I’ve never known a better man than Bob. I will miss him.

My friend Bob died yesterday. I think he was in his late eighties. Thirty-nine years ago his friendship and confidence in me changed my life forever.

I was a recent graduate from the University of California in Santa Cruz and Bob Carle was the chair of the Christian Education Committee at the First Presbyterian Church, Santa Cruz, the church that had become my spiritual home during my college years. I had stayed in Santa Cruz rather than going on to graduate school as I had planned (I was going to be a history professor), and was working as an instructional aide in a school for profoundly disabled kids. It paid the rent. Continue reading →

 Our clinic site for today and tomorrow is right here in San Lucas Toliman, as it is on many of our trips. Yesterday was a good and busy day and we are expecting the same today.

Though we stay plenty busy, there are occasional break – for lunch and sometime just to come up for air. I love talking to our doctors during those break times. I like to hear about who they have seen and what they have done. Most of what they done is what they call clinic medicine. Pains and coughs and upset stomachs are what they deal with. Every so often, though, some one whose case is very different comes into their make-shift examining room. What unfolds at those times can be a story of hope and healing or the sad reality that, at least here, there’s. to much to be done. Continue reading →

For Christians, giving is not just what the good among us do. It is what we all must do all of the time.

We asked for 600, but we received 844.  Toothbrushes, that is. And we asked for “some” toothpaste and received 550 tubes of various sizes. We should not have been surprised. This is LPC, after all.

Dental hygiene is one of the things we like to emphasize at the make-shift medical clinics we help staff and supply in the villages around Lake Atitlan that the Guatemala Mission Away Team will visit this coming week. Children are offered fluoride treatments and we send tooth paste and tooth brushes home with as many clinic patients as possible. Continue reading →

One of the reasons that I love serving a small ball church is that my relationship with Christ has been mostly small ball, though there has been an occasional grand slam.

This week of the Super Bowl, small ball, a baseball term, has emerged as the favored metaphor to describe the president’s State of the Union Address. From the left and right, Fox News and the Huffington Post, consensus is that the President’s State of the Union Address this past Tuesday evening will not be counted among his better speeches or a State of the Union Address to be remembered. I’ll let you do the Google search, but enter “small ball” and “State of the Union” and you’ll have thousands of result in less than a second.

So what is small ball? Check here for a thorough definition, but suffice it to say that small ball is a strategy for winning a baseball game that is more interested in stolen bases and bases on balls, bunts and sacrifice hits, than it is on doubles and triples and home runs. Continue reading →

Age segregation is a curse in too many churches, LPC included.

If you are a Facebook user you’ve probably seen those memes that pop up on your news feed every so often. There might be a picture of a typewriter or the Skipper and Gilligan, SpongeBob Square Pants or an Apple 2 computer. You are supposed to click “like” if you remember what’s pictured in the post.

Yeah, I am that old. And, yes, I remember dial telephones (harvest gold and permanently attached to the wall). I can report accurately that the S.S. Minnow set sail that day for a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour. Most of my friends in the Baby Boom Generation cohort are likely to say, “Me, too.”

Sure it’s kind of fun to remember the way things were, things mostly (and rightly) forgotten. And maybe those kids who don’t remember ought to know why people still ask, “Can you dial the number for me?” and why we talk about typing a document. And, really, if you think about it, Thurston Howell, III, was so typical of the 1%. We should have known. Continue reading →