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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I’ve been giving our Wednesday pastors meetings a lot of thought lately–particularly since we started talking about cutting back from weekly gatherings to the first Wednesday of each month. We had 52 people present today, including one first-timer–Carl Hubbert of Harahan’s FBC–and some rarely seen pastors such as David Rodriguez of Horeb (Spanish) Baptist Mission. And we had Rudy and Rose French, our Canadian MSC missionaries, back. We had three from Bear Creek Baptist Church in Houston, an IMB missionary from Cote d’Ivoire, Africa, Joe and Linda Williams (our NAMB-appointed counselors), and a large contingent of local ministers who are on the cutting edge of rebuilding this city.

I tell you the honest truth: if we cut back to monthly meetings, I will have withdrawal pains. I love these weekly sessions, and can tell they are the high points of the week for a lot of the fellows. That’s why, after announcing that we would continue meeting here at Good Shepherd Spanish Baptist Church through October and at the New Orleans Chinese Baptist Church for the first three Wednesdays of November, I said, “Thereafter, we’ll meet the first Wednesday of each month at the associational Baptist Center, unless. Unless ten of you come to me and say you want to continue meeting weekly.” We’ll see.

Linda Williams said, “If you cut out the weekly meetings, a lot of people around the country will miss reading about what’s happening locally in your blog.” One more reason I’ll miss having them weekly.

In November, Rudy French is having a heart procedure done in Canada and we’re already praying for him and Rose. Today was their first visit back with us in several months. They had an unusual announcement to make. Rudy is going to become the pastor–not the interim pastor and not a supply pastor, but THE man–of one of our churches. I’ll wait until it happens to name the congregation, but you’ll be interested in what brought it to this point.

Some weeks ago, Rose e-mailed me that Rudy could never pastor. “Pastoring a church bores him,” she said. I laughed at that. So, when that church’s pastor search committee kept telling him they believed God wants him to become their pastor, he resisted. Finally, they said the magic words. “What would it take for you to come as our pastor?” Rudy said, “I’ve studied your history. You’ve had pastors, one after another, for a couple of years each and they move on. You do business as usual and you never grow. Your budget is the same it’s been for years. I would want you to go out of business as just another church and become a mission center.” What would that involve, they asked. “Put in permanent shower fixtures, fix up the place to host church mission teams coming to help rebuild the city and do evangelism in the neighborhoods. Scrap everything and start fresh. Become an evangelism and mission center.” A lady in that church has already donated a large sum of money to get the transformation started, and the church has put people to work on it. My understanding is that Rudy will officially begin as the new pastor on December 1.

I’ve abbreviated Rudy’s account of how this all came to pass. My wife commented that it took an outsider to see what the church needs to do and to convince them to do it.

It’s God’s own way.

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A funny thing: those most afflicted by the scourge of racism don’t have a clue.

The governing council of St. Bernard Parish has stirred up a hornet’s nest. Recently they voted 5-2 to limit a homeowner’s ability to rent out his single-family dwelling. He can let it only to someone he’s related to. The aim, the authorities said, is to preserve the integrity of the neighborhoods and maintain the same culture they had before. There will be no jokes here about “what culture?” in this parish which has long depicted itself as the poor relation of New Orleans.

Predictably, citizens inside and outside the parish are yelling “racism”. Having lived in the Deep South since the age of 11, and after watching local and state governments go through all kinds of legal maneuvering and verbal contortions in order to keep down racial minorities, I have to say that what St. Bernard Parish is doing looks mighty suspicious.

Letters to the editor in Wednesday’s paper take both sides on this issue. (I think I’ll spare you, if that’s all right.)

Parish councilman Craig Taffaro, who authored this regulation, said to a reporter, “What a tremendous burden it must be to believe that everything is motivated by race. Our motivation is simply to do what’s best for our recovery and to restore and maintain our pre-Katrina way of life.”

Hmm…let’s see…what was that expression we used to hear in Alabama throughout the 1950s…the “Southern way of life.” Elect this candidate because he wants to preserve it; oppose that guy because he wants to destroy it. As I recall, no one ever defined the term. It was just “understood.” By whites and blacks alike, I’ll wager.

As a pastor for over four decades, I suppose I’ve committed every social and etiquetical (is that a word?) breach there is. I’ve offended the handicapped, teased the hurting, and joked about the pain some walking wounded were experiencing. I’ve done all this and more, but never maliciously. I didn’t “mean” to hurt them. But I did.

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I haven’t mentioned it here, but Saturday was a big election day throughout Louisiana. In fact, we turned our association’s offices on Lakeshore Drive over to the electoral process. The “Baptist Center” became the voting place for nine precincts in the Gentilly area of New Orleans. Freddie Arnold hung around much of the day Saturday, to be on hand in case he was needed. He said the voting was light. I voted at my usual polling place–John Curtis Christian School’s elementary school library–here in River Ridge.

All of the 13 amendments on the ballot passed big, which was unusual. Several had to do with restoring the coastal wetlands and another with merging all the area levee boards into two, one for each side of the Mississippi River. We were assured that the federal government was watching to make certain the citizens were as concerned with flood protection as they were being told. The vote for levee consolidation was 81 percent in favor. Pretty strong.

The folks in back of the levee consolidation movement didn’t celebrate long. They promptly announced they’re now turning their attention to consolidating another bizarre local contraption–the seven tax assessors who reign over their tiny fiefdoms throughout Orleans Parish and who need to be merged into one central office, like is the case throughout the rest of creation.

Commander’s Palace restaurant opened for brunch Sunday for the first time since Katrina. The ancient building where they are located in the Garden District was severely damaged in the hurricane, then when they started making repairs, workers found major structural problems that had not been evident. It has taken this long to restore the facility. Like getting the Saints back in the Superdome, this is a symbol that the city treasures.

Macy’s in Kenner’s Esplanade Mall is not returning. That end of the mall is dark and empty and needs filling badly. We’ve talked previously here about the boarded-up historic Fairmont Hotel downtown, another sad sad thing.

But Memorial Hospital is back. The site where many patients died in the week following Katrina, this huge medical center, known for ages as Southern Baptist Hospital, was bought recently by Ochsner Foundation along with a couple of medical facilities. Ochsner is now the largest health care provider in the metro area. The headline in Monday’s paper reads “It’s official: ‘Baptist’ is back.”

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7:30 am. The monthly brotherhood breakfast at Kenner’s First Baptist Church provided some insights on life in metro New Orleans these days.

On the first Sunday of each month, some forty men and boys gather for their monthly allotment of cholesterol (thick bacon, sausage, eggs, sausage gravy, grits, huge biscuits–you get the idea) and the kind of fellowship only a men’s gathering provides: laughter, teasing, back-slapping, loving, affirming. Three men spoke in the meeting; only one was scheduled.

Johnny, the leader, said, “You’ve heard the old line about ‘I’m from the government; I’m here to help you.’ Today, one of our men is going to give his testimony along that line.” He introduced Scott who had lost his business to Katrina.

Before Scott got started, Barry stood up. “If he’s going to tell about getting a Small Business Administration loan, I can give you some sad stories along that line. Applying for an SBA loan was absolutely the hardest thing I have ever done. It took 9 months, and there must have been a hundred steps involved. Finally, they sent us the money, then took it back. They sent it again and then took it back. We’ve got it now and I expect them to ask for it back any day now.” Your government in action.

Scott told of the frame-shop business he and his wife had purchased in 1999 from another church member. “This was our livelihood,” he said. During their Katrina evacuation into Belleville, Illinois–“some people call it Mayberry”–he went on line and found an aerial post-hurricane shot of the West Esplanade location of their shop. “There was this giant hole in the roof where you could see all the way through. That’s not good.” They had lost everything.

“The question was what to do now.” Some people suggested bankruptcy. “We didn’t want to do that.” Someone suggested he file for unemployment. “We did, and got $90 a week. That’s for a family of four. You know about how much good that did.” His parents in Boston called and said his room was still available; he could come back home. “I said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m married now with two children.” Laughter.

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The other day, Freddie Arnold was telling the pastors about the iron bell his wife had bought at an antiques store years ago and how it was the only thing he had salvaged from his flooded East New Orleans home. When he finished, I told my “bell” story.

My parents used to have this large cast iron bell mounted on a post behind their farmhouse. About 15 minutes before time for lunch, someone would go outside and pull the rope and ring it. The sound carried a mile in every direction, so my mule and I could hear it way down in the bottomland we were plowing. Now Toby, my mule, knew what the bell meant. His ears perked up and he wasn’t worth shooting after that. As long as he was pulling the plow toward the exit, he made double time. But if I was trying to complete this section and still had a few rows to go before knocking off for lunch, he resisted all attempts to turn him.

Finally, when I pulled his harness off and whopped him across the backside, he literally ran up the long hill toward home, displaying more energy in a few minutes than he had expended all morning. By the time I arrived at the house, Toby would have eaten the nubbins in the trough which someone had laid for him and was rolling in the dust.

In Isaiah 1, God said, “The ox knows his owner, and the donkey knows his master’s crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand.”

Some people are dumber than a mule. They’ve gotten themselves lost and do not know how to get to the Father. It’s our job to find them and show them the way. The Lord Jesus said, “I have come to seek and to save those who are lost.” And, “As the Father hath sent me, so send I you.”

After the meeting, Tobey Pitman approached me. “So you had a mule named Toby.” I laughed and said, “Yes, but you spell yours T-o-b-e-y and my mule spelled his T-o-b-y.”

Tobey Pitman is a career NAMB missionary who has directed the work of the Brantley Center–sheltering, feeding, and discipling the homeless of this city–for several decades. These days with so few homeless in the city and due to the low water pressure downtown, the center is closed and Tobey is overseeing Operation NOAH Rebuild for the North American Mission Board. And for the Lord, of course. And for us. He’s a great guy and we are all so indebted to him.

Last night my phone rang. “Hi Joe. This is Toby.” I paused. “Toby?” “Yep.” “Toby Wood?” I thought I recognized that voice. “Of course, how many Toby’s do you know?” I said, “Oh, three or four.”

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Updated 9/29/06: Please note the correction at the bottom of this article.

Wednesday morning at our weekly pastors meeting, we began with a question: Who’s not sleeping at night? Or, Who keeps waking up in the middle of the night?

We handed the microphone to the half dozen who raised their hands. “Family problems,” one said. A daughter with medical needs and a son who needs to get his life right with the Lord, then marry the mother of his child. “The world situation,” another said. A third said, “I’m lonely.” His wife is in Heaven and he lives alone. “I lie awake thinking about Heaven,” he said, eager to be there.

I didn’t go into my reasons for waking up in the middle of the night, but I expect they are typical. I lie there thinking of what I need to do the next day, of tasks I did not complete the day before. Sometimes I get up and make a list of people to call and work to do, and it seems to settle my mind. This morning, I rose and wrote two letters and drew a cartoon that was on my mind–is there anyone else on the planet, I wonder, who wakes up with a cartoon bugging him?–and by then, it was time to get up anyway.

The cartoon? I had been half awake praying for the meetings we’d scheduled for today, one at 8:30, the pastors at 10, and another session after lunch. I asked the Lord to give me good recall for names, and this came to mind. A group of people are sitting around a boardroom table. One fellow is saying, “I’ve been on vacation for two weeks, so tell me again: who are you people, what are we doing here, and why does it matter?”

Okay, I was gone only one week, but it felt like a month.

Anxiety and worry are types of fears. And we know what the Word says about fear, don’t we. “God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind.” I call that the PLUS of Christian living: Power, Love, Sound mind. II Timothy 1:7.

We’re not to fear the forces of darkness; He has given us power.

We’re not to fear other people; He has given us love.

We’re not to fear the unknown; He has given us a sound mind.

How many times in Scripture do we read the command, “Fear not”? You’d think we’d get the idea.

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