10. Don’t glide, but stroke to the finish.

Mike Cavic was gliding to the finish in Friday night’s 100 meter free-style. Just behind him, Michael Phelps was still pumping, stroking. That final half-stroke propelled Phelps forward to touch the electronic pad one-hundredth of a second before Cavic. Along with a billion other viewers, I could see that Cavic had won. We were all knocked out to see Phelps’ name flashed on the screen as the winner. Turns out his mother was surprised, too. The television cameras showed her deflated reaction to what appeared to be a loss, then relief and elation flooding over her as she realized he had won the race and his seventh gold medal.

Stroking made the difference.

Over the past few days, being on vacation allowed me to watch more of the Olympics than would have normally been the case, and I had wondered about this. Why do swimmers go all-out during the race, then glide to the finish? It’s definitely slower than stroking. You know it couldn’t be so, but it appears they decided to give themselves a little break at the end.

I once knew a pastor who served his church faithfully for over a quarter of a century. He was a good man in a hundred ways. But those who worked alongside him said, “He retired five years before he quit.”

He was gliding home.

9. It’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s real.

Turns out that the opening ceremony fireworks, watched by a billion people around the globe by television, was computer enhanced. Officials said they did not want to risk fires by exploding all the fireworks the occasion called for, so they did the next best thing: simulated much of them.

Nearly 30 years ago, I spent a few minutes in the studio of a professional photographer in Grenada, Mississippi, and watched him move the moon around on a photograph to get just the effect he wanted. Once he had it where he liked it, he printed the photo and no one was the wiser. I remember that now and think, “That was a generation ago. No telling what they can do now.”

My wife and I were combing through antique stores in Jackson, Mississippi, some years back and noticed workers hammering away in a back room. “What are they doing?” I asked the owner. “Building antiques,” she said. They were tearing apart ancient pieces of furniture no longer of use to anyone and using the wood to fashion new items which would then be marketed as antique.

The more we are surrounded by the fake, the “virtual,” and the computer-generated, the more need there will be for God’s people to be genuine and demonstrate to the world what the real article looks like.

8. If you want to win, build your team.

Continue reading →

“Something about that champion swimmer doesn’t look right,” I thought, as the world watched America’s Michael Phelps take another gold medal in Beijing. “It’s something about his proportions.”

Then, Thursday night, August 14, I found out what it is. Turns out I was right.

NBC’s Bob Costas pointed out that Michael Phelps was “engineered” for swimming. He’s 6 feet 4 inches tall, his feet are size 14 (like flippers, Costas said), and his huge hands work like scoops. However, his legs are short, just right for the body of a six-foot-tall man. His torso is V-shaped, with these massive shoulders tapering down to a 32-inch waist.

The rest of the field is beat before they enter the water. Michael Phelps was built for championships. Add to these natural gifts a talent for self-discipline and hard work, and it’s all over. The sweet spirit and killer smile are icing on the cake.

In an Associated Press story, reporter Paul Newberry quotes a Russian swimmer who had come in second to Phelps. “He is just a normal person, but maybe from a different planet.” An official who overheard that added, “The problem is, we have an extraterrestrial. No one else can win.”

Sure glad he’s on our side. At this point, he has won 6 gold medals, about half of all the USA has taken, and more than all but three or four nations of the world. He is a phenomenon. The best ever.

I imagine my sister and her family–that would be the PHELPS clan from Nauvoo, Alabama–are popping buttons right now. I would.

As a minister, I’ve encountered a few “Michael Phelpses” in the ministerial world over the years, people who seem to have been programmed for great success in the preaching and church-leadership world. They work hard, they love the Lord and do things right, but sitting there in the audience listening to them, you get the impression that they had a head start on the rest of us from the time they were born.

Continue reading →

1) Turns out the mayor of Mandeville, whose antics and frantics have made him a rival to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for negative press, now saw that his relatives were awarded no-bid contracts in violation of state law. I suggest Hizzoner Eddie Price start looking for other work, ’cause he ain’t long for City Hall.

2) A Katrina transplant to Texas, who narrowly escaped conviction for murder in 1999 when a local jury could not agree on a guilty verdict, later moved to Dallas and offed someone. The Texans who formed the jury took care of business and convicted him for first degree murder. Rondel Allen will be a resident of the state pen for the rest of his life. Sorry, Texas friends. If our people had done their job, a man would still be alive today.

3) Our fair state today becomes the last of all fifty to ban cockfighting. What took us so long?

4) In Greeley, Colorado, the body of a 25-year-old suicide victim has been found in the Pawnee National Grasslands. Standing guard beside the decomposing body of Jake Baysinger for the past six weeks was Cash, his German shepherd. The dog had been surviving on mice and rabbits, authorities say, but was thin and dehydrated. The very definition of faithfulness.

5) Critics of China are having fun with a little Milli-Vanilli trick that government played at the opening ceremony a few days ago. A wonderful 7-year-old, Yang Peiyi, sang “Ode to the Motherland” but because she has a chubby face and crooked teeth, a 9-year-old child actor was recruited to lip sync the words. It’s all about the government’s need to present a perfect image to the world, we’re told. If they’re serious about wanting to improve their image, they ought to end religous oppression and take a stand for human rights.

6) A Covington woman who served on the board of “Wishing Well Foundation USA, Inc.,” a Metairie nonprofit set up to grant last wishes to seriously ill children, has been accused of embezzling $17,300 from the organization. She was the accountant and had been trusted. A German shepherd is more faithful.

Continue reading →

Being a pastor since 1962, I’ve not had to do something most of my friends have accomplished numerous times over these decades: look for a church home. Until last week.

On vacation, I spent a long weekend–Thursday night until Monday morning–with our daughter and her three girls in a lovely town in New Hampshire. One reason for staying through the weekend was to help them find a church. It is not necessary to go into all the reasons why they had not done this on their own, but the granddaughters in particular were ready and willing to attend church and I know how fleeting these moments can be and felt the need to act now. Before making the journey northward, I enlisted the prayer support of a number of friends.

Immediately, I found myself facing the same question as many another church-seeker: how can we quickly find a church, the one suited for our needs, without taking the atheist approach?

Not that an atheist would be looking for a church, but if he/she did so, they would most likely do it on the basis of location, appearance, program, the various services it offers, the compatibility of its membership, and so forth. In other words, exactly the approach 90 percent of church seekers use.

I had no time for this. In town for one Sunday only, I would have one chance to get this right. That reason more than any other drove me to serious prayer.

Several choices appeared to hold possibilities. My oldest granddaughter, now almost 19, had joined the Catholic church some two years earlier. From her parents, she had received no religious instruction or leadership, and when her boyfriend’s mother invited her to attend the Catholic church with them, she did so eagerly. She took the instruction classes and was baptized and loved everything about it, she says. But her younger sisters, ages 10 and 17, had attended only Baptist churches the few times they had gone, so with Grandpa being a Southern Baptist preacher and preferring something along that line, all three indicated a Baptist church would suit them fine.

The question was, which one.

Continue reading →

I don’t exactly write books; I tell other people to write books.

The story behind that cryptic comment is this: when Rudy and Rose French left New Orleans nearly a year ago, after an incredible two years in our post-Katrina city with so many ups and downs, I suggested Rudy write his experiences down. My initial thought was it would be therapy for him, help to “get it out of him.”

The British have a saying that one handles tragedy by “tea and talk.” Putting his experiences in writing became a form of talk for Rudy. The tea, well, Rose has to take care of that.

To my pleasant surprise, Rudy not only wrote his experiences and testimony down, he published it in a book. “You Can Learn A Lot From A Hurricane: My two years in New Orleans following Katrina” is Rudy and Rose French’s story.

Now, Rudy and Rose are missionaries. They are missionaries everywhere they go, not just at some site where the denomination might send them. Recently, he went to Korea as a short-term missionary. Right now, they’re living in Springville, Tennessee, and are missionaries there. For two years, they were missionaries to New Orleans.

Regular readers of this blog have heard some of my stories about Rudy. Some you didn’t know it was Rudy I was writing about, because I didn’t want to embarrass someone he was bumping up against in his service for the Lord. Rudy is the guy who left Canada, selling his gun collection to pay expenses, and drove to New Orleans to help us following the hurricane of August 29, 2005. When we didn’t put him to work, he volunteered at one of our churches that was feeding state troopers from across America–and the ladies in the kitchen put him in charge of the garbage detail. Now, Rudy began to have a little attitude problem.

Continue reading →

Following Katrina, as groups re-entered the city and began to organize for ministry, quite a few gravitated to the name NOAH as their title. Southern Baptists did, then found a United Methodist group already had staked it out, so ours became Operation NOAH Rebuild, the NOAH standing for “New Orleans Area Hope.”

As we reported here recently, it now turns out the City of New Orleans had its own version of NOAH, the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Corporation. Established as a non-profit outfit to supplement the work of volunteers who were being overwhelmed by the scope of the rebuilding yet to be done, NOAH has become a front page story for the worst of reasons. Thursday’s headline reads, “Volunteers did the work but NOAH contractors got paid.”

Two years ago, Mayor Nagin said he wanted the city to offer gutting services because the faith-based and grassroots organizations just couldn’t do it all. This was the centerpiece of his 2007 budget, funded with several million dollars which, no doubt, came from the federal government directly or indirectly.

The NOAH agency was headed up by Stacey Jackson, who has resigned in the last couple of months. The office worked with sub-contractors who then gutted out houses assigned to them, turned in an invoice and were reimbursed by NOAH. That was the plan, at any rate, and it appears to have worked. Sort of. Somewhat. To a certain extent.

The fact is no one knows. No one from the city’s NOAH agency checked to see that the work was done, we now learn.

So, among the scandals now coming to light is the fact that at least 90 homes which NOAH paid contractors to gut out were untouched by those companies, but volunteers from around the USA did all the work.

(We cannot emphasize too strongly this controversy has NOTHING to do with Operation NOAH Rebuild, which has never charged anyone a dime to gut out or rebuild a house. This is a ministry of God’s people helping our people in need for the glory of Jesus Christ.)

Continue reading →

Friends. They make life so much fuller, fun so much deeper, work so much easier, and burdens so much lighter.

I urge young pastors to “find yourself some friends; you’re going to be needing some.” Not all pastors know this or believe it.

Amazing how much independence and isolationism one finds among pastors. They will stand in the pulpit and exhort their members on the virtues of fellowship with one another. They will illustrate the point by the well-worn story of the pastor who sat in the living room of a straying church member and with the tongs, reached into the fireplace and moved a burning coal off to one side where it proceeded to die. The enlightened member told the pastor he got the point and would be in church the following Sunday. “We need each other,” the preacher tells the congregation.

Pastors believe that for everyone except themselves.

The average pastor seems to believe that fellowship with other pastors is time wasted. Whether this is a personality quirk or some theological snag formed from a misreading of Scripture, I’m not prepared to say. But it’s dead wrong.

The Lord thought the preachers needed to get together. He chose twelve–make no mistake, they were chosen to be preachers–and kept them together for three years. When He sent them out, it was in pairs. When God called missionaries, the first went forth as a team, Barnabas and Paul. The second generation was made up of Paul and Silas, plus Barnabas and John Mark. No one went alone.

On Paul’s final trip to Jerusalem for Pentecost, he sensed a deep need to visit with the leaders of the church at Ephesus. A messenger traveled to that city to round up the church leaders, bringing them to the coastal town of Miletus for a day with Paul. Acts 20 describes the meeting and uses three terms for the leaders: elders, shepherds (pastors), and overseers (episcopos). We moderns would do well to note that the head of that congregation was not one hot-shot know-it-all man, but a number of people working together as a team.

How does one find a special friend? First, you won’t find them in clusters, but one at a time, slowly, carefully.

My own plan is simple: ask God, then pay attention.

Continue reading →

This land is far from being overpopulated. If you doubt that, take a drive and notice how mile after mile is woodland and farmland. Even New York State–which I crossed this week and will do so again Monday on my way South–is mostly one big city and a lot of rural countryside.

The corridor from Washington, D.C., northward through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City has the worst mishmash of interstates and toll highways imaginable. If you doubt this, get down your atlas and stand in awe. Some of the interstate segments are so scrunched in with the others, the pages have no room for the numbers. I missed a sign in New Jersey and went 10 miles out of my way before turning around and at the last minute finding the correct turn. The tolls coming up (from Washington to New England) figured out to something like 20 bucks.

One of the best traits of human beings is our adaptability to difficult situations. Drive through any of the interstate corridors in and around Washington, D.C., and be amazed that people who grew up in “normal-land, USA” can adapt to such killer traffic patterns and go on to deal with it every day. That’s one of the most admirable traits of the human animal—and the fact that we put up with it one of the worst.

You’d think that after a while, a person would decide, “The stress of driving in this traffic is destroying my nervous system and dooming me to an early grave; I think I’ll move to a quiet town somewhere.” The fact that we don’t, that we hang in there for the sake of a job and money, speaks volumes about us, and none of it is good.

Continue reading →

Thirty-two years ago–that would be the summer of ’76–my wife and I took the children on a Bicentennial vacation up the East Coast. We were combining trips to the Southern Baptist Convention and my first session as a trustee of the Foreign Mission Board with our own personal travels, and decided on a theme for our journeying.

We visited presidential homes. Starting in Columbis, TN, we called on President James Polk. In Nashville, it was President Andy Jackson. In Staunton, VA, Woodrow Wilson was not at home, but we went on in his house anyway. We visited with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and went through the White House (if Jerry Ford was at home, no one was saying). Later, we drove north and saw the hometown of Calvin Coolidge, Hyde Park where FDR came from and returned to, and in New Hampshire, the home of Franklin Pierce. I think that’s all.

This time, I’m making pretty much the same journey, except this is not about presidents, but calling on some of my preacher friends. Of course, the main idea is to visit our grandchildren in Charlotte, NC and in Laconia, NH, but it’s a great opportunity to see some old friends.

If any of the preacher-friends I’ve visited are reading this, they can relax. I’m not telling a thing. What happens in McDonalds stays in McDonalds (or the Waffle House in Spartanburg or Nordstrom’s Cafe in Charlotte). Still, the experience is proving to be quite a blessing to me personally.

I’m always surprised on encountering ministers who never connect with their colleagues in the Lord’s work, for whatever reason. That might be a good subject to pursue for a future article here–why so many pastors are loners.

Continue reading →

1) We never take vacations, but visit families. I expect you know how that is. The last real vacation we had was the Spring of ’04 in between pastoring FBC Kenner and this job with the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans. Tomorrow, though, vacation begins.

It was to have been a driving trip to South Dakota to meet up with Margaret’s sister and brother-in-law, our beloved Susan and Jim from Seattle. Alas, their health problems forced them to cancel, and we’re not going without them. I insisted to Margaret that we take some kind of vacation, and she suggested that if I want to get out of town, then I should drive to New Hampshire to see our daughter and three granddaughters–as well as our son and his family in North Carolina–and visit with friends along the way, one of my favorite activities.

So, Sunday, July 27, that’s the plan. She doesn’t feel up to accompanying me, so I checked out several recorded books from the library to take along, and after a wedding today and a going-away thing for Dr. Ken Gabrielse tonight at a church member’s home, I’m packing and pulling out tomorrow morning.

I’m leaving a few things for my son Marty to post in my absence.

2) Do you know the name Maria Shaw? I didn’t either. Evidently, she’s a psychic of some notoriety, said to have a call-in show on the CBS radio network, which is available here only on the web. Anyway, she has moved to New Orleans and was interviewed in Friday’s paper by columnist (formerly, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, we would have called him a humorist, but the hurricane knocked all the bluster out of him) Chris Rose.

One question he asked her was: “What do you see for the Saints this season?”

Continue reading →