I have not been his pastor for 21 years, but at least twice over these decades, my friend Rick has said, “Joe, I pray for you every week. I ask the Lord to grant you long life so you may serve Him for many years to come.”

Recently, when he said that, I thanked him and expressed my surprise that he would still pray for one out of his distant past whom he sees so rarely. I told him what someone said to our mutual friend Bill Hardy.

After a number of years as their minister of education, Bill was moving from Woodland Hills Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, to join the staff of the First Baptist Church of Kosciusko, an hour up the highway. At the reception in his honor a little lady said, “Bill, I have had you at the top of my prayer list all these years.” He said, “I sure do thank you. And I hope you’ll keep me there.” “No,” she said, “let your new church pray for you. I’ll be busy praying for our next minister.”

I’ve reflected a number of times on Rick’s prayer that I would live long and serve well. Genetically, it would appear not improbable since my father is 95 and Mom will be 91 on July 14. We’re told that more and more Americans are living to be 100 these days.

The question comes: do I want to live to a ripe old age? Is this something one should desire?

In Isaiah 38, God sent word to King Hezekiah to set his house in order, that he was about to die. The Judean king was stunned. He sunk into a deep depression (“turned his face to the wall”) and cried out to God bitterly that “I’ve served you faithfully all these years.” Implying, it would appear, that the Lord owes him. And, since he actually had been superior to most of his predecessors, God heard his cry and granted him 15 more years of life.

Hezekiah was thrilled. But it turned out not to be a blessing for the country.

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In the Lakeview section of the city, two church schools are up and running, flourishing even, while the public school lies in ruins. Neighborhood people say St. Dominic’s Catholic and St. Paul’s Episcopal schools–both pre-K to grade 7–became leaders of the comeback of Lakeview. Edward Hynes Elementary however has lain untouched since the hurricane and is due to be demolished. Therein lies the controversy.

In the first place, city agencies have more hoops to jump through than private schools, we’re told, more red tape and more complex financing issues to deal with. A school board member said, “We lumber like a mastodon.”

After the storm when people were re-entering Lakeview, the very-active parents organization mobilized volunteers who arrived at Hynes Elementary ready to gut out and clean their school. They were turned down by the Orleans Parish School Board, due to liability issues and the need for FEMA to get in and assess damages.

So, while the two church schools welcomed volunteers and contributions from encouragers across America and got on with the rebuilding, Hynes Elementary lay there, just as it does today, untouched. Like a bad time capsule. The chief financial officer for the school board explains that dealing with heavily damaged properties like Hynes is not as high a priority as reopening schools with greater potential. When the weeds at Hynes became scary, parents and neighbors convinced the board to have the lawn cut. One small victory.

The school board has put Hynes on the list for demolition and total replacement. This puzzles the community. Even though FEMA declared the building as more than 51 percent damaged–thus qualifying it for replacement–some local construction companies have toured the building and found it solid.

The principal, on the other hand, admits the building was decaying even before the storm. She says FEMA found greater damage than can be seen by a walk-through. This appears to be a great opportunity to get a new building and who can blame her. The fact that the school will not be in operation until the 2009 year matters some but not a great deal since the community is still sparsely re-settled.

The Essence festival in New Orleans this week has welcomed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as major speakers. Both candidates for the Democratic nomination for President promise that the rebuilding of this city will be a large feature in their administrations.

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In my previous request, I asked for cards for Pop’s 95 birthday and I might have mentioned to many of you, that he received right at 160 (depends on who did the counting). Mom will be 91 on July 14 and we have never had a card request for her and she does not need to be left out. So….here’s my request…a birthday card for her to the following address:

Lois McKeever 191 County Road 101 Nauvoo, Alabama 35578

It will be appreciated if you will do this and you might mention it to other members of your family since when you get to be 91, most of your friends and relatives are already gone on.

When you get to be 91 or 95, let me know and I will return the favor. Thanks a million!!!

Ronald J. McKeever

rjmdsm (at) excite.com

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Driving back home from North Alabama Tuesday, I stopped for a rest in Picayune, Mississippi, and read the Biloxi newspaper. As with our paper, it was saturated with Katrina news. A charitable eatery called “God’s Katrina Kitchen” was being shut down by one of the towns on the Mississippi coast.

Ever since the dark days following Hurricane Katrina, the good people manning this food ministry have been doling out free meals to construction workers and volunteers and storm victims. They’ve even relocated a couple of times, and are allowing the homeless to sleep on their premises. That’s what caused the problem, evidently, for the townspeople say crime is following the kitchen and it’s now time to shut the ministry down. When the town council voted to do just that, some applauded and others wept.

That is a microcosm of life in these Gulf cities these days. The same event is often good news and bad news.

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In Reader’s Digest, October 2004, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones says, “For marriage to be a success, every woman and every man should have her and his own bathroom. The end.”

Ten years ago, when two good friends of mine–both widowed and family friends for ages–decided to marry, they agreed to keep both their houses. Ann Marie says, “Rick’s house is too small for all my stuff.” Rick says, “It’s just about large enough for her clothes.” She smiles, “Besides, it’s on the golf course and he loves to golf.”

Rick says, “After breakfast, she leaves and goes to her house. She works around there, in and out all day, and then we get back together at night.” Ann Marie says, “I have friends whose husbands have retired and they’re underfoot all day. This is so much better.”

Besides, I suggested, you each have grown children and they have families, so this gives you more room to have them over.

I told them about two other friends, Winfield and Barbara, both widowed. I’m going to hazard a guess about their ages when they married, again about a decade ago. He was perhaps 70 and she was 55. I’m just guessing, Barbara. (She reads this.)

Winfield owned a house in Nashville and Barbara had a home in Cumming, Georgia. They kept their houses and lived in both of them, a few days or a couple of weeks here, then there.

I gave them the famous Tallulah Bankhead quote. Asked if she thought separate beds were necessary for a happy marriage, she answered in that husky Hollywood voice, “Separate beds nothing! Separate towns.”

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1. All our facilities hosting church volunteer teams coming to help rebuild the city are overflowing. A minister from Tennessee called me this week. “Dr. Harold Bryson said you might be able to help us. We were headed for the Mississippi Coast to help with a project that we understand has been canceled. We’re coming Sunday. There are 40 of us.” I called Bob Christian at Hopeview in St. Bernard Parish. He said, “Joe, we can host 150 people here, and we have over 200 coming next week.” I knew the NOAH Volunteer Village was in the same situation, so made a call to FBC Norco. Pastor’s wife Rose French said, “We have 20 bunk beds and have accommodated as many as 28, but tell them to come on. We’ll take them.”

2. Yesterday, the Louisiana Road Home program met with hundreds of applicants for grants in a feeble attempt to reach 10,000 for the month. They hoped to give out 900 grants yesterday. People were standing in long lines in the hot sun–but if they were successful, most felt it was well worth the wait.

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It’s hot in New Orleans. Summer, which officially arrived last Thursday, did what she normally does–arrived in mid-May and threw a blanket over New Orleans and made herself at home like she owned it.

A group of youth and sponsors from Faith Baptist Church of Texarkana, Arkansas, are doing the summer camp at Highland Baptist Church this week. While spending Tuesday morning drawing all the kids, I said to one of them, “Good thing you’re Southerners. You know about hot weather.” He said, “Yeah…but this is something else.”

Yes, it is. It’s called the humidity.

When we moved to this city to attend seminary over 40 years ago, one of the first things Margaret and I did was buy an air-conditioner. We’d managed in Birmingham, Alabama, with only a window fan, but it was “something else” down here.

The Wednesday pastors meeting welcomed 25 today, about normal for the summer months. Thuong Le of the Vietnamese Baptist Church just returned from 2 months in his home country, teaching preachers, and brought with him a minister who is going to establish a work in New Orleans East where so many Vietnamese live. Pastor Le said, “After his initial 3 months are up, we hope to have found the finances to support him so he can continue the work.”

(As always, for a complete account of the pastors meeting, go to www.bagnola.org where administrative assistant Lynn Gehrmann posts her notes.)

“Since we’ve been taking visiting church groups into New Orleans and the lower parishes,” Rudy and Rose French reported, “we have felt that we need to be knocking on doors in our own neighborhood of Norco.” Rose told us, “The problem was what to use to get people to open their doors and talk to us.” She thought of the baskets of toiletries and household items they’ve been distributing in St. Bernard Parish–and that’s where Rudy was today–and said, “The people of Norco did not have a lot of hurricane damage, so they don’t need that. They needed something else.” So she asked the Lord.

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Billy and Ruth Bell Graham. Clifford Stine. Brad Bradford. Jimmy Draper. And Mama Rose.

The Billy Graham organization sends out a prayer card with the famous evangelist’s photo and dates of telecasts so we can pray. I post it on the fridge with a magnet and almost daily pray for him. I have told here of the time Dr. Graham spent an hour or more in my office, just before the funeral of his beloved friend Dr. Grady Wilson. As we chatted, I asked myself, “Do you pray for this man?” Realizing I didn’t, I asked why not. My answer was the weakest thing: “He’s a world-wide evangelist. And I’m only one person.” Instantly, something inside me said, “And do you know anyone who is two?”

Ever since, I’ve prayed for Billy Graham. Even if–and perhaps because–he is a world-famous Christian leader, he needs the prayers of God’s people. Particularly, in these days since the homegoing of his wife Ruth, I’ve lifted him up.

Monday night, I decided to type in the name “Clifford Stine” to a movie-star search engine and see what came up. Sometime in the early 1970s when I was on staff at the First Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, I met this gentleman. He and his wife joined our church, and if memory serves me correctly, I baptized them. They were retiring from the motion picture industry in Hollywood, his wife had relatives in Jackson, and so they moved there. I picked his brain somewhat about what movies he had worked on and still recall the answers.

He was not an actor, but a director of photography and sometimes director of special effects, spending his whole career with Universal. The first movie he worked on was King Kong. Really. And in the 1950s when Universal was turning out all those scary sci-fi movies, Stine directed special effects on them. “The way we did the ‘Incredible Shrinking Man,'” he said, “was by making larger and larger furniture.” Low-tech by modern standards, but hey, it worked.

So, last night, his name came up and I learned that, yes, he worked on King Kong in 1933 as “the second assistant camera.” He was 27 at the time. He worked on Gunga Din, Spartacus, Patton, The Hindenburg, two Abbott and Costello movies (“Meet the Mummy” and “Go to Mars”), and Doris Day’s Pillow Talk. And about fifty others.

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The other morning, a TV news show featured the author of a book about transitioning from college life to the workaday world of a career person. The woman said, “One thing you should do is clean up your internet image.” That was a new thought for me. She continued, “You want people to think of you as a professional person now, not the carefree kid of messy dorm rooms and frat parties.”

I thought of one of our pastors. His e-mail address begins “tennizbum.” On the other hand, another of our pastors has an address that begins with “Godsman.” Knowing nothing of the two except their internet handles, which would you choose as your spiritual leader? (Tennizbum is a good guy. Just making a point.)

Sometimes these little details are clues to who we are in greater ways. I keep thinking about a staff member I used to know who was extremely lazy. One of his former pastors said to me, “I should have picked up on that quality about him from the beginning. The first time he walked into our church offices, he spotted a couch near the receptionist’s desk and said, ‘Oh boy–a couch! This is my kind of church!'”

Robert Cerasoli is a name we expect to hear more in the future. He’s the new inspector general for the City of New Orleans. We’ve never had one of those before, but the office was created in 1995 when voters approved a number of revisions to the City Charter. An ethics board was called for, one that would hire an inspector general to study the workings of city government and root out corruption. Only recently did we get the ethics board and they’ve just now hired Cerasoli as the IG from a list of 21 applicants.

The assignment doesn’t begin until August, but Cerasoli, a Massachusetts native, has been in town this week–at his own expense, he said on the radio; he’s serious about this–meeting with officials and trying to get a handle on the exact powers, directions, and limitations of his job.

The newspaper says his salary is $150,718 and the budget for his office is $250,000 for the rest of this year, which doesn’t sound like a lot. When you consider that U. S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office has netted 28 convictions, guilty pleas, or indictments in an ongoing probe into city government just in the last year or so, it’s obvious the inspector general has his work cut out for him.

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“I’m calling from USA Today newspaper. Jim Burton of the North American Mission Board in Atlanta said you might be able to help me.”

If I can, I’ll be happy to.

“I’m writing about the spiritual state of the people in your area, how they are adjusting to their post-Katrina lives–dealing with the problems of the devastation, the slowness of governments to help, the few neighbors returning, the difficulties in rebuilding, and so on.”

I told her people are more open to talking about God and receiving the spiritual assistance of others than we’ve ever known them to be. Our people who take baskets of household items door-to-door in the troubled areas are finding everyone hospitable. No one refuses to open the door and no one slams it in their faces. They appreciate any help offered and are glad to listen to someone with a witness.

But out in Jefferson Parish–the cities of Metairie and Kenner, primarily–there’s an anomaly. (I didn’t use that word. It only shows up in my writing, not my talking.) Every one of our churches, even the ones which appear to have received no hurricane damage, has lost members, some as many as 40 percent. And yet this parish’s population is around the same as before the storm. This would indicate that while thousands are moving out, those moving in have not been attending church, or at least not in this parish.

Down the street from our associational offices on Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans sits the regional offices for the Lutheran denomination. Monday, one of their leaders sat at our break table and told a similar story. All their churches have lost members and their schools are all suffering. The people with faith seem to have grown in faith, but the churches have not grown numerically. A ‘for sale’ sign sits in front of their headquarters building. They’re asking $1.3 million, and would love to relocate to the Northshore area.

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