Gone fishin'

My mom is in town visiting so we played tourist this morning and trekked down to the Shedd Aquarium. I usually have mixed feelings about going there. My memories of previous visits (and my wife concurs with me on this) are very dark rooms with creepy fish and a fear that the tanks are going to break at any moment and we'll all get eaten by some strange fish that should be in the Amazon. But this is not your father's Shedd Aquarium.

It really is a remarkable place (despite the $23 fee for adults and $16 for kids) and put me in continuous awe of God's creation. Beauty and ugliness (in the eye of the beholder, I suppose) are right next to each other, existing peacefully, I would imagine.

A tourist tip for those visiting Chicago and Chicagolanders going downtown: if I had to do it over again, I'd skip the dolphin show and spend most of my time in the Wild Reef section, which was, for lack of a better word, inspiring. The dolphin show? Eh. Unless you have kids who are dying to see the dolphins do a few jumps, you'd be better off doing something else.

I must say, though, that the whole thing made me want to buy an aquarium. I know now, though, to wait a few days on those impulses.

Humbled by prayer

Pastors quite naturally talk a lot about prayer. Whether they actually pray themselves is probably a topic for another time, but I was struck a couple different ways today when thinking about prayer.

There's some long-range planning going on this summer in our church and that always brings (for me) a lot of excitement and also some anxiety. Our family went down to the dog beach in Highland Park yesterday and as I was coming back up to our car, out of nowhere, a thought came to me: Am I intentionally praying about these hopes/objectives? A more penetrating question came this morning: If I am, do I really believe in the efficacy of these prayers? I was humbled and a little embarrassed by my initial answers.

Later today I received a wonderful voice mail message from a long-time member of our church who moved to warmer climes last year. In the midst of her message, she said, quite emphatically, "I'm praying for you every day." I have no doubt that she does and I am unbelievably moved by that. It's amazing what someone else's prayers can do for your own.

Quiet, please--baseball game in progress

I went up to Milwaukee again today to watch another baseball game, this time against my favorite team, the Reds (who lost, by the way, in truly ugly fashion--their bullpen is so, so bad). But the thing that made me ponder did not take place on the field.

The ticket I used was a Father's Day gift and it was a great seat--seven rows behind home plate. The crowd was pretty genial and somewhat sedate around where I was sitting. There were a few of us Reds fans and the Brewer fans didn't seem to mind our occasional cheering for the opposition. Until the top of the 9th. There was a guy (a Reds fan) a few rows behind me who started screaming at the Brewer pitcher. He kept calling the pitcher a "muppet" (he did kind of look like one) and kept saying over and over that he needed to throw harder. It was a weird sort of heckling and a little annoying, but nothing outrageous. After a while, however, a Brewer fan turned around told him to knock it off. The Reds fan made his case quite well: He wasn't swearing; he was simply cheering for his team. The Brewer fan then started to educate him on how he was supposed to cheer. It was OK to cheer for the Reds, apparently, but not OK to say anything bad about the Brewers. They went back and forth on this topic for a few minutes, to the chagrin and amusement of the people sitting around them. I thought the Brewer fan was making kind of a ludicrous case, but then he said something that made me think of church. He said to the Reds fan, "You're too exuberant."

Ah, yes. Exuberance. Passion. Excitement. So many in our society look askance at people of faith if they show a little too much exuberance. Keep it quiet. Keep it to yourself. Keep me out of it.

"We shouldn't put down people who show great euphoria and excitement after a born again or religious experience. They're right. Suddenly the world makes sense for them. Suddenly it's okay, despite the absurdity, the injustice, the pain. Life is now so spacious that we can even absorb the contradictions. God is so great, so bottomless, so empty, that God can absorb even the contraries, even the collision of opposites. Thus salvation often feels like a kind of universal amnesty, a total forgiveness of ourselves and all other things."
--From "Everything Belongs" by Richard Rohr

Outcasts on wheels

For the third year in a row, our church has done amazingly well in raising money and awareness in the fight against multiple sclerosis. We had more than 90 people participate (either volunteering or biking) in the "Tour de Farms" MS 150, a two-day bike ride around DeKalb. Our goal was to raise $40,000 and, at this point, we've topped that by $4,000.

I rode 35 miles on Saturday with probably about 20 folks from Christ United Methodist Church (others rode longer distances). As we were gathering for our 7 a.m. send-off, I noticed again the numerous businesses who were present. They weren't hard to miss because they had employees/representatives wearing very nice biking gear with their company names emblazoned on them. Allstate was there. So was CDW, Walgreens, Harlem Furniture, and others I can't recall. I remember noticing them last year and wondering how expensive it was to buy those outfits and whether we could find someone to buy some for us.

(I had the same hang-up in high school. When I ran cross-country my first two years, we had these pretty ugly uniforms and old sweats. Other teams had the latest, greatest gear. I jokingly (?) complained to our coach that we needed new uniforms. On the contrary, he said, he loved it that we looked the worse. That way other people would underestimate us.()

CUMC had nice cotton t-shirts and some people wore them. We were actually a mish-mash of different clothing, abilities, and bicycles. I heard one of our youth say, "We're like a bunch of outcasts." I'm not sure if he meant that in a bad way, but his comment was right on. We were a bunch of outcasts in more ways than one. We weren't all dressed the samewe didn't have the best gear in the world, but we were a community of faith on wheels, people proclaiming (and huffing and puffing) that Christ is Lord. That makes us outcasts, and I was so proud to be a part of it.