Florida is so hot... and not in the paris hilton way

Writing from GA, and over the next 2 weeks or so I plan on catching you up on what all has been happening with work and life, but briefly:
my son has recovered fully from the car wreck;
Boone was canceled due to lack of registrations - much more on that later;
spent last week as Guest Cook at Unistar and had a marvelous time;
currently at GA in Fort Lauderdale and going on vacation after that for a week.

It is excessively (read unnecessarily) HOT and HUMID down here and the convention center is right next to the sewage treatment plant. Despite these downfalls, I am having a good time, seeing and meeting lots of people, and looking forward to the Service of the Living Tradition tomorrow night which features our own (PSD) Reverend Victoria Safford. I am excited about this for a couple of reasons.... 1) because I got to go to White Bear UU Church (with Dee and Alice Smith) when I was on my way to Unistar and it is so beautiful and they are such a cool congregation, and 2) because I want to give this service a second chance after last year's SLT that was definitely note-worthy, but not for the right reasons. 'nuff said on that.

I plan to get my pics from my trip to Unistar up somewhere soon... some of this technology moves faster than me and I need to determine how and where to put the pics. The water in Des Moines was lapping at the edge of the interstate but I don't think my pics will do the flooding justice regarding how severe it was.

Lots of workshops I want to attend and it looks like plenty of room to get into them - unlike last year. I will try for regular updates and comments about what I attend! I am having lunch with Nick Allen tomorrow to talk about the future of youth ministry in PSD and beyond.

Packaging Girlhood

I was listening to Kansas City's NPR station while doing Meals on Wheels yesterday and caught part of one of my favorite programs - Up to Date.

http://www.kcur.org/uptodate.html#Wednesday

I was able to hear the portion where callers can phone in and ask questions or make comments on the topic and I was delighted to have caught Wednesday's topic - how the media sells sexuality to our female children and how adult women are being "girlified" at the same time.

Then I learned about Club Libby Lu - An "experience-based retailer" that allows groups of girls to come in, get covered in makeup, nail polish, and age-inappropriate clothes so that they can learn their roles as princesses, divas, and sex objects. Basically - it is a store where you can take your daughter to be turned into a living Bratz doll. I have been meaning to rant about Bratz for quite some time and just didn't get around to it, but a store where you can have parties to encourage our girls to become everything that they think boys want them to be at the cost of their individuality and a huge dent in parents' pocketbooks? I am horrified.

I will be tracking down Dr. Lynn Mikel Brown's book and let you know what I think.

Mortality

If you have met me you have probably heard about how much I hate winter. It was with great enthusiasm that I crawled back into bed last Sunday when I learned that my congregation had canceled services due to the incredibly slick roads. Don't get me wrong.. I love working. But I don't love driving to work when it is dangerous out. I called my son's father to tell him to sit tight and not come up to the Fellowship, but he didn't get the message. Next thing I knew I was on the phone with the Franklin County Sheriff's Department hearing that my son was in a wreck and headed to Children's Mercy Hospital and I needed to get there right away. TOTAL PANIC!

Got my husband up and he was able to take sensibly to the sheriff and assure me that my son was fine, but injured, and we needed to move it.

Long story short - broken iliac crest and a scraped up face. His dad had bruises, and the oncoming driver that they hit because they were driving over the posted speed limit and the road was covered in slush had a broken rib. Very lucky.

There are all kinds of changes going on with YRUU and C*UUYAN that I should be passing on to others, but it hit me this morning that my son almost died. I saw the pictures of the wreck. He almost died.

Hug your family and friends tightly. Drive safely. Tell people that you love them when you love them. You never know what will happen. We don't always get second chances.

Roadside pulpits

I love reading roadside pulpits - those signs outside of the buildings of religious communities, and auto repair shops. I am just amazed at how poignant, and true, some of these short bits of wisdom can be and really keep me thinking. I am also amazed at how weird some of these are and how irritated I can get about them .

There is a fundamentalist church in our town that has me really puzzled. Their minister is the official minister to KU Sports, which I find bothersome, and he has been very outspoken in the community against GLBT non-discrimination clauses. I am not a fan.
His church recently had the following on their roadside pulpit:
Sin Closes God's Ear.

What the heck is that about I thought to myself. That doesn't invite me to come there. That doesn't offer me hope. That makes me feel really awful for anyone who believes that. I thought that maybe the other side of the pulpit would then read: But Opens God's Heart

Nope. Nuthin.

I thought maybe this was a passage of scripture and since I am not really up on the bible I was missing out on the connection. Googling this phrase got me nowhere.

I find it hard to believe that making this statement is attractive to anyone, let alone that this is a message that is possibly reiterated inside their walls on Sunday morning. Sin closes god's ear? So we all "sin" and there is no repenting? No apologizing? No forgiveness? No LISTENING? I can't get behind a god that won't listen to me because I make poor choices and honest mistakes. I screw up... I'm still learning. Sometimes I am making it up as we go along. Aren't we all?
God won't listen to me because I'm human? What about good intent? My first ever fortune from a fortune cookie said "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

If you know me, you can imagine the amount of incredulity in my voice. I am totally baffled by this attitude. I don't consider myself a theist anyway, but good grief - from a marketing standpoint that is not good advertising. How can god be a forgiving god if she/he/it can't hear us because we're so awful?

You can tell I am pretty upset by this since I am writing all these choppy sentences. What on Earth are they thinking over there? Anyone? Buehler?

Is there some theology that can help me understand what this means in a positive way?

The Greatest Generation

I was listening to NPR the other morning and they were interviewing Tom Brokaw about his new book Boom. He was on the air pimping his new book, but also telling stories about his career and the many crazy things he has reported on over the years. Naturally, talk turned to his book The Greatest Generation. Call me a Gen X whiner, but the nickname that Brokaw coined for the folks that lived as young adults through World War II irritates me to no end. I am in no way trying to diminish the sacrifices made by those who pulled us through those challenging years! But this title does leave me with a feeling of defeat - kind of a "why bother" attitude that my generation is famous for.

I've never read this book, so I am not sure of the context of the moniker's creation. It just seems so absolute, and since it is quoted so often, it caught on pretty fast. I wonder if Brokaw realizes how far-reaching the sobriquet would be when he created it. It certainly has colored my view of my own generation and others - and not for the better. Perhaps that is the bane of my generation.

The Golden Compass

I got one of those emails recently warning of this awful movie coming out that will damage me and my children permanently and seriously!!
The Golden Compass is a children's fantasy novel by an atheist and the characters kill god at the end. I looked it up on imdb.com, and no mention of killing god whatsoever. Hmmmm.

So I head into my 5th grade son's parent-teacher conference with his homeroom teacher who is also the reading teacher and a very liberal Southern Baptist. She laughed when I asked about the book and told her about the frantic email warning. She loaned me the book from the 5th grade library, and then emailed me the next week to share that she had just received her first email warning about the evils of fantasy literature, which apparently some people cannot identify correctly.

Having just finished The Position by Meg Wolitzer (a great read about a family whose parents wrote a groundbreaking book about sex), I am ready for another fiction read. My non-fiction task is currently a book recommended by Phil Lund - The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. This one will take a while for me to plow through.

check out for yourself the imdb info on the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385752/

The content of the email (from my fundamentalist sister-in-law) and the snopes comments are at:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp

Heaven forbid we teach people to discern fact from fiction and make decisions for themselves. SIGH

Pushmepullyou

I was having a talk at an event this last weekend with a friend who is also a member of the group that hosted the event. We limit attendance to 400 people. We feed them at this event and provide several live bands... this is a big event that requires TONS of coordination - all from volunteers who care about this event that we have now hosted for 12 years.

Our conversation had to do with him not knowing what was going on with meals, and my response was "well... I put it on the forum days ago that I was making food for Friday night for everyone," and his response was "I don't use that. I like my information pushed to me, not where I have to go pull it." I am the exact opposite.... I cannot stand getting tons of emails that have little to do with me. I want the info somewhere that I can easily get to to find it when I need it, and not sort through a barrage of stuff that clogs my mailboxes with everyone "replying to all" when really not all need to know their response, etc. I am a user of forums/discussion boards and not a lover of list serves or yahoo group-type arrangements for information sharing. I am about maxed out on all of it though.

I manage a portion of a website, have 3 email address accounts to deal with, numerous websites that I constantly glean info from for work, multiple discussion boards and blogs that I haunt, various newsletters that are "pushed" at me via email, a new forum I am trying to get up and running for PSD, and now I need to manage a facebook and/or myspace page for PSD work as well - probably both brands and probably more than one of each for different populations. And I am not even keeping up with all of the many forms that are being used currently and I don't use lots of these very well either. I am suffering from information overload ... too much coming at me and too much that I am trying to disperse. And good old analog technology... I have at least three phone meetings every month, and three committee meetings to attend in person.

And this is the kind of thing we are asking of our volunteers as well. How much of a spiritual home are we providing when we are practically deluging them, and our staff, with so much? It has almost gotten to where Sunday mornings are the slow portion of my work where I just have people wanting my attention in person, not in every form of technology I can think of as well.