P.S. about the P.S.

When I was hastily cranking out yesterday's post, I forgot about my P.S. from the post a week ago:

P.S. There is an old wives' tale that if you make a wish when you catch sight of the first robin of spring (before the robin flies away), the wish will come true. I saw my first robin of 2017 on today's death march and made a wish before he flew off... You'll be the first to know if it comes true. Promise.

It came true. ;)

(Theologically, not ornithologically...) 

There are three dates in my life...

...that are significant because they are singular milestone experiences. One of them is today.

I passed my theological interview this afternoon, so I am certified to be ordained upon completion of my study program (August 2). I cannot put into words what this means to me; however, it was God who got me through... I am just amazed at how clearly I feel led to serve as a pastor!

The other two dates are June 16, 1963, the day I was baptized in a Presbyterian church in Westfield, NJ (by a minister whose last name was Christian), and September 16, 1993, the day my wife and father pinned on my Chief Petty Officer anchors.

Of course, my wife and I share the intimate experiences of our wedding ceremony and the births of our daughters (well, okay, I was there for those in a support role, but you know what I mean...).

I have to say that I am humbled and grateful before God who has been leading me to this day (since June 16, 1963) and who gave me a loving wife that continues to be part of all that I am. I am so undeserving, but oh so thankful.

Now it's time to drop into a coma until tomorrow. Then it's back to work...

It's true! The Lord's work is never done.

С Богом, ya'll!

More Fitbit cyber-bling!

Today in our corner of Indiana the sun came out-- at least it was out this morning for a while. The temperature around noon was rumored to be climbing toward 60...

So I decided to go on a solo death march in a t-shirt and shorts (in northeast Indiana in mid-January!). As I was on the back end, the ol' Fitbit had, well...a fit. When it vibrated , I checked my phone and saw that I had earned the Penguin Badge. I think the Fitbit people should award actual badges or plaques or something for my I-love-me wall. Actually, I broke my daily steps record during the 5 miles and some change I walked (and ran in spurts a few times, just to try my now 2-year old knees...it wasn't easy) on my death march. I'm hoping to get 20,000 in one day at some point.

It's such a mild day, I'm going to crank up the grill on the patio in about an hour.

Still have a bronchitis cough, but it's starting to trail off. I'm still a walking phlegm comet, but I'm better than I was a week ago.

Killer week coming up. If you don't hear from me by or on Friday evening, I've had a debilitating stroke. Another plea, if you're a prayer (pray-er), say one for me!

I'm going in.

С Богом.

P.S. There is an old wives' tale that if you make a wish when you catch sight of the first robin of spring (before the robin flies away), the wish will come true. I saw my first robin of 2017 on today's death march and made a wish before he flew off... You'll be the first to know if it comes true. Promise.

One nation under Trump? (or Who ya gonna call?)...

Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Are we really-- officially-- one nation under Trump? I watched the inauguration and listened to his address... He's no John F. Kennedy; however, I say let's give the guy a chance. I trust that God knows what He's doing, strange as it seems...

While pumping gas this morning, I noticed an anachronism next to the air dispenser (which takes credit cards...), a pay phone. And a working one at that. It made me feel old, as I'm one of the aging boomers who knows the origin of the phrase "drop a dime on" (used to be, boys and girls, that you could use one of these pay phone gizmos to place a local-- that means not long-distance, which means...nah, never mind-- call for a dime).

What a week this has been! Bronchitis aside, it's been like standing in familiar surroundings, but in a snow storm (flakes swirling everywhere, low visibility), trying to find the right path home (or, at least, to shelter). I think I may be brain-dead.

However. A week from today I will have my certification for ministry interview (we call it a TI-- Theological Interview-- here at the monastery). It is the sole (soul?) focus of my existence for the next 7 days. Once that has passed, I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief and...well, focus on finishing out my program of study.

And incidentally, not coincidentally nor intentionally, the cat and I will be batchin' it from Sunday to Sunday while my wife is away on business. Maybe it's a good thing? More likely it's a God thing to keep the distractions to a minimum...

So, again, if you're a prayer, please add me to your list. No name is necessary. God's gotten to know me pretty well over the last 6 or 7 months!

(And, if YOU know me pretty well, don't drop a dime on me...besides, God already knows all about it.)

Until we meet again... С Богом, ya'll.

Fix your man-bun, stop whinin' about Trump, and sip your...

...triple, venti, half sweet, non-fat, caramel macchiato while you read through the online diary of Lt. George W. Pearcy, an Army POW during WWII who was sick and sweating in the hold of a Japanese prisoner transfer ship before a U.S. sub torpedoed it in the South Pacific.

Perhaps this man's words, penciled on scraps of paper and can labels, will inspire you...

Maybe, just maybe, you can forget about what your country can do for you...

Imagine what it must have been like for those men and women who defended our values and, yes, your freedom to make a statement everywhere you go, from the food you eat, to the beverages you order, to the clothes you wear, all over social media-- your lifestyle choice, your designer dog, your abjectly ironic tattoo of "unselfish" in Chinese characters on your hip, your sour cherry flavored e-cig, your proclivity to roam 98% hairless, and your New Age spirituality are dividends of the hard-scrabble country that created you.

After I read Lt. Pearcy's diary, I tried to put myself in his shoes, in his time. And I couldn't.

But his experiences, the pain he suffered and the pain his family suffered not hearing from him after he left for the war, left my throat dry. But as I thought about him and the many others who gave their lives for a cause greater than themselves, I had to smile...

For perhaps, just perhaps, there's still a thread of that soldier running through our DNA, mine...

...and yours, brother.

With infinite respect and head bowed reverently,

The Striptease of Human Discovery - P.S.

[This is a postscript to the previous post...]

Family history research as a pastime, that is, armchair genealogy, is far from an exact, um...science. In fact, human error, both in the recording and researching (as well as the procreating-- not the act itself, mind you, but the he-said-she-said that often follows). I enjoy it, as it provides at least some pieces of my (and my family's) identity puzzle, even if only myopically. DNA analysis sheds light on a person's (not necessarily the entire family's) more recent origins, but is a useful tool nonetheless to redirect a search or eliminate a possibility. Ancestry's DNA analysis report is very broad and consists of estimates based on probabilities. Church and Science both agree that we all came from somewhere; and both point confidently to a "Mitochondrial Eve" and a "Y-chromosome Adam."

Genealogy-- the bona fide science-- is really interesting! While it remains more of a hobby for me, I still enjoy finding connections, learning more about where I fit in on the backdrop of the rest of the human population.

So, in an effort to keep it all in perspective (if you are unsure what I mean, go to YouTube and search for Ancestry DNA results-- it's really not about race, ethnic superiority, fueling the Creation-Evolution debate, or bragging rights), I offer two very good sources of information on the topic...

1. What DNA Says About Human Ancestry—and Bigotry, an article posted to MIT's website. An excerpt:

Not only is our concept of race arbitrary, but it is based on a relatively insignificant difference between people. Skin pigment, eye shape, and hair type are all determined by genes. Indeed, as the human genome is mapped, geneticists might be able to reconstruct what mummies or other ancient people looked like. But the physical ''stereotypes'' of race, writes Cavalli-Sforza, ''reflect superficial differences.'' For example, light skin color is needed in northern climates for the sun's ultra- violet light to penetrate into the body and transform vitamin D into a usable form. This mutation may well have arisen at different times, in different ancestral groups, on different points along the DNA. That's true for cystic fibrosis, which occurs almost exclusively in people of European descent but is caused by several different mutations.

In other words, ''white people'' do not share a common genetic heritage; instead, they come from different lineages that migrated from Africa and Asia. Such mixing is true for every race. ''All living humans go back to one common ancestor in Africa,'' explains Paabo. ''But if you look at any history subsequent to that,'' then every group is a blend of shallower pedigrees. So, he says, ''I might be closer in my DNA to an African than to another European in the street.'' Genetics, he concludes, ''should be the last nail in the coffin for racism.''

2. The Ancestry DNA Witch Hunt, an insightful 2014 post to the The Genetic Genealogist blog, excerpted here:

Indeed, even the most documented and sourced tree is likely wrong, although genealogists are loathe to admit this. NPEs (non-paternal events) happen, and many were either never publicized or were lost through time. Further, there are simply errors in most family trees that result from inaccurate source documents, or other sources.  Ironically, it will eventually be the DNA that reveals the errors in our trees, even without documentation. 

At each generation, only 50% of a person’s DNA is passed to their children.  That 50% is almost completely random. Further, at about 5-9 generations, ancestors start to completely fall off your Genetic Family Tree.

Of course, take all tree hints with a serious grain of salt, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. A professional genealogist knows to question all records, no matter how official or ordained, and tree hints are no different.

...beware anyone who tells you to avoid Ancestry DNA... You’ll be missing out on one of the largest autosomal DNA databases, and all the discoveries that could come from that.

Hmmm... Maybe in the end (as in the beginning) we're not so different, after all?

The Striptease of Human Discovery

The universe is composed of classified information, slowly revealed over centuries in the striptease of human discovery. --Steve Rushin, from his Point After column in Sports Illustrated, 1/16/17

It's been more than a few days since I last posted-- January is in blink-and-you-miss-it full hum...the only collateral damage, so far, is a second bout of bronchitis that reared its ugly head last week. On Thursday I went back to the walk-in clinic and the doctor treating me said this persistent bronchitis is probably a form of "walking pneumonia" called mycoplasma pneumonia. Without other tests he couldn't be 100% sure, but he said the clinic had seen a lot of confirmed cases, all with lingering and recurring bronchitis symptoms. Anyway, maybe the azithromycin I'm on will finally exorcise this insidious evil from within...

Yesterday, I tried to get through our meeting with the district president without hacking-- near the end I'm sure I sounded like I had emphysema. In spite of that, I think the conversation went well; I sputtered briefly on one question, but, otherwise, I feel like we left a positive impression. And it seems ever more likely, in my opinion, that we will be called to serve in Texas; however, we won't know for certain until the end of April.

For this post's subject line, I borrowed from my favorite Sports Illustrated writer, Steve Rushin, whose opening sentence in this week's issue is a gem! What a great metaphor-- "the striptease of human discovery"...

...which applies to an infinite list of pursuits across a wide spectrum of scientific, religious, and other human interests, among them the popular pastime of family history research, and which brings me to the kissing-cousin relationship of DNA analysis and recorded bloodlines (yes, pun intended). My Ancestry DNA results are in (click to enlarge chart) and indicate that a skosh over a third of my genome markers point to Irish roots (ain't that a puck in the gob?!). Well, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish, really, as the primary geo-ethnic demographic. Sooooooo, what'll it be for dinner tonight? I think now I'm jonesin' for corned beef and cabbage...no, how 'bout some Welsh rarebit-- mm! mm!...nae, nae, lassie-- haggis and shortbread (it's offaly good)!!

It is interesting, and Ancestry attempts to match similar DNA profiles with others who have uploaded their family trees-- meaning the striptease could possibly reveal another human being with DNA eerily (but mathematically predictable, I suppose) similar to mine. And this genome typing provides only estimates of ethnicity (based on a growing databases of submitters and research that's very interesting, actually) and there are an infinite (theoretically) number of combinations and billions of people in the world. My wife's is still being processed. I'm curious to see her analysis (that may answer a few lingering questions...).

The week ahead may not kill me, but it's going to wear me down. There's so much going on and so much to do, the bulk of it seminary work. And this bronchitis or boogie-woogie flu or whatever it is has harshed my urge to get busy. Hopefully by this afternoon the fog will break and visibility will improve. I feel like I'm in the calm before the storm.

A closing shout-out for The Boys in Dallas! I'm looking forward to watching tomorrow's game against the Packers! It won't be easy, but I think they can do it!

That's it for today. If you are a prayer, keep me/us in yours, please, that next week (and the week after-- big interview on the 27th) will keep me in it through the last round...

С Богом, ya'll.

Carried away by a little Wonder...

But just because a record has a groove
Don't make it in the groove (from Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder, 1976)

I was out running errands yesterday and as I was leaving the grocery store for home, Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke was playing on the radio (on Ft. Wayne's Big 92.3, which IMHO plays more variety and has much less happy-talk and time-wasting hoo-ha than the average mix and classic rock stations) and I was cast back into my freshman year of high school (so many years ago!)...

It's funny how a song or smell or even a mention of something in the news can send you to another time and place...

I noticed in this morning's newspaper that this Sunday Elvis Presley would have turned 82; that also took me back to 1985, to the Elvis Presley Memorial Field Day aboard the USS Pollock (SSN-603), which I posted about a year ago.

Such reminders of my former lives make me sigh over the passage of time. No, I wouldn't want to go back; it's hard to believe I was ever even really there in the first place...

If I live long enough, I'll probably be thinking the same about seminary!

Lastly (but not leastly), while I was searching for a file on my external drive, I happened across some writing I did in my early years as a high school teacher (before 2004, when church and Russian combined to chip away at any free time I might have had). I wrote a few poems (you can find two here at poetry.com, if you promise not to critique me, and I tried writing free verse in Russian, but a native speaker said Russian poems are never free verse so there won't be a statue of me anytime soon in Red Square), started a short story or two and an eBook (entitled In Between the Dark and the Light, about a middle-aged, happily married man who begins to have recurring different dreams about a woman; recurring, because the same woman appears in each, yet different because each dream builds on the one that precedes it-- a series of nocturnal vignettes in which a man with a wife of 30 years develops a relationship with another woman in another time and place...or so it would seem...and the only person who could confirm such an affair is an 82-year old woman living with her husband in another state more than 1,000 miles away whom this guy has never met...in the daylight... (How he knows her identity is the crux of the story...). And while those endeavors remain half-baked, I found this idea I jotted down that's still waiting to go into the oven:

“You can catch the Devil, but you can’t hold him long.” (Old folk saying.)

There is a story (turned into a good Twilight Zone episode) called “The Howling Man” by Charles Beaumont, in which the Devil exploits Man’s desire to good (and his carelessness with faith)…

So I have a story in my head (that’s just waiting to come out) that involves the same sort of exploitation; however, it’s based on what each of us has in that “closet” where we’re so sure no one—not a best friend, spouse, or even God—will ever look.  I even have a title, simple as it is:  “The Picture.”

(What really scares you?  What are you ashamed of?  What do you think you’re getting away with?  Ever wonder if you can, someday, truly come clean?  Would you even want to?)

Suppose there existed somewhere a picture that no two people see the same way. I don’t mean aesthetically; I mean that no two people would see the same subject matter.  In fact, what if you stumbled across this picture yourself at a flea market or a garage sale or a consignment gallery and were so drawn in by the beauty rendered by The Artist that you just had to have it—no matter what the cost?  What if what you saw on the canvas repulsed or humiliated you because The Artist has offered everyone else (so you think) a glimpse of your deepest, darkest thoughts, desires, or deeds? Wouldn’t you, then, want to buy it, no matter the cost, just to destroy it?  What if you and someone else were looking at this picture together… Then what?

It’s still a germinating seed at this point and, well, there are a few bugs to work out (as well as some artistic lethargy issues), but I think this untold tale has promise.

And, if I knew you could keep a secret, you’d be amazed at what in life inspires me.

Anyway. But just because a record has a groove, don't make it in the groove... Finishing a book or short story and getting either published must remain on my bucket list for now.

Now you see me, now you don't. Just so you know, I'm not just another pretty face. :)

С Богом.

Yea, verily... I am, so far, impressed with 2017!

Happy New Year from the Hoosier State (and every other state I may be in)!!

The weather today has been SPECTACULAR! I wended my way to church this morning around 7:15am and the dawn spoke of Creation in such a way that I just had to be a part of it-- and nearly missed my turn of US 30...

This is the start of my "fulcrum month," so the pot of anxieties was already a-simmer as I got up, after only 4 hours and 25 minutes of sleep (according to my trusty Fitbit-- I really need to find out how it knows I'm sleeping...or not...hmm, may as well toss that into the pot for seasoning).

I was part of both services and delivered the children's message. During the first service, only four little tater tots came forward, maybe the oldest was 3, and they just sat there at my feet and blinked at me... It was more than a little intimidating. In the second service, I had a typical mix of kiddos and that message went better (though, personally, I don't think either was all that great-- the children's message is not my pastoral forte); in fact, one lone dude approached me in the parking lot and thanked me for my message (maybe the adults get more out of it?).

By the time we got home from church, it was noon-ish and the temperature outside was climbing into the mid-40s, not a cloud in the sky and we finally got a break from the gale that's been blowing all of December. We had lunch and then around 2pm headed out for a SECOND death march (4 miles), which was most enjoyable. We went out yesterday morning into the slate gray sky and gale force wind and it was okay with a tailwind, but turning into the wind I thought I was sure to become a 250-lbs. Mary Poppins. I don't know what the wind chill was (20s, I'm sure), but it was cold. I got 3 miles out of it (and no frostbite).

My daughters gave me this Fitbit I'm wearing for Christmas. Yes, I'm a year behind the Fitbit craze, but what a nifty little gadget! I hit 10,000 steps for the first time today (had almost 9,000 yesterday). I've "earned" two corny badges, the first a boat shoe or loafer or flip-flop badge, and today a sneakers one. I'm not into virtual bling, but it's nice to be validated on occasion, if only from a hi-tech bracelet.

Speaking of validation, my field work pastor remarked to me this morning as we were putting on our helmets and pads for the first service: "I think you'll be a great pastor." What a kind thing to say-- it really made my morning, day, month, and, of course, (new) year...

And now, the grill is going on the patio (since it's just cold, no wind, snow, ice, etc.)... Steaks!

So, life is good in 2017. For the first day, anyway (but I have a good feeling about the rest of it fueled by my trust in God)... Hope your 2017: Day 1 has been as good as mine.  :)

С Богом, ya'll!

P.S. The Cowboys lost to the Eagles today, the only downer. I understand, but I don't like it. :(