The Olympics, and achievement just out of reach

Before our morning Bible study some of us walk up to the local coffee shop, bypassing Starbucks. We're friends with the owners and the staff and we've been walking up there almost every day for a decade.

When Bill opens the place, he takes some time to banter with us, mostly making fun of our friend Gary. With nonstop Olympics coverage this week, Gary's been regaling us with stories of his glory days when he almost made the U.S. Olympic team in gymnastics in 1964.

Many of us have such stories-- the if-only tales of fame and success just out of reach.

Gary was amazed that the gymnasts were doing routines that his generation never even imagined were possible. A French guy's "Victoria cross" the night before was especially shocking, he said. He shook his head. Gary is 65 and somewhat out of shape, but occasionally he does a handstand for us, and all the change falls out of his pockets. It's pretty funny and sort of amazing, too.

If-only tales. We've learned to embrace these missteps in life, because without them, we might have missed God along the way. Instead of being bitter about getting a silver medal instead of a gold one, Gary is just happy for what he's been given. That's rare.

But stories of almost-success will never be the same for us now.

A chance encounter

A few weeks ago, Bill said he'd been riding his bike around the lake when he heard someone shouting or crying, he wasn't sure which. He turned the bike around and pedaled back down the road and saw a woman inside a security fence that enclosed one of the large estates that face the lake.

She explained her daughter was out of town, and she had come by her house to check on things, and the electronic gate had shut and she didn't have the code to get out. She was trying to reach her husband on her cell, but there was no answer. She broke into tears.

The real cause of her distress was her son-in-law, she said. He had been hiking and climbing in the Sangre de Cristo range in Colorado, and his family had not heard from him for a few days. They were all greatly concerned.

It was a rare moment of transparency and weakness shared between two strangers. Bill used his phone to get in touch with the husband, and finally got her out of the gate. Then he continued on his bike ride.

A few days later he found her husband's number in his phone and decided to call to check on the situation.

No, the husband said, they still hadn't heard anything. They were assuming an accident had happened.

Life can be strange

We'd been following Bill's bulletins on the situation since his first encounter. I prayed for the guy and his family as we walked home that day, if memory serves.

A few days after that, the report came in-- the man had fallen off a mountain during a hike and was missing.

Today, as Gary was ending his Olympics story of how gymnasts used to do things in the old days, Bill came over with the newspaper. There was the obituary. The man had fallen 1,700 feet to his death. He was 44.

Another tale of success just out of reach, I guess. This time a true tragedy.

As we lamented the man's fate and expressed amazement at Bill's happening upon the mother-in-law and the whole quirkiness of coincidence, Bill mentioned he was getting ready for his long-planned vacation next week.

Maybe he hadn't connected the dots on everything until that moment, but we did, and we sort of just looked at him, blankly.

Bill's going to Colorado to climb Long's Peak.

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Maybe I made a mistake

Maybe I made a mistake.

Summer finally caught up to us a few weeks ago, just as my bike commuting was becoming routine. We've had 17 straight days of triple-digit heat. It's taking me longer to recover, and it affects my judgment.

For instance, last week I was wheeling through downtown one afternoon, past City Hall, past the homeless hangout, into the Farmers' Market district. There's a flower market there that's sort of an oasis on my trek. It's beautiful, especially in contrast to the baking heat of the concrete around me.

I jumped the curb to get a better look, lost control of the bike and slammed directly into a concrete post on the sidewalk. With my cat-like reflexes I embraced the impact and did a controlled collapse, ending up hugging the street. The bike's fork was bent and wouldn't roll. I was scratched and bruised, but nothing was broken.

It was late enough that the market area was pretty deserted. Like many urban areas, downtown Dallas goes dead after work, although that's starting to change. Still, the sun was up just high enough to fry me. I tried to drag the bike into a patch of shade. At more than 100 degrees it was starting to sap my energy.

I called my wife. This concrete post sort of jumped out in front of me, I told here. She said she'd come pick me up after she finished watering the garden. Fine.

I couldn't sit down because the concrete was too hot. I wanted to go over to the flower market, but I didn't want to leave my bike. I was embarrassed and sort of stunned.

In an instant, my whole afternoon had changed.

I was about to lodge a private complaint to the Lord about my condition, when I noticed Big Bob.

I'm calling him Big Bob, but all I saw was a large homeless man, clutching a beer bottle in a paper sack shuffling past me down the sidewalk. He didn't acknowledge me, and he didn't pass close enough for an exchange of greetings.

I almost felt like Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense. We were in two separate dimensions. Although I was sweaty and haggard-looking by this point, I was obviously not from his world. I was dead to him, and under normal circumstances he would have been to me. So, what was God trying to tell me here?

Big Bob walked over toward the wall of a building, until he almost had his nose to it. What the...

He unzipped and peed right against the wall. Broad daylight. Didn't even set down his bottle. Then he shuffled off.

Gee. That puts a cap on today's experience, I thought.

What brings a man to the place where his city serves him merely as a latrine? What mistakes, wrong turns and blind alleys in life brings you to this place?

Well, maybe in an instant, his whole life had changed.

And that bottle in a bag. One thing we learned early on when our community started taking in homeless people is that when they tell you they only had a few of beers, they're not talking about that little frosty bottle of Heineken you share with a friend at the local pub. They're talking about a 24-ounce bottle of Bud from 7-11. Two or three of those better explains why they, for instance, might have set fire to a dumpster.

One man who lived with us for several years explained that the bottles also come in handy at night. Just before you lie down under the bridge, you very loudly smash the bottle, making sure everyone else sees the remaining jagged edges of what's left in your hand just before you curl up. And the leftover broken glass can serve as a warning if anybody sneaks up on you while you're asleep.

But I didn't have to worry about any of that. I just had to get what was left of my bike back to my renovated two-story home in an old East Dallas historical district.

No wonder Big Bob relieved himself on his city.

Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe we all did.

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Beastie: Tip of apocalyptic iceberg

There's am alarming development that I see eventually causing the breakdown of civilization as we know it.

Consider the story of Dr. Arnold Kim, physician-turned-blogger.

Sure, blogging can be emotionally rewarding and intellectually stimulating. It can also be addictive, a huge time-suck and eventually grind a person down into millions of cynical bits. Usually it produces a weird combination: the blogger doing Leonardo DiCaprio's "I'm King of the World!" on the doomed Titanic.

But there's something socially and morally wrong about Arnold Kim, who heads up MacRumors.com, the website of Apple gossip and rumor, leaving his medical practice ...to blog.

That's right. He stopped treating kidney disease, abandoning the sacred role of the healer, to practice his blogging hobby full time.

Of course, it's a lucrative website-- he can draw a six-figure salary at either job (something we at The Door know nothing about).

But as a society, can we really afford to have valuable contributors just drop everything for the brief thrill of seeing their name in print? In the past, writers and journalists toiled for years hoping they'd eventually offer as much to humankind as a doctor does on his first day out of medical school.

Forget about rising oil prices, terrorism and Brokeback Mountain. This truly fills me with dread.

Think of the consequences if this catches on. Do we want our firemen ignoring the bell just to spellcheck their latest blog entry? Homeland Security agents working on their trout fishing blog while aliens sneak into the country hassle-free? Judges turning in their robes merely to service the Internet uber-feed? Engineers fiddling with their youtube subscriptions as bridges collapse under rush hour traffic?

Someone call Sen. Grassley! This can go nowhere good. The vision is disturbing, even here in my cozy cubicle. Affected as if by the strange, deadly malaise in The Happening, people will start jumping off of buildings, texting their posts as they drop. I'm sure this is mentioned somewhere as a sign of the apocalypse.

No, better to leave blogging to the desperate and wicked social substrata of geeks and losers who currently dominate the field.

When the smart, the successful and the beautiful begin to post their opinions in the blogosphere, the real world is put in deadly peril.

And we bloggers might then have to take some responsibility for it.

LOL! As if!

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Help us cease from striving

If you're burned out on televangelist appeals for money, megachurch ministry-bloat and evangelical politics, it might be refreshing to take a look at an organization that's trying to give a life-long, no-strings-attached hug to a few million of the poorest, dirtiest, most despised people on earth.

I dropped in on Gospel for Asia's annual conference last weekend at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas. Their main topic was how to accommodate more poor people in their churches.

It seems that back in 2001 about a gigagillion Dalits-- India's lowest-caste "untouchables" -- got together and announced that Hinduism just wasn't doing it for 'em any more. The thrill was gone. So they offered the Christians, the Muslims, the Buddhists and any other religion an opportunity to pitch their version of spiritual reality to them.

The result is that GFA is scrambling to establish thousands of schools and churches around India to accommodate an increasing influx into their ranks of people who literally define the word "outcast." The word Dalit actually means "broken people."

Dalits can't be squeezed for big tithes and offerings. They don't bring anything to the table. In fact, they always show up with deep and often tragic needs. One Dalit who spoke at the meeting recalled how his parents somehow managed to claw their way our of grinding poverty to get him into a school, but he was only allowed to sit in one little spot in the corner on the floor away from the others. He wasn't allowed to drink from --or even get near-- the water faucet. "I experienced poverty, starvation and untouchability," he explained. "Now I am touched by the gospel of Jesus."

When I traveled to India a couple of years ago with GFA, I saw hundreds of these poorest of the poor along the roads everywhere doing the dirty work, squatting over little cooking fires, begging, defecating at the side of the road, scrounging for scraps of plastic or bits of cloth. These probably aren't the outsourced customer service guys from India you talk to when your computer goes on the blink. They're what St. Paul called the "offscouring of the earth."

The apostle understood, like GFA does, that these are the very people Christ died for. And He can only touch them through us.

But then, this Dalit's prayer caught me off guard: "Lord, help us cease from striving."

Huh? Isn't that what evangelism is all about-- striving to get the main thing done, accomplishing the mission, working the plan, doing it right?

Maybe not. The speakers all seemed to be talking about servanthood, being bondslaves. Slaves don't have many plans, and the pay isn't very good, besides.

At one GFA session, Gayle Erwin, author and a member of the GFA board, understated the case when he observed, "nobody comes out of GFA with million-dollar homes." In other words, Sen. Grassley is not interested in this group. It has too much obvious integrity. Despite the decreasing value of the dollar, there was little agonizing over the economy at the conference. The only mention of it was a suggestion: "You better hurry up and give quick."

GFA President K. P. Yohannan eloquently described the plight of the Dalits, but didn't mention that he still drives his early '60s VW when he's in the States. No air-conditioning. A native of India, Yohannan started GFA back in the 1970s after studying for the ministry in Dallas. Since then he's gone from looking goofy to looking grizzled, but carries himself with an air of peace and self-detachment that puts everyone around him at ease. GFA now has more than 16,500 native missionaries serving in 11 countries in South Asia. You can support one of these native missionaries for a ridiculous total of around $50 a month.

These Gospel for Asia people take Jesus very seriously but without our western/American overlay of overachieving busy-ness, guilt, arrogance or attachment to political causes. In the Indian state of Kerala, where GFA's largest seminary campus is located, the government is run by communists who sometimes work in cooperation with Christian groups. Yikes! Jerry Falwell's rolling over in his grave. It's a different world. Of course, GFA is as conservative as can be, except when it comes to the poor. Then they're liberal in the New Testament sort of way, with the emphasis on "liberality."

Lots of news came out of the meeting. One native leader from Burma told about delivering aid to victims of the devastating cyclone and people being saved as unburied bodies littered the fields. One of the native missionaries in Nepal who served time in jail for his faith described radical changes that have opened up that country to religious freedom.

And the media noticed one interesting angle-- while hundreds of supporters of Gospel for Asia prayed and sang, hundreds of Harry Potter fans at the opposite end of the hotel gathered--in full costume-- to role-play, buy Quidditch sticks and Hoggwart's capes and hear speakers delivering scholarly papers on the book and fantasy film series. (The two groups' wary interaction was discussed by the Dallas Morning News Religion Blog).

For me the big news from the conference was, when faced with a world of screaming need, the only effective response is to pray like the Dalit convert did, "Lord, help us cease from striving."

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I lost my shorts downtown

I've been riding my bike to work lately. My eight-mile route goes right through downtown Dallas, and it allows me to take the pulse of the city, not to mention its temperature and humidity levels, estimate its ozone pollution and gauge the mental state of its citizenry.

I can often taste its urban grime in my mouth, too.

The other day I waited at a light behind an old pickup truck driven by a spikey-haired middle-aged woman. As I breathed her exhaust, I read her bumper sticker: "My body's not a temple, it's an amusement park." Hmm. She did look sort of like a Coney Island carny.

My own body's feeling more like a junkyard of worn out parts these days. Drivers usually ignore me, but I can't ignore the terrain. Our streets are terrible for bicycles. A previous mayor vowed to fill in the potholes, but that never happened. Oh well, the ride helps me "buffet my body," as St. Paul put it, so I guess it's good for me.

Down near the soup kitchen a long line of homeless people snakes around the side of a building. On a bike, this can be an intimate encounter. I can look right into their eyes, and I wonder what they're going to do, how they got here, where they came from. They must think I'm crazy. Dallas just opened a big new homeless shelter. Why aren't these folks over there?

Our church has taken in homeless people for years, so I have no illusions. These are all humans, in dire situations. Some are addicts. Some are just on a streak of bad luck. Some want friendship and a sanctuary. Others don't.

When I got to work, I realized that somewhere downtown, a bungee cord came loose and I lost my shorts. I carry a rolled up pair of shorts for the ride back in the afternoon when it's extra hot, and they were gone. Darn! I really liked those shorts.

Maybe one of the homeless guys found 'em and they're walking around downtown, pockets filled with other people's spare change and a crumpled up pack of cigarettes. I hope so.

On the way back it's twice as hot, and slightly uphill most of the way. I'm sweating in my khaki slacks and my goofy helmet. I pass by the homeless crowd again. This time they're in the shade, trying to stay cool. Some are sleeping. Some are arguing. A couple of guys are tossing a ball around. There's a big van from the health clinic parked across the street. That's nice to know. No telling what medical problems they're dealing with on the street.

None of the guys are wearing my shorts.

I began riding my bike for several good reasons. Gasoline is too expensive. I want to fight terrorism by not sending my money to the Middle East. I'll get more exercise. I'll experience a moment of zen. I'll reduce my carbon footprint. Blah blah blah. My plan was efficient, logical, maybe even prudent.

But seeing the homeless crowd every day has become the biggest part of my new routine. They live in a world that is never efficient or logical. It's crazy and out of control. I've started praying for the ones who stare at me as I peddle by. Viewed from a car, they don't seem so desperate, so hot, or so many.

I lost my shorts downtown the other day.

Maybe I'll lose my heart next, who knows?

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Prepare to be tweeted like dirt

I’ve never tweeted.

I confess, I’m a tweet virgin. Never even gotten a tweet, let alone sent one.

Yes, I’ve thus far avoided joining the Twitter community. Twitter is a free social networking service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"-- text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to each other through the Twitter site. This way people can keep up with what you’re doing between blog posts and website updates and e-mails and phone calls.

Amazingly, Twitter touts itself as a “solution to information overload.”

On the other hand, if you join someone’s Twitter group you’re a “follower,” which has a nice discipleship-like sound to it.

Here’s the kind of stuff I’ve probably been missing:

George: Seething in anger at my coworkers and boss who are slowly draining me of creativity and the spark of human kindness. 2 minutes ago from web

Bob: This scabies medicine feels really weird. I almost don't want to put my shirt back on. Yech. one hour ago from txt

Gloria: Instead of praying today, I’m tightening up my prayer list. Just eliminated David cuz we haven’t talked in, like, forever. 9:45 a.m. June 24, 2008 from web

Alicia: Almost finished reading Thomas Friedman's NYT column. Malaise set in after realizing world is flat, and passed out. Woke up in pool of own vomit. 7 a.m. June 24, 2008 from web

Louis: Should I worry about my Dish TV spying on me after Bush signed that telecom bill? 11:35 p.m. June 23, 2008 from web

Albert: Jst gt carjacked. Mistakenly grabbed phone to twitter instd of handgun. Damn! 9:47 p.m. June 23, 2008 from txt

Steve: Hey, lightening alrt. Run for co 8:43 p.m. June 23, 2008 from txt

I’m willing to give Twitter a shot, though. Should The Door start a Twitter group? Do we really want to know what Joe Bob is up to at 1:30 in the morning? Do we?

Discuss.

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Monkey business

It's easy to overlook the obvious.

The biggest mistake many businesses and project planners make is to forget to place a deity on the payroll.

The Dallas Cowboys certainly learned this lesson back in their heyday. They were God's team as well as America's team, and it worked (until Deion Sanders sort of overdid it).

This month a business school in India was looking for a chairman for their institution. "We scanned many big names in the field of technology and management. Ultimately, we settled for Lord Hanuman, as none was bigger than him," said Vivek Kangdi, vice chairman of The Sardar Bhagat Singh College in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. The school awards bachelor's degrees in engineering and management.

Hanuman the monkey god is one of the most popular gods in the crowded pantheon of Hindu deities. According to the report on CNN, his most famous feat, as described in the Hindu epic the Ramayana, was leading a monkey army to fight the demon King Ravana and rescue a kidnapped princess.

This reminds me of the liner notes on the Christian music album my friends and I put together back in college. "Produced by the Holy Spirit" we wrote then. We meant it in the most humble way, rather than as total presumption. But, hey, we were young. One reviewer pointed out that the Holy Spirit must have neither taste nor skill if our album was any indication.

Let this be my public apology to God. Blasphemy pops up so easily in our thoughts, I suppose, that we come to think of it as piety.


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