My friend Barry is a Jew. We connected almost by accident many years ago, and he has taught me a number of lessons about relating to someone different from me.

In the early 1970s Barry–a native of Southern California–took it upon himself to see the Deep South. I’m not sure of the details, but believe he flew into Mississippi and rented a car. He drove to Oxford just to see for himself the university where James Meredith had been forcibly installed as the first black student, an incident much in the news back then.

In Jackson, Barry drove around, found the Capitol, and walked into the governor’s office. Everyone was gracious–he had not been sure what to expect–and next thing you know, he showed up in the office of the First Baptist Church across the street. The receptionist, Mickey Brunson, stepped across the hall to my cubbyhole of an office, and said, “Joe, we have a gentleman here who would like a brief tour of the church. Can you do it?”

That’s how we met. And started corresponding. In 1981, when the Southern Baptist Convention met in Los Angeles, Barry picked me up at the hotel and gave me the grand tour. We attended a baseball game in Anaheim and checked out the campuses of UCLA and USC. And I embarrassed him.

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Today, District Attorney Eddie Jordan announced that the grand jury found insufficient reasons to charge Dr. Anna Pou with murder in the deaths of four patients at Memorial Baptist Hospital in the days following Katrina. Dr. Pou spoke to the media, expressing her relief. DA Jordan expressed his confidence that this is the right decision. Attorney General Foti called his own conference in Baton Rouge to express his disbelief and said Jordan never called all the witnesses his office had recommended.

A collective sigh of relief went up from the community. None but a few insiders know beyond any doubt what happened at Memorial, but almost everyone is ready to put this business behind us. I say “almost,” because there are the family members of the deceased and then there are the members of Mr. Foti’s staff. Everyone else, though, has had enough.

It’s not over though. Dr. Pou has two lawsuits in progress, one against the State of Louisiana and one against the AG’s office. And I believe the family members of the deceased have their own lawsuits.

The one-day-of-the-month when everyone involved in the Unlimited Partnerships gathers for a day long meeting in the Leavell Center of our seminary was Monday. I audited the morning part of the meeting and took notes, but in reading the report from our leader, Dr. Bill Taylor, decided just to let you read some of what he had to say.

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Chris Rose’s column in Tuesday’s Times-Picayune deals with the “badges of honor,” those spray-painted markings left from the days following Katrina when National Guardsmen were checking houses for survivors or victims. They brandished their cans of spray paint with a flair, marking giant X’s on every home no matter whether damaged or not, noting their unit number, today’s date, a number–usually a zero–to say whether anyone was found inside, and often “NE” to indicate “no entry.”

Animal lovers frequently came behind the guardsmen looking for abandoned critters. The markings they spray-painted beside the NG tattoos were usually large and gaudy and wordy. “Two cats under the house; dog in back.” Occasionally, a house will carry a full conversation between these animal lovers: “Dog in back.” “Could not find it.” “Look next door.”

Sometimes the only damage a home sustained was the bright red paint on the brick carrying the post-hurricane graffiti. A souvenir of our saviors; residue from our rescuers.

The community has not agreed on what to make of those tattoos. Or even what to call them. Hieroglyphs of catastrophe. Crisis markings. Marks of distinction. Disgusting souvenirs. Badges of honor. Battle scars.

I sometimes suggest to preacher friends that they consider bringing a sermon on scars. The scars on your body tell a story about you.

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In England, they call them Water Closets or “WCs” for short. When a group from our church visited the London and Kent area some years ago, a man in a Sunday School class leaned over to me and asked about our deacon W. C. Thomas, who had just been introduced, “Why in the world would his parents give him such a name?” I explained his name was William Cledith, and that in America “W.C.” had no connotation about rest rooms–or anything else, for that matter.

People are funny about rest rooms.

You don’t hear “little moron” jokes any more, but one I recall from childhood went like this. “Why did it take the little moron four hours to travel fifty miles on the highway?” Answer: “Because he kept seeing signs that said ‘clean rest rooms’ and he must have cleaned a hundred that day!”

Here’s a question for you: in what public buildings in every town in America would you expect to find the dirtiest, smelliest rest rooms? Most people would probably answer: in the schools. The institution where we send our children to spend eight or more hours every day. The institution charged with molding these young lives and preparing them for the future. Dirty, stinky toilets.

Yesterday, Friday, a group of New Orleans high school students who have formed an organization they call “Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools,” held a news conference to talk about some of the more basic problems facing our city’s public schools.

Dudley Grady, age 16 and a rising senior at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School, told the assembly that during the Katrina evacuation he attended school in Shreveport and got the surprise of his life. The rest rooms were beautiful. He wondered, “Why are their bathrooms so clean and ours are so not?”

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I talked to Mom this Friday morning, as I do every day, and she says the birthday card count has leveled out at 144. Our goal, of course, was a card for each of her 91 years. So, she’s thrilled and we all are.

Thanks to so many who wrote these terrific notes and cards. A special thanks to you who went the extra mile with a personal note or, in several cases, enclosing a dollar or two. Even though we did not ask for it, several included money and Mom she ended up with over $150. That was lagniappe, as we say in South Louisiana. A little extra.

One of my Texas cousins wrote, “Hey, I didn’t know everyone was sending money. No one told me.” I wrote her back that that was not part of the deal, that we were just asking for notes. The money business got started over 15 years ago when Pop was coming up on his 82nd birthday (we thought that might be his last; he’d had health problems) and big brother Ronnie–always one to figure the money angle, being a Baptist preacher and all–thought we should get him that many cards, and ask everyone to include a dollar bill. Pop ended up with over 200 dollars and had a lot of fun opening the cards and reading the notes.

This week, we’ve had a death in the family–Mom’s youngest sister, Lorene Kilgore McKleroy, from Lake City, Florida–and our family is sad and coming together in love. Since they’ll be flying the body to North Alabama, and that will incur extra expenses on her husband, my siblings thought our bunch ought to contribute financially to help. When Pop suggested to Mom that she give some of her birthday money, she responded in typical half-serious, full-teasing mode and said, “I didn’t tell you what to do with your birthday money, and you don’t tell me.” I’ve laughed at that ever since.

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I stumbled onto Isaiah 50:4 the other day and plan never to be without it. The New American Standard Version reads like this: “The Lord has given me the tongue of disciples that I may know how to sustain the weary one with a word.”

Everyone I know down here is weary. Some are weary in well-doing, some are weary for just “doing,” and many are weary for their own reasons. Everyone needs a good word.

In our Wednesday pastors’ meeting, attended by thirty, some of whom came late or left early, we heard the kind of reports that do indeed sustain the weary one. Most were praise reports.

Rudy French told of a church team visiting his FBC-Norco from Forest, Louisiana. Yesterday, they knocked on doors in St. Bernard Parish and led three people to Christ. The pastor led one, Rudy led another, and then, the third guy is the one that stood out. Rudy said, “I was driving the van and dropping the group off in small clusters. I was driving down a street and noticed this guy in his yard working on his car. He was shirtless, sweating, tattooed, wearing a bandanna on his head.” When the fellow waved a greeting, Rudy stopped to chat with him. Soon, he was sharing his faith in Christ and the man was weeping, praying to receive the Lord.

Rudy said, “I came back and told our group about him, and one of the men said, ‘Wait a minute. You said he was shirtless and wearing a bandanna on his head?’ Right. The man said, ‘I spent a half-hour witnessing to that same guy before you got there. And he wanted nothing to do with the Lord. What happened?'”

Rudy said, “I told him, ‘I don’t know what happened. The Lord just intervened.'”

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Just outside Slidell, Dolores and Kermit Atwood live in the house they have owned for decades. It’s a humble house, they paid it off long ago, and they’ve never had to pay taxes on it. However, it recently came to light that in 1996, the house was revalued for $75,100, exactly $100 above the homestead exemption cutoff. The Atwoods would be taxed for the $100 difference and they were billed for $1.63. But there was a problem.

When the addresses were updated from “Rural Route Whatever” to street names to comply with the 911 system, their home address became 4122 Dauphine Street. However, the tax bill–which the Atwoods did not know existed and were not expecting–was sent to the old route address. When it was returned to the assessor’s office marked “address unknown,” it was entered into the books as an unpaid tax debt. Eventually, in July 1997 the house was sold at a tax auction for the $1.63 in unpaid taxes plus 10 cents interest and $125 in various costs. A real estate guy named Jamie Land bought the property a month later from the folks who acquired it at the tax sale.

The Atwoods had a 3-year exemption period during which they could redeem their home from Mr. Land. The problem is they didn’t know it. At no point had they been notified. The first they knew of this monkey business was exactly one week after the exemption period had expired. “We’ve lost our house?” they asked, astonished. “For $1.63?” even more astonished. “For a bill we never received?”

Is there any sanity in the universe, they wondered. How could this happen in America? Too bad, said Mr. Land. Business is business.

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Senator David Vitter hopes he has put his troubles behind him after the very brief news conference he and his wife Wendy held Monday at a Metairie hotel. Mrs. Vitter called for everyone to show grace to them to protect their children. Others in the community have echoed that plea. Couple of quick comments.

It’s not just that the senator consorted with prostitutes, as bad as that is. It’s that his own words–uttered when President Clinton was being assailed for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky–condemn him. At that time, he called Clinton a moral failure, unworthy to hold that hallowed office, and urged him to resign. If there’s a difference here, we haven’t found it yet.

The other thing is this. When a public figure, whether a preacher or a politician or whatever, decides to ignore his family’s welfare and do something horrendous, not to say stupid, like this, then would someone please explain where he gets off asking us to protect his children when it becomes public. Wasn’t that his job in the first place, and didn’t he fail to do it? And isn’t he asking to have it both ways: to have his fling but not have to pay the consequences.

I am in favor of protecting the children. And I admire the wife for her strength and loyalty.

The talk shows and newspapers are saturated with citizens defending and damning Vitter, who has always seemed a very decent sort, if perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His counterpart, Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, however, creates the impression of being the brightest girl in the class, the one brainier than all the rest of us, someone created to be a senator.

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