Urban Onramps

If you played sports, do you remember playing a basketball game where it was the fourth quarter, both teams have turned the heat up, and you can’t even breathe for all the action going on? Imagine the fourth quarter of a critical play-off game, away from home, in a hot gym filled with screaming fans. Your legs are tired. Your coach yelled instructions at you, but you can’t hear them.

That’s kind of how I feel. The weird thing is that there’s not anything huge going on, but more like “a lot” of stuff going on. There’s a high quantity of challenges. That’s what the fourth quarter of a play-off is like. It’s a time when every play, every pass, every shot, every choice of direction counts. That’s what today felt like. There wasn’t much ease or margin in today.

Yet and still, I feel ok. I even thought when driving to my 3:30 p.m. meeting. In my mind I was griping about the challenges of the day, but my next thought was, “I do love my life, though. I’m having a good time.” Some highlights from today:

– I took Micah to the doctor early in the day. She’s had this wet cough for three months. We think she’s just got allergies.
– I was about to drop Micah off at Harambee when I learned that a Pasadena pastors prayer meeting was going on. It’s a meeting I’ve been trying to get to for some time. I totally dropped what I was about to do and rushed there. We had a great prayer time. God is teaching me, or changing me, or something, cuz I’m slowly started to enjoy prayer more. It probably helps to be with a bunch of normally dignified pastors who are (literally) whooping and crying and crying out. Them being undignified helps me be undignified.
– I have 26 voice mails to return. This after returning a bunch of calls already. I think I can knock things out tomorrow morning.
– If you are a praying person, please keep my whole household, all the folks who live in my house, in prayer. Kids are sick, mom and dad are tired, and friends are working hard.

Heh

You thought it was a good plan, an innovative one, an edgy effort to accomplish your goal. But it unraveled like your friends and colleagues said it would. Confess now!

I confess that we were going to hook up urban youth computer experts with a major Hollywood-based magazine that needed their print zine repurposed to the web. Talent, meet need. Presto. Right! I learned the hard way that “Management” is not just a layer of fat to be cut during budget-tightening. The youth turned their attention to other things, as youth do. Even the high salary wasn’t enough to keep them focused and on-time. I ended up holding the bag, having to deliver a number of web pages myself, even though I had no time for such a task.

That wasn’t so “dubious” (dictionary def.: “of doubtful quality or propriety”) because a lot of people, a wide variety, had looked at the plan and considered it good. It wasn’t like everyone we told about the plan told us it wouldn’t work. Or we shouldn’t do it.

Got home from Fresno a few hours ago. Immediately went and grabbed Sam and took him to City of Hope so he could get his port-o-cath removed. Kafi had to take him last night at midnight to the hospital because he had a fever. She called me. I was asleep in the hotel room in Fresno. I considered just leaving - leaving behind the 600 people attending the prayer meeting - and going home to care for him. So I laid in bed, half asleep and half awake, until Kafi called again at 2 a.m. “He’s ok,” she said. “His fever went away. They said bring him back in the morning for a chest x-ray.” So I woke up at 5 a.m. to prepare for the 6:30 a.m. prayer breakfast. The night before, at a dinner with the prayer breakfast committee, I spoke for 20 minutes. At the morning prayer breakfast I had 25 minutes. I thought it would be tougher to speak to 600 people scattered around the room, but it wasn’t that tough. Maybe it’s because the Christians in Fresno are awesome. Quien sabe? After that we went over to the Fresno Mennonite Biblical Seminary for a 930am - 11:30am session where I talked some more. Then it was lunch with the No Name Fellowship where I had 25-30 minutes again. Then we did this interesting discussion with Hispanic pastors and lay church leaders. They’ve got a lot going on there, as I mentioned before. I kept my suit on all day. On the ride home we stopped in Fowler at this truly dive-ish dive. I got a bacon cheeseburger and washed it down with a taquito. It was so beautiful today. Beautiful and windy - when the car pulled into the driveway I saw that the wind had blown down my gate. So it’s just late now. I’m about to fall asleep. Micah is at Aunt Shirley’s. Tomorrow I have a meeting with Habitat for Humanity folks to talk about this corner store that’s for sale. At noon it’s a sweet lunch gig with International Justice Mission (Gary Haugen is in town). At some point I’ll sleep more. But I’m grateful for the chance to share and be heard by the Christians throughout Fresno. I hope they were blessed by what I had to say.

UPDATE: Here’s a newspaper report (Fresno Bee) of the prayer breakfast. There should be a reporter’s correction: Though my father lived 10 miles from where I live now, he actually died when I was in high school and living in Burbank, which is farther.

And below is my big talking head.

The Case for Teaching The Bible: “Should the Holy Book be taught in public schools? Yes. It’s the bedrock of Western culture. And when taught right, it’s even constitutional.”

I haven’t read the article yet, but look forward to it.

UPDATE: This is a helpful article. Here is the writer’s position on how to teach about the Bible in public schools:

…if an elective is offered, it should be twinned mandatorily with a world religions course, even if that would mean just a semester of each. Within that period students could be expected to read and discuss Genesis, the Gospel of Matthew, a few Moses-on-the-mountain passages and two of Paul’s letters. No one should take the course but juniors and seniors. The Bible’s harmful as well as helpful uses must be addressed, which could be done by acknowledging that religious conservatives see the problems as stemming from the abuse of the holy text, while others think the text itself may be the culprit. The course should have a strong accompanying textbook on the model of The Bible and Its Influence but one that is willing to deal a bit more bluntly with the historical warts. And some teacher training is a must: at a bare minimum, about their constitutional obligations.

Consider this from an article in the Times of London:

The [UK] Department of Health says it is now generally agreed among doctors that cannabis is an “important causal factor” in mental illness.

As always, you gotta check the lab equipment (so to speak) on these studies. But it appears that there is growing evidence that pot is worse than we thought. This comes at a time when marijuana use is much more widespread. I’m using my own personal observation that young people and young adults are blazing up in public more than ever.

Whenever I get invited out of town for a speaking engagement, I tell the folks that I’m willing to speak early and often. “Put me to work,” I say. If I’m not at home with my family and attending to my first ring of work/ministry priorities, I would prefer to use all of the “away” time on mission. The people in Fresno took my request seriously. Check out my schedule for this Tuesday:

• 6:30 a.m. - Fresno/Clovis Prayer Breakfast: “Security in an Unsecure World”
• 9:30 a.m. - Pastors’ Discussion @ Mennonite Biblical Seminary Chapel: “Transforming Your City Through Protest and Invest”
• 11:45 a.m. - No Name Fellowship @ Fresno Pacific University: “Can You See Me When I’m Thirty?”
• 2:00 p.m. - Hispanic Pastors’ Discussion: “From East LA to the White House and back to the barrio”

By 3 we will be officially done. By 4 we should be back on the road. By 8 I should be back in Pasadena after driving down the 99 and then the 5. I’m looking forward to this day. There are a lot of great people in Fresno who are attempting great things, and it’s always a pleasure to spend some time with them.

Here’s a May 17 article in The Fresno Bee about the prayer breakfast and what I plan to share there: Religion: Prayer breakfast speaker will talk on security. I would appreciate your prayers for this entire day. If you choose to pray, and if you drop me a line to let me know you are praying, I’ll hit you back at the end of the day and report on how God’s Spirit was at work.

From the Tax Foundation:

Overall, we find that America’s lowest-earning one-fifth of households received roughly $8.21 in government spending for each dollar of taxes paid in 2004. Households with middle-incomes received $1.30 per tax dollar, and America’s highest-earning households received $0.41. Government spending targeted at the lowest-earning 60 percent of U.S. households is larger than what they paid in federal, state and local taxes. In 2004, between $1.03 trillion and $1.53 trillion was redistributed downward from the two highest income quintiles to the three lowest income quintiles through government taxes and spending policy.

Those are eye-popping figures, though I withhold my final judgement until I examine the methodology behind this analysis.

Times of London:

The Anglican Church took another step towards its apparently inevitable schism when US Episcopal bishops rejected the ultimatum from primates of the Anglican Communion to fall into line over homosexuals.

The Primate of the Southern Cone, in a statement linked over at Anglican Mainstream, says, “It is not possible to maintain relationship when one party unilaterally and coldly departs from previously agreed foundations. Now we must move to separation as quickly and as gracefully as possible. Of course, the realignment must take into account those in the United States who remain committed to historic teaching and Biblical Truth as it has been handed down. To limit further needless damage, may God have mercy on the Anglican Communion and help us come to resolution quickly.”

…Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005…

From this article: In surge in Manhattan toddlers, rich white families lead the way

This week’s Pasadena Weekly has stories on each of the run-off candidates for the District 1 seat. These are some good articles. Here’s the one on Robin Salzer, and here’s the one on Jacque Robinson.

CNN: Ruben Navarrette
Gonzales being whacked like a piñata

The nation’s first Hispanic attorney general is being pressured to resign by — pick ‘em — Democrats trying to make hay, an elite media that long opposed him, civil libertarians who condemn administration policy on detainees and wiretaps, conservatives who think Gonzales is too liberal, and liberals who think he’s too conservative….

The attorney general does have one person in his corner. President Bush came out swinging Tuesday, insisting that Gonzales has his support and warning Democrats not to go on “a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants.”

I’ve interviewed Gonzales twice since he became attorney general. During the last interview, which took place three weeks ago in San Diego — that is, before the controversy erupted — I asked about the firings of the U.S. attorneys. He told me what he has told others: It was about performance.

“I have an obligation…to ensure that we have the best people we can have in here,” he said. “All I will say is that the decisions that were made…were based upon performance, and there are many factors that go into that.”

An avid baseball fan, Gonzales even pitched an analogy. “What I care about is — are we trading up?”

As a political columnist, I cover liars for a living. And yet, I’d say Gonzales is pretty much as advertised by his old friend, President Bush: an honorable public servant.

The above is from Navarrette’s CNN column. Here’s his regular Washington Post-syndicated version:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales shouldn’t go quietly. In fact, he shouldn’t go at all.

Not when the evidence suggests that most of the folks who might have acted inappropriately in the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys work not at the Justice Department, but at the White House. And not when many of those who are now clamoring for Gonzales to leave office are clear that they never wanted him there in the first place.

Associated Press:

“On campus there is such a strong attitude of pluralism and acceptance, but then it doesn’t extend to [abstinence],” Kinsella said.

AFP:

“Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through. They parked the vehicle, and the adults ran out and detonated it with the children in the back,” [Major General Michael] Barbero said.

This is in next week’s issue of Newsweek:

A test version went up in January. The site gets between 50,000 and 60,000 unique users a day and it hasn’t officially launched yet.

GodTube is the best example of a new group of Web sites that aim to do the same things regular Web sites do, but with a Christian (or Christian conservative) point of view. Like the idea of MySpace, but hate the thought of your children as prey? Try Famster, a secure online community for families. Like Wikipedia, but chafe at what you see as its liberal bias? Try Conservapedia. All three sites are brand-new and have some kinks to work out.

Ryan also noted this: What Would Jesus Download?

We sent a Harambee youth, Jasmine, to this (last item on the page) last summer. It was great. We are hoping to send another, if not two, this summer.