I’m toward the last of a two week vacation, the period in and around Christmas and New Year’s. The first week, I drove up to Nauvoo, Alabama, and spent 3 days with my parents. On Thursday, all my siblings came in and we had a great visit. They left late that afternoon and Friday promised to be a quiet day. So I called J. L. Rice in Double Springs.

J. L. and I were best friends at Winston County High School back in the 1950’s and after working in Chicago for several decades, he and Betty are back here. He’s mostly retired, but has a barn and cattle and a huge yard and grandchildren, plenty to keep him occupied. He leads the worship at Meek Baptist Church in Arley, a resort community on the shores of the massive Smith Lake. Betty is the church secretary and her brother Etsel Riddle is the pastor, so don’t cross one of them unless you want the whole family on your case!

Anyway, I called him Friday morning and asked if we could have coffee that afternoon at the only fast-food place in town, Jack’s Hamburgers. “I’ll call around and see if I can find any of the gang,” he said. Nine of our classmates showed up. Pretty good on a two-hour notice. (I wonder if any other graduating class of WCHS could have done that, especially considering that we graduated nearly 49 years ago.)

We sat at a large round table in the middle of that little restaurant for the next two hours, laughing and reminiscing until our sides hurt. J. L. whipped out his digital camera and the counter girl took our picture. Later, he printed out a copy of it on my computer, and back at home, I produced a cartoon version of it.

(I’ll e-mail it all to Marty and he can put it on the website the first of next week. [as promised, here it is] Right now, he’s at Nauvoo with his family, visiting his grandparents and letting 9-year-old Darilyn and nearly-5-year-old Jack run free on the farm. Neil is there with his three, so the cousins are bonding. When I called Thursday evening, they had been fishing in the pond and were now lighting a bonfire.)

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Going east on Interstate 10, just before you leave Jefferson Parish and enter Orleans, construction workers are hard at work a few feet to your left putting together a massive “fly-over” that will allow commuters driving into Metairie from the Pontchartrain Causeway to avoid the most congested part of the interstate and get on into the downtown area. It’s due to be finished in 2009 and is costing 69 million dollars. Now they’re having to take up much of the concrete they’ve laid and start over.

Inspectors found that 350 cubic yards of concrete–that would be some 40 cement trucks worth–will have to be ripped up and replaced. All we’re told is that the concrete was “adulterated,” and a spokeswoman for Boh Bros. Construction said they’re looking into how that particular cement made its way into the supply chain. Inspectors say the plan is for the concrete in this corridor to last 75 years, but that this particular concrete is thinned down to the point that it would be worn out in less than half that time.

Inspection is good. Strict enforcement is great. Accountability is a terrific thing. We motorists have to trust that the highways and bridges going up everywhere around here will do what they are supposed to. Most of the major thoroughfares throughout this city are elevated, some of them frighteningly so, like the well-named “Highrise” in Gentilly that passes over the Industrial Canal.

How does that line go? “People will not do what you expect; they will do what you inspect.”

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My friend John got involved in a conversation, I suppose we could call it, with a group of lesbians on a website they maintain. It felt more like getting caught in a crossfire, for my money.

“Your name came up,” he warned, “and I thought I’d better warn you, you may be hearing from them on your website.” Thanks a lot.

I went to the link John provided and read his extensive give-and-take with the participants in that group. It was not a pretty thing. He would type in some fairly reasonable statement in disagreement with their position and they would explode with ugliness, crudity, and accusations. He was a blankety-blank bigot, and once my name got involved–I’m still not sure how that happened–then I was a bigot of that brand and to that degree also.

I responded to John that I would not be saying anything to anyone from that camp trying to draw me into the fray. Some fights are not worth the effort. As the oldtimer said, a dog can whip a skunk, but it ain’t worth it.

I was telling a mutual friend about John and wondering why he even engaged these sisters in that conversation in the first place. He said, “Oh, John loves a good fight.” We laughed and I said, “He reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt’s dog.” TR’s mutt was always getting in fights and coming out on the losing end. A reporter said, “Mr. President, your dog’s not much of a fighter, is he?” Roosevelt said, “Oh no, he’s a wonderful fighter. He’s just a poor judge of dog!”

I suppose someone has to engage the homosexual activists and respond to their charges and then take the heat from the conflagration. But not everyone is called to that kind of verbal conflict. I, for one, know almost nothing about lesbianism or male homosexuality. (I prefer not to call them ‘gays,’ since I’ve never met one yet who was gay, meaning “showing a joyous or merry mood.” –Webster.)

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I’ve heard that the actor Denzel Washington is a Christian. I hope so, because at this distance he seems like such a fine young man.

Tuesday afternoon, I saw his movie “Deja Vu,” which was filmed here earlier this year. The local reviewer recommends you suspend your critical faculties and just enjoy the picture, even though the plot is rather fanciful. That’s what I do anyway, so it worked out just fine.

I’ll not review the movie. I recommend it if you like crime dramas. I recall their shutting down the Crescent City Connection for half-days at a time while the movie people were either filming on the bridge or exploding things underneath it. And they manufactured a major thoroughfare downtown off I-10 called “Bayou Boeuf.” It doesn’t exist, but the plot needed them to get out of town easily and into the open country quickly. Oh that it were this simple.

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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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