Category: personal

I just saw this list from Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Hartgrove and I liked a lot of it, so therefore, I am sharing it with you guys. Here are 50 specific ways to love your neighbor.

1. Fast for the 2 billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.
2. Contact your local crisis pregnancy center and invite a pregnant woman to live with your family.
3. Ask your pastor if someone on your church’s sick list would like a visit.
4. Join an open AA meeting and befriend someone there.
5. Adopt a child.
6. Mow your neighbor’s grass.
7. Volunteer to tutor a kid at your local elementary school. (Try to get to know the kid’s family.)
8. Grow your own tomatoes–and share them.
9. Ask a small group in your community to meet regularly for intercessory prayer.
10. Build a wheel chair ramp for someone who is homebound.
11. Read the newspaper to someone at your local nursing home.
12. Plant a tree.
13. Look up the closest registered sex offender in your neighborhood and try to befriend him.
14. Throw a birthday party for a prostitute.
15. When you pay your water bill, pay your neighbor’s too (they’ll let you… really).
16. Invest money in a micro-lending bank.
17. Ask the next person who asks you to spare some change to join you for dinner.
18. Leave a random tip for someone who’s cleaning the streets or a public restroom.
19. Write one CEO a month this year. Affirm or critique the ethics of their company (you may need to do a little research first).
20. Start tithing (giving 10%) of all your income directly to the poor.
21. Connect with a group of migrant workers or farmers who grow your food and visit their farm. Maybe even pick some veggies with them. Ask what they get paid.
22. Give your winter coat away to someone who is colder than you and go to a thrift store to get a new one.
23. Write only paper letters (by hand) for a month. Try writing someone who needs encouragement or who you should say “I’m sorry” to.
24. Go TV free for a year. Or turn your TV into a pot where flowers grow.
25. Laugh at advertisements, especially ones that teach you that you can by happiness.
26. Organize a prayer vigil for peace outside a weapons manufacturer such as Lockheed Martin. Read the Sermon on the Mount out loud. For extra credit, do it every week for a year.
27. Go down a line of parked cars and pay for the meters that are expired. Leave a little note of niceness.
28. Write to one social justice organizer or leader each month just to encourage them.
29. Go through a local thrift store and drop $1 bills in random pockets of the clothing being sold.
30. Experiment with creation-care by going fuel free for a week–ride a bike, carpool, or walk.
31. Try only reading books written by females or people of color for a year.
32. Go to an elderly home and get a list of folks who don´t get any visitors. Visit them each week and tell stories, read the bible together, or play board games.
33. Track to its source one item of food you eat regularly. Then, each time you eat that food, pray for those folks who helped make it possible for you to eat it.
34. Create a Jubilee fund in your Church congregation, matching dollar for dollar every dollar you spend internally with a dollar externally. If you have a building fund, create a fund to match it to give away and by mosquito nets or dig wells for folks dying in poverty.
35. Become a pen-pal with someone in prison.
36. Give your car away to a stranger.
37. Convert your car to run off waste vegetable oil.
38. Try recycling your water from the washer or sink to flush your toilet. Remember the 1.2 billion folks who don´t have clean water.
39. Wash your clothes by hand, or dry them by hanging to remember those without electricity or running water. Remember the 1.6 billion people who do not have electricity.
40. Buy only used clothes for a year.
41. Cover up all brand names, or at least the ones that do not reflect the upside-down economics of God’s Kingdom. Commit to only being branded by the cross.
42. Learn to sew or start making your own clothes to remember the invisible faces behind what we wear. Take your kids to pick cotton so they can see what that is like (and then read James).
43. Eat only a bowl of rice a day for a week to remember those who do that for most of their life (take a multivitamin). Remember the 30,000 people who die each day of poverty and malnutrition.
44. Begin creating a scholarship fund so that for every one of your own children you send to college you can create a scholarship for an at-risk youth. Get to know their family and learn from each other.
45. Visit a worship service where you will be a minority. Invite someone to dinner at your house or have dinner with someone there if they invite you.
46. Help your church congregation create a Peacemaker Scholarship and give it away to a young person trying to avoid the economic draft, who would like to go to college but sees no other way than the military.
47. Eat with someone who does not look like you. Learn from them.
48. Confess something you have done wrong to someone and ask them to pray for you.
49. Serve in a homeless shelter. For extra credit, go back and eat or sleep in the shelter and allow yourself to be served.
50. Join a Yokefellows ministry at a prison close to you. Remember that Jesus said he would meet you there (Matt. 25).

Obviously some of these are a little extreme but the way Jesus describes loving your neighbor is extreme.

Supposedly it is Spring somewhere in the World. 😉 This is what my drive to Ashland today looked like. Real pretty but it’s May so it really shouldn’t look like this.

In this case the “threads” in question are the “threads” who regularly setup for our Sunday night worship gathering. I try to be the first person at setup each week and to start working before anyone else gets there. When I can’t be there early I make sure the setup team knows it and I try to make sure there is extra help there. This weekend I was (and I still am at this point) on call for my Clinical Pastoral Education time at St. Michael’s Hospital. I have been called in to the hospital several times today. I was just returning from one call at St. Mike’s and pulling into Washington Elementary school at 4 p.m. (my normal time to get there) when I received another call to get back to the hospital for an emergency. Crud. I was a little freaked out and worried about the setup but there was no need for me to be because the “threads” jumped up and took care of it all. I rushed back to Washington a little after 5 p.m. to find everything had already been taken care of. You guys are the best.

I’m a big fan of Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, a.k.a. Francis of Assisi and so Pam and the boys gave me a Frank statuary a good while back. Besides being a good reminder to try and live a no holds bars faith in Christ, he also serves as a snow depth measure. 🙂

Here’s the melt from this year. April 6th through 26th.

So yesterday was a fun day. I was scheduled to run the Oshkosh half marathon for the fourth time. The half marathon is my favorite race distance, long enough to be a decent challenge but short enough that I can still function the next day. The same is not true of the marathon distance. The Oshkosh Half Marathon is one of my favorite races because it is large enough (1,200ish for the half alone) that you are always running with people around you and has been consistently well organized. Just for the fun of it here are the races that I have enjoyed running in the most:

• Chicago Marathon – Absolutely amazing. The only other races I can imagine being as good would be Boston and New York.
• Point Bock Run 5 mile (Stevens Point) – It is local, 2500ish runners, and a huge party after the run that people have to be chased away from.
• Oshkosh Half Marathon – Reasons stated before.
• Frostbite 10 mile run (Stevens Point) – It is local and you never know what’s going to happen weather-wise – really I’ve run it in everything from mid-50s weather and 4″ of snow coming down.

Anyhow here’s how my day went yesterday. I left home at 4:30 am to make it to Oshkosh in time for the 7 am race start. At 5 am I clipped my very first deer. I don’t mean my first deer in Wisconsin. I mean my first deer ever. Stupid thing ran out in front of me on a two-lane highway when I was going 55 mph. I literally screamed. I’ve heard stories of deer totaling vehicles and hurting drivers. I was sure it was going to be bad. Turns out it wasn’t that bad at all. Scratched some paint off the bumper of Fred the Sentra but that is no big deal because I hope to paint her this Summer. I think the deer probably made it away from our encounter with nothing more than a slight bruise on its hind quarter. I make it to Oshkosh with adrenaline in my system but really none the worse otherwise.

So then I ran the race. I haven’t run much since doing the Whistlestop Marathon in October. In fact, I haven’t run a distance longer than 7 miles since then and with all the snow and cold temps we’ve had this Winter I’ve only been running around 10-15 miles per week. So my plan for the Oshkosh Half Marathon was for it to be part of my prep for running as things warm up. My goal is to set a new personal best (PB) for the half marathon this year. Right now my PB is 1:58:40 and I am convince I can get it down to at least 1:57 perhaps sub-1:55. The Oshkosh Half was just going to be a training run. I started running with the 2:20 pace group hoping to finish at around 2:17ish. I figured at that pace I could run the half and still felt good enough to still set up for Tapestry that evening. I started off and felt great so I pushed it a little bit. The weather was supposed to be horrible. It wasn’t and that helped. Instead of being cold, overcast, and windy, with rain, sleet, and snow it was just cold, overcast, and windy with just a few spittings of snow. Not bad. Ended up finishing in 2:09:47. I’m pretty pleased with that. I was also a little confused when I crossed the finish line because I saw the person 10 spots in front of me get a medal and then everyone suddenly looked confused. There were no more medals. That’s right they ran out of medals. Marathon and half marathon medals are part of the fun and you only get to wear them without looking like an idiot immediately after the race. They said they would send me a medal through the mail but I can’t really wear it anywhere when I get it.  Oh well. So I found my car and started to head back to Plover.

Everything was going swimmingly. I was driving through a snow storm but it wasn’t accumulating and I was thankful for that. I also felt good after the race. I was almost home, about 18 miles out, when my driver’s side front tire blew out on Highway 10. The good news? The Sentra handles great with a front tire blow out. The bad news? Well I found that out when I tried to change my tire. The spare was great, which I had check when I bought Fred from Eric. What I didn’t check was if Fred had a jack. She didn’t. I pulled out the spare and waited for AAA to bring me a jack. That took about 45 minutes to complete something I could have finished in 5 minutes by myself. Anyhow that was the end of my journey. I still think the Oshkosh Half Marathon is a great race. Now I need to register for another race.