The Lake House

Will, Basil and I arrived here in Vandalia, IL on Thursday sometime after 11 p.m.

For the next few days, we will be staying right on the lake. A couple at Parkview, Ann and Marty, have allowed us the use of their greyhound-bus-converted-into-an-RV. Pictured above are a couple of shots of Basil who jumps into the bus driving seat any old time she wants. (Enlarge them to see the details more clearly.)

All of our belongings are stored in the basement of the parsonage. A huge thanks goes to the fifteen people who arrived to help unload it! We are grateful for God's blessings: a safe and relatively stress free move, new friends that have helped and welcomed us as one of their own, a newly renovated parsonage that we will occupy in just a number of days. God is good!

Anniversary of George Brett's Pine Tar Incident

Tonight, Will and I went to Kaufman stadium to say good-bye to the Royals. Pictured here is the free t-shirts that the first 20,000 fans received (of coarse we got them) to celebrate the anniversary of George Brett's pine tar incident.

They played the video of the incident at the game and this is basically what happened: George Brett hit a home run, circled the bases, sat down in the dug out. Then the umps pick up his bat and begin conferencing about the amount of pine tar he had rubbed on it. (FYI- pine tar looks like tar and is something that some folks put on their bats in order to have a better grip and it would have absolutely no affect on how far you could hit the ball) They soon announce that the home run was illegal, no good because there was too much pine tar on George's bat. The angle of the camera was just right to see George storm out of the dug out and attempt an attack on the umps. Weeks later, MLB announces that the umps were wrong and the home run was legal.

Now, we have t-shirts that look smudged with pine tar!

It was a sad evening for several reasons: Kaufman was filled to the gills, but most of the fans were cheering for the Yankees.....those around us were actually looking down their noses at us as we cheered for our home team. The Yankees won 9-4! So long, farewell to the Kansas City Royals. We have enjoyed borrowing you as a favorite team for these last six years. We will miss you.

House

Please buy this house! Anybody?! We are practically giving it away! All it needs is some love.

http://www.prukc.com/xq/ASPX/MLSNum.1380852/qx/HomeSearch/Listing.htm

The Countdown

The first three days of this week, we were in Chicago enjoying the EP Gathering. It was a great time conversing about Christian Formation in Congregations. Monday evening we played hooky from the Gathering and went to Wrigley Field. I'm working on getting a picture posted here for everyone to envy. It was everything people say about Wrigley.....the fans were out of this world enthusiastic!

Wednesday we traveled through IL and made a quick stop to have dinner and conversation with some lay leaders from Parkview.

Now, we are in Kansas City for just a few days to pack and clean! And SELL OR RENT this house that occupies the corner of 26th and Garfield in Kansas City, KS. I have not been calling the place "home" for most of the summer. It no longer feels like home to me. When we stay here, it feels more like we are visiting and camping.

The countdown is on. Five days! Our days of wandering are about over and we are ready. We are ready to learn lots of new names. We are ready to cook meals and sleep in our own bed. Like, the exiles that returned from Babylon, our eyes, ears, and hearts are wide open. We know that God is making the way for us...."You shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah 55:12-13)

Again with the Mud Hens

Another thing: 5th/3rd Field is wonderful. It is located right downtown. Some folks were watching from their hotel window across the street. This was 116th sell out game, no wonder, it was such a ROCKIN time.

Mascots

Pictured here are some team mascots that we have watched recently.

On Friday night, we were in Toledo and watched the Mud Hens. Toledo knows baseball. The game was sold out and there were over 10,000 people in attendance. Practically every person we saw had a shirt or cap on proudly displaying this mysterious mascot of theirs. There must be more Mud Hens fans in Toledo than Royals fans in Kansas City.....and they are a AAA minor league team. We ate at the legendary Tony Packo's right across from the park and were stunned at how fantastic the food was! Thanks Toledo, this was an awesome baseball experience. If anyone reading this knows what a "mud hen" actually is....please, we are dying to know.

The next evening, we went to a Ft. Wayne Wizards game. The opponent team was the Cedar Rapids Kernels (corn that is!) We absolutely loved this mascot that sometimes I cheered for them just for fun. This is A baseball, but it made for an exciting game cause people would successfully steal bases and miss the ball and even hit some home runs. The fans were very relaxed and pretty much never cheered with the exception of this one six year old girl behind us that was screeeeeeching at the top of her lungs and the worlds decibel level "strike the turkey out!"

Tonight, I am chilling in my motel room and Will is taking in a Northern League game in Joliet. Joliet, IL, Jackhammer! Gary, Indiana Railcats are their opponents.

I was talking to one of my friends who just moved to Lansing, MI and they have a minor league team named the Lugnuts. I was commenting to her that it seemed like a funny mascot and she said: "You think that's bad, Centralia, IL High School teams are the Orphans!"

So, I want to open the conversation up to all sports fans, please send a comment here to my blog stating what the most interesting, mysterious, or humorous mascot that you have come accros.

Conference Craziness

General Conference is not an occasion that you would think would be jam packed with hilarity. Yet, strangely, it was for us. For instance,in the middle of a relaxed conversation, Joe bolts out of his seat, hurtles and cracks a coffee table and goes to pretend to sing. We had no idea what got into him. He was pretending to sing and dance at this exhibit. His wife says: "you haven't ever heard Joe sing for real, have you?......well, everyone knows that he cannot sing."

Another irony: on the same day that David Kendall (our first ever Bisphop to be elected as a "lead" Bishop- who knows- not even he knows exactly what this means!) preached a message that was infused by the power of the Holy Spirit and was about our being ready for the wind and the fire of God to once more consume the church there was a golf cart that caught fire. I saw it but was not thinking clearly enough to have my camera ready for it, so you can see pictures of it on the fmcna.org site.

Another detail that tickled my funny bone was Will and I waking up one morning with a group of cattle in the field next to our tent (about 10 feet away)staring and moooooowing at us.

General Conference of the FMCNA

Will and I are in Spring Arbor, Michigan for the "quadranium" (meaning every four years, I think) gathering of Free Methodists from all over the country and some international locations as well.

It is such a joy to meet many strangers-turned-friends in these days. We re-connected with folks that we haven't seen since we were in college. We also discovered that Will's second cousin is married to a woman who grew up in the Parkview FMC, the place where we will be moving very soon.

As we have told the story of our lives over the last years, it is clear now more than ever how God has been with us. Being reconnected with these old roots serves as a reminder that we are not traveling this journey alone. We have such a great cloud of witnesses that surround us. They sometimes pose as strangers....other times as only aquantances, and other times close friends.

Hopefully, if my technology is cooportative, I will post a picture or two here soon.

Bohnoeffer on Strangers

Here is a thought from Bonhoeffer that I thought was very fitting addition to my previous ponderings regarding strangers turning into friends.

"We are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of otherness and strangness which resists all our attempts to overcome it by means of natural association or emotional or spiritual union. There is no way from one person to another. However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology however frank and open our behaviour we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there is no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him."

Since when do Pitchers bat?

I am new to this stuff called blogging but when we got this great picture of Roberta and I at Coors Field in Denver I knew I had to say something...and all I gotta say is when did the pitchers start batting? For all you non baseball fans, there is a National League and an American League and in one the leagues the pitchers bat and in the other they do not and the Kansas City Royals are in the one that the pitchers do not but since we are moving to the St Louis Cardinals area and they are in the other league it is good that I got acclaminated to pitchers who bat. The Colorado Rockies pitcher who we saw bat had a great hit but then turned ankle when he rounded third base and had to be pulled out of the game. Is this why pitchers don't bat???? -Will