Category Archives: Life reflections

1000 words

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Next week I’ll tell you more about the ship and the people on our Alaskan adventure, and we still have the amazing story of the Aleuts in Juneau and the Russian Orthodox church there, but for this week, please enjoy vicariously the photos we snapped. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is value for time. :]

Every time I woke up, I’d sneak out onto the balcony, and the views were always amazing. This is the first night, when the supermoon had just started waning.

Dawes Glacier was a huge chunk of ice, with pieces breaking off and refreezing over time. It is named for Henry Dawes, a laywer and politician from Massachusetts who apparently knew the right paperwork to file, because it had been named in 1890 by John Muir as Young Glacier after his companion The Rev. Hall Young, but Dawes renamed it in 1891 and the name stuck. The fog started coming in just as we were leaving the glacier; the whiter parts are the ice.

There were so many waterfalls, the disembodied voice that came on the ship’s com and began telling us things said, because there had been significant rainfall the week before. Normally the mountains don’t have so many waterfalls.

Pack ice was all over the place as we went north, always close to shore though. Sometimes they looked like dragons or other mythical creatures and you began to understand why mariners thought they’d seen monsters.

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The day the entire boat sat silent, taking in the grandeur of the glacier and fjords, we were also freezing on our balconies. Beth and Brandon waved from next door just before securing us all the day’s cocktail: Mallibu hot chocolate (rum added). We never found out how cold it was, but it reminded me of my days in grad school in Newfoundland, when the pack ice would come in and breathing near the ocean felt like ice razors were sliding down your throat.

More next week, including some of the fun fun people and silly things we did. But here’s one final shot of Jack enjoying the views. He said later that the balcony room had paid for itself – and that cruising was his ideal vacation: You sit with a drink in your hand watching the scenery walk past you.

The Politics of Bible Reading

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We’re in the period of the Christian year where Acts is up. For those unfamiliar, that’s the book following the four gospels in the New Testament, and it’s often described as the most journalistic book in the Bible. We studied the eyewitness account of the shipwreck found therein, for a reporting class on disaster news at the University of Tennessee.

I’ve read the Bible through five or six times if you give me a little leeway for skimming the public health parts of Leviticus on mold care. As a child, as a euphoric member of Youth with A Mission, as a college student fighting to keep her faith and sanity, I never noticed what I do now as a health policy advocate and director.

Acts is massively political.

Heavily about the prejudice between Romans and Greeks, Jews, and Gentiles it chronicles Romans on top, Roman Jews better depending on the trouble you were in, and if you were a gentile Greek convert, just be grateful anyone would deign to speak to you.

I do remember in YWAM and in other sermons how the good news of the gospel the apostles were spreading took center stage, how Jesus transcended all the problems. Paul getting converted dominates Acts, winner takes all. The anger over Greek widows getting less food at distribution, the confusion of Greek gentiles when men show up and tell them they must get circumcised or they’re not real Christians, the appointing of managers to oversee free meals: just background stuff.

Maybe because it’s Divided States of America here, maybe because I’m old enough to have seen a few things in action, maybe because I spend a lot of time working with free food and health policies that (mostly) men in power make without any lived experience of hunger, I see how much Acts is about getting our act together using thoughtful, prayerful solutions to social problems.

Certain widows are getting short rations? Let us pray, then appoint seven men (oh well) to oversee the handouts: six of them are Roman, one of them is Greek, and three of them appear to be Gentiles.

There’s a circumcision cult starting in Antioch? Hold on! We’re coming! We are sending four men to you, and two of them are Gentiles, and one of them is Greek! We got your back, and you don’t have to do this.

And, by the way, Jesus loves you. So, we’re gonna try and make sure everyone’s interests are represented in the things Jesus told us to do.

Photo by Susi Lawson Fine Art Photography

It’s not a side message, it’s a central message: figure it out, with kindness, with prayer, with honesty, and with genuine representation of those who understand the mutual interests at stake. It’s what Acts tells us about how we should live now.