We're moved. We still don't have internet access at home yet. The NK soccer team filled the truck for us, and the Millersport football team unloaded for us!

Forgetting it All


In some conversations I've had with youth workers, one thing is often discussed; frequently the youth worker is the whipping boy (whipping person?) for the senior pastor. The youth person gets to do all the scut work that the pastor doesn't want to do or doesn't like to do. The senior pastor makes fun of the youth worker in public. The pastor never pays attention to the youth or the youth worker unless there is a problem. The list goes on and on and on.

But then many youth workers go on to become senior pastors... me included.

And it seems that often (we) forget it all. It reminds me of a time in fraternity life. It was during "health" week, and during one particular dinner, we pledges provided "entertainment" in which we primarily made fun of the active brothers. Now (as we expected), we got pelted with food. But what we didn't expect was later, when we had another event in which we were drenched with beer. Now, the beer wasn't supposed to be part of the event, but some of the brothers were drinking from a keg, and some of them wanted "revenge" for how we'd made fun of them earlier, so somebody threw a cup of beer. I personally got doused for lampooning a brother with a "dance" (complete with that brother's favorite shirt, stuffed with a pillow). Then we got to clean up the mess.

The next year when this event came along, it was much worse than my year had been. Whereas they had a keg available (mostly for drinking), that year there was a "dead" keg... for throwing. Each brother with a "pledge son" (including me) was given an entire pitcher of flat beer to pour on his son (I invited my pledge son "Rockhead" into the kitchen and poured mine down the drain while he watched; I told him, "That was supposed to go on you."). It was awful.

The worst part was that my class, the ones who had so hated being doused with beer the previous year, was the group who was throwing the most beer. The excuse? "They did it to me, and now it's my turn."

Eventually (possibly the next year), this practice was finally done away with.

But my thought on it is that when we've been mistreated in a church, especially by a pastor, then when we become pastors, the worst possible thing for us to do is to turn into the same miserable person who tortured us.

Vacation Part 6, in Which We Waste a Day

Let me preface this entry by admitting that we usually fill our vacations so full that we exhaust ourselves and then wish we had another week to recover. But when we went to Seneca Lake for vacation a few years back, it was just a relaxing time in which we did a lot of reading, relaxing, etc., and I wouldn't consider any of that time wasted.

However, this day wasn't like that. I woke up early and went for a run. It would be quite an adventure to live in St. George, especially where we were, because you could go a few blocks and be trail running right away. Good stuff. Then when I got back, we decided to go to this tourist office place to decide what to do. It wasn't open yet. So we went to this wildlife museum. It wasn't open yet either. So I tried to find the church where we would be going on Sunday. I couldn't find it. We went back to the wildlife museum to find that it had what amounted to life-sized dioramas complete with taxidermy. We just bought zoo season passes to see real live animals, and to go through the dioramas would have cost us (as a family) about what the zoo season passes cost, so we decided to skip it. The kids liked playing in the gift shop, though.

So we bought needed groceries, ate lunch and decided where we would go next. Tara's mom had been "suggesting" to us that we really needed to go to Las Vegas while we were out there; she even suggested that we could stay at a cheap motel there so we wouldn't have to drive back late at night. Having stayed in a cheap motel in Vegas (in approximately the same neighborhood in which Tupak was allegedly gunned down), I nixed that idea completely. Besides, I don't gamble. Or, I should say, I don't play "games of chance." I regularly spend a huge chunk of money in the type of gambling better known as "insurance" - but that's another story. Anyway, slot machines aren't attractive to me in any way, and I am enough like my father to dislike being parted from my money. But Tara's mom kept insisting about how "family-friendly" Vegas was and all the free things, so we went.

Where we stopped (free parking) was probably the highlight of the strip; it was the pirate ship at Treasure Island.

Yes, Jonathan is wearing my sunglasses. Somehow we left his back at the condo. But it was dad to the rescue, trying to make him as comfortable as possible.

As we were walking around, Tara made the comment: For me, this is vacation Hell. She had that right. There were crowds everywhere and if you weren't gambling, there sure was a lot of up-scale shopping to do. The dolphin show, which M-I-L remembered as free, now cost $15 per person. The "free" viewing of tigers? Another fee. The Caesar's Palace moving statues (which I don't think our kids would have appreciated anyway)? Broken. Everything else? Tons of people, and nothing whatsoever appealing. (There was a huge aquarium behind the counter at one hotel, and we spent a while there watching the fish while M-I-L rented a stroller for more than we paid for ours).

I did, however, feel "at home" in this particular location.

We then went looking for something to eat. There were plenty of buffets available - each for $30 or so per person. I guess we could technically afford that if we really, really wanted to, but that wasn't how we wished to spend our hard-earned money. So we left the strip in search of somewhere to eat. We ended up driving for a while, first through some really nasty sections of town (on the strip, there are of semi-pornographic advertisements and promos for what seems to be prostitution pretty much on every corner, but once you're off the strip, it gets much worse). We then went through some "normal" areas and found a road that looked like it would have restaurants. Along the way we saw the following scene.

In case it's not clear enough, that building is the home of the Living Faith Assembly: God's Family Church. On the left side of the building... that is indeed an ATM. Only in Vegas would there be an ATM on a church building...

We ended up at an Olive Garden Restaurant; I was too hungry to keep looking. We all enjoyed our food (I would have been fine had I just had the salad and breadsticks, but the Italian food was good anyway, plus we had enough to take left-overs back to the condo).

We are glad that we hadn't decided to try to spend any more time in this wretched place.