It would have been funny, had it not been rather pathetic. As the sheriff’s deputies were evicting the tent-dwellers from the flatland alongside the Mississippi River Monday, one of the dispossessed called out for the television camera, “But that’s my home! It’s my home.”

Well, I thought, it shouldn’t be your home. It’s government land, it’s subject to flooding, and no one is allowed to live on the batture. If you think New Orleans is not a safe place due to its low elevation, this is a hundred times worse.

The batture is the narrow strip of dry ground between the river and the levee, sometimes no more than 50 yards, sometimes wider. As to exactly who owns that land, that has been in dispute almost since the levees began to be built. The quickest answer is the federal government. And yet, I can take you over the levee in Orleans Parish and show you four or five houses on stilts that were grandfathered in, the result being that the people own their own homes and, the way it came to me, residents do not live in the state of Louisiana, but in the USA only. Those homes get passed down from generation to generation, because to sell to an outsider would take an act of Congress. Literally.

Where I walk up on the levee each morning, where Florida Street intersects with the levee and the river, you’ll find a number of private businesses alongside the river–companies that trade with barges and towboats–and a sign advertising a lot for lease. I asked the levee policeman this morning who owns that land. “Some private individual,” he said. “They have squatters’ rights.” I take that to mean a form of being grandfathered in. They owned that parcel at the time the federal government decided it was taking possession of the batture.

Neighbors told the television reporter that they had recently seen as many as a dozen tents on the batture at that spot. Monday, there were only three, but they were full size, able to accommodate an entire family. Litter was everywhere; these were not neat people, even though they have this giant bayou (okay, Mississippi River) flowing past their back door.

“What bothers me about that,” the levee policeman said to me, “is they were camping just inside Orleans Parish. Now, all they’ll have to do is walk upriver a mile and they’ll be our problem.” “Our” meaning, Jefferson Parish.

Now, I’m aware those folks may be otherwise homeless and may feel they have no other alternative but to erect a tent on forbidden property. Aside from that, it’s worth our making a couple of spiritual parallels and observations.

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I did not mean it as criticism, but I once said to a young pastor, “Good sermon. I enjoyed it. But there’s just one thing.” He perked up, knew something was coming, and said, “Yes?”

I said, “You gave us the prescription before you had finished the diagnosis.” I paused to let that sink in, then said, “Everyone enjoys your preaching. You have great presence and a good style. So this is about the sermon itself and not you.”

“The audience is not prepared for the good news of the Gospel until you tell them what the bad news is.”

He got it, and nothing more was needed.

Of all the Christmas Scriptures, my favorite is the line the head angel uttered to the shepherds while mid-air above the Bethlehem meadow: “I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be to all people….” (Luke 2:10)

You and I know about news. We have 24-hour news radio and television stations. The “news” paper arrives in our front yards every morning.

For an occurrence to make the news, it must meet three qualifications: it must be real (it’s true), recent (it didn’t happen last year), and relevant (it has some meaning to the hearers).

Real, recent, relevant. It happened, it just happened or we just found out about it, and it impacts us.

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“I’m on vacation.” I say that to myself twelve times a day. Margaret overhears and says, “Why do you keep saying that? Are you trying to convince yourself?”

I tell her, “I’m trying to shut down my inner stress.” I recall for her how in 1971 when we moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and I joined the staff of the First Baptist Church, our first year was one of the hardest of my ministry, and yet the stress was all self-induced. “I felt bad all the time, like I should have been accomplishing more than I was.” No one was criticizing or pressuring me. The voice driving and accusing and stressing me was my own.

If you have been to New Orleans and seen the effect of Katrina and her floodwaters on our city, if you have driven the mile-after-mile of shut-down neighborhoods with their overgrown yards and boarded up strip malls, if you have grieved over the closed churches and their thousands of dispersed members, then you understand how frustrating it can be to be looked upon as a leader when you accomplish so little.

“Everyone brags on me,” I tell her, “and says I’m doing a good job. So it’s not other people. It’s me.”

That’s why I decided to take this week–the one prior to Christmas–as a vacation. There’s not a lot going on anywhere around here this week or next, and it’s a good time to vegetate without the sense that I’m letting someone down. Then, next week, the time between Christmas and New Year’s, our offices are closed anyway, a custom my predecessors started a long time ago and which I’m not about to change.

I suggest to pastors they never take the last week of December as official vacation. There’s practically nothing going on in any church then, the phone doesn’t ring and no one drops by, and it’s a great time to catch up on your reading.

So, I’m trying to shut down. It’s two weeks in a row of telling myself, “I’m on vacation.”

“What exactly does that mean?” Margaret asked.

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For years, nobody gave a thought to my birthday. I was never given to a lot of hoopla, so that was fine with me. I’m not against celebrating special events or observing religious festivals, but well, you don’t see people throwing birthday parties in Scripture, so I got along just fine without one.

Then one day my sister got into the act. Carolyn loves making people feel special and she had this bright idea.

“It’ll just be a little dinner for your birthday,” she said. “Just the immediate family.”

She wanted to do it so badly, I agreed to it. And, sure enough, it worked out. About 10 of us gathered at my house, Carolyn brought the cake and our other sister Patricia made dinner, and it was a nice evening.

That was the first year.

The next year, Carolyn started planning the birthday dinner several weeks in advance. She was not satisfied with the intimate gathering we had enjoyed last year. She had enjoyed it, she said, but she felt badly that more family wasn’t included. This year the whole clan would be invited.

I suppose everybody showed up, because our house was crowded and some had to eat out on the front porch. We had a big time, laughing, singing songs, eating. I bet I got my neck hugged a hundred times. I blew out the candles and we ate cake. To my surprise, a few people brought presents. That was nice, but unnecessary.

The third year, Carolyn realized she was on to something.

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The annual Christmas dinner for the ministers and spouses of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans was held at the Ormond Plantation on Tuesday night, December 12, 2006. We had told the hostess for this wonderful ancient facility we anticipated having 150 present. On Friday before the big event, we called to ask them to increase that figure to 200. In post-Katrina New Orleans, our ministers and their families are hungry for fellowship with each other and for an excuse to get out of their homes–in many cases, a FEMA trailer–and celebrate.

As the director of missions for the association and responsible for the evening, I arrived early to make certain everything was in order. Even though I have driven River Road in Destrehan hundreds of times over the last 16 years, I was not certain precisely where Ormond Plantation was and ended up driving past the entrance and having to turn around and go back. Darkness had come early to our part of the Deep South and the heavy fog was complicating matters.

Since this plantation and several others in the area faces the Mississippi River, separated from that body of water only by River Road and the levee, fog is always a problem in the winter. Tuesday night, it was as bad as I’ve ever seen it.

A large sign announcing “Ormond Plantation” sits perpendicular to the two-lane highway and in the daytime can be read easily. However the darkness, the fog, and the lack of any kind of night-time illumination meant most of the invited guests would drive right past their destination.

I pulled into the parking lot, got out my flashlight, and walked through the heavy mist to the sign by the road. Then I had a decision to make.

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At our weekly Wednesday meeting of the Baptist pastors of New Orleans, Oscar Williams (Good News Baptist Church) shared their plans for next Saturday’s neighborhood ministry. They’ll be going door to door in the Destrehan area where their displaced church is meeting these days, looking for anyone needing groceries. They have 300 food baskets to give away. And that’s not all.

They’ll be asking for information on the children in these homes–how many, what ages, boy or girl. Then, they will have a drawing. Lots of drawings, in fact. Seventy drawings for seventy bicycles. Bikes of all sizes, brand new, a gift from Wal-Mart.

Oscar missed our Ministers’ Christmas dinner Tuesday night because his brother-in-law called at the last minute to say the truck with the bicycles had arrived and they needed a place to store them. “We’ve got them all over my house, throughout the First Baptist Church of Destrehan (where Good News is worshiping temporarily), and in my brother-in-law’s home.”

We all wanted to know, “How did you get Wal-Mart to give you seventy bicycles?” “We asked them,” Oscar said. “What a novel concept,” some wit remarked.

Wal-Mart remembers New Orleans.

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At the end of our Tuesday night Christmas dinner for all our ministers and their spouses, I drove home through the heavy fog giving thanks to God.

Thanks for the 200 or more who attended. In the old days (pre-Katrina), we might have a hundred show up, and we had to create gimmicks to get them to mix and meet. Tuesday night, the decibel level was off the scale as they visited and laughed and hugged. The dinner had ended and it was time to begin the program, but I hated to call a halt to the fellowship. The joy in that place was palpable.

Thanks for the gifts of God’s people that paid the tab. Get 200 people into a plantation house for a Christmas dinner and the tab easily runs into the thousands of dollars. One of our churches provided child care, but we paid for the workers. Jim Chester–evangelist, funnyman, storyteller, and magician–provided a fascinating program and kept us laughing. God’s people gave us the money to pay him a nice honorarium.

Thanks for our special guests. Gibbie McMillan represented the Louisiana Baptist Convention so well, reminding everyone of the special feature of our denomination called the Cooperative Program by which a person gives his offering into his church and touches the entire world. Pastor Keith Manuel promoted the Louisiana Baptist Evangelism Conference coming up January 22-23 at the First Baptist Church of New Orleans. Our wonderful servant leaders from Operation NOAH Rebuild and Global Maritime Ministries were present and blessed us, as always.

Thankful for the joy. I don’t know how else to say it. Recently, on this page, I left the Sam Shoemaker story of the man who knocked at his door late one night and said, “I just feel I need to thank Someone.” I know the feeling. I’m grateful for the pastors of the big churches who came to the Christmas dinner because their presence sets a good example and encourages everyone else. I’m grateful for the Spanish pastors who attended, because they actually did their own dinner a week ago in downtown New Orleans and could have chosen to skip this one. And I’m particularly grateful for the pastors of the bivocational churches who came at great inconvenience, because they have to rise early and be at work while some of us are just stirring.

Thank you, Father. What an honor to be Yours and to be used by Thee.

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My wife’s favorite television channel is the USA Network. Their slogan is: “Characters Welcome.”

Someone ought to erect signs with those words at every entrance to New Orleans. If there ever was a city of characters in America, this is the one.

In 1990, when we told my parents we were moving to New Orleans from North Carolina, my dad said, “Well good. It’ll be good to get you back down South.” I said, “Dad, there’s something you need to know. The people of North Carolina are just exactly like the people of Alabama and Mississippi. But the people of New Orleans are strange.” Or I might have said “weird.” And I did not mean it as a putdown.

Over these years, I’ve moderated in my views of the folks down here. Most are normal in every way, just exactly like your neighbors in any city in America, even if they do have unusual and foreign-sounding last names like Bourgeois (pronounced boor-zwha) and Melancon (pronounced muh-lah-sah with a nasal ring). They’re great folks.

But characters, that’s what we have down here. And honestly, it may be the best thing about living in New Orleans. Now, I pastored the First Baptist Church of Kenner, which ain’t New Orleans exactly (or at all), but it’s part of the city and people who run New Orleans live all over Kenner and Metairie and it may as well be.

All of this is leading up to saying that we lost a real character last week. Marshall Sehorn died. We had a little service at the Lake Lawn Crematorium early Saturday morning. His ashes will be divided, half taken to Concord, North Carolina, where he grew up, and the other half buried here in Metairie. We’ll be having a real memorial service sometime after the first of the year.

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m being too hard on our mayor and his team. Then I read something like the following, which appeared in Saturday’s “Money” section of the local newspaper….

Under the headline, “Developers Castigate City Hall,” writer Greg Thomas reports on a 3 day tour of Katrina-land by a group of investors and developers brought together by the Urban Land Institute. They finished their excursion at the 17th Street Canal, the dividing line separating Jefferson and Orleans Parishes, and then had lunch in the Quarter at the Monteleone Hotel. Afterward, they met with reporters.

Rufus Lusk, a realtor from Baltimore, expressed amazement that the City Planning Commission had so few planners and that it has just recently been approved to hire more. “There are planners from cities that would volunteer to come and help,” he insisted. The American Planners Association would be the place to start to find such helpers. Lusk says the last thing a developer needs to hear when he’s looking at making an investment here is that it will take months to have development plans reviewed and placed on an agenda to be approved or modified.

“Who’s in charge?” Lusk asked. Who indeed.

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How not to take a poll.

The East Jefferson neighborhood section of Thursday’s Times-Picayune posts a question each week and gives out a phone number to register your answer. Last week, the question was whether Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee’s proposal to install surveillance cameras in high crime areas is a good idea. Only 7 callers said ‘no,’ and 363 said ‘yes.’

The question Thursday was based on something we reported here last week, that a University of New Orleans survey found that one-third of the residents say they are “likely” or “somewhat likely” to move away from this area in the next couple of years. So the question is: “What is the likelihood of your leaving?” The phone number is listed, and then these instructions: “Likely–Press 1.” “Somewhat likely–Press 2.” And that’s it.

There is no way for one to register that you have no desire to leave. The assumption is that you are planning to leave, and the only question is how eager you are to vamoose. Not a good way to take a poll, unless one figures into his computations that every resident who does not phone that number is planning to stay. In that case, you might end up with numbers such as: “Likely: 263,” “Somewhat Likely: 472,” and “Planning to stay: 134,547.”

Whatever numbers their little poll produces will be meaningless.

The ubiquitous FEMA trailers…240 life-saving square feet of cramped misery…must leave Jefferson Parish before April 1, according to the Parish Council. They will allow appeals for exemptions to this ordinance, but otherwise homeowners must have them gone by the last of March.

From the beginning, my understanding is that FEMA has said the 60,000 or more trailers in the metro area were meant to stay for 18 months and no longer. If they insist on holding to that deadline, expect howls and protests like nothing you’ve ever heard. Sunday while driving through St. Bernard Parish on the way downriver to Poydras, I found myself in the world’s largest trailer park. Block after block, trailers in every driveway. Lots of activity, as people were working on houses and in yards and hauling building materials up and down streets. But there is no way Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemine parishes will be finished with FEMA trailers for another five years.

Dr. Edward Blakely, the city’s new recovery chief, is confident New Orleans can emerge from this crisis as a transformed city. “It’s my business,” he said. “It’s what cities around the world pay me to do.” Fine, professor. That’s what we want. Tell us what to do.

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