With a surprise winter snow blanketing much of the south, including Winston-Salem, NC where I live, it’s time to share a comparison of conduct between hardy residents of the North and more fickle occupants of warmer climes. I claim no original thought here; the list below is just something that showed up on “the internets.”

But, having been raised in Wisconsin, which is next door to Minnesota (to the right, for all you who are geographically challenged) I can relate.

I’m reminded of the ubiquitous Ole and Leena who were informed by surveyors that their Minnesota farm, located virtually on the state’s eastern border, is actually in Wisconsin. “Thank goodness,” long suffering Lena told her faithful husband. “I don’t think I could take another Minnesota winter.”

On to the comparison:

When the temperature is:

60 above zero:
Floridians turn on the heat.
People in Minnesota plant gardens.

50 above zero:
Californians shiver uncontrollably.
People in Duluth sunbathe.

40 above zero:
Italian & English cars won’t start.
People in Minnesota drive with the windows down.

32 above zero:
Distilled water freezes.
The water in Bemidji gets thicker.

20 above zero:
Floridians don coats, thermal underwear, gloves, wool hats.
People in Minnesota throw on a flannel shirt.

15 above zero:
New York landlords finally turn up the heat.
People in Minnesota have the last cookout before it gets cold.

Zero:
People in Miami all die.
Minnesotans close the windows.

10 below zero:
Californians fly away to Mexico.
People in Minnesota get out their winter coats.

25 below zero:
Hollywood disintegrates.
The Girl Scouts in Minnesota are selling cookies door to door.

40 below zero:
Washington DC runs out of hot air.
People in Minnesota let the dogs sleep indoors.

100 below zero:
Santa Claus abandons the North Pole.
Minnesotans get upset because they can’t start the mini-van.

460 below zero:
All atomic motion stops (absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.)
People in Minnesota start saying, “Cold ’nuff fer ya?”

500 below zero:
Hell freezes over.
Minnesota public schools will open 2 hours late.

Here’s to a mild winter – by southern standards!

 

It’s coming. The sun’s daily rising and setting prompts the inexorable turn of calendar pages and guarantees it.

This Sept. 11 marked 16 years since the day the world stood still as 19 terrorists commandeered four huge jets and flew them into New York City’s World Trade Center towers, into the Pentagon and into the ground.

More than 3,000 people died, and a nation took to its sick bed.

Those whose hurt hasn’t healed, and media who excavate a trove of emotional stories from pain cannot allow an anniversary of such magnitude to pass without notice.

Alan Sherouse, a pastor in Greensboro, NC, was pastor of Metro Baptist Church in New York City on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. He said it is often outsiders and media who manufacture the pageant of pain around such anniversaries. New Yorkers are too busy in their daily lives to give it much notice until the din of forced recall becomes so loud they all must pause – and remember.

Sometimes we are too self-absorbed in our own hurts to realize the enormous pains endured by other occupants of our shared planet.

Not to diminish either event but for the sake of some perspective I remind us that Nazi Germans exterminated an average of 3,618 persons every day from Dec. 7, 1941 when Chelmno became operable until the armistice was signed May 7, 1945. It was a 9/11 every single day for 1,247 days.

The blow America absorbed on Sept. 11, 2001 was mighty. But twice as many Americans died in the first 10 years after the event while executing our military response. We briefly enjoyed the world’s empathy, expressed by the French headline Sept. 12, 2001 that said, “We are all Americans today.” But we spent that currency in a shockingly frivolous manner.

The hazard of the pending national remembrance day for 9/11 victims and their families is that rhetoric and fervor will increase anti-Muslim sentiment. Politicians, fear mongers and television evangelists have used the event to raise alarm – and money. Politicians and war material manufacturers use reference and remembrance to justify our misguided involvement in wars to which there is no end and for which there is no tangible goal.

Since 9/11 is the sole reference point of some in regard to Islam, they use the event to claim we are in danger as a nation of becoming subject to sharia law. Do you really think Muslims in America want to be ruled by the strict Islamic sharia law they fled in other countries?

Islam did not create the disaster. Terrorists flew the planes – misguided, evil men who happened to claim Muslim identity. In the same way misguided and evil Anders Breivik claimed a Christian identity when he killed 77 people in Norway in 2012. Who doesn’t recoil to hear Breivik referred to as a “right wing, Christian fundamentalist?”

Will we use the anniversary day to extend a hand across the religious and cultural chasm between whatever we claim as our own identity and the person on the other side who describes himself or herself with other terms?

New York City pastor, author and stand up comic Susan Sparks was volunteering with the Red Cross the day after 9/11 taking inbound search calls. A woman called looking for her husband, and described what he wore when he left for work in one of the towers.

The woman started to laugh and said, “Oh, he left with the worst tie on.” Sparks didn’t know how to respond.

Then the woman said, “I’m sorry if humor seems inappropriate, but it’s all my family and I have left now.”

Laughter is always a lifeboat in the rough sea of grief and loss. As we face each anniversary of this tidal wave, we’ll know we are healed when the next anniversaries simply come and go, and our tears are dried by smiles.

 

Pew research says 63 percent of Americans have moved from their hometowns. Some 15 percent, like me, have lived in at least four states. For most, it was to pursue economic opportunity.

If you’re among the 45 percent of movers who return home to visit a time or two each year, you know the feeling that envelops your soul as you near the place where you grew up.

It wraps me up when I turn off Wisconsin Highway 22 onto County Road B.

I’ve lived in the South since Uncle Sam crooked his finger in my direction in 1972, so coming home has always involved driving north, through the capital city of Madison. Forty years later I need my GPS to get me through town. New interchanges would divert me through strange suburbs sprouting where I once picked peas and corn as a summer canning company worker.

Billboards tout products and services that didn’t exist when I left town: computer sales and repair, wireless telephones, home health, Kia, Hyundai and Honda dealers, Mexican restaurants.

Traffic lights direct cars through intersections where cows once lumbered toward the dairy barn twice a day to make their contribution in an era when we thought, “milk does a body good.”

Driving north out of the big city toward my little hometown the change rate diminishes. I see some farmers have built new houses in corners that weren’t much good for crops anyway. There are fewer farmers, but they have bigger tractors.

They plant every inch, from ditch to ditch, mostly in corn, some soybeans. Oats, alfalfa and other food crops have been squeezed out, thanks to the insanity of subsidized ethanol production.

Fence rows are gone, to give big tractors space to turn, and in favor of raising crops to feed animals in enclosed places, rather than fencing fields for grazing.

Then I come to the top of the hill, and turn right at Rocky Run Cemetery, onto County B. The cemetery seems the same; no one has left.

A restful blanket of snow drapes over the sentinel stones.

County B needs repaving again.

It’s three rough miles down County B to the farmhouse where I grew up; where my parents lived almost 40 years. Each mile wafts the fragrance of memory through the car windows.

I see the Nelsons painted their barn; the Johnsons finally cleaned up that tangle of brush in the front yard; the Rogers’ neglected barn collapsed onto itself, its beams sticking out from the rubble like sun bleached ribs of an elephant carcass.

Hoel’s pond would be good for ice skating this year. In most years cattails eat up the space at the edges and make the ice rough. This year it’s clear.

The pond was our hockey rink. We just had to shovel off the snow. If the ice was thick enough, we could use a tractor and blade.

Driving past the home place the trees are bigger. All the buildings are smaller. Aren’t they?

The “new” owners don’t care for the place like we did. It looks seedy, like a newly retired man growing his first beard.

Dad bought it as a place to raise his family, and a place to putter when he grew old. Puttering there lost its charm with the ambulance that carried mom away.

I don’t stare at the place like I used to when dad lived there. He lives in town now, with a wife of almost 19 years. Although the old place is in the country, “in town” is just a mile further, where County B ends.

The big sledding hill behind the school building I attended for all 12 grades has been knocked down. In fact, the school has been knocked down in favor of a senior adult living center.

Houses fill the old playground. Dad lives across the street.

I drive a lot of roads to get home, but County B forever connects the child I was to the man I am.

 

 

Record snowfall paralyzed the east coast during the snow event of Jan. 22-24. Churches almost universally cancelled services throughout the Atlantic states buried beneath 20 to 40 inches of snow.

While many Christians likely welcomed the “free Sunday” to sip an extra cup of coffee and stare transfixed at the Weather Channel looping footage of slipping cars, jackknifed trucks, empty grocery shelves, snow shovels in someone else’s hands and people skiing through parks, some others of us felt a small, worship shaped hole in our hearts.

I’m a church person. I like church. I like to be in church among other people who enjoy the community that common fellowship provides in our disjointed world. But wisdom prevailed over valor and we left the car in the garage.

Then George Bullard, executive director of The Columbia Partnership, a group of which I’m a ministry partner, offered to his Facebook friends the opportunity to worship together over the TCP conference call line. We conduct a national conference call 44 Thursdays a year, interviewing thought leaders who have insights that contribute to the TCP mission to “transform the Church for vital ministry.”

This line would be open Sunday, so George enlisted a couple of ministry partners and we notified friends on our social media that we would be having a 30-minute worship time over the conference call line. Simply dial in and join us.

It was spontaneous, creative, and insightful and met a need. Those friends who were camped out on Facebook that morning jumped in and we worshipped, reading scripture, talking about the beauty of creation in the blanket of white and the sound muffling nature of snow.

Our leaders were in three different states. We took prayer requests, prayed and blessed the 10 or so participants who found their way to the phone.

While many of us who want to help churches become Faith Soaring debate its effect – positive and negative – on worship and community, the fact is technology is an increasingly predominant element of daily life – for everyone. Ignore it at your peril.

In the midst of a blizzard of information and opinion here is one little snowflake of insight: don’t let the enormous capacity and complexity of “technology” put you off because you’re not current. Find the niche in which you can utilize the technology you command to build community, even if it’s just the telephone you hold in your hand.

I love it when gifts start to accumulate under the Christmas tree. They mean it’s really going to happen – again. Until they do, the tree, ornaments, garland, Santa house and candy dish only set the stage.

Like luminaries, but with less fire hazard and less gaze gripping power, the decorations I pull out of the attic for my wife to put up each year, light the way for other Christmas traditions.

I remember when we’d been married a few years and she said to me, “We need to establish some traditions.” She’s so adorable.

“Well,” I said, “the things we do each year are our tradition.” Traditions aren’t established by plotting. They become tradition from accidental repetition.

We traveled at Christmas then, since both of our extended families lived in lands far, far away. Eventually the kids wanted to wake up in their own house on Christmas morning.

The last time we went to Wisconsin for Christmas it was 13 degrees below zero; which is why that’s the last time we went to Wisconsin for Christmas.

We stalked and bagged a tree each year, and decorated it with ornaments often homemade and always meaningful. As young married couples, we and our friends often exchanged ornaments as a way to start each other’s Christmas decoration attic stash.

We treasure many of those ornaments still. They are precious packets that emit sweet memories each time we unwrap them. Our tree today is adorned with little round pictures of our children at very young ages – and now their children.

I marveled to pull out an ornament featuring the face of our first child, born in 1979. This season we hung that ornament on a tree in our house for the 36^th time. There’s an unintentionally established tradition continued through 10 houses.

This year we made ornaments of the faces of his three children. Side note: if you teach little ones in church, have an ornament making Sunday. Their parents will call you blessed for decades.

We’re on the third year of an artificial tree whose primary attribute is that it is pre-lit. I slam the three sections together, plug it in, hit the switch and voila! No more wrestling with tangled cords and the only “blue” in the air is on the ornaments.

Oddly though, the lights overwhelm the ornaments. We can see only the light and not the bells, balls, bulbs, pictures, angels and sleighs that hang there with them.

We had the presents under the tree, wrapped and ready, a week before Christmas. But, I just carried them all to a hiding place because the grandchildren are coming for dinner. We aren’t prepared to deal with the pestering questions, package shaking, hovering and begging that would ensue if they were out there in the open but unavailable to open.

When they leave I’ll pull the gifts back down and spread them again under the tree, my own anticipation growing for when they will be back to share the innocent wonder of what must be the most exciting day in their lives.

The stage is set. Tradition lives.

A pink bicycle with handlebar streamers and an ice cream truck bell waited in our house all week for a birthday surprise for Adeline, our neighbor who was turning six years old. Her dad stored the bike at our house to make sure it wasn’t discovered before its time.

Grandpa and grandma were down from Delaware. Video camera batteries were charged fully and the stage was set. Then our door bell rang and daddy Greg was there to wheel the surprise over to his house.

We followed him with the camera to record the moment and got just the reward we were looking for: through the view finder leaped a thrilled-beyond-words, literally jumping for joy child who was tickled pinker than a handlebar streamer to see the royal carriage rolling her way in daddy’s hands.

She ran across the yard to meet him, shouting deliriously, “It’s just what I dreamed.”

Daddy’s love to fulfill the dreams of their children. It’s seldom easy because the dreams daddy’s want their children to dream too often are bigger than daddy. When we luck out and strike the right chord and respond correctly to the right cues our own joy is a big explosion in a small container, fueled by our child’s joy.

Adeline herself is a dream come true. She is a miracle baby having had several operations as an infant and her parents still are ever alert to fevers. All the neighbors know to be extra attentive.

All afternoon Adeline worked to learn how to ride that pink bike. Balance was still a problem and she didn’t reach that one magical moment when learning to ride a bike when you’re just about to tip over but something clicks and instead of putting your foot out to brace yourself, you push hard one more time on the pedal and your momentum catches and you’re riding.

After persistent effort, one day she hopped on that bike and zoomed down her driveway completely in control, her hair flying and her smile a wonder.

I imagine her daddy looking out the window, thanking God and saying, “It’s just what I dreamed.”

I avoid cycling in the rain when I don’t have to, but sometimes I must get from Point A to Point B even when the clouds are dumping on me. The last week of September I rode the North Carolina Mountains to the Coast event and it was almost all in the rain.

We rode in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our tents in the rain, set them up in the rain, ate in the rain, walked into the rain from the shower trucks and constantly checked the weather to see when the rain would stop. All we saw was “rain expected throughout the day.” Every day. When the sun surprisingly broke through on day four, we all felt like vampires who must hide from its rays.

As luck has it, we were riding toward Hurricane Joaquin. NC Emergency Management eventually called the ride off with two days to go to keep 1,000 crazy cyclists from peddling toward the very town Joaquin was targeting on North Carolina’s east coast. I did not protest.

My buddy Steve Moorhouse, a fellow draftee in 1972 who had traveled from Colorado for the ride, and my local riding buddy Tibor Shimek rode 300 miles — along with 1,000 of our closest friends — the first four days coming out of Waynesville, to Hendersonville, to Shelby to Concord to Southern Pines. We were blessed to spend three nights with friends, rather than wrestling with the rain and equipment in the campgrounds. Basically, that gave us a night to dry our equipment after packing it up wet in the morning. We were so grateful.

Our first day of riding included a four-mile hill of 10 percent grade. That ascent is difficult for you to imagine but think of the steepest hill in your neighborhood. It’s probably a few hundred yards long and requires your hardest effort to climb or walk. Now stretch that effort the length of four miles.

I wanted to quit on it many times. But I couldn’t find a good place to dismount because the road was littered with walking cyclists! No, the real reason I gutted the climb was because of a failure five years ago.

On the last day of RAGBRAI, the annual ride across Iowa, 10,000 riders faced Potter’s Hill, a one-mile climb that reached the nearly impossible grade of 19 percent at one point. Yes, in Iowa.

I didn’t make it up Potter’s Hill without walking my bike for a spell and it has bothered me ever since. I didn’t even dip my tire in the Mississippi at the end of the ride because I felt I hadn’t earned the privilege. That failure motivated me up the NC mountain through Pisgah National Forest.

Climbing the switchbacks on the mountain road that passes Sliding Rock and Looking Glass Falls on its downside, I could  see only a hundred yards ahead. I had no idea how many switchbacks remained, but I found a cadence I could maintain, though it required my strongest effort. Each turn revealed only another section of hill.

I don’t know how much longer I could have gone, but when I made what turned out to be the final corner and found myself at the top, I was too tired to cheer. I wasn’t too tired to feel awfully proud. Many others made it without walking, but probably half did not.

Our reward should have been a long, swooping descent with a light feathering of the brakes to keep our speed under control. Instead, the downhill was tense because the roads were wet and covered with slick leaves, it was raining and my hands cramped trying to create enough braking power on slick rims to keep from straying into oncoming traffic or going into the ditch. I was unsuccessful only once, but the ditch was shallow.

The beauty of riding in the mountains is that hard climbs are usually rewarded with lovely descents. There is a gift for your sacrifice. Of course, some riders think the climb is their reward and a descent is a waste of time. They are the crazy ones that mothers warn their daughters not to marry.

If on your ride, or in your life, you’re in a hard spot, keep pedaling. Find a cadence you can maintain and turn the crank. The top is around the next corner. Surely.

But you know what? If you must walk it for a while, that’s alright too. It’s not really a failure, and it may motivate you for the next big hill.

When items once precious but now outdated by neglect or wear come to the end of their fruitful life, we are more likely to drag them along behind us, rather than toss them onto a refuse heap. Whether it’s school days memorabilia or household items we are sure still have useful life remaining, we carve, stack, sort and shove out a space for it in the attic, and then cart it from house to house in successive moves.

Once tucked away again, we don’t give it a second thought until the day we move again or finally throw up our hands and say, “This stuff has got to go!” After a quick sort we toss 90 percent of the stuff we considered so precious a decade earlier and compliment ourselves on the newly acquired floor space.

The same winnowing process seldom works for a church. Churches don’t move and instead, they accumulate memorabilia from ancient days like barnacles onto the hull of the congregation, increasing the drag and slowing forward progress.

On a recent double dip trip to Philadelphia I spent a day interviewing the architects of a transformation at First Baptist Church, one of the oldest congregations in the country.

Then, I helped my son clean out his attic.

It’s the same job.

The First Baptist Church congregation – a dwindling remnant of about 30 active souls – came to the stark conclusion in December 2013 that they had about six months of operating reserve before they would have to close their doors.

They worship in a magnificent, domed, stone and steel structure built in 1899. It is in the heart of center city Philadelphia. It sits a block from public transportation terminals, shoulder to shoulder with hotels and condos, a bulwark shouldering above a lace of streets and sidewalks teeming with tourists, shoppers, homeless and young professionals who live and work in the canyon shadows.

The building once hosted original oratorios. Tradition says ushers served in tails and gloves. The city’s most influential citizens plopped in its pews, either to worship or to be seen. Gold leaf covered the interior walls until a fire in 1949, giving the room a soft yellow hue.

Then the suburbs beckoned to members with children. Access to downtown grew more crowded and difficult. Expensive habits were hard to break.

And preserving the building became the congregation’s mission.

Maintaining the 68,000 square feet with century old systems sucked up their funds like tornadoes over trailer parks. They realized they couldn’t do it anymore.

First Baptist Church of Philadelphia was chartered in 1699 with nine members. They held their first meetings in a Sunday morning empty saloon.

As church trustees were considering sale of their facility 314 years later, trustee chair Mary Lynn Williams led a reflection on the church’s nine founding members.

“Sitting around a table with 10 members, we talked about the difference between the church’s first nine and us ‘last nine,’” Williams said. “What were the first nine looking at? The future. Our problem is we kept looking back.

“Our looking backward all the time and our need to preserve this tradition is part of the reason we’re in the shape we’re in. The building was an albatross around our necks.”

First Baptist sold their facility for $2 million to Liberti Church, a young Reformed Church in America congregation that had been renting the sanctuary for nearly two years. Liberti Church promised to raise $10 million to renovate the historic structure, a remodeling that will include a special space for First Baptist to continue to meet there.

As First Baptist struggled to make ends meet, they unloaded some things that once were precious. They sold their Queen Anne silver to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They rented space to a theatre troupe. When the building transaction was complete, they sold their pipe organ to an historic organ trust that will restore it and give it on permanent loan to another historic downtown church.

When survival is uncertain, formerly precious items become ballast.

When staying afloat requires it, they can be tossed overboard.

My son wasn’t trying to stay afloat when he surveyed his crowded attic. But the time had come to go through the boxes he and his wife said they were going to go through when they moved into the house eight years earlier.

We schlepped boxes filled with memories once too precious to part with from the attic to the garage, with only a quick pass through the body scanner that was my daughter-in-law’s eyes to examine contents.

But she was less sentimental this time, pulling some of the music she studied as a child for her six-year-old daughter. Books, pictures, trophies and camp crafts got one more chance to tug the sentimental chord with her. If they didn’t, they were gone. And she was a hard sell.

A quick call to 1-800-Got-Junk cleared the garage. Sorting through sentiment at your church might not be as easy, but as First Baptist Church Philadelphia learned, it’s never too early.

Spring revealed the rough winter it was for people, trees and roads. Since those are three of my favorite things, it was rough for me, too.

At regular intervals the crinkly brown grass on interstate highway medians wears dark scars, muddy tracks, remainders and reminders of drivers’ unfortunate missteps from the firm, sure, asphalt slabs, into the quagmire of the unpaved median.

Sometimes charcoal colored stains left by locked down, smoking tires run to the edge of the asphalt and become muddy tracks in the median. In wettest conditions those tracks were short and quickly grew deep.

When drivers in cars buried in median mud tried to free themselves without aid, their tracks smudged wide and sloppy and the edges are not sharply defined. Their spinning wheels frothed back and forth, leaving a deep, muddy reminder of their anger and futility.

I saw a metal pole marking the sudden stop of a single pair of tracks; all that remained of a highway information sign. Maybe it lifted a mute caution to slow down, or that vision might be limited by fog, or the road could be dangerous when icy. Maybe it said “Put Down the Phone and Drive.”

Sometimes a single track carved a large ellipse where it dipped into the center grass with one wheel before the driver pulled it back onto solid ground.

Several tracks made a big “C” from one side of the interstate, through the grass, weeds and lilies and up onto the other side, heading the opposite direction. You’ve probably seen state troopers make that move, and then turn on their blue lights and double your heart rate until they zip by you, their eyes on the driver who just roared past.

One day I saw an 18-wheeler still in the tracks he made through the muddy ditch on I-85 near Salisbury. A large tree split his tractor cab from the bumper, through the engine compartment clear back to the windshield. I suspect those were that driver’s last tracks.

When snow and ice cover the land, when rain fogs our windshields, when dark nights and glaring lights limit our sight and we shake our heads to stay alert, we want to keep our wheels on the super slab and make no tracks in the median.

But we all make tracks in life. We leave a mark wherever we step, a mark that says we were here, in the right track or the wrong.

Those who come along after us see the tracks we left in the lives of our children. They see our tracks in the workplace, and at church and in the smiles – or despair – of our spouses.

We leave broad, ugly slashing tracks across the green medians of children we abuse. Our careless cutting words scar their tender hearts. The backs of our hands knock them toward the ditch rather than helping to keep them straight and steady.

On the worst days of winter travel, drivers before you wear clear tracks through the slush and leave a dry route to follow. If you stayed in those tracks, you would stay out of the ditch.

We can do that, too, in our children’s lives. We leave dry tracks through icy roads for them when we love our spouses; when we teach them to pray; when we give them the freedom to run to the edge of the cliff, but hold onto their shirttails; when we build their self-esteem by holding high expectations and giving them tasks to accomplish; when our presence at their recitals or athletic events or school meetings verifies our support; when we love them unconditionally through long hair and short, through good grades and bad, through speeding tickets and car wrecks; when their tears fall on our shoulders and not on the floor.

Thank God for the tracks you followed. Ask His strength to leave good tracks behind.