Category: personal

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Project Tuna Casserole

Each week I go to the  Place of Peace (PoP) meal done by Evergreen Community Initiatives (ECI) and about every three months Tapestry provides the meal for the week. If you aren’t familiar with the Place of Peace, it is a meal that it is open to everyone that was started by the Catholic Workers Movement house (CWM) in Stevens Point. When the Point area CWM group disbanded ECI jumped in to lead PoP meals. Since it is an open meal it involves all sorts of people from all sorts of groups. The PoP meals are wonderful and I, my family, and a tons of “threads” love being a part of them.

Around 5 months ago Tiffani (the leader of ECI) asked if I would start coming by weekly because she wanted a pastor to be there to pray with people. Back when ECI was connected with Evergreen Church, the pastor of Evergreen, Al Kinnunen (an all around great guy) was there each week for this purpose. Since Al and his family left the country to do God’s work elsewhere and Evergreen Church sadly stopped existing long after he was gone there hasn’t been a pastor necessarily around each week. So Tiffani, knowing that I love PoP, asked if I would come around to pray with anyone who wants prayer. Therefore, most Thursday nights I am there talking with and praying with whoever wants to talk or pray.

That’s how I learned about the desire of a few guys for tuna casserole.

There are a group of guys with some communication and developmental issues who believe that tuna casserole is the greatest thing ever. Each week while the food is getting ready and I am about to pray over the meal, one of them sends a aides up to me to ask if it is tuna casserole. Seriously this has gone on for weeks. Personally I can think of very few things in this world as disgusting as tuna casserole. Blah! But these guys desperately want tuna casserole.

Sarah L has already sent me this photo of cookies her students made for the PoP meal next week.

It is Tapestry‘s turn to bring the meal next week. Now as a church we are known as the jambalaya church. I usually make a huge pot of jambalaya and the rest of the threads bring other wonderful things. Homemade bread, lots of fruit, salads, vegan friendly options, lots of things. Since I am there pretty much every week to pray I know that we are bringing something different and something that is looked forward too, because I get asked regularly when the next time is that we are bringing the jambalaya. Most of the people at the PoP meal aren’t wanting tuna casserole and therefore we aren’t going to bring a lot of tuna casserole. But there are about three guys there who are desperate for tuna casserole and I plan on making sure they receive it.

We already have a thread who has volunteered to make the casserole for these guys. She’s never made tuna casserole before and personally I’m pretty sure there is no way you can ruin this dish because, in my opinion, it is already pretty nasty.  😜 All I know is that I am looking forward to the brief moment when then guys send one of their aides up to ask me if it is tuna casserole and I get to look at them as say “Yes! It is tuna casserole!”

Then I will quickly walk away from the smell of that plate.

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My Mom Is A Reading Fool

Just a quick aside.

My mom reads more and more quickly than any non-speed reader I have eve been around. I watched her read “Our Souls at Night” in two hours while the rest of us were sitting around talking, working, and watching TV.

Evelyn Terrell is a reading fool.

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Bonhoeffer Quote – God Loves the Lowly

I’ve mentioned before that I am reading  “God Is In the Manger“ by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and “Celebrating Abundance: Devotions for Advent“ by Walter Brueggemann as part of the my Christmas preparation during Advent. I decided to start sharing some quotes from my daily readings because I am enjoying and being challenged by each book so much.

And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God in the Manger, p. 22.

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Last Oil Change Before A Milestone

Yesterday I had the oil changed in Fred the minivan for the last time before she reaches 300,000 miles on her odometer (hopefully nowhere near the actual last time). I am super pumped about this because while Pam and I have had several vehicles that have made it over 200,000 miles we have never had a vehicle make it over 300,000. Dollar for dollar Fred the minivan is by far the best vehicle Pam and I have ever owned.

I don’t think I’ll be able to hit 400,000 miles with Fred because the Wisconsin road salt is beginning to eat away at her, but I am really pleased with all the money I have saved from her making it to 300,000.

As a pastor and chaplain I regularly listen to people having financial problems. Driving an older car is by no means the answer to everyone’s money issues, but it doesn’t hurt because repairs and maintenance on a loan free car are usually much less expensive than a monthly car payment. Fact is that we usually tire of our cars much sooner than their life-expectancy.

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Cat in the Snowmas Tree

That’s a rather odd looking ornament.

Pam bought a small artificial tree a few years ago and declared it our “Snowmas” tree. She decorates it with snow-type ornaments and leaves it up as long as there is snow on the ground. This is Helen’s (AKA Hellion’s) first year with the “Snowmas” tree.

Hellion has been fine with the real tree in our living room, but apparently artificial trees are a different matter. Hellion hasn’t left the tree and even spraying her with water doesn’t deter her. Seriously Pam has sprayed pretty much a whole spray botte of water on Hellion and it hasn’t made a difference. Hellion is soaking wet and still wants to climb the tree.

This isn’t going to end well.

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Quote from Rutledge’s "The Crucifixion" – Generically Religious

We have not become a secular society so much as we have become a generically religious one. Undifferentiated spiritual objects, therapies, and programs are widely marketed. Popular religion in America tends to be an amalgam of whatever presents itself. Discerning observers have noted that these new forms of spirituality are typically American; highly individualistic, self-referential, and self-indulgent, they are only feebly related to the history or tradition of any of the great world faiths.

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 10.

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My Study Buddies

Up until a few minutes this is how they were helping me study. Now one of them is incessantly barking beside me. I’ll let you take a guess which one is loudly telling me it is time to eat.

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Knowledge as Love

One of the problems with reading Jürgen Moltmann besides the fact that I have to re-read everything around 10 times before I have the faintest idea what he is saying, is that once I believe I understand what he is saying I want to underline around every other sentence he writes. Of course, this completely defeats the purpose of underlining because I am no longer able to spot what I was trying to remember because of the mass of writing on the page. While reading The Spirit of Life some time ago, I was sending lots of quotes to Pam because I was so excited about what I had just read. One of the quotes I sent to her was the following:

When we try to get to know something by the methods of modern science, we know in order to achieve mastery; “Knowledge is power”, proclaimed Francis Bacon. We take possession of our object and no longer respect it for what it is. … The act of perception transforms the perceiver, not what is perceived. Perception confers communion. We know in order to participate, not in order to dominate. That is why we can only know to the extent in which we are capable of loving what we see, and in love we are able to let it be wholly itself. Knowledge, as the Hebrew word (yada) tells us, is an act of love, not an act of domination. When someone has understood, he says: “I see  it. I love you. I behold God.” (p. 200)

I believe this connects with so much of our knowledge. We do it with creation, others, and sometimes even ourselves. It is knowledge to dominate and control rather than knowledge to connect and love. Connection and love are so much better than domination.

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Why Does The Baby Jesus Have Horns?

I know I should never change something about my sermon at the last minute. I know that usually when i do change something at the last moment (which I should never do) it leads to a mistake. That’s why I try to remind myself to never change anything in the message at the last moment.

Still last night while I was falling asleep I thought, “I should add an image of the baby Jesus after the slide saying ‘We Become What We Worship'”. So this morning I went to Google Image search on my computer and did a quick reuse usage rights imge search. Up popped this image.

I’ll assume that you instantly see the horns that have been added the the baby Jesus’ head. They are really pretty obvious. I should have seen them instantly. I, however, did not see them.

I didn’t pay as much attention to the image as i normally would for the images in my message PowerPoint. After all, this was a minor point that i just wanted to add an image to briefly reinforce. Without seeing the horns the image looked fine to me and, therefore, I quickly added it to my message PowerPoint without thinking anymore about the image.

At least until some “threads” asked during the message what was behind the infant’s head. I said “it is just stained glass”. Then someone said “no … why does the baby Jesus have horns?” I turned around to look at the big image projected behind me and was completely confused. Yep, those are horns. I hadn’t seen them at all before, but they were blatantly clear now.

Well, that killed that point.

This is why it is important to remember to never change anything about your message or message PowerPoint at the last minute. It also helps to be a part of a very gracious community of faith who just laugh with you at your mistakes. Thanks “threads”.