Otter's Rock

One of my two churches has a big wooden cross on a stand that they set up in the sanctuary during Lent. It is draped in black for Lent, and then in white for Easter.

Guess who just realized she completely forgot to set it up until today, just before the Fifth Sunday of Lent. (Lent is five weeks long + Holy Week)

OTOH, if nobody in the congregation said anything, they probably didn't notice ...

I've been home for a little over a week.  I spent the first week sort of vegetating in my parents' home, getting Stella used to my parents' dog, because that's where I'm mostly staying until my stuff gets here sometime after August 2nd.  And then we went up over the weekend to visit my brother N and his family because it's the birthday season for the family and we needed a birthday party.

Now, my brother and his wife live in Washington, which is the state I will be living in, and my parents live in Oregon, so I figured while we are up in Washington, that would be a good time to get some stuff done!  Like get a drivers' license!  Sort of important, considering my North Dakota one was expiring in like a week.  Bldack in ND, I had figured that it shouldn't be a problem to just get a new license, in my new state, and that it would be stupid to spend the money to renew my ND license when I could just wait and get a new one here.  But now I wish I had done that, because this has been way, WAY too stressful.

So, first, there is a new law in Washington that requires you to have proof of residence before getting a driver's license.  This is partly in relation to national laws that set standards for IDs and what proof of identity you need to have before you get one ... but I don't get how Washington has implemented it.  They have two levels of drivers' licenses, a regular one (with lesser ID standards) and an enhanced one (which will let you use it for Federal ID purposes even when the standards go up in a few years).  For the enhanced one you need to show TWO proofs of residence, and for the regular one you need to show ONE proof of residence, and I don't get why they are so emphatic about proving you live where you say you do.  I mean, once you have proved you are a US citizen or legal resident, why do they care about the exact residence?  This is something that ND does not do, so I was not expecting.  I mean, ND's standards for proving citizenship are high, but once you've done that, you can just tell them your address and they take your word for it.

Problem being, most of the things you can do to prove residency require you to already be living at the new address for at least a month--they're stuff like utility bills and the like.  And I'm not, so I can't.  (Also, most of the utility bills will never be in my name because it's a parsonage, and the church takes care of all that stuff.)  But if I let my license expire and then get a new one, then I would have to take the tests--both written and driving--all over again.  So I was frantically trying to figure out how to get proof of residency (could I get internet hooked up and use that bill as a proof of residency?  not in time, it turned out).  I even considered renewing my ND license online, which I could have done, except that if you wear glasses you have to have a doctor sign off on an eye exam to renew online, which I could have done, but I figured would be only minimally less hassle than getting proof of residency here in Washington.

Then I figured out that car insurance would work as proof of residency, and I needed to buy a car ANYWAY, having sold my Jeep in ND because I would much rather drive a compact car than an SUV (which I had needed for driving all the backcountry ND gravel roads).  (A car title works as proof of residency, but it has to be the permanent title, not the temporary one you get when you first buy the car.)  So, okay, I figured, buy a car, get the insurance, then I can get my WA driver's license!  And I'd already done my research and figured out what kind of car I wanted, so off to the dealership we went.  Test drove four used cars, figured out the one I wanted, went in to sign the paperwork.  I figured it should be easy because I was paying like 3/4 of it off at once and I have great credit.

Except apparently not because I haven't checked my credit report lately and apparently they somehow LOST my Jeep and my credit card, so all they have are my old student loans, which were paid off years ago.  Rather, somehow PART of the system doesn't know about them but part does?  Because the insurance guy who works at the car dealership said his system showed I had an A+ credit rating, so why the heck the dealership itself thought I had no credit he had no idea.  I ended up having to borrow money from my sister in law.  Now, my sister in law is a wonderful person, but it is rather more fraught to borrow from family than from a bank.  ANYWAY, trying to straighten that out took all day, so I decided to just spend the week with my brother and sister-in-law and their kids to help take care of the kids and also so that I could go in to get my driver's license, now that I had everything I needed.  (Straightening things out with the credit bureaus is probably going to take a while ... have called my credit card company and tried the online thing to access my credit report online, but there's some stuff that has to get sent to them in letter form.)

So, yesterday I went to the driver's license place!  (Washington doesn't have a DMV, it has a Department of Licensing.)  And I got there, handed the nice person at the counter all my stuff to prove I was a US citizen and lived in Washington, and she had me look into the little eye test machine to prove that I hadn't gone blind since the last time I got a driver's license.  No big deal.  Except that she had a test that I don't remember from ND, where they show a white box to one eye and a red dot to the other and you have to tell them whether the dot is inside or outside the box.  This is to test that your eyes work together ... and mine don't.  Both work just fine, but I can only see out of one at a time.  (And I can consciously switch which one I'm looking out of.)

Anyway, since that wasn't listed on my ND driver's license ... I needed an eye exam!  So off I went.  I figured one of the cheapo places in a larger store would be the place to go, since they always take walk-ins and they're supposed to be cheap, right?  Except no, none of the places I tried had an optometrist in yesterday. So I tried a regular optometrist clinic, and they said I could come right in.  And they were lovely about the whole thing.

Except they said my health insurance had been cancelled on July 16th, my last day at my previous call.  Now, that was NOT supposed to happen.  In fact, my denomination has a non-profit corporation to handle pastor's benefits specifically so that stuff like that DOESN'T happen, so that when you move from one church to another your healthcare goes with you.  Problem: the new church has to contact the benefits place and say that yes, you do indeed have a new call there ... and my new church hadn't quite gotten around to it yet.  So I had to pay for the eye exam out of pocket.  But hopefully the church will get the health insurance thing sorted out quickly.

So then I finally got back to the DoL, and got my license with no further problems.  But what should have been a short errand had instead, again, pretty much taken up the whole day.

I got back to my brother's house, he was still at work, and my sister in law suggested we take the kids out to the pool (hottest day of the year and their house has no A/C).  I said that sounded awesome.  And we went.  And found that the pool was closed because a kid had pooped in it and contaminated the system in the big pool as well, they'll be open today but they had to shock and reset the system.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Can't something just go right first time for once?

So today church was a little more exciting than normal, and we almost burned the church.. down!

We were going to have a potluck after church, right, so before service everybody goes down and puts their food in the kitchen, plugs in the crockpots, puts some things in the oven to keep warm, etc., etc.  And somebody set something (not sure what) on top of the stove just because it was a place to put something.

This stove, by the way, is like sixty years old.  It dates from when the church was rebuilt when it burned down in the early fifties.  But since it's only used for potlucks a couple of times a year, it's still working.  And the knobs are kinda touchy.  And somebody must have bumped one, because it was on.  And it set the stuff sitting on the burner on fire.

Thank God one of the members smelled something and went down in the middle of service to check on it, saw it on fire, and was able to handle it.

Unfortunately, the fire extinguisher in the kitchen, while not quite as elderly as the stove, was still far more elderly than it should have been, shall we say, so she had to grab the pan with the fire in it and drop it in the sink.  (And thank God it wasn't a grease fire!)  Nobody else knew anything about it until service was over, but she was definitely the Hero Of The Day.

For those of you who don't know, The Shack is a best-selling book about Christian faith, and particularly how we deal with loss and grief, and lots of Christians love it and some Christians hate it and it just got made into a movie, and I wanted to know if I should take my youth group to see it.  Having never read the book, I asked my fellow pastors in an online forum.  Most said it was great, not perfect but with some really great things to discuss, and one was vehement that it was a horrible, destructive, and misleading theology and view of God.  So I asked him why he thought that, since everyone else thought it was great.  His key arguments:

1. It uses feminine imagery for God, which contradicts Scripture.
2. God is only loved in the book, never feared, and in Scripture he is always feared.

But, uh, dude,

1. The Bible uses feminine imagery for God in several places, and particularly maternal--Jesus describes himself as "a mother hen" who wants to gather his chicks into his wings, in the Hebrew Scriptures God describes Godself as a nursing mother a couple of times ... yeah, God-as-woman is a small part of Scripture but it's woven throughout.  Denying the maternal and feminine aspects of God are the thing that truly contradicts Scripture.
2. The greatest commandment as given by Jesus is to LOVE the Lord your God.  Not fear, LOVE.  And you know what?  He got that from the Hebrew Scriptures, he's quoting there.  So while the idea of fearing God is in Scripture, so is the idea of loving God.  Also, Biblical ideas of what it means to "fear" God are not what we talk about when we talk about fear.  It's a sort of awe-filled respect and awareness of vulnerability that we don't really get in English.

So his two major arguments against it are COMPLETELY bogus.  And wrong.  And, actually, make me more inclined to take the kids to see it, not less.  He notes other problems that (if he's right about them) are definitely issues, but ones that I think we would benefit from discussing, so again, a reason to take them to see it, not to avoid it.

"Interesting" things pastors get in the mail: offers to give my congregation free "voting guides" by someone who thinks that the national debt is the absolute most critical issue facing the nation (second only to the government "subsidizing" anything else he dislikes) and that anyone who disagrees is either a Calvinist or an "Islamist." And claiming that using his voting guide could result in a gift of $10,000 to my ministry.

This guy also wants me to show a DVD to my congregation about how "atheists, gaytheists, and lawless thugs have infiltrated the IRS for criminal harassment of churches." And assures me that anything I may have heard about churches losing IRS tax-exempt status for endorsing particular politicians is only "ridiculous misinformation" spread by "noisy atheist groups" to "gullible clerics."

It kinda has the feel of somebody taking a Nigerian scam email, diehard Tea Party frothing (not any of their actual serious discussion points, just the froth and slogans), and a Bible, throwing it all in a blender, and sprinkling cheerful glitter over the resulting incoherent mess. The smiley faces throughout add an ... interesting touch.

If you have any interest in the topic of Christianity and homosexuality, this is a very interesting and thoughtful lecture by Bishop Dave Brauer-Rieke of the Oregon Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, making the case for inclusion and welcome and against literalism.  He does a very good even-handed explorations of the Biblical texts at stake and why the common usage of them as knee-jerk "homosexuality is bad!" proof-texts is, at best, problematic.  It's a 95-minute podcast with accompanying powerpoint, but it's well worth listening to.

Hope Homosexuality Hospitality