Rare and Wonderful Pleasures

"Have fun!" Kersten said.  "Well it should be humorous." was my reply.

I had the opportunity yesterday to join my two sons for a round of golf.  We went out to the Idaho Club north of town to try out the new  course.  For Dieter it was a return home to the course that he played in high school, only it was totally redone, a Jack Nicklaus designed course now, and far more challenging.  Back when it was the Hidden Lakes golf course Dieter had recorded two hole in one's.

A quick anecdote about that.  Dieter used to show up at the golf course and just get paired up with whoever the club house could pair him up with.  Golfing with one gentleman one day, Dieter took a 'gimme', to which the gentleman objected.  Irritated, and with the attitude 'game on then', Dieter proceeded on the next hole to hit a hole in one.  No gimme needed.  On the eighteenth hole, a par five, Dieter again holed out, this time on his approach from over a hundred yards.  When they got back to the club house the gentleman's response was "Who the hell is this kid you paired me up with?"  For the next few weeks the golf pro would introduce Dieter at the first tee as "Tiger Woods".

Well, for Jens and I it's a different story.  Yesterday, Dieter was in rare form, driving the ball over three hundred yards consistently, and in the fairway.  Jens and I surpassed Dieter only in terms of the opportunity we had to experience a variety of scenic locations.  The course Nicholas designed is challenging, with very tight fairways and lots of water.  Not to mention that the lake was at flood stage adding even more water.  The balls we lost probably cost as much as the round itself, or so it seemed.  And yet each of us had a few good shots, a few good holes, and a lot of fun.

Rare and wonderful pleasures.

Our oldest, Katie, is finishing up her school year as an elementary music teacher.  A musical, concerts, and the day to day antics of her kids.  She shared on Facebook a few weeks back:

"When you have been working at building something for years, it is exciting when it suddenly catches on and takes on a life of its own.

Thinking about that with our musical and how it has become a part of the school culture all the things that my staff and parents and the community just jump in and do to make it a great experience for the kids. (Today I totally spaced the Safeway run I was supposed to make for our cast party, with a donation from Safeway, that another staff member requested for the kids, asked the parents to help and within 3 minutes had 4 families willing to take time out of their day to do it.)

AND WHOA how is Vivace Camp taking off!!! I have been getting new ones registered every day. With one more registration we'll top last years numbers, and if you add in the campers whose parents say they'll be there but haven't turned in paperwork... we only have 10 spots left?!? Crazy!"

To witness the joy of my daughter's vocational accomplishments is a rare and wonderful pleasure.

And Dieter is here with his new bride, Dayna.  It's an interesting experience welcoming new members into our family.  It's like childbirth all over again, yet without the morning sickness, the agony of labor, the sleepless nights and the dirty diapers.  A new daughter who is well on the way to being a 'finished product'.  Dayna and Dieter found gems in each other.  We couldn't be happier for them.

Rare and wonderful pleasures.

This weekend we had the pleasure of being with Jens and Kersten Friday evening when they got the news that their offer on a new house was approved.  Another milestone in their building a life together as a family, centered around our first grandson, Jasper.  Excitement.  Ker's work as a nurse is going well and Jens has begun a new adventure working to buy Sandpoint Computers.

To be able to share these experiences on a day to day basis, especially watching Jasper grow before our eyes, is a rare and wonderful pleasure.

And then there is Brita.  She just returned from another adventure, this time biking the North Shore of Lake Superior with a friend.  For the record, Minnesota readers, Brita related that for as much as people rave about the North Shore, in her opinion its nothing compared to the lakes and mountains of the Rocky Mountain west.  She loves where she lives and works, and is mindful that many people work for a lifetime to be able to retire here, and this is her home.

One of the delights to me about this is that after moving quite a bit early on in my seminary and ministry days, I came to Sandpoint with the hope to set down roots in this community so that my two youngest children might have the experience I never had, which is to have a place called "home".  Jens and Brita are not sojourners in this place.

It is a rare and wonderful pleasure.

And Karla and I get to take it all in.  Karla will accompany the kids on a bike ride down the Hiawatha trail in the Silver Valley later today.  Me, I get to preach again about the inclusive love of God that know no borders or barriers.  Above all we have the precious experience of seeing Jasper's face light up whenever we see him.  

Rare and wonderful pleasures.

I realize that this all sounds a bit like a Christmas newsletter and may carry a tone of bragging.  For me it is simply a matter of being overwhelmed with gratitude for the life that is unfolding before our very eyes.  What a rare and wonderful pleasure it is to step back and realize that you have everything you could have ever wanted.  Oh, there is more to come, I'm sure.  Additional new members of our family.  Challenges to be overcome, and accomplishments to celebrate.

Often I have written in this column about the difficulties of negotiating through life as a bipolar person.  There are challenges.  

But life is good.  I am not defined by my disease.  

I have many times thought that if my life is to be judged, I would most like to be judged on the basis of the children Karla and I have raised.  They are, I believe, our greatest accomplishment.  Having said that I feel a need to acknowledge that God is their creator, not Karla or I, so it is not right to take too much credit.  But what the heck, you get the point.

What too often gets lost amid all the wrestling with a disease such as bipolar disorder is the abundance of priceless blessings that are there to be enjoyed.  

Wow!   Just wow!  Rare and wonderful pleasures.

Making a difference.

One of the problems associated with being bipolar is that one's thought patterns are, uh, bipolar.  They tend to come from the two ends of the spectrum.  At one end of the spectrum is unbridled optimism that sees no limits and craves the opportunity to transform the world.  At the other end of the spectrum is debilitating resignation to what is.

During one of my  more pronounced manic phases I hatched a plan to transform and empower the Church's ministry.  It was based on my experience developing Luther Park at Sandpoint, our congregation's senior housing ministry.  I proposed using this model as a means of fueling Church growth across the nation.  Elements of the plan included:

1. Initiating a new ministry based on the development of Senior Housing in conjunction with a new congregational start.
2. Operating the "not for profit" senior housing, as a "for profit" enterprise, and using the revenue generated by the senior housing to support first, the new congregational start, and second, further expansion of the Church's ministry elsewhere.  The proforma developed for the proposed new ministry in the Boise area projected a total of 225 units to be developed, and would in short order, when leased up, produce about a million dollars annually of positive cash flow.  A significant amount.
3. In addition, I envisioned a day care for the children of staff and the community to be developed as part of the ministry.  It was conceived of as a quality of life issue, surrounding seniors with children, and children with seniors, and providing day care for the many staff members that would need it.
4. The hopes also included a nucleus of multicultural ministry, as many of the staff would likely come from the Hispanic population in the area. 
5. And finally, and most importantly, I envisioned this model as being capable of duplication throughout the country and offering to the Church a means of self supporting mission expansion.

This entrepreneurial approach to ministry had its merits.  I was able to sell the idea to the powers that be, enough so to get the Church to purchase the land for the development.

What went wrong?

The damn economy collapsed.  Non-recourse financing, upon which the project was conceived, ceased to be available.  Projects that used to be financeable based on their own merits now required considerable 'skin in the game' by the parent organization, including both collateral and the ability to back the loan.  And the market shrank for senior housing with the collapse of the housing bubble.  Thankfully, the millions of dollars that were spent will in time, be recoverable.  At least I hope so.

At the other end of the spectrum one can get locked into a depressed resignation to the way life is and become convinced that nothing can be done to change the outcome.  Depression.  Pessimism.  

There is a danger of falling victim to that in my current call.  The congregation I'm serving has, for a variety of reasons, experienced a decline in membership and  worship attendance over the last few decades.  It is at the point that if we lose a member, the budget needs to be reworked.  We're that close to the line.  

What can we do?  I fight the tendency to resign myself to a belief that there is nothing we can do.  We are victims of the drift in our society toward a secularism that excludes involvement with the Church, and that social trend is not going to be reversed by any effort on our part.  OK, so is that depression or honesty that results in such thoughts?l

The truth is that the sociological and demographic shifts in our country are real and profound.  It's not just one congregation that is declining.  Across every denomination in the country the experience is being shared by congregation after congregation.  As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, posting my sermons on Facebook and boosting them throughout the community is not likely to alter the current trend in our nation.  Would that I be so profound and gifted to do that.  I'd write a book and retire.  

Unbridled optimism.  Depressed resignation.  Polar opposites.  Bipolar thought patterns.

Somewhere in the middle there is a balance that represents a healthy, realistic, world view.

Every journey begins with one step.  Current trends will not continue forever.  

Perhaps the healthy balance is to forge a middle ground between 'you can change the world', and 'there's nothing you can do', toward an outlook that simply affirms that 'you can make a difference'.  

I think that is what I currently desire more than anything else.  Simply to make a difference.  This happens one person at a time.  Tom Cable of the Seattle Seahawks made the observation regarding Thomas Rawls, one of the Seahawk's running backs that "you can't become a thousand yard rusher on a single play".  Success as a running back involves slogging it out a few yards at a time.  And repeating that.

Pentecost was a miracle.  Three thousand baptisms in one day.  Billy Graham would have been proud.  We have had one adult baptism this last year in our congregation.  One person who was adopted through baptism as a child of God.  That's one person more than no persons.  One step in the right direction.

I have found hope, and I believe a healthy balance, in the agricultural images for the life cycle of the Church.  There is a time for tilling.  A time for planting.  A season of growth. And a time of harvest.  

Now this is the thing.  If you try to harvest the corn on the 4th of July you are going to be disappointed.  "Knee high by the 4th of July" means, among other things, that there will not be any cobbs until later.  I have come to believe deeply that we are at a time of tilling and planting in the Church, not a time of harvest.  "It's springtime in America" is not a pessimistic statement.  But springtime is not harvest time.  

In the midst of all this a bipolar person does well to retrain those thought patterns.  Life is lived best in the middle ground between the polar opposites.  Sober optimism.  Realistic hope.  Achievable ambition.  Making peace with the tension between mania and depression.  This is not a lukewarm existence.  It is neither static nor explosive.  It is not a lifeless equilibrium.  

You can change the world make a difference.  

And making a difference, however small, is sufficient.