Fall finally arrived in New Orleans Friday. My system for identifying the return of our favorite season is simply the first day the temperature does not get out of the 70s. It was a glorious day. And yes, Friday the 13th. Unlucky? Back in 1962, April 13 was a Friday when Margaret and I tied the knot at West End Baptist Church in Birmingham. Pretty good day, if you ask me.

Friday, Shannon called our office. She identified herself and said she was in a hotel downtown. “I’m leaving town later today and I didn’t want to leave without doing something to help New Orleans. So, do you know of a church where I could volunteer for a couple of hours? I’ll take a taxi.” I thought for a few seconds. Fridays, most churches pretty well have their stuff done for the weekend and may not need any help. Shannon said, “I’ve called a long list of churches and no one needs me.” Then I thought of the perfect answer.

Shannon took a taxi across the river and worked in the offices of Operation NOAH Rebuild. Office manager Dianne Gahagan said, “We can always give a volunteer work to do. It might be running the copier or collating material.” Shannon assured us she would love it.

Interesting lady, I think you will agree.

Thursday, a phone call came from Lori in North Carolina. After Katrina, she had personally assisted several of our residents during the evacuation and was continuing to help them. One particular lady, she said, has moved back to New Orleans and it’s not working out. With the decline in business here, the woman cannot find work in her field and can’t support herself. She’s lined up a place to live in Baton Rouge and Lori called to see if I can find a couple of guys with pickup trucks to move her next week.

Friday, Lori sent a note listing precisely what items the lady wants moved so we can see that two pickup trucks should get the job done. Then I received a call from a friend in the offices of the Baptist Association of Greater Baton Rouge. Lori had called Donald Davis saying that we were going to be moving the woman to B.R., and she would need their help in finding work for the lady.

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If you’re a television watcher, you know Harry Anderson. He starred as the judge of Night Court and then in Dave’s World before retiring to New Orleans and opening a curio shop. Long before he made it big, Harry did magic in the French Quarter and later married a young lady from Baton Rouge. He is a character in every sense of the word, but let’s admit it, this is a city that welcomes characters. Anyway, Harry is moving away.

For one thing, his customer base has eroded. Then, he received a bill from the power company for the electrical service for his storage building, a location that has only two drop lights. The bill was for $7,339.77. He paid someone to stand in a long line at Entergy’s office. The bill was dropped to $15. Other people do not have the means to hire stand-ins such as he did, Anderson said.

Anderson was disappointed when the citizenry re-elected Ray Nagin as mayor. He says he was hoping the mayor would go on television and make the energy and insurance companies do the right thing, “but he was busy endorsing William ‘Dollar Bill’ Jefferson instead. Not quietly and not ignominously, but at a press conference.” Anderson is not in a mood to be kind to Nagin. “Joseph Heller could not have written a more bizarre scene,” he says, referring to Nagin’s act of erasing any evidence that he was not going to be another run-of-the-mill politician. The re-election of what he calls “Car 54,” our mayor, was the last straw. They’ve sold out and are moving to Asheville, North Carolina.

One more sign that things here are not good. Here’s another. Orleans Parish Criminal Judge Charles Elloie (pronounced El-waa) has just been suspended by the Louisiana Supreme Court pending an investigation into his bizarre practice of reducing bail or throwing bail requirements out altogether for criminals with long histories of bad deeds. The Metropolitan Crime Commission, a local group of citizens who serve as watchdogs over our police and judiciary, had long complained about this man who set himself up as a law above all other judges. One case in point…

[Name removed by request] was arrested on March 29, 2005, and charged with the aggravated rape of his 10-year-old sister. I mean, is this a bad crime or what? Less than four hours after his arrest, Judge Elloie released him on a personal recognizance bond. This means he doesn’t have to put up any money unless he fails to show up for his trial. After the public learned of this and raised a stink, the judge backtracked and set bond at $100,000.

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Eva Wilson works with the Kansas-Nebraska Convention of Southern Baptists. In an e-mail Thursday, she informed us that they are once again sending another team of volunteers into New Orleans to help with the rebuilding of the city. The group of 50 should arrive at Gentilly Baptist Church Saturday night, October 21. Their leader is Elijah “Touch” Touchton from Trinity Baptist Church in Pittsburg, Kansas. “Touch,” known to his team-members as “the Boss,” is an electrical contractor by trade and has been involved in full-time volunteer missions for more than a dozen years.

Eva sends her regrets that she’ll not be along this time nor will she make the November trip due to all the associational and convention meetings Southern Baptists tend to group together this time of the year. She expects to make the December trip.

Prior to Katrina and her ugly sister Rita’s visit to our part of the world in ’05, the Kansas-Nebraska Baptists had a working partnership with the much larger Arkansas Baptist State Convention, but working together in Katrina-land has taken their partnership to a higher level. Eva writes, “I often hear of ‘synergy,’ but this is one time I have truly experienced it.”

Over this year that our good friends from Kansas-Nebraska have been coming down, 116 volunteers have put in 5,000 hours here. They have rewired 10 houses, which saved the homeowners from $100,000 to $150,000. They’ve sheetrocked 3 homes and finished several others. They’ve insulated two homes, hung the sheetrock and installed the outside siding at Global Maritime’s new port ministry center, and poured the wonderful sidewalk outside our BAGNO associational center. They have done electrical work and painting at Gentilly Baptist Church where they and the Arkansans have created a headquarters and where they all stay. In addition to all this, they have handed out 900 flyers to local residents, given away 500 gift bags, 200 care bears, and 18 backpacks.

Eva Wilson writes, “It is a privilege for our small convention to join God’s work there.”

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“Like drinking from a fire hydrant” best summarizes our pastors’ meeting this Wednesday morning at Good Shepherd Baptist Church of Metairie. The program was so jam-packed, some of it took place in the dining hall in the middle of our meal.

We promoted the October 30 Fall meeting of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans–our first meeting since Katrina–which will be held at Ames Boulevard Baptist Church of Marrero at 7 pm. This one will not be business as usual but will feature several representatives of state Baptist conventions around the country that have been so present and so helpful since the Katrina event. We will have a feature about Operation NOAH Rebuild and the 27 Zone Ministry in which state conventions or associations adopt a portion of this city for ministry and evangelism. The administrative committee asked me to bring a short “Bible treasure” to close out that meeting. (Please help us get the word out. Everyone is invited. This is NOT just for ministers and professional clergy. This meeting is for the laypeople. Everybody!)

We promoted “The Best Library Conference in America” to be held November 3-4 at FBC of Marrero. Hope Ferguson, the instigator/brains/organizer/spirit behind this event, arrived from Natchitoches in time to address everyone in the middle of lunch. She passed around a signup sheet asking pastors how many people they’re planning to bring. (I’m suggesting every church bring 6 people.)

Hope has 25 conference leaders coming from 6 states to lead this event, and we’re going to do everything we can to get our people there. It kicks off on Friday evening, November 3, at 5 pm with registration, then supper at 5:30 pm. Then the meeting gets underway with a full schedule. Next morning, Saturday, they’re serving breakfast at 8 am and going forward with a full day’s events.

“You are getting two meals and two snacks and a lot of door prizes and special gifts,” Hope said, “and it won’t cost you a dime!” What a bargain. I’m doing everything I know how to convince our church leaders that now is the time and this is the place to either get your library jump started or to put new life and vision into your old library. Anyone coming needs only to call our associational office to let us know. 504/282-1428. (You do NOT have to be local; in fact, you do not even have to be Baptist!)

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Tuesday at 6 o’clock, my son Neil called. “Sorry to wait til the last minute to tell you, but our choir and the children and I are singing at the seminary tonight. We’re doing the musical ‘Somebody’s Praying For You.'” I told him his children had already told me and I would be there.

The choir was a blend of seminarians and choir/orchestra members from a number of local churches and someone said, even from FBC Summit, MS. The musical is a wonderful, moving reminder of the importance of prayer. Early in the program, Neil stepped to the microphone and sang with a small group of children–including his twins Abby and Erin–a song called, “Pray for Me.” The picture is of children asking adults to pray for them.

When Dr. Ken Gabrielse, chairman of the seminary’s music department and conductor of the program, asked me to come to the front and say a few words about the role of prayer in our rebuilding of New Orleans and our churches, all I could summon at the moment was my oft-repeated one-minute speech that goes like this: “Wherever I go, people say they’re praying for us. I thank them and say, ‘May I tell you how to pray? Pray big. We have a massive task before us, one that will not be completed for another ten years. We need big prayer. Perhaps you could pray like this: ‘Father, you love this city. Jesus died for this city. You have many people here. Satan has held it long enough, Lord. Take it back. Do a new thing here, Lord. Do a big thing. Do a God thing.’

“John Newton, who wrote the words to ‘Amazing Grace’ had this to say about this kind of praying: ‘Thou art coming to a King; Large petitions with thee bring; For His grace and power are such, None can ever ask too much.” Pray big.

You know how it is, I’ll betcha. I sat back down on the front row as the choir resumed singing about how someone is praying for you, and only then did I think of something Ken Watkins had e-mailed me this very day. Ken spent most of his career as director of Baptist Campus Ministry at Mississippi State University, and built one of the most wonderful programs anywhere. These days, he pastors a small church in upper New York State and works as a chaplain at a retirement home. Tuesday he sent an email asking how I was doing. His wife–whom I have not met; they’re relatively newlywed–has a co-worker named Glenn who had been praying for me and wondered how I was doing.

Give that a little thought. A colleague of the wife of a friend was praying for me, and I didn’t know it. Later Tuesday night, Dr. Chuck Kelley and I walked out of the chapel talking about this very thing, how we are the beneficiaries of unknown friends everywhere lifting us to the Father. How truly blessed we are. And who are these unnamed friends praying for us? God alone knows.

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Those of you who receive this article twice a week via e-mail–and there are 1200 or more of you–would miss the following which was posted on our website today at the end of the article “Get the Bad News Over With.” It’s from Pat Blackman who grew up in the New Orleans area and whose wonderful mother Alice Blackman, now in Heaven, was one of those precious saints who made pastoring the First Baptist Church of Kenner so pleasurable for me for nearly 14 years. Pat’s terrific sister Leanna Mohr still worships at Kenner. Pat himself now lives in Texas. Here’s his note….

“I just returned from a week in New Orleans attending the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) convention. I have to say I’m proud of the SEG for staying with New Orleans when several other conventions pulled out. My SEG contacts told me they were not about to cancel for two reasons: one, there are a lot of SEG members in N.O., and two, they felt the city needed the support.

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When New Orleanians ask about dealing with stress, I often recommend laughter. It’s such a stress reliever that I’ve come close to tweaking scripture from where it reads, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” to “A merry heart IS medicine.” I’ve mentioned in this website before that I frequently am invited to address groups on laughter. One of the exercises we perform is to make ourselves laugh for two minutes at a time.

Right. Make yourself laugh. You can do this. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds. It feels fake at first–after all, you’re forcing it–but the effect is past in a moment. You start feeling so silly that the very act of laughing makes you laugh. At the end of two minutes, you’re glowing. It’s like you have had a tonic.

Now comes reports of others, professionals, doing the same thing. An article in the Sunday, October 8, Times-Picayune, a reprint from The Washington Post, tells of laughter therapy classes in the George Washington University Center for Integrative Medicine.

According to reporter Anita Huslin, research from the University of Maryland shows that laughter opens your arteries. A scientist at Loma Linda University says it boosts the immune system, relieves stress, and teaches you how to breathe like a baby.

The leader of the GWU class, Siddharth Shah, a physician and psychotherapist, has worked with disaster relief workers who respond to hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorist acts. He knows the healing power of laughter and teaches his students that they should dose themselves every day on this miracle drug. He admits to laughing in the shower every morning as he begins his day. And in the classroom, he teaches participants various techniques to infuse their daily lives with laughter.

Walk around with a cell phone to your ear, he suggests. It’s not on, but you’re the only one who knows that. Now, laugh out loud. Giggle, like you’re talking to someone. Not one soul in a crowded room thinks you’re weird, certainly not the way they would if you were not holding the phone.

Dr. Shah teaches the lion laugh, where participants lift their arms like paws and roar. The lawnmower laugh has a couple of crank-up laughs followed by deep belly-laughs.

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I wish you could have heard Rudy French preach at FBC Norco Sunday morning. This Canadian brother is quiet and unassuming in person, but strong and forceful in the pulpit. I took notes from his message on Numbers 13, the “Kadesh-Barnea incident” where Moses sends 12 spies into Canaan to check out the conditions. Of the 12, only two believed God could win the victory over such an impressive enemy. Following are some of my notes.

“What do you see here?” Rudy asked two young people he brought up to the front. It appeared to be nothing but a sheet of white poster paper. The youth stared at it and noticed the small sticker on the back. “I see a bar code,” the girl said. The boy read the numbers under it. Then they sat down.

Rudy French said, “This piece of poster paper contains 1232 square inches of space on the front and the back. Yet, the young people saw only a one inch bar code. They did not notice the other 1231 square inches. That’s us today. We are missing the other 1231 square inches.” I wondered where he was going with this.

“When Katrina devastated New Orleans, I was working in Canada with a new church start. I saw on television what was happening here, and the Lord spoke to me: ‘This is a great opportunity for evangelism.’ The people in New Orleans had been praying for revival, and here was the opportunity.”

“I told my wife God wants us to go to New Orleans. She had many questions. What will we do there? Where will we stay? How can we support ourselves? I did not know. I only knew God was leading. Rose had just taken a new job in a pharmacy that paid well, and now we would be leaving.”

“We came in October of last year, and I started telling people the good news of Christ. People were interested in hearing of the love of God. They responded. I did not need to use any of the techniques I had learned over the years to convince people. They were ready.”

Rudy explained the story of Numbers 13. God had given Israel the land of Canaan. It was theirs. All they had to do was go in and take it. Yet, they put their eyes on the obstacles–the giants and walled cities and standing armies–and did not believe God.

“God gave them the land, yet they were afraid to take it. I am fearful that God may have given us New Orleans and we have not taken it. Like Israel, we’re afraid to go in and claim what God has given.”

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At Friday’s vision tour, involving a number of out-of-state pastors and local guys, someone said, “I heard a businessman in another state say you’d have to be crazy to invest in New Orleans right now.” Not what we want to hear.

Saturday’s newspaper announces more bad news. Microsoft was scheduled to hold three large meetings in our city, and has moved them all elsewhere due to the lack of sufficient airline service. Two of the gatherings would have brought 14,000 each to the city and the third 2,000. “We’ve made a very difficult decision to hold three of our annual conventions…in other places,” said spokeswoman Robyn Kratzer.

And yet, next month we’re scheduled to host the National Association of Realtors–bringing 25,000 conventioners–and they’re not canceling. Those in the know say the lack of enough air service is only one factor in cancellations, others being the high crime rate and the cost of insurance to cover event cancellation.

The murder rate in shrunken New Orleans is now over 100 for the year, whereas Boston, with several times the population, has only 75. Not good.

A wreck on Interstate 12–the east-west link connecting Slidell with Baton Rouge–has shocked everyone on Thursday of this week. When a 20-foot aluminum ladder fell off a truck, an 18-wheeler swerved to miss it. The driver lost control and side-swiped several vehicles before his truck plummeted across the median into the path of a lovely little Lexus carrying three women. The photo is a sight to behold. Two women were crushed to death and the driver was seriously injured. A highway patrolman said five people have been killed on Northshore highways since Katrina as a result of storm debris or construction equipment falling onto the highways.

This week the owners of a St. Bernard Parish nursing home where 35 residents drowned following Katrina had their day in court. Salvador and Mabel Mangano are (were?) owners of St. Rita’s Nursing Home downriver near Poydras. While family members of victims held signs and posters outside the Chalmette courthouse, the Manganos entered accompanied by their lawyer and surrounded by deputies. Inside, they pleaded innocent to 35 counts of negligent homicide charges and 64 counts of cruelty to the infirm for failing to evacuate their facility as the hurricane approached.

Another Katrina legal situation this week involved the former clerk of criminal court, Kimberly Williamson-Butler. This lady’s history in this city is short-lived but a comedy of errors and misjudgments and bizarre statements. It was all good news for her this week, however: the district attorney failed to convince a grand jury to indict her for misappropriation of funds. She’s free to go. Earlier this year she ran for mayor and received perhaps a hundred votes, and has been largely absent since. I would not be surprised to see her reappear now that she can claim to have been exonerated. This young lady delights in wearing the badge of a martyr.

If the traffic seems worse, there’s good reason. On the Causeway that spans Lake Pontchartrain from Metairie to Mandeville, traffic is up by 10 to 28 percent over the same months a year ago. Much of it may be New Orleanians who moved to the Northshore but are back and forth working on their flooded homes. Or workers commuting into the city for construction jobs.

Visitors who take our 30 dollar tour of the devastated areas ask, “What’s keeping the city from tearing those buildings down and hauling them off? They’re eyesores.” I explain that they have to contact the owners, file legal papers, give owners time to respond, that sort of thing. Thursday, New Orleans began reinspecting more than 3,000 of the worst properties. Owners have previously been warned that these structures are public nuisances and need to be cleared away or cleaned up. Workers will post notices on buildings where nothing has been done, and owners will receive certified letters giving the dates of administrative hearings if they wish to protest the actions. The hearings will begin in November. So many legal hurdles to clear before you can demolish someone’s private property. That’s good, of course. We’re a nation of laws. But it’s slow and cumbersome.

On a similar note, Jefferson Parish has hired a company to tag offending property and notify homeowners that unless something is done, they will be fined and/or their building demolished. A special court has been established to deal with nothing but these cases, with hearings to begin this month. Using the tell-on-your-neighbor policy, more than 700 complaints have come in, reporting blighted yards and ruined houses where nothing is being done.

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Two letters in Thursday’s Times-Picayune comment on the St. Bernard Parish Council’s decision prohibiting homeowners from renting to anyone except relatives. The second letter is wonderful.

Frank Buffone of Lacombe is confident the ordinance will be overturned by the courts. “However, the reasoning behind it is sound.” Outside speculators will want to come in and buy properties and get rich off rentals. We must not let that happen, he says. Chalmette used to be a tight-knit community with the kind of values we need today.

Then the second letter, verbatim: “SBF w/small children seeks SWM homeowner in St. Bernard Parish for lunch and movies followed by marriage and rental of your property. Willing to bear child if necessary to qualify as ‘blood relative’ if marriage is not sufficient for me to enter parish as a resident. Prenuptial agreement no problem. Strictly business!” Gloria Young of New Orleans.

Confidential to my mom in Nauvoo: She doesn’t mean it, mom. It’s tongue-in-cheek stuff to make a point.

New population figures for Orleans Parish has come up with numbers far lower than any of the guesstimates various groups have posited. Couple of months ago, Entergy, the power company, took the actual number of hookups in the parish and multiplied it times two-point-something and came up with a figure of 225,000. But the number announced this week is based on actual door-to-door surveys made by college students hired by the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Precisely 187,525 residents now live in Orleans Parish, they said. That’s a decline from pre-Katrina days of 59 percent.

Mayor Nagin is not buying that for an instant. “It’s at least 250,000,” he says. He points out that the margin of error for this survey is 11.5 percent, much higher than in most polls. He has been predicting a population of 300,000 by year end.

The surveyors insist they followed the methodology of the U.S. Census Bureau, and that these are not estimates. They did it the old fashioned way: a door to door survey of specific neighborhoods. Interestingly, they announced that Plaquemines Parish has a population of only 20,024, down some 8,900 from pre-K levels. However, those numbers have a whopping 36.3 percent margin of error.

Which, for my money, means: you may ignore this poll altogether.

The other bit of front-page news Friday morning is that the mayor has endorsed William Jefferson for re-election to Congress. My first thought was that he did it out of fear, fear that Jefferson will be chosen once again by the electorate and he doesn’t want to be on the short end of that stick. But Nagin had a worse explanation than that. “He endorsed me when I ran for mayor, so I’m returning the favor.” That’s it.

One supposes that if David Duke had endorsed him for mayor, Nagin would be backing his candidacy for Congress. (Not that Duke is running. He has a full-time job in some prison somewhere, I think.)

I wish you could have sat in the gym of Jefferson Baptist Church in Baton Rouge Thursday night and heard the testimonies from our new church planters in the Southeast Louisiana. A young man–I think his name is Jason–who is on the staff of FBC Baton Rouge spoke of ministering to post-modern young adults downtown. He said, “I’m the only preacher you know who used to be a hairstylist.” Jose Mathews raised his hand. “I was.” “Were you a barber or a hairstylist?” “Hairstylist.”

The young preacher went on to speak of the homosexual community where he was focusing so much of his work. “My brother is one of them,” he said, “so I have a special reason for being down there.” Jason broke the group up when he said, “Help me reach the gays for our congregation and I’ll keep them out of your churches!”

James Welch has pulled together 25 people in the Magazine Section of New Orleans for “Sojourn,” the new church plant here. James gets teased about his wild hair which pokes in every direction. “I know what you’re thinking,” he began, “and yes, Jason is my hair stylist.”

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