Faith Works 8-25-07
Jeff Gill

Look Out, He’s Gonna Rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes From My Knapsack 8-26-07
Jeff Gill

School Lists For School Boards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s all free advice.

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

Faith Works 8-18-07
Jeff Gill

Youth Groups Serve Many Purposes

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the choir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes From My Knapsack 8-19-07
Jeff Gill

Durable Goods and the Disposable Consumer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith Works 8-12-07
Jeff Gill

Elvis Has Left the Church Building

Thursday, Elvis Presley has been dead for thirty years.

If he were alive today, he’d be 72.

Why are you snickering?

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

Anyhow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes From My Knapsack 8-12-07
Jeff Gill

Making the List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee…….

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

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

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

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


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

Faith Works 8-4-07
Jeff Gill

1 in 500 Americans – Really

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes From My Knapsack 8-5-07
Jeff Gill

Fairly Good Times, Deep Fried

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith Works 7-28-07
Jeff Gill

Kneading a Symbol

On the south side of Courthouse Square, Great Harvest Bread Company offers their wares, mostly baked.

The Little Guy always badgers me to go in, which we usually do when he’s in tow and I’m heading just above them to the Licking County Coalition for Housing (did I mention they have a golf event Aug. 25 at Raccoon Int’l? No? Well, there we are . . .).

Smells are free, as are slices, which is my son’s primary motivation, but he wants to take a loaf home. The choice, though, can take . . . OK, I won’t run the risk of exaggerating, but it does seem quite a while.

I’ll ask him what he thinks Mom would like, which can be a struggle to translate into “what I like, but she probably would, wouldn’t she?” Fortunately for him, the Lovely Wife likes pretty much anything that’s a baked good.

(When I mentioned to her that some had been grousing about the trend at many Farmer’s Markets to have a predominance of baked goods instead of produce, she replied “And the problem is?”)

The very kind lady behind the counter, quick to cut a slice even before you ask, knows her whole grains and semolinas and yeast varieties. I do not, but bread as a final product is of interest to pretty much anyone who likes to eat and thinks a bit about what it is they’re putting in their mouths.

They had some pepperoni rolls that day, which she admitted were rolled up and baked around sliced discs of pepperoni sausage; I told her about Fairmont, West Virginia, where we lived when LG was born, proudly home of the pepperoni roll. The claim there is that it was an ideal way to make lunch for coal miners, indestructible and easy to eat in the dark with dirty hands. Their pepperoni was not in slices, but in rods, square lengths of sausage, three in each hand-sized pepperoni roll, and a rugged crust.

She replied with the Cornish pastie, a dough round flipped over a stuffing of ground meat, carrots, nowadays celery, but traditionally with cubed rutabaga. I’d had pasties at Mackinac City, where a restaurant and museum honor the Cornish and Devon ironworkers who 50 years ago this summer built the Mackinac Straits Bridge, “Mighty Mac.” (And I learned when I got home and checked on-line that it burned down two years ago, but is being newly raised out on the edge of Mackinac City just in time for the golden anniversary celebrations!)

The Little Guy finally came up with Cinnamon Chip Loaf, a hunk of bread about the size and shape of his head, but softer. The label says “great for French toast,” but dipping this stuff in batter and frying it seems redundant. We just slice it and eat it.

Bread was once an everyday part of most households, with mounds of flour on the counter, bowls with rising dough on the sideboard under a tea towel, and often a fresh loaf coming out of the oven, flaking crust and delightful smell covering the kitchen.

Now we see making bread as an artisanal experience, a special event often facilitated by a gadget looking like R2-D2’s little brother next to the food processor, which pops out a globe of admittedly tasty bread.

For most of the religious traditions in Licking County, bread is part of the ceremonial life and at the heart of worship. Some of the immediate power of that presence came from the place bread held in the home, in the everyday: a piece of mild magic summoned up by those you knew well, dough swelling to twice its size and more, crust adjoining soft networks of bubbles outlined in bread, crushable back down to the inevitable pellets made by children around the world from whatever the local specialty.

The staff of life, the most mundane of meals, a trick unveiled on the most important stage of any child’s life, the dinner table. The loaf so lovely and whole, that must be broken and cut and sliced so all may eat.

Making bread can be a religious experience, some say; I’d say that appreciating our daily bread surely is, and getting a bit closer to how it comes to be makes that appreciation turn into actual thankfulness.

Which would be the best thing since, uh, sliced bread.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s partial to Irish soda bread, rhapsodies to yeast aside. Share your recipe with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 7-29-07
Jeff Gill

Engineers Can Be Poets, Often In Steel

Way back when, 50 years ago when Howard LeFevre was just fifty years old, a fellow named David B. Steinman built a bridge.
Little Davey grew up literally in shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and as he went to school and graduated from Columbia, he wanted to build bridges.

The first work credited in his portfolio is a Boy Scout pioneering project near Moscow, Idaho, where he first taught engineering and did some scoutmastering, combining the two into a bridge over a creek larger than any the boys had built before.

Though the BSA was only 2 years old at the time.

Steinman went on to design and consult on his own, even helping supervise a renovation of his beloved Brooklyn Bridge, of which he wrote: “A bridge is a poem stretched across a river, a symphony of stone and steel” since David Steinman was a poet, inspired as much by Roebling’s architecture as by Shakespeare.

He was asked to consult on a bridge over the Tacoma Narrows in Washington state, and on reviewing the plans, said “when the wind picks up that structure will shake itself to bits.” His was the minority report, and filed accordingly.

They pulled Steinman’s file out when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge went from the joking tag “Galloping Gertie” for the resonance up-down wobble it always had, to a near-tragedy as Galloping Gertie shook herself (and one frightened dog trapped in the middle) to death, at least taking long enough to allow all the vehicle drivers to crawl off and for a local photo shop owner to make one of the most famous home movies ever seen.

If Steinman, the poet-engineer, had gotten that right, then the Michigan state government, wanting to connect their upper and lower peninsulae with an unprecedented, record-setting bridge, wanted him to design a bridge for the even windier Mackinac Straits.

1953 they hired him, and 1957 they honored him. “Mighty Mac” was built to withstand winds of over 350 miles per hour, which meant even the governor and senators could safely give speeches from the center span.

What makes Mighty Mac safe in high winds is also what makes it almost impossible for some to drive the five miles from shore to shore. The decking is steel mesh, meaning you can (as a passenger) look over the side and right through down to Lake Michigan 200 feet below (and another 200 feet of water below that). This is effect is either exhilarating or terrifying, though as a driver, why are you looking down, anyhow?

But the state highway folks keep a crew of people around to drive you across is you ask at the toll booth, and the last time we were there, one told me a fellow had to be driven across every month some years ago, and it bothered him so much that they had to lay a blanket over him lying down flat on the backseat. It’s a service they provide for free, or at least included in the toll.

Checking my facts on-line, I see that one of my favorite Eagle Scouts, Mike Rowe, will feature Mighty Mac on her 50th birthday in his show “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel. Painting this bridge, like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, never ends – you finish at one end, and just go back to the beginning and start over.

If you’ve vacationed in the Straits area, eaten Island fudge, or just passed through on your way to Sault-Ste-Marie and O Canada, you know what an amazing sight the bridge is, both far away and nearby. The towers are just under the height of the Washington Monument, catching clouds or sticking out of morning fog, while vast cargo vessels are dwarfed by passing under her.

The Lovely Wife and I honeymooned in its shadow 22 years ago, and we’ve since had occasion to take the Little Guy to visit, but a trip this summer didn’t work out, more’s the pity.

If you want to see the bridge, just go to the official website of the Mackinac Bridge Authority, www.mackinacbridge.org, or check out their friends at www.mightymac.org. You can see a live webcam, fog, rain, and all, plus pictures of bright sunshine or icebound in snow. Looking at David Steinman’s greatest poem is like a quick vacation in itself.

Oh, and I wouldn’t have known of the poet in the engineer, except that at Bethany College, just above Wheeling WV, the theater complex, not the engineering building, was given by the family in his honor, where a painting hangs in the lounge of David, with his background of course being: The Mighty Mac.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he wishes he had space to talk about Fort Michilimackinac, too! Share your vacation or anniversary tales at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 7-21-07
Jeff Gill

Sixty Years of . . . Faith, and Speculation

Not to get into my own odd schedule and habits too much, but when circumstances have me up after midnight, I will always tune into the Art Bell “Coast-to-Coast AM” radio show.

For those of you who actually sleep after midnight, a course of action I heartily recommend, a little explanation is called for. Art is a long time radio host who started out in the mold of Larry King, and steadily increased his percentage of guests who were focused on the paranormal and extraterrestrial affairs until that pretty much became the show.

He got spooked enough by some of his guests that he retired a ways back, then returned, sharing hosting duties with his replacement, George Noory.

George is now the regular weeknight host, and with the birth of a new child Art is only an occasional fill-in on weekends, but he’s been back for a very important anniversary in the “Coast-to-Coast AM” world.

60 years ago this month, outside of Roswell, New Mexico, something happened. The Air Force says Project Mogul lost some balloons, and UFO adherents say we had visitors from outer space.

“Independence Day” was a straight-faced take on what many believe, which is that our government had tucked away in storage alien spacecraft, or at least parts, and possibly even some alien corpses which we’ve autopsied.

Yes, the infamous “Alien Autopsy” videos have been revealed as a hoax, but some in the UFO community argue that the hoax was helped along by the government to cover up and discredit information that there was an alien autopsy, just not the one we’ve seen.

Apparently, just in time for the July 7, 1947 anniversary, one of the last witnesses to whatever was originally seen passed away, and left a posthumous confession that supported the alien accident theorists.

What I heard on the radio was kind of touching, and kind of sad. It was a long series of older adults, insisting that their parents who were young adults 60 years ago, were good people and honest, who never would have changed their stories for personal gain.

I believe them. Well, I believe their assertions that personal gain and advancement never motivated their “greatest generation” parents, I really do. But there is a 60 year series of articles and newsletters and books and websites that shows most of them did tell different stories at different times under different circumstances, which is why this story won’t go away.

They did change their accounts, in major details and small, and the fact that one of them chose to make a final set of claims after death (themselves not in line with earlier statements for and against the UFO theory) doesn’t mean I’m required to accept that last document as fact, or “disgrace one of the finest Americans who ever lived.”

He was no doubt a wonderful man, but what did he see in the New Mexico desert in 1947, and what was he told to do by authorities? People of good will can disagree, but my money is on the weather balloons. Sorry.

So why do I still listen? Largely, because so many of my fellow citizens firmly believe that the government is covering up a crashed flying saucer in their keeping (and most say it ended up in Ohio, at Wright-Patterson AFB!). Partly, because the nature of the conversation drinks so deeply at the wells of faith. They believe, or in the words of Fox Mulder, “I want to believe,” and their greetings and conversations with George and Art and across the transcontinental phone lines sound like the back of a church after a wedding or funeral: “Hey, Bob, haven’t talked to you for a while,” “Nah, I’ve been busy, taking care of my mother after her surgery; have you been doing your lectures much?” “Sure, mostly in California, but I get over to Nevada from time to time.”

The Roswell enthusiasts are a community, and they know each other by name, know their families, and they’ve even had two major schisms, making them just like most mainline denominations in American life (there’s the Socorro school and the anti-Socorrans, and I forget the other).

Some of what they claim makes me chuckle; then I remember that some of what I believe (healing, resurrection, eternity) makes the clever kids chuckle at me. How do I make my truth claims in ways that are the same as the Roswellians, and how can I do better?

Which is why the next time I have to make a drive after midnight, the radio will drift over to Art or George or whoever is hosting, and I’ll listen intently. They want to believe, but in what?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; convince him of your close encounter of the third (or second, or first even) kind at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Sentinel Letter to the Editor -- 26 July 07

“On my honor, I will do my best”

For nearly a century, young people around central Ohio and here in Licking County have said those words as a promise, the Scout Promise, rooted in the World Scouting Movement founded by Robert Baden-Powell.

“To do my duty, to God, and my country”

Wednesday morning, August 1, at 8:00 am in England, on the shores of Brownsea Island where Scouting’s first campout took place (a test run of the system B-P had dreamt up), thousands will say the Scout Promise of their nation’s Scout organization together.

“To obey the Scout law, to help other people at all times”

In each time zone, hour by hour around the globe, at 8 am all Scouts, past and present, are invited by the World Scouting Movement to gather in a public place and simply say their Scout Promise together. From 22 boys and 3 men on August 1 in 1907, Scouting today is found in 216 nations with over 38 million members, male and female.

The Boy Scouts of America include Cub Scout packs for 1st through 5th grade, Boy Scout troops to age 18, and Venturing crews for young men and women ages 14 to 21. Girl Scouting shares the same roots, extending to this country through a friend of Baden-Powell’s, Juliette Low, who began the GSA in Savannah, GA in 1912.

But it all traces back to those first four patrols, the original Brownsea troop of Scouts, trying out advancement that is measured against one’s own growth, not in competition to defeat another, trying out teamwork as patrols, with each youth getting a chance to experience leadership in practice. They sang songs by campfires, learned constellations in the night sky, and slept out in tents.

To salute those beginnings, Granville area Scouts and scouters, past and present, are invited to join in Opera House Park by 8:00 am on August 1, where we will greet the new day and Scouting’s second century by saying our respective Scout Promises together. St. Luke’s Parish Hall will provide a weather backup (“Be Prepared” is our motto, you know), and wherever Scouts gather, coffee is very likely to be served. Please come join us!

Jeff Gill
Asst. Cubmaster
Granville Super Pack 3

Notes From My Knapsack 7-22-07
Jeff Gill

Who You Callin’ a Weed?

Jolting up from almost every roadway and curb in the area, suddenly appearing, bristly and stalky small shrubs, covered with light blue flowers: they are chicory.

If you’ve had the pleasure of New Orleans region hospitality, and drunk the coffee, you’ve ingested a bit of those plants.

Chicory, they say, goes back to Andrew Jackson and the Battle of N’Orlins, when pirate captain Jean Lafitte could not smuggle in coffee anymore when Admiral Cochrane of the Royal Navy blockaded the port.

So they roasted and ground the root of chicory, and brewed up their own version cut half and half with the dwindling coffee beans. And they never stopped.

The coffee content is higher, to be sure, but the savory tang in a Louisiana (or parts of Tennessee) cuppa joe comes from the plant with those beautiful azure flowers, which are no doubt being sworn at this very moment by folks with weed whackers.

Chicory is a native plant, and along with the now erupting goldenrod shoots and the early stems of my beloved ironweed, they dominate the later summer in ditches and medians and other less heavily tended open areas. What dry weather and harsh conditions do to lawn grass is where the long-time local plants thrive, along with a fair measure of invaders like dandelions and garlic mustard.

More sadly, chicory is the first of the series of blossoms that announce the latter half of summer, from post-fireworks chicory to mid-August’s gold and purple of goldenrod and ironweed, to the profusion of asters and michaelmas daisies from Labor Day. Asters are the little star shaped flower all up and down the last tall growth of the summer, from the Greek “aster” for star, and the Native Americans knew it as the herald of first frost.

In my neighborhood, the deer are not only so hungry but thirsty enough to eat sedum and peony, hosta and um, some other plant I’m not sure of. But they’re eating stuff I’ve never seen them go for, leaving only the basil and boxwood alone.

The marigolds, though, are showing their central American roots by just shouting their silly orange heads off in the heat, barely wilting even when we forget to water (when I forget to water; the Lovely Wife never forgets when she’s home). Deer apparently won’t touch them, though the idea that they don’t eat what’s next to them has been refuted by events the last few summers.

We’re thinking about a whole garden of marigolds, basil, and lavendar next year.

Now, when you’re talking about native plants, the amazing thing is that most of what makes up the green in an average lawn right now has only been in this country less than a few centuries. Dandelions, plantain, clover, most daisies, a fair amount of the grasses, and of course crabgrass are all introduced species, landing somewhere in the wake of the Jamestown settlers in 1607.

Actually, some botanists think it likely they came ashore when the early ships shoveled their ballast of gravel and dirt from Portsmouth and the Thames estuary off onto the shore in Virginia, to make room for loads of tobacco heading back home. The dirt harbored the seeds which germinated and, um, spread.

At any rate, chicory’s blue splatter along the roadways reminds us that summer is halfway (culturally, anyhow, not astronomical summer). Make the most of what we have left, which is quite a bit!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he tends to just let stuff grow in his lawn. Ask him about an odd plant by your curb at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 7-15-07
Jeff Gill

Do You Know How To Get To Hogwarts?

Rev. Vicki Zust was rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Newark, and left us a few years ago at the request of her bishop to serve the Diocese of Southern Ohio.

She’s now “Canon to the Ordinary,” which is fancy Anglican-speak for “bishop’s assistant,” traveling the part of the state in her diocese on behalf of the bishop, visiting congregations and advising parish councils and clergy.

Our loss was the diocesan gain, as Vicki had served the Licking County Coalition for Housing and various downtown Newark task forces ably and energetically (though she will be back in Licking County next Sunday, July 22, to preach and lead worship at St. Luke's Episcopal in Granville).

She also put something together in her last summer at Trinity for a Vacation Bible School, designed to serve both the youth of the parish and the downtown locality.

Knowing that kids had been reading the J.K. Rowling books starting with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” even as each successive volume got longer and longer (we’re talking “Gone With the Wind” length, pushing 1000 pages), and as a regular reading tutor with “Ohio Reads,” this seemed like an opportunity.

“When a series of books gets kids asking for the opportunity to read, without being assigned the reading in school, you really want to know what’s going on,” Vicki told me in a recent phone call from Cincinnati.

She read the books herself, seeing the distinct conflict between good and evil through Headmaster Albus Dumbledore of Hogwarts School and the dreaded renegade wizard Lord Voldemort. The focus steadily zeroed in on how even as a young boy, Harry Potter must choose in the simplest acts how to always fulfill the good, even while tempted with his heart’s desires by evil. Voldemort’s machinations are often hidden from plain sight, but the impact of his deeds always reveal the cold, selfish heart behind them.

“It seemed to me that the idea of transfiguration, the revelation of God at work in the world around us, was central to these books,” Vicki said. So she took the most recent volume, at that point, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” and built a series of activities around the story.

“We wanted the children to see that everything around us is special, and we are called to use our gifts for good,” Vicki explained to me, and so the four “houses” became groups, and they wandered the church building and the neighborhood “finding signs of the presence of God.”

“Order of the Phoenix” is the book whose movie comes out this week, and the seventh and final episode, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” comes out next Saturday, or rather, Friday night at midnight. The Little Guy and I will be at an area bookstore that actually doesn’t want any more publicity because they’re expecting over 200 children with parents in tow as it is.

The early speculation focuses around whether or not Harry will die to save those he loves, and the smart money says yes: those arguing not are the ones with the burden of proof. Harry has been a Christ-figure in many ways through the series, and it is hard to see how author Rowling can avoid someone laying down their life for their friends . . . except that Dumbledore already has, so anything could happen (unlike, say, Tony Soprano, who had only one way to go in the end).

There are those who worry about the magic, benign or otherwise, in the Potter series, and there is almost oddly a complete absence of faith from the halls of Hogwarts. I’d remind those who find Harry insufficiently Christian that the second best selling series of children’s fantasy, Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” stories beginning with “The Golden Compass,” is overtly and intentionally hostile to organized religion. Hogwarts may not have shown us a chapel on the grounds, but I continue to believe there is one, and there hasn’t been anything said that rules it out.

The Narnia Chronicles, Rowling’s Harry Potter, and Tolkien’s epic sequence of Middle Earth Tales can spark the Christian imagination. The reality of faith is not overturned by any imaginings, but waits for a compelling account to fill the gaps necessarily left by fiction. As Pascal might say, “a God-shaped hole” our preaching can properly fill.

(Oh, the answer to the title question? As any young wizard, or even mundane muggle can tell you, it’s Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station to the Hogwarts Express.)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s read the Potteriad as far as this week’s release, and couldn’t be curiouser about how the saga will end. When you’ve read the last chapter and have an opinion to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 7-8-07
Jeff Gill

Round Numbers, Sharp-edged Memories

Anniversaries are a columnist’s friend, and potential downfall.

Few things are as tedious as reading “this is the 70th anniversary of SPAM, which recently sold the six millionth can from Austin, Minnesota,” if you don’t care about spiced meat products. A round number doesn’t change that, does it?

Except it does. Our sense of history is triggered a little more easily by the decade or century, and even items or places or subjects that don’t mean much to us personally help to define our personal history. SPAM is World War II for some people, a campout staple for others, and a budget staple during tough times now past, to what I hope is a very small number of people. Grilled SPAM with barbeque sauce and a pile of vegetables roasted in foil will always make me feel eleven years old and out for my first patrol camping trip.

Say “Star Wars” to certain folks, and “ecchhh” is their reaction, but even a dislike shows that the whole “Star Wars” phenomenon marked a generation – and that generation began thirty years ago, in the summer of 1977. I had just gotten a tape recorder for my birthday, and took it to our town theater with two 60 minute tapes. The next day, I played the cassettes for some of my friends in church youth group out on the back steps of the church, my voice whispering at the outset “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away…”

To many young “Star Wars” fans, 1977 is before they were born history, but a history that defines their whole lifetime. I feel that way about Robert A. Heinlein, whose centenary was yesterday, born July 7, 1907. Without the science fiction of Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and the still-with-us Arthur C. Clarke, no “Star Wars” would have appeared. Heinlein died nearly twenty years ago, but his output began well before my birth, and continued right through my adulthood: seeing that this summer is his centenary is a bracing definition of the century that has shaped my ideas and ideals.

I never met Heinlein personally, but I’ve taken many a tour on the S.S. Keewatin in Saugatuck harbor, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. As a kid with my brothers, as a honeymooner, as a parent, I’ve walked the decks and passages of this Canadian Pacific lake liner, built a hundred years ago in Glasgow, Scotland (itself in the news these days). Passenger ships don’t cross the Great Lakes anymore, nor do the passenger trains they serviced from Georgian Bay over to the coast of Lake Superior, where the Canadian Pacific took back their travelers and carried them across the prairies to the Rocky Mountains and beyond to Vancouver. Those days ended pretty much before I was born, but a big hunk of their atmosphere is real to me because of the S.S. Keewatin Maritime Museum.

And rooted in those same long-ago days, but constantly renewed by current circumstance, is the World Scouting Movement, born with a blast on a koodoo horn at dawn on August 1, 1907, with three adults and twenty-two boys on Brownsea Island off the southern coast of England. I’ll have a bit more to say about that centennial next weekend, but there is a flavor and scent and feel that endures from those days even as we’ve swapped burlap for nylon, LED flashlights for kerosene lanterns, and SPAM for freeze-dried pesto pasta.

My parents having their 49th wedding anniversary this summer reminds me that they’ll have a fiftieth next July, which triggers all kinds of realizations: any good ideas for me and my siblings as we get ready to observe that round number?

And I’m betting that everyone has some connection to one or another of these memory triggers turning zeroes over on their odometers this summer.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he may be Ron and Rose’s oldest, but is still well off of 50 himself. If you have any round numbers to celebrate, tell him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

* * *

Notes From My Knapsack 7-15-07
Jeff Gill

Scouting Sunrise August 1

Twenty-two boys. They came from wealthy homes with distinguished names, and they came by recommendation from inner city ministry leaders. One was a nephew a bit younger than should have been there, and some had already been in the work force a few years.

They came at the call of Robert Stephenson Smythe Baden-Powell, a hero from an overseas venture of the British Empire that had few heroes, and so was a celebrity all out of proportion to what he’d accomplished.

Baden-Powell, or B-P as he was generally known, knew that his fame was an unearned gift, and he was determined to make use of that gift other than for his own self-congratulation. What he had seen over a career in the military was a steady influx of young men who had grown up without ever seeing the woods or the wilds, but came from either urban poverty or genteel isolation.

B-P wasn’t interested, as some claimed later, in building up future candidates for the military. Like most career soldiers, he hated the scourge of war and knew all too well the destruction of lives and hearts that were war’s natural byproducts. But he had written a book for soldiers called “Aids to Scouting” which had unexpectedly sold out to youth leaders and children while he was becoming a media celebrity. His first thought for re-writing the book on returning to England was to just retitle it “Peace Scouts for the Empire” and make a few small changes, but as he warmed to the project, B-P realized nothing less would do than to study the whole field of youth training and education, and start from scratch.

And part of what I honor about B-P to this day, a hundred years later, was that he could have sold about any book to young people in the British Empire and beyond, and made a mint. But he not only worked out what seemed to him to be an arrangement for a youth activity that would complement traditional schooling and use outdoor education as the linch-pin of his system, but he would not publish the book until he had taken his system and actually, literally field tested it, on a borrowed island off Poole Harbour called “Brownsea.”

What he thought he had learned from his experiences around the world, and in a few years of research, was that more things drew young people together than separated them, and so if he had the right principles, then both rich and poor, city and rural, and later (with some prodding) even boys and girls could equally benefit from the program.

Outdoor education for leadership development rooted in character formation, calling on hands-on activities performed in small groups, or “patrols” with rotating leadership. That’s what Baden-Powell came up with in his draft for “Scouting for Boys,” the first Scout Handbook, and he was determined that each approach would be tried with a diverse group of boys in an encampment.
So August 1, 1907, the camp was mustered to the call of a kudu horn, the flag (of Great Britain) was raised, and the first Scout Promise said as the sun rose over the English Channel, and over an experiment and a dream. The dream took on the shape of reality in four patrols – Ravens, Curlews, Wolves, and Bulls, each with a patch and a flag to follow around the island, real boys now dreaming of adventure.


That dream now lives for boys and girls, young women and young men, in 216 countries and some 38 million members today. America got “Boy Scouts” in 1910, with “Girl Scouts” complementing what B-P called “Girl Guides” in his country, started shortly after. Today four million youth and adult leaders are registered in the Boy Scouts, and another nearly four million in the Girl Scouts.

All going back to three men and twenty-two boys camping on an English coastal island a century ago.

There will be 300 Scouts from around the world, male and female, standing on the shore of Brownsea Island on August 1 at 8:00 am. A ways inland, the World Scout Jamboree will hold some 50,000 youth from around the world.

And all the rest of us in today’s Scouting Movement are asked to gather in some public place in our community, where our pack or troop or crew lives and serves, at 8:00 am in our own time zone, and simply say together our Scout Promise. From 8:00 am Greenwich, hour by hour in twenty-four time zones around the world, every hour and each sunrise will be greeted by Scouts sharing their Scout Promise.

Wednesday, August 1, at 8:00 am there will be Scouts in Licking County on a street corner near you, giving thanks for the past hundred years and making a commitment for the century ahead.

They’ll even help you across the street, if you like.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s a proud member of Scouting since 1969 at Camp To-pe-nee-bee and an Eagle Scout; if you have a Scout tale to tell, pass it along to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 7-7-07
Jeff Gill

Gifts, Graces, and Gumption

Saw Scott Hayes working at one of the key tasks of ministry the other day, outside of the “Look Up Center” on O’Bannon, the former Hazelwood School.

He was, of course, um . . . preaching? No. Witnessing? Well, sort of. Building up an effective ministry on the east end of Newark? Kinda.

He was mowing the lawn.

I was explaining to a fellow clergyperson the other day, new to some of the ways of the World as it intersects with the Church.

My point, sadly, was nothing more complicated than “never let anyone know you are good at clearing paper jams in the copier.” Parallel to that point is discretion about displaying plumbing skills in front of anyone other than the trustees.

Pastors, ministers, clergy of whatever sort, all know that there is an intrinsic hazard to having keys to the building, because you’ll be the first call most people make. And there is not a seminary dean who hasn’t joked that they need to add a plumbing and electrical skills course to the program, and everyone would sign up. (Instead, they add another class in Akkadian or Sumerian, and wonder how to get more student interest ginned up for them.)

Scott, and many of us, know that before a wedding on a Saturday or when the VBS is coming, you just gotta go find the clippers or the trimmer or the pushmower (I’ve been blessed through the years by good parishioners with riding mowers and a trailer, Amen!), and you do what has to be done.

What clergy are, as a group, not prepared for in schooling, and barely aware of until it hits us in the face, is that you need to know how to do fundraising.

No, I don’t mean preaching stewardship sermons, though those are important. But the mechanics of putting together a campaign, the nuts and bolts, the techniques of how to set up a leadership phase, announcing your goal, keeping the progress in front of the congregation (and other supporters if we’re talking a program or non-church ministry), and having an effective closing stage . . . these are skills, with a body of knowledge and best practices, that are out there but often not well understood in the church. You may have chiropractors or entomologists in the parish, but you’re more likely to have a certified arborist than a development professional sitting in the pews.

All of which creates certain problems, like feeling tugged and torn by each offer made by someone selling or providing a product or service to the church, to use their “fool proof, almost always works” set of tricks for raising money.

Add in the tempting swamp of “can’t we find a grant for that?” and a church leader can find themselves up to their necks in said swamp.

If your faith community is part of a denomination or church body, the problem is magnified by the fact that almost all of them are running their own capital campaigns or outreach initiatives, so if you go to them for assistance, they’re likely to just route you through their own priorities. That, and they often don’t know any more about fundraising than you do, and just have glossier fliers and a shiny veneer of confidence.

There are a number of vital settings for ministry in our community that need and deserve our support. The Look Up Center, Open Arms Shelter a little closer to downtown on E. Main, the Licking County Jail Ministry where Scott Hayes doesn’t have to mow, Water’s Edge Ministry in Buckeye Lake . . . the list could go on. All of them exist for the good of the community and to advance the Kingdom; most of them have websites, a few have Paypal, and even that represents the challenge and opportunity to do fundraising in an unfamiliar modern context.

Trusting God and rooting your work in prayer are necessary first steps, but fundraising is a skill and a gift that should be sought and valued just as you wouldn’t want just anyone switching out the wiring in your church building. We know to look for a certified electrician for major work, but fundraising folks think can be done by anybody.

Pray that God gives you a plan and people who know how to implement that plan when it comes to fundraising, and I’m praying someone offers to do the mowing for Scott!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s seen a capital campaign or twelve through, some successfully. Not all, though! If you have good news, fiscal or faithfilled to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

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Faith Works 6-30-07
Jeff Gill

Have You Ever Been To Moss Point?

We’ve all heard of New Orleans, and many of us in Licking County not only heard about Hurricane Katrina, but have been down to the region assisting in the clean-up and rebuilding effort.

The whole impacted area is called the “Gulf Coast region,” and along with N’Orlins you may hear sometimes about Mississippi, and Biloxi.

On east of Biloxi there was incredible damage, in an area admittedly a little less populous than to the west, but where the force of the hurricane winds and storm surge was arguably the strongest. Right in the path where the eastern corner of Katrina was fiercest, is Moss Point, Mississippi. You’ve probably never heard of Moss Point.

Next door Pascagoula gained a measure of fame in the 1980s when novelty singer/songwriter Ray Stevens featured the town in his hit, "Mississippi Squirrel Revival." But Moss Point has mainly had reason to sing the blues the last couple years.

On August 29, 2005, on the strong eastern side of Hurricane Katrina, much of Moss Point was flooded or destroyed in one day, pounded by vicious hurricane-force winds which lasted from 7 am to 2 pm at a consistent 75 miles an hour, and with a storm surge exceeding 20 feet in some sections. Moss Point was devastated.

Dozens of folk from Central Christian Church, on Mt. Vernon Road in Newark, went down to the Gulf Coast in 2006 and again in February. On the first trip, they slept in the Moss Point Christian Church sanctuary, elevated enough that the structure was sound even with major external damage. The members of that church, led by Pastor Lester Brooks, fixed the roof of their church even before they repaired their own homes, and quickly turned their skills to help others. In that, too, Pastor Brooks led them, taking his day job as a licensed electrician out into a community ministry of repair and healing.

When the Newark folk joined them, sharing meals cooked by Mabel Ford and joining together for morning devotions, driven from job to job by Daddy Willie Smith, 87 years young, they all came together as family. Like a big family reunion, folks made do: for instance, Steve and Connie Crothers slept under a grand piano. Others found pews and patches of floor that suited them.

Then they woke up, sang “This Little Light of Mine,” ate more of Mabel’s cooking, maybe heard Pastor Brooks preach a bit, and went out to work some more until they had to come home.

But they felt like they needed to go home again when they returned, this past February, but needed and housed in Gulfport. So they made sure to go back for Sunday worship to Moss Point, where they were welcomed like the family they’d become. And three of their Moss Point family took time off from their work to come help their nearer neighbors rebuild in Gulfport, all working side by side.

Tomorrow, Central Christian gets to return the favor, and welcome Pastor Brooks to their pulpit at 10:30, and feed Mabel Ford, and Willie McClendon, and Daddy Willie if he can make it, and any of the rest of you who show up, with a potluck to follow. The choir will sing “This Little Light of Mine,” and I’m assured “there will be some preaching.”

There are many of these stories rattling around Licking County from those who’ve been there and returned, but not as many where the story comes to live and walk and preach and eat among us. You’re invited to join these brothers and sisters in a celebration of what faith is building in Moss Point, and Pascagoula (no squirrel involved), and right here in Licking County. And there’ll be plenty to eat.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s seen work trips and mission trips change lives on all sides of the relationship. If you have a mission trip story to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 7-1-07
Jeff Gill

Hospitality and Heritage in Licking County

Through late spring and early summer, I had the pleasure of meeting 300 new friends.

These were Canadians, whose tour operators had heard about Licking County from the work of our Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB). While making a sweep across the Midwest, they saw Licking County as a spot where a brief interlude could fill in the gaps between major attractions to our north and south.

The reaction of the staff who accompanied the bus loads of friendly and curious folk from southern Ontario (the province of Canada just across Lake Erie from Ohio) was that Licking County was consistently experienced by their customers as the unexpected jewel of their trip. Cherry Valley Lodge in Newark, the world-class Newark Earthworks, the Greek Revival architecture of Granville, and eating at the Buxton Inn left our northern guests wanting more. An evening listening to music at the Granville Inn, and a trip out of town past the Longaberger basket building and Blackhand Gorge, with signs pointing to Flint Ridge State Memorial, has made quite a few request a return tour in Autumn, when the leaves are turning in the Welsh Hills and along the slopes of Licking Valley.

I’ve been privileged to get to tell the 12,000 year old story of visitors feeling at home here in Licking County, and make an explicit invitation to them, and other individual bus tours, to return and stay a few days on their own. My invitation is sincere and based on a firm conviction that there’s more to see and do here than an afternoon and night’s stay, then off and away, can reasonably fit in.

It’s also rooted in the concrete knowledge that a tourist staying two and three nights also needs to buy meals, purchases admission to places like the Heisey Glass Museum, and may make other expenditures whether art at The Works, ice cream at Ye Old Mill, or sundries at the drugstore. Tourism is economic development that costs very little in local investment, and is not only sustainable but expandable with high return rates, where word-of-mouth builds visitation rapidly over time.

Local businesses that directly relate to tourism, like hotels and inns and restaurants, not to mention museums and cultural attractions, know how to be welcoming and work at enhancing the visitor experience. They understand that the point is not only so we get repeat visits, but make visitors want to encourage their friends and family to visit as well. Bus tours, where sixty people come as a group, are even more beneficial, given that to get them individually means thirty or more cars parking and exhausting their way around the sites and attractions of Licking County.

Our recent set of guests (you can call them tourists, if you want, but I like to stick with the frame of mind that comes with “guests”) ran into a few situations where they encountered local residents who were, not to put too fine a point on it, shocked to learn people would pay money to come here. Telling the residents that their home has been advertised in the pages of National Geographic provoked disbelief, and a number of reactions along the line of “No, really, why are you here?”

If in fact there are local folks making complaints that tour buses are sharing our streets, I’d hope to communicate to them that tourism is a great economic development option for Licking County, and while there may be mixed feelings over ethanol plants or other business development, there’s really no downside to tour buses. Our CVB staff is to be commended for their promotion of this low cost, high return business for the county; many local folk who get National Geographic were pleasantly surprised to see an ad for visiting our home in those distinguished pages.

“Do people really want to come visit here?” some ask us. Yes, they do, I get to answer with a smile, especially when we let them know we’re here, and what we have to offer. If you encounter a tourist, thank them for coming, if you would. Treat them like a guest in our common home, and encourage them to stay a few days. We’ll all be glad you did.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he also enjoys talking on a microphone while swinging wildly from an overhead strap with one hand on a tour bus. If you have an odd hobby to share, write him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 6-23-07
Jeff Gill

The Sense of an Ending

If you don’t care for English lit analysis, don’t worry. It’s just that I’ve taken enough classes in that subject to have the name Frank Kermode stuck in my head, unfairly (since he’s written broadly and well on many topics, including Biblical study) tied to “The Sense of an Ending,” a work that takes a point that can only seem obvious after someone has made it.

Kermode goes through a series of illustrations to show us how our expectations and assumptions about where a work of literary craft is going shapes how we read and interpret the text, well before we get to “The End.” Disney movies will end with someone learning something, happy reunions, and an amusing evildoer getting a generally off-screen comeuppance. Oprah recommended books will see a protagonist through unbearable suffering to a point of rest, reflection, and stoic endurance. Jackie Collins novels will . . . nevermind, and no, I’ve never read any.

And I’ve not watched, other than news clips, a single minute of “The Sopranos.” Sounds like an excruciating show to watch, and we don’t have HBO at Chez Gill.

Many of us have been learning about the intense, if not widespread following that Tony and his family (and his Family) led through this final season. The final episode of the final season had an ending that, to some, lacked finality.

Perhaps another way to look at it is that the ending David Chase supplied subverted the ending we expected, and had been watching through the screen of that assumption. In the end, Tony would pay for his crimes, we would see his suffering as redemptive, or his final escape from justice would point clearly to some higher justice (a life lived looking over his shoulder, a life empty of meaning or lasting significance, outward contentment masking inner despair and decay).

Well, Sir Frank Kermode wrote a revised edition of the book that got him knighted, and his observations in 2003 following his 1967 original have to do with our seemingly endless fascination with “subverting expectations,” to the degree that the twist ending or upended conclusion is what we assume is coming, and we watch or read with that assumption in the driver’s seat.

I haven’t watched a minute of “The Sopranos.” Keep that in mind, as I offer this firm and unfounded opinion. C’mon people: Tony got shot in the back of the head, and there was nothing. Blackness. As had been suggested by the gangster chumps themselves, repeatedly and even reaffirmed in a recent re-run before the finale.

So the question to viewers, of whatever faith tradition, is, “So, how does that grab you?”

I suspect on very small but fairly emphatic evidence from the creator-writer-director that he’s saying “This is it. No justice, sorry.” As a person who watches even a fiction with a faith perspective, I feel a strong sense of “Nope, that isn’t quite it; there’s a further chapter to be written.”

But “it isn’t fair” is not the basis for faith in God or what is eternal. “It isn’t fair” is a child’s plea in the face of reality, when big kids steal ice cream and cool kids get the front and center spots. People, possibly David Chase, critique faith and religion as just that, a childlike plea which solid, cold, dark reality does not even notice enough to ignore.

Most of us have our set of truths that lead us away from simple, silent blackness to a further light where all will be revealed, and must be judged. Tony Soprano did not really believe in such an ending, and lived his life accordingly.

But in a conversation with a fellow pastor of a slightly different theological bent, we did agree that there is a strange, unavoidable hint of possibility beyond the scene of Tony, Carmela, A.J., and others framed in a window as the Last Supper, with Meadow still parking outside.

If Tony is killed in front of his family, that event may represent the one chance of redemption the rest of them have. If he lives, they have clearly indicated that in one way or another they will stay “in the life.” If he does, in fact (in fiction) fall face forward into his onion rings, then what may those three (and Paulie) yet make of their lives? Through Tony’s death could come their redemption. Did David Chase intend this, or is it just the power of a particular conclusion woven into our culture that has shaped, is shaping, our perception of this ending?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you spot faith in a dark corner of popular culture, point it out to him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 6-24-07
Jeff Gill

Why Are We Stopping, Dad?

There are two kinds of dads – those who stop at historical markers, and those who don’t.

Admittedly, some are more compulsive than others. Yes, I have been known to go miles off our planned course to end up seeing the site of the first thoracic surgery in the state of Indiana. I think the building had been torn down, but the state historic marker was there.

For our own “Beautiful Ohio,” check out www.remarkableohio.org and enjoy some road trips from the comfort of your couch. Recently, I’ve had the chance to be present for dedications of new markers in Perry County for Zion Reformed UCC on their 200th birthday as a congregation, and along Granville’s Main Street for the Old Colony Burying Ground.

Other sites around Licking County are working on the process to get an official state historic marker. It isn’t cheap, with the base cost starting at around $2,000.

Infirmary Mound is one spot I’d love to see get an official marker; just off the side of the area where the annual Civil War re-enactment will be held this weekend, this was a fifteen foot tall conical mound before the mold-board plows starting working around the base in the 1840’s. Drive in off of Rt. 37 just north of Union Station Road, and wind your way back into Infirmary Mound Park to the Equestrian Arena; there an uneven patch of hilltop is all that remains above ground of a two millennia old family cemetery that once rose up, as opposed to spreading out across the landscape. Dozens, maybe hundreds of individuals were laid to rest there.

Next to T.J. Evans Athletic Center on Sharon Valley Road is a better preserved mound, also once fifteen feet or more in height, now maybe five. People coming to Newark Community Schools events park up the sides of this mound, which might get more respect if an official “State Historic Marker” were nearby.

We have 22 “Remarkable Ohio” state historical markers in Licking County; about five in Perry County. The oldest Licking County marker is in Hebron, set up in 1960, and the newest dates from 2007 by The Works in downtown Newark, with the Lockmaster’s House along Canal Street, helping mark Howard LeFevre’s 100th birthday as well, I’d guess. There are 1167 of them around the state over all, ranging from points along the famous Civil War “Morgan’s Raid” to the site of the first “electric suction sweeper” in North Canton with the Hoover Historical Center.

You can spend some amusing hours finding errors in these markers. I know a writer of one who found information that changed a statement made on the bronze plaque just months after they submitted their text, but you can’t erase a $2,000 slate very well. Some mistakes are rooted in changing knowledge, others from simple ignorance, and a few . . .

James Loewen is working on a new book, called “Surprises on the Landscape: Unexpected Places That Get History Right,” a follow-up to “Lies Across America,” which noted “historically inaccurate or misleading historical markers and sites across the United States.” The “Lies” book is a searing indictment of what passes for public history in many parts of our country, where inertia and the expense of changing signage leaves “savages” in metal print for future generations referring to Native Americans, or odd silences about other minority groups (check out the Cincinnati Riots of 1884, for instance).

I’m impressed with Prof. Loewen taking on the challenge of showing what’s done right, which can be more difficult to fairly present than pointing out flaws. The sites and interpretive sites that meet his perceptive and exacting standards will make for a great list of “don’t miss” historic attractions.

None of which will blunt my drive to check out the most obscure and least significant historical markers. They don’t go up unless someone there really cared about what is shared on the text. What makes them compelling is the process of reading not only the signage itself, but reading the subtext of what made this effort worth seeing through to a sign and dedication, no matter how long ago the ceremony, let alone the event commemorated.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his family is remarkably patient with some of the stops they end up making, and who knows, it could end up being an interesting column. Tell him about historic signs you’ve seen at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 6-16-07
Jeff Gill

Where Do You Go To Worship On Vacation?

Some folks have a strange idea that worship is one of the things you vacation away from.

Like the lawn, the timeclock, and grocery shopping, there are those who want to get away from the whole church experience.

If that describes you, there’s something about what attending a worship service means to you that needs revisiting.

Let’s be generous, though, and assume that you’ve reflected on why you are part of a worshiping community, are situated as well as you can find in your area for a church, and may not find everything fulfilling your spiritual needs. Maybe that issue is exactly what God’s trying to tell you: you need to worry less about your needs, and work on why we’re made to give thanks and catch a vision in community, and not just in solitude.

One way to get some perspective on whether you have some personal issues to sort out, or need to find a church somewhere else, is to visit churches while on vacation. In fact, even if you think your faith community is the best experience you’ll have this side of the Heavenly Choir, you should visit different churches on vacation.

At the worst, you’ll come home convinced that no one, anywhere, knows how to worship like you do at home. The best and most likely outcome is that you’ll learn a thing or two that your congregational leadership and/or pastor will appreciate hearing about.

Certainly the main point should be that a regular pattern of praise and prayer isn’t what you want to break up. Keeping those disciplines together, while you shake up the usual breakfast on the fly, check e-mail, and run errands flow of the day, can be illuminating in many ways. When you walk into a worship space among the new experiences of amusement parks or beaches or historic sites, there’s a whole new understanding that your heart will open along with that strange church door.

Don’t know where to go? Some folks don’t travel without reservations made in advance, and I respect that, but a church that you just step into can be the most revelatory experience. You saw it as you drove out to the beach, and thought “let’s just try it out.” If that feels a little too outta-hand for you, ask your pastor. Almost any clergyperson will happily help you find churches of your denomination near your destination.

You can also go online to your denominational website (most of them have pretty intuitive addresses, like disciples.org, ucc.org, or unitedmethodist.org; for Catholics, masstimes.org is pretty neat). If you know the zip code for your hotel or campground, you can find congregations within a certain number of miles, and even links to their websites.

But let me beg of you one more time: don’t try too hard to find a service that’s exactly what you’re used to. If there’s a worship style or approach that you don’t quite appreciate, vacation time is a good time to go sample and see for yourself. Stretch, grow, learn. If you just confirm your feelings from before, at least you can say you’ve been there, done that. Hey, you’re a stranger. You can always get up and leave!

You wouldn’t want to eat at the same fast food chain every meal on vacation that you frequent back home, would you? Oh, OK. Never mind. The rest of you, check out a new worship experience on vacation, and then come home and tell me about it. I’ll skip names and places as requested.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s worshiped a number of strange and wonderful places. Tell him your worship tale at knapsack77@gmail.com.