Lunch hour was starting out slow at the Taco Bell where I just finished my meal. I like eating there. There’s a bigger selection there than at the mini-Bell in the student center. The folks are friendlier.

Today, the staff of five or six became involved in a kitchen debate (between drive-ups) and I couldn’t at first tell what all the additional heat was cooking up.

Then I heard something with the inflection of a question about “Adam and Eve” and “created first.” For a while, I couldn’t make out anything else. It was all good-natured and punctuated by frequent laughter. Then I heard, “Mary? What has Mary got to do with anything?” A little later I could make out “Revelations” three times, and the loud response: “I take back what I said. You’re confused AND you got your own interpretation. When you study Revelations, you got to KNOW what you’re reading about. It’s like a parable.” The rest was lost to me, as the speaker realized she was too loud for a Taco Bell with one dine-in customer sitting as close as he could to the counter.

I have no idea what it was all about. It obviously went from one end of scripture to the other in a very short span.

I do have some idea why overhearing part of it made me feel warmed and filled in a way usually foreign to fast-food tex-mex dining: just because the conversation was happening at all.

It could have been about so many other things.

In I Chronicles 29, King David surveys the vast storehouse of wealth given by the people of Israel for the building of the temple he is not permitted to build, and he praises the Lord in the presence of the assembly:

“Praise be to you, O LORD, God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Yours, O LORD , is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise your glorious name.

“But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. O LORD our God, as for all this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. I know, my God, that you test the heart and are pleased with integrity. All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent. And now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. O LORD, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you.

I tend to be critical of building big, fancy, expensive church buildings. A new one opened a year ago near where my congregation meets, costing $18 million; members gave $6 million on one Sunday morning. How quick I was to utter a line much like one Judas muttered when perfume anointed the feet of Jesus … the same Jesus who drove moneychangers and sacrificial animals from the courts of a beautiful temple.

Was I really concerned about providing for the poor, or just jealous of the generosity of another fellowship?

Isn’t God capable of blessing me with enough to acknowledge His sovereignty AND provide for the poor?

Shouldn’t I, like David, be expressing my thanks by my giving?

Whether you liked him or not, President Bill Clinton made some strides in recognizing and repairing the inequities due to race in our country. His efforts are part of the focus of a panel discussion titled “Bridging the Divide” this afternoon on the campus where I work.

My sweet wife Angi has done a lot of work to organize the event, which may be broadcast live on C-SPAN beginning at 4:30 p.m. CST — if not, C-SPAN will doubtless carry it later.

Panelists include Sanford Cloud (National Conference for Community and Justice), Robert Evans (Plowshares Institute), Rose Ochi (L.A. Police Commissioner), Janet Murguia (National Council of La Raza), Feisal Abdul Rauf (American Sufi Muslim Association Society), and panel mediator Deborah Mathis (Tribune Media columnist).

You can read more about it at http://www.ualr.edu/cpsdept/bridgingthedivide/. The event is one of many surrounding the dedication/opening of the Clinton Center and Presidential Library this week.

I said the Clinton administration’s efforts were part of the focus of the panel, because the event is subtitled “Racial Reconciliation in the 21st Century.”

And because we have a long way to go before we can say we’ve done good, according to Micah 6:8:

“He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

This morning I watched a color guard of ROTC high school students raise the flag on our campus. A small group of us pledged our allegiance to it and to the republic for which it stands … then listened as it was lowered to half-mast, and the names and destinies of U.S. submarines were read by a retired sub commander, punctuated by the tolling of the bell.

Veteran’s Day began 86 years ago as a celebration of the end of World War I and, though it was called ‘Armistice Day’ for 16 years, it regained its current name 50 years ago.

But it was 140 years ago that President Abraham Lincoln captured the spirit of this day and its meaning at the close of a fair in Washington DC, with more than a year to go before the close of the Civil War.

On that occasion he spoke these words, which continue to resonate to this day:

“This extraordinary war in which we are engaged falls heavily upon all classes of people, but the most heavily upon the soldier.

“For it has been said, all that a man hath will he give for his life; and while all contribute of their substance, the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it up in his country’s cause.

“The highest merit, then, is due to the soldier.”

Today, as in Lincoln’s day, our nation seems deeply divided. Our President faces the task of seeking to heal wounds and reunite citizens.

Perhaps there is no better place to begin than with the recognition that President Bush put into words a week ago: “We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us.”

I think we all agree that this is still one nation, indivisible, and above it flies one flag which many soldiers and sailors defend and have defended – some giving, as Lincoln noted in his Gettysburg Address, their “last full measure of devotion.”

As the bell tolled, my thoughts were not so much for the submariners whose histories often closed with the frequently-repeated phrase “all hands lost” as it was for the few servicemen I know from church who are serving in Iraq. They daily face the horror of war. They resist its temptations. They rebuild schools. They restore power grids and plumbing.

And many of them, when asked what they would like us to send them for another Christmas over there, ask for school supplies and crayons that they can give to the children in the places they’re stationed.

Father God, please bring them home safe and soon.

And bless them for showing Your generosity while they’re there.

I’ve been trying to catch up. I’ve been looking into definitions – primarily at Wikipedia – for items like “emerging church” and “postmodernity” and “evangelical” and “fundamentalist Christian” so I’ll know better what people are talking about when they bandy about those terms and others.

(And, by the way, all of the cross-reference links and talk links and dispute notations in Wikipedia are very helpful, even though they can draw you into a whirlpool that only the strongest of the curious can resist.)

I have resisted doing my homework for this long, not because of any fondness for ignorance, but because I hate it when definitions become labels. We need definitions. We don’t need labels.

We certainly don’t need to view those labels as magic words that make something what we label it; or that make others agree with us; or that make them do what we want them to do.

Labels can be very effective; I don’t argue that. They can also be very destructive and divisive.

You can call someone a label and get elected. You can call someone a label and get him or her excluded, banished, excommunicated – or worse. You don’t have to prove it. All you have to do is allege it.

All that matters is the sound byte. And it has always been that way.

When the fellowship of believers began, the discriminating label was “Christian.” You could be tortured and executed for owning it. But as the majority began to wear that as an “in” label, the “out” labels proliferated and changed: “Hussites.” “Anabaptists.” “Protestants.” “Separatists.” “Reformers.”

You know the more recent ones.

Do we really need to add more?

My involvement minister has asked me to submit a topic and syllabus for an Adult Elective course at church designed for 1) seekers, 2) new converts, 3) discipleship training or 4) leadership training. In the past, these have met for an hour a week for as few as 4 or as many as 8 weeks, usually averaging six.

I don’t know how to answer him. I’m completely blank. I don’t know what I can add to the canon of spiritual ammunition that the Adult Elective series has already volleyed, plus all of the regular Sunday morning Adult ed studies and all of the past sermon series.

I’ve been trying to reduce my spiritual load for a while to better set my own house in order. I hate to admit it, but our preaching minister’s Sunday message on “Solitude” (in a series from Richard Foster’s “Celebration of Discipline”) has made me wonder if I’m going through what St. John of the Cross described as “the long dark night of the soul.”

That’s not to be confused with Douglas Adams’ hilarious and irreverent “The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul” and its Norse deity connnections, nor with the phrase “the long dark night of the soul” used in other eastern mystic religions — though it has some common ground.

The mystic/Gnostic St. John described it in the 15th or 16th century as the emptying process that prepares the soul for being filled with God’s illumination.

Frankly, I’m not into any of the mystic stuff of any religion, and the whole concept of “secret knowledge” meant for a few but not everyone sounds elitist and creeps me out.

But I do feel spiritually empty, and have for a good long time now. I know it’s partly an angst of sorts that all Christians feel deep down, knowing that God has created people for more and better and closer to Him than this world offers. Yet it’s more than that, a feeling that I haven’t yet heard or heeded a calling — not necessarily a unique one for me; just a calling that every once in a while I think I hear whispering in my heart.

Is it the unwritten book that’s been rattling around inside my head and heart for twenty-odd years (plus one or two even ones)?

Is it just the yearning for the days when contemplating the biblical canon still blew me away?

Is it really a craving for the divine creative spark?