Faith Works 11-15-08
Jeff Gill

Startling Echoes, Head-turning Parallels

These last few weeks have been dramatic and evocative on so many levels.

I’m enough of a history geek to recall in the middle of so many other associations that Grant Park in Chicago is named for the general who began a career in Illinois, and who played a key role in ending the Civil War. I’m also old enough to remember Grant Park as a place forty years ago where “armies of the night” surged against police barricades with angry shouts and raised fists, as a Democratic candidate for president was being nominated to fail.

And my own heritage out of Illinois and Indiana, and my wife’s from Kentucky, keeps the thread living and vital pulling through the fabric of today about a tall young man who ran for an Illinois Senate seat 150 years ago, losing to Stephen A. Douglas after a dramatic series of debates over freedom, slavery, and the place of liberty in this nation.

Abraham Lincoln, born February 12th exactly 200 years before the January 20th we have ahead of us, entered office without an official faith stance or church membership. We’ll have a number of opportunities these next few months to review and rehearse Lincoln’s journey of belief, but I’ll just note that perhaps no president has written so thoughtfully and so well about discerning God’s will in human affairs than the man from Springfield.

But I was mc-ing a clergy gathering just a few weeks, and got some very uneasy laughter from partisans of both candidates heading for Nov. 4 when I pointed out that pastors had an interesting choice ahead of them in the two major parties: one a fellow who had sent a letter quitting his church because he didn’t agree with the minister, and the other a guy who wouldn’t formally join the church where he attended with his wife because he had a busy travel schedule.

I’m pretty sure both McCain and Obama supporters laughed, and both laughed uneasily, because that knife really does cut both ways. Men are bad about “joining” and more likely to “quit” over conflict than women are.

Men’s ministries have never held the role or influence, ironically given other aspects of American culture, that women’s groups or ladies’ aid societies have maintained. They’ve always been smaller and shorter-lived compared to their female institutional counterparts. In mainline/oldline Protestant denominations, another era of die-off is hitting men’s programming, and among evangelicals the Promise Keepers’ movement had great impact for a season, but has generally faded into obscurity (though Bill McCartney and Raleigh Washington have just returned to leadership with PK, so we’ll see what happens there at www.promisekeepers.org).

Why are men so resistant to “joining” and so quick to cut ties? Some suggest that women are more invested in relationship as a basic quality and value, hence their structures are more important to them on a personal level.

Others note that much of modern church life is in a more feminine mode, starting with singing (yes, I know Billy Ray Cyrus sings, but in general . . .), the décor, and often even the preaching, focused on feelings and emotions and personality.

John Eldredge has become a kind of one-man movement among evangelical Christians with his books and weekend programs starting with “Wild at Heart” and “Waking the Dead.” He argues that a more masculine faith is needed to most effectively reach men, which makes a certain rough sense of the face of it.

A number of Reformed and Calvinist pastors have expressed alarm at John’s use of popular movies and books to present a worldview that is “not quite Biblical” in nature; liberal mainline writers are concerned at what they see as his glorification of combat and warfare in those same images.

Eldredge argues that he is using those popular images to tap into an essential hunger for men to be part of “spiritual warfare” to defend and protect their families, and can quote Scripture just fine for his own defense. He’s happy to admit that his oeuvre isn’t for everyone, but is an outreach to an audience that has tended to sit outside in the car reading the Sunday paper waiting for the wife and kids to come out of church.

You can judge for yourself at www.ransomedheart.com, but the two candidates present an interesting test case for any faith community – if you met Barack Obama or John McCain through work or community business, and wanted to invite them to your church, how would that offering look to them?

(CORRECTION: the original version of the first para said Grant was "born in Illinois," which of course is incorrect, said the guy living in Ohio. His business career which turned into his return to the Army with the Civil War began in Galena, Illinois, but he was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, just upstream from Cincinnati.)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; suggest a way to reach those left out by modern church life at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 11-8-08
Jeff Gill

Points of Light, Circles of Hope

Last Sunday evening I had the distinct pleasure of Emcee-ing a “Gospel Celebration” concert at the Midland Theater in Newark, on behalf of the Licking County Coalition of Care.

Funds were raised and spirits raised higher, but I had an interesting moment when I got a round of applause I wasn’t expecting.

During one of the transitions between groups, which is when the master of ceremonies is actually useful if they fill the time productively, I tossed in a little speech about how “no matter who wins the election on Tuesday, the kind of work the Coalition does will still be vitally needed; government is not good at providing time, a listening ear, and a word of hope.”

Trust me when I tell you that I was acutely aware that the hall and the 600 audience and some 200 performers included the most passionate of Obama supporters, and hearty advocates of John McCain, and at least one Bob Barr stumper that I knew of. But what I was pleasantly surprised by was how the crowd thundered applause, as one vast meaningful rumble, when I noted that the change in presidency will not change the need to support work like what the Coalition of Care does.

I was thinking that again Thursday night, when I was standing in a more modest throng, but significant for a candlelight vigil after dark on a November evening. Just to keep things a bit confusing, I serve as board president of the Licking County Coalition for Housing, a group which works on providing transitional housing to people and families leaving emergency shelter and needing assistance to get to stability, along with a major financial literacy effort to do preventive work to fight homelessness.

For the last seven years, we’ve done something inspired by a very moving exhibit at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, where a wall is simply twenty feet of empty shoes, echoing a pile found at Auschwitz. The mind quickly thinks to fill those shoes with bodies and faces and people, but the emptiness remains and helps you imagine and understand loss, to resist invisibility.

That’s why we’ve set out some 1,400 pairs of shoes, discards from other agencies, for the last six years, to show the number of people who come to the Housing Coalition for assistance and support in staying housed, one way or another. We get federal funds to maintain the 38 units of transitional housing we provide as the core of those supports, so we don’t pray with our clients the way the Coalition of Care can, working as they do with entirely local funds, but I know that many of our staff and friends pray for the people they work with, every day.

And even the Housing Coalition can have a little ecumenical prayer in our public education efforts, which I got to do at noon on Courthouse Square and what I listened to Brad Isch, pastor of Narrow Road Community Church on Fifth St., do in both prayer and a bit of preaching about the need to go from awareness to action, in this as in so many areas of our lives.

The Housing Coalition needs support from those of us who still have jobs, who can afford to share with those who are hurting, for unrestricted funds and also for local match to qualify for those useful if restricting federal dollars (give us a few hundred thousand a year and we could walk away from those HUD bucks, but . . .); the Coalition of Care needs your help because no one anywhere else is going to help pay to keep the lights on and support people here in Licking County in that way. We can count on them to pray with and listen to and share a little aid provided by congregations working together, and they can help direct people most efficiently from church referrals to the state and federally funded agencies they need to talk to, but with the knowledge that someone will stand behind them or even with them as they make their way through those systems.

It is said about prayer in schools that as long as there are algebra tests, there will be prayer in school; we will always have much prayer around all the efforts in our community to help people in need. Pray for those folks, pray for those working to make that aid usefully available while strengthening the recipients at the same time (a tough, tough challenge), and pray for those making decisions through this holiday season about their giving.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s happy to remind you that donations can come online at www.lcchousing.org! Or just write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 11-6-08
Jeff Gill

Presidential Candidates in Black and White

One of the interesting challenges of writing a newspaper column these days is that you get to write material days (sometimes weeks) before a print run, while the internet never sleeps.

So my writing of this piece precedes the election itself, but will necessarily appear after the results have been splashed far and abroad. What to do?

Actually, given the historic role of the Obama campaign, let alone a likely victory, my thoughts have tended towards putting his story in a broader, but also Ohio context.

One of the aspects most remarked upon about the Barack Obama candidacy is the fact of his African background, with a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, and matured in Illinois by way of Columbia and Harvard.

In fact, Barack Obama would not be the first President of the United States to carry some African heritage. Surprised? Well, this gets to be a complicated and obscured history on many levels.

Quite a few U.S. Presidents have had African ancestry claimed for them, but mostly it’s been political opponents making the claims, hoping to rally racism and xenophobia against the other side.

Ohio’s own Warren Harding was said to have African American ancestors. His usual response was along the lines of “who knows what my ancestors were up to?” makes you think he wasn’t quite saying no to a claim that was political poison in the 1920’s. Modern genealogical research leaves the question open, which is as good as a “Yes” for me looking at the 19th century.

Saying that Harding was the great-grandson of a black woman was supportable enough for the New York Times to print in April, anyhow. Less proveable is the persistent claim that Andrew Jackson, namesake of Licking County’s Jacksontown, was as much as one-quarter black, and that an older brother was sold as a slave until redeemed by family. These stories trace back to a common and unsubstantiated source from a political opponent, but intriguingly they can’t be entirely dismissed, either.

Dwight Eisenhower was quietly but persistently said to be one-quarter black, perhaps largely based on two points about his mother: she was a committed Jehovah’s Witness to the end of her life, and her younger portraits do look quite African American, if in fact such a thing can be usefully said.

For an Ohio connection to the presidency and African Americans, the most interesting is to Thomas Jefferson.

As Annette Gordon-Reed, in her new book “The Hemingses of Monticello” points out, not only is Sarah, or “Sally” Hemings most likely the effective “second wife” of our third president, she is almost certainly mother of six or possibly seven of his children.

From 1790 to 1808, the births of each of Sally Hemings’ children match a documentable presence of Thomas Jefferson nine months before, where no other male in his line would fit as precisely – and DNA test results show that the narrative of Eston Hemings in the Pike County Republican of 1873 is supported by scientific data.

Not only do Eston and Madison Hemings end up in Ohio (though Eston continues on to Wisconsin before his death, to put more distance between himself and slavery), but Thomas Woodson, whose family maintains by oral tradition that he is the first son born to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings out of their Paris sojourn in 1790, is the founder of a settlement of free blacks in Milton Township, Jackson County, Ohio.

Madison Hemings’ son becomes the first African American elected to public office on the West Coast, becoming a California State Assemblyman in 1918, though born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1879.

Sally Hemings’ last resting place is to this date unknown, as she was a 56 year “old woman worth $50” according to probate appraisal in 1826, after the death of Jefferson on July 4. He could not see his way clear to freeing his slaves upon his death, as did George Washington, but his daughter Martha gave Sally “her time,” a form of freedom that allowed a former slave to remain in the area. But did she?

Scholars believe that Sally Hemings died in 1835 in Charlottesville, VA, down the hill from Monticello where she lived from her childhood, to nursing her half-sister Martha Wayles Jefferson through her death in 1782 when she was nine, through the trip to Paris at 14 or 15, the two years overseas, and then the return to Monticello which she never left . . . until Jefferson’s death.

Is it possible that like many widows of that era or even today, Sally Hemings went to live with one of her more prosperous sons? The gravesites of Thomas Woodson in Jackson County, Ohio, or Eston Hemings in Ross County, Ohio, are not well marked or fully recorded. Rather than beneath a parking lot in downtown Charlottesville, VA, could the “second wife” of our third president be buried in southern Ohio? It is quite possible.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about anything other than the election at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 11-1-08
Jeff Gill

A Man Who Rippled the Waters

Last weekend I got to spend my time with members and leaders of the Church of the Brethren in the “Western Plains District,” which includes all of Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Colorado and New Mexico, and a mission on the Navajo Reservation.

With yesterday as “Reformation Day,” the anniversary of the nailing by Martin Luther of his 95 points for reforming the Church Catholic of his day in 1517, Lutherans are remembering their roots.

However, it was a movement called “Pietism” led by pastors like Phillip Spener and others that helped to create a number of other movements that we don’t always associate with the Lutheran end of the Protestant Reformation. John Wesley was deeply influenced by Spener’s writings in college at Oxford, and encountered Pietists at key moments in his faith journey that helped produce the Wesleyan/Methodist communion.

Pietism was behind a number of German, or “Deutsch” groups that came to William Penn’s colony in the New World. They were often called “Dutch” by the English speaking Quakers, but the Pennsylvania Dutch included not only the Anabaptist movement communions like Amish and Mennonite, but Pietists who were tagged with names like “German Baptist Brethren,” “United Brethren,” and other religious societies who withdrew into institutions like the Ephrata Cloister (a possible inspiration for the Shakers later) and the Harmonists, who ended up on the Ohio River founding New Harmony, Indiana.

Between Philadelphia and New Harmony there are a number of Dunkard Creeks and Dunkard Hollows, remnants of the folks who in large part became what is now known as the Church of the Brethren. They are still found in Ohio, but many moved west with the frontier, and their congregations still tend very strongly to rural settings, and are rare in cities.

As they migrated west, some of their number slid over into the E&R branch of what is now the United Church of Christ, and others into the old EUB, “Evangelical United Brethren,” which is now part of the United Methodist Church. Ohio still has quite a few Grace Brethren congregations, and Ashland University is one of the legacy institutions of a group named “The Brethren Church”, another branch of the Brethren stream.

However those rivulets meander, you can trace them all back to a place in Germany called Schwarzenau, and a miller’s son named Alexander Mack near the Eder River. The Schwarzenau Brethren arose in 1708 with baptisms of adults in the Eder by Alexander Mack; this break with the established church of their German state, and the official requirement for infant baptism, led to persecution and finally a migration that went first to the Netherlands (like the Pilgrims did before 1620), and then to America in 1719.

So 2008 is a 300th birthday for the Brethren movement, and my Church of the Brethren friends shared with me their pictures and stories from a summer visit to Scharzenau and the Eder River, where the Mack Mill and many other structures from their heritage are still standing.

I brought home from this gathering for the Little Guy a book, lavishly illustrated, called “Alexander Mack – A Man Who Rippled the Waters.” It tells the tale of Mack, the Brethren, their travels, and the hunger for freedom to worship and seek God as one’s conscience dictates. You don’t have to be related to the Scharzenau Brethren to enjoy the text or the paintings on each page . . . but odds are you are, in some way!

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

Faith Works 10-25-08
Jeff Gill

Looking Up Into the Rafters

Thanks to the marvels of them internets, especially that Ebay person who is so busy doing all these auctiony things, I will shortly have a Dickens’ Village “Peggotty’s Cottage” to put under my Christmas tree.

My tastes in reading and, sad to say, writing, were long ago warped and distorted by having read “David Copperfield” when I was far too young. Long sentences and repeated semicolon-related offenses are the least of my sins that trace back to following the tale of Trotwood.

On the Norfolk coast, David Copperfield encounters a home made from an overturned boat, described as charming and cozy beyond even the label “Dickensian.”

The Peggotty family lives there, overlooking the North Sea, and I had a sense of what it felt like to live in such a house when I looked up into the criss-crossing rafters of my home church and a number of nearby churches I would find myself in, from time to time, growing up.

I had a slightly mistaken idea that “worship” related to the idea that we gathered each Sunday under the outline of an upturned ship, a “wor-ship” that sailed us into God’s stormy seas of trial, where we had refuge with Jesus at the helm and worked together as the crew.

When pastors and preachers talked of the honored dead who had gone before, the saints in glory who were now a great cloud of witnesses, whether in my Disciples congregation, the Episcopal parish across the street, or the Lutherans to our north and west, they pointed up – at the rafters and joists and hammerbeams.

That was a picture of heaven and the realm of glory that stuck: those knurled knobs and solid timbers spanning the nave (recalling “navis,” Latin for “ship”) were an outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible place. High ceilinged woodwork hinted at heaven, and still does.

It was pleasing to see the ancient timbers and lathed ornament of Trinity Episcopal, 1834, on the front page of the Advocate some days back. As I had the chance to tell the congregation of St. Paul’s Lutheran the next Sunday, where I was filling the pulpit and whose history followed Trinity in that same space, it was oddly pleasing to reach up on the third floor of the current spatial arrangement, and touch those finials and brackets.

My very strongest sense is that myriad young eyes, and a few adults, had looked at those upper ornaments during church services and thought “I will never actually touch that, but it appears so familiar to me.” And with that thought, I could reach out and touch them.

These were the hints and signposts of heaven, the home of the saints, the pointers to All Hallows for many people over many years.

In the illustrations by Phiz in the Dickens original for “David Copperfield,” and with color and more perspective reading the “Classics Illustrated” comic version, I’ve always had a picture of Peggotty’s cottage, where the ship’s braces and struts are just overhead, within reach. I suspect part of my great love of the movie “Local Hero” is due to the key appearance of a Peggotty-type residence near the conclusion of the story.

Something solid and real and mundane, but just out of everyday reach, visible but almost unapproachable, except by extraordinary means, maybe a little extra assistance not our own. That’s what it means to reach up to heaven, to join the saints in glory.

The eve of All Saints, All Hallows, is of course the night before Nov. 1, that feast day; October 31 is All Hallows’ Eve. Thursday is “Beggar’s Night” in most central Ohio communities, leaving Friday in a bit of limbo.

But Nov. 1 is called, on a liturgically oriented calendar, All Saints’ Day, backstopped by Nov. 2, All Souls’, when everyone from humble Barkis to hopeful Micawber to striving Trotwood Copperfield himself is lifted up as a member of the honored dead, those who have gone before yet still cling closely to us.

Except they’re fictional. Yet their example is as real to me as the long torn down, demolished, vanished roof timbers of my childhood church that I will now never touch. I touch someone else’s reverie on First Street, in the 1834 church building there. And with the saints, I enter the blessed realm through the merit of others’ works, earning nothing on my own but graced and gifted by the generous offering of others.

And we can give one another the gift of a thoughtful and well-considered vote on Tuesday!

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

Chess geeks, unite!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXM3wrIhcwY

Oh, you know you have to see it . . .

Faith Works 10-18-08
Jeff Gill

Take a Hike

October 4 was the “feast day” or commemoration of Saint Francis of Assisi, who brought an appreciation of nature and animals back into the heart of Christian faith and imagery.

Give Francis credit for those sheep and ox and donkeys that are so prominent in our coming Christmas celebrations and decorations; they’re in the Bible, but had been dropped from our iconography until Francis led them back into the heart of the stable where they belong.

The outdoor tradition of that rustic saint has led to his religious community, the Franciscans (the friars and monks who still wear a simple brown robe and a belt made of rope), keeping up the practice of “prayer walking,” praying and focusing on God through the rhythm of step and pace and slow, steady progress.

The tradition of walking meditation can be found today in Dominican houses, Franciscan monasteries and retreat centers of all sorts today; Methodist “Emmaus walks” and Orthodox Easter processions round and round the churchyard, even an interfaith expression with Buddhist meditation teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, with a book and DVD on “Walking Meditation.”

So when Church World Service’s multi-denominational work invites churches to join in a “CROP Walk,” they’re not only raising funds to fight hunger, but giving you a chance to practice a form of prayer and devotion that has a long and broad tradition perfect for this beautiful season of the year.

The central Licking County CROP Walk starts after 1:00 pm and an opening prayer and registration at OSU-N, walking along the bike path to the YMCA and back. Other communities, such as Granville and Buckeye Lake, will have their own walks at the same time. Pledge envelopes are available at many area churches, or you can bring and/or make your own donation that day and just join in the procession.

CWS does work around the world in the name of dozens of Protestant denominations, and works closely with other denominational relief and development bodies in the “Third World” or Global South, while a major percentage of the dollars raised by a CROP Walk stay for hunger relief efforts right here in Licking County. The Licking County Food Pantry Network is a major participant in this program each fall.

Walking as a tool for sustaining and deepening prayer may be just the approach your prayer life needs, and a CROP Walk may be the place to get it started. The distractions even in a quiet home can be multiple, and most who struggle with keeping a prayer practice talk about their challenges to keep in a prayerful state for an extended period, or just maintaining focus.

A prayer walk can address all of that: you have the progress of the walk as your indication of where you’re at, and that you aren’t done; you can steadily increase the length of the walk to bump up the time spent in prayer; there may be less distraction in your mind when your body is needing to keep up the thump-thump-thump of walking steadily along.

If you’re just looking for a beautiful environment and less people right around you to try a prayer walk, the Octagon State Memorial, also known as the grounds of Moundbuilders Country Club, is having an open house from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The Ohio Historical Society will have formal tours leaving regularly and children’s activities and such, but the over a hundred acres that enfold the majestic 2,000 year old mounds are filled with fall color and are a wonderful site for a prayer walk.

Did Native Americans two millennia ago have prayer walking? I can’t imagine that they didn’t!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a prayer practice that works for you at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack -- Granville Sentinel 10-23-08
Jeff Gill

Is Granville Haunted?

What a rich and beautiful season, if you’re watching the hillsides and treeline instead of the financial and news channels.

Pumpkin patches like Devine Farms down Rt. 37 (turn left at US 40 for the Devine’s, or right a bit further to Pigeon Roost Farm) are a riot of orange and yellow and many shades of brown. Summer spoils us with green, and we brace ourselves for the whites and greys of winter, but the rich palette of autumn deserves some close attention.

You have to look fast, because of the shortness of the season, and with night falling ever sooner (and look past the political signs with their own unique color schemes). But even the nature of the darkness has a special fall quality, with mists in the early morning and still a wisp of hanging smoke some evenings.

It’s just warm enough to let a few more grills to fire up for dinner, and a fire pit or chiminea is especially welcome for a group to huddle around when the cold knife of an October night slices the sunset away.

As a general rule, I don’t tell ghost stories. We have plenty of practitioners of that art, starting at certain inns with great skill, and being told alongside the stray bonfire or camping lantern by us amateurs.

Granville is haunted, though. Make no mistake about it. I actually am quite skeptical of ghosts and hauntings and poltergeist tales; the Bible has a couple of ghosts in the Old Testament, but they seem to be more dream figures and guilty consciences than apparitions of the sort featured in your usual ghost story.

Haunted is another story. Haunted is a state of mind, and an openness to evocations that help to make us sense, more directly, of the reality of lived experience not our own. A moment that may be long past, but still moving through and past our lives today.

Passing the Four Corners, with a “ghost” of a high conical mound in the center of the original street plan, a point from which the very visible grid we now drive was platted; a block north, where “The Drag” curves up College Hill, there was set into that alcove where a stone panel now faces south, once a building, a market and school and structure whose keystone stares at you in the basement of the Granville Historical Society. It may sit in darkness most days on the floor there, but I see the sun-face gazing back contentedly, above the spot where Denison’s open book now looks blankly down Main.

East of the village, where new and comfortable homes now spread past Bryn Du, I walk often through an intersection where the first European settlers here, a young Welsh couple, spent a winter, survived a year, and then Lilly Jones died a few weeks after giving birth. Some evenings, you can almost hear the low cry of a baby, and the muffled sobs of a strong man brought low by frontier life, punctuated by the impact of a spade into cold earth, now simply still-green lawns.

Heading back towards the village, past the Great Lawn, over ground well populated two millennia ago, with the rustle of fallen leaves turning into the shuffle and stomp of moccasined feet, a chant blending into gospel cadences softly sung by escaping slaves not two centuries back.

The historic center of the village spreads out before you as Mount Parnassus, spirits of the Greek Muses hovering over the very name, recedes to your left, and John Chapman walks past you, padding along barefoot and long-limbed, invisibly returning to the forest where Mr. Appleseed is most comfortable, even if he did sleep in the stable basement of the Buxton Inn on harsh wintry nights. The sidewalk past the Granville Inn, with the remnant of one of our many vanished colleges now just the back wing, was once the favored stroll for courting Victorian era students. Kept male and female on their respective ends of Broadway, healthful walking, at least, was never discouraged, so this very promenade was where those young passions found their object and focus . . . who courted and proposed and plighted their troth in front of a tree shaded lawn where now couples marry under vast white tents, right into October.

Is Granville haunted? I should think so. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

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

Faith Works 10-11-08
Jeff Gill

Sing, Shout, Celebrate, Support

Ephesians 5.19 reminds us of the role “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” have in Christian communities, from the earliest days of the church.

Spiritual songs may have been an assortment of things in the earliest days of the Christian church, but the musical label “spirituals” is the unique blend of African traditional forms carried to this continent by the unwilling immigrants aboard slave ships, mixed with the Scots-Irish traditional music of congregational singing in the southern highlands.

While early urban and cultured American worship still hewed close to the classical forms of the Old World, the participatory art form of congregational singing, encouraged by traditions out of Welsh singing and northern European Pietist practices, helped to bring about the art form that we now call “Gospel music.”

Gospel music is a wide river with many tributaries, flowing down out of the highlands and down through verdant swamps, coming together into a Big Muddy of gospel music rolling power, drawing so many sources into a single deep expression.

Gospel can have a country sound among white folk, a distinctly African form with rural black hymn singing, and all these streams converge in the roots of blues and jazz and rock and roll, but the idea and ideal of “Gospel music” endures for all races and ethnicities in this country.

So if you go to a Gospel music concert, you may hear what you expected, or you may hear something more; you are almost certain to hear music that takes you beyond your expectations.

The Licking County Coalition of Care, a co-operative outreach ministry of 43 Christian congregations in this county (43 and counting!), has put together a Gospel Celebration for Sunday, November 2nd, at 4:00 pm in Newark’s Midland Theatre. You can click to www.midlandtheatre.org for ticket information, if you go to “tickets” and look under “Gospel Celebration” for Nov. 2.

They’ve got Vintage Voices, Christian Apostolic Church’s Sanctuary Choir, a quartet from First United Methodist Church in Newark, the choir from Shiloh Baptist Church, the Granville High School Chamber Singers, and even more groups scheduled to sing between 4 and 6 p.m.

Churches that purchase a block of 20 seats can get that chunk of theatre for $15.50 apiece, but you’ll be buying individual seats the “day of” for $17. So check www.midlandtheatre.org or call 345-LIVE. You can buy single tickets for that amount on Nov. 2, but why not buy a block of 20 seats now, and gather up the faithful to come and fill them?

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that in the last few weeks, this faith-based group has heard from an average of over 100 families a month, people needing support for their efforts to keep the lights on and stay under a roof. The Coalition of Care has tried in their first couple years of existence to meet and pray with families asking for aid, spending an hour and a half in follow-up conversation with households that average 4.3 persons per home.

“Putting God’s love into action” is the emphasis this community group keeps as their priority; The Coalition of Care works to maintain an ongoing level of conversation and communication with those they assist, using funds offered by local congregations through the co-ordination of the Coalition of Care.

You can learn more about their mission and plans at www.coalitionofcare.com, or call 670-9700. But right now, they need people and particularly churches to buy up blocks of seats immediately (20 seats @ $15.50 each, vs. $17 per otherwise), and then make sure to fill those 20 or more seats with church members and friends – put people in those seats who need not only a little spiritual boost from listening to the superlative singing of spirituals, but also the chance to get excited about the coalitions and collaborations that mark Licking County charitable outreach.

And your columnist has been invited to participate, not as a singer – it’s safe to come listen, then – but as your Master of Ceremonies. Wa-hooo! I hope to meet many of you on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 2, for a marvelous afternoon of Gospel music in all the forms that wonderful art can take, from 4:00 pm forward. I suspect that the wrap-up will give us all a chance to sing along a bit, and between the economy and the election, we could all use a little singing together.

“Joyful Voices, Helping Hands” – watch for the posters and flyers, and come join us that afternoon. I’ll be the one singing just a little bit off-key, off to one side!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s looking forward to preaching at St. Paul Lutheran tomorrow where we’ll “recall” the old Trinity Episcopal building that’s been in the news lately. Tell him a tale of history at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 10-4-08
Jeff Gill

Uh-oh, They’re Talking About It Again
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Fall is usually the season for financial campaigns in local faith communities, sometimes called a “stewardship emphasis” or “pledge drive” or almost anything but fund raising.

The awkward fact is that avoiding the term “fund raising” makes sense, because the problem is less that there needs to be an annual emphasis on giving from participants, than that these matters should be discussed year ‘round, but rarely are.

Once a year is better than never, though. One time a year is sometimes as often as church leadership’s nerves can take the strain of talking out loud about one of the few no-go-zones left in a culture where sexual habits and personal failings are the stuff of reality tv and coffee shop unembarrassed conversation, but wallets and income and spending are kept in secret.

Check out Mark 4:22 on that.

Here’s what is important for religious people in general, Christians in particular, and potentially of benefit to anyone about the practice and discipline of stewardship. Stewardship, or care for what we’ve been given, is not just what you call the little tablet of envelopes you get when you join.

The Lovely Wife and I have had a practice since the beginning of our marriage. We have a budget, based on projected income. That budget starts with giving 10%, saving 10%, and then we look at what’s left.

What’s left is shaped by the fact that almost 30% of our “gross income” goes to taxes, the good and worthwhile work of larger institutions, and a bit of waste here and there (yes, some, but that’s not our topic today). When our household adds up income and payroll taxes, my self-employed quarterly estimated to SocSec and various local taxing bodies, our property taxes, and the chunk of spending that goes to sales tax, just under 30% of our income goes to local, school, county, state, and federal taxes.

Since most years we actually put more than 10% in savings, that means, if you’ve been doing the math, that we live on less than half, under 50% of what we earn. My point is not that we’re dreadfully frugal (we are, but not so terribly), but the order you figure this out in, and the fact that the last thing this method takes you to is how much you can spend on whatever.

The budget, with that 48 or 49% we’re looking at in the final stages, has to list house payment and utilities and groceries and some clothes and such, the Little Guy’s amusements, and . . . there’s usually some amusements left for us, mainly aimed at a vacation trip or two.

If you start with that, and work backwards to how much you can “afford” to give, I can pretty much guarantee you the number will be 1 to 2%, tops. Given that our national savings rate is effectively in negative numbers these last few years (the hidden engine of our current economic mess), unless you give to your church on your credit card, it won’t be there.

So starting with what you give isn’t about how much more your church needs the money than you do. It’s about how much you need to look at your income more as gift and opportunity and responsibility than as “what I earned,” which is why I know most folks would flip out at the idea of living on less than half of “my income.”

A gift you can give yourself is to stop seeing it as “my income,” and seeing yourself as a steward of what comes into and through your household at any given time. I’m willing to bet most of my readers aren’t paid what they ought to get, and who of us says “no, I haven’t earned it” to a raise? Pay is rarely equal to value, or daycare workers and kindergarten teachers and OB/GYN nurses would make more than anyone.

Start with giving, which says to God and your own heart and anyone else paying attention (like the children in your family who don’t miss a thing), “this is just what I get to manage for a season.” Prioritize some savings, which says to a future you and yours “I know that me, right now, isn’t all there is.” Write down your fixed costs, and make sure to account for taxes, because sooner or later you’re gonna pay ‘em.

And have fun with the rest; if you do those other things first, I’m not really all that worried with the choices you’ll make with what remains. For many of us, there’s not much trouble we could get into with that amount, anyhow!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he likes Dave Ramsey, but he’s no financial adviser. Tell him where you find fiscal wisdom at knapsack77@gmail.com.

What a President should be reading (1903 edition)

http://books.google.com/books?id=KPMEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA265&lpg=PA265&dq=theodore+roosevelt+nicholas+murray+butler+november+4+1903&source=web&ots=tABgmNj7Ox&sig=XWaObhC6DDCzn1seH2AYb4xLKsw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA267,M1

Market explosion, fueled by mortgage gasoline . . .

Here's the fuse being lit in 1999 -- http://tiny.cc/T6Jz1

Read it, and see how obvious it all is now.

Faith Works 9-27-08
Jeff Gill

Watching The Sun Set, Reflecting Light Into Darkness
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We celebrated our friend Don’s life, in a sanctuary lit from the west, not the east.

The sun was going down, with the golds and reds in the stained glass casting an unusual glow across the crowded pews, filled with smiling, crying people.

After the service was over, we rolled down off of the hill where Thornville perches, a view northwest over an arm of Buckeye Lake starting to fill with a faint haze below, and just enough scudding cloud above to give the sky some depth and texture.

We were crossing Don’s mission field, laboring up towards the Jacksontown ridge, where browning treelines caught an extra russet hue to our east, and then passing under I-70, we started seeing glimpses to our left of the wide, open valley where the South Fork bends from Hebron towards Heath.

Old historic State Route 13 crossed the even more historic White Chapel Road, dipping through Hog Run where some of our earliest county history was set down in parchment deeds and sandstone grave markers.

Up the other side, and across Dorsey Mill Road, with an ancient Adena burial mound of Native American cultures two millennia ago and more in the backyard of a much newer home; a mound which is also the first recorded “archaeological dig” in Licking County back before the Civil War.

A few of the fallen from that war, and more foreign conflicts in decades since are laid to rest in Mount Calvary Cemetery, glanced at quickly as we snake right and left and down off Radio Heights, Jenkins Knob, or whatever you call the sudden and brief view of Newark’s courthouse ahead and the invisible (from above) border with Heath, before you come to the corner of Linnville Road, National Drive (the old Plank Road), and Hopewell Drive.

We turn left, crossing the South Fork eagerly surging towards a meeting with Raccoon Creek to our right, and wend our way to the busy corner with Rt. 79. Business aplenty to the left and the right, with the darkening stillness of the Great Circle straight ahead, trees multiple centuries old having survived the windstorms, while a couple did not, and lay fading on the grass.

Down into the trench between the Wehrle factories on Union Street and Modern Welding off of Williams, then bursting out into the sky, leaping Raccoon Creek next to White’s Field (where the ghosts of Babe Ruth and decades of Friday & Saturday night heroes play), arcs lifting left and right with solid earth beneath but oh so much sky overhead.

If you are heading south, or a quick and familiar eye in your rearview if you’re branching east or west going northbound, you see the treelined curb of Blue Jay Heights southeast of downtown Newark, where the united waters of the North Fork and that of the South and Raccoon branches are urged on to the east, the darkening east which is the destination of the single Licking River, exiting the mysterious channel of Black Hand Gorge on towards the Muskingum Valley.

We head on west, where the light is not even fading anymore, but dimming, and the first stars – really planets – are popping above along the ecliptic’s curve. Rt. 16 skirts the first outcroppings of the Welsh Hills as we head for home.

Truly, we live in the Land of Legend. The thing about that is that many, most of those legends are true stories. Mary Harris and Christopher Gist, Catharine Stadden and John Chapman, Chaplain Jones and Theophilus Rees, Jonathan and Margaret Benjamin, Israel Dille and Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

The list goes on, and our friend Don is now one of them, a legend whose story inspires; but the creativity is in how he lived his life, not in how his life was written. Most of the details are not terribly literary or dramatic, but how he lit up a gathering, even as the sun set, is the glowing heart of the story we’re not done telling.

Don, of course, would want me to say that his was a reflected light; like the moon that rose as I meditated on this Land of Legend we call home, that clear pure light is reflected from the sun, and what Don shone into lives around him was what he picked up and reflected from the Son, his savior, Jesus the Christ.

Rest in peace, Don, until all the legends of this land are raised up and seen in the clear light of truth, at the last telling of all tales.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a legend you know at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-25-08
Jeff Gill

Where the Foundations Are

It was likely after watching a Chicago Cubs game on WGN, the snowier channel on UHF (kids, ask grandpa what that is), that I was down in the basement getting my hair cut by mom.

At one point, there in the unfinished part of the basement, that I was looking up at the joists and stringers and ductwork branching off of the furnace, and suddenly realized – our house was not solid.

My home was a structure, a framework like the newer houses down the street going up as I watched after school, with two by eights and two by fours and a main support I-beam across the center line. The apparent unity of the exterior was an illusion made of aluminum siding and fascia board and shingles up top, while a balloon frame of lumber and sheathing held up the floors and ceilings, plywood and sheetrock coated with paint and paneling and spackle.

This new realization helped me figure out how to hide stuff in switch plates and under vents that lifted quietly away from the floor, where you could reach down into the ducts beyond what was visible. Comic books you wanted safe from little brothers, or money and trading cards you wanted safely out of sight could go behind those vents.

I never forgot, though, the real shock of seeing clearly that a house, or any building, was really the sum of parts more than it was a whole.

Years later I was involved in laying block atop footers, mixing mortar and finding out the obvious, that most homes are not built on bedrock or stone of any sort, but actually float atop soil on the pontoons of the foundation. The lowest level of most structures is not anchored in an irrevocable way to solid stuff, but moored, if you will. A foundation is as much a boat as it is roots, and the heave and sag of seasons and eras is taken into account as most substructures are planned.

Then I worked on archaeological digs, and found that soil is, if anything, even more fluid than I realized. Slopes migrate and new layers slowly build up, so that any stratigraphy is not an irrevocable record of immutable time, but is a slippery and suspect document in its own right. Delve into the geology behind the soils, and you start to catch a glimpse of glaciers plaining continents, and continents playing bumper cars with one another, sliding first against one land mass and then another.

So to find that the wisdom of Wall Street is actually a body of suspect conventional wisdom mixed with fragile trust, a confidence that can evaporate in a single trading day, is not so surprising. If a building is a collection of parts that work together, and the earth itself not immutable, but constantly changing, then the stock market may well be something less than bedrock itself.

Can the earth move? Ask a Californian. Do buildings collapse? Ask a firefighter; faster than you might think, and even when it looks stable from the outside. Do markets always self-correct? Check your mutual fund.

Somehow, the wisdom of markets needs to be tempered by human hearts, but those hearts need wit alongside of compassion. Myriad minds buying and selling have an economy of common sense that is hard to replicate in any one thinker or decider, but in unusual times a single thought may need to have a place to stand and be heard.

Clearly, one of the themes of the national election and state policies here in Ohio is who knows the right balance between decisive compassion and generalized calculation. The short-term caring choice could actually hurt more in the no-so-long run, but “help me now” always carries its own logic.

As does “I’ll help you, right now.” Is there help that isn’t worth the taking, because of the price on down the road costing more than the crisis at hand? That’s the choice we’re all working on right now.

Sept. 30th is the deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 4th election!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s been a Cubs fan since his birth in Chicagoland a year or two ago (but not longer ago than their last World Series appearance). Give him your thoughts on impermanence at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-20-08
Jeff Gill

Rock Of Ages, Rolling Thru Generations

One of the many benefits of living in Licking County is that we have so many opportunities to hear live music performed, often by people who live right down the street from us.

All day down in Hebron next Saturday is their “Music & Arts Festival,” with high school bands at Hebron Elementary from noon, a “Battle of the Bands” on High Street from noon next to the car show along the National Road; country, bluegrass, and gospel over at Canal Park from noon as well, all culminating with McGuffey Lane at Main and High for 6 pm. (Details at www.hebronmusicandartsfestival.com, thanks to the Hebron Business Association, the Greater Buckeye Lake Chamber of Commerce, and the county Convention and Visitors Bureau.)

Over in Granville today on Broadway the Hot Licks Bluesfest (http://hotlicks.spruz.net) starts at 12:30 and runs to their final act, The James Cotton Band at 8:30 pm. The Granville Federation for the Appreciation of the Blues raises thousands of dollars for Licking County charities like Big Brothers, Big Sisters or the Licking County Coalition for Housing, all through custom t-shirt sales and some really good eating.

There will be good crowds turned out for both of these events, as there was for the big Dawes Arboretum concert Labor Day weekend. Live music pulls in ears and minds and hearts, and pulls people together.

You should know, if you’re not aware of it already, that thousands upon thousands of Licking County residents turn out to share together in the joy of live, participatory music every Sunday morning. They don’t call it a concert, or a show, they call it worship and praise and even prayer itself.

Many don’t realize that quite a few of the musicians playing so well on stages and in clubs and late into the night on Saturday are getting up and anchoring a praise team or choir or sitting at a console on Sunday. They lead worship bands or play the organ or just lead congregational singing (a harder craft than almost anyone realizes who hasn’t done it).

Live music has long been a core element in worship, alongside of preaching and printed bulletins. Some just think of it as background noise, keeping the odd interruption from the outside away from the quiet ambiance of the sanctuary.

What music has become for many congregations, especially new church starts, is the core defining characteristic of their approach to faith and worship. If you are more of a piano and organ kind of worshiper, that implies many other elements of what kind of church you’re likely to be, while a drum set on the platform says volumes to many, let alone a stack of Peavey speakers.

Sunday afternoon at 3 pm St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Granville will have a piano and organ recital, dedicating a new piano and offering their powerful Casavant pipe organ with selections from Bach to Widor. Marcia Brannon and Julia Parker will present a concert that is free and open to the public as the dedication service for their new concert piano.

Is that a worship service? No, it’s yet another free concert with live music in Licking County, but all of these opportunities and venues speak to a connection between faith and music that is essential for many of us.

Can you worship God without music, in utter silence? Sure. But can you imagine worship without words, but music only? Can you imagine worship with music that isn’t your own preferred style? Can you imagine worship in any music style at all, or is it only fit and proper in some?

These are vital questions, and ones congregational and worship leaders wrestle with every week. You might want to think about them as you attend one, or two, or even three and more different chances to enjoy the music that lifts your spirit this weekend.

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

Happy Constitution Day!

Sen. Robert Byrd and i agree on very little, except on this day, and its significance.

July 4th is not only the wrong day to celebrate the Declaration of Independence (you could go with July 2 or 8 just as accurately, first reading and vote on 2nd, most signed it on the 8th), but as for the day we began to be the country that we are, we have been, and that we might just yet fulfill, Sept. 17 is THE day -- the day the Constitution was officially voted into existence under the preamble: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Modern historiography tends to focus on the compromises and the shortcomings, which are many in the document (the 3/5th compromise the most egregious of them all, putting a lesser work on some humans while still leaving them in bondage even as you gave their owners votes based on their bleeding backs). What Catherine Drinker Bowen called it in her still readable account, now almost 50 years old itself, is a "Miracle at Philadelphia."

They gathered to tweak the Articles of Confederation, which were nearly unworkable from 1776 over the next ten years. Unlike the blazing talent of a Thomas Jefferson writing the whole, the group process -- with leadership like Benjamin Franklin and James Madison and Edmund Randolph and Governeur Morris, to be sure -- created a remarkable document that has just enough flexibility to work without being so rigid as to require constant adjustment.

The European Union tried to write themselves a constitution starting in 2004, and they came up with an unreadable volume that to date has not been ratified (they're starting over after a "period of reflection."). The length and comprehensiveness of the EU draft constitution is a big part of why they can't get it passed; our Constitution, for all its flaws, can be read in just a few minutes by anyone.

Why don't you read it today yourself? Or you can listen to it by clicking the buttons on the sections -- either way, at this link:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States_of_America

If you are a teacher or educator of any sort, here's a slew of links at the Library of Congress for getting into the many fascinating details of this truly Founding Document:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Constitution.html

An Autism Educator Story

http://lessonplans.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/becoming-an-autism-educator/

Faith Works 9-13-08
Jeff Gill

Politicians at Prayer
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With our bicentennial year winding down for Licking County, I’ve been doing a last few presentations of my Chaplain David Jones research, which is (in my opinion) a fun and fascinating look at Revolutionary and early American history through the lens of a Welsh Baptist preacher who pointed many of our earliest settlers to these valleys.

Key to my story is the setting of northern New Jersey in 1772, and the role of “the established church” in the debates over independence.

The reason the Founders were so specific about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the first words of the Bill of Rights, was that “establishment” means, essentially, that the pastor’s salary and basic church expenses are paid out of the general revenue. The “state church” is paid for out of everyone’s taxes, and while “nonconformists” and “recusants” and other “separatists” had varying rights through English history to gather and worship on their own, you still paid your church tax like everyone else, and then had to dig deeper to pay for your Welsh Baptist pastor and chapel.

This is still true in England for the Church of England, for the Lutheran Church in Germany and other Nordic nations, and was true for Congregationalists in Massachusetts into the 1830s.

Huh? After the Constitution passed?

Yup, we had a constitutional provision that there would be no national established church, but this being a federal republic, the states could and did have “establishment” in the early United States, Virginia holding onto her Anglican establishment beyond the point where Governor Thomas Jefferson hoped she would let go of such un-liberal institutions.

So Welsh Baptists in Freehold, New Jersey were very open to discussions of freedom and even independence, while fervent Tories loyal to Great Britain, like their Governor William Franklin, Ben’s son, were furious at such “traitorous talk.”

You’ll note, then, that “establishment” has a very particular meaning – taxes going directly to support faith communities – while it is counterbalanced by “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Anxieties all around seem to have been provoked by video footage of the Governor of Alaska, speaking at a youth leadership conference in a church, while referring to the impending deployment of her own son to the Middle East.

It might be useful to look directly at a transcript of what she actually said:

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country,” says Gov. Sarah Palin (in video of the talk posted at the church’s Web site). Pray “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure we’re praying for: that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

I have to admit that I’m baffled by what folks are getting into such a lather about. I’ve heard almost exactly those words used in churches where I know the pastor praying is quite strongly against the Iraq war. No one wants to assume that we know the full and precise application of God’s will in any one given situation, but to ask for guidance and the wisdom and strength to follow divine promptings is S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) in the life of faith.

In fact, some weeks back Barack Obama wrote in a note he thought would remain private, but that his campaign confirmed once it appeared in print, after his visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem: “Lord, Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will.”

Good for him!

Neither of these candidates for high public office are talking about anything even remotely like establishment of religion, and the fact that they have a humble and hopeful understanding of what “the free exercise thereof” looks like is encouraging to a country parson like myself.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of prayer in the public square at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-11-08
Jeff Gill

Seven Years, Uneasily Considered

That morning, as the heroic passengers of United Flight 93 began to roll their cart towards the cockpit, I was leaving a jail ministries meeting I had chaired through a long, weary morning, and drove towards Granville.

Peter Jennings was talking, I gathered, about some civil defense exercise on the radio, and then I began to wonder. First, it was too late in the morning for mid-half hour news to be on, and second, this was NPR and Jennings was the anchor for ABC. Huh?

By the time I rolled into the parking by Slayter Center up on campus where I was heading next, it was clearly time to think those words that belonged in history books or movies, but were very unpleasant to consider right in front of me: “this is not a drill.”

Obviously, my next meeting was toast, as we all stood and watched TVs in the commons area, many Denison students around me well versed in New York street names and numbers, as we watched the Twin Towers burn.

And then fall.

We hung onto our denial for some moments – “must have been an internal explosion of fuel,” “the dust sure does obscure . . .” and then we all realized, just before the anchor of the moment spoke the words, that the first tower had fallen. Entirely.

The shock and nausea had not quite sunk in when we saw the first footage of crowds running as if in 79 AD from Vesuvius in the streets of Pompeii. Just when that unimaginable scene had settled into a new category quickly summoned up in our minds, the second tower fell.

As we all know, the day’s terrorist acts were over, but the realizations and recategorizations were not. It did not seem like things were slowing or getting any better for days.

And as we all know, President Bush committed the biggest blunder of his eight years in office shortly after that. He asked us to “keep on shoppin’.”

Look, I understand the need to keep the economy going, and that stopping our economy was one of the goals of the hijack killer thugs, but it was an opportunity missed and more.

I thought of that again just last week on the campus of OSU-Newark, sitting under the bright white awning of the Martha Grace Reese Amphitheater, our State Sen. Jay Hottinger (Rep.) in front of me, State Treasurer Richard Cordray (Dem.) next to me, county elected officials of both parties in the crowd along with so many busy agency directors who no doubt had important business to conduct and maybe even some shopping they needed to do for their families.

But they took time out to help the honor and swear in the dozen-plus newest AmeriCorps members in Licking County and the region around us (and it’s “member,” not volunteers, not employees, as they just get stipends and an education grant on completion of their service).

Positive Balance, the financial literacy program that we’ve had going with AmeriCorps members for two years in our county, has worked so well the state has asked us to take it out to 20 more counties across southeastern Ohio. Actually, Mr. Cordray asked if we could do all 88, and Deb Tegtmeyer, our Executive Director, decided that we could only pull so many rabbits out of the Licking County Coalition for Housing hat. As board chair, I agreed . . . but who knows what the future holds?

What we both know is that this effort doesn’t work without people who decide to make some personal sacrifice for a greater good. AmeriCorps service is something like Peace Corps or Marine Corps or USAID service, and it is at the heart of what this country does best, and we need to do a little more of.

On September 11 of any year, that kind of “Let’s roll” towards service beyond self is what we really ought to honor, and what Americans will welcome being asked to do.

Yes, even more than shopping.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; ask him about Positive Balance or anything else at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-6-08
Jeff Gill

Sitting Down To Dinner
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Last weekend, the Little Guy and I went to our local Farmer’s Market.

The Lovely Wife wanted us to bring home not the bacon, but some tomatoes, corn, and ideally green beans, too.

Unfortunately, we were slow to move, the Little Guy and I, so by the time we made our way down to the carts and tailgates, I feared that our preferred purchases would be out of stock, and only the gooseberry preserves and smashed loaves of banana bread would be left.

It wasn’t too late, as it turns out, and we made our way home with a hefty sack of locally grown, tasty and fresh produce, hitting all three appointed categories.

Back at Sycamore Lodge, I quickly started to snap off the stems, string, and rinse the green beans, tossing them in a pot of boiling water to blanch before setting them aside for a roasting over the coals in a foil envelope, a little later that night.

A dash of lemon juice, some olive oil, and thyme from the garden went into the packet, and a perfect batch of green beans came out.

And a smell. The smell of cooked green beans, hanging even outdoors on the patio, not too strong, but unmistakably cooked green beans.

One of my strongest memories of my maternal Grandmother is of green beans, picked in her vast garden (it seemed vast to me as a little guy myself), piled in bushel baskets, being methodically topped and strung and blanched. That smell in the kitchen takes me to a particular place and time, wherever it is now that I smell it.

That smell was in the air, and our dinner, with Market Day steaks and other elements my grandma would never have recognized, was still connected to those dinners, around the kitchen table in the house long gone from our family, a meal eaten long ago, but real and tasty in the midst of what we’re eating right now.

There is a sense that every meal participates in every other, that we set our tables echoing the model we grew up with (fork on the left or the right, how mom did it and not how Emily Post wants it), our recipes from great aunts and the stray uncle, and those preferences for salt our doctor dislikes and pepper dad put on everything and Tabasco we learned from the Marine Corps and Cholula we picked up from friends on a camping trip some years back.

This makes sense to Christians particularly, when a meal with bread and wine is said to have a direct, vital connection to a meal long ago, one we weren’t even in attendance at.

Every meal is connected to every other, as we all eat, and taste, and smell, and remember. The scent of blanching green beans makes my grandmother live in my kitchen, two states and more decades away. The communion around the dinner table of my family encompasses names and persons whose role at this feast is dim even to me, and my wife brings her own, and who knows what our son thinks about in his private moments (probably something about Pokemon).

Elijah’s chair doesn’t quite sit empty at our table, though we have unexpected guests from time to time. Yet there is a divine presence at our mealtime, the connection of age to age and the recollection of faces and relations, as well as where our sideboard and silverware comes from. That living link is a bit of God with us, fellowship hallowed and holy, made manifest by a scent both real and remembered.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of menus that bridge generations at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-4-08
Jeff Gill

Who Belongs Here, Anyhow?

Having been a PTA president (before moving to Brigadoon), I may be too easily cheered by this prospect, but I hear folks say Sarah Palin hasn’t faced tough enough challenges in politics and negotiations to be McCain’s veep.

PTA to city council to mayor to governor to . . . all I can say is, if she faced down Murkowski and Stevens (Obama voted for the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin vetoed it), and she survived the brutality of school and civic politics, I’m thinking . . . put it this way: I think more people in the State Department would benefit from having run a village council campaign or sat through a couple of zoning appeals.

The civil affairs officers in Iraq have said much the same.

No matter what happens in 60 days, we will have a senior administration official from either the 50th or 49th state, Barack Obama from Hawaii and Sarah Palin from Alaska. John McCain is from the 48th state of Arizona, and Joe Biden from the 1st, as the senator from Delaware likes to say with Constitutional accuracy.

That’s a fun fact, as is the almost unremarkable point that none were born in their now “home state” except for Obama; Barack’s choice of Illinois for his professional life is meaningful on so many levels, as we move into the bicentennial year of Lincoln’s birth . . . in 1809 Kentucky, and by way of Indiana to Illinois at 21.

We move around in this country, more so now than even in 1830 but it was more common then than you might think. Here in Granville we have a solid substrate of lifelong residents, and a thick overlay of migrants and immigrants and move-ins from neighboring states (like us’ns from Indiana) and even far off countries.

The college on the hill now has about 22% of her student body self-identified as multicultural, so Denison looks much more like the country as a whole than does the village. We are used to academic visitors in Brigadoon, but we don’t always see them as “part of the community.” Actually, student volunteers do amazing work around Licking County to help autistic children, do research for staff at homelessness and housing agencies, read to schoolkids, build Habitat houses, register voters (R as well as D, plus I), and make trails or pick up litter along them.

So who is a Granville resident? Legally, we have certain definitions, with modifications for the school district, who gets municipal services, and who has to live under village ordinances.

Personally, some folks feel like they aren’t residents, or aren’t . . . and this is where it gets tricky. It’s a look when you say a certain street address (or perceived look), an assumption about “587” on a form that has to be crossed out for some other exchange, it’s what you didn’t know that “everyone knows.”

I tend to feel welcome pretty much wherever, but the fact is that some folks are more at ease in new environments than others. Call it a personality quirk. Like many quirks, we have plenty of quirkers who feel quirkly in Our Fayre Village.

How do we want to welcome and include new residents into this bubble of real reality called Granville? Where can people learn the folkways and foibles and “everybody knows” of this place?

Reading the Sentinel is one way (especially the OpEd pages), and the Great Picnic was and will continue to be an incredibly valuable community-building tool. The barriers to entry are low (sign up at village hall or just show up and wander around), and the benefits are high (food, and dancing among the straw bales to La-Z-Boy and the Recliners).

What other ways do you and your neighbors and associations help people “feel at home” here in Brigadoon? Remember, you never know when the fog will set in again and suddenly a hundred years have passed us by . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about places you see time stop around Granville at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-30-08
Jeff Gill

Great Dads Need a Great Team Behind Them

If you think about a dad, the picture tends to be of a solitary figure, standing boldly and bravely and often alone.

That may be a problem.

Dads, like anyone, need love and support and perspective. Other dads, buddies who help build you up, and a loving relationship at home are all so very important. Fatherhood is not a solo act.

A number of Licking County churches are joining together for a “Great Dads” seminar, next Saturday at Centenary United Methodist in Granville. Ed Rizor and the men of Centenary are pleased to invite Christian men from all over our area to spend from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm looking at a program titled “The 6 Basics of Being a Great Dad.”

Ron Hitchcock is pastor of marriage & family life at Vineyard Church of Columbus, and he will present the day’s program around the themes of:

1. Providing Unconditional Love and Affection
2. Spending Time
3. Communicating Constantly and Creatively
4. Partnering with Mom
5. Instilling Moral and Spiritual Values
and 6. Establishing Your Fathering Legacy
Ron shares that in surveys, teens have been asked about stress, and who they turn to for help in a crisis. The truly disturbing answer was that dads ranked 48th on their list!
Cost is $25 per person with pre-registration, and you can call Centenary at 587-0022 to ask about signing up; same day registrations are possible but can’t be guaranteed.
This morning seminar is aimed at dads, prospective dads, dads in training, newly wed men, expectant fathers, or any guy who plans on having children in his household someday. For more information about the seminar you can visit www.greatdads.org and see more about the roots of this program.
And can I point out that this is the time of year when Cub Scout Packs all over Licking County are doing their fall recruitment – check the elementary school near you. Boys 1st through 5th grade can become Cub Scouts, and scout leadership is always in short supply! Check out www.lickingdistrict.org or www.skcbsa.org for more info, or call the Field Director for our county, Jeff Schiavone, at 438-8094.
Finally, on the news and events front, the 11th annual Licking County Prayer Breakfast is coming right up on Sept. 11, with doors opening at 6:00 am. Program time with worship and prayer (of course!) starts right at 6:30 am, and I can say from past experience they get us back towards our day’s obligations by 7:30.
Tickets are $15 per person for a fine, filling breakfast and a few favors at your table, and you can buy a table for $100 to seat eight. Elsa Kok Colopy is speaking on “Changed,” out of her experience as a risk-taker, adventurer, author, and storyteller. Call 522-7407 to reserve your spot!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher (but not much of a risk-taker); share a risky tale of adventure with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-23-08
Jeff Gill

Phoning In My Religion

Not to delve too deeply into politics, but last Saturday night was a televised presidential candidates’ forum at Orange County, CA’s nationally known Saddleback Church, moderated by Pastor Rick Warren. Rick is author of “The Purpose Driven Life” which has sold 25 million copies, so he’s got a wee bit of media attention in the past.

Some have said that they weren’t comfortable with a church as the setting for the first almost head-to-head meeting of the two major parties’ candidates for president, and I suppose there’s a case to be made for that concern, but the candidates were simply invited by Pastor Warren, who has come to know them both, and either or both could have said “nope.” If they’re fine with it, I’m interested.

And quite frankly, Warren was a better moderator than about nine of the last ten debate facilitators I’ve had to listen to in the last year, so good on him. Anyhow, they each took an hour on stage, shook hands in the middle, and were not quite debating, but offered many illuminating moments about their personal and political journeys from the perspective of faith.

But there was a moment that was quite unintentionally illuminating, and it wasn’t from Obama or McCain, coming after the event had formally ended.

One well-known national political reporter said in the course of post-forum analysis “they did a really interesting thing setting up for this here: they had two large screens on either side of the platform, where you could watch them as they were talking from wherever you sat in the room.”

I turned to the Lovely Wife, jaw slowly swinging open. The reporter, who in my experience is credible and quite intelligent, just told me something. Does she know what she actually just told me? That analyst just revealed that she has almost no experience with large or megachurch worship settings whatsoever, in person or on TV or tape.

Full disclosure: I preach most weekends, and am as likely to preach for 25 as 250, and never before 2,000. But I’ve been in and around enough large churches, in multiple states, let alone seen the footage of others, to know that no megachurch worth its salt is without two large screens on either side of the platform. None. You’re more likely to find two large screens permanently built into the architecture of the front of the worship space than you are a cross (that’s a discussion for another day).

Later on, I saw this comment at the New York Times political campaign blog, “The Caucus”: “The church itself rises in the desert and is surrounded by palm trees and dusty mountains, but it’s hard to tell it’s a church. In fact, inside, it looks more like a giant warehouse, than traditional religious sanctuaries. The hosts treated the forum as a major live television event. A woman who was introduced as tonight’s “stage manager,” told the audience to be sure to give Mr. Warren a hearty round of applause when he appears, and to save their bathroom visits for commercial breaks.”

Wow. Y’know, the warehouse comment (I found three more like that just with GoogleNews), might have been pertinent twenty years ago, maybe ten. But most Americans are familiar with the look of large church campuses by now, and calling them “giant warehouses” just tells me they’re looking around for the stained glass or felt banners, and on not finding them, going “Whoa, this is not what I expected.”

No, I guess it isn’t. Do you get out much? I mean, other than around the world?

Later on, “The Caucus” noted that “The event reflects the importance of religion in American life and, increasingly, in politics. It also marks the coming of age of a broader brand of evangelicalism that is more socially minded and more diverse than the orthodox religious movement of the Christian right.”

Thanks for noticing, folks, but here’s a news flash – Evangelicals have been diverse and complex since, oh, always. Socially minded? That’s where we started, and we’re not done. And if by diverse, you mean “ah, maybe now they’re ready to vote for a pro-abortion candidate if we paint them green enough,” well, keep hoping.

They really, really should get out more. I’ll bet there’s a warehouse-like, screen-toting, jeans wearing preacher church just down the street from wherever they live, and I do mean wherever. Just ask at your Starbucks and someone else in line will give you directions.

Yep, we’re so diverse we go there, too.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s not a member of a megachurch, but he does know how to use PowerPoint in worship. Tell him a story electronically at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-21-08
Jeff Gill

Get a Peace of Scouting

This Saturday, Granville’s own Super Pack 3, our Cub Scouting organization, will have their start of the school year picnic out at Infirmary Mound Park.

Aug. 23 at 3:00 pm the lawn chairs and shady canopies will unfurl around the bounce houses and food tents back behind the horse show arena, and a few hundred Cubs and Scouts and little brothers and sisters (plus parents) will say hello to a new school year of Cub Scouting (and a hog will end his year, with our sincere appreciation shown in bbq sauce).

First graders are Tiger Cubs, and from those newest Scouts to the Webelos ready to make the jump in March to Boy Scouts in Fifth grade, we have over 150 young men in Super Pack 3.

The normal pack meeting, the gathering of the whole shebang, is at 7 pm on third Thursdays right through May, but the heart of Scouting is the small group: dens in Cub Scouts, patrols in Boy Scouts. Each grade has a “rank,” Tigers in First, Woves in Second, Bears in Third, and Webelos in Fourth and Fifth. And each rank has three to five dens (Pack 3 had 21 dens last year), which is where the real Scouting program happens, learning about the outdoors, themselves, and what it means to be a citizen and a leader among your peers.

The Scouting Movement goes back to 1907, 1910 in the US, and really to May of 1900, when the entire British Empire went crazy over good news in a very bad year. The Boer War had gone badly for England in South Africa, and a small outpost had been cut off and assumed overrun. It turned out that Mafeking was holding out against overwhelming odds, and on May 18, 1900, a relief column made it to the city and commanding officer Robert Baden-Powell.

Baden-Powell, or B-P as he was known by both friends and respected enemies, returned to a hero’s welcome, and the startling news that his book written for soldiers, “Aids To Scouting,” was selling like hotcakes among young boys (and girls) back home, with “B-P Clubs” starting in various towns (think Michael Phelps and swim clubs).

B-P was actually disturbed by this – he had not written the book for children, and knew that romanticism of warfare was not what young people needed. On the other hand, he saw so many city kids new to the military come into the wilderness helpless, starving where food was handy and dying of thirst where water was available. If kids thought heat came from furnaces and food from grocery stores, what would you expect?

So he turned down a cushy spot in the military bureaucracy, retired a General, and spent two years doing research and writing (in Windmill Cottage next to Wimbledon, which I’m told you can still visit). Then he told his publisher, eager to hit the shelves while his fame was still remembered, that he wouldn’t sell his scheme until he tried it himself.

B-P called his new plan “Peace Scouts,” and used the “patrol method” to deliver character formation and leadership development through outdoor education, with a focus on learning by doing, not adults standing up talking unless it was storytelling. And he did one thing that some still think controversial – he kept uniforms as a central feature of his program.

Uniforms weren’t about militarism, but about uniformity. Because the test run of his new book, “Scouting For Boys,” was to bring 22 young men to an island off the English coast, 11 from the city, and 11 from the small towns and countryside, 11 from some level of privilege and 11 from humbler backgrounds. The Scout uniform was meant, and still means that all the boys are on a level playing field, with only their individual achievements marked with “merit badges” and “activity awards” which they earned by competing against . . . themselves.

August 1, 1907, these 22 boys and three adults spent two weeks testing out “Scouting For Boys,” and the program they began there now serves 38 million young men and women all over the world, in over 200 countries (basically, every country but Cuba and China).

The program gave birth to not only Boy Scouts but Girl Guides, called Girl Scouts in this country, and in 1930 the junior level, Cub Scouting was formally organized. The nation with the largest total number of Scouts in all phases? Nope, not the USA, which “only” has 7.5 million registered – that would be Indonesia, with over 8 million young men and women in Scouting.

But you can just come out to Infirmary Mound Park Saturday afternoon! Or e-mail me at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-16-08
Jeff Gill

What Are We Supposed To Think?

Opinions and observations are my stock in trade, and trust me when I say the shelves are well stocked.

So when I ask the question “what are we supposed to think?” it doesn’t mean I don’t have an idea myself, or that people ought to spend more time telling others what to think, which no one likes to hear.

Yet when every new crop of political ads is parsed and analyzed for “what it really means” or how our thoughts are being manipulated by subtle symbolism, I’m looking around in the here and now and asking about some of the up-front and in-your-face messages that we seem to be sending each other.

Sometimes you can see the outside of the message, but can’t figure out what’s inside the envelope, so to speak.

Tattoos, for instance.

Yes, my family has been out to the State Fair and Hartford Fair recently, why do you ask? And as you walk around in the sun and heat, where everyone is dressed accordingly, you certainly see some major tattooing going on.

A few questions – when you put a band of two-dimensional barbed wire around your arm for life, what do you want me to think? That you’re tough? That you’re a fascinating mix of tender and tough when a sweet faced, well-coifed young lady has a barbed wire wrap sealed with a skull?

Or all those skull tattoos. I get the Grateful Dead “feed your head” message in the tie-dye t-shirts and car stickers with a blossoming skull, and the contrast is meant ironically between the hard, enduring bony eye sockets and the colorful wispy petals of flowers growing within. (I also get that you’re thinking pharmaceuticals get you closer to the heart of that irony, which is why I don’t got one.)

But all the skulls with snakes coming out of the eye sockets, flame-topped skulls, and other grim reaperish body décor . . . what do you want me to think when I see your clearly placed on display body art? That you’re a dangerous person to be avoided? That I should trust the friendly smile and assume that you were joking when you put a grim harbinger of death on your shoulder?

I’ve got a civic, governmental question, too. When we see the now more common red and yellow license plates, indicating that the registered owner of the vehicle is convicted of DUIs, what are we expected to think? That we should avoid tailgating this person? That neighborhood kids will pedal their bikes by saying to each other “whoa, that’s an ugly contrast that I don’t want on my ride someday!”

Do we think that putting these in ever growing numbers out on the roadways will cause more people to scorn and mock their neighbors, or will they just start to become one more option in the riotous range of license plate logos?

What I think when I see one is “what are the odds the person driving that vehicle today is even the one this plate is meant to warn us about?’

There are t-shirts that I’d like to ask “what are you wanting me to think” of the wearers, but most of them I don’t feel comfortable describing on the “Your Faith” page. When I see a dad and two young kids walking down the street, with dad’s chest making a lewd suggestion to the world, you have to wonder if there’s any thinking going on there at all. Maybe all the other t-shirts in the drawer were nastier than that one, so this was the choice meant to say “hey, I’m trying here with my children, give me a break.”

Churches and church-going folk may not have many of the above-mentioned issues to deal with in-house (koff, koff, ahem). Anyhow. What faith communities often do have trouble with is seeing how their building, their signage, their parking areas, let alone their worship, is saying something to new visitors.

Very often, what we’re telling people to think is “you really won’t feel comfortable here; are you sure you belong here? Thanks for dropping by, we’ll pray for you . . . as you leave.”

Hey, we respond, that’s not what we want people to think. If we can step back and take a good long careful look, we might learn something about how a stranger or unchurched person might see what we’re saying to them; often as tattooed, yellow license plated, lewd t-shirt wearing members of our communities. How do we make them think “God may actually care about me, after all.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of how your congregation tells their story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-9-08
Jeff Gill

Where the President Will Worship Tomorrow
___

Last night the Olympics began in Beijing (or Peking or however you’re used to seeing the capital of China spelled).

Many human rights activists have said that world leaders should boycott the opening ceremonies because of Communist China’s human rights record, especially in regard to religious minorities.

Among Christians, and particularly evangelical Christians, the image of house churches or “the underground church” is the vivid picture carried of China. Contemporary Christian music heard on local CCM radio stations and in some congregations’ worship services offer phrases like these from the Newsboys’ hit, “He Reigns,”
“the song of Asian believers, filled with God’s holy fire . . . Let praises echo from the towers of cathedrals, to the faithful gathered underground.”

What may well be confusing over the next few days is that the religious reality of modern China is really does range from “the towers of cathedrals, to the faithful gathered underground.”. There absolutely is an underground church, often meeting in houses without official government sanction, hence “underground.” Some may meet in caves and basements, but “underground” here mainly means “without government approval.”

There is, though, a “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” Christian church that operates with government license. Hard numbers are not easy to come by in China’s authoritarian culture, where most statistics are considered state secrets, but there seem to be 10 million members of the “official” church at minimum.

That’s like the United Methodist Church for size, so they’re a distinct force in Chinese society. But the underground church, obviously, doesn’t have official numbers. The best estimates for the number of regular house church worshipers runs to 50 million. That’s like . . . well, it’s like nothing since the early Roman empire and the beginnings of the Christian faith. What else can you compare this movement with?

As for the much-debated official church -- the “three-self” does not have anything to do with the Trinity, but is a working abbreviation for “self-governance, self-support, self-propagation.” That’s window dressing for “we don’t publicly advocate from the pulpit anything that makes the Communist Chinese government feel itchy,” such as doctrines like the second coming of Christ or the resurrection of the dead.

So to have public worship and buildings they can call their own means that the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” trims their beliefs, or at least their preaching, to suit political winds. That also means many underground, or non-sanctioned Christian groups say that the official churches are not authentically Christian.

That’s harsh, but not entirely unfounded. And it gets even more confusing.

There is also an official Chinese government Catholic body, the “Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.” They are not entirely in communion with Rome and the Vicar of Christ in the papacy by government decree, which says that the Vatican has not sufficiently apologized for “imperialistic actions” in the 19th century, though Rome has tried to avoid a total break with the bishops of the “legal” church given the circumstances. Meanwhile, there are underground Catholic groups in China who are strongly affirming that they are in communion with Rome, but that the “state church” with Catholic forms is in fact not truly valid, or really wholly Christian. The BBC estimates that there are 5 million “state” Catholics, and 8 million underground Catholics.

If you’ve been keeping track, this all means that there are over 70 million Chinese who are claiming Christian affiliation of one sort or another – and before you dismiss the appeasing “state” church folk, remember that to make a public confession of even the “approved” faith is not looked upon with favor by the Communist Party, or by most of the other billion Chinese. Underground or in the open, to claim any Christian faith at all is a bold and lonely step. 70 million have taken it in one form or another.

President Bush said some weeks ago that he would split the difference, diplomatically, by going to the very, very official opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, and then attending a house church worship on Sunday morning.

The Chinese government responded by fairly successfully identifying the leaders of most of the Beijing area “house churches” and sending them en masse off to an involuntary vacation far, far away from the capital and site of the Olympics.

So President Bush’s staff has identified an official Protestant “Three-Self” church where he and Laura will worship tomorrow morning, the “Kuanjie Protestant Church,” which is one of the most prominent officially government registered churches in Beijing. His staff indicated that to re-do their plans for this week would just impact and damage even more innocent pastors and church members than they already have.

How should a leader set a proper example in a place like this, where the state sill controls most of the image-making machinery and media outlets? Just as the US Olympic team has selected a young man who grew up as a Darfur refugee to carry the flag into the opening ceremonies, the opportunities to make symbolic gestures are many. To make a speech with specifics could endanger some of those millions “gathered underground” even more than they are now, and staying away loses you any leverage at all to help them.

Where and how the president goes to church tomorrow will be an interesting statement worth “reading” closely – let the games begin!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he got a medal once for fourth place in the long jump in eighth grade. Tell him your Olympian tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-7-08
Jeff Gill

Everyone has a talent or skill of some sort.

Mine happens to be bleeding. Not everyone can bleed quickly and well, especially in a rare blood type, and when you can, that gives you a chance to excel when Olympic competition is far beyond your grasp.

I was at the Licking County satellite center recently, donation needle in my arm, working another pint closer to 12 gallons donated over the last thirty years.

They’ve moved across Newark’s West Main Street to a spot just east of Licking Memorial Hospital in the row of medical offices that face their parking lots. The hours for donation are the same, Tuesdays from 12 noon to 6 pm and Fridays from 8 am to 2 pm. If you’re 18 years of age and have over a hundred pounds on you (I qualify!), they are very likely to take your arterial output.

Yes, they still ask you a long series of questions after checking your pulse and blood pressure and checking your iron (it really is a mini-physical every 60 days for a regular donor), but the “yes” and “no” stuff is very private and on a computer screen. Basically, if you’ve gotten a recent bootleg tattoo or piercing, they may ask you wait, and some other screening questions help them as they continue learning how best to screen the blood itself.

But the bottom line is most fairly healthy people who haven’t eaten marrow pudding in Yorkshire recently can give blood. Can . . . give blood. And don’t.

Laying on the cot with a needle in my arm, even a nearly hundred timer like me doesn’t want to stare right at the spot where I got stuck, so I looked up at the “Supply Board.” This is a white board where they keep an updated list of numbers, by blood type (A, B. AB, O, and +/- for each), showing how many units were currently in storage in central Ohio, and for that particular type, how many days’ worth of supply that meant.

Not a single category was listed at more than 2 days.

Quite a few were listed as “-“ which meant on an average day of surgery and car crashes and such, there was barely enough – or not enough – to cover that day’s needs.

My blood type was “-.” Hey, it’s nice to feel useful, even when all you’re doing is laying there with a tube hanging off of your arm.

As I said, I’m good at bleeding, do it quickly, and soon the cot was open for the next . . . well, there’s part of the problem. They needed a next to take my place, whatever the blood type, but I could have taken my time for all the action they had in line.

I got my fig newtons, passed on the coffee, slugged back some water, and asked “do you have many signed up for later?” The staff sadly said “No, but we sure could use more donors.” I took the card, with the phone number, 348-4696, or 1-800-GIVE LIFE, and the web site where you can schedule an appointment to donate, www.BloodSavesLives.org.

And said, “I’ll tell my friends you need them.” They really do, too.

Remember, “No Child Left Inside” next Tuesday, Aug. 12 – let’s get all kids outside for at least an hour to put bugs in a jar or get their sneakers muddy. Check out www.greenhour.org for ideas!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and has given blood regularly since he was 18; tell him how donated blood helped you at knapsack77@gmail.com.