Out On A Limb

This is a great video that features the Skit Guys, my favorite acting duo of the moment. It won the Southwest Airlines "Wanna Get Away?" commercial contest.

Church Signs Continue to Shock, Awe

The latest entry in the "World's Worst Church Sign" Contest has it all: vagueness, failed attempts at clever irony, insider churchy language, and simple awfulness.

This one has a story attached, even. The sign read, "When eagles are silent, parrots will squawk." I saw it, thought it over, and chuckled a bit. I told Cindy about it, and she, always trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, said she thought the intent was good. We decided it meant that if the noble, good, and true folks don't speak up, then the gaudy, noisy, and rude will rule the day. But... wow. Then Cindy happened to mention the sign to a coworker in a conversation about noisy birds outside classroom windows or some such. The coworker acted a little offended that Cindy would mention it in such an offhand fashion, saying she thought it was an important reminder that we need to be silent and listen for God to speak in our lives. When Cindy told me this, my reaction was a hearty guffaw. So God is the squawking parrot? I love this town.

A Tree-Hugging Granola-Faced Pansy Boy

So I grew up going to a Christian school (a very good school, too) in Midwestern Suburbia. Our state representative, state senator, US representative, US senators, governor, and the rest were typically Republican. My teachers in school taught a very conservative political outlook on life, fueled by doses of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Reagan.

I'm still fairly conservative politically. I find the abortion issue tough to sidestep, and I still weigh that issue very heavily in my consideration of candidates to vote for. I'm still registered as a Republican voter. But there's an insidious streak of liberalism in me, and for this I place the blame squarely on my dad.

Readers who know my dad will doubtless be shocked by this wild accusation. Dwight Purtle teaching liberal politics to his son??? Lemme 'splain you how come.

It started with the family vacations. Unlike most Baby Boomer uber-capitalists, my parents didn't buy us enormous piles of plastic junk for Christmas every year. We got stuff, and it was good stuff. But some of my friends got a lot more stuff. One year when I was about ten and my sisters were about eight and six or so, I noticed the disparity between my friend's stack of Christmas loot and my own. I broached the subject with my dad, and he looked thoughtful for a bit. Then he told me that my friend Steve's* parents spent half the year every year paying off Christmas. They were apparently proud of it. He told me that wasn't the way we did things.

Then he asked me where Steve had gone for vacation that summer. I told him I thought they went to Branson for the weekend. "And where did we go?"

We'd gone to California. Two full weeks away. Granddad's house and Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks in the Sierra Nevadas. We did this at least every other year. I loved that trip, even though it usually meant a road trip of three days out and three days back in an 80-something Oldsmobile sedan with my two sisters and me in the back seat fighting most of the time. Sequoia National Park is home of the world's largest living thing: the "General Sherman" tree, a Giant Sequoia redwood. There are also lots of great mountain hiking trails and scenery.

Yosemite National Park was, and still is, simply my favorite place. I've mentioned it before in this blog. Granite monoliths almost a mile high, some of the tallest waterfalls in the world, and relentless beauty everywhere.

On these trips, my dad taught us wilderness ethics. Littering was a crime deserving severe punishment. We were to leave campsites "better than we found them," picking up not only our trash, but the trash the previous people had left as well. "Don't feed crackers and food to the squirrels," he said. "Our food isn't good for them." We were not to get too close to wildlife, even though other people would surround a deer or bear with their cameras clicking excitedly. We were not allowed to pick wildflowers. "Leave them so everyone else can see them too." We stayed on the trail: we didn't want to damage the plants or erode the soil. We kept our voices low, and saw more wildlife than many of the other hikers. We went to ranger talks in the evenings and paid attention when they told us how to "leave no trace" when we hiked and camped. We listened as they told us how people had damaged many of the pristine wilderness areas, and how we could help restore those areas by following certain guidelines. We decried the debacle of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.

Another major contributing factor to my liberalism for which I blame my dad is National Public Radio. The NPR member station in Kansas City is KCUR, and I've probably listened to more programming on that station than any other in my lifetime, with the possible exception of a Christian station in Kansas City called KLJC. My dad would also tune in the nearest NPR station wherever we were on the road. Besides promoting all kinds of obscure underground jazz, world music, and new age artists, NPR has a decidedly leftward-leaning slant on the news, especially on environmental issues.

And then we started to recycle. We started taking in aluminum cans long before it was fashionable. We got a "recycle bin" at home just like the rest of the neighborhood, but we actually did it conscientiously. We would cut the labels off tin cans and pop bottles, cut the little plastic rings off the tops by where the lids screwed on, and we recycled everything we could recycle - by the book. We turned off lights and tried to conserve water (this was mostly because it made good fiscal sense, it's true, but we did it). We lowered the thermostat in the winter and raised it in the summer. We got energy-efficient windows and light bulbs.

And finally, we took National Geographic magazine for my entire life. I still read it cover to cover every month. Do you know they have some of the finest photographers in the world on staff?

So let me make my confession. I am what some of my teachers at the Christian school might have termed a "tree-hugging, granola-faced pansy boy." When it comes to environmental issues and the whole "greenhouse gas," "carbon footprint," and even the dreaded "global warming" thing, I'm as left as the side of the road the Brits drive on. I like nature to stay natural. I like trees. I like people who pick up their trash. I like fair-trade shade-grown coffee and organic farming. I like clothing companies who don't exploit the environment or employ child labor in other countries. I support local farming. I like fuel-efficient, low-emissions cars. When my wife gets a cup of coffee to go, she saves the cup and reuses it at least once. I'm learning to follow her example.

Let me make clear that I'm still skeptical about various environmental organizations. I read a news story about an Earth Day celebration in Dallas a few years ago that left a lot of litter all over the place. I think a lot of environmentalist wackos are precisely that: wackos. And I still believe God created this whole world, despite reading and hearing all the evolutionism in National Geographic and on NPR. And it's precisely because I believe that God created this world that I think it's worth taking care of. He gave us that job, remember? We're to have dominion over it, but we're not to wreck it with our trash.

Now go pick up some litter. And recycle that soda can.



*Not his real name. Mysterious, eh?

Fear of Depth

Well, Dwain unexpectedly showed up at my church tonight, and our enjoyable (but regrettably brief) conversation motivated me to blog tonight. I've been avoiding le blog lately, for reasons I'll explain below.

Cindy and I honeymooned in Grand Cayman. I have a recommendation for a perfect small, quiet beach inn for not a lot of bucks if you're interested. Our second-favorite activity on the trip was snorkeling. We went every day, and most often we drove to a place on the north-central section of the island called Rum Point. The beach and reef wasn't too overpopulated by partying crazies there, and the snorkeling was spectacular.

I'm not an exceptionally good swimmer, but I love snorkeling. And Grand Cayman's snorkeling is some of the best. Stingrays, myriad colorful tropical fish, and a colossal reef known as The Wall. At Rum Point, The Wall is about 100 yards out from the end of the pier. Inside the reef, the water stays shallow, very clear, and you can see everything around you. Out past the reef, The Wall drops off a mile or more straight down. It's an underwater cliff.



I have a desire to do some scuba diving over the Wall at some point, but when I'm honest with myself I have to admit I think I know what would happen. Swimming over that drop-off would be a vertigo-inducing thrill at first, but I would very quickly begin to imagine all the things that could be eyeing me hungrily from those dark depths. I would look around at the reef and its inhabitants, take some pictures while glancing constantly over my shoulders, and retreat to the safety of the shallower waters as soon as dignity would permit.

My fear of depth is what has kept me from this blog for a few weeks as well. When I started these little inanities, I did it just to exercise the writing muscle a bit and write about anything and nothing. But I always had it in the back of my mind that when something really deep and write-up-worthy came my way, the Proser would come into his own and this page would become something important. Such was the naive pomposity of my thinking.

A couple of weeks ago, a teenage boy named Dustin was killed in a car accident in El Dorado Springs. He came to our youth group fairly regularly until his dad started a new church about six months ago. Some of his best friends are still youth group members. He was in our home several times. He beat me handily at a video game called Halo several times.

I spent last week doing my best to help students, parents, and teachers through this impossible time in any way I could. Here I need to pause and say that I'm humbled and grateful for the incredible amounts of grace, peace, and strength that God provided for so many of the people involved.

I came to this blog in the middle of that process and stared at a blank screen for half an hour or so. I had my deep, important issue to discuss and I found I had no desire to explore it - at least not in this partly public setting.

Why couldn't I write about something this profound? The deep things scare me away, it seems.

There was also this: while there were many people hurting deeply in the process and many others who really rose to the challenge and did their best to help the hurting, I was disappointed and a bit jaded by other people. Some who weren't even that close to Dustin seemed to want to use the occasion to turn the whole world into their own personal therapy session. Others were well-meaning, but incredibly and stupidly insensitive to those who were hurting. Others seemed determined to grab a piece of the hype that weirdly surrounds a tragedy. I found I had no desire to become one of those hype-grabbers.

I've always heard that some of the greatest songs, books, art, and poetry was born from times of tragedy. I'm not destined to create any of that, it seems.

So that's it. That's my skirting-the-issue way of dealing with the deep issue I'm afraid to tackle. If you're looking for something more conclusive on this issue of grief and loss, you might check out some pretty good things Wendie, Chris and Dwain had to say about it here and here.

Words

A couple of interesting links for those of you who are of a literary bent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

http://www.100words.net

On the 100words site, look around and figure out what's going on, then go to the 2001 entries and look at the September 11th and 12th posts for several authors. Some are quite good.

(Warning: the 100words site doesn't filter naughty words. However, most of the authors do keep it clean.)

Snow

I love snow. Most people I know talk about snow like it’s some kind of infestation or something. Gotta call the exterminator with the big truck and the plow blade. Spread salt over the parking lot to keep it from growing back.

I know it causes a lot of inconvenience – I had to spend forty-five minutes this morning shoveling it out of my driveway before I could move my car. Then I spent another fifteen minutes shoveling later this afternoon when I got my car stuck in our friend Candace’s still-unshoveled driveway (Candace drives a 4X4 and scoffs at snow shovels like Chuck Norris scoffs at “humane” mousetraps). But I love snow.

The accumulation here last night was about fourteen inches. This made Cindy wildly happy; in the two-and-a-half years she’s lived in El Dorado Springs there has been a total of about 3 inches of snow until last night. Now that she’s a teacher I think she likes snow days even more than she did when she was a student. She was exuberant when they cancelled school.

Also, since I’m a youth pastor, a snow day is a great excuse to get out and go sledding or snowball fighting “to build relationships with the students.” And go sledding we did. There’s a great sledding hill off First Street at the southwestern corner of town. It’s long and steep enough to be fun, but not so long that you’re completely exhausted after hauling your sled back uphill. Alex, one of our youth group guys, took charge of building a snow ramp halfway down the hill. He piled snow, packed it down, piled, and packed. After he’d groomed it for half an hour or so, it was a very cool sledding jump. It actually got a little scary. Some of the people there were afraid to try it at first. It took a little bit to work up the nerve. Then it was off down the hill, and no going back. As long as an intrepid sledder leaned back just before hitting the ramp, he would sail about five or six feet off the ground, pondering just for an instant his own mortality before coming back to earth with a “whump,” a spray of white powder, and a whoop of delight. Invariably this resulted in snow down the collar, in the face, up the pant leg, and anywhere else. But back up the hill we all went, grinning and impatient to try it again. And the best kind of sled to use was the round disc variety – no way to steer, no way to keep from spinning around. Even though it was messy and we were all a bit sore later, we’re doing it again tomorrow!








See Aaron's blog for more pics of this snowfall.

Ha ha.... Tonka...

Since about the middle of spring this year I had been intending to do a brief solo backpacking trip, and I just never did it. Cindy and I had a great trip, about which I've written here. But a couple of weeks ago I finally did it. Nothing too spectacular - there's a state park just over an hour away with a seven-mile backpacking trail, and that's where I went. Part of the reason I chose this location was that the name of the place is Ha Ha Tonka State Park. But when I got there, I found that I had underestimated the place.

I arrived just after dark, picked up a trail map and started hiking. After a bit I turned off my flashlight and decided there was enough moonlight to leave it off. It was dreamy and a bit surreal - and I had one of the coolest prayer times I can remember. I hiked about two miles, found a likely spot just under the crest of a ridge and set up my tent there. It rained slightly and dipped below freezing for a bit during the night, so I had a layer of moisture on my tent in the morning that prevented my seeing much outside the little window. As the sun came up, I could hear rifle shots echoing through a hundred draws and valleys around me - a reminder that youth rifle season started that morning in Missouri. An understandably nervous buck approached my tent snorting; I gave a polite "ahem," and I could hear his hoofbeats retreating. I was glad he chose that course of action instead of one similar to the deer-convertible incident in Tommy Boy. I lay there enjoying the sound of the wind for a while, then got up and unzipped the tent flap. I was astonished at the view. I had unknowingly picked one of the best places on the trail to set up my tent. From my ridge top there was a glimpse of the Lake of the Ozarks in one direction, a corduroy series of increasingly blue ridges in another, and the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century castle (built by an early Kansas City business baron) in another. The rest of the trail was caffeine to the soul as well. It was a gift.

The trip was exactly what I needed for several reasons, most of which are none of your business. (And no, Cindy and I aren't having marital difficulties, for those of you whose nature leads you to fear the worst.) God apparently knew I needed that appointment with Him, too. The counseling issues I've been dealing with since are way over my head, but I haven't drowned yet. I guess in that way you could say the Holy Spirit is a bit like a scuba mask... that's probably not a simile destined for mass publication, eh?

I liked it so much I went back the following weekend with my brother-in-law Kevin Carlson. It was great again. And the next day when we were driving through Camdenton, the local Dairy Queen was having a "customer appreciation day," during which everything was 50% off. We... ate a lot of Dairy Queen food. Kevin wondered aloud if heaven would be like a Dairy Queen on customer appreciation day. I think he might be onto something there, except that heaven will add Henry Weinhard's Root Beer and an extensive steak menu.

In other news, one of the other churches in El Do this week got my weekly "Worst Church Sign in Town" award. Taking the honors was a sign that read, "Be thankful for what you have, not what you don't."