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"Saddam Hussein escaped justice," someone said on NPR radio this Saturday morning. This murderous Iraqi dictator was found guilty of the 1982 murder of 148 Shiite Muslim civilians and sentenced to the gallows, a sentence that was carried out promptly last night.
The question lingers, "But what about the hundreds of thousands of others he slaughtered? Shouldn't he have to pay for those deaths also?" But this raises another question: "How?" All he had was one life and that one was taken. Biggest question of all: "So where is the justice in this?" Answer: We may not expect absolute justice on this side of the grave. On the other side, well, that's another story.
They said Saddam's last words were "God is great." I take that to mean he uttered "Allah Ak-bar," the phrase which is so much a part of Islam.
My word on this is: A few seconds after Saddam's neck snapped, he began to understand just how great God truly is, and not in any way he anticipated.
"It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgement." (Hebrews 9:27)
The way I read Holy Scripture, Saddam's troubles have just started. You would not want to be in that man's shoes.
This, incidentally, is why Scripture makes so much of the death of Jesus on the cross, that act by which He paid the complete price for every sin ever committed. Every sin, every one, forever. Yes, he died for Saddam's sins too. It's why believers make so much of the mercy and salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ.
If we all got what we truly deserved, we would be in the same predicament as Saddam at this moment, awaiting our appointment with the Supreme Judge of the universe from whose righteous decision there is no appeal.
Recently, we told on this website a story we titled "The Brown Bag Christmas." We specified very plainly that Carrie Fuller had shared with our Sunday School class this story from her own family, and we clearly spelled out that the small child in the story is her own grandmother. What is fascinating about that is that soon afterwards, I began receiving e-mails from people asking, "Did that really happen?"
I was glad to see that other websites and some publications picked up the story and adapted it to their purposes and reprinted it. Most chose to leave out the Carrie Fuller connection. The bad thing about that is that this wonderful and authentic story now lives in cyberspace and just like thousands of other tales which may or may not be true, this one is now circling the earth without proper identification. People will read it and think, "Just another Christmas myth," and let it go at that. And I hate that. I grant you it's a nice story and perhaps not of earth-shaking magnitude, but this whole thing symbolizes a larger issue for me.
People need to know whether a story is true. Someone inside us wants to know. Did this happen? Are these people real? Can I count on this? Or did someone just make this up?
They used to ask John F. Kennedy, Jr., whether he remembered his father and if he recalled playing around the desk in the Oval Office. He said something like, "I have a hard time knowing whether I'm actually remembering those things or I'm remembering something I've seen a hundred times on television."
A half-dozen years ago, Fred Rochlin published a book ("Man in a Baseball Cap" by HarperCollins) containing stories of World War II which he had shared with his family over the years. It's a typical war story, well-told and interesting, but the small book ends with an admission I've never seen anywhere else. Here it is verbatim.
"I remember flying from Dakar in the Senegal across the Sahara Desert through the Zagora Pass into Marrakech, Morocco. We were low on fuel. We landed at this dusty town, Timbuktu, mud huts, everyone speaking French. American Air Force fuel depot. Thousands of barrels of fifty-gallon, one hundred octane aviation fuel. We had cold beers. Refueled, took off, flew through the Zagora Pass, through the Atlas Mountains and into Marrakech. I remember all this with pristine clarity."
"It never happened. I checked my old navigator log. We didn't land to refuel. We flew right through the Zagora Pass. And we wouldn't have refueled at Timbuktu anyway. Too far away from the course of our flight. So, where did that memory of that dusty French African town come from?"
I'm toward the last of a two week vacation, the period in and around Christmas and New Year's. The first week, I drove up to Nauvoo, Alabama, and spent 3 days with my parents. On Thursday, all my siblings came in and we had a great visit. They left late that afternoon and Friday promised to be a quiet day. So I called J. L. Rice in Double Springs.
J. L. and I were best friends at Winston County High School back in the 1950's and after working in Chicago for several decades, he and Betty are back here. He's mostly retired, but has a barn and cattle and a huge yard and grandchildren, plenty to keep him occupied. He leads the worship at Meek Baptist Church in Arley, a resort community on the shores of the massive Smith Lake. Betty is the church secretary and her brother Etsel Riddle is the pastor, so don't cross one of them unless you want the whole family on your case!
Anyway, I called him Friday morning and asked if we could have coffee that afternoon at the only fast-food place in town, Jack's Hamburgers. "I'll call around and see if I can find any of the gang," he said. Nine of our classmates showed up. Pretty good on a two-hour notice. (I wonder if any other graduating class of WCHS could have done that, especially considering that we graduated nearly 49 years ago.)
We sat at a large round table in the middle of that little restaurant for the next two hours, laughing and reminiscing until our sides hurt. J. L. whipped out his digital camera and the counter girl took our picture. Later, he printed out a copy of it on my computer, and back at home, I produced a cartoon version of it.
(I'll e-mail it all to Marty and he can put it on the website the first of next week. [as promised, here it is] Right now, he's at Nauvoo with his family, visiting his grandparents and letting 9-year-old Darilyn and nearly-5-year-old Jack run free on the farm. Neil is there with his three, so the cousins are bonding. When I called Thursday evening, they had been fishing in the pond and were now lighting a bonfire.)
Going east on Interstate 10, just before you leave Jefferson Parish and enter Orleans, construction workers are hard at work a few feet to your left putting together a massive "fly-over" that will allow commuters driving into Metairie from the Pontchartrain Causeway to avoid the most congested part of the interstate and get on into the downtown area. It's due to be finished in 2009 and is costing 69 million dollars. Now they're having to take up much of the concrete they've laid and start over.
Inspectors found that 350 cubic yards of concrete--that would be some 40 cement trucks worth--will have to be ripped up and replaced. All we're told is that the concrete was "adulterated," and a spokeswoman for Boh Bros. Construction said they're looking into how that particular cement made its way into the supply chain. Inspectors say the plan is for the concrete in this corridor to last 75 years, but that this particular concrete is thinned down to the point that it would be worn out in less than half that time.
Inspection is good. Strict enforcement is great. Accountability is a terrific thing. We motorists have to trust that the highways and bridges going up everywhere around here will do what they are supposed to. Most of the major thoroughfares throughout this city are elevated, some of them frighteningly so, like the well-named "Highrise" in Gentilly that passes over the Industrial Canal.
How does that line go? "People will not do what you expect; they will do what you inspect."
My friend John got involved in a conversation, I suppose we could call it, with a group of lesbians on a website they maintain. It felt more like getting caught in a crossfire, for my money.
"Your name came up," he warned, "and I thought I'd better warn you, you may be hearing from them on your website." Thanks a lot.
I went to the link John provided and read his extensive give-and-take with the participants in that group. It was not a pretty thing. He would type in some fairly reasonable statement in disagreement with their position and they would explode with ugliness, crudity, and accusations. He was a blankety-blank bigot, and once my name got involved--I'm still not sure how that happened--then I was a bigot of that brand and to that degree also.
I responded to John that I would not be saying anything to anyone from that camp trying to draw me into the fray. Some fights are not worth the effort. As the oldtimer said, a dog can whip a skunk, but it ain't worth it.
I was telling a mutual friend about John and wondering why he even engaged these sisters in that conversation in the first place. He said, "Oh, John loves a good fight." We laughed and I said, "He reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt's dog." TR's mutt was always getting in fights and coming out on the losing end. A reporter said, "Mr. President, your dog's not much of a fighter, is he?" Roosevelt said, "Oh no, he's a wonderful fighter. He's just a poor judge of dog!"
I suppose someone has to engage the homosexual activists and respond to their charges and then take the heat from the conflagration. But not everyone is called to that kind of verbal conflict. I, for one, know almost nothing about lesbianism or male homosexuality. (I prefer not to call them 'gays,' since I've never met one yet who was gay, meaning "showing a joyous or merry mood." --Webster.)
I've heard that the actor Denzel Washington is a Christian. I hope so, because at this distance he seems like such a fine young man.
Tuesday afternoon, I saw his movie "Deja Vu," which was filmed here earlier this year. The local reviewer recommends you suspend your critical faculties and just enjoy the picture, even though the plot is rather fanciful. That's what I do anyway, so it worked out just fine.
I'll not review the movie. I recommend it if you like crime dramas. I recall their shutting down the Crescent City Connection for half-days at a time while the movie people were either filming on the bridge or exploding things underneath it. And they manufactured a major thoroughfare downtown off I-10 called "Bayou Boeuf." It doesn't exist, but the plot needed them to get out of town easily and into the open country quickly. Oh that it were this simple.
It would have been funny, had it not been rather pathetic. As the sheriff's deputies were evicting the tent-dwellers from the flatland alongside the Mississippi River Monday, one of the dispossessed called out for the television camera, "But that's my home! It's my home."
Well, I thought, it shouldn't be your home. It's government land, it's subject to flooding, and no one is allowed to live on the batture. If you think New Orleans is not a safe place due to its low elevation, this is a hundred times worse.
The batture is the narrow strip of dry ground between the river and the levee, sometimes no more than 50 yards, sometimes wider. As to exactly who owns that land, that has been in dispute almost since the levees began to be built. The quickest answer is the federal government. And yet, I can take you over the levee in Orleans Parish and show you four or five houses on stilts that were grandfathered in, the result being that the people own their own homes and, the way it came to me, residents do not live in the state of Louisiana, but in the USA only. Those homes get passed down from generation to generation, because to sell to an outsider would take an act of Congress. Literally.
Where I walk up on the levee each morning, where Florida Street intersects with the levee and the river, you'll find a number of private businesses alongside the river--companies that trade with barges and towboats--and a sign advertising a lot for lease. I asked the levee policeman this morning who owns that land. "Some private individual," he said. "They have squatters' rights." I take that to mean a form of being grandfathered in. They owned that parcel at the time the federal government decided it was taking possession of the batture.
Neighbors told the television reporter that they had recently seen as many as a dozen tents on the batture at that spot. Monday, there were only three, but they were full size, able to accommodate an entire family. Litter was everywhere; these were not neat people, even though they have this giant bayou (okay, Mississippi River) flowing past their back door.
"What bothers me about that," the levee policeman said to me, "is they were camping just inside Orleans Parish. Now, all they'll have to do is walk upriver a mile and they'll be our problem." "Our" meaning, Jefferson Parish.
Now, I'm aware those folks may be otherwise homeless and may feel they have no other alternative but to erect a tent on forbidden property. Aside from that, it's worth our making a couple of spiritual parallels and observations.
I did not mean it as criticism, but I once said to a young pastor, "Good sermon. I enjoyed it. But there's just one thing." He perked up, knew something was coming, and said, "Yes?"
I said, "You gave us the prescription before you had finished the diagnosis." I paused to let that sink in, then said, "Everyone enjoys your preaching. You have great presence and a good style. So this is about the sermon itself and not you."
"The audience is not prepared for the good news of the Gospel until you tell them what the bad news is."
He got it, and nothing more was needed.
Of all the Christmas Scriptures, my favorite is the line the head angel uttered to the shepherds while mid-air above the Bethlehem meadow: "I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be to all people...." (Luke 2:10)
You and I know about news. We have 24-hour news radio and television stations. The "news" paper arrives in our front yards every morning.
For an occurrence to make the news, it must meet three qualifications: it must be real (it's true), recent (it didn't happen last year), and relevant (it has some meaning to the hearers).
Real, recent, relevant. It happened, it just happened or we just found out about it, and it impacts us.
"I'm on vacation." I say that to myself twelve times a day. Margaret overhears and says, "Why do you keep saying that? Are you trying to convince yourself?"
I tell her, "I'm trying to shut down my inner stress." I recall for her how in 1971 when we moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and I joined the staff of the First Baptist Church, our first year was one of the hardest of my ministry, and yet the stress was all self-induced. "I felt bad all the time, like I should have been accomplishing more than I was." No one was criticizing or pressuring me. The voice driving and accusing and stressing me was my own.
If you have been to New Orleans and seen the effect of Katrina and her floodwaters on our city, if you have driven the mile-after-mile of shut-down neighborhoods with their overgrown yards and boarded up strip malls, if you have grieved over the closed churches and their thousands of dispersed members, then you understand how frustrating it can be to be looked upon as a leader when you accomplish so little.
"Everyone brags on me," I tell her, "and says I'm doing a good job. So it's not other people. It's me."
That's why I decided to take this week--the one prior to Christmas--as a vacation. There's not a lot going on anywhere around here this week or next, and it's a good time to vegetate without the sense that I'm letting someone down. Then, next week, the time between Christmas and New Year's, our offices are closed anyway, a custom my predecessors started a long time ago and which I'm not about to change.
I suggest to pastors they never take the last week of December as official vacation. There's practically nothing going on in any church then, the phone doesn't ring and no one drops by, and it's a great time to catch up on your reading.
So, I'm trying to shut down. It's two weeks in a row of telling myself, "I'm on vacation."
"What exactly does that mean?" Margaret asked.
For years, nobody gave a thought to my birthday. I was never given to a lot of hoopla, so that was fine with me. I'm not against celebrating special events or observing religious festivals, but well, you don't see people throwing birthday parties in Scripture, so I got along just fine without one.
Then one day my sister got into the act. Carolyn loves making people feel special and she had this bright idea.
"It'll just be a little dinner for your birthday," she said. "Just the immediate family."
She wanted to do it so badly, I agreed to it. And, sure enough, it worked out. About 10 of us gathered at my house, Carolyn brought the cake and our other sister Patricia made dinner, and it was a nice evening.
That was the first year.
The next year, Carolyn started planning the birthday dinner several weeks in advance. She was not satisfied with the intimate gathering we had enjoyed last year. She had enjoyed it, she said, but she felt badly that more family wasn't included. This year the whole clan would be invited.
I suppose everybody showed up, because our house was crowded and some had to eat out on the front porch. We had a big time, laughing, singing songs, eating. I bet I got my neck hugged a hundred times. I blew out the candles and we ate cake. To my surprise, a few people brought presents. That was nice, but unnecessary.
The third year, Carolyn realized she was on to something.
The annual Christmas dinner for the ministers and spouses of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans was held at the Ormond Plantation on Tuesday night, December 12, 2006. We had told the hostess for this wonderful ancient facility we anticipated having 150 present. On Friday before the big event, we called to ask them to increase that figure to 200. In post-Katrina New Orleans, our ministers and their families are hungry for fellowship with each other and for an excuse to get out of their homes--in many cases, a FEMA trailer--and celebrate.
As the director of missions for the association and responsible for the evening, I arrived early to make certain everything was in order. Even though I have driven River Road in Destrehan hundreds of times over the last 16 years, I was not certain precisely where Ormond Plantation was and ended up driving past the entrance and having to turn around and go back. Darkness had come early to our part of the Deep South and the heavy fog was complicating matters.
Since this plantation and several others in the area faces the Mississippi River, separated from that body of water only by River Road and the levee, fog is always a problem in the winter. Tuesday night, it was as bad as I've ever seen it.
A large sign announcing "Ormond Plantation" sits perpendicular to the two-lane highway and in the daytime can be read easily. However the darkness, the fog, and the lack of any kind of night-time illumination meant most of the invited guests would drive right past their destination.
I pulled into the parking lot, got out my flashlight, and walked through the heavy mist to the sign by the road. Then I had a decision to make.
At our weekly Wednesday meeting of the Baptist pastors of New Orleans, Oscar Williams (Good News Baptist Church) shared their plans for next Saturday's neighborhood ministry. They'll be going door to door in the Destrehan area where their displaced church is meeting these days, looking for anyone needing groceries. They have 300 food baskets to give away. And that's not all.
They'll be asking for information on the children in these homes--how many, what ages, boy or girl. Then, they will have a drawing. Lots of drawings, in fact. Seventy drawings for seventy bicycles. Bikes of all sizes, brand new, a gift from Wal-Mart.
Oscar missed our Ministers' Christmas dinner Tuesday night because his brother-in-law called at the last minute to say the truck with the bicycles had arrived and they needed a place to store them. "We've got them all over my house, throughout the First Baptist Church of Destrehan (where Good News is worshiping temporarily), and in my brother-in-law's home."
We all wanted to know, "How did you get Wal-Mart to give you seventy bicycles?" "We asked them," Oscar said. "What a novel concept," some wit remarked.
Wal-Mart remembers New Orleans.
At the end of our Tuesday night Christmas dinner for all our ministers and their spouses, I drove home through the heavy fog giving thanks to God.
Thanks for the 200 or more who attended. In the old days (pre-Katrina), we might have a hundred show up, and we had to create gimmicks to get them to mix and meet. Tuesday night, the decibel level was off the scale as they visited and laughed and hugged. The dinner had ended and it was time to begin the program, but I hated to call a halt to the fellowship. The joy in that place was palpable.
Thanks for the gifts of God's people that paid the tab. Get 200 people into a plantation house for a Christmas dinner and the tab easily runs into the thousands of dollars. One of our churches provided child care, but we paid for the workers. Jim Chester--evangelist, funnyman, storyteller, and magician--provided a fascinating program and kept us laughing. God's people gave us the money to pay him a nice honorarium.
Thanks for our special guests. Gibbie McMillan represented the Louisiana Baptist Convention so well, reminding everyone of the special feature of our denomination called the Cooperative Program by which a person gives his offering into his church and touches the entire world. Pastor Keith Manuel promoted the Louisiana Baptist Evangelism Conference coming up January 22-23 at the First Baptist Church of New Orleans. Our wonderful servant leaders from Operation NOAH Rebuild and Global Maritime Ministries were present and blessed us, as always.
Thankful for the joy. I don't know how else to say it. Recently, on this page, I left the Sam Shoemaker story of the man who knocked at his door late one night and said, "I just feel I need to thank Someone." I know the feeling. I'm grateful for the pastors of the big churches who came to the Christmas dinner because their presence sets a good example and encourages everyone else. I'm grateful for the Spanish pastors who attended, because they actually did their own dinner a week ago in downtown New Orleans and could have chosen to skip this one. And I'm particularly grateful for the pastors of the bivocational churches who came at great inconvenience, because they have to rise early and be at work while some of us are just stirring.
Thank you, Father. What an honor to be Yours and to be used by Thee.
My wife's favorite television channel is the USA Network. Their slogan is: "Characters Welcome."
Someone ought to erect signs with those words at every entrance to New Orleans. If there ever was a city of characters in America, this is the one.
In 1990, when we told my parents we were moving to New Orleans from North Carolina, my dad said, "Well good. It'll be good to get you back down South." I said, "Dad, there's something you need to know. The people of North Carolina are just exactly like the people of Alabama and Mississippi. But the people of New Orleans are strange." Or I might have said "weird." And I did not mean it as a putdown.
Over these years, I've moderated in my views of the folks down here. Most are normal in every way, just exactly like your neighbors in any city in America, even if they do have unusual and foreign-sounding last names like Bourgeois (pronounced boor-zwha) and Melancon (pronounced muh-lah-sah with a nasal ring). They're great folks.
But characters, that's what we have down here. And honestly, it may be the best thing about living in New Orleans. Now, I pastored the First Baptist Church of Kenner, which ain't New Orleans exactly (or at all), but it's part of the city and people who run New Orleans live all over Kenner and Metairie and it may as well be.
All of this is leading up to saying that we lost a real character last week. Marshall Sehorn died. We had a little service at the Lake Lawn Crematorium early Saturday morning. His ashes will be divided, half taken to Concord, North Carolina, where he grew up, and the other half buried here in Metairie. We'll be having a real memorial service sometime after the first of the year.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm being too hard on our mayor and his team. Then I read something like the following, which appeared in Saturday's "Money" section of the local newspaper....
Under the headline, "Developers Castigate City Hall," writer Greg Thomas reports on a 3 day tour of Katrina-land by a group of investors and developers brought together by the Urban Land Institute. They finished their excursion at the 17th Street Canal, the dividing line separating Jefferson and Orleans Parishes, and then had lunch in the Quarter at the Monteleone Hotel. Afterward, they met with reporters.
Rufus Lusk, a realtor from Baltimore, expressed amazement that the City Planning Commission had so few planners and that it has just recently been approved to hire more. "There are planners from cities that would volunteer to come and help," he insisted. The American Planners Association would be the place to start to find such helpers. Lusk says the last thing a developer needs to hear when he's looking at making an investment here is that it will take months to have development plans reviewed and placed on an agenda to be approved or modified.
"Who's in charge?" Lusk asked. Who indeed.
How not to take a poll.
The East Jefferson neighborhood section of Thursday's Times-Picayune posts a question each week and gives out a phone number to register your answer. Last week, the question was whether Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee's proposal to install surveillance cameras in high crime areas is a good idea. Only 7 callers said 'no,' and 363 said 'yes.'
The question Thursday was based on something we reported here last week, that a University of New Orleans survey found that one-third of the residents say they are "likely" or "somewhat likely" to move away from this area in the next couple of years. So the question is: "What is the likelihood of your leaving?" The phone number is listed, and then these instructions: "Likely--Press 1." "Somewhat likely--Press 2." And that's it.
There is no way for one to register that you have no desire to leave. The assumption is that you are planning to leave, and the only question is how eager you are to vamoose. Not a good way to take a poll, unless one figures into his computations that every resident who does not phone that number is planning to stay. In that case, you might end up with numbers such as: "Likely: 263," "Somewhat Likely: 472," and "Planning to stay: 134,547."
Whatever numbers their little poll produces will be meaningless.
The ubiquitous FEMA trailers...240 life-saving square feet of cramped misery...must leave Jefferson Parish before April 1, according to the Parish Council. They will allow appeals for exemptions to this ordinance, but otherwise homeowners must have them gone by the last of March.
From the beginning, my understanding is that FEMA has said the 60,000 or more trailers in the metro area were meant to stay for 18 months and no longer. If they insist on holding to that deadline, expect howls and protests like nothing you've ever heard. Sunday while driving through St. Bernard Parish on the way downriver to Poydras, I found myself in the world's largest trailer park. Block after block, trailers in every driveway. Lots of activity, as people were working on houses and in yards and hauling building materials up and down streets. But there is no way Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemine parishes will be finished with FEMA trailers for another five years.
Dr. Edward Blakely, the city's new recovery chief, is confident New Orleans can emerge from this crisis as a transformed city. "It's my business," he said. "It's what cities around the world pay me to do." Fine, professor. That's what we want. Tell us what to do.
Last week, an editor with Rick Warren's internet magazine for pastors asked me to write an article for them. He had seen something I wrote perhaps 3 years ago about how I had started taking care of my body, lost some weight, and got serious about exercise. "Tell us what you are doing and let's encourage pastors to do the same," was the general thrust of the assignment.
Well, somewhere in the body of that article I commented on the benefits of my program. Years ago, I used to have colds a couple of weeks every winter and from time to time experienced lower back pain. "I no longer have colds and it's been years since my lower back has given me trouble," I said. That was last Friday.
Monday morning I woke up with lower back pain. Spent the day on a heating pad and taking muscle relaxers. Tuesday was a little better; Wednesday a lot better.
I know what did it. Sunday afternoon, I had slouched on my recliner and watched the Saints' football game, then spent a couple of hours at the computer typing the day's blog. The computer chair is canvas, which means absolutely no back support at all. Tuesday, I threw it out and bought a real chair at Office Depot.
Nothing like a dose of humility to get the week started off right.
Wednesday morning, we began our weekly pastors meeting with a brief "associational executive committee" meeting. This group is made up of the pastor of each church and one elected layperson. Instead of meeting quarterly as formerly, we've decided to meet the first Wednesday of each month in order to stay on top of developments.
The administrative committee reported that although our associational receipts (the monthly gifts from our churches) are running about 70 percent of normal, we are spending much less than normal also, so we're doing fine. They announced we are signing a contract with PayCheck to handle our payroll, primarily for the security they offer against errors in handling taxes. One of our churches ran into such problems not long ago and they are learning the hard way how difficult the IRS can be in these situations.
"As you know, this has been a difficult year for our city," the letter began. "We have all had to make sacrifices we never thought we would be faced with, which has brought me to this difficult decision my family and I have had to make."
The letter from our family doctor continues, "I regrettably have to inform you that as of December 29, 2006 I will be leaving my practice and moving to Houston, Texas."
Dr. Irma Pfister is an excellent young doctor who was recommended to us by our E-N-T doctor and has treated both Margaret and me for the past couple of years. My other internist--I'm at the age where we have lots of medical people in our lives--Dr. Kathleen Wilson, moved to Florida earlier this year. Same kind of letter, same reasons.
It's like an epidemic around here, doctors moving out. Perhaps they have lost so many clients and with a smaller population base, they are unable to earn the kind of income they need. Just as likely, it's a matter of not wanting to live in such a depressing environment, particularly when a partnership is available in a modern, clean, progressive city where the issues facing New Orleans are all left behind.
We understand, but it truly hurts.
I bumped into a seminary classmate today on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary where he and I sat through three years of classes together in the mid-1960s. We exchanged pleasantries and chatted about the challenge we're facing in this city, with the rebuilding of our neighborhoods and churches. My friend is president of one of our Southern Baptist seminaries and as prominent a personage as our denomination has. As we parted, he said, "I almost envy you."
Almost. Not quite, I imagine.
Two of our senior champions are honored in Sunday's Times-Picayune.
In the section where they run old photos each week--sort of, "Do you remember this?"--Bob Vetter's 1945 high school picture shows him in his football uniform. He was a star for Holy Cross High School as they won all kinds of championships. Bob attended LSU, then worked for his grandfather's lumber company in St. Bernard Parish, and then in 1949, joined the Marines and fought in Korea where he was awarded the Purple Heart. Here's the account, as told by his daughter, Lisa....
"My dad was a forward observer for a heavy mortar company. He had to go beyond the front lines and radio back to the Marines where the enemy was set up. He had to carry a 45 pound radio and his gear, which weighed 60 pounds. A Korean soldier spotted him and shot him in the back. He started rolling down a hill and landed in a foxhole, which actually saved his life. His fellow Marines found him and took him back to the base where they (medical personnel) operated on him in a tent that had a mud floor."
He survived and came home and now owns and runs Vetter Lumber Company. He is also--and this is why I'm telling the story--the associate pastor of Poydras Baptist Church and one super nice guy. Still as handsome at 78 years as he was as a teenager.
Bill Rogers has half a page devoted just to him in the paper. The absolutely lovely photo has him standing, hands in pockets, grinning big, looking this way. "Peoples Health" is sponsoring the selection of a senior adult from time to time as their Champion. Here's the ad....
I mentioned Wednesday that a couple of our African-American pastors are supporting the plans to demolish New Orleans' public housing projects and replace them with multi-income planned developments. I should mention that Pastor Marshall Truehill of First United Baptist on Jeff Davis Parkway is vocal in his opposition to those plans. Friday's Times-Picayune quotes Marshall, who was attending a meeting which HUD officials called to give information and take questions on the issue. He asked if the former residents of those projects had bonafide rental contracts prior to Katrina and if so, did the lease have a clause that one could be evicted because of a natural disaster. Columnist Lolis Eric Elie calls that "an important question." Apparently, those attending the meeting came away feeling this is a done deal and their dissent is meaningless.
Thursday, en route to Natchitoches to speak to the Baptist association's annual Christmas dinner for ministers and spouses, I ran by Fellowship Baptist Church at Prairieville where a large group from several churches in Idaho and Utah are constructing the new sanctuary. The rain was coming down, but they were hard at work inside the roofed and enclosed building. David Vise, student minister from Calvary Baptist Church of Idaho Falls, ID, called everyone together and let me address them. David told how one day back in 1974 he walked into my office at the First Baptist Church of Columbus, Mississippi, and we prayed together and he gave his life to Christ. He finished seminary at Southwestern in Fort Worth and is one of those young men we preachers look to with pride.
I thanked the group for their involvement in our area and urged them to make the drive into New Orleans while they're this close. We'd like to have them take more mission trip down this way to help us build housing for New Orleanians.
That night, I tried my best to thank the Natchitoches Baptist Association and the First Baptist Church of that city for their work in our area. These are the good folks who took the lead and bore the costs for the Church Library Conference held at Marrero a month ago. Lee Dickson is the director of missions there, and if the Lord has a finer servant, I'd like to meet him. Of course, Hope and Dr. Jerry Ferguson spearheaded everything. People involved in church media work all over this country will recognize the name of Hope Winter Ferguson who has published books and articles and other materials to help churches establish libraries and do it right. In addition to being committed to this work, they are incredible friends and hosted me overnight.
In Friday's letters column, one writer wants the city to open the public housing developments and let the displaced New Orleanians come home. Just below, another writes, "All public housing should be demolished and townhouses built in their place, with the residents of public housing given the opportunity to buy...with federally backed, low-interest loans." The debate continues. Meanwhile, plans for the demolition apparently go forward.