November 2019

Home place

These days I tell lots of stories about my home town. I think that I had a good time growing up in that community. If I am honest, however, I have to admit that from my early teen years, I invested a lot of energy in thinking and dreaming about how I would get out of that town. I never really had a vision of staying there. I had options for doing just that. My father would have worked hard to make room for me in his business and for me to one day take over for him, but that wasn’t my interest and he never pressured me. When I was 14, I spent the summer on my cousin’s and uncle’s ranches, 200 miles from home. It was an even smaller town, but it was an opportunity to get away from home. I repeated the process the next summer. When I was seventeen, I went to college 80 miles from home in the state’s largest city. I spent a few summers in my home town, but never lived there for longer than three months after I headed for college.

I retained my sense of home state for the four years we lived in Chicago. I thought of myself as a Montanan who was temporarily living in Chicago. We went home the first two summers and managed our church camp just up the river from the home of my birth and growing up years. There was, however, no job for us in Montana when we graduated from seminary. We received a call to serve in North Dakota. We stayed in North Dakota for seven years. It is the state where our children were born. I had more of a sense of belonging to that place. Although I would still refer to Montana as my home at times, I also referred to North Dakota as home. I remember distinctly a trip that I made to New York City, where I announced proudly at all of the meetings that I was from North Dakota. Although she lived in Montana for her school years, my wife was born in North Dakota. My father also was born in North Dakota. There were good reasons to claim that state as home. We loved the people and the community where we lived.

We stayed in Idaho for a decade. I think that both of our children developed quite a sense of belonging to that state. Our son lived there from age 4 to 14 and when we moved to South Dakota thought of Boise as home for quite a while. He was quick to move from South Dakota, going to college in Forest Grove, Oregon and then to graduate school in North Carolina. From there he moved to Washington, a state he has called home ever since. Our daughter was a bit slower to leave South Dakota, going to college in Wyoming and then Montana before returning to South Dakota for a while. She served a short term as a nanny in New Jersey and then returned to South Dakota again. Then, when she left, she really left, moving to England from there to Missouri and now lives in Japan.

I’ve been thinking about home and what home has to do with our identity. My wife and I have both lived in South Dakota and in this particular house in South Dakota longer than we have lived any other place in our lives. This is our 25th winter in this house. Today we will spend the entire day at home with a blizzard raging outside and travel limited. I could put the chains on the pickup and venture out, but I have no particular reason to do so. We are very comfortable in our home. We’ve weathered a lot of blizzards in this place. We know what to do if the electricity goes out. We have plenty of food. Yesterday I was in town for a little while. The roads were very slippery with freezing drizzle making getting around challenging. I stopped to talk to a friend through the windows of our cars and had to back down a block or so to get enough traction and momentum to make it up the hill. As soon as I had done the essential business of my day, I was back in my car and heading home. It felt good to get back home. The slippery roads didn’t matter when I didn’t need to go anyplace. I heard about and saw pictures of lots of cars in the ditch and lots of problems for the wreckers and felt blessed to be able to just be a home.

But this home will not be mine forever. We humans don’t go on forever. I watched the previous generation struggle with the sense of home. Both my mother and Susan’s father came to live in our town at the end of their lives. Susan’s parents stayed in their home as long as they could - all the way to the end of her mother’s life. That home became a bit of a burden for her father and he never did succeed in the process of cleaning it out and dealing with the possessions they had accumulated. That job was left to their daughters. My mother made a move to live near my sister when she was still healthy and active. She succeeded in emptying our family home. My brother was the next resident of that house. She did, however, keep her summer place. It worked well for her to spend a few months there every year for a while. That place remains in the family and there is still some sorting that needs to be done there.

We think it would be best for us to move from this house while we have our health and energy to deal with our accumulation of things. We’d like to be the ones to do the sorting and downsizing. It seems like a challenge at the moment.

So where will our next home be? That is yet to be discovered. I assume that the building will be smaller. I think it will be closer to the home of our son and his family. Whatever happens, I can no longer think of home as a single place. I’ve had many homes in many states. In a sense I belong to all of them.

The next time I am asked, “Where are you from?” I’ll have to think a bit before giving an answer. It hasn’t been a place, but rather a journey.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

Changing times

Perhaps every holiday invites some thinking about the past. We remember previous celebrations and notice the changes that occur in our lives. Change is a constant. We grow older. New people come into our lives. Loved ones come to the end of their lives. Holidays are filled with memories of firsts and lasts: the first Thanksgiving with the new baby; the last thanksgiving with Dad. Early in our marriage Thanksgiving was an occasion for us to start new traditions for our family. Our second Thanksgiving found us in Chicago - to far away from family to make the trip home for that particular holiday. We learned to gather with friends and enjoy a traditional Thanksgiving meal. One of the guests at our third Thanksgiving in Chicago had grown up in a family that operated a restaurant. I had carved a turkey before, but he taught me how to carve and bone a turkey the way professionals do it. I’ve remembered those lessons ever since.

Yesterday was a wonderful day for us and we enjoyed close friends and a wonderful meal. We spent the entire afternoon sitting around the table, talking and enjoying one another. I couldn’t help but speculate on some of the changes that are a part of our life. We know that it is likely that we won’t be celebrating our next Thanksgiving here. What has become a family tradition will need to change. But we’ve had lots of changes. We’ve celebrated in a lot of different places and ways.

Thanksgiving is a special holiday for clergy because we aren’t used to the concept of weekends. Because we work on Sundays, our sabbath needs to be a different day of the week and often doesn’t line up with what the rest of the world is doing. But Thanksgiving weekend usually offers a three day weekend for pastors. Our children were out of school and we had time to enjoy one another. Thanksgiving weekend often included opportunities to go sledding or take a hike. For a few years we were given the opportunity to use another family’s mountain cabin and get away from the phone and the worries of everyday life.

I remember a few years ago when I noticed that people were wanting to stretch Thanksgiving weekend. Our tradition had been to gather for a community Thanksgiving-Eve celebration in one of the downtown churches. A colleague suggested that we move that service from Wednesday to Tuesday because people want to travel on Wednesday to be with family on Thursday. The concept made sense and the time of the service was changed. It is now our tradition to hold that service on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. But this year the public schools in our town took the entire week off from school. Attendance at the service was light. There was some speculation that perhaps the service needs to be a week before Thanksgiving because so many people are not available Thanksgiving week. I don’t know what shape the service will take in the future, but I know that things will change.

Because of the extended week from school, we noticed that a lot of families in our church were celebrating Thanksgiving on days other than Thursday. “We’re having our Thanksgiving on Wednesday.” “We’ had ours last Saturday.” It is a funny conversation in a way. I grew up with holidays occurring on a specific day, not with the concept of a moveable holiday. The changing days of celebration combined with a forecast blizzard for tonight meant that we had staff working at the church yesterday. It seemed really strange to me to be taking a day off when others were working. I exchanged several text messages while sitting at the table with a staff member who was getting ready to print the bulletin for Sunday. Thanksgiving weekend used to be a time when we had the bulletins printed on Wednesday so everyone could take the same days off, but flexibility to accommodate the needs of various families necessitated the change. And I can remember when my cell phone didn’t work in the location where we were celebrating Thanksgiving. Those days are past.

Another changed is the accuracy of weather forecasts. I grew up paying attention to the weather because my parents were pilots. My father taught me how to read weather maps at an early age and we would go together to the Flight Service Station to get the latest forecasts when planning trips. These days I can view the doppler radar from my cell phone. Forecasts are updated minute by minute and they are remarkably accurate. We’ve lots a bit of the sense of “we’ll take the weather whatever comes.” I still threw a parka in the back seat of the car yesterday and made sure that I had tire chains before heading into the hills to our friends’ house, but I’m pretty confident that blizzard conditions won’t be coming until tonight. And we can plan ahead to deal with the weather. I’m confident that we will need to reschedule tomorrow’s hanging of the greens in our sanctuary. We might even have the first Sunday of Advent without the Christmas Tree up. We didn’t used to know ahead of time what conditions we’d be finding 24 hours in the future.

So we’ll gat a few chores done today and make sure we’re ready to hunker down when the snow and winds are raging outdoors. We can make a few plans and we should be dug out in time for worship on Sunday morning. Folks heading out to the hills to cut their Christmas Trees are probably OK this morning, but should plan to get home by there early afternoon. Snow probably won’t start accumulating until mid-afternoon. The full-bore blizzard won’t arrive until after dark. Tomorrow will be a good day to stay inside. It could snow most of the day, which means we may need to get up early on Sunday to dig out.

We live in a constantly changing world. Some things have improved. Some things we miss terribly. I don’t mind accurate weather forecasts, but I don’t want to have every moment of my life planned in advance. A few surprises now and then spice things up nicely.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

Thanksgiving, 2019

Happy Thanksgiving! It is a greeting that will be exchanged a lot today - even by those whose travel plans have been stymied by inclement weather. It is a national holiday and one of the few national holidays that comes with extra time off from work for many. Of course the shopping frenzy of the day after Thanksgiving means that those engaged in retail sales will be doubly busy on that day. And some stores will be open today to capture whatever of that market they are able. So it isn’t a holiday for everyone.

We had dreams of expanding our annual community Thanksgiving service to make it a truly interfaith event. We did succeed in adding the Synagogue of the Hills and Rapid City Seventh Day Adventist Church to our list of celebrants, but support from the downtown churches was a bit lukewarm and attendance was light, not aided by the weather or the fact that the public schools have taken the entire week off.

Much attention has been given to cooking and eating a feast, a tradition in which we will take part later today. I have been up for an hour and a half before sitting down to write this morning. I like to rise early on holidays and make fresh buns. It is something that I remember from my days of growing up. My mother would rise early on Thanksgiving and set to work preparing the meal. If we were traveling to share the meal with relatives, she’d be up early baking bread to accompany the meal. Leftover turkey sandwiches in fresh baked rolls are a long-standing tradition in our family.

My father used to tease my mother about her cooking from time to time. The truth was that she was an excellent cook. She grew up with four sisters in a household where her mother took seriously her work as a homemaker and trained her daughters in those skills. My father’s mother was busy with a family of mostly boys and had only one daughter. The game at their house was volume. Prepare food in large batches - all those boys working on the farm meant a lot of food was consumed. But when my dad would tease my mom, she would double down working harder, gathering fresh recipes and making lots of food from scratch. We used flour directly from her family’s farm, ground in a small home mill. Fresh ingredients and lots of hard work were a part of our diet.

One of our family stories is about my father asking mother to make chicken and dumplings. She complied. He said it was very good, but the dumplings weren’t quite like the ones his mother made. She tried new recipes. Each time the response was the same. It’s not quite like my mothers. Finally our mother asked our grandmother what the secret to her dumplings was. She replied, “I’ve never made dumplings in my life.” Caught in his joke, my father was served Bisquick dumplings for the rest of his life. I grew up liking Bissquick and use it all the time.

There will be plenty of family stories this weekend and a few heartfelt prayers. Certainly we have a lot for which to be grateful in our house. Susan’s close call with a reaction to medicine has made us much more aware of our mortality and the blessing of every day we have together. The love and support that our family, church and community demonstrated during her illness is another blessing for which we will be eternally grateful.

Coming from a Congregational heritage, we know the stories of the Pilgrims and what is sometimes called the first Thanksgiving. Of course thanksgiving is a tradition that dates back to the earlier of Biblical times, but there was something new about the shared meal celebrated the support that indigenous people offered to the Pilgrims who arrived seriously short of basic survival skills. The heritage of that event is mixed, of course. the subsequent history of abuse of indigenous people, land seizures, forced relocations and much more gives us pause as we celebrate an event that some people see as a dark moment in our history.

As we have been thinking about Thanksgiving this year, our conversations have reached deeper than those things. For the most part, Thanksgiving is described in popular culture as a passive event. We eat a meal. We say a prayer. We make lists of things for which we are grateful. The discipline of keeping a gratitude journal is a useful exercise and I don’t want to discount its value in spiritual growth, but in the Bible, Thanksgiving is not a passive activity. It is a real, physical event and the focus is as much on the giving as it is on the thanks. In multiple places the Bible commands thanksgiving. It reminds us of our heritage of being led from slavery to freedom and then it gives specific instructions about the nature and the manner of the gifts we are to bring. We are to offer the first fruits of our labor - the freshest and most precious of our livestock and garden. And it is to be given away. God is generous. Our response ought to be equally generous.

Picking up on the tradition of black Friday - the day in which sales move a typical retail business into the profit side of the ledger for the year - we now have all sorts of other events on the calendar: Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and finally Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is a recent attempt at capitalizing on the frenzy of consumers and the outward flow of cash.

The Bible, however, doesn’t tell us to relegate giving to the money we have left after we’ve been on a buying frenzy. It says to make the gift first - before consuming any of the bounty for ourselves.

It is a thought to which I intend to give more attention and focus as I think through the meaning of this season. For now, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. May this season bring you both the joys of expressing thanks and the joys of giving.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

A personal anniversary

Yesterday was a special day in the story of our family. On November 26, 1917, a baby girl was born in Isabel, South Dakota. Her father was the community druggist, and undertaker, and jeweler, and casket maker. It was a small town. One had to scramble to earn a living. Surrounding the town were homesteaders who were quickly learning that the plots awarded by the government were too small to support a family and the abundant crops promised in the advertisements were not possible with the drought that was sweeping the nation. Times were hard for folks in Grant County. Then things got worse. The nation slipped into a depression. Her father died. Just surviving became an intense challenge for mother and daughter.

That all happened before I was born and before I met the daughter. But I did meet her. She grew up to become the mother of three daughters. I married the eldest. She was the best mother-in-law anyone could hope to meet. She treated me with all of the love and respect and care that she showed to her daughters.

She didn’t like to make a big deal of her birthday. I suspect that some of her childhood and teenage birthdays were perhaps disappointing to her during the hard times. Or perhaps she was just by nature more comfortable focusing attention on others and deflecting it from herself. Whatever the reason, we never had a big birthday party for her. But the anniversary of her birth is still a significant date in my personal story. If not for her and her superb skills at homemaking, child raising, and home management, my life would have been so much different that i cannot imagine it.

That, however, isn’t the only anniversary associated with that date. It was on November 26, 2018, one century and one year after the birth of that woman that our daughter announced to us that she was expecting. It was very early in her pregnancy, and we didn’t have permission to share the good news for some time, but that led to the birth of our grandson. Our daughter and son-in-law had been hoping and trying to have a baby for several years. For what it is worth 2018 was the lowest birth rate in the history of keeping that kind of record in the United States. They weren’t the only couple struggling to have a baby, but their struggle was known to us because she is our daughter. Our results, however, were amazingly wonderful. We have this incredible baby boy in our family whose presence has already given us so much joy.

Over the months of his life, we have had several conversations with our daughter that have been salted with questions like, “Who does he look like more - Mike or me?” or “Do you think he looks like me?” or “Does he look like I did when I was a baby?” The questions have prompted us to bring out baby pictures and make our observations. In a sense, it doesn’t matter who he looks like. He is a healthy and happy baby. In another sense, it is fun to compare his appearance with the baby pictures of his mother and father.

I grew up immersed in family. I have brothers and sisters and we lived close enough to know dozens of cousins. We had aunts and uncles and grandparents around at holidays every year. There were many Thanksgivings that we celebrated surrounded by extended family. I married into another family. I had met the sisters and brother of my mother-in-law before we married. I knew her in-laws. I knew the cousins. We had shared Thanksgiving with extended family with her.

rachel patrick
Our daughter also grew up surrounded by family. She knew here grandparents and her aunts and uncles and cousins. She sat at table many, many times with our extended family. But there is a small difference. Being adopted, the family in which she was immersed was not made up of her biological relatives. I could look at cousins and imagine our shared genetics. I could look at members of my wife’s extended family and imagine some of the traits that she possessed that were also possessed by other family members. I could see similarities between her and an aunt. For our daughter in all of the world she has only knowingly met one person with whom she has shared biology. That person is her son.

That truth has not left her lonely. She is a happy and well-adjusted person. The stories of our people are filled with examples of family being much more than biology and genetics. Our people have long adopted family members and incorporated them into our stories. She knows the stories of grandmothers of our faith who were welcomed into our family and became a part of our people. She has know the love and acceptance of an extended family that is delighted to have her as a member.

Still, there is something unique to the relationship she has with her son. He does, by the way, look both like his mother and his father. And his father, being adopted, has a story similar to our daughter’s.

Maybe each of us carries a bit of mystery. There are things about my past that I do not know. There are stories of our people that I have not been taught. My father’s side of the family were people who moved often. We have some genealogy, but there are plenty of past generations whose stories we have not discovered. In our city there are quite a few people who have the same last name as I, but whose relationship I do not know. We might be relatives, but if we are the connections are unknown.

So we learn to live with mysteries. Another mystery is that of birth itself. The newest baby in our family has a story that is just beginning to unfold. He will go places and see and do things that we cannot imagine. For now, it is a joy to simply look into his face and imagine the stories that lie in his history and his future and know there are more questions and more mystery.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

Of science and religion

I am not a scientist. I did not study science in college or graduate school. My passion became philosophy and religion. Both of those topics require a healthy respect for history. You have to understand that there is an evolution of thought. The ideas with which we wrestle are bigger than ourselves. We did not come up with the concepts upon which our religious beliefs are based in a single generation. If you read the Bible, you discover that even basic ideas such as the existence of one God, took generations of struggle to emerge from a wide range of different ideas and notions about the world.

Although I am not a scientist, I have deep respect for scientific method. I have no doubt that the quality of life that we enjoy is directly enhanced by the discoveries of scientists and their ability to maintain a discipline of consistent observation and careful testing of theories. In many ways science and religion are deeply connected, which explains why the church has been so involved in science and science education through much of its history. The contemporary notion that religion and science are somehow opposed has only been around for about a century and seems to thrive in places where education and history are not the focus of thought and conversation. So, as a pastor, I often hear complaints about religion from some of my scientist friends that come from misperceptions about the nature of religious thought. And I also hear criticisms of science from religious friends that are based in a lack of knowledge of scientific method.

Both science and religion have their foundations in the simple observation of the world around us. The ancients looked at the world and tried to come up with ways of explaining what they observed. They perceived beauty and were awed at the grandeur of landscapes and vistas. They observed the ways of life and death and sought explanations of what they saw. Their observations led them to develop methods of measuring. This process of observing and measuring led to the basic techniques and tenants of science. It also led to the development, over centuries of observations, of a language to speak of what was observed. Mathematics Is a consistent language to describe observations and record measurements.

In this process, people became aware that there are forces and realities in nature that cannot be directly observed. This led to a mistaken notion that religion was the realm of things that cannot be measured. We sometimes call this “theology of the gaps.” When we come to something that science cannot explain, we relegate that area to religion. As science grows and expands in its capacity to observe, the areas left to religion get smaller and smaller. It is an interesting theory, but it is inaccurate. Religion is not just speculation about that which is not understood. And there is plenty of speculation that is not particularly religious in nature.

I have a friend who is a particle physicist. A phrase that I often hear from him is, “If the math is correct . . “ If the math is correct, scientists will some day be able to detect particles which are too small to be directly observed. If the math is correct, the distances between objects in the universe is getting greater and the universe is expanding. When he speaks this way, I am reminded of how much speculation is a part of science.

There is, in science, a concept that is known with the rather unexciting name of a theory of everything or T.O.E. In principle, a theory of everything would explain all of nature in terms of a single force, so to speak. In search of this theory the assumption is made that the essence of nature is mathematical. Einstein spend decades searching for a theory of everything, a unifying theory that would explain every part of nature.

From a human perspective, however, the search for a theory of everything will forever be an impossible quest. Even if we were able to come up with a theory that explains everything we now know, new discoveries are always being made. New observations bring awareness of things that were not previously known. As soon as we think we had explained everything, something new is observed. We humans are finite. It is not possible for us to know everything.

Despite our urge to observe and measure and explain all the we perceive, the nature of the universe is not static. The universe is constantly changing. Things don’t stay the same in one neat pattern. We grow in knowledge and understanding.

Practitioners of religion often make mistakes that are similar to those made by scientists. Faithful people have been known to act as if religious knowledge has somehow been fully received. They speak as if everything that can be known or needs to be known could be contained in the Bible, for example. They fail to study the history behind the Bible and the reasons why particular words were collected into the book that is foundational to our faith. Often people want to confine their understanding of the Bible to a single perspective as if it were some consistent, unified theory of everything. It is not. It is a collection of the stories of faithful people. It contains truth far beyond a single generation. And it is constantly subject to interpretation and application to new situations and circumstances.

In religion we teach the concept of humility. We humans are not God. We are not all knowing. We are not all seeing. We have limits. Being aware of our limits is essential to understanding our place in the vastness of the universe. But we have not always practiced the humility well. We sometimes assume the we understand more than we are able. We sometimes speak as if we possess truth that is beyond us.

In this ever-changing world, I find much joy at the intersection of science and religion, where mutual respect allows for continuing discovery of an ever-changing world. That, sprinkled with a dose of appreciation of beauty and a touch of awe, gives a place where we continue to learn and grow and open ourselves to new ways of seeing and thinking and understanding.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

The water is calling

I’ve often thought about my love for boats given that I’ve never lived where boating is a way of life. I grew up next to a river that until very recently was considered to be unnavigable. These days a few intrepid kayakers with creek boats have made short trips in sections of the river and I’ve even padded around a bit in an old creek boat not far from where my growing up years were spent. Two miles downriver the Boulder enters the Yellowstone which can be navigated in kayaks and canoes and rafts. We’ve floated in the Yellowstone in many different types of craft over the years. The name of my home town, Big Timber, comes not from some unusually impressive stand of trees, but rather from the return of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1806. As they crossed Montana, Lewis kept to the Missouri River, but Clark led a portion of the explorers overland to the Yellowstone River. Near my home town, they not only had found the river that would take them to the Missouri and a rendezvous with Lewis, they found trees that were big enough to create dugout canoes for the journey. After traveling with horse and on foot, the ability to float downstream was an appealing upgrade for the weary travelers and they dubbed the place Big Timber because of the trees they harvested there.

Since those days I have lived mostly in places without any big water. My boats have traveled more miles on the trailer or on the roof rack of my pickup than they have in the water. I have a hadn’t-built kayak that has criss-crossed the United Staes and Canada. I suspect that the boat has traveled at least 20,000 miles on the top of the truck and perhaps a couple of hundred miles on water. Most of its paddles have been short - less than 5 miles. I’m hardly the “Old Man and the Sea.” I don’t have a sea. My boats have visited the ocean, but it is a rare year when they are dipped in saltwater.

Generations of humans have had an attraction to and a fear of big water for as long as there have been humans who lived within sight of an ocean or mighty river. Living in the 5th century before Christ, Homer wrote of the attraction of the sea:

“And into the broad expanse, and into the bosom of ocean plunge, to behold the old man of the sea and the home of your father.” (Iliad)

He also concludes the epic Odyssey with the opposite advice:

“Go forth once more, you must . . . carry your well-planed oar until you come to a race of people who know nothing of the sea, whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars, wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it: When another traveler fails in with your and calls the weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain, then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord go of the sea. Poseidon.” (Odyssey)

I guess I’ve lived like a member of the “race of people who know nothing of the sea.” for most of my life. Most of the time I’ve lived more than a thousand miles from the sea. We did live in Boise Idaho for a decade, which is only about 500 miles from the coast, but just a short walk to the desert. We lived in Chicago for four years and there we were a short walk from Lake Michigan, a truly impressive body of water, but we had no boat in those days and I never went far enough from the shore to need a boat in those days.

Still, I am attracted by the water. I dream of paddling along the shore of the ocean, exploring the inlets and islands and places close to the shore. I’ve no need and no abilities that draw me to crossing oceans in a tiny boat, but the small amount of paddling in protected waters that I have done has led me to want more such experience. It is one of the things that is very attractive about the possibility of moving to the area where our son lives. They can be at the Salish Sea, formerly called the Puget Sound, within a half hour of leaving their home. It was from a place within a very short distance of their home where our family boarded a tourist boat for a whale watching tour a few years ago. The smell of salt water and the last of freshly caught fish have imprinted wonderful memories in my mind of that place.

I know that big waters can be dangerous. We’ve visited the Oregon Coast on days when the winds are fierce and the waves are threatening and the spray is freezing cold. I know there are days when one does not want to venture out into the storm. Living near the ocean will demand that I learn new skills of judgment and discretion. My boats are little and small boats do best in small bodies of water. Unlike larger boats, however, my boats enable me to sit on the water and feel the rise and fall of the swells and see the world from the perspective of the surface.

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote of life on the river and traveling by night on a raft: “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

The big water continues to call me. I know that the years have passed and that i’ve become a sentimental old fool, but it does seem that perhaps I should heed that call.

There is a folk song that goes, “ . . .give me a boat that can carry two. And both shall row, my love and I.”

I’ve got the boat. I built it a few years back. Now I just need the water and we’ll go rowing, my love and I. Of course she doesn’t have to row. She can just ride. I don’t mind the rowing.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

Christ the Servant

Today is Reign of Christ, also known as Christ the King Sunday. It is the last Sunday of the Christian Calendar. Next week we begin a new year in our cycle of readings with the first Sunday of Advent. I am not the only clergy person who is a bit nervous with all of the triumphalism that often accompanies this holiday. There have been generations of preaching about “King Jesus,” and the ways in which Jesus will reign over all of the earth. My discomfort with the occasion is not in the images of the way of Christ becoming the way of the world, or of Christians pledging loyalty to Jesus above loyalty to any other authority. It comes from the simple fact that there are a lot of faithful Christians who are envisioning Jesus as some kind of temporal political leader.

In contemporary America Christians who get involved in political matters all too frequently compromise their values in search of political power. I have written before of my distress with those who call themselves Christian while refusing to welcome refugees and strangers into our country. There’s no need to return to that topic today. But it isn’t the only way that people of faith compromise their faith and values when they become involved in politics. You don’t have to look beyond the seemingly unwavering support of President Trump by the so called religious right in our country. Here is a man who has been married three times, publicly committed adultery with a porn star, speaks of his son as if he were his wife’s but not his own, and lies without a second thought. Yet he has the backing of religious leaders because they believe he is advancing their political agenda. They are willing to overlook his personal life and his shortcomings because they believe that he is the key to their winning, whatever that may mean.

The reign of Christ does not look like the presidency of Donald Trump. Jesus spoke of it himself. The Gospels report that the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to Jesus and asked a favor of him: “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” She was envisioning a kind of royal court, with a hierarchy where those who are physically closest to the ruler have the most power. She was seeking glory and recognition and power for her sons. Jesus turns the topic to suffering and sacrifice. He tries to explain to them that the realm of God is not like a worldly political kingdom. The request becomes known to the other disciples, who are indigent and upset. They do not take kindly to the political maneuverings of the mother of their colleagues. Jesus called them to himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not e so among you.” The relationships of those who are close to Christ are not like the relationships of political leaders. The strong man, tyrant who appears to wield the most power in this world is not a model of relationships in God’s realm. Jesus goes on with is teaching: “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

If we were truly serious about the celebration of the reign of Christ, we might do so by imitating his behavior - by serving others and giving up our position and privilege and even our very lives for others.

Recently I spent some time visiting in jail. I visited a detainee who was grieving because of the death of her adopted father. I listened to her crying and I conveyed to her the love and care she needed at the moment. I read to her from Romans: “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I read to her from 1 Corinthians: “Love never dies.” I don’t know how much comfort I gave, but she thanked me for my visit. Later that same day, I spoke with a detective, who informed me that she had no legal relationship to the deceased man. He apologized for giving me inaccurate information that stemmed from his being told that she was an adopted daughter. Then he said something that seemed to me to be a bit strange. He apologized for wasting my time. I know this particular detective pretty well. It surprised me that he would think that comforting a grieving person would somehow be a waste of my time.

I am well aware that my title and position grant me some pretty big privileges in our society. I suppose it is no big deal, but I can walk into and out of the jail and visit detainees without taking permission. I have a key card that takes me around the metal detector in the jail. The same card opens a back door when the lobby is closed. The control room operators know my face and open doors for me. The booking sergeants answer my questions. The pod officers greet me and open interview rooms for me even when my visit is not scheduled. Not many people are able to do that. I am treated with deference and respect and often referred to by my title. I’m called “Chaplain,” and “Reverend.”

I squirm a bit at some of the formalities. Despite the privileges I enjoy, I am not somehow better than any other person in that institution. I am a human being, just like the detainees. I feel grief at loss and pain and sorrow and all of the other human emotions. I am not immune from mortality.

Perhaps our holiday needs a new name. Instead of Christ the King, how about Christ the Servant? Instead of fancy vestments and processions, how about a day of service for others? I suspect that it won’t catch on, but for me it seems like a better way to understand how Jesus Christ works in our world.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

Survivor Day, 2019

In 1999, Senator Harry Reid introduced a resolution to the United States Senate which led to the creation of National Survivors of Suicide Day. Reid is a survivor of his father’s suicide. The day is now observed world-wide on the Saturday before Thanksgiving is observed in the US. It has now been 20 years since that first Survivor Day and the event is now called International Survivors of Suicide loss Day.

I can’t remember exactly how long we have been holding an event here in Rapid City to honor survivors on Survivor Day, but we started somewhere close to the beginning. In the early years, we held our events at the hospital because the hospital had the technology for us to link up with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s national teleconference. The AFSP organized a panel of experts, some survivors, and some researchers and after the panel discussion, participants could call in questions. As the years went by, the technology changed and we were able to move to other venues for our gatherings. The number of people who participate has gone up and down with differences in publicity and promotion as well as with the ever changing lives of the people of our community.

I don’t expect that this year’s event will be large. There hasn’t been much advance registration. We haven’t received coverage in the news. It isn’t considered to be news any more. We do this every year and every year our message is the same. We gather to provide support for those who have lost a loved one to suicide. We speak openly about suicide and we seek to understand the causes of these tragic losses.

Each year the AFSP produces a documentary video that contains a message of hope, growth, resilience and connection. It is the connection that I find so important.

Because of my work with our community’s LOSS team, I know the stories of a lot of families. I’ve been to the scenes of many deaths. I’ve sat with family members as they confront the shock of sudden and traumatic loss. Every story and every situation is unique. There is nothing that is normal or usual about death from suicide. Even cluster events where there are multiple suicides with similar features and we can see the relationships between the deaths are uniquely traumatic for those who are left behind.

I don’t have the numbers for 2019 yet. The year is not yet finished and we often see an uptick in suicides around holidays. But I know the trends. We live in a community that is disproportionately affected by suicide loss. Our state has a high suicide rate and our county leads the state. It is not a distinction that we enjoy.

I am often challenged to speak of suicide prevention and I’ve invested a lot of time and energy learning what I can. I am trained as a suicide intervention specialist and I work with other professionals in our town to intervene when we have the opportunity. We have been successful on many occasions in assisting people who are thinking of suicide. This is in spite of a lack of resources in our community. It is challenging to arrange emergency care for those suffering from acute mental illnesses. There are often delays. We have been told that there are no beds in our hospital for those suffering from certain conditions. We have been told that someone has to wait weeks to be seen by a psychiatrist. We have worked to find other safe places for those who are suffering.

The vast majority of suicides in our community, however, come with little or no warning. Survivors wake the the morning with no idea the trauma they will face that day. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “If I’d only known. . . “

In the midst of all of this, however, I want to be clear that the reason I participate in Survivor Day goes beyond a sense of loss and grief in our community. The loss is real. The pain of grief is real. I have, however, found survivor events to be among the most hopeful gatherings in our community. Sure we share our stories of tragedy. And yes, we share our despair at the lack of resources. But there is no group of people more committed to prevention, education and support than survivors of suicide loss. When I am with survivors, I feel energy around positive efforts to prevent future suicides, remove the stigma attached to mental illness and suicide, advocate for additional resources and make real changes in our community. Despite what you might expect, survivors are not inwardly focused. They are at various states in a journey of recovery and recovery involves reaching out to others with compassion and care.

The holidays are tough for a lot of people. They are especially tough for those who have experienced a recent death of a loved one. Along with the memories of past holidays is a sense of what might have been had things been different. The loneliness of grief is more intense around the holidays. Everyone is saying “Happy Holidays!” and “Merry Christmas” at a moment when some survivors are feeling anything but happy and merry.

So we will gather again today as we do each year. We may be less than a dozen. We probably won’t be more than 20 even though there are more than a hundred people whose lives have been directly affected by suicide loss this year. For some it is just too soon to get out with others. For others, it is a day for quiet introspection and not social gathering. But for some of us, it is a day to recommit ourselves to caring for our sisters and brothers in our community, to doing whatever we are able to prevent death from suicide, to remember those who have been lost and to advocate for additional services and care for those in need.

I know there are some who are made uncomfortable by talk of suicide. With all due respect, we won’t be silent. If making another uncomfortable saves a life, it is well worth it.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

Telling stories

I was sitting with a group of people prior to a meeting and the subject of speeding tickets came up. I have received three speeding tickets in my life, all before I reached the age of 30, so I didn’t have any recent stories to tell. he best I could come up with occurred in 1995, when I was pulled over by a highway patrol officer a few weeks after the state had lifted the 55mph limit on all of its roads. The place where I was traveling had a new limit of 65 mph. The officer reported that he had clocked me at 67 mph and although he wasn’t going to give me a ticket, he wanted me to know that there a new zero tolerance of exceeding the new speed limits. It isn’t much of a story, but it was what I had.

Later, I got to thinking about my desire to have a story to tell. In other similar occasions, I have told the story of when I was a teenager and my father was stopped for speeding. The officer, trying to make a joke, asked my father for his pilot’s license. My father, being a pilot, produced it. The surprised officer laughed, gave him a warning and we were on our way.

There are occasions when it seems that everyone has a story to tell. This time of year I hear a lot of blizzard stories. I have a few of my own to tell as well. Most folks who have lived around here have had some experience of driving on icy roads or a tale of the power being out for an extended period during a storm, or of a blizzard that downed trees and made things difficult for a while.

In our town, there are a select few who have flood stories. The 1972 flood in Rapid City created a lot of terrifying experiences. Many people experienced the loss of homes and vehicles. Many lost friends and loved ones in that dramatic event. Those who experienced the flood have a lot of stories to tell. I didn’t live in Rapid City at the time. I did visit after the event and saw first hand some of the destruction. My stories aren’t as dramatic as those of the survivors.

Telling our stories is one of our ways of connecting with other people. We do it naturally whenever we have an opportunity. There is storytelling around the table before meals or at the coffee shop. There is storytelling before and after meetings. It is common for me to go around the church turning off lights and locking doors after a meeting. Then I get into my car and pull around the building to find that there are multiple conversations going on in the parking lot between people who haven’t left for home yet.

We love to tell stories.

In recent weeks, we have discovered a new set of stories - ones that if we had heard them before have a fresh impact in the light of our own personal experiences. It seems as if a lot of my friends and acquaintances have stories of experiencing atrial fibrillation. Yesterday I had lunch with a church member who himself and his wife had been treated for AFib since Susan’s hospitalization. I don’t know how many cardio inversion procedures are done at our hospital each day, but it seems that there are multiple cases each day. According to the American Heart Association at least 2.7 million Americans are living with AFib. More than 200,000 cases are treated each year. There are a lot of AFib stories out there. I suppose that one of the features of our lives is that we will be hearing and telling those stories from now on.

Occasionally, when I am with my sister or one of my brothers we will get to telling stories and I will be surprised by the stories that I hear. With one brother, especially, I hear stories that don’t connect with my memories. It seems that we have very different memories of similar events and times in our lives. I joke that either we didn’t grow up in the same house, or he is a liar, I don’t know which.

Studies have shown that the stories that we tell the most often are more likely to have drifted from the actual events than ones that are told less frequently. It appears that when we tell stories frequently, we develop memories of the storytelling. When an exaggeration or deviation from the actual events occurs, we develop false memories that lead us away from the actual events.

It hasn’t always been that way for our people. For thousands of years, we practiced a very different kind of storytelling. In the days before electricity and modern conveniences, telling stories was a major form of entertainment. People would gather in the evenings after a meal and tell stories. The stories were frequently repeated. Those with the deepest significance became memories, word-for-word by groups of people. Group memorization has a self-correcting feature. When one person makes an error in the telling, others correct that error. With this technique people were able to tell stories with complete accuracy for generation upon generation. When writing became common, it was less trusted than the spoken word. Writing was prone to errors, whereas stories that had been memorized by groups of people were reliable. It is hard for us to think in those terms, because since the invention of the printing press, we have reversed our opinions about writing. Until very recently, we have believed that things that are win writing are more reliable than the spoken word.

With the advent of the Internet, however, things are shifting again. It isn’t uncommon for someone to take out their phone and do a bit of on the spot research during a conversation. Their sources, however, might not be as reliable. There is a lot of misinformation available on the Internet.

Who knows what stories our grandchildren will tell? Who knows how accurate they might be? Time will tell. One thing is certain, however. They too will tell their stories. It is something we have always done and will always do.

Did you hear the one about . . . . ?

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!