife and daughters decided to visit a huge mall. I stayed in the van to snooze but soon found myself in a conversation with a New York building contractor who divided his time between New York and Florida.

"I wish I could sit down with President Bush," he said. "I'd tell him he has blood on his hands."

When you listen to people, even strangers, you hear interesting things.

On the news last night a newscaster said that CPT does not use security so they were easy targets for kidnapping.

Tom Fox was a sacrificial lamb for the blood on American hands. Of course, some Iraqis have his blood on their hands too.

Bullets fly in circles, bloodying the hands of those who pull the trigger. A wise friend of mine once said, "They that live by the sword, die by the sword."

I take quiet pleasure in knowing the Christian Peacemaker Teams will not bloody any of the Swords of Righteousness Brigade who took Tom Fox and the other CPTers.

Grieving Tom Fox

I am mourning the death of Tom Fox, a Christian Peacemaker Team member whose body was found last Thursday in Baghdad, bound with gunshots to the head.

Plow Creek has sent three of our members to Colombia and Hebron to serve with CPT, and the father of one of our members, Erin Kindy, has spent much time in Iraq with the CPT team there.

So this news story is more than a news story.

It also hits close to home because my wife's father went to Ethiopia in 1950 as a missionary and was shot and killed.

People who go to dangerous places out of obedience to the Lord sometimes are killed and family and friends are left behind to grieve.

Remarkably, the day before he was taken captive, Tom Fox wrote a reflection on why he and CPT are in Iraq.

Three CPTers are still being held captive. Lord have mercy on they and their captors.

One more holy night

Last night we gathered in a plain room, sang Christmas carols, prayed and listened to scripture readings.

It was the Plow Creek Christmas Eve service, an annual event that brings together those of us who are not traveling to see family and those of us who traveled to Plow Creek to see family.

We sat in a rough circle of folding chairs. On a small table in the center of the room a single white Christ candle burned.

As we sang about a baby being born the candle flickered.

Sarah read, "The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world".

We sat there crazy enough to believe and sing about God shrinking from creator of the universe to a baby.

As we sang the Christ candle burned.

Then Emily Fitz, home from physician's assistant school in California, handed out candles and we formed one large circle around the room. Someone dimmed the lights until the candle at the center was the bright.

Then Louise Stahnke, who led worship, lit her candle from the Christ candle in the middle of the room. Then she lit two other people's candles who each lit the candle of a person next to them.

Rick Reha started us singing "Silent Night, Holy Night."

As we sang, slowly the fire and light from the Christ candle passed from candle to candle along each side of the circle.

Five year-old Helen Moore with long brown hair and churubic face stood next to me. When her candle was lit she turned and solemnly lit my candle. Then I turned and lit Sarah's candle.

We sang cheerfully, gratefully, believing that this baby, born oh so long ago, became a man who passed on such powerful love from his Dad in heaven that it is possible for us to love one another...and even our enemies.

The darkness did not have a chance. As we sang the room filled with flickering candle light.

Giving thanks for friends

Last week Lynn Reha from Plow Creek had to spend four days in the Chicago area for her work. She stayed with friends in the Clearing, a Reba Place Fellowship household.

Lynn's colleagues were amazed that she could stay with friends while on her business trip.

Lack of friends is a side effect of the mad American rush to succeed. Even though I've lived in a commune since 1977 I too get caught up in the rush. Yesterday I wrapped up a capital campaign feasibility study for a local nonprofit that I squeezed in this fall between being on the leadership team for our church and our communal group at Plow Creek and also serving as the one person staff for Evergreen Leaders.

This morning I've been enjoying slowing down. My first meeting is at 10:00.

Reba Place Fellowship, a communal group founded in the 1950's, sent out three couples to found Plow Creek in 1971. This week ''Christian Century'' has an article on "The New Monastics: Alternative Chistian Communities." Reba is featured in the article.

David Janzen is quoted in the article. He and his wife Joanne often come to Plow Creek for retreats. They'll be joining a bunch of us at Plow Creek for a Thanksgiving dinner at Plow Creek's Alpha House where Mark and Louise Stahnke live.

I am thankful for time to slow down, admire, and give thanks for friends.

Hospital tales 8: Gee, but it’s good to be alive

When life sends you into a tailspin, tell the tales.

After the procedure, I encouraged Sarah to go home and get some rest because she would have had to sit up all night in ICU with me. I thought she needed sleep.

By 3:30 a.m. I had a headache and nausea and felt so alone. I lay there thinking, when somebody from Plow Creek is in the hospital we ought to always have someone with them.

Sarah called the ICU nurses on Tuesday morning and in my infinitesimal wisdom I told the nurses to tell her to come at noon. Poor Sarah. When she showed up at noon I kept weeping because I had been feeling so alone in my misery for the last eight hours. Also, apparently the medicine they gave me for nausea made me weepy.

I went back to interventional radiology where they took the catheter out, peered around inside the vein, and saw that the clot was gone from the knee to groin. Thank you, Lord. They sent me back to ICU for four hours because I guess I was still a high risk for dying.

“I just want to get out of here,” I said to Sarah.

When I got to a regular hospital room Tuesday evening I was exhausted. At one point I woke up and Sarah was on the phone with Heidi and Jon. She asked if I wanted to say hi to them. I greeted them cheerfully and then woke up a bit later. “Did I fall asleep talking with Jon and Heidi?” I asked, feeling very embarrassed.

“Yes, they laughed when you started snoring.”

Uffda. Later, to Sarah’s utter amazement, I slept through getting my blood drawn.

The next morning a young doctor sauntered in and began spelling out their plans for putting me on a blood thinner and regulating it over the next few days.

“Ah, what about Lovenox? I understand that if I went home on Lovenox I could get home sooner.”

He looked a bit taken aback and said, “I’ll go check on that.” He left.

“You can go home,” he said when he returned. My head was spinning. Fourteen hours before I was in ICU because I might die at any moment and then he casually announces I can go home.

When Sarah and I questioned him about what kinds of activities I could do once I was out of the hospital he said, “Use your common sense.”

Sarah, who teaches a lot of non-medical people at her job to provide basic medical care for people with developmental disabilities, knows you never tell people to use their common sense. You never know what people think is common sense.

“He should write that in the chart and then have to go to court and explain that he told the patient to ‘use common sense’”, Sarah snorted to me.

Hopefully he was a first year resident and will learn to move beyond “use common sense” before he’s unleashed on patients on his own.

At home I took a shower. Ah the simple pleasures of life.

But during the shower I noticed my back was itching. “Oh, know,” Sarah exclaimed when she looked at my back. “You have a bright red rash.”

Then she explained that a rash can be the first sign of an allergic reaction to a medicine. The second stage is anxiety because our system realizes something is amiss before we do. The third stage is difficulty breathing. The fourth stage is shock and you need immediate medical attention (or you die).

Great. I lay in bed checking to see if I was anxious.

Of course, I was anxious.

But was my anxiety the normal “I might die at any moment” anxiety or was it the second stage of an allergic reaction to a medicine?

Fortunately, I have an amazing ability to fall asleep at night. I kept waking up and I was always alive.

Gee, but it’s good to be alive.

Hospital tales 7: Way out in the forefront of medicine

When life sends you into a tailspin, tell the tales.

After the lysing procedure they wheeled me into surgical ICU with four tubes and wires coming out of my leg, an I-V in each arm, and two monitors. I must have looked like a float in a parade.

As soon as we entered, an ICU nurse looked at one of the monitors and said, “What’s this? We’ve never had one of these before.”

“It’s an ultrasound that pushes the clot buster into the clot,” said a radiology nurse who was part of the parade. “This is only the second patient we’ve used it on.”

“We don’t know anything about it? What if the alarm goes off?”

“Call the tech. If the something goes wrong call the tech. We have a power point I can show you about it.”

There’s nothing like being on the forefront of medicine, so far out front that the ICU nurses are scared.

Bravely, and later I thought, foolishly, I encouraged Sarah to go home and get some rest since she couldn’t stay with me in ICU and spending the night in the waiting room would be very uncomfortable.

At about 11:00 p.m. the alarm went off on the ultrasound monitor. The nurse came in and pushed a button that turned it off. Then she didn’t now what to do next. I reminded her that interventional radiology had said to call the tech.

She went and got another nurse and they both studied the monitor. Neither one of them knew what to do. “Should we call Angio?” one of them asked the other. Assuming that Angio was the tech I voted for calling Angio.

The nurse pushed a button turning the machine back on but she wasn’t sure if the monitor reading was correct. Again I voted for calling Angio.

Later the nurse came back and told me that she had called the number for the tech. The tech, she discovered, lived in Seattle and was flying out the next day to teach staff at St. Francis, She described what the monitor was displaying and he reassured her that everything was fine.

It’s good to be out in the forefront of medicine, I guess.

The next day as I was being wheeled back to interventional radiology we passed a door with a department sign on it: Angio. Oops, I realized, Angio was not the tech.

Hospital tales 6: Face down in empathy

When life sends you into a tailspin, tell the tales.

At 12:30 on Monday afternoon they wheeled me through halls, an elevator, and more halls to interventional radiology.

“We’ll take him to holding until they are ready for him,” they explained to Sarah. “You can stay with him in holding until they are ready for him. Then you can wait in the waiting room and when they are finished the doctor will come out and tell you how it went.”

I started laughing. Lest they think I was going nuts,I explained. “I grew up on a farm,” I said, “Holding sounds like the place we put critters in before we shipped them.”

Earlier a nurse practitioner from interventional radiology had visited me in my room. She had explained the lysing procedure and had explained I would be awake during the procedure but that they would give me drugs that would put me in “la-la land.”

I asked about the drugs. One would relax me and the other would reduce my memory of the procedure.

La-la land. That was the best medical term I heard during my stay.

When I was wheeled on a gurney into an interventional radiology room the radiology staff told me that I would be lying on my stomach for the procedure.

I had a mild moment of panic. “My rheumatoid arthritis makes lying on my stomach hard to do and I can’t turn my neck to breathe,” I said. They may be experts in interventional radiology but I’m an expert on what my body will and will not do.

They listened to me and we worked together to figure out how to get me from the gurney onto the table. Soon I was lying face down with a pillow under my chest and a rolled up towel under my head that allowed me to breathe.

Once I was in position on the table the sweet nurse whose job it was to medicate me into “la-la land” (the best medical term I heard in the hospital) leaned over and said, “You don’t look very comfortable at all. I sure wouldn’t be comfortable in that position.”

I about cried.

“Thanks for the empathy,” I said. “Empathy is a great gift even when you can’t change the situation.”

Hospital tales 4: The patient is in charge

When life sends you into a tailspin, tell the tales.

I remember vividly my moment of enlightenment in the early 1970s.

Between the ages of 17 and 23, 1968-1973, I spent many months in the hospital for eight orthopedic surgeries and much rehab for my rheumatoid arthritis.

After one of the surgeries I was transferred from an acute care hospital to the rehab. Sitting in a wheelchair physically and emotionally depleted from the surgery, an aide announced they were going to transfer me from the acute care hospital wheelchair to a rehab wheelchair. Dimly, as a couple of aides grabbed a hold of me, I thought they were going about it wrong. But they were medical people so I assumed they must know best.

They proceeded to inflict great pain on me while transferring me.

I didn’t blame the aides. Instead, I paid attention to the light bulb that went on in my brain. Medical people may be the experts but the patient is in charge. It’s his or her body. The patient always decides what gets done and what doesn’t. And when the patient is dimly aware of something amiss he’s responsible.

This pain-earned bit of wisdom helped me when I arrived at St. Francis on Saturday evening by ambulance. I saw five doctors, singly or in pairs. I think they were all residents and interns, none of whom was Dr. Debord.

I didn’t mind. I always consider it an honor to have medical people learn their trade by practicing on me. After all, we have three generations of nurses in our family and they all had to learn on patients.

I’ve heard that July is a poor time to be a patient in a teaching hospital because residents all rotate in, up, or out on July 1. But my blood clot didn’t ask me about timing.

One after another I answered the residents’ questions and watched while they took my pulse in both legs.

About the third or fourth resident began happily rattling on about how the they were going to do several blood tests and order a hematology work up to see why I had gotten the clot. I didn’t understand all he said but I did catch that he didn’t mention lysing.

A warning light went off in that part of my brain that fully embraces that I am in charge of my medical care.

I waited until he was finished and said, “Have you talked to Dr. Debord? I was transferred here because he said I was a candidate for lysing.”

The resident was kind of taken aback. “We’ll talk to Dr. Debord,” he said. Later I wondered if he was a hematology resident since he seemed to be so interested in a blood work up. I don’t recall seeing him again but they did wake me up at 5:00 Sunday morning to take five vials of blood. No one talked to me about the blood work but hopefully they had good practice.

Hospital tales 2: And denial comes tumbling down

When life sends you into a tailspin, tell the tales.

A week ago today I laid in the hospital bed with a blood clot in my left leg and read my patient rights in a classy folder handed to me by the nurse. That brought back memories of the last time I had been in the hospital and the first time I had tried to exercise my rights as a patient.

In the mid 1970s Congress passed a law on patients’ rights. As I understood it I could now see my chart. Having spent lots of time in a rehab hospital starting in 1968, I was eager to read my chart. I asked to see it.

The next thing I know I get a visit in my room from the assistant administrator. He was as smooth as a knife cutting through butter as he chatted me up. After a bit he gently let it slip that I had a good relationship with the medical director and that he was sure I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that relationship by asking to see my chart.

Needless to say my patient rights melted like butter on a hot griddle.

Thirty years later, early in the afternoon I met Dr. Norris, the young on-call doctor, who had ordered the ultrasound that revealed the blood clot and who had put me in the hospital.

She did a great job of keeping my denial in place, saying that if my insurance approved Lovenox, a new blood thinner, for home use, then Sarah could inject the Lovenox at home and I could probably go home the next day. In the hospital one day and out the next. Piece of cake, I thought.

I called the insurance company and left a message (they were closed for the weekend) asking for approval of Lovenox at home.

A bit later Dr. Norris returned and said she’d like to consult with a vascular surgeon from Peoria. Wow, what a conscientious doctor I have, I thought.

Next thing I know she’s back explaining that she and the Peoria doc think that I’m a good candidate for lysing, a procedure where they inject a chemical directly into the vein to break up the clot in hopes of saving the valves in the vein which work very poorly if the clot stays in there too long.

Then sweet Dr. Norris took two swings at my denial with a sledge hammer. “IVCH doesn’t do lysing except in the emergency room when people are having a heart attack,” she said, “so if you decide to have the lysing we’ll transfer you to St. Francis in Peoria by ambulance or by air.” Then she let it slip that Dr. Debord said that I’m a “high morbidity risk.”

Uffda.

Around here patients who are about to die get shipped off to Peoria. And high morbidity risk? Fancy way of telling me I could die at any moment.

Dr. Norris left the room to allow Sarah and me time alone to decide about being transferred to St. Francis.

My denial tumbles down like a ragged old pair of pajamas. I’m tearing up. I’m choking up. “I’m not ready to die,” I tell Sarah. “I mean, I’m ready to see Jesus but I don’t want to leave you all alone. I don’t want to disappear on you. I’m sorry, Sarah, for putting you through this. I know it’s crazy to say I’m sorry--I didn’t choose this--but I’m sorry to put you through this misery.”

Sarah, the love of my life, lost her father before she was born and a step-father when she was 18-months old. I don’t want to be another loss in her life.

Sarah lowered the bed railing and sat on the bed. We hugged. We kept looking in each others eyes, Sarah looked away, trying to control her emotions. We held each other and when we parted she had tears in her eyes. “I’m trying to keep my emotions from taking over,” she said. If she went down her trail of losses she’d be too sad to think straight.

Poor Hannah, our eldest daughter, calls then and I choke up on the phone with her.

Sarah and I decided--lysing in Peoria it is. Staff tells us that the transfer will be by ambulance within an hour. Sarah heads out to bring a few things home and pack in order to stay the night with me at St. Francis.

Hospital tales 1: I’ll just keep on working

When life sends you into a tailspin, tell the tales.

“What can I do for my leg?” I questioned the Lord in my journal on July 9.

Admittedly, asking the Lord a direct question is a dangerous practice because I might hear wrong, but that doesn’t keep me from trying.

“Swim and sit in the Jacuzzi and let healing time pass," I thought I heard.

“Okay.”

“Baby it with hot packs and cold packs. Ask Sarah.”

A few days later Sarah, my beloved, read my journal while I was lying in the hospital. “You sure didn’t do a very good job of hearing the Lord,” she said with a laugh.

“That’s true,” I said, “the only thing I got right was asking you.”

When I asked Sarah, a nurse, if I should use hot pack or cold packs under my sore knee she asked to look at it. “There’s a reddened area above your knee and it’s hot to touch,” she reported. “That could be a blood clot above the back of your knee. You better call your doctor.”

Now denial is a wonderful thing. It keeps us from spending too much time thinking about the fact that we can die at any moment.

I vaguely knew that blood clots in the leg can break off and be deadly but I didn’t spend time worrying about that. I called the doctor who ordered an ultrasound. “If it is a clot,” she said, “I’ll have to put you in the hospital.” I felt my denial slip a bit but I quickly pulled it back up.

In radiology at the local hospital I watched beautiful, color, abstract patterns on a screen while the tech pressed the ultrasound by my groin. “What’s that?” asked Sarah.

“That’s a clot,” the tech said. My denial was very good. I wondered how she could see the clot beneath my knee from by my groin. Only later did I realize the clot went from below my knee to my groin.

True to her word the doctor put me in the hospital.

I wasn’t supposed to use my cell phone because it would mess up the telemetry, the nurse said. I sneaked and used my cell phone a few times to complete arrangements for hosting a sister church the next day at Plow Creek.

My denial firmly in place, I kept working in the hospital, making phone calls and studying The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make by Hans Finzel.

Trusting a man who makes no secret of his brokennness

On this last day of my vacation I continue to ponder trust. The people of Plow Creek are used to me pairing "trust and openness" as if they were a couple of nesting mallards.

Coca Cola and KFC are two companies who are famous for guarding their secret recipes for soft drinks and fried chicken respectively.

They clearly believe that a well-kept secret is the path to power. Not trust and openness.

I wasn't always "the world's most open man", a comment by my wife. I grew up in a tough Scandinavian clan who knew how to suffer in silence. When my body began to fall apart at age 17 with the onset of rheumatoid arthritis I kicked suffering in silence into high gear.

When hit with humiliation after humiliation I toughed it out.

By the time I was 21, after my seventh surgery in four years, I was so depressed that I thought I might end up on the psych ward. Being a strong, silent Scandinavian didn't seem to be working very well.

I sought out a Christian professor on campus and poured out about 15% of my woes. That proved to be helpful. Especially when I managed to put into words that I was quite sure God didn't want me to get married. After all, he didn't seem to mind me becoming disabled; he probably wanted me to see me suffer more by dashing my dream of being married.

When you suffer in silence long enough it's amazing the thoughts your brain comes up with.

The professor didn't try to correct my thinking. He simply asked if I had asked God about marriage. I hadn't. Although I continued to cling to a belief in God like a man clinging to the debris of a sinking ship, I wasn't too sure that at any moment he might step on the fingers.

Since he hadn't answered my desperate pleas to be healed...

But the professor seemed to think it was okay to ask God about getting married. To me his suggestion was as hopeful as dew forming during a night in the desert. I asked.

Sure enough one morning a few months later I woke and while lying in bed praying I sensed God telling me that it was okay to get married.

That answer gave me the confidence I needed to do my part in the summer of '73--Rich and Sarah fall in love. Maybe there was a better way than suffering in silence.

That wild idea was confirmed for me in 1981, three and a half years into my sojourn at Plow Creek. I found myself telling my sharing group my story of becoming disabled. I'd shared it all with Sarah during our courtship but this was the first time I ventured to trust a group of people, a bunch of God's people, no less.

The first time I shared I shared maybe 20% of the humiliations and I thought I was all done. When I was done someone in the group said they'd be glad to hear me share more. Hmmm, I thought, maybe there is more.

A few weeks later I went deeper into the story. They listened so kindly--Margaret even cried with me. For the first time I began to discover some meaning to the humiliations. For instance, I grew up in a Pentecostal church and I answered many altar calls, asking for healing. At first, I fully expected to be healed. I would head to the front of the church, eager for the laying on of hands, eager to be healed. But after answering repeated altar calls and not being healed, I found myself limping back to my pew in utter desolation.

"You were the scape goat," said one of the men in my sharing group. When I didn't know what he was talking about he pointed me to the Old Testament where I discovered my story. The people of Israel had a ritual of laying their hands on a goat to place their sins on the goat, and then the goat was drivien into the wilderness.

My dear Pentecostal people laid hands on me in faith at first. But eventually as I was not healed they kept laying hands on me in, what I suspect, was anxiety.

No one in my church talked to me about me not being healed. I answered altar calls, they laid hands on me and prayed fervently, and then, like the scapegoat of old, I wandered off into the wilderness.

Eventually I stopped answering altar calls. God can heal me, I declared to myself, but he obviously isn't doing it through altar calls. Then a few years later I drifted away from the Pentecostal church.

I could have kept guarding myself, not exposing my humiliations, keeping my shame a secret and climbed to the top of some organization on talent and endurance, making sure that I would never be weak and humiliated again.

But suffering in silence would have kept me wandering the desert. In a deep sense, in that Plow Creek sharing group, I came home. After losing my Pentecostal people I found a new people.

A few weeks later Plow Creek asked me to become a pastoral elder, in part, I suspect because on some level they knew needed an elder who was comfortable with his own weakness. They could trust a man with power who makes no secret of his brokenness.

Trust and openness is a path that leads home.

When it's better to be a lamb

"If you can't be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who's strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always," Illinois Senator Barack Obama's step-father told him when he was a boy.

“But always better to be strong. Always.”

Let's go back to the sexual harassment that I recounted in yesterday’s blog. The next day I went to church and prayed desperately. I didn’t know what to pray and my prayers seemed like rain falling on granite. The event became one more in a series of humiliations that were part of becoming disabled.

The immediate shame of each event dried and crusted and I went on with the task of surviving as one of the weak of the earth.

In the same way that I brought to our marriage gritty joints that were prone to sudden flares of pain, I also brought humiliations.

“Men take advantage of weakness in other men.”

Of course, part of me was strong. At the end of my freshmen year I was elected president of my university’s Inter-Varsity chapter. I remember my shock. What did the other students see in me?

One of the reasons Sarah was attracted to me was that she could take care of me. She’s a nurse and part of her loves being a care taker. When we had our first child Sarah suddenly had someone else who needed her care even more than I did. We had a rough stretch as I figured out how to handle physical tasks that she had been so willing to do before--like washing my hair.

So I entered our marriage as a leader and someone others felt free to take advantage of.

One Christmas after our second daughter was born I decided it was time to revisit the shame of the dorm. It had always been hard to talk about. Molested by a man? And I wasn’t even sure it had happened, since I was asleep. That Christmas, something in me said that it was time to stop running away from the shame.

I began writing about it in my journal. Soon I was furious at God. Weak, I had allied myself with God and yet he hadn’t protected me. What good is God if not for protection? And all semester long I had tried to stay pure. I had thrown away the picture of the naked woman they put in my King James Bible. I had said no to the drunk co-ed who wanted to get in bed with me. Once they had blocked me from entering my room to get my suitcase to go home. When I got back from home they asked me what I thought of the porno magazines. But there was no porn in my suitcase when I got home. They swore they had put it in there. I was sure God had evaporated the porn to protect me.

Then they got me while I was sleeping.

I raged in my journal. Eventually I wrote what I had concluded about the event: I was ruined for life.

Those words rang like the distant tolling of a church bell at a funeral. Ruined for life. Journal in hand I looked at those words. They were exactly what I had concluded. Ruined for life. Then a little voice inside me asked: Was I really ruined for life?

I was married. I had children. Not exactly ruined for life. I was living the life I had longed for ever since I was a little boy. Then I remembered another phrase, this one from a song we sing at Plow Creek: The lamb who was slain has begun his reign.

I wrote that phrase in my journal--the lamb who was slain has begun his reign--and it set off a geyser of joy.

Yes, that was it exactly. I was like a lamb in the dorm, an innocent lamb that was molested. But that was not the end of the story. I knew the original story, Jesus of Nazareth going through a day of humiliations ending in his death. He too was molested but his story didn’t end there.

It isn’t always better to be strong. Sometimes it’s better to the lamb who was slain who has begun his reign.

Blueberries are like proper sex

A couple of years ago a philosopher friend, Greg Clark, said, "Every time I ask you a question, you tell me a story."

I guess that's how my brain works.

Yesterday as I wandered through my blog I began to ponder why in humans sex and trust is linked like the membrane and nuclei of a cell.

So I have a story. Actually two.

Yesterday Sarah and I visited with Sarah's 79-year-old mother, Jean, and Walton, her 85-year-old friend. Walton and Sarah's father, Ralph, were best friends in a Baptist seminary in the 1940's.

Ralph was shot and killed while serving as a missionary in Ethiopia in 1951 while Sarah was still in the womb. She's been searching for her father ever since and here was a chance to here more stories about him.

Walton told a few stories about Ralph but he kept drifting off to stories about Eunice, his wife of 53 years who died a couple years ago.

Shortly before he met Eunice, Walton had broken an engagement with another woman. Then he met Eunice at a camp and sparks flew immediately. Ralph saw what was happening and he asked Walton if he was being true to his fiance. Walton 'fessed up to Ralph that he had broken his engagement.

"That's the kind of friendship we had," Walton said.

Walton met Eunice in August, they got engaged in October, and married in December. "I never kissed her until I gave her an [engagement] ring," he said. "That's the way we were."

"Did I ever tell you about the first time Ralph kissed me?" Jean asked Sarah. "He kissed me and then a week later he apologized." She paused. "That was kind of disheartening."

"Ralph was very proper," said Walton.

I can think of another word. Trustworthy.

Contrast Jean and Walton's stories with the story Alma (not her real name) recently told me. Ten years ago Alma decided to leave, Alfred, her husband of 40 years. He was an alcoholic who periodically drank and became violent towards her. Ten years ago he was drinking again.

"I was so nervous when I left him I thought I wouldn't last a week," she said. "I thought I'd die of a heart attack."

She carefully planned her escape so that her husband would not know where she was, moving half way across the country. There she bought a .22 caliber pistol. "With planes nowadays," she said, "you can get anywhere in the country within a few hours. If Alfred showed up at the door I wanted to make sure that he wouldn't get in."

For seven years Alma kept the pistol under the liner in the waste basket in her bathroom. "I always figured I'd have a reason to go to the bathroom," she said.

Alma's story tastes bitter. I can only imagine the improprieties that led to the earthquake fissures that ended their marriage.

Now Jean's story of her courtship with Ralph and Walton's story of his courtship with Eunice have a different taste. Their stories make me think of tasty good sex blooming like blueberries in the backyard.

You know trust and blueberries will keep producing for fifty years.

Considering pine cones and sex

This morning I sat under a pine tree in northern Minnesota considering the pine cones lying on the pavement at my feet and hanging from the branches overhead.

Pine trees put a lot of energy into reproducing.

Probably none the pine cones from this particular tree will take root and yet year after year the tree produces new pine cones and drops them hopefully to the earth.

Which gets me thinking about chastity before marriage and fidelity during marriage, two of the commitments we make to each other and our God when we join Plow Creek.

Shouldn't we be like nature and cast our seeds far in wide in hopes that a handfull will take root and reproduce?

Sitting under the pine tree this morning I read the following quote from Jim Wilder's The Complete Guide To Living With Men:

We have all been to school. Did anything happen there that would help you control your fears and desires? Does school help you stay out of an attractive person's pants? Did you ever pass a test that helped you to be calmer when in trouble? Did any grade you finished make you a noticeably better parent? Did you ever get a license that made you more generous?

Several years ago we went through a sex scandal at Plow Creek centered around one of our founders. Uffda. We are a rather egalitarian community who sit in a circle and make the decisions that shape our church and life together. Sarah decribed it best. After the "confession" she said it was like a bomb went off in members meeting and everyone looked around wondering, "Who can I trust?"

Sex and trust. As far as I can tell trust is not part of the mix when pine cones reproduce. But for some reason or other we human beings link sex and trust so deeply that when we are sexually betrayed we seem to feel it at the cellular level.

I wonder where my thinking will go next as I explore my world (God's world?) on this vacation.

It's time to go have lunch with Sarah's aunt and mother.