Becky and I returned home just this morning on the red eye from Seattle after two wonderful weeks in central Washington with our son and his growing family.  Yes, the highlights were the glorious times with the grandkids, but we also snatched a few fleeting moments of adult conversation with Christopher and Katie, as well.

Six of our days away were spent at Lake Chelan, about sixty miles north of Ephrata where Christopher and Katie and the kids live. Our two oldest grandchildren, nine and six years old, each spent their own three days with us at a condominium overlooking the lake. Long story short, we gave the kids an overlap night, and I did the ferrying back and forth, so two additional roundtrips Chelan to Ephrata and Ephrata to Chelan, and an empty car on a couple of legs.  I loved the drive. Continue reading →

The Washington Cascades not too far from where our son (who shot the photo earlier this week) lives.

The dictionary defines a vacation as “a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation.” Vacation so used is an American word first put to use in the late Nineteenth Century as we were trying to figure out how to live as an urban and industrialized or professionalized people. It was a progressive idea. Paid vacations became an issue in the early days of unions and labor contracts.  The idea was to vacate, get out of, the dirty air of the city, the oppressive working conditions and the deadly dreariness of the assembly line, the crowded life of the tenement or the row house.  The sea shore, the lake, and the mountains; lodges, cabins, campgrounds, and hotels were favorite destinations.

A farmer on the land or a baker in a village would never have thought of a vacation.  But vacations won. Together we spend over $100 billion per year on our vacations and an average family of four will spend between $5,000 and $10,000 on this year’s vacation. Three quarters of us will go into debt for our vacations. Continue reading →

Facebook and its family of social media services, Instagram and WhatsApp, were a mess on Wednesday.  It turns out that you couldn’t post your pictures for nine hours.  Twitter lit up. People were angry and some were seriously anxious. Nine hours with no new selfie?

I think this is what you call a first world problem.

For nine long hours on Wednesday I could upload may latest favorite picture of me, but the photo would not display on my feed. Rather, Mark Zuckerberg’s robots scanned the photos and posted the verbal description of the photo that is used in a computer-generated voice description for the visually impaired.  Apparently, this is what the robots do with every photo we upload, it’s just that we usually see the photo and not the written description of it.  No word as to whether this was some sort of work slowdown on the part of the robots or if any of them will be disciplined for their slack work on Wednesday. Continue reading →

Even at six million to one, I don’t like the odds.  Not when you’re talking about eternity.
 
I will be speaking at the Men’s Breakfast at a neighbor church on Saturday morning.  We’ll be thinking about the ways that confidence beats certainty every time – in fact, the futility of certainty and the wrongness of being right. 
 
I will save that message for Saturday morning, but my preparations got me thinking about certainties and probabilities and odds. One thing led to the next; this article and then that post and one of them mentioned an intriguing travel app, and, well, I had to download it to my phone. 
 
Am I Going Down? (available for Android or Apple) is a fear of flying app. You enter your route and the type of aircraft and then the app tells you the odds of crashing and how many flights you’d have to take before you’d have to start getting nervous.
 
Becky and I are flying out to Washington state later next month, so I entered our information. and Am I Going Down calculated our odds.  We have a 1 in 6,333,688 chance of having our flight crash before we debark in Seattle.  The app adds that we could take that same flight every day for 17,353 years before we went down. 
 
The odds are meant to comfort the fearful flyer. I got pretty anxious thinking about going through airport security every day for 17,353 years. 
 
Certainties and probabilities are fact based. The maker of Am I Going Down tell us “10 million routes can be assessed using actual data from sources such as the Geneva-based Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives, the United States National Transportation Safety Board and the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization.”
 
It turns out we could have gotten 379 additional years of daily flights if we had booked on United instead of Alaska, but that flight has a layover in Denver, and we think the non-stop is worth the risk. 
 
Confidence is not about facts or a massive data upload.  It is about faith and believing a story unlike any story ever told, the story of Jesus and his love. You can’t prove it and no data dump is going to improve the odds of it being true. In fact the odds of it being true are not good at all,  Foolishness, the intelligentsia among the Greeks called it. But you can believe it and then find the improbable and unprovable  – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control suddenly showing up at the least expected times.  
 
With “proper confidence,”  author Lesslie Newbigin’s wonderful phrase, we boldly sing, “When we’ve been there 17,353 years, long past TSA, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.”
 
See you Sunday Continue reading →

The flight from Denver arrived in Philadelphia around 11:30 last night, just a little late.  Our EPC General Assembly came to a close less than 24 hours ago, and it was so full.  There’s not been nearly enough time to even begin to put all the pieces of the week together in a way that paints a picture of what the week was all about for our denomination and for those of us privileged to be a part of the time at Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church.

Here are some of the “-ful” pieces that will fit together into what we will understand better in time:

• Wonderful worship.  What more can we say about 1,000 voices singing “Great is Thy Faithfulness” or “Ten Thousand Reasons”
• Faithful preaching from Andrew Brunson, Léonce Crump, and others
• Helpful seminars on leadership, ministry, and theology
• Hopeful presentations on the future direction of the EPC as we seek to be Christ’s church in our complicated world
• Joyful connection with friends and colleagues, old and new, from around the church and around the world.

Elder Don Reimold and I will give an initial report on the Denver GA to the elders at Monday evening’s Session meeting.  We will keep you posted on ways we might let the entire congregation hear more about his very “-ful” week.

See you Sunday!