We are ready for Halloween. We have candy treats ready to hand out, though the mini candy bars are even smaller this year and came in bags with fewer treats than last year. We have the ingredients to make a large pot of chili for family and friends who will gather at our house for supper. Unlike our neighbors, our home isn’t decorated for the occasion. Our grandchildren will bring pumpkins from the farm when they come over this afternoon. Some of the houses in our neighborhood were decorated before the first of October this year, and several of our neighbors spent a lot of time and money on their decorations. We moved into our house right before Halloween four years ago and were surprised at the number of children who came to our door seeking treats. Since then, we’ve been better prepared.
I look forward to the evening. My favorite part is sitting on the front porch, handing out treats, and watching all the children go by.

Halloween is a mash-up holiday. It has roots in harvest festivals. Before it was associated with All Saints Day and the name Halloween, people in the northern hemisphere gathered around bonfires to celebrate the end of the harvest and prepare for winter. Celtic traditions include the extinguishing of hearth fires in homes, cleaning fireplaces and chimneys, and kindling new fires for winter heat. Wearing masks, dancing, and sharing sweet treats were part of the celebrations.

Apart from harvest festivals, Halloween also has roots in the remembrance of the dead. In some parts of the world, it has become traditional to visit graveyards to pray and place candles and flowers on the graves of loved ones.

In the early centuries of Christianity, All Saints Day originated as a day to honor martyrs. It was originally a spring festival, established in the 7th century by Pope Boniface, who designated May 13 as the day for its observance. In the 9th Century, Pope Gregory’s rearrangement of the calendar moved All Saints Day to November 1. Gregory’s date change was strategic. He wanted the Christian holiday to replace the Celtic harvest festival.

Instead of replacing the harvest festival, the holidays became combined, and celebrations spread out. In some places, three days are observed: Halloween on October 31, All Saints on November 1, and All Souls on November 2.

In modern times, the connection between Halloween and All Saints seems less prevalent. Many who celebrate Halloween don’t observe All Saints Day and see the day as a secular celebration. I think we are also witnessing another change in recent years, as Halloween becomes increasingly a holiday for adults. The observances of Halloween I remember from my childhood focused on activities for children, primarily wearing costumes and going door to door seeking treats. In my family, trick-or-treating was reserved for children. We were allowed to dress up and go out though our eighth grade, but when we reached high school we were expected to stay home and leave the treats for younger children.

A quick look at the Internet or a stop into a pop-up Halloween store reveals that much Halloween marketing is aimed at adults, with a wide range of costumes and decorations well beyond the budgets of children.

Across the border in British Columbia, folks mash together Halloween with the English Tradition of Guy Fawkes Night. In England, November 5 is the day to observe Guy Fawkes with bonfires and fireworks. In 1605, a group of Catholic conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, attempted to assassinate King James I by blowing up Parliament. They planned to install a catholic king. A holiday was declared to celebrate the king’s survival, and burning effigies of Guy Fawkes became part of the festivities. Fireworks were lit to remember the explosives used in the failed attempt. Our neighbors in British Columbia don’t need much of an excuse to light fireworks. We’ll hear blasts and see occasional bursts in the sky to the north for the next several days, starting tonight.

I don’t know much about the changes and transformations in Halloween celebrations. I haven’t gotten into recognition of the day beyond enjoying children in costumes and handing out treats. I also like the tradition of inviting our grandchildren’s friends and their parents to our house for supper. I don’t plan to wear a costume. I don’t have any fireworks. I’m not planning to light a bonfire.

The beginning of November is a time for me to remember family members who have died. In churches I have served, All Saints Sunday has been set aside to remember church members and friends who died in the previous year. Grief, however, does not end after a year. The remembrances always bring to mind others who have died. When I think of All Saints, I think of my mother’s family. She was one of five sisters. The first of the five to die suffered heart failure as a child. Likely, her heart condition would not be fatal with today’s advanced cardiac care, but losing a sister was part of my mother’s story. In my immediate family, a sister was the first to die. It has been 56 years since my oldest sister died, but her memory and story are part of my identity, and she is often recalled. These days, our parents have both died, as well as another sister and a brother. Our family of nine is down to four survivors, but the presence of the others is part of who we are.

There are so many others we remember when we pause to think. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins join those killed in war and friends from church. It has been 50 years since I first officiated at a funeral, and there have been many since. Even before I became a minister, I was no stranger to funerals. As a teenager, I played taps for the military honor guard at many funerals.

So tonight, while I enjoy handing out candy, I’ll think of many wonderful people whose lives touched mine and who have gone before. Hebrews 12 begins, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . .” Indeed, I am surrounded, and the cloud of witnesses is great. I hope I can share a bit of their kindness with the children who come to our house this evening.

We began our careers as pastors with a call to serve two congregations in southwestern North Dakota. That corner of North Dakota wasn’t settled until after the turn of the 20th century. Located south of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the land was originally part of the Great Sioux Reservation and the site of the last large-scale buffalo hunts aimed at forcing the Lakota people onto reservations. When subsequent actions by the federal government reduced the reservations, the land became property of the United States, which offered part of it to the Milwaukee Railroad and opened part of it to homesteading in the first decade of the century.

The churches we served were part of a process in which church founders followed the railroad and planted churches in the communities. A town site was located every 20 miles to provide water for steam locomotives, but more than half of those towns never became home to more than a few families. Once the buffalo were gone, it was tough country from which to make a living from the land. Cattle ranching depended on growing hay for feed. Grain farming was dependent on unpredictable weather. The original 160 allotments were too small to support a family. In each generation, farms and ranches were consolidated as people moved away from the area.

By the time we arrived, the towns were nearing their 75th anniversaries, and the population was steadily declining. We spoke of serving churches in rural and remote locations. The local hospital received funding from a program founded to support wilderness health providers. We thought nothing of driving 150 miles one way for shopping and specialized medical care.

The reality, however, was that those communities weren’t really remote, and we weren’t really isolated. We felt the support of the communities we served. We got together regularly with other clergy serving congregations in the area. We had access to reasonably priced groceries and high-quality health care. We were able to visit our families who lived elsewhere.

Decades later, we spent some time at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre in Manitoba, where we met pastors serving really remote communities. In northern Canada, some communities are not accessible by road. We used to think of the United States as large, but Canada's landmass is larger. Canada is the second-largest country in the world after Russia. The provinces that border the US are large from north to south, and their population centers are mainly in the south. Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are dotted with villages that are hundreds of miles from the nearest town and more than a thousand miles from urban centers.

In those remote areas, indigenous people have lived in traditional ways, hunting and fishing, and practicing subsistence living. Some of those communities have been impacted by resource extraction, often through mining and petroleum drilling.

Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories is the largest lake in Canada entirely within its borders. It straddles the Arctic Circle. It is the world’s tenth-largest lake by volume. Fort Confidence, on the north shore, is now uninhabited. A mining area called Port Radium is on the eastern shore. The indigenous community of Deline is on the southwest corner of the lake. It is where the Sahtu Dene people have lived for thousands of years. Originally a nomadic tribe, they started to settle more firmly in Deline in the 1940s.

Tribal members had been employed at the Eldorado Mine on the eastern shore of the lake. The mine opened in 1932 and was an early source of radium, a substance considered a miracle cure for cancer. It could also be used to make instrument dials glow in the dark and was a sought-after substance during World War II. Sahtu Dene men worked at the mine, transporting valuable bags of radioactive ore. During the war, mining switched from radium to uranium. Uranium made its way from Canada’s north to the Manhattan Project in the U.S. and ultimately to Japan in atomic bombs dropped at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In addition to the legacy of destruction of atomic weapons, the war left behind a legacy of nuclear waste and environmental damage. The Eldorado mine’s ore processing facility, located in Port Hope, Ontario, is the center of a billion-dollar cleanup campaign. Less attention, however, has been paid to cleaning up the mine site on the shore of Great Bear Lake.

The Sahtu Dene miners went back to their families in the Deline area. Many developed cancer as they aged. The town gained the grim title of the “Village of Widows.” A national report examining the mine's health legacy, conducted in 2005, acknowledged the legacy of fear and anxiety surrounding environmental contamination and health.

When someone in Deline needs advanced health care services, they must be transported to Stanton Territorial Hospital, located in Yellowknife. That is a 350-mile flight. The drive from Deline to Yellowknife is 1,752 miles when the ice road is open in winter. There is no year-round road connecting Deline to the outside world.

The population of Deline isn’t significant. Five hundred seventy-three people lived there in 2021, according to a count. The population has been slowly growing in recent years, up from 533 in the 2016 count. They are served by a primary care clinic located in Deline.

Deline is just one of the remote communities in northern Canada. There are several communities north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories that are even farther from advanced medical care than Deline. Nearly a thousand people live in Tuktoyaktuk, located on the Beaufort Sea near the Mackenzie River Delta. It is the most northern village accessible by road in Canada.

When we lived in North Dakota, we didn’t really live in a remote location compared to some communities in northern Canada. We didn’t even know what remote was at the time.

I’ve never been to the Caribbean. I’ve flown over it on trips from Costa Rica to Miami. My visits to Costa Rica included beaches on the Pacific side, but I never made it to the Caribbean side. I have a cousin who has lived in Belize since the late 1960s. We’ve dreamed of visiting them there, but have never worked it out to go. My parents went and enjoyed sailing with my cousin and his wife on the Caribbean. I have many friends who have taken Caribbean cruises and visited some of the islands. I have a friend who is currently on a Caribbean cruise taking a different course from the one advertised, sailing far south of the intended route to avoid a hurricane.

From what I have read in the news, Hurricane Melissa is the strongest hurricane in the region in the 174 years that records have been kept. It came ashore in Jamaica with sustained winds of 185 mph. I once experienced winds that approached 100 mph. I can’t imagine what 185 mph winds feel like. I know that it would topple trees and take the roofs right off of buildings. And that is just what it has done as it blew across Jamaica. Prime Minister Andrew Holness said, “There is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5. The question now is the speed of recovery.” At least 77 percent of the country is without electricity, and nearly 15,000 people were in shelters yesterday as the hurricane passed. Officials in Jamaica have not released news of fatalities, but they are just beginning to search for survivors and victims. The death count from the storm is at six as I write, but is expected to rise rapidly as day breaks and rescue crews can get out. Officials don’t expect any airports to open before Thursday.

It is a big storm that just made landfall in Cuba and is threatening similar destruction there. It developed very quickly. On Saturday, it was still a tropical storm. In under a day, wind speeds increased from 75 mph to 140 mph, making it one of the fastest intensifications ever seen in the Caribbean. Despite the high winds, the storm system is moving slowly by hurricane standards, which means it is picking up a lot of water and leaving behind vast amounts of rainfall.

Jamaica has not yet recovered from another Caribbean hurricane, Beryl, which caused losses of $200 million. That storm also went through rapid intensification. Exceptionally warm conditions cause the rapid intensification of hurricanes. Last year, global average sea surface temperatures were the warmest on record. The ocean surface temperature in the Caribbean is currently two to three degrees above normal. That doesn’t sound like much, but tropical storm derive their energy from the top layer of water. Warmer water means more intense storms. Climate change is real, and damaging storms are just one indication of its impact. A meteorologist at the science non-profit Climate Central estimated that the potential cost of damage from Hurricane Melissa would be 50 percent higher than if the sea surface temperature were normal. It remains to be seen if the current temperatures are a new normal. Temperatures may continue to rise, and with them, storms will set new records for speed and damage.

It can be easy for people living in distant locations to fail to appreciate the impact of hurricanes. But just because we aren’t directly affected by those particular storms, we are experiencing the effects of climate change. Up here in the northwest, where we will never see a hurricane, the premiums on our church’s property insurance have risen to $52,000 per year. We participate in the United Church of Christ’s Insurance Advisory Board program, which is a relatively small insurance pool. Abnormally high claims in recent years have driven up the cost of insurance for all participants in the program. Those claims are directly related to wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The cost of property insurance for everyone has risen dramatically due to the impact of intense storms driven by climate change.

A storm in the Caribbean, not expected to impact the United States directly, doesn’t have the same effect on insurance rates as wildfires in Los Angeles. Still, the Southeastern states have experienced more violent hurricane seasons and are expected to face more storms in the near future. With four out of the five hurricanes this season undergoing rapid intensification, it is only a matter of time before another Category 5 storm makes landfall in the US.

As Hurricane Melissa moves through the Caribbean, it is expected to stay offshore and accelerate as it moves northward. A large area of low pressure will form over the northeastern US, bringing rain and strong winds to the region. Those states will not experience the rainfall associated with the hurricane, but will likely see higher-than-normal rainfall.

Today, we pray for the people of Jamaica as they begin to pick up the pieces after the devastating storm. And we pray for the people of Cuba as they experience the hurricane’s direct path over their island. Cleanup and damage assessment will likely be slow due to the challenges of infrastructure destruction. With landslides, fallen trees, and power outages, communications will be disrupted for weeks. It could be some time before we know the full extent of the suffering caused by the storm. Dangerous conditions will persist as rescue crews attempt to get to those in need.

Our weather forecast for today includes predictions of winds up to 15 mph. We’ve experienced much higher winds and don’t expect to suffer damage from them. I can’t imagine winds blowing 185 mph. The sound alone must be overwhelming. I might delay my bike ride until the winds decrease this afternoon, but my life won’t be disrupted. The day will give me time to pray for the victims and consider a gift to support relief and recovery efforts.

Although we have been retired for five years and have lived in our current home for four, I am still adjusting to the rhythms of this place. When we lived in South Dakota, the first of November was well past the time to put the garden to rest for the winter. Here, the winter is shorter. We have had a few days with mild frost, but I still have dahlias, sunflowers, and a host of other flowering plants that are still producing blossoms. We have tomatoes on the vine. Even though the days are shorter and the fruit is ripening more slowly, we’ve left some of our tomatoes outside, long after we would have picked and processed the green tomatoes when we lived in South Dakota.

In a strange twist from the other places where we have lived, our lawn is green and growing. Autumn moisture has revived the grass that was dormant in July and August. Short days mean it is growing more slowly than at other times of the year, but it will still need to be mowed through November.

For the people who have lived here for a long time, there is nothing unusual about the weather. On a recent rainy day, a friend posted, “Isn’t this why we love the Northwest? Lots of weather.”

Despite what others may think, we did not choose to live here because of the weather. I confess that I don’t miss having to own and maintain a snowblower to keep my driveway accessible, but I don’t think heavy winter snow would have kept us from living near our grandchildren. We live where we do because one of our retirement goals was to live near our children and grandchildren. We had to choose because our two children live on two different sides of the continent. Our daughter lives in South Carolina, and we would love to be closer to her family. It is hard to watch her son grow up and not be able to go to every soccer game, school program, and grandparents’ day. Some days, I wish I could meet her for coffee or give her a quick hug as she rushes off to work.

In that regard, however, we count ourselves as among the most fortunate people in the world. In our mobile society, it is uncommon for multiple generations to live close to one another. We have friends who have grandchildren on other continents. While our South Carolina grandson was born in Japan, they moved back to the U.S. the first year of our retirement. We’ve already purchased our airline tickets to spend Christmas with them this year.

We are lucky to live in a neighborhood with lots of children, and our subdivision attracts many on Halloween night. Each year, I sit out on the front porch and hand out candy to a constant parade of costumed children. And as a bonus, our grandchildren live on a farm with neighbors farther away, so they come to our neighborhood to Trick-or-Treat. Our Halloween tradition is to have a simple supper and invite the grandchildren and their friends to use our house as a base for gathering treats. I have a lot of treats to hand out to the children who come by, but I usually run short by the end of the evening. Our grandchildren collect so many treats as they go around the neighborhood that, toward the end of the evening, they share some of the treats they have gathered to keep my handout bowl filled. There is a sorting process: less desirable treats end up in the bowl for recycling, while the favorites are retained for consumption. I don’t mind the sorting because, in general, the younger children show up at our door earlier in the evening, and after 7:30 or so, most of the ones coming are middle school-aged.

Unlike some of my friends and neighbors, I don’t mind handing out treats to older youth. I think going to the effort of coming up with a costume and walking around the neighborhood asking for treats is not a bad way for them to invest their time. There are a thousand ways they could get into trouble, and even if they don’t, walking around the neighborhood with their friends is far better for them than spending time on their cell phones or playing video games. They’ll get a treat from me if they come to my house.

Halloween this Friday will be a fun evening for me, but it is also a reminder that there is work to be done. Even with the longer season, I plan to spend the next week mulching in the strawberry bed, digging dahlia tubers and storing them for next spring, pulling up the tomato plants, cutting back the raspberries, and preparing the beds for winter rest. I have a winter game that I play with the hanging flower baskets. I put them on the back porch, where they can get sunlight, and it is a bit warmer, since they are next to the house. When they die, I clean out the pots and store them for the following year. However, last winter, a couple of plants survived the winter. Since they were hardy, I kept them in their pots and added a bit of soil and a few other plants. They also got a bit of extra fertilizer in the early summer.

I’m not much of a gardener. We have neighbors who take cuttings from their geraniums. In fact, they’re so good at it that we get new geraniums from them each spring. I’m content to dig up my dahlias and store the tubers. It’s like digging potatoes. I leave the daffodil, iris, and tulip bulbs in the ground. We won’t need to plant any more of them this fall.

Unlike the news anchors and several of our neighbors, I can believe November is nearing. I won’t be saying, “I can’t believe it’s November” to anyone. I can believe it. I enjoy it. And I’m ready to welcome the changes in the weather. I won’t even mind shoveling a bit of snow.

My friend Min lived to be 111. I didn’t meet her until she was 94. By then, she had been widowed a second time and had made her home in a continuous care retirement village. She was blind and had care companions who came to her apartment and accompanied her on trips to the doctor or to attend a women’s basketball game at the college. Although she had been a member of the church I served for more than 70 years, she wasn’t able to attend worship often because she used a wheelchair for mobility. The local service that provided a wheelchair-accessible taxi didn't run on Sundays. For 17 years, I visited her regularly as her pastor and heard many wonderful stories about her life. She told me that her first husband, who owned the local newspaper, would not allow a television in their home when their daughters were young because he saw the television as competition for the newspaper. She told me about the night they barely made it out of Dark Canyon before a flood washed out the bridge and destroyed their house during the 1972 Rapid City Flood. She told me of years spent serving as a Gray Lady, providing companionship to patients in the hospital.

Min taught me a lesson in humility. She was always interested in what was going on at the church, and she grew excited when we undertook a project to refurbish and expand our pipe organ. I don’t remember exactly which year it was, but when the organ was completed, we arranged for her to attend worship near her 104th or 105th birthday. The people who ran the wheelchair taxi were delighted to give her a ride on their day off so she could attend services. She came to church dressed to the nines, but she was always neatly dressed whenever I visited her. A couple of weeks after the service, I visited her in her room at the care center, and I asked her about her visit to the church. Her hearing wasn't good, so I had to raise my voice so she could understand my question. She replied, “The organ sounded good.” I asked her what she thought of the rest of the service. She said, “I didn’t understand a word you said, but the music was great.” So much for my special prayer and sermon prepared to celebrate her presence in the community. It reminded me that I was not the center of the church. It also made me wonder how much of the prayers I offered at each visit she had actually heard and understood.

I have learned many lessons from my elders over the years. One of the great teachers in my life was half a century older than I. He was my age or a bit older when I met him, and he was still actively teaching full-time. He taught me to reflect on experiences to realize the meanings they held. He taught me a particular way of making photographs that captured meanings as well as images. One of the classes he taught was titled “Spirit in the Aging Years.” I assumed he would be talking about his own experience, but when he addressed aging, he often told stories about his mother, who lived into her nineties. At the time, the nation was experiencing an energy crisis, and Jimmy Carter was the president. Carter addressed the nation and urged people to turn off unnecessary lights and turn down thermostats. My teacher visited his mother at that time, and her apartment seemed cold to him. He mentioned it to her, and she told him to put on a sweater. She had heard the president ask citizens to turn down the temperature, and she was keeping her thermostat set as he recommended. “Mother,” my teacher said, “The president said it is OK for senior citizens to keep their apartments warm.” She replied, “If you think I’m any less patriotic just because I’m old, you’ve got another think coming!” I think of Ross and the stories he told about his mother now that I am approaching the age he was when we met.

There have been many others. Of course, I have learned important lessons from people of all ages. Before we had children, I knew quite a bit about child development, youth culture, and education. When I became a father, our children taught me how little I really knew. It is possible that I learned my practice of getting up in the middle of the night and working for an hour or so before returning to bed from our daughter when she was an infant. She woke up ready to play nearly every night for the first few years of her life.

As a youth minister, I quickly learned that the youth of the church have a lot to teach those of us who are older about the nature of faith and the process of forming Christian community. My friend Skyler, who is a freshman in college this year, taught me a great deal about loss, grief, and resiliency when his uncle died suddenly.

Now that I am retired and considered an elder in the church, I continue to learn a lot from those who are older than I am. Last night, my teacher was Judy Collins. She entertained a packed house at the Massey Theatre with a 90-minute concert with no intermission. She is 86 years old, and if she hadn’t mentioned her age, the audience might have thought she was much younger. She has continued to work through a lot this year. Last December, her husband, Louis Nelson, an industrial designer whom she had known for more than 50 years, died of cancer. She has been working through her grief and continues to tour internationally. She is no stranger to illness, having suffered polio as a child and tuberculosis in her twenties. Last night, on stage, her spirit shone through from her opening song, “Both Sides Now,” to her “Amazing Grace” encore.

Listening to her sing, I was reminded that my life and work aren’t over just because I have retired. There is still much for me to do. She showed me how the spirit can shine through, regardless of how many decades one has lived.

In one more week, we will “fall back” at the end of daylight saving time. The shifts to and from daylight saving time seem to be a bit easier than they were years ago, before we had devices that automatically made the switch. I use my phone as my alarm clock, so it will automatically adjust. My watch also adjusts without my input. We still have a time adjustment practice in our home, however. The clocks in the stove and microwave have to be set. And we have two antique mechanical clocks. The routine for mechanical clocks is different in the spring than in the fall. In the spring, we can move the hands forward one hour. In the fall, the easiest way to make the change is to stop the clocks for an hour. Because the clocks can only be moved forward, they would have to be run through 11 hours otherwise, and that is a lot of chiming.

The twice-each-year change is a reminder about how complex our understanding of time has become. How we set our clocks has become a political decision. In the spring of 2022, the US Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The bill would have made daylight saving time permanent. Had it passed in the House of Representatives and been signed by the President, we would not be “falling back” anymore. The bill never made it to the floor of the House of Representatives, however. That’s right. A bill was so completely bipartisan that it received unanimous consent in the Senate, yet was blocked from even being debated in the House. Politics can be unpredictable and confusing.

Back in 2019, British Columbia held a referendum in which 93% of voters supported permanent daylight saving time. However, the referendum's implementation has been delayed to align with Washington State's time zone. Meanwhile, in neighboring Alberta, a similar referendum was defeated. Slightly more than half of the voters preferred the time changes. In Alberta, there was a fervent debate over which time should be made permanent. Some people voted against the referendum because they wanted permanent standard time instead of daylight saving time.

It doesn’t look like the debate will end soon despite evidence that the biennial changes contribute to increased accidents, lower productivity, and other problems.

The way we measure time is in itself confusing. There probably is a reason we have chosen to divide the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds, but I don’t know what it is. It seems like a digital system might work better. 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 10 hours in a day. Maybe that wouldn’t be practical. Shifting to 20 hours a day might work better, and a digital system could be maintained.

That wouldn’t change the calendar, however. Like the 24-hour day and 60-minute hour, the months of the year are based on a base-12 system. Politics, however, was involved, so the months don’t all have the same number of days. The names of the months reveal a former time when there were ten months in the year. September comes from the Latin for seven, October from the Latin for 8, November from the Latin for 9, and December from the Latin for 10. Then there is the problem of leap year, which corrects the fact that a year is 365 1/4 days long, not 365 days.

The system is pretty confusing.

There are other calendars. The one most familiar is the one most commonly used. A lunar calendar has 13 months with 28 days each. That yields a 364-day year, and if followed, means the months rotate slowly around the seasons unless leap days are added.

The organization of our society depends on agreement on how to measure time. We need a shared calendar and a way to count time so we arrive at the same time for meetings. I know that today is Sunday and we will meet for worship at our church at 10 am. Other members of the church will show up at the right time on the right day. The fact that we use a base-seven system for days of the week has its roots in religion. The creation story at the beginning of the book of Genesis in the Bible presents a seven-day cycle: six days for work and one day for rest. If there are reasons for seven instead of six or eight, I do not know them. Seven is the way we’ve been telling the story for millennia.

We’ve kept the seven-day week, but many people work five days with two days off, and there are proposals to go to a four-day work week. Unlike in former times, when many states had blue laws, much business is conducted on Sundays. Many workers are required to keep retail businesses open on Sundays. The Post Office now delivers some packages on Sundays. Not everyone gets the same day off. Millions of people in our country work multiple jobs to make ends meet and don’t get many days off.

I am a morning person. As a result, I prefer standard time. Switching the clock means I can ride my bike earlier in the day. Although it also means it gets dark earlier, I tend to be winding down most evenings and don’t mind. As a morning person, I’ve enjoyed living on the western side of the continent as well. I can make a phone call to a colleague on the East Coast first thing in the morning for me and reach them at mid-morning. I am part of a group of people who live in four time zones who meet over Zoom once a week. The meetings begin and end three hours earlier for me than for those on the East Coast. I prefer to have them earlier. I used to teach in an online program that met from 9 am to noon Eastern time. That meant I had to start at 6 am in my time zone, but I finished the class by 9 am and had the rest of the day for my usual activities. It works for me to be retired in the Pacific time zone, but it probably would have worked equally well in any time zone.

I’m pretty sure I’ll remember to adjust the clocks next week. If I don’t, my phone and watch will keep me from showing up for church an hour early.

The world of politics, especially in the United States, is so filled with dramatic headlines, sudden shifts in direction, and crises that it is hard to maintain focus. The constant stream of new actions tends to dull perceptions. Each shock is greater than the last, but the attention span of leadership at the top is so brief that the news becomes more of a stream of social media outbursts than factual reporting. Sometimes it is impossible to tell the difference between threats and reality.

Inspectors general are removed and fired. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains U.S. citizens. The president and his family reap huge profits from crypto schemes that appear to be bribes. The east wing of the White House is being demolished to make room for a ballroom that will be bigger than the rest of the official residence. Classified information is disclosed. The House of Representatives ceases all business to prevent the disclosure of the Epstein files. National Guard troops are sent into cities where no crises exist. Funding is cut for agencies authorized by Congress from the Department of Education to FEMA. The president orders the Department of Justice to give him millions of dollars. Tariffs come and go and come back again. Trade talks start and stop. Officials are appointed without qualifications. Universities and law firms are threatened. An aircraft carrier is sent to the coast of South America after strikes against private boats kill dozens in what are called, without evidence, drug smuggling operations. The government shuts down, forcing thousands to work without pay, while Senators refuse to negotiate, and members of the House are not convened. Millions face dramatic increases in health care costs. Millions more face losing health care entirely. The list goes on and on and on.

The largest citizen protests in the nation's history make headlines for a few days and are quickly swept off news feeds by more outrageous actions and more presidential social media blasts.

Heads are spinning. We are left not knowing how to react.

Meanwhile, a Canadian baseball team has won the first game of the World Series. Children prepare to celebrate Halloween in costumes inspired by pop culture. Thieves used a truck-mounted ladder to enter the museum’s second story and steal priceless art without being detected. Judy Collins is on a concert tour.

It might be accurate to say that Judy Collins is still on tour. The 86-year-old singer-songwriter continues to entertain and amaze audiences. I was eight years old when she released her first record album, “A Maid of Constant Sorrow.” It was the same year that Bob Dylan’s first album was released. She has released 55 albums, won awards and tributes, written books, toured worldwide, made films, headed a music label, been a social activist, and a keynote speaker. Tomorrow night she is presenting a concert at the Massey Theatre, less than 30 miles from my home. And I have tickets.

I expect that the nearly sold-out theatre will be filled with folks like me, with thinning hair and widening waistlines. I’m not as old as Judy Collins, but I’ve reached the age when most people refer to me as a senior citizen, and I’m not afraid to use the discounts. I receive Social Security and am enrolled in Medicare. And I know the words to the opening lines and choruses of songs by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, and others. I expect to enjoy the concert. I wasn’t tempted to shell out the money for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour when it came to Vancouver, even though it got a lot of attention and caused delays at the border crossings. I don’t think Judy Collins is going to cause a traffic backup in town, but I make no apologies for being drawn to her more gentle folk-style singing.

For most of my life, I have lived far from the venues where big-name musicians perform. And when we lived in Chicago, where there were plenty of star-filled concerts, we often didn’t have the money to purchase tickets. I have been happy listening to music on the radio and have lived through seasons of record albums, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, and streaming. I’ve heard songs so sweet that I’m glad to have been alive at the same time as the artist. I’ve read concert tour reviews and listened to podcasts featuring interviews with artists. I’ve strummed my guitar and sang the same songs that have been performed in huge auditoriums, though not before an audience.

Somehow, one elderly musician appearing on a stage near my home has captured my attention enough for me to look forward to the concert. And the concert has provided me a bit of respite from the confusion and chaos of the stories in my newsfeed.

A couple of days ago, Susan returned from an errand with a gorgeous leaf from a big leaf maple tree. The leaf sported green, yellow, orange, and red. As she handed it to me, she said, “It’s hard to stay grumpy when you find a leaf like this.” She is right, of course. The natural world provides a critical balance to the chaos of government and political discourse. Mountains, trees, oceans, and plains operate on a timescale entirely different from our human rush. Seasons come and seasons go with glory beyond expectation. A single leaf can inspire awe.

We thirst for the balance that a song or a leaf can offer for lives that are too often distracted by the latest headline. Finding that balance can be as easy as taking a walk or listening to the radio. Talking that walk and listening to that song with a friend can enhance the experience beyond measure. I’ve got a date for the concert. We haven’t been dating quite as long as Judy Collins has been performing on stage, but we’ve been married for 52 years and still enjoy experiencing life together. I am grateful for the balance in my life.

There are several routes that I take when riding my bicycle for exercise and exploration near our home. I ride on back roads a lot to avoid dangerous traffic. Some arterial roads in our area have 12-foot lanes with no shoulders and speed limits up to 50 mph. That’s no place to be riding a bike, so I take back roads with slower speed limits to get to roads that have bicycle lanes. The other day, while riding on one of the lightly traveled back roads, I passed three construction zones with flaggers managing one-way traffic. At one flagger, I had to wait about 5 minutes while equipment was moved. I was the only vehicle waiting in my direction, and a car was waiting in the other direction when the lane reopened. There isn’t much traffic on the road. The project causing the traffic disruptions is burying fiber-optic cable to bring Internet service to homes along the road. Currently, folks living in those houses connect to the Internet via cell phone hotspots or Starlink satellite.

The road I was riding my bike on leads to high-end, expensive homes. Million-dollar homes line the route. They have great views of Boundary Bay, the San Juan Islands, and White Rock, BC. Some have access to the sea. I suspect that nearly every property on that road will soon be connected to the fiber-optic cable. According to an article in a local online news source, about 11% of our county's residents do not yet have access to fixed broadband. Less than half of the residents in San Juan County, which consists of Islands, have such access.

Our country has been working hard to provide high-speed internet access to every home. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program is investing over $42 billion in broadband expansion. I don’t know how much, but a small portion of that money helped pay for the half-dozen matched mini-excavators and the fleet of company pickup trucks that lined the road where I was riding my bike.

The nation-wide broadband access program is in what some have dubbed the “last mile” phase. The more rural and remote a home is, the more difficult it is to get it connected to fixed broadband. The terrain of our county presents an additional challenge. Some islands are not served by ferries, and there are also homes on rugged, forested mountain slopes. It would be impossible for private companies to make a profit from providing broadband to some of the more isolated locations. Public utilities and co-ops apply for a combination of state and federal funding to support projects to expand access. However, with the federal government shut down, it is unclear when, if ever, funds will be available to complete access to all locations.

Meanwhile, there is no slowdown in construction to get cable connections to the million-dollar waterfront properties. And, a short bike ride away, our neighborhood is served by two independent broadband providers. We had our choice when we moved into our home. When poor customer service became a problem with the first company we chose, switching to the other company didn’t even involve trenching to our house. Both companies already had a fiber-optic cable run to our home.

While waiting for the construction crews alongside the road and riding my bike around the area, I began to wonder how long this particular technology would remain relevant. After the massive effort to connect all the homes, will fiber-optic connections become obsolete? There is so much obsolescence in contemporary technology that it is a legitimate question. It wasn’t that long ago that connecting homes to telephone landlines by copper wires was a priority, and a massive investment in that infrastructure resulted in phone lines being strung to very remote locations. Our house is connected to a landline, but we haven’t used it. Our cell phones are the way we access telephone service. We don’t have any hard-wired phones left.

Although we use our broadband access every day, I also have a cell phone hotspot that gives me connectivity when I am away from home. My daily journal entries have often been uploaded from campgrounds when we are away from home. The files I am uploading are relatively small, however. My cellphone hotspot can’t handle larger files such as videos. Those who travel in rural, isolated areas and need high-volume broadband often use Starlink satellite service. I think satellite broadband might be a more practical way to connect for some island and mountain homes in our area. Beyond that, however, I wonder whether wireless technologies will continue to expand to the point that the fiber-optic cables for which our nation is investing billions of dollars will fall into disuse in a short time.

My bicycle might last longer than the expensive cables they are burying in the ground. And the bike I ride most of the time is equipped with a battery-powered electric boost system and boasts a digital display. The basic technology is hundreds of years old, but this particular bike will not last as long as my other bicycle, which is a simple mechanical device without a motor.

My thoughts as I ride my bike won’t affect the installation of fiber-optic cable. There is a good chance that I will not be around to witness whatever technology replaces the connections now being put in place. An old guy on a bicycle might be a temporary inconvenience for a flagger whose job is mostly directing cars. Still, I might be providing a bit of entertainment to break up an otherwise tedious job. And I don’t operate in the area of billions of dollars. Others are making the decisions about where that money is getting invested.

I hope that the construction will not disrupt many trees. The trees have been around much longer than we people and our technologies. They have witnessed many changes. And whatever else happens, future generations of living creatures on this planet will depend on trees for oxygen and shade.

Growing up in Montana, I was used to hearing stories of cold temperatures and massive blizzards. In Montana history, we studied the blizzard of 1886. Montana was a place of open cattle ranching at the time, and the summer of 1886 was hot and dry, with grass too short to support the large herds of cattle on the range. The rains finally came in October, and the temperature plummeted. As the rain turned to snow, the ice crusted over what grass was left, making it impossible for the cattle to find food. The ranchers could do nothing to save their livestock. In January, a killer blizzard swept across the state and killed what cattle had not previously starved. Cattle froze standing up. Cattle died in the streets of small towns. Cattle carcasses dotted the landscape. Ranchers went bankrupt. After that winter, ranchers began fencing pastures and growing hay and alfalfa to store feed for winter. In our history classes, we were taught that the winter of 1886 changed Montana ranching from free range to fenced pastures.

The old timers used to tell stories of the winter of '36. The cold set in deep that year. There were stories of temperatures of -60. The depression was already affecting every town in the state, with fuel shortages because money was scarce. Inventories of groceries and animal feed in stores were low. Schools closed. Water pipes froze. Train boilers froze and cracked open. When the chinook winds brought warmer weather in March, it was a false spring, and temperatures went back to -30 in April.

I grew up thinking that the weather was much worse before I was born. That is the way the stories were told in my hometown. “You think it is cold now? Back when I was a kid, it stayed below zero for a solid month!” “You think this snow is deep? I remember when we had to shovel snow to get out of the second-story window of our house!”

That said, I did survive the blizzard of ’69, during which 32 inches of snow fell in a couple of days in late April, and drifts 20 feet deep developed across the southeastern corner of the state.

And there were some memorable blizzards when I lived in South Dakota. The heaviest snows come in the spring. In 2015, we experienced a blizzard on Mother's Day, with more than twenty inches of heavy, wet snow. May blizzards didn’t occur every year, but April Blizzards brought down trees during Holy Week one year. I had to drag trees away from the entrance of the church with my pickup to prepare for Easter services that year.

The big blizzard during our time in Rapid City came in the fall, not the spring, however. In 2013, heavy snow came in a three-day blizzard at the beginning of October. It set records for October snowfall and produced some records for the most snow in a single day. The snow was preceded by freezing rain, and the extra weight brought down trees all around the area. On Friday afternoon, we barely made it home from church, having to drive around one street clogged with cars that couldn’t make it up the hill. When we got to our street, the snow at the bottom of the hill was so deep that our all-wheel drive car couldn’t make it up the hill. With the help of tire chains and neighbors, we managed to get it into a neighbor’s driveway and then walked home. Overnight, we lost two trees in our backyard. By Saturday morning, we were snowed in. At the bottom of our street, not far from where we had left our car, other cars had gotten stuck, and the street was completely blocked. I blew snow, cleared a bit of our driveway, and put tire chains on all four wheels of our 4-wheel drive pickup, but there was nowhere to go with the street blocked. The electricity was off, but we had a wood stove for heat. Church services were cancelled on Sunday. By Monday afternoon, I had cleared the snow from our driveway, and our neighbors had cleared the street enough for us to get our car up to our driveway. We shoveled and blew snow from driveways up and down the street. There wasn’t much else to do. I worked on cutting up the fallen trees in the backyard.

Suffice it to say that I have blizzard stories to tell. I may even tell a few of them this weekend. The forecast calls for the winds to pick up today as a large storm approaches our area. The winds will be accompanied by heavy rain. Forecasters are warning of possible power outages and urban flooding. We’re safe from floods, and our gas fireplace has a pilot light, which means it works when the electricity is off. We’ll be warm, and wind gusts of 40 - 45 mph don’t seem that severe to me. The rain and wind might keep me from riding my bike as much as usual, but we’re not going to get snowed in.

It will snow in the mountains. Mount Baker is expected to add a foot or more of snow. It is snow-capped year-round, but we will notice the snow line descending to lower elevations. The combination of snow in the mountains and heavy rain downstream will cause the rivers to rise. We’ve seen fall flooding since we moved to the area, but this storm follows a dry period, and the reservoirs are all low. Heavy river flooding is not expected.

With any luck, the storm will have passed by Sunday, and folks will be eager to get out to church. I may even hear a few tales of big waves at the beach or a tree that fell into a power line. Some of our friends may have extra cleanup in their yards after the winds. I’ll listen to them report and then begin, “You think that was windy? I remember the October blizzard of ’13 when we were snowed in for three days with no electricity. . .”

Yesterday I wrote an essay about original sin that I did not post in this journal, but posted on my Substack. I have imposed deadlines on myself and my writing for Substack, publishing a prayer each Sunday, an essay each Tuesday, and a poem each Thursday. I started the Substack as an alternative to this journal, and I intended to give up the practice of daily essays and introduce a new website. That is still my plan. The new website has been delayed because I am waiting for a book to be published, which is an adventure in itself. I’m a novice at book publication and so don’t know quite what to expect. I’ve been told that the print and e-book versions of the book will be available online and in bookstores before Christmas. So I have moved back my deadline for the new website from the original date of September 1 to January 1, 2026. The deadlines are all artificial and self-imposed, so I feel free to change them at will. I guess we’ll know when those who read these essays from my website go online and discover the new website.

Lately, I have been posting the same essay in my journal as the one I put on Substack, but yesterday’s essay on IKEA and tariffs somehow didn’t seem to fit the more environmental focus of my Substack. Then, as I rolled my bicycle out for my morning ride, it started raining, and I didn’t feel like riding in the rain, so I came back to my desk and wrote an essay about alienation from Creation as original sin and published it on Substack. The result surprised me. When I checked Substack in the evening, the essay had generated comments. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. People like to talk about religion and religious doctrines more than I anticipate, which is strange because I have been a pastor for more than four decades and have built my career from talking about and teaching Christian faith.

I am not, however, blind to the reality that fewer people are participating in churches. Attendance at church services has fallen pretty consistently over the span of my career. The congregations I served had stable worship participation when I served them, but each experienced a drop in attendance after my term of service. In my retirement, I am often at gatherings of people outside of the church, and I hear a lot of comments about people who are intentionally choosing a life without the regular practices of the Christian community. For a couple of decades, I have encountered people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” I am still not sure what they mean, but it seems to involve a kind of self-selected combination of religious practices, combined with a largely private belief system. Those who identify as “spiritual but not religious” often are unaware of how much they have in common with others who claim the same title. Their practices frequently focus on self-actualization. When asked how they practice their spirituality, they often cite hiking, meditation, yoga, self-help seminars, and retreats.

I have also encountered many people whom I describe as “religious but not spiritual.” These individuals participate in religious institutions, but their participation is often limited to attending church without making a commitment. They describe themselves by saying that they are “not joiners.” They might make small donations, but do not make an annual plan of giving and resist the fundraising efforts of their chosen churches. They prefer entertaining churches, often selecting a church because they like the beat of the music, have theater seating, and impressive sound systems. Church services seem to be performances with an on-stage cast and an audience.

The labels, however, fall short of recognizing some basic things we all share in common. Several 19th and 20th-century scholars have written extensively about religion and religious thinking as being inherent in human existence. In other words, being human means being spiritual according to some definitions. The German sociologist Max Weber wrote about the “Protestant Ethic” and its connection to capitalism. He also explored many religious themes and doctrines without using religious language. A century after his death, his ideas frequently crop up in conversation without him being credited. Weber wrote about the nature of God, about the role of suffering in human life, and the quest to discover one’s true identity. As a theology student reading Weber, I used the language of Christian doctrine to describe his ideas. Ontology is the study of the nature of God. Theodicy is the concept that suffering can be redemptive. Soteriology is a fancy word for salvation or the quest for the ultimate meaning of life.

After the response I received to a rather hastily written essay on sin yesterday, essays on ontology, theodicy, and soteriology might be interesting follow-up ideas. All three can be used to speak about the climate crisis and our relationship with creation.

Although they do not use the word theodicy, there are a lot of environmental scholars who have written extensively about the suffering that is the result of human abuse of the natural world. Human-caused global warming contributes to intense storms, wildfires, and flooding. Climate refugees are forced to move and suffer the consequences of overconsumption and pollution. There are grave injustices caused by ignoring environmental protections. Climate scientists have written of the “long dark” period we have entered as humans in which the survival of the species is no longer assured. Humans have already contributed to unprecedented species extinction and loss of diversity. We may have set in motion conditions that will lead to the extinction of humans as well. I could easily write an essay on environmental theodicy.

However, as was the case when I was a working preacher, I am much more interested in hope than in judgment and condemnation. An essay on ecological soteriology is in order. I believe that rediscovering our connections with the natural order is key to finding our way through the current crisis and discovering new ways to live on this planet.

Perhaps, however, I would do well to learn from Weber and speak of these things without using the theological jargon. After all, I have readers who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. And I find conversation with them to be fascinating and illuminating.

I’ve never been in an IKEA store. I know that they offer furniture, cabinets, and more home decor. Much of what is sold at IKEA is delivered in kit form. Consumers assemble the pieces using screws and cam devices. A few tools, such as a screwdriver and a rubber mallet, are required. I have assembled several pieces of kit furniture, including a bunk bed that our grandson used, a couple of desks and printer stands for church offices, and a few other items. I have friends who purchased kitchen cabinets from IKEA and are pleased with the results after a few frustrations with what they thought were incomplete instructions.

IKEA built its market share in the US on its budget-friendly pricing. Kit furniture could be sold at lower prices than completed furniture. A quick glance at the IKEA website reveals that many of the products sold in their retail stores can be purchased online. There is so much, however, that making a selection might be a challenge.

IKEA was founded in Sweden with the vision of creating a better life for people, regardless of the amount of money they had to spend. The name of the company is an acronym. I and K are the initials of the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, who started as an entrepreneur selling pens and wallets out of his home. E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where he grew up, and A stands for Agunnaryd, a nearby village.

The company started out focusing on inexpensive wooden furniture. However, it has grown to a network of over a thousand suppliers in over 50 countries. Some products are produced in multiple countries. There are major production hubs in China, Poland, Italy, and Germany.

Like other global companies, IKEA considers labor and material costs when determining where to produce its products. Those locations are changed in response to global economic conditions. The global economy also affects where its products are sold.

Several rounds of tariffs have made a challenge to the company for marketing in the US in recent months. There have been times when the company cannot determine which tariffs apply or what the retail cost of an item will be when it is making manufacturing decisions. The result has been a slump in sales. Because the company was in the process of intentionally lowering prices to remain competitive during the economic slowdown, it is difficult to tell the exact impact of the tariffs. Still, U.S. sales have dropped significantly this year.

One company, however, doesn’t paint the entire picture of how the tariffs are impacting the U.S. housing market. It isn’t just furniture and cabinets that are driving lower home sales. Tariffs on construction materials, including steel, copper, and wood, have increased the cost of new construction and remodeling. Home buyers and renovators have faced costs as much as 50% higher than initially estimated. For most buyers, it is the largest purchase of their lives, and for many, the price increases have made it impossible for them to purchase a home.

With an already raging housing crisis driven by low inventory, high interest rates, and high demand, this new round of price increases is shifting the dream of home ownership for many. People who are forced into the rental market become trapped in high rental costs that prevent them from accumulating enough savings to purchase a home.

It isn’t just housing. Automobile dealers are using leasing programs to sell cars. Many U.S. consumers become trapped in a situation where they never own, but only rent. The price of an item no longer matters when all they are able to see is the monthly fee. Those who do not own have no control over costs. It is a form of feudalism.

So far, we have avoided much of the rental dilemma by purchasing used items. In fact, much of the furniture in our house wasn’t even purchased. It was obtained from relatives as they downsized. Well-made furniture can last for multiple generations of use.

We have seen ourselves as priced out of the new car market and have purchased used vehicles. With careful maintenance, we have been able to make our vehicles last for many years. Our “new” car is 14 years old. It is in good shape, and we plan to drive it for many more years. Looking at prices in our area, it is clear that when we need to replace it, we will not be able to afford a vehicle with mileage as low as was the case when we bought that car. Fortunately for us, our mileage is decreasing as we settle into retirement. We no longer need to drive as much as we did earlier in our lives.

Tariffs are imposed to encourage domestic production. However, modern manufacturing is dependent on international markets for raw materials. Even when major manufacturers increase domestic production, they can’t altogether avoid tariff costs. No amount of tariffs will offset the increasing demand for products. The result is higher prices and lower living standards. That was true in the 20th century when isolationism was a factor in a global depression. Faltering economies contribute to the rise of authoritarianism. However, policymakers seem to have a very short memory and resist learning from history.

As we continue a slow process of downsizing, we face the dilemma of what to do with some of our possessions. As our grandchildren become independent and move out of their parents’ homes, they may need furniture. Even IKEA’s prices will likely be too steep. The ability to give them furniture is appealing. However, we have no idea if they will want any of the furniture in our home. It isn’t fancy. It isn’t modern. It is sturdy, however. And, unlike IKEA, it doesn’t take an instruction manual to assemble.

Of course, all of that assumes that our grandchildren will be able to find a place to live independently. They will need more than furniture. We live in unsettling times, and like others, we are unsure of how best to plan for the future.

The other day I purchased a gate latch at a local Tractor Supply store. the clerk scanned a bar code on the package and I opened the payment icon on my watch. I held my watch close to the point of sale terminal on the counter and followed the instructions on the screen. I entered my personal identification number by touching the numbers on a keypad display on the touch screen. Then I used my forefinger to trace my signature in the box on the screen. As I did, I complained a bit to the clerk about the fact that I can’t make my signature look right by dragging my finger on the screen. The clerk responded, “It doesn’t matter. Most people just make a few squiggles.”

It matters to me. I’ve tried to use a consistent signature since I was a child. I was taught that my signature mattered. When I got my first checking account, my father taught me how to write a check and he emphasized that having a consistent signature was important to prevent someone from committing fraud and making unauthorized withdrawals from my account. I practiced by signature on a pad of counter checks that we kept at the shop. Counter checks are a thing of the past, but customers used to be able to fill in the name of their bank and create a legal transfer of money even if they did not have their checkbook with them.

I fashioned by signature in part after my father’s signature. We both have the same middle initial and when I sign my name I make a loop on the front of the H of Huffman that circles my middle initial just like my father did. It is a distinctive feature that is not common. It is also difficult to replicate with my finger on a touchscreen.

Times change. It has been 25 years since then U.S. president Bill Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act into law. For the record he used a pen on paper to sign the act. In those days it was the custom for presidents to sign bills and then hand the pen to supporters who witnessed the signing ceremony. For a quarter of a century people in our country have been able to enter into legal contracts by clicking a box on a computer screen. In numerous cases the courts have ruled that customers have released companies from legal liability by checking a box on a computer.

Not long ago I checked in at a doctor’s office for a routine medical procedure. They had a signature keypad on the counter. As part of the procedure I was asked to sign the keypad using a stylus several times. Each time I asked the receptionist checking me in what I was signing. The receptionist first offered a brief explanation something like, “That is authorizing the doctor to perform the procedure,” or “That is authorizing us to talk to your family members about your condition.” When I asked further the clerk was able to provide me with a printed copy of what I was signing. One of the forms I was asked to sign actually stated that I had received a copy of the document I was signing. If I had not asked, I would not have received the document. Relatives have reported to me being asked to sign electronic keypads at medical facilities where the receptionist or clerk could not provide copies of what they were signing.

There are still a few places where a formal signature is required. I can’t remember the specific forms, but there were a couple of documents involved in the purchase of our house that required ink on paper signatures. There is still a formal signing process at the title company when one commits to a mortgage and transfers title to real estate.

A few months ago we executed new wills, powers of attorney, and advance care documents. There was a formal ceremony in the lawyer’s office with a clerk, two witnesses, my wife and myself. We had been provided copies of each document in advance and been given an opportunity to suggest changes before the signing. At the ceremony we signed multiple copies of the documents and were provided copies of what we had signed. A couple of days later we received photocopies of the signed documents for our files.

Signing ceremonies invite serious reflection. When we sit in an office with witnesses and apply our signatures to paper, we think, “This is important. I need to know what I’m doing. Do I really agree to this?”

I have a few valued books that have been signed by the authors. For some of them, I waited in line clutching the book while the author signed the copies one at a time, asking if there was a dedication or a name the customer wanted to have addressed in the signing. But I have also purchased books from a bookstore that were presaged by the author. I have the signed copy but I never actually met the author.

It seems, however, that signatures are going by the wayside. I’ve watched as people just make a few squiggles on keypads that don’t seem to have any meaning. Once, when I was struggling to sign for a purchase, a clerk said, you can just drag you finger across the screen and reached over and made a straight line on the screen, which accepted it as my signature. I didn’t complain because I wanted to make the purchase, but I used my online banking to check all of my transactions every day for a couple of weeks because the experience left me not trusting the process. The transaction that had been made without me actually signing went through with no problem. I know that there is no longer a person at the bank who compares signatures, but I still want my signature to mean something.

When I have to e-sign on my computer I don’t use the stock signatures that the software offers. Instead I work to create my own signature by moving my finger on the touchpad of the computer. Sometimes it takes me several attempts to get the signature to look the way I want. There are some programs that retain my electronic signature and auto fill it onto computer forms.

Our oldest grandson has his own checking account at the bank, but he doesn’t have any checks. He will probably never use checks. He sees his plastic debt card as the key to making purchases. He knows how to make online purchases with the card. He will likely go through his life without ever thinking about his signature. It makes me sad to realize the loss of signatures as important parts of legal transactions.

Meanwhile, just like I did with the old counter checks when I got my first checking account, I keep practicing my signature. I’m getting better at signing with my finger on a touchpad. Sometimes the screen display even looks like my signature.

One summer at church camp, we played the largest game of Capture the Flag that I’ve ever seen. The way I remember it, all of the kids at that particular camp participated with the counselors serving as instructors and judges. The rules of the game are pretty simple. At our camp, there was a large field that was free of trees but had a few obstacles, such as rocks. It was mostly grass, however. The way I remember it, we had at least 50 campers playing. We were divided into two teams, and a center line defined the territory of the teams. On each side of the playing field, there was an area designated as the flag zone and another area designated as the jail.

The goal was to capture the flag of the opposing team and return with the flag to one’s own side of the field without being tagged. If you were tagged, you had to go to jail. A teammate could free a player who was in jail if that teammate ran to the jail, tagged the jailed player, and the two ran back into their own territory without either being tagged by an opposing player. The rescuer rescues teammates one at a time. The flag zone was a safe area, and no one could be tagged in that area. If an opposing team member was in the flag zone, the defenders had to wait until that player left the zone to dash to their own side of the field before tagging that player.

I don’t know how long the game lasted. It seemed at the time to last a long time. I never got near the opposing team’s flag. We had a fast runner on our side who was good at rescuing those of us who ended up in the other team’s jail, and I think I was captured and freed several times. The game was pretty chaotic, and it was hard to remember who was on which team. I tried to use that confusion and stroll toward the flag, but got tagged on each try when I got close. Eventually, one of the teams succeeded in capturing their opponents’ flag and making it back to their own side, and the game concluded. I can’t remember which team won. I wasn’t the biggest or fastest at camp, and I wasn’t a huge fan of field games. In my memory, the game was moderately fun but not the best part of camp.

We were recalling the game and talking about it in the buildup to the No Kings rallies that were held yesterday. In June, organizers mobilized more than 5 million people at rallies in all 50 states to protest authoritarian moves by the president, such as detentions of citizens and immigrants by often-masked and unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, aggressive slashing of environmental and educational programs authorized by Congress, aggressive gerrymandering to manipulate elections, and defying court orders. The June rallies were peaceful. Speakers at the one we attended were careful to urge participants to be peaceful and not engage with counter-protestors. We didn’t see any counterprotestors and were surrounded by like-minded people at that event.

Since June, however, the administration has doubled down on its authoritarian tactics, recruiting and deploying additional ICE agents without proper training, sending National Guard troops into cities against the wishes of Mayors and Governors, firing federal workers despite court orders not to do so, and shutting down the House of Representatives to avoid swearing in a duly elected member.

In anticipation of yesterday’s rallies, Republican leaders, including the president and the Speaker of the House, called the rallies a “hate America rally.” They spoke of participants as “antifa people” as if antifa were a political organization. It isn’t. It is an acronym for “anti-fascist.” They tried to portray the rallies as violent events. On that score, they were wrong.

The numbers yesterday exceeded those in June, and there have been no reports of significant violence. Over 100,000 people participated in rallies across all five boroughs in New York City without a single arrest. News organizations were able to interview participants from both political parties, including veterans who emphasized that military service involves an oath to the Constitution and not to any leader.

Over 2,600 rallies in cities and towns across the nation were carried out without violence or arrests. The attempt at portraying the rallies as hate events did not succeed. News coverage of the events showed many people carrying the US flag. Marches in major cities were led by people carrying the flag. Others carried copies of the Constitution and signs with quotes from the Constitution. Looking at the news coverage following the event, the rally participants succeeded in capturing the flag.

Of course, there will be others who claim to have captured the flag. There will be plenty of flags in the background of the news conferences of administration and congressional leaders. There will be pictures shown of protestors carrying the flag upside down by those who may not know that displaying the flag in such a manner is part of the official flag etiquette for times of distress.

When I was a high school student, I was criticized for participating in a rally of people opposed to the War in Vietnam. I wrote a letter to the editor defending my action as that of a loyal citizen engaging in lawful action to influence the opinions of others. The paper ran my letter under the title, “I protest because I love America.”

It seems to me that there were a lot of people engaging in protests who love this country and who see their actions as defending democracy. The right to assemble for peaceful protest is guaranteed by the first amendment of the US constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The people have peaceably assembled and petitioned the Government for redress of grievances. It appears they have captured the flag.

I’m 72 years old and I still haven’t figured out how to consume media. I’ve never been a big fan of television. At one point years ago, friends gave us a television set because they thought that we needed to have one. I watched reruns of M*A*S*H in the middle of the night when I was up with our daughter, who wasn’t a very good sleeper when she was tiny. I am easily distracted by television, so I have never used television as background, as is the case in some homes where I have visited. As a pastor, I was distracted by the constant television in nursing homes and care centers, and often turned the sets off when I visited folks in those locations. After our children grew up and moved into their own homes, we haven’t had a television in our house.

The Internet, however, has blurred the line between computers and televisions. I have two 32” monitors at my desk, and they are large enough to watch videos for entertainment. When I am writing, I enjoy being able to have an internet browser open on one monitor and the document I’m writing on another. Sometimes I compare two drafts of the same document. When I am on a video conference, I can devote one monitor to the conference and have documents open on the other one for easy reference.

I watch YouTube videos for entertainment. I don’t subscribe to YouTube channels, except for our grandson’s channel, and he doesn’t post regularly. However, there are several entertainers whose regular posts I often watch. I don’t think it is much different from folks who watch television for entertainment.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people who have giant televisions in their homes. They would consider my computer monitors to be small. And it is common for people to have televisions connected to fancy sound systems that rival commercial theaters. They can experience the art of content creators differently from how I do with my computer.

I watch a few news programs on the Internet, and from time to time, I watch monologues from late-night entertainers, though I’m not a regular fan of any of them. I prefer to get my news from reading, and there are several online news sources that I check regularly. I scan headlines in media like the New York Times and Washington Post most days and read a few articles from time to time. My favorite news sites at the moment are CBC, BBC, and NPR.

One of the reasons I shy away from the late-night entertainers is that I’m put off by the frequent use of what I consider to be offensive language. Mostly, it is the occasional curse word and pretty mild compared with contemporary movies.

Despite my choices, however, it is clear that social norms have shifted when it comes to language and the way people talk about others. Political candidates don’t shy away from cursing. Even dropping an occasional f-bomb doesn’t garner much media attention. And sometimes politicians use that language to generate press attention.

So I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that there are internet chat groups where racist and homophobic comments are not only posted, but encouraged. The Young Republican chats exposed by Politico in the past week are genuinely awful. Some politicians are dismissing praise for Hitler, comments about African Americans as monkeys, and violent threats as simply the indiscretion of young people. Aside from the fact that you have to be my age to see people in their 40s as “young,” the language is offensive, and dismissing such language is precisely the wrong response from adults. As a youth minister, I intervened and corrected the youth who made racist or sexist jokes. I tried to create a culture of caring for others.

Politicians, however, seem not only to tolerate but also encourage insults about gay and Black people. Praise for Hitler and the devices of anti-semitic genocide are grossly offensive to me, but seemingly easily dismissed by politicians in press conferences.

Although acceptance of offensive language seems rampant among right-wing commentators and Republican politicians, it is not confined to those on the red side of the aisle. Jay Jones, Democratic candidate for Attorney General in Virginia, texted about a political opponent deserving “two bullets.” A direct threat of violence should never be considered acceptable.

The problem for society is much deeper than the political scandal of the day, however. The second term of the current president is destroying social norms. When the leader at the top mocks those with disabilities, makes disparaging comments about women, GLBTQ folk, and racial and ethnic groups, it is clear that social norms are not just shifting. They are being destroyed. It isn’t just one chat group exposed by Politico. There are dozens of influencers who are feeding hate speech. And it is a direct reflection of a president who has shattered civility, called for violence against his opponents, ordered military force against protestors, targeted journalists, and regularly abused people because of their race, nationality, disability, and sex. Beyond that, he demands constant expressions of loyalty from those around him. They are encouraged to go even further than he has. Young Republicans speaking positively about gas chambers is not an anomaly. It is the direct result of a culture that demands loyalty above personal responsibility.

I confess that my response to this has been to avoid it. I don’t post to chat groups very often, and when I do, I am cautious about my choice of words. When I encounter offensive speech online, I tend to avoid returning to those sites. I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but when I do, I find I click the “see less of this type of post” frequently. While I am quick to confront those who use offensive language in face-to-face encounters, I tend to look away when I find such language online.

I continue to struggle with media. I hope I never get as comfortable with it as some of our politicians seem to have become.

I’m not much of a sports fan. I often don’t pay attention to baseball until the championship series are being played. I’ve got a few favorite teams, but I’ve only attended a couple of Major League Baseball games in person. I can’t quote the statistics or even name many of the players. I’m even more ignorant about World Cup Soccer. I’ve watched a few games on television and I’ve seen the loyalty of Costa Rican fans.

I do know a bit about geography. As a result, I want to point out a bit of trivia that amuses me, even if it has little to do with the games and the players.

Trivia point number one: Toronto is south of Seattle. The American League Championship Series is currently tied two games to two. The first two games were played in Toronto, and Seattle won both of them. The next two were played in Seattle, and Toronto won them. The next game will be this afternoon in Seattle. The sixth game will be back in Toronto on Sunday, and if needed, the seventh game will be on Monday in Toronto. While the 49th parallel is the boundary between Canada and the US in the west, the border dips south through the Great Lakes, reaching its southernmost point at Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. Then it wanders northeast to Toronto, which is on the border next to New York State. Toronto is south of Rapid City, South Dakota, where we lived for 25 years. Travel between the two game sites is mostly east-west. If you were driving, it would be a 2,600-mile trip.

There are quite a few Toronto Blue Jays fans who have traveled south to watch the games in Seattle, and more will be there today. There is a bit of national pride involved, and some folks from Vancouver, BC, are ardent Blue Jays fans. Seattle still has the home-field advantage for today’s game, but that hasn’t been a factor in the series so far. There will, however, be a good section of Blue Jays fans in the stands.

Trivia point number two: There are no games of the 2026 FIFA World Cup scheduled for Boston. Gillette Stadium, host of some of the games, is in Foxborough, which is a half-hour drive south of the city. The location is of interest because earlier this week, the U.S. president threatened to force World Cup soccer games scheduled for Boston to move to another location, citing Mayor Wu as responsible for unspecified issues. “Your mayor is not good,” he told reporters. So, for the record, the stadium chosen by FIFA, the organization that selects the cities for World Cup games, is in a town that does not have a mayor and is run by a town manager and a five-person board. Politicians, however, frequently play loose with geography. The current president seems to have a bit less understanding of geography than some other politicians.

The president, however, is not restrained by facts. His reason for sending federal troops to Portland, Oregon, to quell protests appears to be based on five-year-old footage of Black Lives Matter protests that were replayed by Fox television. The people who live in Portland don’t think their city is a “hellhole.” My sister is a city bus driver in Portland. She goes to and from work and gets through her days without any problems, other than a few traffic snarls and an occasional ice storm. Portland is not a dangerous city, despite the presence of federal troops who have been met by people in Halloween costumes.

It is unclear whether or not the President has the political clout to change the venue of a World Cup game. Technically, no national leader has that power. On the other hand, Gianni Infantino, president of the governing body of FIFA, has a friendship with the President and was in the wings at the recent Gaza peace summit in Egypt. It is too late to change the venue of the games. It takes years of preparation to host those games. We live between two other cities slated to host the 2026 games, Vancouver, BC, and Seattle, WA. Hotel rooms and vacation rentals are already booked for the time around the World Cup matches. Soccer fans are dedicated to their teams and willing to travel and spend significant money to be present for the games.

Although it is not a point of geography, it might be of interest to note that the President doesn’t have a perfect track record in sports administration. Forty years ago, he was the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the old USFL. He convinced fellow team owners to shift their schedule from springtime, where they had an audience, to the fall, where they would compete with the NFL. The gambit failed, and the USFL imploded. He did, however, forge a friendship with one of the players on his team, Herschel Walker, whom he has now appointed to be the US ambassador to the Bahamas. I’m pretty sure that the President knows where the Bahamas are. I don’t know if the ambassador knows that the Bahamas is a sovereign country and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, having gained its independence in the early 1970s. The Bahamas, by the way, have never before qualified to play in the World Cup. Their men’s team has already been eliminated from the qualification process for the 2026 cup.

Soccer is confusing to a person who isn’t a sports fan. It’s easier for me to keep track of baseball. My next-door neighbor is an ardent Seattle Mariners fan. I’ve been cheering for the Blue Jays. A team from outside the US winning the World Series would make it seem like it was a World Series and not just a national championship. My neighbor and I get along just fine. We don’t argue and share plenty of laughs. However the series ends, we’ll still be neighbors. Who knows, we may even be cheering for the same team in the World Series.

Last night, I was listening to CBC radio and heard an interview with a woman who initially had trouble filing an insurance claim for damage to her car. When she called an insurance adjuster to report that the windshield and side mirror of her car had been destroyed when she hit an animal, the adjuster asked her what animal she had hit. She reported that a fish had caused the damage. When the accident first occurred, she thought a rock had hit her car, but when she and her husband surveyed the damage, it was clear that it had been caused by hitting a fish. There were imprints of scales in the windshield and remains of a fish on the wipers and other parts of the car.

Hitting a fish with a car is a rare occurrence, and the adjuster at first told the woman that her claim could not be honored. The adjuster said that the wildlife collision claim was for cases when cars hit deer, elk, or moose. There was a provision in the insurance to cover striking a bear, but no mention of hitting a fish. However, when the woman consulted her local insurance agent, the agent was able to speak to a supervisor, and the insurance company is going to cover the car repairs.

After news of the incident got out, she learned from a neighbor who had once found the remains of a fish in the rain gutter of his home. The neighbor had previously seen an osprey drop a fish and was sure that a similar incident had occurred to get the fish to his roof. Ospreys are known to catch fish that are large enough that they make it difficult for the birds to fly. Occasionally, they will release the fish and go back for a smaller meal. However, ospreys migrate, and there were no ospreys in the area at the time the fish hit the windshield.

The current theory is that an eagle must have been the one that dropped the fish. There are numerous bald eagles in the area, and eagles are good at catching fish. Whatever dropped the fish, there were no injuries except to the fish itself. The insurance company paid the claim, the woman got a new windshield and mirror, and she has a great story to tell for years to come.

Have others experienced falling fish while driving? I have watched eagles fishing in the bay while riding my bike. Once I saw a bald eagle with a fish in its talons fly overhead to a nest high in a Douglas fir tree. It never occurred to me that an eagle might drop a fish. Eagles fly high enough that a dropped fish might reach terminal velocity by the time it hits a car or a bicycle. I wear a helmet when I ride my bike, but I don’t know if I could take a fish to the head without crashing.

I have no plans to change my bike riding patterns, however. I’m not really afraid of being hit by a falling fish. Other dangers cause me more alarm. When I ride my bike to the farm, one of the roads I take is a two-lane road with a 50 mph speed limit. The road has a 3-foot bike lane and signs warning drivers of the presence of bikes. I have a rear-view mirror on the left side of my bike, so I can see cars and trucks approaching behind me. You might think that the scariest vehicles would be the big semi trucks. Yesterday, multiple dump trucks with dump trailers were hauling dirt from a construction site. However, they were no problem for me riding my bike. I could see the drivers pulling into the other lane to pass me, and I could hear their tires on the rumble strips in the road as they did so. The vehicle that really gave me a scare was a pickup truck pulling a dump trailer. I heard tires on the rumble strips and assumed that it was crossing into the oncoming lane to pass me. However, the rumble was the trailer tires crossing into the bike lane. It missed me by what seemed to be only a foot or so. As it went down the road, I noticed that the trailer was from a rental company and that it was wider than the pickup that was pulling it. Glad it had missed me, I rode right on the outside line of the bike lane for the rest of my trip.

Rental trailers aren’t the only vehicles whose drivers don’t seem to know how big they are. The worst offenders are large RVs. Recreational Vehicles do not require a commercial driver’s license in Washington, regardless of their size. A 40-foot three-axle trailer pulled by a semi-tractor is a recreational vehicle. A converted commercial bus is a recreational vehicle. And some of those vehicles are driven by drivers who don’t seem up to the task of managing such a large vehicle safely.

The driving lanes on the road where I was riding my bike are 12 feet wide. I suspect that the trailer that crossed into the bike lane was 8 feet wide, about the same width as the mirrors on the pickup pulling it. That means there is room for two feet on each side of the trailer when it is pulled down the road. I’m aware of how it works because our camp trailer is 8’ wide and I pull it on that road. It takes awareness and skill because some bridges on other roads in our county have 11-foot lanes. A driver has to be precise to stay in the correct lane. Driving directly into the sun or a bit of fog can result in an even bigger challenge. Vehicles, however, have brakes. One option when approaching a narrow spot, or a bicycle in the bike lane, is to slow down. That option often isn’t the one chosen by many drivers.

I hope that they don’t get a fish falling on their windshield. Some of these drivers probably would lose control and wander out of their lane if that happened.

For the last few days, we have been able to see the commercial trollers going back and forth just outside of our bay. The coho salmon are running, and fishers are putting in long hours harvesting the fish. Over six million coho salmon are harvested from the North Pacific each year. About 3/4 of the harvest is by US fishers, with Russian fishers harvesting the remaining 1/4. Alaskan fishers catch the highest numbers of coho salmon. Gill nets, seine fishing, and trolling catch cohos. They are also favorites of sport fishers. They give up a great fight when caught on light tackle. Fly fishers prize cohos caught in both salt and fresh water.

The commercial boats are fishing close to our bay because coho salmon school in shallow water. Just before entering the freshwater streams, the fish become very aggressive, chasing bait and lures. Those traits also make the coho a popular fish for sport fishers. Cohos average between 7 and 11 pounds, but there are occasional fish that are much bigger. A mature coho can reach up to 35 pounds. A fish bigger than 30 pounds of fly tackle is an exhausting battle for the fisher.

Salmon have been the primary food source for Coast Salish people since time immemorial. During the runs, they catch and dry the fish to preserve them for later use. Salmon were so important to the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest that they agreed to treaties ceding their land in exchange for maintaining their fishing rights. Because of the traditions of indigenous fishers and their hard-fought battles to maintain their rights, we try to purchase all of our salmon and other fish from the Lummi tribal market, which is close to our home.

Humans, however, are not the only ones who feast on salmon. Seeing the trollers in the outer bay, I keep my eyes peeled for the eagles in the inner bay. They will often perch in a treetop near the water or occasionally on a post sticking up in the water. An eagle will make a dive from flight when it sees the silver of the fish flash in the sunlight. Seeing one catch a fish is a dramatic and awe-inspiring joy.

The southern resident orca pods also survive on salmon. While some pods of orcas eat other marine mammals, the southern resident pods are fish eaters. They have been in decline since the settlement. Dams on the rivers have prevented salmon from reaching their spawning grounds and decreased their population. Fishing by humans has further reduced the salmon population. Pollution has also contributed to the decline in the number of salmon. When the population of salmon decreases, so does the population of orcas. Only 74 southern resident orcas remain, according to the latest count by the Center for Whale Research. Compared with the pods of Biggs orcas that eat seals and other marine mammals, the southern residents produce very few calves and have a high rate of infant mortality. Fewer calves and higher mortality are signs of poor health of mothers. When mothers don’t get enough food, fewer calves survive. As the pods decrease in numbers, inbreeding occurs, which also contributes to poor health for calves.

One of the ways of distinguishing a tourist from a local in our part of the world is to have a conversation about salmon. When we lived away from the coast, I would occasionally purchase frozen salmon. Other times, fresh salmon would also be available at a higher price. For a very short time, when we were living in Idaho, Albertsons Grocery stores offered salmon at a loss as part of a competition aimed at Fred Meyer's stores. My taste for salmon went up at that time.

Here, however, distinction is made between the different kinds of salmon. Pinks are the most common and among the smallest of Pacific salmon. People catch them by fishing from the banks of local rivers and streams. Chums are also smaller fish, sometimes called “dog salmon” or “keta salmon.” Chums have pale flesh compared to other species. Sockeyes have the reddest coloring and the most vibrant flavor. Coho salmon, also known as “silvers,” have a more delicate texture. The largest salmon, Chinook, also known as “king,” is probably the fattiest of all salmon and has a rich flavor. Then, if you want to get technical, you can occasionally find someone around here who might call steelheads salmon. They aren’t. Steelheads are an ocean-going trout. The comparison sticks because their lifecycle is similar to that of a salmon. They are born in fresh water, grow to adulthood in saltwater, and return to fresh water to spawn three or four years later. Some cutthroat also have ocean-going lifecycles. If you ask a local how many types of salmon there are, you might get either 5 or 6 as your answer.

Despite the preference of many people who live in the area, I generally do not purchase king salmon, preferring coho. Kings are the preferred food of the resident orca pods. I know that my consumption does not affect the number or types of fish harvested. The fishery is tightly controlled, with treaties and regulations governing the amount of harvest for human consumption. Still, I can enjoy a nutritious and tasty meal of salmon without feeling like I’m competing with a struggling mother orca who is nutritionally deprived.

One of the indulgences of this stage of my life is smoked salmon. It is a wonderful treat, and I often have a bit of it on hand for lunches and snacking. I get mine from the Lummi fish market, processed the traditional way over a cedar fire. Although I am an immigrant and a newcomer to this part of the world, I am connecting with the people who have long made their homes here through their gracious sharing of traditional food. I’m even becoming a bit of a snob by choosing what kind of salmon I’m enjoying.

In the early 1990s, I was living in Boise, Idaho, where a group of volunteers was working to establish an organization to build homes for people in need following the model developed by Habitat for Humanity. The organization now known as Treasure Valley Habitat for Humanity was initially called Boise Valley Habitat for Humanity. While raising funds for its first house, the group attracted Millard and Linda Fuller, who were part of the founding of Habitat for Humanity. Millard was an inspirational speaker who helped provide the momentum needed for the completion of the first Boise Habitat for Humanity home. He told the story of how he and Linda, after achieving financial success early in their lives, were moved to give away their possessions and start life over at Koinonia Farm, a community farm near Americus, Georgia, founded by Clarence Jordan. From there, the Fullers spent three years in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, organizing local people to build affordable homes without profit and providing homeowners with interest-free loans to own them. Millard called the program “Biblical Economics.” Visiting after his presentation, someone asked him what he had done to become wealthy early in life. The answer was cookbooks, specifically church cookbooks. As a college student, he began publishing cookbooks for churches. Churches would collect recipes from members, which he would organize, print, and bind into books to sell as fundraising items. By employing college students, he was able to keep labor costs low and squeeze a bit of profit from each cookbook sold. He was a self-made millionaire before he turned 30.

I don’t know the details of how Millard Fuller’s cookbook printing business worked, or even how much money he accumulated. But I do know the power of recipes in the life of a congregation. For all of my adult life, I have struggled with my tendency to overeat and gain weight. Sometimes I joke about that struggle, saying, “When you attend church potluck meals as part of your job, it is hard not to overeat.” Of course, it is silly to blame church buffets for my health habits, but people do understand the appeal of a potluck meal.

Looking back, it is hard to remember specific meals shared in the congregations I served, but I have attended hundreds of funeral lunches over the past five decades. As a pastor at a funeral lunch, I was usually near the end of the line, having greeted the mourners. Sometimes the dishes on the serving table were getting nearly empty when I passed through the line. By that time, I was usually getting pretty tired, having worked hard to lead a meaningful funeral service and provide care to a grieving community. A pastor, however, enjoys certain privileges. There would be times after the mourners had left the church and the funeral lunch dishes had been washed and put away, that I would return to my office to find a plate with a few sweets on my usually messy desk. Dona would have saved a few of her molasses cookies and left them for me, or there would be a couple of Lois’ lemon bars or a delicious oatmeal-raisin cookie. Over the years, I collected the recipes for many of those treats.

There are a half dozen well-used and food-stained church cookbooks on the shelf in our kitchen. A few of them have some extra recipes hand-penned at the back. Some of them have commentary written in the margins of the recipes. Anyone who has tried to replicate the treats from church potlucks knows that the original cooks had tricks of preparation that don’t show up in recipes. A story I have often repeated is of a toddler who asked his mother to bake the cookies he had enjoyed at their neighbor’s home. He couldn’t pronounce Phyllis’s name, so he called the neighbor Fifi. His mother obtained the recipe from the neighbor, and the boy eagerly waited as she mixed and baked the cookies. When they had cooled, he eagerly took a cookie and bit into it. With a serious expression on his face, he said to his mother, “Mom, Fifi tricked you!”

There are recipes for beloved foods that don’t have all of the information. And there are foods whose recipes never end up in the church cookbooks. For years, when Christmas was nearing, the church office would have a plate of cookies that included Mavis’ rum balls. I don’t know the recipe, but I used to theorize that Mavis didn’t drink hardly any alcohol and only purchased rum once a year when it was time to make Christmas cookies. Since she didn’t drink rum, she didn’t want to waste it and added a bit extra to the recipe. I don’t think one would want to drive a car or operate heavy machinery after eating several of Mavis’ rum balls. The chatter in the church office got a bit louder with a bit more laughter when Mavis arrived with her plate of Christmas cookies every year.

Another church member once confided in me that while other bakers knew to soak raisins before making oatmeal cookies, the real trick was to soak them in brandy instead of warm water. That detail is not mentioned in the cookie recipe printed in the church cookbook.

Another privilege of being a pastor is that the collection of recipes is for me a collection of memories. I not only remember the foods, but the people who prepared them. I not only remember the funeral lunches with Dona’s molasses cookies and Lois’ lemon bars. I remember the funerals for those women and the memories that their recipes invoke.

Boise Valley Habitat for Humanity saw the first family move into one of its homes in February of the year that I moved from Boise to Rapid City, South Dakota, where I was honored to be part of the founding of another Habitat for Humanity affiliate. As we worked on building homes, we were served meals prepared by volunteers. Millard and Linda Fuller may have given up the business of publishing church cookbooks, but they founded a fantastic organization of volunteers who continue to share good food and recipes. Whenever I taste good food, I remember the generous people and the love with which they prepared those meals.

I’m pretty good at remembering things that I memorized as an elementary student. I regularly recite Psalm 23, and I can play my piano recital piece from the fourth grade. But I only know the opening couplet of the children’s poem by Jean Marzollo, which leads me to believe that I never memorized the entire poem. The opening couplet, however, was sufficient to remember the year Christopher Columbus arrived in Central America, likely a question asked on history exams. Here is the poem as it appears on the Poem Analysis website:

In 1492 – Columbus sailed the ocean blue
Jean Marzollo

In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.

He sailed by night; he sailed by day;
He used the stars to find his way.

A compass also helped him know
How to find the way to go.

Ninety sailors were on board;
Some men worked while others snored.

Then the workers went to sleep;
And others watched the ocean deep.

Day after day they looked for land;
They dreamed of trees and rocks and sand.

October twelve their dream came true,
You never saw a happier crew!

"Indians! Indians!" Columbus cried;
His heart was filled with joyful pride.

But "India" the land was not;
It was the Bahamas, and it was hot.

The Arakawa natives were very nice;
They gave the sailors food and spice.

Columbus sailed on to find some gold
To bring back home, as he'd been told.

He made the trip again and again,
Trading gold to bring to Spain.

The first American? No, not quite.
But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.

The romanticized version of history presented by the poem ignores much of the authentic history of Columbus. Describing the four voyages he made to the Americas as “trading gold” is not an accurate description of the exploitation, enslavement, and murder of indigenous Americans that were part of the seizures of God that were part of the beginning of the colonization of the Americas. Born in Italy, Columbus sailed under the flag of Spain. He explored parts of the Caribbean, the coasts of Central and South America, and the Gulf of Mexico. His treatment of indigenous people was brutal. He was removed from his post as governor of Hispaniola due to his harsh treatment of the people.

What followed was catastrophic for the people who had lived in the Americas since time immemorial. European exploration and colonization resulted in the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas. For indigenous Americans, violence, exploitation, enslavement, harsh labor, and diseases, including smallpox, resulted in massive declines in population.

It wasn’t as simple as a children’s poem. Many states and local governments have taken action to address the complexity of history.

In the late 1980s, Governor George Mickelson urged the South Dakota legislature to seek reconciliation between Native Americans and whites. The history of relations between the two races in South Dakota was filled with violence and injustice. In response, the South Dakota legislature declared 1990 a “Year of Reconciliation.” It also renamed Columbus Day to Native American Day. The measure passed unanimously. That’s correct. There were no votes against the measure in the legislature. In South Dakota, it is Native American Day, not Columbus Day.

Over a dozen states and 130 local governments have chosen not to celebrate Columbus Day or to replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In Bellingham, the city just south of where we live, the day is officially observed as Coast Salish People’s Day.

In 2021, President Biden was the first U.S. President to issue a formal presidential proclamation for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, designating the day to honor Native Americans and their histories and cultures. President Trump, however, has issued a Columbus Day proclamation, saying he is “reclaiming” the explorer’s legacy. It seems that his education and understanding of American history are still at the level of a children’s poem. Romanticizing Columbus and calling him “the Original American Hero” does not change the harsh, brutal history of colonization. It does not erase the massacres and enslavement. It does not eliminate the rich cultural and spiritual histories of the people who lived on this continent before what he calls “discovery.”

Despite the rhetoric coming from the White House, learning the truth of history is not an “attack on history.” Instead, the way history was taught when the president was a child was inaccurate and misleading. Embracing those teachings is ignoring the truth. Furthermore, a presidential proclamation does not erase the work of reconciliation by many people, nor does it change the historical fact of the South Dakota legislature’s unanimous decision to rename the day, or the fact that other states and cities have followed that example.

Our indigenous brothers and sisters have known centuries of exploitation and oppression. While they view the actions of the sitting president as a setback, they understand that the struggle for freedom, justice, and historical truth is a long journey. As my friend Matt Iron Hawk said, “We’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.”

Today is a day of mixed celebration for our country. Some will observe Columbus Day. Some will observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The complexity of celebrations reflects the complexity of our history.

The simple children’s poem recognizes that Columbus didn’t understand where he had gone and that he gave the wrong name to the people he encountered. “India, the land was not,” it says. The poem acknowledges the hospitality of the people who first greeted Columbus, though it does not mention his cruelty and murder in the process of extracting wealth to take back to Spain.

Today is a day to reflect on history, consider how it is taught, and understand how it is both understood and misunderstood in our country. It is a good day for respectful debate about the stories of natives and settlers and the complex relationship of colonization. It is a day to go beyond the children’s poem, perhaps even a day for a new poem.

A colleague once commented about the Ten Commandments, “If people can’t observe the Sabbath, we haven’t got a chance at stopping murder, adultery, stealing, and lying.” I don’t fully share that perspective, but I do confess that I have struggled with Sabbath for most of my life. And I worked as a pastor for my entire career. Obviously, if the only measure of Sabbath-keeping is attending worship, I’ve got a pretty good track record in that department. Even though I am now retired, I don’t often miss worship. The commandment, however, doesn’t define Sabbath in terms of church attendance. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work . . .” (Exodus 20:8-10a)

Pastors work on Sundays. Leading worship is work. For most of my career, I observed Monday as a day of rest and did not go into the office unless there was an emergency. There were times when circumstances required me to work on my day off, but that happens to many workers. And like most people I know, I took care of home chores and family obligations on my day off. As a pastor, I had the luxury of a flexible schedule. I took time during a workday for family obligations or personal needs. I didn’t have to cram all of my medical and dental appointments onto my day off. Furthermore, I truly enjoyed the work I did, so it was hard for me to see working as a restriction. I wanted to do the work for which I was paid.

Now that I am retired, it is even more challenging to know what it means to keep the Sabbath. I rest every day as much as I want. I attend worship, but that does not consume an entire day. I occasionally lead worship, which involves more hours of preparation than when I was serving as a pastor and filling the pulpit every week. Still, it is hard for me to make the distinction between work and rest. Since I no longer define work by receiving a paycheck and no longer designate a single day as my day off, I’m not sure how best to observe the Sabbath.

This journal is an example. I write every day. I don’t take a day off from writing. I developed this discipline as a spiritual practice, but also to teach myself to write. I started publishing my journal online in 2007, and I have not missed a single day since then. I don’t see it as a burden. I don’t feel it as an obligation. It is something that I enjoy. I have wondered how much longer I will keep it up. I do have plans to end the daily publication on my website soon when I unveil a new one, but I intend to keep writing every day. I have already started publishing my writing in a different format on Substack.

So what does it mean for me to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy? I justify my writing with my belief that writing can be a sacred activity. I write prayers every week. There are many occasions when I pray spontaneously. I am often called upon to offer a public prayer, and I try never to refuse a request to pray. But I also plan prayers, write them out word for word. Precise language is essential, and writing allows me to use language carefully.

As a working pastor, I wrote out weddings and funerals word for word before I led those services. I knew that they were once-in-a-lifetime events for those participating, and I wanted to be careful not to misspeak. Although I learned to preach without notes, it was a discipline that took me years to develop, and every sermon requires plenty of preparation work.

Not long ago, I was talking with a friend who had a career as a teacher and school administrator. He told me of a time shortly after he had been hired as superintendent of a school in a very conservative community. He was mowing his lawn on a Sunday afternoon after having attended worship in the morning. A member of the school board advised him that he should not do such a thing. Mowing the lawn was work, and he should not work on the Sabbath. It wasn’t a joke. The school board member was serious. In that member’s church, which was the largest in the town, there were specific rules establishing what could and what could not be done on Sundays.

With my friend, I agree that sabbath keeping is not about following rules. And it is not about imposing rules on someone else. Keeping a day holy is much deeper than following a set of rules. I would even observe that lawn care and yard work could be seen as a holy activity. Caring for creation is one of the first commandments God gave to humans. Spending time outdoors has always been meaningful for me. There is holiness in just being outdoors.

I do not live in regret. The balance of work and rest that I discovered during my working years seems to me to have been faithful. I did take time for my family. I did take time for prayer and study. And I developed habits that continue now that I am retired. Still, I don’t think that I could single out one day of the week and say that any particular day is more Sabbath than any other. I find time for rest every day. I experience holiness every day. And just because I am no longer paid, I still work. Furthermore, I have discovered that some things that I used to call work aren’t really work. I once thought of visiting in a care center as work. Now I see it as an expression of friendship.

I’ve learned quite a bit in my life so far, but I’m not sure I’ve got the third commandment down yet.

The story of the small town of Coupeville on Whidbey Island mirrors a narrative I have encountered in other small towns. For centuries, members of Indigenous tribes visited the area where the town was eventually located for fishing, harvesting land crops, trading, and other purposes. When European explorers arrived, the indigenous people were curious. They welcomed a few settlers and established patterns of trading. Because their culture did not involve private ownership of land, at first, they didn’t understand the settlers’ setting of boundaries. Some conflict arose. People were killed. In addition to strange ways, the explorers and settlers brought strange diseases to the indigenous people. Fatalities were high. Populations were decimated. Eventually, treaties were forged, and people were forced to relocate, leading to the depletion of resources and dramatic lifestyle changes.
Meanwhile, the settlers formed communities and founded towns. They built churches, schools, and fraternal halls. Their homes clustered around the community.

I grew up in a small town in Montana that is located on the traditional lands of the Apsáalooke Nation, known as the Crow Tribe. They were allotted 38 million acres by the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851. Then the Bozeman Trail crossed their land in 1865. In 1868, their land was reduced to eight million acres by the second Fort Laramie Treaty. Eventually, the railroad and settlers arrived. Our small town grew up. By the time I was born, settlers had been farming and ranching in the area for a couple of generations and were well established.

I served congregations in two communities in southwestern North Dakota that were on the land originally used for buffalo hunting by the Lakota people. After trappers, explorers, and eventually settlers began to arrive in the region, the United States undertook the systematic destruction of the buffalo herds in an attempt to control the Lakota people. The towns where I served were near the location of the last massive buffalo hunts. The railroad was slow to come to the area, and settlers didn’t arrive until after 1900. By then, the railroad company had already established the townsites as water stations for steam engines. Settlers arrived on the trains and were granted acreages from the land the federal government had seized from the Lakota people, whose territory was reduced through various treaties and government actions.

There are many other stories. The arrival of immigrants and their taking over land that had been the area of indigenous people is the story of each of my homes. I recognize the story of Coupeville. I also know how a small town can be a great place to live. Two thousand one hundred people are enough for some thriving businesses, a few medical services, a good school, and several churches. Add in a few attractions for tourists, and it works for the present generation of residents. In some cases, there is a mixture of settler and indigenous families that live together well. In Coupeville, the Point Elliot treaty established land ownership for settlers while retaining hunting, fishing, and native plant gathering rights for the Coast Salish tribes, who had visited the area for thousands of years before the settlers arrived.

Coupeville was officially established in 1910. During the Second World War, the area became part of the United States' defense systems, and Fort Ebey was established near the site of an earlier military fort, Fort Casey. The population, however, has never been large, and there are significant areas of undeveloped land. While most of the praise areas became established farms, the bluffs and coastal hills were left undeveloped. Those lands were, however, titled, and over the years, people with means have purchased tracts of land. Many have been developed into home sites with the clearing of old growth and heritage forests to provide views of the sea.

In 2008, Scott Price and his family purchased 15.1 acres on the outskirts of Coupeville, intending to build a home there. They wanted to preserve the native forest as much as possible. Eventually, they built on another piece of land and sought ways to protect the original property. Although there were potential buyers who wanted to cut down most of the fires for open views of Penn Cove and Mount Baker and subdivide the land for homes, the Price family did not want the land to be used in that manner. Eventually, they worked with the Whidbey Camacho Land Trust to develop the land into a park. The unique park features many outdoor sculptures by artists from the island and beyond. It is a unique place, unlike anything we had previously visited. We walked about a mile and a half from downtown on an established path and entered the park through a wooden archway. A wide variety of sculptures greeted us in many different media. Some were wood carvings. Some were giant metal installations. Some featured ceramics and stained glass. All were settled into the forest with a minimum of disruption. One whimsical installation was a simple square concrete pad titled, “You too could become a sculptor.”

While there are familiar aspects as I learn the history of this region and many attractions in the small towns, there are also surprises and differences from other places I have lived. This is my first experience of living in a coastal location. The maritime history, including historic sailing vessels, has engaged me, and I have enjoyed reading about the captains and sailors who plied the waters of the Salish Sea and beyond.

The historic wharf with the century-old schooner SUVA was a fun place to explore on our visit. The Island County Museum had a large area dedicated to the indigenous history of the three villages that once were near the townsite. On display are several canoes, including long racing canoes as well as family canoes. Also in the museum are displays about the ships and mariners who settled the town.

Each small town has its own surprises. It’s worth exploring to discover them.

Being retired and living in a place with a mild climate results in an extended camping season. One of the things we intended to do as soon as we retired is to explore the state parks that are close to our home. Now we’ve been retired for five years, and we are just getting around to some of those explorations. Yesterday and today, we’re on a quick explore of Fort Ebey State Park. We are on Whidbey Island. We got here by driving across a bridge to Fildago Island and then crossing another bridge, over Deception Pass, onto Whidbey. The southern end of the Island is served by a ferry that goes to Everett. There is also a ferry from Coupeville here on the island to Port Townsend at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula.

Whidbey is a large island, about 75 miles north to south. However, here in the middle of the Island, it is very narrow. This afternoon, we climbed up to the top of a bluff where we could see both sides of the island. Beyond the island, we could see Mount Baker and Mount Rainier in the North Cascades to the east and the mountains of Olympic National Park to the west.

Before it was a state park, Fort Ebey was part of the strategic defense of the United States during World War II. With an unobstructed view of the Pacific to the west of the Olympic Peninsula, guards would be able to detect ships from Japan should they attack. The fort was equipped with large guns, set into concrete bunkers. Some of the places where the guns were located have been preserved.

After the war, the State of Washington obtained part of Fort Ebey and has a campground with beach access and hiking trails along the high bluffs and through some forested areas. I’m sure this campground is full during the summer, but there are many empty camping spaces now. We have a lovely site that offers dramatic views to the west. It was the perfect place to watch the sunset last night.

Fort Ebey got its name from Jacob Ebey, who settled the Island in the middle of the 19th Century. The 1850 Donation Land Claim Act allowed settlers to gain title to farm land, and the Ebey family was successful in proving up several claims in the area.

Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve is a one-of-a-kind partnership administered by a trust board comprised of representatives from the National Park Service, Washington State Parks and Recreation, Island County, and the Town of Coupeville. Placing preservation of the land as its highest priority, the trust provides access to a large area of land with hiking trails, campgrounds, and more. The Reserve offers many recreational opportunities and protects farmland from development.

The prairies on Whidbey Island have a long history. In contrast to other islands and coastal areas, Whidbey Island has large areas of productive farmland. Jacob Ebey was reported to have claimed that the Island boasted the best farmland he had ever seen. Although there has been timber harvesting on the Island for many years, there are also large areas that are not as heavily forested. Local tradition and lore explain that the Coast Salish tribes maintained the open prairies long before settlers arrived by setting fire to the land from time to time. The open prairies produced camas, an important part of the Native American diet. The sea provided a rich source of protein with clams, crabs, mussels, and other shellfish easily harvested at low tide. The Coast Salish people also fished from canoes, harvesting salmon, halibut, mackerel, as well as marine mammals. Teams of skilled hunters could feed a community for a long time with a single whale.

Visiting the area when there are fewer tourists allows us to reflect on the many layers of history of this place. During the last ice age, the entire region was covered with huge amounts of ice. As the ice retreated, it scraped out and shaped the coastal areas. The Mountains were also sculpted by the ice, but in the coastal regions, the evidence of the retreating glaciers is visible. The National Historical Reserve has many signs that explain the history and geology of the region. Part of the reserve is the preservation of working farms. The combination of history and ongoing agriculture makes the reserve a fascinating place to visit.

We enjoyed a quiet evening, watching the sun set. The quiet was a special treat because Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve is right next to Whidbey Naval Air Station. Jet aircraft do fly over the area at all hours. However, activity at the NAS has been low during our visit and we have enjoyed the absence of the roar of afterburners.

The two of us are very comfortable in our little camper, and even though we are retired, we find joy in getting away from home and our usual routine. We have more time to hike and talk.

We live in a time of so many crises. The climate crisis is real, and action is required from the grassroots level to international diplomacy. The minority takeover of the federal government by those with the intent of establishing an authoritarian state demands that we participate in active resistance. Public attacks against our neighbors of different faiths and different ethnic backgrounds combine with attacks against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons, and we feel compelled to stand with them. It sometimes seems as if we need to live in a state of constant vigilance and can never let our guard down.

In these times, it is important that we take time to be in nature. I suppose that these journeys have a self-care function. But self-care is not the primary reason we keep returning to experiences in nature. We come to keep ourselves connected to the natural world as a source of wisdom and discernment. If we are to remain faithful to our responses to the crises the world is facing, we need to remain in the struggle for the long haul. We dare not burn out or become disconnected. Regular visits to places of natural beauty are critical for reminding us why our actions are important. Strength for the battle comes from the places of vision.

The seasons have changed. Fall is in the air. These days, when I rise, I have to wait for daylight before going on my bike ride. I’m adding layers, too. Although temperatures around here are warmer than those in other places we have lived, I notice when they dip below 50. We haven’t had any frost yet, but the chill of most mornings is a reminder that frost is on the way. Perhaps it is an illusion, but it feels like the cold affects me a bit more quickly than it did when I was younger. I’ve already worn my long underwear for a couple of early morning adventures, and I have a helmet liner that I wear under my bike helmet when it gets cold. I’ve worn that a few times as well.

Yesterday was a gray day as I rode my bike around the bay shortly after sunrise. A lone heron was perched upon a pole set in the water. I always check out that pole when I go past. It is a favorite perch of a young eagle, last year’s fledgling. In my imagination, that particular eagle is nearsighted. The idea seems absurd, but since this specific eagle seems to prefer a lower perch than the other eagles in the area, I’ve imagined that his fishing goes better from closer to the water. Perhaps he is a bit less eagle-eyed than some of the other big birds.

Yesterday, however, I might have imagined the heron to be farsighted as it had chosen a perch farther from the water than its peers. I can’t distinguish individual herons from a distance, so I don’t know if this is the same heron that I often observe fishing from a rock a few feet out from shore. Since I don’t know what the birds are thinking, I like to imagine my own scenarios. In my mind, this heron is not far-sighted. Instead, I think of this bird as a heron who doesn’t like to get her feet wet.

I don’t know what heron knows. Indeed, the heron must understand that its fishing technique depends on lightning-quick neck extensions, not on diving like an eagle. I’ve never seen a heron catch a fish in flight. They are graceful flyers, but the transition from standing to flying always seems a bit awkward. I don’t think herons can transition to flight quickly enough to catch a fish. The pole must not be a fishing perch.

Maybe heron is tired from the nearly constant struggle to catch tiny mackerel for the insatiable hatchlings in the nest in the tall trees. A rookery is a hungry place of continual activity. Parent birds come and go, constantly bringing food to the chicks in the nests. I imagine that the chicks of this heron have finally fledged, and she can now afford the luxury of just sitting instead of needing to fish on every trip to the bay. But I don’t know what heron knows.

She may be evaluating the shoreline in search of the perfect place to fish, knowing that location and timing are crucial when it comes to silver fish, sacrificing all to become part of a heron in flight. I don’t know what heron knows.

I do know that heron is far more patient than I. She calmly waits as I watch her, knowing she can sit still much longer than I will. I will move on, and she will still perch quietly, examining the scene before her, caught, perhaps, between memory and hope. I don’t know what heron knows.

When I was a kid, one of the schoolyard insults was “birdbrain!” The term means stupid, foolish, or silly, but schoolyard insults are rarely accurate. It essentially meant that the person being labeled had been singled out for a bit of bullying. I suspect that such name-calling is no longer tolerated on schoolyards, but times were different then.

The term may come from the fact that birds have comparatively small brains. When you compare the size of the skull to the size of the rest of the animal, birds don’t have as much space for their brains as mammals. We raised chickens at our place, and I have many stories of chickens doing things that don’t seem to me to be particularly smart. One rooster beat itself bloody attacking its own reflection in a hubcap. Once, when a few scraps fed to the chickens landed outside the coop, a hen got her head stuck in the chicken wire trying to get at a morsel of food, despite there being plenty of food on her side of the fence. I grew up with a bias about the intelligence of chickens.

I have since learned that, although the brains of birds are relatively small, they are more densely packed with neurons than the brains of larger creatures. The types of neurons in the brains of birds are responsible for higher-level thinking. Studies have demonstrated that birds’ brains are organized similarly to mammals. Birds are capable of conscious thought. Observers have witnessed birds use rudimentary tools, a capacity once thought to be exclusive to humans.

Crows and parrots are capable of mimicking speech. The family of corvids, which includes ravens, crows, jays, and magpies, is often considered the most intelligent group of birds. Scientists have conducted intelligence studies on pigeons, finches, chickens, and birds of prey. Birdbrain should be taken as a compliment instead of an insult. It could mean that a larger percentage of the physical space of one’s brain is devoted to higher thinking and problem-solving.

I don’t know what heron knows. I don’t even know if heron is thinking. Herons likely possess a genetic memory of which foods are most beneficial and how to catch the small fish that comprise a significant portion of their diet. They know how to build nests high in the trees to keep their chicks safe, and they know that when the time comes for chicks to fledge, their first flight will be mostly gliding. Herons require time and space to transition from standing to flying.

I don’t know what heron knows, but I imagine she knows a lot.

Citizens of the United States have been aware for decades that our healthcare system is flawed. We pay the highest prices in the world for health care and have much worse health outcomes than other industrialized countries. Rates of infant and childhood mortality are higher than in other high-income countries. Mothers die in childbirth at a rate over three times the rate in other comparable countries. The United States is the only member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that does not provide public health coverage to all residents. It has the highest rate of avoidable deaths of any OECD country. Our country has the highest rate of chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes, depression, heart disease, and others.

Statistics, however, don’t really tell the stories of citizens who don’t have access to primary care because of a lack of financial resources. Those who lack insurance may also face food insufficiency. Hungry, sick, and no access to care is a terrible combination. Having your children hungry, ill, and without care is much worse.

While there are healthcare losers, our country also has winners when it comes to healthcare. I did not work in a high-paying profession, but my family had our health insurance premiums fully covered by my employer throughout my career. I didn’t encounter the expense of health care until I retired. Like many others, retirement coincided with an increase in illness and healthcare concerns. Unlike others, I continue to have options when it comes to health insurance. However, the last couple of years have produced a shrinking of possibilities due to federal policy decisions.

Our health insurance is currently purchased through our church, as it was during our working years. Since becoming eligible for Medicare, the insurance provided through our church is a Medicare Advantage plan. Like about 33 million other US citizens, our Medicare benefits are offered through a private insurance company that contracts with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Medicare Advantage gives services typically provided by the government, along with additional benefits. Those services are covered by Medicare premiums deducted from our Social Security and an extra insurance premium deducted from our pension. The combination enables the private insurance company to generate a profit.

Profit in healthcare is one of the reasons we pay more for worse results than the rest of the world, where healthcare is often provided on a non-profit basis.

Changes in federal policies have left Medicare Advantage plans in a shaky financial position. Despite reaping profits for decades from the program, insurance companies are now reducing benefits and withdrawing from specific markets. Shareholders pay attention to profits, and the companies that provide Medicare Advantage plans answer, first and foremost, to their shareholders. Last year, about 1.8 million people lost their Medicare Advantage coverage, and cuts threaten many more as the open enrollment period opens this month.

Insurance companies explain these cuts as simple business decisions. The combination of funding cuts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, rising healthcare costs, and increased utilization of services results in decreased profitability. On paper, the solution is to cut benefits, thus reducing both utilization and costs. It is easy to explain to shareholders.

For consumers, it feels a lot more personal.

We have noticed the cuts in several areas. Our insurance company will still cover the cost of medicines provided by our local pharmacy. However, for regularly prescribed medications used for ongoing care, our co-pay is reduced if we purchase them from an online pharmacy owned by the insurance company. This year, we were able to have our annual wellness check with a local physician. However, the insurance company is urging us to use their telemedicine and paraprofessional services in place of a local provider. Routine health screenings through telemedicine and paraprofessionals often lack continuity. Were we to use the services provided by the insurance company, we would meet with a different provider for each visit.

This fall, we received notice that our local family medicine clinic will no longer be eligible for payment by our insurance provider. We will have to choose between leaving our Advantage Plan and staying with our local providers or changing doctors to those farther away who are still able to contract with our insurance company. Changing doctors is no guarantee that the new providers will be covered in years to come.

The problems we face are minor when compared to those faced by millions of others who cannot afford health care premiums. One provider of Medicare Advantage Plans, not our company, is withdrawing from 109 counties across 16 states in 2026, disrupting coverage for approximately 180,000 people. We are conducting a thorough review of our options. In 2026, we will still be able to obtain coverage in our county, although with a much smaller pool of providers, which means more travel and longer waits to see doctors. It also means establishing care with new providers, a daunting challenge we faced when we moved in 2020. One example is that the wait to be seen by a dermatologist is longer than the recommended interval between checkups for the skin cancer treatment I have been receiving.

The challenges we share with millions of our fellow citizens make us aware of how high the stakes are in the congressional debates over the current government shutdown. It is difficult to obtain exact numbers regarding the impact of the proposed cuts to healthcare. Still, the proposed budget cuts will leave at least five million people without care in the short term, with the number of additional people left without health insurance potentially reaching as high as 17 million over the next several years. Despite the rhetoric from some lawmakers, these people are citizens. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid.

Uninsured individuals raise the costs for everyone. Because hospital emergency rooms treat all who present themselves, they become the only accessible healthcare for millions of people. Those expenses must be covered by increasing costs even more.

The system is broken. Writing an essay won’t fix it. Opposing the Affordable Care Act is not a plan to fix the system. And health care is personal. We all have a stake in seeking alternatives, and we don’t have to look far to find countries with systems that work much better.

I left the small town where I grew up for college in 1970. The focus of the next decade was my education. By the end of the decade, I was living in a small town once again, after a journey that could be measured in more than miles. My undergraduate years were spent at a small liberal arts college located just eighty miles from my home. The world of ideas I found there was expansive. I met students and teachers who were very different from those I had known in my small town high school. I read books and discovered ideas that surprised and amazed me. I was a very different person by 1974. I learned how to study and be a successful student. I fell in love and got married. I studied philosophy, theology, and ethics. I formed some firm opinions that I have retained ever since.

Following undergraduate education, I spent four years in graduate school, which further opened my eyes and expanded my experience. Having shared our undergraduate years, my wife and I moved out of our home state to Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago, we faced a steep learning curve as we transitioned to urban living. We learned to navigate public transportation and to drive on busy freeways. We learned about apartment living, locks, and security. We learned about academic research and professional writing.

By the end of the decade, we were serving two small congregations in the southwest corner of North Dakota, where I learned a great deal more. Those congregations challenged me to integrate my academic experience with what I knew growing up in a small town with an agricultural economy. I needed to be able to conduct scholarly research, write, and speak with confidence, while also responding to the cycles of planting and harvest. I might be asked to discuss moral issues over coffee at the cafe and talk about life and death in a lambing barn on a ranch.

Key to my education were the people I met along the way. When we arrived in Chicago, our small entering class contained many international students. Among the people we met in our first weeks in our Chicago apartment were families from South Africa and Australia who had moved to Chicago to study.

From our classmates and colleagues, I learned about Apartheid in South Africa, where the white rulers of the Nationalist Party enforced harsh, institutional racial segregation. The white minority controlled political party forced a repressive regime on the indigenous black minority. Our entering class at seminary had both black and white students from South Africa. From them I learned part of the history of their country. They told me stories of Nelson Mandela, who was then imprisoned at a notorious facility on Robben Island. Mandela had been sentenced to life in prison because of his leadership in the banned African National Congress. Initially arrested for a passport violation for leaving the country illegally, while serving a five-year sentence for that violation was tried and convicted of sabotage. We followed South African history and the story of Nelson Mandela after we graduated from seminary. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 after serving 27 years and continued to lead the transformational politics of the end of apartheid.

Back in the 1970s, part of my education involved discussing my classmates' return to South Africa with them. As students, our personal property mainly consisted of books we had acquired during our educational years. Books of biblical scholarship, theology, psychology, and sociology contributed richly to our learning, and we invested in the books we felt we would use as we went out into the world to pursue our careers. Our South African colleagues, however, had to sort their books before returning home. In addition to shedding some books due to their weight and the cost of shipping, they had to remove from their libraries many books that were banned in their home country. I was shocked to learn that they had been allowed to come to the US, but that their government was trying to prevent them from returning with specific ideas. Among the banned books were treatises on education and books of liberation theology.

I thought of the repressive regime of South Africa as a relic of a past era. Surely they would someday discover democracy and allow their people to be free. I watched with deep interest as the next decades passed, apartheid came to a peaceful end, and the nation undertook a deep process of truth and reconciliation that has become a model for the world.

I could not imagine that we would come to a place where my home country would be a place with lists of banned books, arrests for misdemeanors such as passport violations evolving into imprisonment without trial, secret police raiding workplaces and schools wearing masks without identification, and minority rule.

I learned a bit of history in my education, but I did not acquire the ability to predict the future.

A group of college classmates formed a band and sang together as a group. After college, they became involved in supporting the struggle for freedom in South Africa. They wrote and performed songs about freedom. They organized and hosted an event featuring Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Recently, they shared a recording of one of the songs they performed at that event. It spoke of the power of freedom in the face of segregation and repression. When I first heard the song, my thoughts, like theirs, were of South Africa’s need to change for the freedom of its people. Listening to the song in 2025, however, it has become a song about the cry of oppressed people in our own country who long for freedom. You can listen to that song here.

The circle journey I took from a small town in Montana to another small town in North Dakota educated and transformed me. The circle journey from advocating for justice and freedom in South Africa to advocating for justice and freedom in my own country is a process of education and transformation.

We still have a long way to walk on the freedom path and many challenges along the way. But we’ll keep walking and we’ll keep believing that God calls us to walk alongside those who are oppressed and the victims of injustice.

I cut myself shaving yesterday. I know what my friends and others who have known me for a while are thinking: “You shave?” I was clean-shaven for my summer job in 1973. When I returned to college that fall, I grew my beard out and have had one ever since. Our children have never seen me without a beard. The joke I often tell about myself is that one day I looked in the mirror and thought, “I’m kind of ugly with a beard.” But when I looked in the mirror to shave it off, I thought, “What if I’m ugly without a beard? I won’t have anything to blame.” So I kept the beard.

I choose to have a beard because I like the way it makes me look. My beard, however, grows quickly and would become scraggly if I didn’t trim the edges. I prefer having straight edges on my cheeks and neck, and I dislike the feeling of hair too close to my mouth. The result is that I don’t take a pass on shaving. Even though I’ve worn a beard and mustache for all of my adult life, I have also shaved all of those years as well.

A trip down the men’s aisle in any drug store reveals that there are a lot of choices when it comes to shaving products. My skin is sensitive so that some products can irritate it. Some of the people I have served have sensitivities to aromas, so I’m not a fan of colognes or aftershaves. I also try to avoid waste and pollution with my personal choices. I’ve settled on a shaving brush and a bar of shaving soap in place of aerosol shaving cream. The choice makes airline travel simple since a bar of soap is not liquid, aerosol, or gel. I think that most razors are pretty silly. I do not need disposable razors with three, five, or seven blades. I have a stainless steel razor that takes a double-edged blade. The razor will last me for the rest of my life, the blades are inexpensive, and I’m not throwing plastic into the garbage all the time, unlike with other razors. I’m happy to keep it simple.

However, it does seem that I am capable of cutting myself. The strange thing is that I don’t know why I cut myself yesterday. It isn’t something that happens very often. I’ve shaved myself thousands of times without cutting myself. And I didn’t just cut myself once yesterday. I have a cut on my cheek and another on my chin. I’m over 70 years old, and I’m walking around looking like a teen who just tried a razor for the first time, though not precisely, as I don’t have pimples.

Little cuts aren’t a problem, though I don’t heal quite as quickly as I once did. I’ll probably have a visible scab for a week or so. The incident will soon be forgotten, though I’m likely to remember it longer because I’ve chosen to write about it. It isn’t the cuts that worry me. What worries me is that I tend to interpret many things in my life as signs that I am aging. I don’t feel particularly old. I have fewer aches and pains than many people my age. I lead an active lifestyle, enjoying activities such as walking, riding my bike, and participating in many activities. Recently, however, I have been wondering if there are signs of aging that I am not aware of.

Over the weekend, I walked from the garage to my study to add an item to my shopping list, and when I arrived, I couldn’t remember what it was I wanted to add. I went back to the garage to see if that would jar my memory. I never did figure out what it was I intended to write on that list. Worrying that my memory is declining doesn’t make remembering any easier.

Shaving has always been a bit of a challenge for me because of he mental challenge of looking in the mirror and having everything reversed. I’m right-handed, and the angles I hold the razor to shave the left side of my face are more natural to me than the ones I use to shave my right cheek. A little slip getting the angle between the blade and my cheek too steep, and I was cutting more than whiskers. And I know from experience that I’ll have to avoid that area until the scab is gone, or I’ll make things worse. The good news is that my hair is now all white, and the whiskers that are missed when shaving don’t show as much as they did years ago.

The trick is to avoid mirrors when I’m not shaving. If I don’t look at the cut, I forget about it. I don’t need to forget about it, however. If it gave me a reason to talk about shaving with our 14-year-old grandson, I’d appreciate the conversation. I could make a case for a good badger shaving brush and a simple razor as alternatives to the expensive and wasteful products sold in stores and advertised on the Internet. I’d like him to form good habits that don’t drain his bank account while being good for the planet. However, I don’t think he wants to turn to me for advice. What his friends say is probably far more important to him than what his old granddad says. Furthermore, he may think that because I have a beard, I don’t shave. I won’t bring up the topic, but I wouldn’t mind if he asked me what razor or shaving soap I use. I have noticed that entering high school this fall has made him more aware of his appearance and more careful in his grooming choices.

In a world facing a climate crisis with over 40 million refugees, in a country where nearly 800,000 people are homeless and almost 14 million children are living in food-insecure households, a little cut on my cheek isn’t a big deal. I hope writing about it will free my mind to think about more important things.

In 2002, the United Church of Christ initiated what would become known as the Still Speaking Campaign. The national identity campaign was initially led by Ron Buford, who, in addition to being an inspirational preacher, possessed a deep understanding of the dynamics of a national identity campaign. His leadership resulted in a simple and memorable logo, dramatic and historic advertisements, and the simple slogan, “God is Still Speaking.” The slogan comes from a quote by Gracie Allen: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” The original quote came from a love letter that Gracie penned to her husband, George Burns, near the end of her life. The United Church of Christ's national identity campaign featured a simple black comma on a red background with the words "God is still speaking." The quote was implied in most of the campaign materials.

Now, more than twenty years later, many members of the United Church of Christ don’t remember the origins of the campaign or the dynamics it produced within the church. A significant part of the campaign involved substantial financial investment in advertising. In addition to print materials to be used by local congregations, the campaign used a national advertising agency to produce several television ads. The ads were designed to show a contrast between the radical hospitality of the United Church of Christ and the exclusivity practiced by some other churches. One of the advertisements featured bouncers at the door of a church turning aside people with disabilities, gay couples, and others. Another showed a church with ejector seats blasting out gay couples, people of color, and those with disabilities. The advertisements can still be found on YouTube.

As a pastor who served the United Church of Christ during the official campaign, I sought to use the materials developed by church leaders in liturgical ways. I know little about advertising. I was never a proponent of conventional advertising for the church, and I was skeptical about its impact. The congregations I served invested in newspaper advertising, and one congregation even ran a brief billboard campaign. However, for the most part, we relied on word of mouth as our primary means of getting our message to those outside the church. I did not embrace the Still Speaking Campaign as an advertising program.

I did, however, recognize an essential theological message in the materials we received from the national setting of our church. One phrase that resonated deeply was, “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” I began incorporating the phrase into the church's weekly liturgy. I wasn’t the only pastor to catch on to that phrase. It is still a part of the weekly worship greeting at the congregation I belong to, as well as many other United Church of Christ congregations. However, the way we used it in the church I was serving was different from many other congregations. Like many other words of the liturgy, I wanted to give the phrase to the congregation. Instead of my speaking them from the pulpit, I wrote them into the liturgy as a congregational response. The tradition of having the people speak the exact words over and over again until they are memorized is a meaningful part of worship liturgy. The things we say together each time we gather have a profound theological impact on the way we live our lives. The primary example of this is the Lord’s Prayer. Songs like the doxology and gloria also belong to the people.

From a theological perspective, having the people own a set of words is only part of the process. The goal is not to get a congregation to say words of welcome, but rather to be a place of genuine welcome. It is one thing to say that everyone is welcome. It is another thing to have everyone who comes to a church feel welcome. That is why it was so crucial for me, as a worship leader, to have the phrase not be just something I said. I wanted it to become something the congregation lived. One way to have the congregation live welcome is for them to greet one another with words of welcome. “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”

I am convinced that change comes to the church through worship. We worship our way into new ways of understanding our biases and history. We become connected to others by worshiping together.

Two decades of the Still Speaking Campaign have not resulted in growth in church membership. The United Church of Christ has lost members over the decades and, along with other mainline denominations, continues to shrink in size. If people expected the advertisements to result in more members, the campaign might be judged a failure. However, I don’t believe that faithfulness can be measured in numbers. The biggest crowds in churches are not necessarily the most faithful.

I remain deeply committed to radical hospitality. At the same time, I recognize that people are divided in their church choices. The style of music in a congregation can have a profound impact on who attends worship. I used to say, “If people pick their churches like they pick their radio stations, we’re the NPR of churches.” We had a definite bias towards classical and jazz music in our congregation. For some, being greeted at the door of the church by the sound of a pipe organ identified the place as different or strange.

People often think it was Martin Luther King who first said that 11 a.m. on Sunday is the most segregated hour in Christian America.” MLK did use that phrase, but it had previously been used by James Baldwin and Malcom X. Whoever first said it, it continues to be true. In the church, we often speak about inclusivity, but we tend to remain exclusive organizations. We are on a journey, but far from reaching our goal. That is why it is so essential to understand the Still Speaking Campaign as far more than advertising. What will remain of the campaign as the decades pass is the theology and, hopefully, the liturgy.

We went to the school carnival last night. The Parent-Teacher Organization makes it clear that this is not a “drop-off” event. Children are to be accompanied by an adult family member. With one high school student, one preschooler, and two elementary students, as well as a father who has a 45-minute commute after finishing work, getting the girls to the carnival would have been a significant challenge for our daughter-in-law, especially since the carnival began at dinner hour. It was a perfect setup for grandparents. Supervising a couple of girls at the school carnival is light duty. The biggest challenge of the evening for me was finding a place to park, which wasn’t a big problem. The girls attend a small-town school. Even with many parents and grandparents transporting children in their cars, there is still plenty of on-street parking available within a couple of blocks of the school. I got lucky and found a place less than a block away.

The second challenge of the evening for me is that my hearing is not as good as it once was. A few hundred excited children in an elementary school gymnasium make conversation impossible for me. Fortunately, most of the games were in classrooms that are smaller and have less echo. Some of the rooms were so crowded that it worked for me to wait outside while the granddaughters went in to play a game.

The games were typical school carnival fare. There was a ring toss, a couple of fish ponds, and a bean bag toss. The prizes were inexpensive trinkets. Most of the participants won a prize at every game. A box maze was set up in a hallway. They had face painting, raffles, and a couple of places set up for family pictures. One of the most popular games is a variation on a cake walk called the Junk Food Walk. Prizes are just what the game suggests. Our granddaughters stayed in the game long enough for each of them to win a couple of times. Among the grandparent duties for the evening was carrying around a box of Hostess cupcakes and a bag of chocolate pretzels. Each girl also had a small bag to carry the other prizes they won.

One of the games was a word search. There were letters displayed at various places around the school. The game involved collecting all seven letters and then unscrambling them to reveal the hidden word. Our granddaughters collected six letters: S, T, H, R, E, and V. I was sitting in the corner of the gym, waiting for the girls to traverse the box maze, and used the time to try to solve the word scramble. I was sure that the missing letter would be a vowel. I even thought that A was the most likely possibility. The hint for the word scramble was “What do we celebrate in the fall?”

My mind started to search for autumn holidays. Thanksgiving was too long. Labor Day didn’t work. I began to question whether the H might be a mistake. If it were a D, the answer might be “VETS DAY.” That didn’t make sense, however. Elementary school children might know Veterans’ Day, but the shortened version seemed unlikely.
Furthermore, the lines to write the letters didn’t have any spaces. I was pretty sure the answer would be a single word. I got a bit distracted by the letters because REV is a tile I’ve had for most of my life, my initials are TH, and my wife’s name begins with S.

While I was pondering this, our fifth-grade granddaughter came and sat beside me. I asked her what she thought the answer might be. After realizing Thanksgiving was too long, she immediately came up with HARVEST, which, of course, was the correct answer. It's a good thing we had our granddaughters with us. Otherwise, I might still be pondering the letters, convinced that I could come up with the solution.

As it turned out, excited children waiting in line to claim the prize for the scramble were all talking. I noticed that other children who had not solved the puzzle overheard the solution and joined the line. They got a sticker prize alongside those who had actually worked out the solution.

When I was considering retirement and what it might mean for me, one of my goals was to find a place to live close enough to the homes of our grandchildren that would allow me to attend their recitals, games, concerts, and other events in their lives. School carnivals didn’t come to my mind at the time. I had gotten my fill of school carnivals when our children were in elementary school and we were active in the PTA.

We were fortunate to find a home a couple of miles from four of our grandchildren, which is terrific for us. We do, however, have a fifth grandchild, and he lives in South Carolina. We only have two children, and they live 3,000 miles apart. Our grandson in South Carolina is in the first grade. We did make it to Grandparents' Day at his school last year, but we missed many of the events in his life. It is a challenge many grandparents face.

Last night, however, I was feeling grateful for the way our retirement has worked out. We’ve been fortunate. Some retired pastors have to play golf or pickleball. Some have to empty their bank accounts to go on cruises and bus tours. Some go on tours of the churches they once served, trying to sell a few copies of their self-published collection of sermons. Some go back to work as hospice or care center chaplains. A few retired pastors make it their business to prolong clergy meetings unnecessarily. Some drive working pastors up the wall with their stories and advice.

I, on the other hand, get to go to school carnivals, provide rides to birthday parties, do farm chores when our son’s family travels, watch the bees in the farm hives, play trucks, collect eggs with a 3-year-old, and read books to children. I also get to go to the school carnival.

I don’t think I’d be very good at golf.

I broke the kitchen window of our house. I was mowing the lawn when the mower struck a rock and threw it into the window, shattering it. I consider myself very lucky. The rock could have flown in almost any direction. Had it struck me, there would have been a significant injury, probably to a foot or leg. I’m cautious not to mow when our grandchildren or pets are around, but my imagination quickly reinforced that practice. The flying rock could have hit a child. Previous owners of our home did quite a bit of landscaping with small rocks and pea gravel. We have removed some of those rocks, but others remain. They don’t often get out into the grass, but once was enough to send us on a window repair journey.

Yesterday I read an online story about something found in the grass at a home a couple of hundred miles east of where we live. According to the Grants County Sheriff’s Office, a 3-year-old found a live World War II-era grenade in the front yard of their home and brought it inside. The child’s parents called 911, and the Washington State Patrol Bomb Squad was dispatched. They determined that it was indeed a live grenade, and it was removed from the home and safely detonated in a remote area.

That story got my attention. I have a 3-year-old grandson who loves to dig up things in the yard. I have to supervise him because he likes to pull weeds, but lacks discretion and occasionally pulls out flowers and other plants we’ve intentionally planted. I’m grateful that the grenade found by the 3-year-old was dealt with safely, but I’m betting those parents are going to keep a close eye on the child for some time whenever outside play is involved.

Then I thought, “Imagine hitting that with a lawnmower!”

It's a hassle getting the window repaired. It is a double-paned window, and only the outside pane is broken. We may need to replace the entire window. It’s on my list of projects to tackle before winter sets in. I don’t want to have workers trying to replace a window when it is raining. Our lawn is small, and I usually only sharpen the blade once a year. However, this year I’ll be replacing it early.

Still, good fortune has been on my side, and I can count my blessings that no one was hurt. I have a spare blade for the lawnmower, so I can replace it and sharpen the one I removed at my leisure.

Another article I read online reported a FBI raid that discovered 57 victims of forced labor living in cramped quarters at a lavish Florida mansion where a church leader lived. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the leaders of the Kingdom of God Global Church have been accused of forced labor and money laundering. The scheme involved forced laborers working in call centers collecting donations without being paid for their work.

I worked as a pastor for my entire career and still serve congregations with pulpit supply from time to time. None of the churches I ever served managed to receive enough donations to purchase a mansion. Of course, it never occurred to us to establish a call center to solicit donations. We asked our members to support our ministries and learned the art of careful budget management.

I consider myself fortunate that I was never involved in any large-scale financial operations during my time as a pastor. We conducted several capital fund drives to cover the costs of building upgrades and repairs, and became proficient at estimating income and planning expenses to match. The reserves of a congregation are held in the accounts of its members and are only tapped when a genuine emergency exists. We never needed to have large endowments or significant cash reserves in the churches with which I was affiliated. I never experienced an FBI raid. Had one occurred, I would have probably offered the agents coffee. I was friends with several FBI agents when we lived in Rapid City.

Like others, I find reading the news to be anxiety-producing. The main headlines of major newspapers often report stories that cause me to worry about the health of our planet, the rise of violence, the increase in authoritarianism, the spread of disease, attacks that kill innocent victims, children who are starving, and hundreds of other world events that cause me to feel unease. When the headlines get to me, I skip the articles and head to the bottom of the page on the computer where human interest stories are located. There, I find stories that make me chuckle. I find out about the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, and curling’s biggest scandal, and that Amazon still sells a t-shirt labeled “wife beater.” That’s a product I’d never buy. I’ll copy a recipe for red lentil soup, but then I'll fail to make the soup. Sometimes I read reviews of movies I’ll never see and books I want to check out from the library. From time to time, I come across a story that inspires a journal entry. Sometimes I combine several stories in a rambling, disconnected piece.

The Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous painting in the world. I braved the crowds to get a glimpse of it when we visited the Louvre in Paris. The painting hung on the walls of palaces for 400 years. It was a popular painting. At one point, it had its own mailbox to receive people’s love letters, but it didn’t truly gain world fame until August 21, 1911, when it was stolen. The theft became front-page news. It took over two years for it to be recovered. By then, there were many more people who wanted to see it. According to museum officials, approximately 30,000 people view the painting each day.

It never occurred to me to write a love letter to a painting.

There will be numerous tributes and kind words written in honor of the life of Jane Goodall. She had an amazing presence. The closest I ever came to her was to hear her speak to an auditorium of over 1,700 people. She was an inspiration to each of us. At that point in her life, she was using her fame to travel extensively and promote environmental stewardship, as well as raise funds and awareness about various projects and programs she had initiated. She said she was traveling 300 days a year at that time, which amazed me. It is a pace that I know I couldn’t match. And she just kept going day after day, year after year. In the spring of 2024, when she turned 90, she celebrated not by gathering with family and friends to celebrate the occasion, but by granting interviews and raising funds to support the Jane Goodall Institute.

Her death allows me to reflect briefly on the nature of hope. Finding hope is a challenge in the chaotic world in which we live. It has been less than three months since another activist and scholar, Joanna Macy, passed away. Macy popularized the term the Great Unraveling” to describe the time in which we are living. Major systems are breaking down. We can no longer depend on the institutions of our society. As the world faces and struggles with its response to a looming global climate crisis, the systems to which previous generations turned to address crises are not providing the change that is needed. Cultural, economic, and political systems are also in unprecedented turmoil. Our environmental crisis and our social crisis are interconnected. The problems of society and environmental issues are interconnected. The climate crisis exacerbates social injustice. Income inequality and ecological destruction are in a dangerous loop. This is evident in the world’s consumption of petrochemicals. Gas and oil extraction profits a select few at the expense of the masses. A few people become very wealthy while others have less. At the same time, the increased use of petrochemicals contributes to global warming. More environmental destruction leads to greater economic injustice, and vice versa. It is indeed a “great unraveling.”

The current crisis, resulting from the shutdown of the government due to a failure to reach an agreement on spending, illustrates the crisis. The senators at the center of the crisis are connected to systems of wealth that are unaffected by the resolution of the crisis. While other governmental employees face financial crisis by being laid off or forced to work without pay. Those whose actions have created the situation continue to receive their paychecks. Their personal wealth continues to grow exponentially beyond the salaries they receive. Those tasked with solving the crisis are benefiting financially from the crisis. Whether the shutdown lasts days or weeks, average citizens are facing a decrease in health benefits and an increase in the out-of-pocket cost of care. More average citizens will face bankruptcy due to healthcare costs, regardless of how the crisis is resolved. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer.

Another aspect of the great unraveling is that we cannot see the outcome. While the trends are clear, we don’t know what will happen politically. Will the trend toward authoritarianism and the destruction of democracy continue? Will environmental destruction result in mass extinctions that include humans? We don’t know. We are entering a period that seems unpredictable, with catastrophic dangers surrounding us.

It would be easy to write about this great unraveling as an alarmist predictor of doom. Joanna Macy, however, did not respond that way. She wrote about hope. She wrote “Coming Back to Life” with Molly Brown, offering inspiration and meditations that empower readers. She wrote “Active Hope” with Chris Johnstone, inviting people to see hope as much more than an emotion. Hope involves finding the power to respond to the crisis that is before us. It is discovering how to become involved and to offer alternatives to despair.

As we grieve the deaths of these two great women, their lives invite us to move through grief to genuine hope. Both of these women engaged in work that has outlived them. Their lives continue to inspire new generations.

One of the gifts Jane Goodall has given the world is her “Roots and Shoots” program. Over 8,000 local groups in 140 countries worldwide involve more than 150,000 youth from preschool to university age in environmental, conservation, and humanitarian work. Since founding the organization, Goodall has taken the stories of children and youth to each of her audiences. She continued to tell the stories of the chimpanzees she had observed, but she also shared the stories of children who were directly involved in identifying local problems and solutions. Children are providing leadership by planting trees, conserving energy, protecting pollinators, mapping communities, learning and teaching land management, and participating in thousands of other projects.

One of the gifts of hope that Jane Goodall has given the world is her passion for empowering children and young people. Her work will continue long beyond the span of her life. Those young people will grow and share inspiration with future generations.

While rich and powerful senators argue about billions of dollars, children are planting trees. While billionaires extend their wealth despite inflation, pandemic, and economic collapse, children are building and deploying habitats for bees and other pollinators. While elders live on the border of despair, children are picking up and recycling trash. While health care systems are collapsing, children are creating green spaces in cities. Jane Goodall taught the world that anyone, anywhere, can make a difference for people, other animals, and the planet we share.

Jane Goodall was a charismatic leader at the center of a worldwide movement, but she never made the movement about herself. It was always about others. While we will miss her stories and inspirational writing, we know that the work she began continues. That ongoing work is a more eloquent testimony to a life well lived than any words I can write.

The elementary school in Boise, Idaho, that our children attended had a dedicated and capable leader. The principal of the school could be found doing virtually any job within that institution. If a lunch server were out sick, she might be wearing an apron and gloves and serving lunches to students. If a playground attendant needed an emergency day off, she would be out on the playground, ensuring the safety of the children. She was an excellent classroom teacher.
Additionally, she handled all the administrative tasks of the school. She was involved in hiring, placing, and supporting staff. She met with parents and was an active member of the Parent-Teacher organization. She helped develop independent educational plans for students with special needs. Her staff, parents, and teachers were all confident that she was capable of doing every job in the school and doing it well.

One day, when I was volunteering at the school, a student erupted in anger. We later learned the reason, but at the time, all I knew was that he suddenly turned violent, upending a desk, throwing a chair at another student, shouting and screaming. I was unsure of what to do. Because I was the closest adult to the child and because I was big enough to do so, I picked him up and held him at arm’s length while I carried him out of the classroom into the hallway. I had no idea what I should do next. Fortunately for me, the principal heard the ruckus and responded quickly. She met me at the doorway of the classroom, took the child in her arms, and calmed him. Later, when all the children were safe and the angry student’s mother had come to care for him, I told the principal how grateful I was that she saw her job as being present throughout the school, not just sitting in her office.

Not all administrators are that competent. Since it is my profession, I will use the ministry as an example. I have known mid-level judicatory officials who shuffled paperwork, met with boards and committees, but could never do the job I did. One Conference Minister made no apology for preaching the same sermon every Sunday. Because he traveled from church to church, he managed to get away with it for nearly a year. A preacher’s job is to make connections between the Biblical texts and the lives of the members of the congregation. He was unaffected by the events in the lives of those he led in worship. He did not research the congregations in his conference. He didn’t understand the dynamics of the pastors' lives. I used to say, “He wouldn’t last a month in my job.” There is more to the story, but I’ve witnessed plenty of ministers who rose to positions in conference and national settings of the church who, frankly, were not very good at being ministers. As a local church pastor, there have been times when I was embarrassed by the lack of competence and unwillingness to do the hard work of ministry exhibited by some of my colleagues.

I have never served in the military. It is easy to imagine, however, that the military leaders who were summoned to Marine Corps Base Quantico yesterday to listen to a rambling speech from President Trump, who never served in the military, and an hour-long lecture on woke culture by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The event occurred on the eve of the shutdown of the United States government, which raises numerous issues and problems for the US military. Although service members are essential and will continue to receive pay, the support they receive from civilian contractors is in question. Those generals return to their commands facing a wide range of questions and problems today.

They don’t need a new set of guidelines for the physical fitness of troops. It isn’t as if either of the speakers at their event could pass a PT test. Hegseth made a big deal of physical fitness and grooming standards. He seemed not to know that all women serving in combat positions have been screened for physical fitness and their ability to perform their jobs. It isn’t as if Hegseth knows how to land a jet on an aircraft carrier, or pilot a drone from a remote base. The women currently serving in combat positions in the United States military are qualified to do so.

Hegseth entered military service in the Minnesota National Guard as a commissioned officer after graduating from university. His deployments included guarding detainees at Guantanamo Bay, serving as a civil-military operations officer, and a training officer. He didn’t rise to his present position because of combat experience. He gained recognition as a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, leading to his appointment to his current job by the President. Even though cabinet positions are authorized and named by acts of Congress, he is proud of the “name change” from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of War. He speaks of lethality as if he doesn’t know that suicide is the leading cause of death for active-duty military members. He called for “changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records,” signaling that bullying and unprofessional behavior are acceptable.

The dedicated women and men of the United States military are faithful to their oaths of loyalty to the Constitution. They are consciously apolitical in their official function. They serve all presidents regardless of party affiliation or political position. I am confident that the generals assembled yesterday demonstrated professional behavior and will continue to serve with honor and integrity as they return to their commands today. They know that they will continue to face unexplained actions from their political leaders, including cuts in the number of general officers, firings of other top military leaders, and deployments to US cities without clear-cut missions. They know how to train troops, and they understand that deploying them to US cities without adequate support and without a clear-cut mission is ineffective training, despite what their leaders say in speeches.

We live in dangerous times. Unfortunately, we currently have leaders who lack the skills to accurately assess the dangers and respond effectively. On the other hand, they do less damage when making speeches than when issuing policy orders. Perhaps we need to create more opportunities for speeches for those who appear incapable of undertaking the actual hard work of leadership. Like my conference minister colleague, they are likely to deliver the same speech over and over again.