Notes From My Knapsack 10-21-07
Jeff Gill

Ah, Wilderness!

Henry David Thoreau and John Muir and Terry Tempest Williams, nature writers and essayists, all tell us about the necessity of a little wilderness to temper our civilized lives.

Orion Magazine and the Audobon Society and the National Parks and Conservation Association each try to get us involved in the story of preserving natural preserves and wilderness zones. The Lovely Wife and I support the work of groups like The Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Education Council of Ohio to that end.

With global climate change on the radar screen for political parties across the spectrum and in nations around the globe (and hey, congrats, Al, on that Nobel Prize), there’s a key role for each of us to play in supporting and safeguarding special places from the Licking Park District properties to UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

This all shouldn’t make us forget that we live in an ecosystem, right now. Your lawn is growing and respiring and decaying, the ditch down the road or over the fence may be an unintentional xeriscape or pocket tallgrass wetland, and that overgrown bush on the corner is harboring a flock of migrating songbirds.

The idea that all of the outdoors can be neatly divided into man-made and natural is the source of a great deal of confusion. Licking County can be limned into myriad zones of naturalness, from the pristine – well, maybe not – to the paved. In between is a spectrum, with gradations subject to the eye of the beholder.

One such zone that needs more awareness and understanding is “Edge.” An edge is a transition from one natural type to another, so a woods edge is one, and a pond edge is another. We don’t think of “Edge” as a natural location the way we do “Swamp” or “Prairie,” so we discount it.

One way we do hear about edge-ness is in the old-growth forest debate, because animals like the infamous spotted owl live in vast, unbroken tracts, and a Hundred Acre Wood with a road driven through the middle of it is now not only two fifty acre woods, but neither is as welcoming a habitat for Owl, Eeyore, and Pooh, or I should say their natural analogues.
More to the point, there are animals that prefer “Edge” as their habitat, just as owls need deep woods with aged trees. Can you guess some?

Of course you can! Yep, deer go for forest edge, and Canada geese go for pond edge. Increase little pockets o’ trees with lots of edge, and you get plenty o’ deer. Put in drainage ponds hither and yon across the landscape, and put an aerator in to keep the ice from freezing right across, and the Canada geese don’t migrate south for the winter.

Aby Johnson, one of the stalwarts of Camp Falling Rock for the Boy Scouts, reminds us that deer were non-existent in Ohio from before 1900 to about 1950, and through the 50’s, the Newark Advocate always ran reported sightings of white-tails on the front page of the sports section, until 1960 when they became a bit too common.

Now, they regularly put on the front-page stories of how villages and cities are working on plans to shoot deer.

We have a glut of deer because we’ve created an ideal habitat for them, in reproductive terms, anyhow, and we helpfully plant seasonal foodstuffs for them like tulips and petunias and day lilies. They thank you by having more children, and doubtless naming them after you in gratitude.

Plus, we forbid hunting. Out in the townships where they plant corn, they also carry carbines in the combine and rifles in the pickup gun rack. They have many deer, but not quite so many even with more and better food.

So the deer will be shot, and then . . .

What will happen next? The only thing I’m sure of is . . . something will happen. Nature abhors a vacuum, said Spinoza, and we live in nature, whether suburban, rural, or urban alley.

What defines your local ecosystem? Ditches that funnel run-off, nearby streams, lines of trees surrounded by knee-high growth of, stuff, a slope here, a clump of bushes over there. Where do rabbits come out of, and how many bird-feeders get pillaged by masked bandits (another edge fan, by the way)?

Mountaintops have their allure, but just as Thoreau said “I have traveled widely in Concord,” why not get more familiar with your own piece of nature? It may help us figure out how to manage it more wisely.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher who has traveled widely in Licking County; tell of your travels at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 10-14-07
Jeff Gill

Hello, World; We Are Newark

Last week I had the pleasure and privilege of sitting in on a conference call for the U.S. Commission for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (check ‘em out at http://whc.unesco.org).

As the callers from across the nation – the guy in Hawaii was up before 5 am, standing in his kitchen in the dark – rang in, introducing themselves, I thought back to a few months ago.

The Lovely Wife and I decided to take the Little Guy to his maternal-side long-ago stomping grounds, Mammoth Cave National Park. When we were waiting for a bus to an outlying cave entrance on one of our guided trips, I stopped under the large American flagpole by the entrance, and copied down a bronze plaque’s inscription.

Under a circular logo with a diamond in the center, the symbol found at sites around the globe marking a World Heritage Site, these words were inscribed:

“Through the Collective Recognition of
the Community of Nations
Expressed within the Principles of the
Convention Concerning Protection of the World
Cultural and Natural Heritage
-Mammoth Cave National Park-
Has Been Designated a
World Heritage Site
And Joins a Select List of Protected Areas
Around the World
Whose Outstanding Natural and
Cultural Resources
Form the Common Inheritance
Of All Nations.”
Below that statement is the date “Oct. 27, 1981.”

Mammoth Cave is one of only twenty places in the United States, like Monticello, the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall, and Yellowstone, with the designation “World Heritage Site.” Those twenty share the title with marvels like the Pyramids of Giza and Macchu Picchu, Stonehenge and Teotihuacan.

That number is about to change, as ten more locations over the next decade will be presented through the Secretary of State to UNESCO for “inscription.” In 2009, the first two names proposed are Papahanaumokuakea National Monument on the northeastern shores of Hawaii (including Midway Atoll), and the Civil Rights Churches of Alabama.

Right on their heels come Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, and . . .

The Newark Earthworks.

Someday very soon, somewhere in our community, a marker like the one at Mammoth Cave is coming for the “Ohio Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks,” an assemblage of both the myriad mound complexes in the Chillicothe area, and our own complex here, all built around 2,000 years ago.

I don’t mind admitting that I teared up a bit during the call, when the list of ten recommended sites was read, and just now when I typed out the official statement that goes with WHS status. Actually, I was pretty happy for the Hawaii guy, too, since he didn’t get up so early for nothing.

Ohio has done herself proud in this effort, with Serpent Mound from just a thousand years ago on the tentative list of ten, and then the Underground Railroad sites from Wilberforce down to Ripley as a recommendation for continued review on the next ten, along with the Dayton Aviation sites, which were on that second list with the suggestion that they resubmit alongside Kitty Hawk.

This is one historic state, and here in Licking County we are truly the “Land of Legend.” The world (and National Geographic) is taking notice, and now the National Park Service and the State Department are following suit.

If you ever wondered what it would be like to live in an ancient hill town in Italy, or by a pilgrimage site in South America, or next to a natural wonder in the US Southwest, wonder no more. You’re already there, and you’re home.

But we’d best be tidying up, because company’s comin’.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is a longtime volunteer guide at the Newark Earthworks sites and Flint Ridge. Tell him your tale of globe-trotting, even if it’s right down the road, at knapsack77@gmail.com.

CURRENT MOON

moon phase

Faith Works 10-6-07
Jeff Gill

Worldview Matters

Rick Warren, whose “The Purpose-Driven Life” has sat on many bedside tables and even been read before falling asleep, wants you to think about “world view.”

This Southern Baptist pastor whose influence crosses all sorts of denominational boundaries is speaking largely to pastors, and to anyone interested in helping their faith community impact the community around them.

Yes, he’s a Christian – you can say that’s his worldview, and you’d be right. His point on those wanting to offer their worldviews to others is that you can’t go at ‘em as if they have no worldview at all, and you’re offering one to fill the gap.

Pastor Warren reminds us that everyone has a worldview, and in the American mission field, there are about six that cover the vast majority of the 60 to 80% of most regions that are unchurched.

His analysis comes down to these six statements: “I’ve got to think of me and mine first,” “the one who dies with the most toys wins” (they even have a bumper sticker), “do what feels good,” “whatever works for you,” “you are your own God,” and “God doesn’t exist.” Most people, Warren argues, live basically out of one or two of those viewpoints on how the world works.

If you want to offer an alternative to those approaches, or philosophies, or whatever you want to call them, you have to first present why those viewpoints aren’t going to get you through life, let alone into the next.

Call them self-interest, materialism, hedonism, pragmatism, solipsism, and atheism, and they line up well down the side of a page, but how you write the definition shapes the response of an evangelist. And Warren is right to remind us of this fairly obvious point, because we do forget that folks don’t pick their worldview out of a philosophy text or mail order catalog, but we live into them, step by step. We adopt them because, in one context or another, they work for us, so we keep them – often long after they no longer make sense, even to ourselves.

What Warren doesn’t get into, being much less long-winded and wordy than your host in this column, is how these worldviews often persist right into the life of faith.

We hold out our faith in God’s guidance and provision, but we hold onto our belief in “whatever works” when it comes to program and planning for church life; our hearts are firmly fixed on Heaven as our true home, and still pursue our own comfort and safe surroundings for fellowship and study.

I haven’t sold 35 million books recently, but I’d step in front of Brother Rick and suggest that we need to have an honest encounter with our own worldview issues within the church, in order to have a saving impact on the fallen worldviews of others.

Are we pursuing growth for a sense of success and security in our own frame of reference, or because we sincerely need to reach out to people we see heading towards their own ultimate sadness with grim intensity?

Can we as believers build up the body, for the purpose of equipping the saints for the work of ministry, without falling into the desire for easy fellowship and cheap grace around a Buckeye game on the big screen?

Most crucially for the Christian faith in this country, and right here in our corner of it, do we want to point fingers at the family arrangements of others just to give ourselves a sense of solidarity among me and mine, when our homes and marriages and children are not being strengthened and built up for a lifetime? We need to put solid foundations under the homes of the faithful before we can out offering ourselves as consulting engineers for everyone else’s contractor business.

What worldview are you living? If a visitor to your church were asked on the way out, “What do you perceive to be the governing philosophy of living in this place?” – what would they say?

In fact, you could try that sometime. Don’t do it unless you’re willing to listen to what they say.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your world view at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 10-7-07
Jeff Gill

Free Speech Works Oddly, But Works

President Ahmadinejad of Iran managed to show off one of free speech’s best features at Columbia University.

Some voices argued with great passion and pretty decent debating points that he shouldn’t be given a public platform, given his use of “free speech” to argue against the Holocaust (all just a misunderstanding), for the obliteration of a country (Israel has no right to exist), and that Iran only wants nuclear plants so he can make that cool glow-in-the-dark paint for watch hands (OK, not quite).

But when he was in New York City for the opening of the United Nations’ General Assembly, he dropped by Columbia for a little meet ‘n greet with the students and faculty.

Turns out Columbia has a president, too, and Lee Bollinger took the podium first to tee off on the human rights record of Iran under the ayatollah-ite regime, and their lack of political freedom, such as restricting the right to breath for some dissidents, hanging a number of peaceful Bahá'ís, along with a quite a few Jews accused of spying on flimsy pretexts. Pres. Bollinger covered it all, with citations.

Pres. Ahmadinejad countered by saying, loudly, clearly, in unambiguous Farsi with a very skilled translator removing all doubt, “There are no homosexuals in Iran.”

Don’t know about you, but that one statement justified Columbia giving him a platform more than any excoriation by the school’s executive officer. Knowing that this fellow thinks he can say something like that with a straight face (sorry, I know) puts us all on the same page about the viewpoint of the current regime.

The great thing about free speech is that if it really is as free as possible, we all learn where one another are coming from, and what we intend. Press releases and sound bites can’t quite deliver that sense of who and what a person’s about.

You could call it the “give ‘em enough rope” philosophy, but that assumes this only works as a negative check and balance. I like thinking of it as more of a “Glass cleaner” approach, with more than a little circle rubbed through the dirty window, but a wide field of view showing as much as possible.

If a candidate for school board says at an election forum, “We have no kids with special needs in our district,” or a municipal candidate says “We don’t need more economic development around here,” or a township trustee race evokes the comment “We don’t have any roads or bridges that need upkeep,” I’d wonder if that was possibly what they meant as a one-line quote in an election guide.

When they keep talking after the room breaks out in laughter, as if everyone were nodding their heads up and down, I’ve learned something useful.

We’re a month away from what I think of as the “real elections,” when school boards and local councils and trustee panels go before the voters. Millions of dollars worth of TV ads during presidential campaigns can cloud men’s minds more surely than The Shadow, but in a local election, not so much.

There are irrational people running for local positions, though, and they often have one rational line they’ve ridden on the road to Election Day. You need to hear the whole statement sometimes, or hear their tagline in a broader, conversational context, to realize “this person is nuttier than grandma’s banana bread.”

If your area has a candidates’ night or election forum, make the effort to drop by and spend an hour listening. What you hear is free speech at its best, and the best solution to the problems people claim come from the wrong kind of speech is more free speech, not less.

Speak out, too, but make sure to listen to some of that free speech first; there’s a price for not doing so.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s met politicians who are unhinged and tightly buttoned down, sometimes in the same person (different days). Tell him your Election Day story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-29-07
Jeff Gill

If Only In Our Dreams

Tomorrow begins the second half of Ken Burns’ “The War” on public television, with last week repeated through the day tomorrow on most PBS stations.

You’ve probably heard that the story of World War II is covered largely from the point of view of the home front, using two small towns and two medium sized cities of the United States as the lenses to view this global conflict.

The selection of just the right pictures, now including color and movie clips alongside the classic “Ken Burns effect,” panning across old black and white photos, is complemented by precisely the narrator voice and exactly the music background for bringing out the unvarnished emotion of everyday men and women. Even the sound effects are just right, just so, justly praised.

An image from last week that sticks with me, as no doubt intended, is a shot of women in a Catholic church, kneeling in prayer while wearing black lace mantillas, loops of rosary beads between their hands. The picture homes in on those prayer cords, and then dissolves into IV tubing, held aloft by a corpsman tending a fallen comrade. Their helmeted, framed faces, drawn and weary, echo the women’s appearance as they prayed back home, the connections between them as real as a rosary, an IV, a vein.

Burns’ team at Florentine Films does a good job helping us sense the absolute lack of inevitability about war’s end, even in 1944, and anxiety about what that end would look like.

In my contact with Americans of the WWII generation, there’s a love of the song “White Christmas,” but the tune that can bring a room of them to absolute silence is “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” When Bing sings, “you can count on me,” even us younger folk know he’s saying “as far as it’s in my power,” but we all know that the tone of the song is not about optimism for Christmas next, but a prayer for some Christmas soon, and not just in our dreams.

For many in service, Atlantic or Pacific theater of operations, the fall and winter of 1944 brought no easy confidence that the sharpest or the best would necessarily make it home. Many good men had fallen from the sky or been swallowed by hedgerows in Europe, and the vastness of the Pacific had consumed so much, so many already. They wanted to be home for Christmas, but feared that it would only be in the dreams of their loved ones.

Hispanic and other ethnic groups have already taken their shots at Burns and PBS for not emphasizing their own role in the conflict. I don’t want to get in that line, but I’m nagged at by the feeling that the place of faith in the motivations of Soldiers and Sailors and Marines, and how church and communion kept the home front connected, has not gotten much consideration.

You could even say that church groups had a role to play in how little they did to prevent “The War,” even that Mainline Protestants have some accountability in their eagerness to embrace warfare in World War I, the harshness they encouraged at Versailles, and the stage setting they helped provide for Hitler, both in Germany or around the world.

You could say that, but then you’d still be affirming that organized religion has an important role in public life, so we don’t even hear about the shortcomings.

Nor do we get much of the picture of when tens of thousands of volunteers, through a network of co-operating churches, fed and offered a smile to soldiers on trains crossing the country. In Kansas, in Illinois, in Dennison, Ohio, people of faith looked for ways to embody love in a time of war.

Chaplains served with honor, and without weapons, in every major ground and sea action of the war, giving the citizen combatants a place to wrestle with hard questions and harder realities of what they had done in their nation’s service. Mass on aircraft carriers, hymn sings in marble quarries, Yom Kippur observances under pine trees – all these are indelible images of the war from many veteran’s reminiscences.

The lack of such a perspective doesn’t take too much away from Ken Burns, but it does leave an interesting gap for someone to fill; we’d best not wait too much longer for that story, either.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of “The War” at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-30-07
Jeff Gill

“The War” Comes Just In Time

My new computer came, some months ago, with a feature for managing photos and presenting them.
It includes a button whose label made me laugh. The caption says “Ken Burns Effect.”

I was amazed to hear that, with the rollout last week and next of Ken Burns’ next PBS feature “The War” on World War II, that his landmark “The Civil War” is now seventeen years in the past.

That program still feels like the breath of fresh air that it was in the popular understanding of the crucial events of 1861-1865 to this nation, but has worn so well, from the music, that included Licking County’s own Kenny Sidle, to tales like Sullivan Ballou’s final letter to his wife.

So seventeen years it is. In the same way, the events of World War II, which don’t seem any further away from me now then they did when I was a kid, are now surely further off.

1969 put the end of “The War” a quarter-century behind us, while I was just a child. Almost forty more years gone by, and those veterans who seemed so old then were younger than Vietnam vets are today, yet the survivors carry – many, maybe most, or so it seems to me – a bounce and vitality that makes their age of eighty or ninety-plus not seem quite the point.

Yet the hard fact is that we lose a thousand of the remaining witnesses to World War II now everyday, and that pace will not last long. It was that urgency which made Ken Burns retract his promise, seventeen years ago, to never try to tell the story of a war again, hearing Bob Dole and others speak in the planning for the now completed World War II Memorial in Washington DC. Burns and his team at Florentine Films set out across the country to find, ultimately, four towns (two towns and two cities, really) to frame his story of the war which, like nothing since the Civil War, touched “every home on every street in every community in America.” Which it did.

So what hath Burns wrought? I’ve only seen five hours of the fifteen that will be the whole (it continues on public television through this week, with a Sunday recap of the entirety in a block, and the inevitable DVD release). Some will no doubt dislike the fact that Burns does not call this “The Good War,” a title taken from Studs Terkel that is not a capsule summary of his point, anyhow; nor does he call this the “Greatest Generation,” a term Tom Brokaw may have copyrighted.

But Burns also wrestles with the moral dilemma of the necessity of this war, and does not lapse into trite foreshadowings of later wars less necessary from some points of view. He relentlessly hones in on the fact that war, no matter what the cause, takes a toll that is beyond understanding, but he wants us to try.

Oddly, if I had to sum up Ken Burns’ style, it wouldn’t be the characteristic pan and scan effect adding motion to still photos, or even his ruthless honesty. It is “restraint.”

So often there’s a scene, or a quote from an interview, or a fact that could, justifiably, bear further comment. The choice, over and over, is to hold back the “creative” input, and simply let the pause hang, the image burn, the statement stand.
A dog in a front yard, which turns out to be a house where a young man soon will enlist (as the Ken Burns effect pulls back, fluidly with an embrace of the viewer), can faintly heard to bark. Just a little louder, and it would have been corny; just a potentially cheesy, a whoosh from a passing car, brought to life in black and white with a swivel of the camera.

Then a soldier speaks of what it meant to watch friends die, and says his piece simply, without tears or elaboration. He stops and looks at his invisible interviewer, just over our right shoulder, and the camera holds. We think, and open a space for reflection.

“The War” is worth our time, as we think together as a nation in the coming election season about when, and how, and why a war is ever worth our time, our treasure, our blood. That space is hard to find, and Ken Burns both creates it, and makes us feel that we can safely occupy it for as long as we need to come to a calmer conclusion than we would in heated, harried, compressed debate.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your story of war or of peace with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-23-07
Jeff Gill

Hebron has seen a fair number of parades down Main Street over the years, with the breadth of the old National Road opening up a broad canvas for scenes of celebration.

Mostly, the celebrations have been baseball related, and involved bands and fire trucks and team members waving while cheerleaders leap and shout.

More somber are the Memorial Day occasions, with many of the same participants, but more subdued, from the Legion hall to the cemetery.

A new tradition may be at hand, with a parade from east to west, starting at the new Kroger parking lot, past the honored dead, into the village, and on through the historic crossroads to where Doc Walter’s office once was, and back to Refugee Road and a final turn into Evans Park.

The Hebron Business Association is organizing a Homecoming Parade this year, Thursday, Sept. 27, commencing at 7:00 pm with the autumnal sun casting long, low rays through the fields ready for harvest and shining on the faces of the band members and Grand Marshals.

Yes, they’ve got a Grand Marshal – actually, a whole raft of ‘em. The newly established “Lakewood Hall of Fame” has a first class of honorees, and confirmed to date for the parade are Ila Mason, Donna Braig, and of course the recently retired Doc Walters.

The parade will end at Evans Park on Refugee Road, on the northwest corner of the village, and a pep rally complete with bonfire will gather ‘round the Lakewood Lancer Marching Band, and led by the Lakewood Cheerleaders (Go, team, fight!).

Beth Walters with Crossroads of Hebron Floral is putting together a grand procession for this parade and Homecoming salute, and you don’t have to be from the Lakewood Schools to enjoy the spectacle and get caught up in the excitement.

This could be an ideal launch for the Fall celebration season, with the Buckeye Lake Fire Prevention parade on Oct. 7 at 1:00 pm down Walnut from Pizza Cottage, the Fairfield County Fair the week of Oct. 7, and the Circleville Pumpkin Show Oct. 17-20 (and Devine Farms on US 40 rocking out the pumpkin-ness all month).

Not to mention a few football games on Friday nights!

Apparently, there are some football games on Saturday, too. I’ve enjoyed some Denison football, which I still argue is the best value in central Ohio, and $2 hot dogs that are worth it (soft pretzels, though, you gotta bring soft pretzels back).

On the whole BigTen Network kerfuffle, I think there’s an assumption made here that could really backfire. Someone, say at an Ohio State, looks out over the 5 am crowd filling the tailgate lots, sees the sea of Scarlet & Gray ™ and thinks – everyone wants a piece of this, no matter what the price.

In the game of chicken with the cable companies, who had better not plead poverty or whine about price gouging (see entry Houses, Glass), both sides seem to think that in the end, we’ll pay a bunch extra to see all the games the Buckeyes play.
Not to be disrespectful of the religion of others, but they may not be that popular.

I’ve been out to stores and on the roads and even in non-sports bar restaurants during fairly major games (no, not Michigan or bowls, c’mon), and life has been going on without let up. No tumbleweeds down Main Street, no crickets in the big box stores, but shiny, happy people going about their business without regard to a football and young men in silver helmets.

Could they put the BigTen Network on premium, and have many fewer people end up caring? Is part of the appeal of “Buckeye Nation” the fact that it was an “everyman” (and some women) kind of experience, and you might have to check three or four different channels, but down in the basement workshop or up in the family room you could have the game on while, gosh, doing other things.

If it has to cost a bunch, however delivered or offered or extorted, I think a significant chunk of central Ohio will slowly, steadily, move on to other pastimes and interests for their Saturday afternoons.

The NFL tried a stunt like this, and found that people just shrugged, didn’t order up the “Obsessive Football Fanatic Channel” in the numbers they thought, and just changed channels to NASCAR. Could this happen to Ohio State?

Me, I’ll be enjoying the fall air this Saturday afternoon. Hope the Bucks win, but I’ll be content with checking the score on-line in the evening, after lighting a nice warm fire.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-22-07
Jeff Gill

The Pornification of Nearly Everything [this is somewhat a part II, with part I just below - jbg]

Thanks to some trends in modern culture and education, my son will likely not learn in school about the Greek and Roman pantheon, gods and goddesses whose antics helped the ancients make sense of geography and natural phenomena, including the fertility deity Priapus.

On the other hand, he knows what the diagnosis of priapism is, symptom by symptom.

You could say the fault is mine and the Lovely Wife for allowing TV in the living room: guilty as charged, your honors.
Why are these ads for medical enhancement of private moments so pervasive?

Through the summer, I did a great deal of driving. Around Licking County, the “contemporary Christian music” formatted radio stations come to us from Columbus and Zanesville, so from Flint Ridge to the Hartford Fair, I can always find CCM music or the radio.

Sometimes, weaving across the Midwest, neither NPR nor CCM stations could be found, and so I’d leave on whatever mild pop music I last found while waiting to drive into a new broadcast radius.

What jumped out at me, after having listened to so much CCM, where all the songs are rooted in the transformative power of a relationship with God, was the philosophical basis of the songs on pop radio.

Yes, they have a philosophical basis.

Some say CCM is too simplistic, too repetitive; I was saddened to hear that Tony Campolo had run down CCM in worship settings while preaching up at Lakeside this summer, accusing CCM of a “7-11” approach: “seven words repeated eleven times, or maybe vice versa.” Ha, ha, ha, Tony. Cute.

But what I heard with mind-numbing repetition and unimaginative sameness in the most middle-of-the-road, adult contemporary pop music, let alone more youth-culture oriented and harder edged pop, was that sex saves.

No? You don’t think so? Go listen to some, and you tell me. The point, over and over and over, was that the moment of physical encounter, the coming together of a relationship, would change everything, transform your life, and make everything new.

When the Bible says things like that, we call it “apocalyptic literature” and usually find it in Daniel and Revelation and chapters of Matthew and I Corinthians. “Behold, I make all things new” says Jesus as the Christ of God, and when seas melt and the heavens roll up like a scroll, we see end of the world imagery as a sign for how God’s power breaks eternity into time.

Virtually all pop music talks about how everything will change, nothing will look the same, and mysterious transformations echo out from the point where . . .

Hmmm. Can’t really be more specific in a family paper, but you’ve heard enough of the music of our era to know where we’re going in that sermon.

If I owe nothing else to CCM (and as a tool for reaching out to the marginal and unchurched today, I think Christians owe quite a bit to this genre), I’m thankful for how immersion in it helped me hear more clearly what my native culture is saying.

Our culture somehow has gotten the idea that a romantic, erotic relationship can change everything, and really, it mainly seems to preach that sex alone is transformative, no matter who you’re with. Again, if you think I exaggerate, go listen to some after reading this, and you tell me.

At the most extreme, pop music is specifically sexual; even in the most mellow and benign forms, the message is still generally that “doing it” will melt oceans, unroll the skies, and fireworks are the least of the explosions that will ensue.

And you know what? Tell people something often enough, and a fair number will start to believe it. We are surrounded by the wreckage of lives lived trying to find inner transformation and control over an unreliable world by, ah, “doing it” with whomever will help them reach that worldly sacrament.

And it doesn’t work.

Faith communities, particularly Christianity, get a bum rap for being against sex. Speaking for Christianity, which is the faith community that makes sense of my life, we ain’t agin’ it. Not at all. No more than we’re against fire. Fire, sex, they’re good, sure.

Fire is good in a fireplace. Fire between the joists, working its way between the walls to consume the entire structure, is bad. Right?

Sex in a marriage is good. Right? Sure. But sex up in the rafters or under the siding means the entire building is compromised, and likely to fall.

Sex is not going to fix your world, or solve your problems, even when you’re married. What we need to preach and teach and surely live out by example in our communities of faith is that like fire in a fireplace, sex in a marriage makes a house a home, can give light to relationships gathered all about, and can really cook.

But sex without the right setting is like a kid running around with matches lighting curtains on fire to see what happens.
Simple distinctions, which need explaining from the outside in, and the inside out. We gotta preach it, tell it, and live it.

Are you with me, or are you listening to the radio?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher; contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-15-07
Jeff Gill

The Pornification Of Just About Everything

If Britney Spears is news, I’m a network anchorman.

And my name is not Ron Burgundy.

If you watched the increasingly misnamed “morning news” programs last Monday, you were treated to seemingly endless footage of Ms. Spears, mother of two, pop star “musician,” on a stage at an award show, surrounded by skilled, professional, fully-clothed dancers.

Ms. Spears was none of the above.

Most disturbing in some ways was the way the commentary focused on how she is apparently considered “fat.” Look, I saw way more of her than I really want to, and I can say with assurance that for a woman with two kids, one born just months ago, obesity is the least of her worries. She looked more fit and in shape, from a purely physical angle, than eleven of the next ten people I’ll see down at the mall.

I was, and am, a little mystified by the general lack of comment on how she was clearly in a daze, stumbling around the stage, barely knowing the words to the song she was not even close to lip-synching.

She danced badly, you say? No, she looked like a captive in a kidnapping video, doing what her captors were making her do at gunpoint, with too little sleep and maybe some pharmaceutical enhancement.

Forget the fat, which wasn’t there. She was wearing underwear with some sequins justifying the label “clothing,” and she was vaguely simulating a stripper routine, alternating with what my high school principal called inappropriate contact with a dozen different guys (all of whom had to be thinking “eight years of lessons and a knee operation and I’m getting union scale, while this stumbling girl is . . .”).

And it was on every morning show, except for Nickelodeon, which is starting to look downright wholesome.

So clearly putting on weight is the one unforgiveable sin in American culture? That can’t be the point, if look down the sidewalk in any Licking County community is any guide. That, or we’re all unrepentant sinners – hmmmm. . . .

But I think the talk about fat was being used to hide from another issue, which is what dieticians and counselors tell us is what real fat is often about.

Britney Spears was acting out, all too well, the role of a stripper, a prostitute, a porn star. If there was one person, just one person in her life who cared about her as a person at all, they would have looked at her and said “fire me, cut my pay, delete me from your cell phone, but honey, you are in no condition to go out on a stage in front of your peers and a global TV audience, not even to read a cue card.”

But strip club owners, pimps, and pornographers tell their often drugged and intoxicated employees “C’mon, you can do it, just toss back another shot of this and get going.”

The numbers tell the story: Americans are consuming porn at incredible rates, and not just on-line. X-rated movies are said to do more business than the mainstream studios, and that’s the money they admit to, keeping in mind that no one disputes that the involvement of criminal figures in the porn industry is extensive. Print formats and pay-per-view XXX are booming at the same time, with in-room movies so lucrative even the J.W. Marriott company, a very “family values” based company in the past, from their Mormon heritage, feels they have to offer that “service.” (Industry reported average viewing time of in-room movies? Seven minutes, which means weary travelers are usually paying a buck or three a minute for the “service.”)

For a growing segment of the audience, a dazed and confused nearly nude woman constitutes entertainment, or the prelude to it. So why would we have much to say about Ms. Spears other than “sheesh, she’s put on, what? Five pounds? Maybe seven?”

Porn is so mainstream that “stripper-chic” is not a joke term, but a fashion label.

Underlying all this is the American mindset that stripping and prostitution and porn are “victimless crimes.” Yep, there’s those quote marks again.

Friends, I’ve spoken to more prostitutes than most of you, albeit in prison visiting areas and chapels. But don’t let anyone kid you about “victimless.” You just saw another victim of this evil system on stage if you saw TV last Monday (or watched the event, I guess, on Sunday).

She stood there, lost, without a friend, trying to move her body to please us, her audience. Libertarians and feminists and family should be her friends, and they apparently could care less.

Only people of faith, I fear, can see this for what it is: a crime, a tragedy, and a call to candor. Porn wounds and scars and kills, starting with women used and abused by men at every step in the process. It doesn’t need to be banned, it needs to go broke. It should be unprofitable and non-viable and utterly despised.

Some ideas next week; stay tuned.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher; contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-16-07
Jeff Gill

Looking For an Apple

Some local orchards have signs up saying “Due to frost, there will be no apples this fall.”

The frost they speak of was back in April.

That’s how growing things works – a frost in the spring leaves you apple-free in the fall, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Our current mindset balks at such an idea. Of course we can do something about it! We can order up a load of apples from New Zealand and dump ‘em in the produce department to pick through, and throw out the culls a week later (with the good Lord alone knowing how many were pitched earlier in the process for lack of cosmetic appeal).

True, the April frost will not cut into our stock of pie filling and applesauce and stuff for bobbing after come Hallowe’en. We will have our apples . . . this year. Probably the next, too.

Meanwhile, apples from New York state will go to Iowa and West Virginia apples will go to Minnesota, and we’ll see Galas and Golden Delicious (ick, personal opinion) with little stickers for Ecuador and down where people stand upside down on the earth.

Does this not seem a bit odd to you? And as energy prices increase, will the silliness become outright irrationality?
If the market has the wisdom I think it is capable of when driven to common sense, usually by price increases, we will see a bit less of perishable foodstuff from across the International Date Line in years to come.

Others will joke “Global warming, huh? Then we should have longer growing seasons in Ohio, not less. Sign me up for a leased landyacht, paid for out of my home equity loan.”

For the record, it’s “global climate change.” The trends, as measured and hypothesized by climate scientists, mean more rainfall some places and less others; reduced snow pack and glacial growth in the Rockies may be part of colder springs, but warmer falls.

If the world mean temperature is going up due to greenhouse gases, or sunspots; if increased particulate matter in the atmosphere is reflecting sunlight back into space to cool other stretches of the planet; if the Great Lakes don’t freeze over anymore during the winter (and they haven’t) – then down-wind of the lakes we may see more snow as a result of the mis-labeled “global warming.”

But there are aspects of what’s going on with temperatures, current and historic, and how we measure that which I grant are not as well understood as some with political agendas would like to say.

To be perfectly candid, I’m much more worried about aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination, and oceanic dead zones. Those are fearfully measurable, and the numbers aren’t good. From numbers to concrete phenomena . . . did you know that there is something, slowly spinning around in the northern Pacific Ocean called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which is the size of Texas? Oceanic scientists call it, ironically, “the world’s largest landfill.” Precise measurements were last taken six years ago, but it’s estimated that the ratio of plastic to living organisms in that water is 10-to-1 by now, or more.

Plastic breaks down on exposure to light, over time, but only into smaller pieces, still floating, very tiny. All those disposable water bottles you saw spinning through an eddy in the creek the other day? There’s a good chance that their fragmentary little selves could add someday to that continent of consumed consumer-ness floating in the Pacific.

That’s in seawater; our own freshwater right here in Licking County is steadily under suspicion, with septic fields and agricultural runoff pushing the entire county closer and closer to across the board sewer and water treatment systems just to preserve drinking water here in Ohio.

Go to Las Vegas, let alone Los Angeles, and figure out where the water for golf courses and green lawns is coming from. Did you know that the Colorado River, the watercourse what carved the Grand Canyon, essentially stops parts of the year, never making it to the Gulf of California? (That was a big hint.)

We’ll figure out what to do about all this short of major disaster. We’ve reduced the hole in the ozone layer with a ban on certain aerosols, and we may well outlaw Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty transplants as a ground cover in parts of the country. But we’ll need water, fresh, drinkable water, no matter what, and as oil becomes pricier, the means to desalinate and purify water resources will need to change. Grey-water management will not be a specialist term and rain barrels will go from history lesson to everyday housekeeping.

Somehow, just becoming aware of our own local ecosystem seems to be an important part of whatever those changes will be, as you and I are either a conscious, or an unconscious part of being the change. Cheap apples from New Zealand don’t really plug a hole in a local economy, they just fill up a line in a recipe.

Whatever we’re gonna be doing with the oil and gasoline we still have available in another generation, it isn’t going to be that. However it is we get pure water in another generation, we’re not going to be using an apple skin and cargo ship as the delivery method of choice.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he reads that passage about “dominion over the earth” as a two-way proposition. Contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

The earlier, evocative shots of the dining room at "The MIlk Pail" restaurant in East Dundee, IL, were the prelude to visiting this place as a kid with my brother(s):

OK, so this guy looks like the zombie snowman ninja of your nightmares, but in a friendly way:


...and the gate into the true magic kingdom of my childhood:

I can't quite explain why this is important, but it is. Suffice it to say this restaurant, "The Milk Pail," was where the Gill kids' great-aunts, Chloa and Georgia, took us before we entered the wonderland that was "Santa's Village." Between the Walnut Room at Marshall Field's in downtown Chicago, and "The Milk Pail," my idea of what classy eating out was got shaped by the experience of those two restaurants and "the aunts," cloth napkins and paying at the table and everything else -- those two places still color my view of every non-fast-food dining experience i have.

Starting this year, "Santa's Village" in East Dundee is no more, but "The Milk Pail" goes on -- a bit remodeled and the grounds not so parklike (room for more parking, no doubt), but the green fake leather chairs and the milk pail light fixtures and the veranda room all ring up a huge batch o' memory-to-go:

Notes From My Knapsack 9-9-07
Jeff Gill

Autumn Skies and a Chill

There’s been talk around the cracker barrel at the general store about fall, and what we’re in for.

The dry stretches of the summer, and leaves curling early, with swaths of yellow already in the canopy, lead many everyday naturalists to expect a swift season.

Will the leaves turn bright colors, or just go to brown, tan, and saffron? Will they give us a few weeks of glowing arches overhead, or just a turn and drop in the same few days?

Along with such speculation comes the scrying of the wooly-bears. I continue in my own bafflement over whether the brown stripe wide means more snow, or narrow brown with more black calls for the harder winter.

But the first wooly worm I’ve seen was grey-black from end to end. Which must mean either no snow at all, or buy stock in towing companies now, since the skies will open.

The team from “up north” felt a chill early, and for those who want to know, the Appalachian State campus is in Boone, NC. Nice place. Good school. Who knew they had so many fans in central Ohio?

The family had the pleasure of hearing repeated cheers for the Mountaineers of Boone (not to be confused with the WV ‘Eers) while watching a remarkable football game in Piper Stadium on Deeds Field at Denison University.

Actually, the game was fairly unremarkable, other than one magnificent runback on a kickoff for the Big Red. They did lose, while playing hard right down to the final whistle.

What that team did accomplish was the 1,000th football game for Denison. This is their 118th season of college football. By my math, that means since 1888 they’ve been playing downs, even if T-formation and face masks are a fairly new development by that measure.

1,000 games. The upstart program west of us, in Columbus, only began in 1890, and is just up to . . . OK, 1141games, but that’s because Ohio State keeps playing after Thanksgiving every year, when all scholar-athletes know it’s time to start studying for finals.

I wish I had some pictures of my dad playing football in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, with a leather helmet and no face mask. Apparently they didn’t have many photographers roaming the sidelines in Anita, Iowa back then, so I just have his stories and a few clippings from the Atlantic, IA paper about his single-wing exploits and defensive derring-do (yep, played both ways).

He’s too polite to point out I’m a much better football player in the pictures my family has than I ever was on the field, with full mask and shoulder pads, forearm shiver at the ready. What I can do is sound as if I’m older than I am, because I played on Indiana’s last single-wing team. There was in my hometown a legendary coach who was still winning championships into the 70’s with the long snap and strongside sweeps by the tailback, led by a blocking back and fullback. When Coach Stokes retired, the entire county football establishment swung over to T-formations and Wishbones, and the era of the quarterback began belatedly for them.

Now the cost of equipment and liability insurance has pushed football, even with high tech helmets and orthopedic cleats, into a bit of a corner, and the Little Guy plays soccer with nary a look at football. Mom and Grandma are quite candidly relieved, and Great-grandma looks down from Heaven with a happy sign as well, I’m told. My dad’s blown-out knee and enough tales of two-a-days from me haven’t made the ladies of the family nostalgic for the grand old days of every lad trying out for the team, pushing the village fire truck up and down hills in August.

Many thanks to the players and families who keep alive fall football, the trainers and coaches who keep the players safer than they’ve ever been, and all the chain holders and concession stand workers and ticket takers who make sure that one autumn ritual is still available to us all, even if fewer of us are playing.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he was a tackle and guard on a number of valiantly losing teams through his football career. Tell him your sports story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-8-07
Jeff Gill

Children Lost, and Found

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” said historian L.P. Hartley.

A story came out of Chicago recently that got me thinking about that strange land where tourists can’t readily travel.

Some folks of Greek ancestry did a little research into an odd corner of their Orthodox cemetery, and found that there were 160 unmarked graves, dating back to before 1935, with 22 buried in 1918 from the global influenza pandemic of that year.
And they were all children.

In looking for the causes for so many unmarked graves, laid to rest mostly before the Depression, the record keepers confronted some forgotten realities of an era just before our own. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1926 the number of children who died within the first year of life was 73 out of 1,000. That same figure today is less than 7 of 1,000 born.

Economics and cultural differences among Greek immigrants play a role, no doubt, but can you imagine the difference it would make in a neighborhood, around a church, for parents in general, if ten times as many small children died?

Just after reading that story, I heard a sermon preached about Methodist heritage, where the congregation was reminded that John Wesley’s mother Susanna was the 24th of 25th children, and that John and Charles were among 19 born to Susanna and her husband Samuel. Only ten of those 19 survived to adulthood, and no one is quite sure how many in the generation before, but likely half or less of the 25 lived.

How must that atmosphere have affected parenting? What does a mortality rate of 50%, and in those quantities, do to your sense of childhood?

Morbid enough?

Ah, but it gets worse. The superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park, John Latschar, recently revisited a speech he gave in 1995, considering whether, in Lincoln’s words, “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

He observed that, nearing the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks (as we approach the sixth), comparing the impact of the Civil War and 9-11 was both sobering, and instructive.

If you look at the numbers as a percentage of the American population, the death toll on the Gettysburg battlefield was the same as twenty-one September 11’s. For the Civil War as a whole, to compare today using population percentages, you would see 37.3 million in military service, and 6 million deaths. As a comparative percentage of the American population, there were 42 Civil War battles that were equal to or greater than the impact of 9-11 in casualties.

Imagine a Sept. 11 every month, for four years. Latschar says “One cannot even begin to comprehend how the nation could cope with such a horrific and prolonged struggle today.”

With the toll in Iraq creeping steadily toward 4,000 deaths, and tens of thousands more wounded (and that simply the American toll of this combat), we count our soldiers dear and grieve even the losses of those who oppose us. We have recalibrated our sensibility and adjusted our willingness to express our feelings over death, whether among children or combat troops.

There is, I think, no disputing that we are better off as a society for losing the indifference that we either once had, or learned to put on. What we have trouble making sense of is both the stoicism of generations past -- and sometimes still with us -- and what to do with the strong emotion evoked by sorrow and tragedy and loss.

Turning our personal grief inward and just plugging along we now see as something less than healthy. Pouring emotions of the moment all over public view doesn’t seem to bring much healing or resolution, either. How do we remember, and honor, and grieve, and learn from senseless tragedy?

Public rituals that make memory tangible can help weave frayed strands of community back together. Shared acts of commitment give a place and location to general feelings of helplessness, and places expression in a setting of communication, not just tirade.

Today we have candlelight vigils and peace rallies on street corners, ribbons on trees and roadside crosses. Pickup truck window clings and yes, even tattoos exist to give voice to sorrow that otherwise might find a more destructive outlet.

Grief and sorrow may not look quite how they once did, but from Antigone to Rizpah (see 2 Samuel 21:10), our enduring human reaction to death is to cherish and honor the dead as a way of showing what we value in life.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your memorial event remembrances at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-1-07
Jeff Gill

Craft and Patience, and Faith

Out at the Flint Ridge Knap-In this weekend, you’ll see plenty of quiet focus, silent diligence, and mutual respect all at work and on display.

Is it prayer?

To some degree, that would be up to the artisan. I wouldn’t want to impose that perspective on anyone who didn’t have that intention. My question is on behalf of those who would, intentionally, see their work as a spiritual discipline.

When you do flint knapping to make a “point,” or arrowhead as folks mistakenly call them (since bow and arrow wasn’t used around here until fairly recently in historic terms), you have to quiet yourself, settle your mind, and find a non-distracting posture.

The idea isn’t to put on a show, a flurry of activity; you need to only make the motions that contribute to each step, going from flake blank to final projectile point.

Your work is steady, but slow – at least in modern terms – and you have to work with the materials. If a beautiful piece of flint has a crease or bulge of crystals, you can’t force it in the direction you want the shaping to go, flake by flake.

But when you let yourself learn from your materials, you find yourself making something unexpected, but all the more fascinating for how you become a part of a larger process, something beyond your own plans and intentions.

That sounds very close to prayer for me, or at least a worthy discipline for entering a prayerful state.

Many people who work with their hands on artisan-type projects report that they feel closest to God when they are creating something. Woodworkers, quilters, blacksmiths, and yes, flint knappers; farmers working the fields at harvest, and bakers at home or at a bakery. All say that the act of creation, the simple repetitions and shaping gestures, brings them to a place where their prayers are not only more personal and clear, but their sense of God’s presence is more real.

“Created in God’s image” would mean we’re created with an aspect of that creative urge, right? “Sub-creators” as J.R.R. Tolkien said in his writing about the meaning not of his literary creation, Middle Earth, but of the act of creation itself – the task of writing and correlating and molding character and plot and landscape, which he went on to compare to . . . woodworkers and quilters and blacksmiths.

Labor Day is an opportunity for all of us to reflect on the nature of work; our work, the work of others that shapes our lives, of the place of work in God’s purpose for our lives. The union movement that gave birth to Labor Day as a holiday is itself rooted in a desire to see work honored and respected, no matter how humble; unions ask laborers to come together to protect the workplace as a setting for more than simply economic purposes. We shape our souls as we choose how we approach our work, whether it’s our attitude as we scrub the grill at closing time, or how carefully we attach the spade lugs to the power supply. A casual, careless attitude toward work as just a set of hours on a pay stub leads inevitably to a casual, careless value of life itself, and all manner of ills, social and personal.

So take a trip out to Flint Ridge off Brownsville Road this weekend (they’re out there chipping away through Monday), and walk about the knappers and reflect on their work, and your own, whatever Tuesday holds.

Can your work be prayer? Is prayer in your work?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s worked closing and scrubbed more than a few grills in his time. Share your story of work and faith at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-2-07
Jeff Gill

Oh, the Writer’s Life For Me

With the Lovely Wife at her ahem-th high school class reunion, my name badge proudly said “Spouse” and had no incriminating ancient yearbook photo (ok, I’m ancient, the photos all look young, fine).

So I spent a fair chunk of time noshing my way through the “heavy orderves” or whatever you call the faux food they serve at these things, and drank some blessedly excellent coffee while watching the crowd get tipsy.

Life of the party, that’s me.

But as my dearly beloved found quite a few of her friends to talk to (shouting over the entire “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which should date us quite as precisely as C14 testing), there was another spousal unit who walked over to my little table and sat down.

He introduced himself, and explained which of the bus stop gals were his wife, and then said “so I hear you’re a writer?”
The way he said it meant this wasn’t entirely a bad thing from his point of view, so I admitted that this was, in fact, one of my many job descriptions.

The reason for his interest was that their son was graduating from high school this year, and he wanted to become a writer. Did I have advice?

Hmmm. How far down platitude road should I go? I’ll confess to starting with a real creaker: writing isn’t something you become, it’s something you do. If you want to adopt writing as a persona, like putting on a Hallowe’en costume, the next step is to start drinking and smoking so as to be more “authentic,” and spent lots of time in darkened rooms, brooding.

If that’s being a writer, I’ll be a painter, thank you very much. But plenty of people take on the role of writer, but end up with a few napkins worth of clever observations stuffed in a drawer, and no more. Writers write, and if you want to get better, write more. You may not be very good in a poetic or literary sense, but anything you actually write (or type) will be better than brilliance that never escapes your cranium. So I said.

As a dad, he liked that. OK, so writing is something you do. He does write for his school paper, and he’s done some creative writing workshops, but what he really wants is to be a columnist. How about that?

Always ready to crush the hopes of the young, I leapt to the observation that there are maybe twelve people in the entire United States who make a living from writing columns. Most of us are doing it a) for free, because we like being in print, and some publication has space to fill, or b) get a modest (say, two pizzas worth) stipend, or c) are working as a reporter of some sort and have worn down our editors to the point where they give us a column, as long as it doesn’t take time away from the real work.
True, if you’ve built up a strong track record as a journalist or author, you may get a decent offer to write one or two or even three columns a week, but I refer you back to the twelve versus 300,000,000 problem. Good luck, but you’d better have a “make a living” plan to go with your aspirations for columnhood.

The dad pointed out that I’d mentioned “editors.” His son had written for some publication for a while, and had said that what he definitely wanted was to write a column that “just said what he thought,” like . . . mentioning a well known sports writer who had a column in the large newspaper of that city.

“He has an editor. Trust me on this one, his stuff gets edited,” I told the curious father. The ideal of “writing whatever I think” is one of those classic “wishes that should never be granted.” The sad fact is that few of us should be allowed to put our thoughts, as is, right into print, and editors are not least unappreciated for the fact that they occasionally prevent us from committing the sin of putting our unadorned thoughts on the page.

More to the point, everyone gets edited. Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ellen Goodman, Maureen Dowd (ok, I think they must not edit Maureen), Robert Novak, Thomas Friedman – everyone gets edited.

You can learn from editing, too, unless you’ve drunk the narcissistic beverage of “my every original thought is a gift from above.” May God indeed help you if you think that.

Will Dad tell the son these wise words? Who knows, but he gave me a column I’d been meaning to write for a while, and my tally sheet tells me that this is also my 500th column here in Licking County. Thanks for reading and even writing to me occasionally!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; no, he doesn’t enjoy being edited, but like a colonoscopy, knows that life has some necessary evils to a greater good. Write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-25-07
Jeff Gill

Look Out, He’s Gonna Rant

There’s tradition, there’s the law, and then there’s being a decent human being.

I’ll admit any one of the three can be a challenge, and to combine all three calls for a saint. Of which I am a poor example. But.

Last week, I was part of a funeral procession. It was for a grand woman who lived a long life, but sadly only eight years after finishing her college degree. She served this community in more ways than a column could count.

As is usually the case, when the pallbearers had carried her casket to the coach, we all pulled out onto Main Street in procession, lights and blinkers on, with little flags on each vehicle.

Did I mention there was a funeral coach with a casket at the front of the line? Of course I did.

We drove a long stretch of Main Street through town, and up nearly the length of 21st St., and a good bit of Rt. 13.

For all of you who pulled over to the side of the road and stopped, or even just slowed down as you could, edging far aside out of courtesy and respect, I want you to know something. The family and friends of this woman noticed your act, and they appreciated all of you, each one. It was a simple act of kindness that took so little time from your day, but meant a great deal to many of us.

And those who did so were both young and old, hot cars with cool decals, land yachts with bobble head dogs in the back window. Young men with dramatic tattooing noticeable from fifty feet away, and women with two kids in car seats gazing uncomprehendingly out of their minivan. Very little drew all those together, the very large number who showed courtesy to this funeral procession, other than basic human decency.

Then there were a few whom I would like to address, even as I doubt that they read, outside of the words “Open Here” on snack foods and packs of cigs.

Just how indifferent to sorrow and honor do you have to be to pass, on the right, a funeral procession, jouncing along the gravel, in order to turn into a fast food establishment?

What kind of callousness do you evince in your everyday life to force your way through a line of cars with – did I mention? – a casket carried in the hearse just ahead?

Need I mention that these so-called fellow citizens were also spread around the age and income distribution; young and old, wealthy retiree and redneck road warrior. The sourballs came in all flavors.

We who claim faith as a value in our lives may still find idle superstition a cruel handicap. Broken mirrors and Friday the 13th should carry no terrors for anyone who has a coherent belief system.

But do you, who leap out into traffic around dozens of your fellows who have, in fact, pulled over for a funeral, speeding past the hearse and mourners, not have any sense of bad luck, of karma, of big juju, of cosmic paybacks?

What the law says about all this I’ve heard described variously, and the solution to what I’m calling a problem is not more police writing tickets. There may well be no actual violation of the law in some of the shenanigans I saw, and I don’t care. What you need to know when you see a recently deceased person and their family coming at you is “whoa, whoever they are, let’s slow down, pause, stop if we can, take off our hats (I saw guys in cars do that, in fact) or turn on our lights, and remember if only for a moment that this life is fleeting.” For this, there is no law.

What might come in handy, and since I’m thinking insensitive idiots probably don’t read the paper, is if we all agree to start some rumors. If people got the idea that zooming past or weaving through a funeral procession was bad luck; if drivers had heard that passing the hearse on the right meant seven years of never even winning a scratch-off again; if young women thought they’d break out in pimples if they crossed the middle of a line of mourners; if old men got the idea that ignoring other cars in their lane pulling over would lead to their losing their license by going blind . . . that kind of thing just might work.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s seen pretty much everything go on around a funeral procession, but see if you can surprise him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-26-07
Jeff Gill

School Lists For School Boards

Everyone is running about with school lists finishing their allocation of required and recommended stuff for the kids.

I’ve got a little list for those getting ready to start a new school year who are learning from the challenging venue of an elected school board seat.

Before I launch off on some unasked for advice, someone might ask why I don’t run myself if I think I’m so clever as to offer suggestions to those who do.

The fact of the matter is that I seriously thought about it, but one of my multitudinous part-time jobs legally prevents me from being on a school board. C’est la vie.

First item on the list, as important to modern schools as pencils to a grade schooler, is transportation. Has anyone for your district run the numbers to see what your budget looks like if gas is $5 a gallon in a couple years?

There are some “peak oil” apocalyptics out there who give careful thought about energy policy, in my opinion, a bad name, saying that we’re a decade away from hemp sandals and living off market gardens with all our cars now tireless, rusted hulks, supporting tomato vines. This is a bit much, though that alternative future would bring general acceptance of shooting (and eating) deer, I’d think.

What is even more certain than global warming is the fact that we are running out of cheap, easily accessible oil. We’ll have enough, even for China, but not cheaply. And as demand increases (n.b. China), supply will become dearer, meaning . . .

If your school district’s budget forecasts assume $2.50 or at most $3 a gallon gas, there may be a big hole in your assumptions. Will it happen for sure? As the song goes, “don’t know where, don’t know when,” but the day is coming soon. I’d want a contingency plan, myself.

Second list item check-off: sports. Great thing, sport, “playing fields of Eton” and all that. More the merrier. What I’d just want to ask about whenever the big ticket, equipment and facility intensive sports come up, is how we’re thinking about “life-long learning.”

Y’see, life-long learning tends to get seen as a books and reading and maybe language and travel sort of thing. But with some major high school reunion activity around our family recently, I’ve noticed that most of the choir and drama and intermural friends of our youth are still fairly fit and active, while many (maybe a majority) of the letter-winner big team sports folk are, um, not so fit. Kinda, uh, unhealthy. They haven’t played (insert sport name here) since their senior year, nor any other sport by the evidence at hand. Are we maintaining access, for all students, to some form of physical activity they could continue into late middle age?

Which goes along with the third thing, already snuck in above: the arts. Lively arts, graphic arts, musical arts, art for art’s sake. Art is one of the ultimate life-long learning skills you can pick up in school – I still use the basic sketching skills of perspective and dimension I learned from a fourth grade art teacher. Right, I know, “No Test Left Behind” doesn’t reward education in the arts, unless you can tie it to math and reading scores. Does this mean an effective local board of education might need to support and affirm community arts programs outside of the “legal” school day? “Cuz they can say what they want in Washington, but art is part of education.

Fourth on this short list, last but not least, ties back to number one, really. Food. A universal subject if ever there was one.
But also a local subject. What our kids eat has quite a bit to do with how their brains work (you are what you eat, quite literally). Where it comes from can affect how you live, too. Allergies and general well-being connect to how well connected we are to where we live.

When fuel and transportation costs go up, so will the price of vegetables from Peru and fruit from New Zealand. Locally grown foods will start making sense, again, for reasons both practical and fiscal.

I’ll admit a small personal tinge in this overly idealistic suggestion. My dad just sent me a clipping from his Iowa hometown paper, one of those “Fifty years ago this week” features.

It seems that the paper had a front page story at the end of the summer in 1957 that Mrs. Gill, the head of the cafeteria operation, was organizing her annual canning party at the high school kitchen. Dozens of community gardens’ produce were put up for the use of Mrs. Gill and her staff right through the fall and coming winter.

Someone will no doubt clue me in on how many different county, state, and federal regulations keep you from doing that today. Of course.

What if we called it a social studies activity, preserving vanishing culinary practices and maintaining cultural traditions?

Well, it’s all free advice.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s proud of his grandmother the lunch lady. Offer your lists to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-18-07
Jeff Gill

Youth Groups Serve Many Purposes

School begins this week, and faith communities of all sorts also launch their youth ministries.

“Youth groups” aren’t in the book of Acts for Christians, or called for in any other sacred writings that I know of, but having a youth fellowship of some sort these days is right up there with having a door. Ya gotta have one.

I’m not going to question this particular conventional wisdom (not this week, anyhow), but for members of the Youth Council or Christian Ed committee or Young People’s Programming group, there is a question worth asking as you prepare to launch off into a new fall season.

Is your youth ministry mainly about formation and discipleship, or is it about evangelism?

The cries will echo immediately off the newsprint or computer screen: a false choice! You cannot choose; you must be both.

Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the choir.

My counsel to church leaders and youth pastors is that an effective youth group will always have elements of both evangelism and discipleship, but knowing which end of that spectrum is most important helps keep clarity in planning and prioritization.
Wait, there’s a hand up in the back. Yes? Oh, there’s a reader who asks “what’s up with those two long words, anyhow? I hear you church-y people using them, but what exactly do you mean?”

Good question. Some church-y words get so polished with use that they can slip right out of our hands. What do we mean?
What I mean by evangelism is the effort to reach out to the unchurched; the process of bringing people to an awareness of what it means to believe, and where that belief leads.

Formation or discipleship is the work of taking someone who has made a basic decision to accept or affirm a belief system, and showing them how to apply their faith to the questions and challenges of everyday life.

For most Christians, evangelism is getting people to the point where they say “yes” to Jesus as Lord of their life, while discipleship is learning what their tradition teaches about how to follow Jesus, and steadily following Jesus more closely.
Is that clear?

What makes this an even sharper question for youth leaders is that, in the process of dealing with bringing large groups of young people together for fellowship, the older members of a Christian community often find that carpets get stained, light fixtures get cracked, and stuff gets left in the fridge. ‘Nuff said.

But those older leaders will say that they can deal with the wear and tear and outright damage to property because “when you get the children, the families follow.” They see youth ministry as an evangelism tool.

The problem with that is you rarely see the families following, in practice. Yes, it does happen, but not as often as you think. The bottom line is that a youth program will rarely “pay its way” in terms of bringing new members to a church. Even when large numbers start showing up at activities and Bible studies, there’s no guarantee that youth group numbers translate into membership numbers.

When everyone understands that a middle or high school program is about forming them as stronger, more committed Christians, you are better situated to celebrate those times when youth work actually does bring someone to a confession of faith, but you aren’t waiting for so many more of those, just to justify the commitment to a youth program in your church.

As you can tell, I think that for most churches, a basic orientation to formation and discipleship should motivate church leaders to support their youth programming. Your own members’ children and grandchildren will grow in maturity as part of your tradition, and they will bring friends who will often need some extra support and mentoring, helping them understand new approaches to faithful living they may not have grown up with. There is evangelism going on, but it isn’t the whole reason you’re onboard.

If you believe your church is called to take on a youth ministry that is specifically aimed at evangelism, that is a unique calling which will be rewarding to all concerned, but will shape every element of your group. You won’t just be able to pick up the latest cool ideas going around at workshops, because formation is a very different human process than evangelism.

And if you’re wondering, I think that mission trips or work projects are really most effectively about formation. Can people make a first step towards faith by ending up along on a work trip? Sure, but they can also end up with skewed ideas about grace and “earning” God’s love. What a mission experience is best at is building powerful discipleship in the workers when they return home with a radically new vision of the Kingdom of God at work in their world.

Is your youth group really all about discipleship, or evangelism? Clarity on this question can make many more decisions more straightforward further down the road.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s been a youth minister and Fifth Quarter chaperone and young adult advisor over many years. Your views on how youth groups can be more effective are welcome at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-19-07
Jeff Gill

Durable Goods and the Disposable Consumer

Here at Sycamore Lodge, the Lovely Wife and I take pride in the number of appliances and housewares we have from our wedding presents, some decades ago.

We’ve bought a new toaster, the blender and food processor have died, and there’s been a dozen coffee makers, but we still have all the pots, most of the glass cookware, slow cooker, and colander, plus my great-aunt Chloa’s wok and hot plate.

We use the dining room table and sideboard my parents started married life with, and a bed, dresser, and kitchen table from LW’s childhood home.

With enough older household gear around, we have reference points for a very simple observation. Stuff is getting cheaper, but it is also getting cheaper, as in, well, cheap.

Wood products are interesting in that the older American made goods that were made for the basic family market are manufactured from wood that is very high quality, with fine grain, few knotholes, and a great finish.

Those kinds of workmanship touches are now only found on the very high end stuff, while a set of new chairs can be gotten much more cheaply in real, let alone adjusted dollars. When you flip them over, you’ll see that they come from fascinatingly exotic corners of southeast Asia.

When you live with them a few months, you realize that little wedges drop out as the tropical woods dry and contract, flaws filled with putty show their outlines, and the material itself just can’t take a bump or scrape without significant damage.
These chairs won’t end up in the Little Guy’s home when he’s our age, trust me.

And plastic isn’t what it used to be, either. Thinner, more brittle, slightly off seam in contact points. Add to that the natural degradation of most plastic . . .

As I’ve mentioned here before, the curators at the Air & Space Museum of the Smithsonian and over in Dayton at the USAF Museum know that the cloth, wood, and leather artifacts of the early days of flight are remarkably durable with a bit of shining and tending, while the suits and masks and stuff of the early Space Age are crumbling to plastic dust even in environmentally sealed cases.

There’s some yard equipment I bought four years ago that seemed durable and carried a respected brand name. It felt solid and lasting, and had a good rating from a consumer group. The low price helped, I’ll admit, but it didn’t define the deal.
Yet I’m not holding the broken bits of a crumbling artifact that might as well have come from an Egyptian tomb. Chunks of the casing are flaking off, and key parts broke in use which led to the breaking of other parts, all of which are no more made today, four years later, than replacement parts for Henry Ford’s grandfather’s buggy whip. Cogs and clips and reels which are necessary for the unit’s operation are snapped, and their equivalent pieces on today’s models, externally identical, and internally a whole new ecosystem of parts.

Which means I have a bunch of useless junk, including un-useable rechargeable batteries which are perfectly good, but can’t be snapped into the models sold now, which can be fixed with today’s parts. The parts are a dime’s worth of plastic, while the batteries are most of the weight and (I’d think) most of the cost.

My one bright spot, if you know the dilemma I face: next Saturday is Hazardous Waste Disposal Day at OSU Newark. On Aug. 25 from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, you can bring by your old batteries, rechargeable or used up commercial, mercury thermometers, household chemicals, and just about anything but paint (put some kitty litter in it and stir, then set it out for your regular trash). Antifreeze, fire extinguishers, metal primers, oven cleaners, furniture stripper, brake fluid, all that kind of nasty stuff you know you can’t put down the storm drain anymore (you do know you can’t do that, right?).

If you have questions, Luellen would love to hear from you: call 349-6308 . . . and Licking County Recycling and Litter Control would love to hear from you.

Meanwhile, do we shop around and buy something that costs an arm and a leg, but is made somewhere within this hemisphere, and will last a few decades – or get the cheapest, knowing now that it won’t even make it five years?

These are going to be important choices for all of us in the coming years. Think about it, and dispose of what you have to safely.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your household durable good at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-12-07
Jeff Gill

Elvis Has Left the Church Building

Thursday, Elvis Presley has been dead for thirty years.

If he were alive today, he’d be 72.

Why are you snickering?

Oh, right, Elvis may not be dead. A Michigan convenience store owner saw him, there was a sighting on an all-you-can-eat buffet line in Reno, stranded motorists in Tunisia . . . wait, that one was Jim Morrison.

Anyhow.

There will be vast gatherings of fans who want to remember “The King,” who will assemble in a candlelight procession passing the site of his grave, and almost equally vast horde of reporters taking pictures of the throng and watching the myriad Elvis impersonators for an elderly version who might be . . . ?

As a Christian, I’ve been asked by skeptics about Jesus, the Resurrection, and Elvis. See, they say, people who don’t want someone to be dead, and gather in ecstatic crowds to remember that important person, whose relics are held as tangible reminders: they can convince themselves that a dead person still lives.

The one point I’ll give such skeptics is that the trade in Elvis relics is real, even if many of the relics are not. Mr. Presley did take to handing out little sweat towels and white scarves in ever increasing numbers, and some of his live concerts show him with a dozen scarves at a time, flicking them one by one to adoring front row fans.

I’ve been in two homes myself where there were what can only be called Elvis shrines, with candles on either side, a picture, suitably idealized, and in a box or, in one home, under a glass dome, the white scarf.

Actually, popular figures have long been prone to after-death appearances. Rudolph Valentino showed up around the county during the Depression, after his untimely death in 1926; his grave has been visited by a series of “Women in Black” leaving a red rose, and no doubt will again, later this month on the Aug. 23 anniversary of his death. Jesse James survived in a profusion of places according to the variety of elderly men who claimed to be the legendary robber who was, they said, not shot by Mr. Ford.

(Edgar Allan Poe has a mysterious visitor to his grave on Jan. 19 each year, which is the mystery writer’s birthday, but Poe himself has stayed safely on the bookshelf with his stuffed raven.)

What sets this kind of phenomenon apart, in my mind, is that the crowds are at the grave, and the appearances are, well, somewhere else. Like Kalamazoo. Elvis doesn’t appear to his friends, his family, or at Graceland, but at fast food joints and salad bars.

Elvis didn’t say he was coming back, didn’t warn his staff about how they’d know when he’d be going in the first place, or how he’d die (he was supposed to start a new concert tour the next day), let alone why he’d be doing all this. Elvis died, rather tragically, and was buried under a mis-spelled tombstone which no one wanted to admit they’d messed up after it was in place.

Actually, not 40 years after Jesus, a Roman emperor named Nero made a big splash with the common folk, cranked out the original “bread and circuses,” loved to play music in public and build himself fancy houses, and killed himself when the bill came due.

For years, especially in the outlying provinces of the Roman Empire where the capitol was seen as the source of misunderstanding and oppression, people had seen Nero as a fellow schlub who understood them and their frustrated desires. And they kept alive a myth for decades that Nero still showed up at parties, the wilder the better.

Yes, there’s a human tendency to want to create mythic heroes who live out our dreams, who make up their own rules and carve their own way through life. And we don’t like their usually tragic ends.

What sets Jesus apart is how he knew his death was a part of his life, and that his appearances after were not meant to erase or obscure the fact and meaning of his dying, but to make sense of that cross and our place at the foot of it. Jesus didn’t show up for his own purposes, but for ours.

Nero and Elvis are emblems of our not-so-secret desire to keep the party going on our terms, while Jesus lives to invite us to a party where a place has been prepared for us.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your story with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-12-07
Jeff Gill

Making the List

Cruel though it may be, the Little Guy and I needed to make an outing for school supplies.

The official lists come out around August 15 for many classrooms, and most of the more specific supplies run out by August 1, so there’s a note of guesswork even with the general “recommended supplies” list in hand.

A more paranoid person than myself might suspect that there’s a malign conspiracy to get people to buy up large stocks of stuff they won’t actually need, but I’m not saying that. Quite.

Two packs of permanent markers are nowhere to be found, but the dozen multi-color pack that no school asks for are in bin-stuffed surfeit. Sure, name brand glue is available for a nickel and the store brand for two cents (don’t tell me that isn’t a classic “loss leader” strategy), but the flimsy folders with characters from movies that came out a year ago and more are surely making up the profit margin.

The Lovely Wife does some strategic shopping through the year, and Grandma, former teacher that she is, buys up clumps of supplies on sale and then much later finds the caches at odd intervals, bringing them to her grandkids along with assorted sacks o’ fun.

No matter what, we still end up with a few items that are a) unlocateable, or b) must be purchased at ridiculous, extortionate, swingeing prices. The protractor with the non-Euclidian extension, scissors with the latest anti-cutting protection device, or notebooks no taller than eight inches with exactly 92 pages, lined.

So we wander about some of Licking County’s famed mercantile establishments. My heart sinks when I see at one that shelving with interesting fall craft supplies are being stripped even of the mark-down tags that we’re there a couple weeks ago. Why are the fall crafts going away? To make room for Christmas stuff, of course.

Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee…….

Where Christmas décor reigns, school gear must take a back seat. Backpacks, in fact, take a back seat, shoved aside with their remaining selection of Hello Kitty, Josie and the Pussycats, awkwardly drawn muscle cars, and two Transformers book bags. Lunch boxes? Don’t ask.

If you haven’t bought back to school clothes yet, you should know that the racks are filling with parkas and snow boots. We all know September is often one of central Ohio’s hottest months, but don’t go looking for short sleeves or flip flops. I’d rather try to find a snow shovel right now than an outfit for the boy, unless he’s going for a start of the school year field trip to Greenland.

All is not lost. You can count on one thing this time of year – if you want a school folder, t-shirt, flip flops, seat cushion, pocket protector, or tissue holder with a large, scarlet and gray Block O on it, with buckeye leaf garnish, they’re easy to find.

Go Bucks! (Wonder if there’s an Ohio State logo Wii out there . . .)


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s quite aware that school starts in ten days! Send him alerts on back-to-school supply sales through knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-4-07
Jeff Gill

1 in 500 Americans – Really

Your kindly scribe was working on a look at the faith community response to Katrina, now two years ago, when a new emergency fell into our awareness up in Minnesota.

Outside of the American Red Cross chapter for the Twin Cities, whose offices were nearby and whose staff were first responders no matter their training, I’ve not found much (by Thursday night) on the churchly front, though I’m sure the Lutheran community was first with the most, either in terms of compassion or hot dish for grieving families.

So we’ll get back to that later, and meanwhile . . . Hurricane Katrina (and Rita, as Louisianans will remind anyone who is interested).

While there’s fair criticism to go towards the state officials, city leadership, FEMA and federal folk in general along with the Army Corps of Engineers, it should always be remembered that there were the estimated 30,000 people who were literally plucked from the jaws of death in the immediate wake of the storms, largely thanks to the US Coast Guard and many Armed Forces Reserve units. That, and 120 billion dollars (that’s a b, boys) spent by the US Gov’mint so far on relief, wreckage, and rebuilding of major infrastructre.

None of which tends to be the help and care and compassion everyday people need in the middle of a major disaster.
Anyone who knows anything about the United States of America since Alexis deTocqueville knew that church volunteers would be the backbone of the relief effort. Few of us could have anticipated the strength of that spine running down through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Estimates are all that exist for numbers around the volunteer tsunami into the Katrina/Rita area, but our cousins over at USA Today did some research, and came up with some amazing statistics. The total number of Americans who have spent a week or so down in the affected area doing recovery, repair, or reconstruction work AS VOLUNTEERS with faith-based groups approaches 600,000.

That’s a huge number, but put it this way: one in every 500 Americans has been to help with the aid effort. Not just wrote a check or worn a rubber bracelet, but went and mucked out refrigerators and crawl spaces, hammered studs, or balanced sheetrock on their heads.

180,000 Southern Baptists, 60,000 Methodists, 6,000 UCCers, 15,000 Nazarenes. Your friends, your neighbors, from all over the nation. Groups like Habitat for Humanity and the Salvation Army have tried to do their part to organize the whole deal, but they’re largely organizing who shows up, not motivating the volunteers and getting them staged and sent. That, they’re doing on their own.

For Licking County, some 145,000 residents, that would mean to do our part would take 290 weeks of workers. With my own back of the envelope notes from churches and college Campus Crusade groups and Presbyterians going wild, I figure we can say we’ve done our part and a bit more, with at least 300 Licking Countians having crowbar calluses on their thumbs and sore backs from sleeping on church floors.

College groups are way out in front on this, as befits those with a bit more flex in their schedules, but week for week, our local students have been doing the rest of us proud. Add all the work together, and you have 50,000+ residences that have been worked on or improved these last two years.

The reality check is that two years ago, at the end of August, 70,000 homes were destroyed in Mississippi and 200,000 in the New Orleans area. Over two-thirds of the residents have returned, but even of those, 60,000 are still in FEMA trailers.

So the work goes on. Church groups in Newark, in Johnstown, in Granville, in Heath, "do not grow weary with well-doing,” but persevere for the faith once delivered by the saints, helping the last, the least, and the lost. “Send laborers for the harvest,” asked Jesus, to do the work of apostles, evangelists, caregivers, and carpenters.

Every giftedness can find a fulfillment in the mission fields of the Lord, and the tragedy of Katrina is matched by the majesty of hearts responding without hope of earthly gain.

And Minneapolis’ bridge reminds us that a disaster response, under one color cross or another, may be needed when we least expect it.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and a regular blood donor; tell your story of faith motivating mission to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-5-07
Jeff Gill

Fairly Good Times, Deep Fried

These are the times that try men’s . . . digestion.

Pork chops on a stick, twinkies on a stick, batter-fried oreos on a stick, batter-fried pickles on a stick. Someone no doubt sells fresh vegetables somewhere at the Hartford Fair or Ohio State Fair, but not before they’ve been dredged in flour and dunked in hot peanut oil.

Zucchini and tomatoes are often a bit worse for wear by the time they’ve been awarded ribbons in the gardener’s “best of” competition, but not enough to make you walk on the other side of the lane past the steak sandwich booth.

Food is necessarily at the heart of fairgoing and fair judging, since the roots of our American fair tradition are deep into the soil of our farms. As the bumper sticker says, “If you ate today, thank a farmer.” Somebody grew, raised, or cultivated everything you threw on the grill last week, unwrapped from the freezer last night, or will purchase from a vendor at a fair.

We’ve put miles and plastic and logos between our imaginations and the reality of planting, tending, harvesting, picking, sorting, packing, shipping, processing, and preparation. Think about the gap from Chicken Little to Chicken Mmmmiii . . . never mind.

At the fair, you can bridge that gap. C’mon, the jump’s not so far, and it doesn’t have to be scary. Milk a cow, or watch one be milked, peel the shucks off an ear of corn, fresh roasted and picked in this area just that morning, watch the cattle parade through the barns and imagine your favorite steak coming from . . . ok, so you don’t want to do that part. But as the fellow said, “Parts is parts,” and that’s where them’s comes from.

Our Hartford Independent Fair runs through this week, and if you don’t get out to Croton (yes, I know where the dickens Croton is; guys, get a new town slogan, please) you miss a chance to see where your future lies.

No, not so much in food – though I’ll bet you’d like some good, healthy, edible food in your future – but in youth. The Junior Fair Board is a great crew that works like the dickens for weeks before and surely the week of the Hartford Fair, and they with hundreds of 4-H presenters, with livestock, club presentations, and The Band are the best side of our future. You can read some bad news about a handful of area youth, and that needs tending, but the good news, this week, is out in the far northwest corner of our county.

The Ohio State Fair has already launched, and runs beyond this Saturday’s end of the local fair. You can hear about the acts from “American Idol” and Weird Al elsewhere, but the evening at the fair isn’t a time I think about for going inside an arena, but for walking around the midway as the lights, many already on, seem to grow brighter and more compelling with the gathering dusk.

You get these long, slow, low sunsets in August, with the haze making a red rubber ball in the west easily visible (I know, you shouldn’t) for a long stretch before it disappears into tomorrow, with the scraps of today picking up enough purple glow from below the horizon to make a dreaming backdrop to the strings and wheels and arcs of lightbulbs across the fairgrounds.

You will no doubt see some of those aforementioned 4-H youth from Licking County competing with their projects and animals over in Columbus, since they regularly do well enough to pick up a ribbon or trophy or two against the other 87 counties of Ohio. And the drama of the final auction is triumph and a touch of tragedy that reality TV can’t touch.
Go. You know you need an elephant ear to make your summer complete.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his sister won a State Fair grand prize (actually, a couple), but he’s been to more different State Fairs than she has (4). No ribbons. You can brag on your favorite fair participant to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.