When Hurricane Katrina threatened the Gulf Coast, hundreds of evacuees made their way to Little Rock. The city and FEMA found a residence for many of them at Parris Towers, formerly a retirement home where a limited fire last summer revealed the ineptitude of its management. Shut down by the state, repaired and refurbished – but not refurnished – it was a temporary solution.

Calls for help went out. The people of my church committed to furnishing 40 of the apartments. But the generosity did not stop there. New and good used furniture and appliances and consumable necessities flowed in to take care of more than 80 apartments. Still the giving did not stop.

As of last week, 135 apartments and homes had been furnished and supplied by the family of Christ at my home church. And last Sunday night, many of the folks who have taken up residence at Parris Towers were invited to church and attended, brought in cars from downtown by our members.

Midway through this week, one of them asked our involvement minister if they could come back. Within an hour, we sent 200 flyers to Parris Towers promising an available church van to bring them to 10:30 services and back home.

The people of Parris Towers are the mission field that came to us. The local media took note of our response. No one prayed aloud on a street corner to attract attention to it; no one sent out a press release about it. (Given the humility of my church family, I don’t think they’d have let me if I had suggested it.)

They just opened their hearts and arms and wallets.

Thank you, God, for the openness; the generosity of my city and my church to the people displaced by ravages of nature. Thank you for the opportunity You sent and the empowerment to serve those good people – and You – through it. Now, as we’re called upon to help again with the needs of people moving from hotels to apartments, open our eyes and hearts even wider to the opportunities You provide to live sacrificial lives like our Savior, Your Son.

The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” – Luke 18:11-12

Thank you, God, that even though I am far too often just like this Pharisee You are transforming me into the likeness of the One who told the story about him – the One who takes away my veil of boast and pride and self.

“And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” – II Corinthians 3:18

Not since I lived in Abilene at the midpoint of a seven-year drought have I been so thankful for rain.

In our parched part of the world it came down in drips, sheets and buckets late last night. It came down pretty much all night, with as much lightning and thunder as the sky could take. It shook the window-casings and rattled the rafters. It frightened my daughter just short of midnight, who found me in the hallway gazing out the window at the wonder of it.

I reassured her I would be there for a while and she could go back to bed.

Sure, there are twice as many leaves on my yard this morning – along with twigs, branches, pine cones and needles – but the earth was so thirsty for rain you can almost feel it sigh with contentment this morning.

In Abilene, the ground had become so dry at one point that we had to have pier installed under the corner of our house to prevent it from falling off. We got off easy. A neighbor had to have twenty-some piers placed to shore up his house at a cost of several thousand dollars.

Yet good came of it. People from all kinds of churches, faiths and opinions gathered in a public park one evening to pray for rain.

One fellow prayed, “God, You send your rain on the just and the unjust – surely we must be one or the other!”

The prayers were answered in a couple of weeks – there was even flooding; Abilene’s downtown area was once deemed by the Army Corps of Engineers to be the most advantageous place in the region to create a man-made reservoir/lake.

Like so many things in this life, you don’t miss rain until you don’t have it anymore. So you don’t always miss it right away.

I wonder what other things I should be grateful for before they go missing?

Thank you, God, for refreshing the earth with the water over which your Spirit brooded at creation … which flooded to save Noah and concealed to save Moses and parted to save the Israelites … which immersed Your Son and all of Your adopted ones, washing us clean of the earthiness which separates us from your heavenliness.

Fifteen men gifted with an unlimited passion for Christ and His body.

I met with four of them as a staff member for the first time this morning at 7:00 a.m. for their weekly “visioning” meeting with the ministry and office staff. In spite of the fact that I early on made a comment that I didn’t mean to be disparaging – that trying to capture a vision is a lot like trying to grab fog – they were welcoming and affirming.

The previous meetings, I gathered, had established some solid, foundational principles to guide further discussion. Before long, though, the conversation took a different turn altogether … about a long-time problem we have had in our church in helping people feel welcomed and at home there, especially among the singles.

I’ve long felt that the singles group is the incubator of our church; the place from whence its current leaders have arisen since the time I was single and started attending at my home church 20+ years ago.

We spoke freely of the challenges, the attempts both failed and successful, to bridge the gap between the “insiders” and the “outsiders” and concluded that the matter was too urgent and too deep to remain a simple matter of visioning.

What impressed me most about the elders – and staff – I met with this morning is that they were not always willing to agree, but they were always willing to listen and seek a consensus.

No one pulled rank. No one was defensive. No one was impatient or unkind or insisted on his own way … well, you know where I’m going with this.

And we all had to agree that, as pretty much the ultimate “insiders,” we needed to listen to the problem and possible solutions as articulated by the folks who feel like they’re “outsiders.”

The four men I met with this morning may not be typical of the remaining eleven, but I believe they all share the same Spirit, the same passion, the same vision – even if articulated in fifteen different ways.

My prayer of examen this evening can’t be articulated in pretty words and compliments. The closest I can come is:

Thank you, God, for working in different ways through each of these different shepherds, and testifying to the unity You create through Your common Spirit in the bond of peace through them.

I’ve been tagged by Brian Burkett over at This Road That We Travel, where I don’t think I have ever actually posted anything though I have been invited.

The meme challenge is to pick out your twenty-third post, find the fifth sentence and ponder any deep hidden psychological meanings that may be found therein, and post your ponderings.

Well, the fifth sentence of my twenty-third post was:

“You can read more about it at http://www.ualr.edu/cpsdept/bridgingthedivide/.”

It was a post about the Bridging the Divide panel that my wife Angi put together as an event associated with the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library here in Little Rock last fall.

Deep hidden psychological meanings?

I’m a positive person, for the most part, and I believe in an individual’s innate power to achieve, especially when augmented by the Holy Spirit … so perhaps “You can” sums up my position on that.

I hold a B.A. in journalism from Harding University, so I guess “read more about it” might be a transliteration of the streetcorner paperboy‘s slogan of a hundred years ago: “Extry! Extry! Read all about it!”

“At” is a preposition which is only one letter off from “proposition” which is what I made when I asked Angi to marry me and that was the best decision I’ve ever made even if it may not have been hers. And we were “at” one of my favorite places in the world when I proposed – on the luncheon train at Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

The link goes to the UALR site. Angi works there. I used to work there. I managed the Chancellor’s Web pages. Linking is something I do. I do Web. I link. I link related and unrelated things. Lance Link was a secret chimp. I don’t know what was secret about it. It was obvous he was a chimp. I find absurdities like these in the links between unrelated items which amuse me. I’m just peculiar that way.

Good grief! Are you still with me? I put in as many links as I could so you could have an excuse to escape this insufferable drivel politely!

Now I’m supposed to tag five other unfortunates to do the same thing with this meme.

For crying out loud, why would I saddle anyone with the nonsense I just went through?

Sorry. Not in my nature.

But if it sounds fun to you and the fifth of your twenty-third has a lot more potential than mine, please consider yourself tagged and be sure to leave me a comment so I won’t miss it, will you?

New Wineskins now has two XML feeds – specialized snippets of code which you can use to keep track of the latest updates to our articles and blog, respectively.

“That’s nice,” you might think, “but when I click on them I see nothing but codelby-gook.”

Quite true. To make them work for you, you right-click on each (click-and-hold, if you’re a Mac user), and drag to something like “Copy Link Location” and release. Then you paste them – when prompted – into an application for your desktop (such as FeedReader or others found at RSS Info) which can read them, or into a Web site / aggregator (such as BlogLines or My Yahoo) which can read them.

The New Wineskins Blog feed is in Atom format; the article feed is in RSS format. Both use XML. Now that tells you a whole lot, doesn’t it? The fact is, neither format has gained an advantage over the other, and since the blog’s feed is automatically generated in Atom, I just thought it might satisfy the RSS stalwarts to offer the article feed in their format. Many reader and aggregator applications can track both kinds of feeds for you (and most of the earlier versions of them).

If you’re interested, Blogdigger hosts a growing Church of Christ Blog Aggregator group, where you will also find the New Wineskins Blog listed.

Oh, yes, there’s also a JavaScript feed for both New Wineskins articles and blog posts that you’ll see on a few blogs and sites. I’m hoping to move that to the new site’s host server soon and will contact as many of that feed’s hosts as I can before it happens, so they can carry the current one on their blogs and sites.

I hope all the feeds help satisfy your spiritual needs.

(The new one for articles is linked to the headline above.)

It’s not often that I’m caught wordless.

Today I am. I am anticipating – with great joy – beginning my new position at my church Monday morning, where my title may or may not end up including the word “minister.”

I am also saddened to know that two of my favorite blog authors are thinking seriously of dropping out of the formal, paid ministry to pursue other careers and continue ministry as an unpaid reward.

One of them has committed to decide, with his wife, today.

I’m not so bound to the illusion of the church requiring paid ministers, huge edifices and expansive programs that I believe this choice would be a bad thing for either of them. But the causes of their desire to depart careers in ministry – perhaps never to return – does make me sad indeed.

Paul made tents on the side. Luke was evidently a doctor. Maybe Peter left his nets permanently; maybe not. (It sounds like he was back at them in John 21 ….)

To be sure, we need more ministers in other professions. And all kinds of churches are finding it more difficult to find qualified ministers; it’s a trend that continues.

I just don’t know what to think about it, what to write about it – most of all, what to pray about it. Perhaps, like everything else I should pray about, I just need to turn it over to the Lord and trust His wisdom, power and providence.

Neal, Brian: My prayers are for you.

But they are wordless.