Expatriated Montanan

Maundy Thursday Message

2010-03-31T13:14:00.001-07:00

Maundy Thursday Sermon:
As given by Chato Hazelbaker 3/18/2009

It has been said that the true character of a person is revealed in their trials. The fire of life’s trials strips off everything that is on the outside and shows us the core of a person’s character. The Bible tells us that each of us will be held accountable not for how we started the race, but for how we finish. Jesus’ final hours must have been his darkest. It is clear for the scriptures that he knew exactly what was coming. The last reading in Matthew demonstrates this as he took his prayers to the Father, asking if he could take this cup of suffering. Tonight, I want us to gain a deeper appreciation for who Christ was in his darkest time.

Let’s look carefully at what Jesus was facing nearly two thousand years ago, a night much darker and later than this. His Earthly ministry was coming to an end, and he knew the same people that had waved palms and shouted his name only four days earlier would be calling “crucify him” in a matter of hours. He knew that his best friends would either abandon or betray him. He knew the physical torment would be beyond what any person should or could be asked to bear. Jesus knew all this before the last supper, before washing the disciple’s feet, and before heading to Gethsemane. By this time Jesus even clearly knew his betrayer. Most would say that Christ’s moment of brokenness came on the cross, but I would argue that Christ’s brokenness started here, because here we see that Christ’s heart was broken. We have all heard and probably given a lot of thought to the physical brokenness of the body, but for a moment think about the mental and emotional brokenness that Jesus must have felt just hours before he was going to the cross.

So in his time of brokeness what did Jesus do – he served and he prayed.

My God, my Jesus is never in a hurry and that is one of the things that I love him for. He was intentional and he taught up to the final moment when he was taken from the disciples, and he taught them by serving. By this time the disciples would have done almost anything for Jesus. Surely they would have washed his feet, fed him, and comforted him in his time of need. If anybody deserved a day off it was Jesus. For three years he had been traveling, meeting every demand, teaching, investing his life into all those he came into contact with. Yet in his final hours he washes the disciple’s feet and serves them dinner. Not only that, Jesus doesn’t do this grudgingly, but we hear in Luke 22:15 Jesus says, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” To me that is a wonderful picture of the kind of service Jesus did. He not only served, but he did so eagerly, investing his very life into the disciples. Too often at our worst times we tend to turn inward. We focus on our needs, and what we think will satisfy the cravings of our flesh. Jesus shows us a much different way of thinking here. At his worst time he turned his attention to the disciples and ways he could serve them. In his final, darkest hours Jesus served.

Then Jesus prayed. Jesus goes to Gethsemane to meet with the Father. It is a model that we see again and again in the New Testament as Jesus took everything to prayer. Yet this prayer is one of the most profound and best described in the Bible. This prayer is a wrestling. As it says in Matthew 26:39 “Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’” Can you imagine? It says in the verses earlier in 38 that Jesus told the disciples he was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, yet he turns to the Father in prayer. Again, I think of times when I have gotten depressed or down in my situation. My tendency is to turn inward, to turn my face from God, yet here in Matthew we get a very clear picture of Christ opening up to God in his brokenness and crying out. He does not hide that pain from the Father, but seems to take strength in sharing it with him, completely giving it over to God in his prayer in verse 42 with the words, “your will be done.”

Serve – Pray. So why does Jesus do it? He does it because his faith is in the Father. He does it because he has read the book and he knows who wins. He is not focused on the day ahead, but his focus is on eternity.

Tonight, where is our focus? Have we been challenged by this message, a reading from the “Purpose Driven Life,” “The Passion,” or something else - yet we remain among the frozen chosen. Let us do as Christ models so powerfully for us. There are 2 full days until Easter. Will we serve and will we pray? I know that in serving I can get tired. I know too often I’m focused on getting eight hours of sleep rather than doing what God has called me to do.

I really feel in my heart that I have not given enough time to this topic. There is so much that could be said about Jesus in his final hours. It is difficult to communicate what a low time this must have been in his life. It is difficult to communicate how miraculous it was that he took time when things were at their worst to serve and pray.

So, my challenge for us tonight would be this. Take the time in the next 2 days before Easter to read the 26th Chapter of Matthew. Pray about it. What is it telling you? There have been no shortages of challenges to us as a congregation lately – the question is will we answer the call.

A beautiful mess (Avatar)

2010-01-08T11:39:00.001-08:00

I'm pretty sure no one reads this often, and it is a good thing because I'm about to step outside of my expertise into movie reviews.

So, Avatar has come up in Oscar talks and is on a course to sink Titantic in terms or revenue. Really? I'm not a Titanic fan, but the beautiful mess that is Avatar is a good example of what is wrong with mass media.

If the role of art, or in this case entertainment posing as art, is to engage us and to illumniate the human condition in some way, Avatar is a pretty poor example. I will absolutely admit that it probably deserves some kind of Oscar for technical brilliance, but once the awards ceremony moves into prime time it should be an afterthought.

The storytelling in Avatar just isn't very good. There is never a moment of suspense when one thinks Sully might not get the alien or defeat the evil hoards. Every character is a broad stroke caricature from the tough as nails heartless commander to the spineless and annoying corporate middle manager. Even in the short scenes with Nala's father we get the complete stereotypical picture of what we have typically been given in tribal leaders.

To me a great film is one that stands up over time, and this one won't. Whereas a move like Star Wars was technically ahead of its time, there were some interesting characters. The story worked and was compelling and that is why the original has held the test of time. Sure the effects look questionable now, but it's still an interesting film. The most interesting character in Avatar . . . (I started to write this sentence several times and I couldn't finish it - there are no interesting characters)

Defense comes to Montana

2009-12-18T09:10:00.001-08:00

My family has a long connection with the Big Hole Valley of Montana. Though my connections is as much folk lore and shared family memory as experience, by grandfather and grandmother both knew the valley well. There is a family story from the valley of my dad having to drive his grandfather back to the house when he was very young because of an accident with a piece of machinery. Proof that the clans that make me up left blood and sweat on the land.

So, it was interesting to read that Donald Rumsfeld has purchased a ranch in the Big Hole. What was more interesting and a nice little Christmas present was the reaction his neighbor.
It makes me miss my native land at this time of year, because on one hand Montana is still small enough that people notice when people move in. However, it's still independent enough to believe that getting along with your neighbors doesn't depend on agreeing on every topic. It's a place where there is room enough for ideas and debate, and a healthy accceptance of the reality that most of the things we argue and fuss over aren't that big of a deal.

The mosquitoes will likely terrorize Rumsfeld for a few weeks, and don?t expect to be able to reach him well on his cell phone. The winter wind will be brutal, and there will be times when it just doesn?t seem like it?s safe to go out. There will also be late summer days when the wheat is golden, and some rancher is still employing a 100 year old "beaver slide". Those will be the things that matter, and for that reason I'm a little jealous and a little homesick this Christmas.

An Open Letter to Tim Pawlenty

2009-10-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone that reads David Brooks column today will disagree with it. Those on the left will read it and believe in their heart of hearts that all Republicans are really tiny minded ideologues who couldn’t care less about their neighbors. Those on the right will think that Brooks (as all big media does) fails to see the real Americans that talk radio, tea parties, and town hall meetings represent.

However, in the center of this great disagreement is great truth, and the bottom line on Brooks’ column is that he is right when he states, “The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity.”

There are a lot of conservatives that look at the cast of characters in media and as a good friend of mine says, “I wish they would get off my side.” I’m not wishing Glen Beck or Rush off of the air. They have a place and they can put pressure and raise stories that don’t get raised other places. But picking candidates isn’t their strong point. In order for them to be effective and to break through the media clutter they have to be out at the edges. They have to take risks and they have to fill time.

So, Gov. Pawlenty, I’m imploring not to take the media stuff too seriously on either side. Brooks is right in that getting out and talking to people will be the key. Health care has to be discussed, wars have to be evaluated, not all taxes are bad. The majority understands a president has to govern in that world, not the world that can cling to ideologies and sound bites. I think most of us also realize that we won’t always like your decisions. I don’t agree with you on a couple of big things, but I realize that knowing what specifically I disagree with you about is better than having you promise the moon and not deliver.

There is room for a conservative that tries to make sense somewhere besides the edges. It won’t always be comfortable, but to become that party that embraces disagreements and handles them well would be the real revolution.

Back from vacation

2009-07-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

I had a lot of great ideas to blog about when I was on vacation. Yes, for three weeks I drove around, saw fascinating stuff, had interesting conversations, ate good food and in general lived a life worth blogging about, and I didn’t blog once. A day and half into a hard transition back to life in the real world and most of those great ideas are now gone, or at least fuzzy enough that they sound far less brilliant, but maybe that is the point.

For the past three weeks I was pretty disconnected. I didn’t worry about the checkbook (anybody know how I can make a quick $500, legal is preferred), how many emails were waiting for me, what was for dinner on that given night or many of the hundreds of things that make up my day to day existence.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my life. Part of what was really great about the vacation was spending all day everyday with my wife and kids. What I finally did on this vacation that I’m not sure I have done in the past decade or so is relax and in that relaxation, I think my brain worked better.

So, I’m back from vacation with a few lessons learned. The key one is that everybody should take a vacation. For me, I think I have learned that means a vacation from a schedule as well. One of the best things about vacation is that we had very few demands on our time, and we didn’t place any on ourselves either.

I’m sure there are other lessons, and I may get around to writing about them. But for now, I needed to get back on schedule and post a blog.

One more nutty Yellowstone Club story

2009-06-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, the New York Times ran the first extensive interview with Edna Blixseth. While I would recommend that anyone interested read the story, I will sum it up here: the story of the Yellowstone Club really is bizarre on a number of levels.

One of the things that did occur to me after reading it was I may have been unduly harsh on members in the piece I wrote for the Montana Standard. Bill Gates may need a place to ski with his kids that doesn’t require security. That says something really sad about the world we live in, but I do see why some individuals may need the privacy. And if the club is as family-friendly as the article states, then maybe the ultra-rich have some problems I glossed over.

Still some things in the story really jumped out at me. Someone out there should really pay me to write a book about this because it has all the makings of a great one:

- The portrait of Edna Blixseth is really interesting. This is essentially a woman scorned story made no less bizarre by the fact that the author points out her current boyfriend is an ex-underwear model who had to sell his Bentley to keep things a float.

- Edna considers gardening a Zen practice, which sounds pretty normal until she adds she does it one hole at a time on her private golf course.

- I really wished I would have had this quote to work with in my piece on the club from a member who wanted to remain unnamed. He said in defending Tim Blixseth, “It’s that aggressiveness that got this thing off the ground, that got the lifts built, that got the forest land away from the government, that got the water rights. As long as it was working in our benefit, everybody thought it was great.” That quote kind of makes my Yellowstone Club as an extractive industry point in a lot fewer words than I used in the Montana Standard.

- The story ends with a description of Edna’s prayer ritual. It is kind of a typical tactic where someone far at the fringe of religious practice is held up as if to say, “See, people that believe in God are the nutty ones.”

Currently there is a song on country music radio that may have one of the great choruses in country music though it is a mediocre song overall. It may be the title of my eventual book about the Yellowstone club, “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.”

Velleity

2009-06-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

Nerd alert: when I was in Mr. Mellang’s fourth grade class I used a thesaurus to help me write a short paper. I’m pretty sure I got some of the words horribly wrong, and sometime around college I swore off the thesaurus, but I still take great joy in finding the perfect word whose meaning matches the reality.

At a staff retreat I helped plan last week one of the participants introduced me to the word “velleity.” As defined by the free web dictionary it is “a mere fancy that does not lead to action.” The way it was presented during the meeting is less elegant buy equaling meaningful, “a problem you don’t care enough to do anything about.”

The retreat actually went pretty well. We spoke candidly about what needed to be changed, and challenged (maybe even too much) the status quo and spoke about what could be changed to make the place better. What was particularly good was that it seemed like making the place better wasn’t just to make our lives easier, but was centered more or less around the idea of accomplishing of a mission. So, if the retreat went so well why am I still haunted by the word velleity.

I think I’m haunted because trying to define the velleity is a humbling task. Andy Stanley in his book Visioneering brings forth the idea that every great vision begins as a moral imperative. It is the deep feeling within in us that a particular situation or problem is so unjust that it must be changed and we must be the person to do it.

It’s an important, but humbling question to ask, “What do I care about enough that I’m willing to do something about it?” Part of that question makes a person face up to what they are not willing to do anything part. I have joked for years that I don’t care enough about getting in shape to give up donuts. The unhealthy eating might be a problem, and I may complain, but it’s a clear velleity, because I don’t quit eating donuts.

I have a colleague about my age who was recently diagnosed with cancer. I wonder if I suddenly had to face my mortality in a real way that I would feel the moral imperative to better care of myself in order to be around to care for my family.

There is an organizational application as well, because I think it is clear that the things we don’t care enough about to act on that kill us. It’s the organization that talks about tighter cost controls but never puts them in place that ends up in real trouble. It’s the organization that waits for someday to invest in people that realizes at some point it has lost its best and brightest.

If a person doesn’t care enough to act on a problem, then that fact needs to be acknowledged. People and organizations that are honest enough to ask these tough questions seem to be a few steps ahead.

Texting in church!

2009-06-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

So after trying to disprove last week that Twitter is sustainable, I had a fascinating experience with integrating technology into communication in a new way on Sunday.

My family doesn’t normally attend Westwood Community Church, but for a variety of reasons we went on Sunday. The pastor, used text messaging during the service. It was really well done. After a short tutorial, he encouraged people to text answers which were put up on the screen in real time. It was really engaging, and no I didn’t even text. My thumbs make me text impaired, but it was still fascinating and the positives far outweighed the negatives of a few folks by me who couldn’t figure out how to get their phones on “silent”.

The up shot is that it reminded me of something about technology and communication that seems to get missed. It is about the message first and the medium second. I know that is a theory not all people subscribe to, but the longer I work, read and think about communication the more I believe it is true.

As communicators, I believe that we need to figure out what the message or the story is first, and then figure out the best way to tell it. This point hit me two weeks ago when I rented the film “The Other Boleyn Girl”. It’s actually a pretty interesting story lost in a pretty bad movie. My estimation is that is because it’s not a movie, it’s a miniseries. There are far too many events and the motivations are too complex to cram into a little under two hours. It is a story that needs nuance and background, and without it you are left asking, “Now why would they do that?” about primary characters.

For what are probably a lot of sound commercial reasons they crammed the story into a movie format. It may make sense commercially, but if you care about the story it doesn’t make any sense.

Sustainability is a big word now for business. I’d apply it to communicators as well saying that commercial considerations may make sense, but the more sustainable option is to care about the message first and the medium second.

Tweeting to distraction

2009-06-05T11:44:00.001-07:00

Anybody remember “Rico Suave”. Yeah, I do to. It is something that got overplayed, overhyped, and now it’s just embarrassing when it gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out.

I think the world is eventually going to feel the same way about Twitter. A Sports Illustrated article today talks about how Twitter is changing sports, or at least our relationship as fans with sports stars. While they provide some compelling evidence, Twitter as the hot thing isn’t likely to keep momentum, and there are some lessons to be learned.

Twitter isn’t really sustainable from a user or a reader platform on a mass basis. A short article by Baltimore Sun critic David Zurawik on Nielsen reporting that most users opt out after the first months points this out. For average people, they realize pretty quickly that letting everyone know everything that you are thinking or doing takes a lot of thinking and doing. It violates one of the basic facts of good communication which is that it has to be interesting and most of us just aren’t that interesting on a minute by minute basis. If you need further proof read my blog.

From the perspective of a fan or listener, I will admit that Twitter appears to have more usage, but not across a broad spectrum. There are a group of people that care enough to follow Stewart Cink’s every thought, but the longer that goes on the more that crowd thins to a pretty interesting few. There isn’t a profit motive for Cink and it has the making of creating a strange relationship with fans. For instance, I can’t even imagine my wife wanting hourly updates about my life let alone anyone else.

So, for those of you in communication and marketing I would say that Twitter is a potential time killer without a lot of upside. Sure it can be used for some useful things, but on an individual level the work doesn’t necessarily lead to the benefits one might hope for.

Until the next Yellowstone Club Lawsuit

2009-05-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

There are some very happy moments in my life when I think, “This can’t be real.” At some moments I feel so blessed by who I get to be with, or what I am doing that it seems like too much.

I wonder if the person that wrote the statement for Sam Byrne, managing partner of CrossHarbor felt that way. In the Billings Gazette on Wednesday Byrne is quoted as saying, "We are extremely pleased that the future of the club has been secured and we can now turn our focus to serving the needs of our members and enhancing our world-class private living and recreation community.”

I wonder if he had a smile on his face and thought, “This can’t be real,” because the situation is so insane. The club is still coming out of bankruptcy, there are still contractors and others waiting to get paid but the winning buyer in the auction for the club can focus on delivering fluffier pillows or whatever it takes to engage in world-class private living. I didn’t even realize I didn’t have a world-class private life before I read that statement. Imagine my embarrassment.

There is another interesting statement in the story that really highlights for me why this should be a bigger story and why there should be more discussion. In saying they were satisfied with the settlement a lawyer for club members said they were satisfied because the settlement “. . . will allow the resort to resume full operations and pay almost all of its unsecured creditors.” I’m intrigued by the idea that it will pay almost all of its unsecured creditors. If I read that right, the members are pleased that it is business as usual for them, even if that means that some of the labor that went to creating Shangri-la goes uncompensated.

My Aunt Terry had a good point in an email commenting on the MT Standard piece. She reminded me that even strip mining is obligated to try and make the land whole after they are done. Apparently I was unfair to the strip mining industry and other extractive industries when I compared them to the Yellowstone Club.

Good Review

2009-05-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

I love the New York Times. I love it in the way only a non-New Yorker with a relatively lower middle class background can. I love it as an object of desire like a Rolls Royce or some other class symbol that I may someday (if I’m very, very lucky) get to ride in, but never own.

Today’s edition was like a lot of days. There were really interesting stories on credit cards, and some things actually came together in my head as the start of a fascinating self reflective essay. However, today I don’t feel particularly self reflective or fascinating, so I’ll point out a book I can’t wait to read.

If the book Lost in the Meritocracy Janet Maslin reviews in the article “Whiz Kid in College, Hold That Attitude!” provides any of the food for thought that the review does, it will be a great read.

I’ll let Maslin’s review speak for itself, but it seems to me that is one of those books that asks really scary questions, because we are all afraid at some level of getting found out. I’m not saying (nor am I divulging any) that we all have deep dark secrets, but it seems to me that my life in my thirties is a constant battle between trying to get a little wiser, and realizing that the depth of my own ignorance.

It seems as I hurtle past my middle thirties, what I have largely figured out is the things that I’m not as good at as I thought. I reminds me a of a story a former boss once told me.

She was picking up her seventh grade son from playing football one night, and as they were talking he said, “You know Mom, I don’t think we will all get to play professional football when are older.”

It was a funny moment, but fascinating that was the moment in which this particular kid figured out the playground fantasy was just that, fantasy.

So, I’m not unhappy. Heck, I’m probably happier now than I have been in a long time, but I’m looking forward to reading this book. Because I think I’m starting to figure out that we may not all write the great American novel someday.

Strange Links

2009-05-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

In the Thursday, May 14, 2009 issue of the Billings Gazette there were two stories about 200 miles apart that show the diversity of Montana pretty well. I have been following the Yellowstone Club story for some time, and the story “Auction of Yellowstone Club waits on negotiations” details the latest developments in this debacle. While the article talks of taking the bankers to the proverbial woodshed, I don’t see many real consequences for anybody involved here. The golf course at the club is greening up, the Blixseths are still rich, and Swiss banking still isn’t a bad business to be in. I’m guessing I wouldn’t mind staying in Montana for a few weeks on the dime of a Swiss bank even if I did have to be scolded by a judge every few days. It sounds like a timeshare presentation to me.

Just over 200 miles down the road they are trying to fill a prison and make a few bucks in Hardin. I’m not sure this was ever a good idea, but it is an ironic twist that in some places a house in Montana will cost you several million and just down the road they will pay you to send prisoners. The article “Al-Jazeera joins parade of media drawn to empty prison”. I coached a team for a few years that used to play in Hardin, and going to school in Billings I spent plenty of time out in that area. The bottom line is, it’s pretty hard to scrape together a living in that area of the state.

It’s the juxtaposition that gets me. A state that attracts the ultra-rich, and some lesser wealthy people who think it’s a great place to retire, it’s a pretty terrible place to try and carve out a modest middle-income career. While the jobless rate in Montana is low by national standards, so are the wages. I suspect that the low jobless rate has a lot to do with the fact that so many people have moved on.

Redistribution isn’t the answer, but there must be a balancing act that would work better. At any rate, there should at least be a place to have the conversation where people realize that these two separate headlines are related by two hundred miles of interstate if nothing else.

Yellowstone Clubber

2009-05-13T11:35:00.001-07:00

Today an opinion piece I wrote on the Yellowstone Club for the Montana Standard appears. I’m pleased with the way it turned out, and pleased that the editor thought it was thought provoking which should be the goal of sharing and opinion.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more coverage of this case nationally. It could be that in an environment where a ponzi scheme has to be in the billions before it is considered serious that this kind of story just isn’t big enough. The New York Times published an interesting overview of the club, “Club Med for the Millionaire Set” in March of 2006.

It is striking to read that article in light of current economic realities. The kind of celebration of wealth described in that article seems to have fallen out of favor, but represents pretty well the feeling about real estate throughout the early 2000’s when our houses represented our riches. In neighborhoods like the Yellowstone Club I doubt that has changed much, but it is no longer as fashionable to flaunt wealth.

I need your help: I am hoping to develop this opinion piece and some other work into a longer magazine (or hopefully) book length project. If you have an opinion, first hand experience with the Yellowstone Club, its contractors, or its members please email me at chatohaze@yahoo.com or post to the blog. If you post I will delete any posts that are offensive or advocate violence. I might be wrong and if I am, I’d like to know. I also know there are some core issues here that are bigger than the club.

Graduation Speeches

2009-05-11T12:09:00.001-07:00

This weekend was graduation at the School of Law, so it was a long week. It made me appreciate the fact that we do not work 6 day work weeks anymore. By the end of the day on Saturday I was wiped out.

However, the events of the weekend have kicked off a pretty good discussion of what it takes to be a good graduation speaker. I'm tempted to go with the easy two part definition of my friend Dave. They are two pretty easy points, don't be offensive and be brief. It seems to me that doing anything else is like showing up the bride on her wedding day. Everybody is there to see the graduate not you. Unless you are attending at protesting at Notre Dame this year would anybody really be there if it weren't for the graduate. I promise this, if you invite me to speak at your graduation I will be gracious enough to realize that I'm just the warm up act. The success of the day has far more to do with little Jimmy or Susie crossing the stage than any particular pearls of wisdom I have. There are probably more guidelines to truy great graduation speeches, but it occurs to me those are a good place to start.

The New York Times has a story today about the resolution of the court case in Libby and grace and asbestos. This one has been going on for a lot of years and is sad all the way around. I have recently been looking into the Exxon Valdez spill for a magazine article I’m working on and this has a similar ring but gets much less attention because there are no stunning pictures of oil covered birds. The tragedy is just as great, and is another example of how justice is lost in the legal process. (Thanks to my buddy Phil H. for getting me onto this story).

The Trap of Tactics

2009-05-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

I was a few paragraphs into “How David Beats Goliath” before I looked up at the author and recognized Malcom Gladwell’s name. The article is classic Gladwell, throwing a lot of seemingly unrelated ideas into a story with a strong central narrative and creating a mind bending milkshake.
It’s a great read, especially for those of us that love the game of basketball on a philosophical level. More importantly for that, as I sat at the computer last night reading it, it helped me come to terms with what I thought had been a meeting gone wrong.
The short story is that I had gathered a group, and started to talk about the plan. I had thought through the tactics and how to best push things along. Heck, I even had a Excel spreadsheet and a homework assignment.
The meeting went badly, because everyone kind of ignored that part of it. They wanted to know about the strategy. They wanted to know about the conclusions I had made in my head, and why we were doing what we were doing.
I had looked at the landscape of the organization and made a lot of decisions based on just getting the project done, and I jumped right there with the group. The problem is that I didn’t bring them along. I didn’t engage their thinking, and their perceptions of what needed to be done and who needed to do it.
What reading Gladwell (and a great phone call from a friend) helped me realize was that it is the way of thinking that matters. I didn’t the groups agreement on how to think about this project, and I didn’t respect how they viewed the problems this project would solve. So, when I jumped in with tactics they jumped back. They wanted answers to a lot of questions I didn’t have.
Today, I’m ready to take a little different tack and look at the problem and try to come up with new solutions, rather than just dive in with tactics. I think that is the challenge for most us in almost all parts of our life. We are rewarded for completed tasks, but much of the time it is the thinking, analysis, and problem solving that truly leads to innovation and ultimately makes our lives more fulfilling.
I can’t think of an area of life where this doesn’t apply. Even in my relationship with Christ, I can go about the tasks of teaching a Sunday School class or writing a tithing check, but Christ is clearly more interested in our thinking our or intent in those things. At work, I can go about the tactics, but what is personally rewarding and best for the organization is that I think about the problems in a long view which solves them in the long term, not just the short term. In my family, I can focus on getting everyone where they need to go without stopping to ask if we are going to the right places.

Quiet concerned

2009-05-05T07:15:00.001-07:00

I keep pointing to this story, because it’s fascinating to me, but I might be the only one. Maybe it says more about me than it does anything else, but I’m still astounded by the latest revelations in the Yellowstone Club debacle.
Today, Edna Blixseth says that she opposed a $375 million loan. What exactly does that conversation sound like? It’s so mind boggling I can’t even imagine. The Montana Standard runs this quote, “’I was quite concerned with us getting a loan of that amount of money,’ she [Edna Blixseth] said of the 2005 transaction engineered by her then- husband, Tim.”
Quite concerned? My wife is quite concerned when I eat too much red meat or decide to play basketball with twenty year olds. Financially, I am quiet concerned that we might need to purchase a new vacuum or that the brakes in the suburban are going out. Anything over a few hundred dollars and I’m quiet concerned. Yet, in this article people are talking about $200 million dollars that went into a personal account like this is a fairly normal occurrence.
I don’t know the Blixseths, I only know a little about the neighborhood they purchased. It’s been a bad deal for everybody involved. The Yellowstone Club is like a cancer growing in the valley. In general I’m not even against rich people, but at some point this case highlights that we seem to have lost perspective when it comes to greed, gluttony and obscenity. Wealth like that in the face of so much need is nothing if not obscene.

If you need a laugh from the same paper read Bill Foley’s column today. If that’s not a Butte column I don’t know what is. A lot of times I disagree with Foley and I have accused him of being the worst columnist in Montana, but the longer I’m out of Montana the more I enjoy reading his stuff because there is something so “Butte” about it. Reading today’s took me back to a seat at a table in the Vu Villa drinking a beer and watching a kid in a letterman’s jacket walk up to the bar and walk out with a case. Different times.

Fish in New York Times

2009-05-04T10:21:00.001-07:00

Today’s New York Times includes a link to the blog opinion piece by Stanley Fish called God Talk. I am a fan of Fish, and often have some piece of his in a pile on my desk waiting to be read, or waiting to be filed for reference in some currently unknown project.

What strikes me most today about the academy and the discussion on religion is how false much of it rings. Today’s discussion by Fish reminded me of a professional conference I once attended where they brought in a debate team for after lunch entertainment.

This was five years ago before much of the debate about gay marriage was settled, so as a topic it seemed provocative. However, the debate ended up being a debate over civil union versus marriage. It wasn’t much of a debate, because those that had given the topic had already decided that one of the two was the right answer.

Now I realize that collegiate debate doesn’t have a lot to do with the fleshing out of ideas, rather it’s about scoring points and judges. However, I think it is still and interesting example of where the institution of higher education gets many of these debates wrong.

Despite how you feel about gay marriage or any other hot button issue, the debate has to happen over the real conflict. The conflict is whether or not gay marriage is an option. The debate is pretty robust and over some key foundational concepts of what it means to be human, religious faith, psychology, law and a host of other disciplines. To start the debate somewhere other than at the core just doesn’t do much good. It alienates the University from those truly seeking answers.

I think Fish has some good thoughts in this piece, and I hope the debate about God and the meaning of life at Universities and elsewhere picks up steam and grows deeper. The answers to these questions shape every discipline.

More Yellowstone Club debacle

2009-05-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

Were it not for the swine flu, Justice Souter’s retirement, and Chrysler headed to the big auto mart in the sky, the drama playing out in Bozeman, Montana would be getting national play. It has all the greed, conflict, and drama you could ask for and now the latest pictures have added a Hollywood actor to the mix. Of course, he’s just the latest celebrity to the mix.

Today in the Bozeman Chronicle, and the Billings Gazette are interesting stories about the ongoing saga of the Yellowstone Club. I have been interested in this story for awhile and wrote this opinion piece for our magazine awhile ago.

What seems to be missing about the most recent stories, and is missing from much of the coverage of this kind of story is the question of justice. It’s interesting for me to think about the fact that I currently own a home, or co-own it with the bank and they are really worried in this economy about me paying it off because I am among those that are “upside-down” due to changing market conditions. It’s my home, I’m going to pay it off. Yet somehow, on paper it made sense to someone to loan Blixseth $200 million. That $200 million pays for a lot of homes like mine.

Swine flu or greed, which will get us first

2009-04-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

Two articles I have written lately have come to be of additional interest as events around the world and in Montana have unfolded. I managed to use the Yellowstone Club as an example of a world gone wrong this winter. Today, the Missoulian continues to update the story that defies all reason.

On another note, for an article about bioterrorism I did a lot of work with pandemic flu documents. Knowing what I know from that experience I am both more concerned about pandemic in general, but less concerned about the swine flu thus far. Then again, I am going to Costco tonight to stock up.

Getting all philosophical about endings

2008-10-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

I remember getting on my bike as a junior in high school the day after basketball season ended in a loss. Uncharacteristically, I was feeling good, and suddenly had all the time in the world. It was cold, but I could feel spring, the snow had melted, and I was looking ahead to a summer and then senior year. Despite the pain and sadness of the loss the night before, somehow it had occurred to me that the sun really did come up no matter what and it gave me an optimism and joy that I don’t often remember feeling. I remember rounding the corner near my house and the tire on my ten-speed hitting the accumulated sand that had run off against the curb and I almost wrecked. To this day, I remember smiling at the idea that I was feeling good but the sand in the road could easily bring me down if I didn’t pay attention.

This Tuesday night, I stood in forty degree weather and rain as I watched my son finish out the high school football season. They got beat, and the season ended. For some I’m sure it feels like the world ended, and as we each bring our own frame to the experience I don’t want to minimize it, but for me I was reminded of seasons ended almost twenty years ago and the fact that the sun does come up tomorrow. I think the new lesson I might be learning is that one of the keys is to have joy in the season.

I thought about this more as I read about the New Kids On The Block on a reunion tour. The reviewer from the Star Tribune said they were great, and the other day on the way home I heard “The Right Stuff” on the radio for the first time in a decade. It reminded me of the pep band playing the first few bars of that tune as the announcer called my friend Vince’s name during our senior year of basketball. Vince hated the New Kids, and I remember him grimacing up at the band. It makes me laugh now. Twenty years later, the New Kids aren’t any better musically, but they are fun. After listening, I also realized I can no longer make fun of my daughters musical choices of Hannah Montana or High School Musical. Sure, Bob Dylan writes with more meaning, U2 is deeper, and Jimmy Buffet is a poet, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to just hum along with a catchy tune.

I guess that is what I mean by enjoying the season. Two decades later, I don’t remember the crushing feeling of losing, I remember what happened during the season, and I remember the people who went through it with me. I remember the look on Vince’s face, I remember Mike eating more than should be humanly possible at McDonalds, and I remember Justin in the back of the bus laughing. There are a few plays I remember, but I remember more about what shoes everybody wore than what the scores were.

The sun does come up after the season is over. That’s the first part of the lesson, and two decades later I’m beginning to realize that learning that lesson just leads to an even better one to live fully in the season, and embrace the team, family, and friends around you.

Shameless Self Promotion: Part III

2008-10-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

This is the final chapter of the book I'm going to post to my blog. I'll take requests for the remainder, but in this day and age of intellectual property it probably doesn't make sense to post the whole thing. So, here Chapter Three. As I was creating that link I was thinking hard about a joke about intellectual property as an oxymoron, but I can't seem to come up with it.

Good weekend to all and to all a good night.

Shameless Self Promotion Part II

2008-10-03T10:37:00.001-07:00

Today, I posted the second chapter of the book I just finished writing to the web. It can be found here. The first chapter can be found here. I would really appreciate any feedback. It will be a slow rewrite, but I have a little momentum now.

Human Trafficking Thoughts

2008-09-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile an issue rises above political wrangling, personal ideology, and theoretical constructs because we can agree; this is just wrong. On Thursday this week I had such an experience at the University of St. Thomas Law Journal’s symposium on human trafficking. I also had the experience of being shamed, and that’s not a bad thing.

The symposium gave attendees a lot to think about, particularly from the remarks of Norma Ramos one of the cofounders of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. In discussing her rejection of the term “sex-worker” she asked the simple question when did sex become work, and do we have to live with the commoditization of everything? Is human sexuality something to be traded on and with? In her talk and as part of a panel later in the day Ramos draws clear lines between a “porn” culture, prostitution, human trafficking and abuses that I cannot even bring myself to write about.

This issue of ending the sex-trade in all of it forms really does rise above political points of view and gets at something we may have already lost, the dignity of each human being as a person. Norma Ramos is a card carrying liberal of great pride and accomplishment, but what I heard her talking about are the very things that the right should be caring about and talking more about. This is not an issue of first amendment, this is an issue where we look at the degradation of the individuals involved in the sex trade, and the devastation to the communities in which we live and we have to ask ourselves simply, “Is this something that any reasonable society should live with?” Again, Ramos makes a powerful point here. She took the examples of theft and murder, and pointed out that no society has ever said that theft and murder and going to happen so we should just figure out how to regulate these things.

It is a Christian point of view that looks at a society and cares for the most vulnerable, and here is a place where we are clearly failing miserably. Beyond just the Christian, for a long time people have been told that to speak up against pornography in any form is to be a prude, to reject a reasoned approach to life, and to infringe on the rights of others. Yesterday, Norma Ramos gave me permission to get over that.

I have two daughters, and when she gave the example of a parent holding a young child and the dreams that go through a parents head of what that child will become: doctor, lawyer, missionary, on that list no parent ever thinks “prostituted person”. So today I’m coming before my God and asking myself, why I would ever support or watch something that I would make me angry, sad, or disappointed in what I had accomplished as a parent if I see my child in it?

There is room for broad agreement on this issue. We have sold enough of our dignity. The solution for me personally is not in legislative action outlawing obscene material, it is the simple act of looking at movies, television shows, advertisements and the flood of media in my eyes and saying, that is someone’s child and a child of God.

Shameless self promotion

2008-09-18T06:37:00.001-07:00

In a bit of shameless self promotion I am posting the first chapter of the most recent book I've written here as a pdf. I have a couple of goals. One is that, I'm having a tough time doing the rewrite. I tend to be more interested in the next book, than in doing the hard work of rewriting the book that is in process. So, I'm partly interested in knowing if the first chapter is interesting enough that anyone would like to read the next chapter. At any rate, my goal is to have the rewrite done by Christmas. My goal was to finish the first draft by August, and I made that, so maybe part of middle age is getting more done.

On a more exciting front, Cole is starting for the Royals J.V. team today as they take on our arch rivals the Tigers. I'll take Cole's cool new camera and hopefully have some good pics.

A note for all expatriated Montanas. If you want to really miss Montana check out the Montana Standard online. There are probably better papers in Montana, but as far as the flavor of the state goes it's hard to beat that one. I've put a link in the left hand navigation to their blog page and I recommend Pat Ryan in the sports department. I try to avoid Foley when possible, but sometimes I miss Montana enough I'll even read his stuff.

Time to restart

2008-09-17T12:11:00.001-07:00

It's time to restart the blogging, but I think I'm going to go quiet at first. I'm thinking about going ahead and posting some of the chapters of the book that I have just finished writing, abut I'm not sure about that either. What I do know is that there are a lot of things that I'm pondering, and getting them out in a written form seems to help.

For the first post in over a year, I hate to say that I'm going to have to cover middle age and the increasing revelation that I have entered into with both feet. The bottom line is that I really don't mind. Here are my top 10 signs that I have entered middle age:

1. I'm often a passenger in my car because my 15 year wants to drive
2. I'm living with three women (wife and two daughters) who all criticize my fashion choices
3. I look forward to the commute home and National Public Radio
4. Lawn care is high on my priority list and it irritates me when the grass is too long
5. I'm pretty sure I'm not the smartest person in the room anymore
6. God is less vengeful
7. I've lost all but one grandparent
8. I avoid arm wrestling my son because I'm afraid I might lose
9. I have no illusions that if I quit shaving my head it would grow back
10. I have friends who are Elks, Shriners, Rotarians, and part of other "old guy" groups

If anybody has any thougths on that book idea let me know.

Social Thought

2007-06-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

There is a blog out there called “Mirror of Justice” that I have taken to reading a lot lately. It is in short, a blog about the development of Catholic legal theory. Professionally, I have been immersed in Catholic legal and social thought for the past several months and I have to say that it has been much, much more enjoyable and edifying than I would have thought. In fact, the other day I heard and interesting quote from a protestant about why it was possible to have robust theological debate in the Catholic Church that doesn’t happen in Protestant (or Evangelical) churches. “When we disagree we start a new church,” he said simply while explaining that there is a long history in the Catholic Church of people on many sides of a particular issues remaining loyal to the key tenets of the church.

I’m not sure any of that would matter much to me, but I have found myself increasingly drawn to those key tenets. I am currently reading the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching and I find that the keys to the faith as recorded in that book are compatible with what is being taught as essential in 90% of the evangelical churches out there. In the end, what it boils down to are the inerrancy of the Bible, the literal person and atoning sacrifice of Jesus, and the inherent dignity of each person that God has ascribed to each person. It is fascinating stuff, particularly how many of the things I thought were true about Catholicism as a whole were in error.

These past few months I have seen faith in a much newer light, and I’m starting to understand more and more that as “Evangelical Christian” becomes some kind of demographic to be owned, it loses its power. I am particularly challenged by the fact that we are warned as Evangelicals to be wary of any church that says, “Christ plus anything else is to be avoided.” We are saying that from pulpits with denominational statements of faith that are sometimes 10 or more articles long and in membership classes we teach that all must agree with these things to become members of the church. I wonder what Luther would think about the church his revolution has wrought.

Does all this disturb me? Strangely no. It is a liberating feeling to understand more about social justice and to know that those tendencies which I have in my own theology are in fact not foreign to the gospel.

Both ways

2007-05-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

Early post this week. I will be spending the next two days on a school retreat which probably also shapes todays post which is somewhat theoretical and academic in nature. In preparation for the retreat I have been reading severeal legal journal papers and the Compendium of Catholic Social Thought (which I highly recommend).

Early this week I read the NY Times review of Al Gore's new book. The reviewer indicates that in the book he argues that in America we no longer use reason appropriately. Without having read it, I hate to take my argument too far, because on the basis of it I agree with him. As an orthodox Christian (my new term) I would say that the modern era is defined by style or substance. However, Al Gore definetely has a problem with that position unless he is willing to take a hard look at the Clinton presidency and how it furthered the careless use of rhetoric to get where it wanted to go. Bill Clinton was not a great leader, but he was a great communicator and they are not the same thing. It appears to me that Al Gore is accusing the Bush administration of many of the same things that went on during the Clinton administration.

I have posted about this before, but there are a lot of things in society that we can't seem to have both ways, and we have gotten so afraid of definitions that the language is becoming more and more vilified. You are either right or left, and to go further and try to explain some incongruity within that it is very difficult. I think this is the problem faced by Republican candidates like Rudy and McCain but is also faced by a number of Democrats who are either pro-life or pro-death penalty or pro-war. Our rhetoric is very fast and very careless. As a society we paint with broad brushes.

In the end we have far too much information and far too little knowledge.

Good Burger

2007-05-18T11:59:00.001-07:00

I had written a post before I went to lunch that was probably more than a bit negative. I have two lessons I learned from the experience. First and foremost, you should never put anything on the internet before you have given it some thought. Secondly, there aren't many things that good cheeseburger can't solve. Sorry to any vegetarians in my audience of one, but I just don't think a Boca Burger would have helped clear my head - though my wife is trying to convince me it would.

The picture is of the new building where I work. Of course the flowers don't look that good yet, but I'm sure they will soon. You see - a good cheeseburger can change your whole way of looking at things.

Graduations and such

2007-05-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight could be interesting, or it could be incredibly boring. That pretty much sums up everyday at 1:55 p.m. but tonight has some more interesting possibilities. Their will be ten girls at the house for an 11 year old birthday party. I’m incredibly outnumbered as I think the only other boy is headed for a sleep over at a friend’s house. So, I will either have to manage the chaos or be completely ignored – I would suspect the later.

Tomorrow it will be time to get up and experience commencement at my new place of employment. The room is set and it looks pretty spectacular. Tomorrow, my thoughts will be at a graduation a few thousand miles away as my brother gets his doctoral degree in Spokane. At any rate, by the time that mothers day rolls around I would suspect that all the mothers in my life would be smart to have low expectations. That point of view has served them well thus far. That’s probably not fair by a long shot. I’m having an unusually busy week and I suppose this is more par for the course for mothers.

Parent Trap

2007-05-04T12:03:00.001-07:00

Being a parent there are a lot of things to complain about. Most of them come down the to the fact that you don’t really captain your own ship anymore. Even early in a marriage a guy can trick himself into thinking he sets the agenda, but kids change that pretty quickly.

Having said that, I can’t complain a bit because the highs are so high. Today I rode the train down to the MOA (Mall of America) to watch a jr. high band performance, and afterward my son said it would be fun if I stayed and had lunch. It was fun. There are few places on Earth I would avoid more than the MOA, but on a quiet day with a son and a few buddies it was great.

Families and friends for all kinds of reasons complicate our lives. They drive our agendas and they drive us nuts, but in the end few of us can imagine life without them. In the bigger and smaller things that have come along lately I can see that.

I know that as I have struggled for freedom over the years, it hasn’t really brought much satisfaction. It is in the collective of a great family, great co-workers, great teammates where the most satisfying things have come from. Right now I’m part of some great groups, I have great family, a good place to work, and a great church. What I notice everyday though as I come and go to work is that their isn’t a lot out there. It makes me feel both blessed and motivates me to try and get involved in more things that build the community that is lacking in so many lives.

Politics as usual

2007-04-27T12:06:00.001-07:00

It is easy to get disillusioned with politics. Having been around and through more than one legislative session even in my thirties I realize that much of what is going in is just more of the same. Due to term limits and the passing of time the faces change and to some extent the tactics get more and less nasty, but the brawl is the same.

What gets lost is the simple fact that we deserve better. This was pointed out to me this week in several weeks at the national and local level. Maybe it hit me most when I was reading the Billings Gazette this morning and noticed a particular news items about politics that came with a warning label about bad language.

Some would say that it is easy to look at it from the outside and criticize, but I’ve been there in one role or another and like I said, it doesn’t change much. On top of that is the fact that perspective makes a lot of things more clear. A person can appreciate summer more in the depth of winter.

Somehow we have allowed ourselves to reward the worse behavior in politics. That’s not to say that politicians themselves are bad people. They are not. It is just that we have fed good people into a system that rewards them for their worst behavior. Great legislators that seek compromise are seen as soft. Those that don’t follow a strict party line are abandoned politically and socially, and maybe worst of all those that sometimes speak from a deep conviction are accused of a variety of intellectual crimes.

As a final note, this is not at all about party. Republicans and Democrats are coequal in the blame and there is plenty to go around. A third party – improbable at best. It is going to take a reformer internally who can stand alone. Someone with dare I say the communication skills of Bill Clinton with the conviction and willingness to buck convention of George Bush Jr. Crazy – probably.

Wrangling

2007-04-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, often times, as Christians I think in the modern era we are focused on the wrong stuff. Professionally and personally I came into contact with two court cases that have added to that mental wrangling.

This week I had the opportunity to talk with someone legally connected to the partial birth abortion decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. It basically upheld the ban on partial birth abortion. I won’t debate the facts of the case. However, I will point out that I read the opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court website and I will say that it is graphic and does make one rethink the theoretical nature of the debate. I will also say that it was seen as a victory for conservatives and in this case, conservative was closely tied to Christian conservatives.

In my expatriate state of Minnesota there has been a legal uproar over the possible installation of foot washing stations for Muslim students at the Minneapolis Technical and Community College. Again, without debating the merits the debate has largely centered on the term, “accommodation” and what is good for one religious group has to be provided for another. This time it is conservatives who seem to be blocking progress on this one and not making many friends in the Muslim community along the way.

Christians need to enter these debates thoughtfully. Clearly, Christ is on the side of life and since there is no other way than through Christ the foot washing stations are not Christian. However, what Christians need to be thoughtful about is how they use the courts and how they rely on the state as an entity.

I read this morning in Acts and I thought about how it was the persecution of the state that propelled the gospel into new areas, and I thought about how even Christ directed to give unto Caesar. Christians should be involved in the courts, politics, and other arenas. That is a great way for Christian to provide influence and leadership. However, Christ has to be bigger in our lives than our professions, no matter how noble those professions are. We must also be careful that we act in a way that promotes the justice that Christ himself promoted for all people in love so that they may see Christ in us and turn toward him. To what extent we as Christians let ourselves become a demographic, we do a disservice to the name of Jesus Christ and what he came to earth to do, which is to save individuals – not nations.

Deepish thoughts

2007-04-13T10:28:00.001-07:00

I remember in high school sitting around and watching Saturday Night Live and one of my favorite sketches was “Deep Thoughts, with Jack Handy”. Played to a background of new age music and fields of flowers, the soft spoken announcer would read pseudo inspirational messages like, “Nothing tears a family apart – like a pack of wild dogs.” It was funny stuff.

As I have gotten older every once in a while I have deep thoughts, but anytime I acknowledge them as a deep thought I realize how polluted my mind is because I immediately think of Jack Handy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. (There are many sources of pollution.) So this week seemed to be dominated by a number of deep intellectual thoughts that came from many directions.

This blog really isn’t about any of them, only a recognition that I don’t tend to do a lot of that kind of thinking anymore, and I think I’d feel better about life if I did. I tended to be more philosophical in my late teens and twenties. Is that loss of mental, philosophical rambling a sign or age, or would I in fact be a better thinker about many things if I exercised my brain more.

Bus Ride Fun

2007-03-30T07:18:00.001-07:00

I like the riding the bus. It’s almost a treat. I get to spend 25 minutes of uninterrupted time where I can read, close my eyes, do whatever. Besides, my bus route runs right along the lake for half of it, what’s not to like.

I like the energy of working in a downtown area to. It’s fun to be able to walk just about anywhere I need to go and get anything that I need (or want). All in all, the move downtown has been pretty positive.

The only thing that I notice is that there aren’t a lot of happy people walking around. You don’t see many smiles on either the bus or walking around downtown. Everybody seems to be headed somewhere, but they are not happy about it. Occasionally you see people walking together and they seem to be enjoying themselves, but that is the exception.

My Twin Cities travel tip of the week is that if you ever need seafood in the center of the country and have a spare $100, Oceanaire is wonderful. It was a great meal and great way to celebrate the new job.

One week down - 259 to go

2007-03-23T09:42:00.001-07:00

I spent my first week riding the bus, working downtown, and trying to figure out exactly how a large, private University works. It has been great. I like the bus, I like the work, and Spring is the in the air.

The fun moment of the week was having lunch with Garrison Keilor. Alright, so we didn’t actually have lunch but he did walk into the small deli where I was having lunch with a colleague on Wednesday. By the way, lunch was great.

I say I have 259 to go because my goal is to be in this job for at least five years, and the feeling after week one is that it is possible. Everyone here is very focused on the mission. They seem to all be working together toward excellence and it is both challenging and invigorating. I’m trying to figure out why they hired me. There are a lot of smart people here and they seem to genuinely like each other.

I’m having a blast.

Seasons End

2007-03-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

I just played my last “noon-ball” game, and its funny how my life and basketball have coincided over the past several months. In the last few weeks my son, my daughter, and my coaching and playing lives have all ended a season.

I realize more today than ever what I enjoy about playing. Its not the games, it’s the teammates. It was a pretty normal lunch time basketball game, but I’m glad for some of the guys that were there. Some of them started playing about the same time I did, and we have shared a lot of things outside the court. Other guys have been playing here forever, and will be playing for a lot of years to come. Then there was that group that I thought about. The only thing that would have been better is if I would have gotten to pick a final team with Chip and Kelly who left awhile ago.

I hope somehow at the basketball banquet next Sunday and in my kids careers I can do a better job of communicating that it really is more about who you play with and how you play the game. While I might have sometimes envied teams with more talent, in retrospect there is not a team I played on our coached that I would have traded for another – and I’m pretty lucky to be able to say that.

As I look at starting a new position next week, it's with high hopes that I will be able to say that with a new team off the court. I know I would say that about the team I was priveledged to work with here.

Lessons from 5th Graders

2007-03-14T09:06:00.001-07:00

I always leave youth basketball tournaments feeling a little worse about the state of sports in America. This last weekend was my daughter’s fifth grade basketball tournament, and if it weren’t for the shear joy of seeing your daughter score a basket I don’t think I would have been able to say it was a positive experience.

One particular incident that stands out is on Sunday afternoon when a referee had to reprimand a parent, two players, and both coaches all within the span of about thirty seconds. Was the official great – probably not, but there was almost no way to call the out of control eighth grade girls game he was trying to keep control over. Whatever he was making that day was not enough.

During the fifth grade games the officials got a share of irritated fans. Coaches seemed to be the worst offenders. If they had spent as much time coaching as “working” the officials the girls would have gotten an education. For the record, I was proud of the way our girls coach conducted herself and coached our girls, but overall the adults seemed to make the experience a lot less enjoyable for the girls. Between officials on the court, screaming coaches and parents, and tournament officials looking for many ways to maximize a buck it was hard to see the love of the game. It was there if you looked, but you had to look awfully hard.

My form of protest is that I vowed then and there to put up a hoop on the driveway this summer. I’ll encourage my kids to do camp and keep playing, but I’ve decided that maybe the playground is the best place to learn. I’m grateful to the coaches I had, especially for the life lessons. As an assistant high school coach for the past two years I can see how that still happens. High school teams seem to be a little more controlled and a little more balanced with a focus on winning the right way. However it seems to me that the traveling team basketball culture has lost sense of why we play the game. The chance that any girl at this week’s tournament will make the WNBA is astronomically small. The chance that they will need the lessons in perseverance, sportsmanship, health and wellness, and confidence that basketball can teach is astronomically large.

So, for the weekend I’m glad we went 0-3 and tried to do it the right way. With a few more practices every week and teaching the girls how to play a 2-3 zone that relies on just not letting anyone come near the lane would likely have garnered us at least one win, but a few days removed I think the future is brighter for our 0-3 girls than whoever ended up winning the championship. Early success is no guarantee of future results, but early effort is.

New Resolution

2007-03-09T11:54:00.000-08:00

My new resolution is to post every Friday, which is a good goal because with starting a new job in 8 days, I should have something to say. I've also decided to try and figure out what this blog is about and actually try to attract and retain some readers and spark some discussion.

Today's post is simply that God is good. I heard from an old friend today who helped me see that and one of the things that pointed out the most that God is good is that she found that out along the way to. I couldn't be happier than to be starting my new job on March 20. Yes, I'll still be an expatriated Montanan, but I think I have landed at a good place. Just one more indicator - they have Caribou Coffee brought in every day. I had my choice of a big office or one near the coffee. I took the one near the coffee.

Real live snowstorm

2007-03-01T09:51:00.000-08:00

Well, we made it to March 1 but we have a snowstorm in Minnesota. We had about 6-8" in the last week and today they are predicting about 16". It seems like we will actually reach that total based on what it looks like out my window.

New Job

2007-02-28T10:04:00.000-08:00

On March 20 I will start a new job at the School of Law at the University of St. Thomas. It's a great opportunity to work in marketing at a school I don't think I could probably get into. We don't have to move which is a huge plus and the job is really great. I will start my Ed.d sometime in the next year and continue to work in marketing higher education.

On the brighter side I will be working downtonw Mpls within 2 blocks of 2 Starbucks, a Caribou, and Chipotle. You can tell where my priorities are.

Random Abstract

2007-02-16T08:43:00.001-08:00

I’m relatively sure I had something important to say today but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is. A few days ago in the car I connected the dots between several random abstract items in my life and thought, “hey that would make a great blog,” but I seem to have forgotten it.

All in all, a really big few weeks though. Major financial purchases, major possible career moves, and a whole lot more.

The big Montana vs. Minnesota of the moment seems to be the battle in my head of thinking of living in a state where a former Saturday Night Live cast member is a member of congress. I can’t seem to get the voice of the SNL announcer out of my head every time I read his name.

Al Franken is a funny guy who is no doubt smart. It was his wit that made him funny. However, the more I watch politicians the more I’m willing to back men and women who seem to be great collaborators, and he is a polarizing figure.

The basketball season is over on Tuesday. This has been a really, really enjoyable year with the 9th grade girls. They have played hard most of the time, and rarely make me want to jump in front of a bus. Plus, I’ve learned a lot the current state of affairs in the American high school, and having this experience this year makes me less worried knowing that my son will become a high school student next year.

Three generations of poets

2007-02-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

I remember finding out at some point in my young life that my Dad had written poetry. In a box my Mom was going through she found a poem and I remember thinking two things. One was, “That is pretty weird.” Two was, “That’s not half bad.” Not that I was probably qualified to judge because I was less than ten, but I remember it was a poem about Wilt Chamberlain.

This fall, my son cruised to a student council election victory on the strength of his election speech which he put in the form of a poem. Yesterday, he read part two as part of announcement to encourage his school to read more to reach a school wide goal. Apparently it was a big hit with the school with the exception of the eighth graders who my son said gave him a “pity clap”. I think he was joking.

The funny thing is that we have never talked about my poetry writing or his grandfathers, yet he has picked up the pen. It is more for fun than fame, and it seems that poetry in daily life has disappeared even more than when I was in school, but somehow he found his way to it. It brings about a lot of nature and nurture thoughts in me, but more than that I think it shows a generational connection. There is some thread within families that cannot be explained but is evident in the strangest ways from the way we talk to the things we like. My son is a lot different from me, and I am a lot different than my Dad. But as I get older, I appreciate more and more those times that God reveals a way that I am the same, connected in ways that I don’t understand.

I wonder to if this is not partly how God sees us. We are his children, and every once in awhile we do something where he looks at us and is pleased because we have displayed some trait of his.

Native non native

2007-01-26T07:12:00.000-08:00

Having moved around a lot I think a lot about what it means to be "from" some place. When we are in Montana, I still feel like it is "home" and that somehow it is a part of me and I am a part of it. What is ironic is that I often find myself in Bozeman or driving past million dollar homes and I think, "These people don't really get Montana." Then I'm faced with the question, but what if the place has changed and I just didn't change with it.

In Seattle it seemed like we were natives right away. Nobody was from Seattle so we all helped each other create a culture. In North Dakota, we could have lived their ten more years and people would still have introduced us as newcomers. In Minnesota, we are somewhere in the middle.

What brought these thoughts to mind this morning was an article in the NY Times on the artistic revival in Butte, Montana. It sounds like the Butte I know, but it also definetely sounds like it is changing. I remember in college being in some of the houses that the article talks about when they were pseudo dorms for Tech students where 8 people could live together for $75 a month. No that was not in the 60's - it was in the 90's.

Good reads

2007-01-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

Two good articles I have read in recent days that are to a large degree unrelated, and to pull them together in my head would be time consuming and a disservice to both writers.

Typically, I stay away from any book that starts with “the Gospel according to. . .” unless those name following is Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. However, Christianity Today had a really interesting excerpt from the Gospel According to the Beatles. It shows in the end that everyone, no matter how creative or successful is searching for something, and I think helps Bob Dylan’s point that you have to serve something.

The other article was by Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated. I really like his writing and I think he sums up the state of college athletics pretty well in this short article. I only wish I would have had a chance to listen to him deliver it on his regular Wednesday NPR spot.

"Yo Rock"

2007-01-24T08:58:00.000-08:00

I hate to see people dogging my favorite film of all time.

Rocky is a great film. Despite what CNN had to say, calling it disgraceful that it won the Best Picture Oscar in 1977 versus Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, etc. I’m here to say that Rocky as Best Picture was not a disgrace, but rather a deserving win.

Sure it’s an old story, but what about some of the great characters and the fact that in the end (spoiler alert) he doesn’t actually win. Film critics would have us think that we are somehow mentally deficient if the think a film we actually enjoy is also good. That seems to be part of art that gets missed. Good art can be unpleasant and challenging, but good art of any type can also make us smile and restore our hope.

A friend of mine has me challenged to start thinking of entertainment and art as separate things. The definition that I am working with is that art is dialogical in nature. It comes from the “I thou” perspective and is trying to communicate something that goes both ways. Entertainment on the other hand is monological, and does not really care about the audience as people but only as consumers. It seeks something from the audience, but not at an emotional level. Anyway, if I ever get into a Ph.D. program in Communications I think this is going to be my dissertation.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Razzies had it right. Material Girls is terrible at best. I was glad the girls borrowed and did not pay for the film. Which by the way they immensely enjoyed.

Transcendence

2007-01-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

As Ali turns 65 there are some great photos of his fights on si.com. Looking through them this morning I noticed the dates. The range from the 60's through the early 80's and in each one he looks like an entirely stunning athlete and champion. Back in the days, the heavyweight champion of the world meant something not only to boxing fans, but to the culture at large. In my lifetime Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan have had that affect on their sports. People care about the events that they are in, and it's far more than the fans of the sport. These figures transcend the particularly athletic skill they have and somehow become icons.
I'll take the argument that Jordan wouldn't be Jordan without Magic and Bird to pave the way right before. I'll even take the argument that Tiger Woods has not yet proven to be a better athlete than Jack Nicklaus, but somehow with three figures that doesn't seem to matter. It's not necessarily logically and you can't stack it up with stats sometimes, but at some level most people feel that it is true.

Tuition and stuff

2007-01-18T11:11:00.000-08:00

I have been wondering for awhile about out of control tuition and the eventual effect is going to have on my career path and society in general. I realize for instance that I can't afford to send my kids to the college that I work at.

Today the news out of Montana is that the Republicans are proposing a reduction in tuition. Great idea in a headline, but this is one of those things that makes a great headline and bad policy. Over the years the lack of a coherent tuition policy in the state has led it to where it is. There have been a lot of conversations and very few solutions. This most current move is a short term fix with long term consequences, because when the surplus dries up they will not have fixed any of the essential problems that lead to higher tuition.

Which brings me to an interesting Newsweek article by Alan Sloan I read the other day about how we are headed for a crash because Baby Boomers are going to break social security. Full of great stuff, but again here is a problem we are not going to face until it is too late.

It's a hard lesson in life and hard lesson in global politics, short term solutions rarely have lasting meaning. Then again, lately it seems like even lasting meaning doesn't have much lasting meaning.

Hate the buzz

2007-01-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

Last night a political figure (name protected so we can focus on the subject of buzz not party affiliation) one of the phrases used in reference to Iraq was “the centrifugal forces of chaos.” Now, I may have an incomplete education but that makes absolutely no sense. A force that brings things into a center would seem to be the opposite of chaos. Did the speaker or the speech writer really think that was going to help the American people understand what was happening in Iraq?

I recently saw a news segment on whether jargon was bad for business, and the answer was a resounding yes. I would say we are actually a step beyond that. We are bombarded with communication, but so much of it is bad communication. From advertising to political rhetoric often if feels like people are just taking several long words and stringing them together. I’m not sure if there is a centrifugal force at work, but modern communication surely reflects chaos.

Along those lines, the word out of Montana today is that Conrad Burns is going to work for a lobbying group. No big surprise, but I think the reason he was able to last so long is that people may not have liked what he said, but you knew with him you were never going to get jargon. He may have been plain, but he was also plain spoken which people appreciated.

Word on the street is that it is winter again in Montana. I'm still hoping for a snow day.

New Year

2007-01-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

It has been a weird, wild, few weeks and I'm still not sure where exactly I am at.

It has been a long strange couple of weeks. My grandfather passed away shortly before Christmas, and going from funeral to Christmas to New Years has led to a kind of emotional jet lag.

The highlights of the season included getting to see possibly my oldest friend and his wife and their young daughter. It was a nice surprise to have a chance to reconnect with them, even if it was at a funeral. Food was a highlight. It’s hard to beat the meals that are prepared around the holidays, and the snacks alone are enough to make me happy.

All in all a season – a season where I’m just not sure how I feel yet.

Searching

2006-12-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

Today is a strange day, and to keep my mind occupied from the things it would rather not occupy itself with I'm thinking about Jimmy Buffet. Not so much the man, but that fictional character that many of us think we now and sometimes rely on for advice in times of questions without answers and wrestling without an opponent.

I've been thinking about Parrot Heads and Margarittaville and the party that is the Jimmy Buffet franchise, and thinking how different that is than how I think about my first Jimmy Buffet record (yes record, my Dad still has it). When I discovered Jimmy I had yet to taste a Margaritta, but there was some deeper longing for meaning that I could tap into, and as I have gotten older songs like "A Pirate Looks at Forty," and "Tin Cup Chalice" seem to speak even more clearly to me about what I'm still looking for. I don't have any desire to go have a cheeseburger in paradise or drink margaritta's until I can't remember the questions, but I'd like to sit down with Jimmy, at least the fictional one in my head and ask him what he meant when he wrote or sang some of that stuff. The parrothead franchise doesn't appeal to me, but their is something deeper that does.

As I was thinking about this I'm going to make a quantum leap and say the same is true with Christianity for me these days. I still love going to church, still love to hear about Christ. But there is a franchise nature to it that makes me want to run away and hide or worse. Like wanting to find out who Jimmy was when he was hanging out in Livingston, Montana (not Texas as has been reported) I want to read my Bible and find Jesus that was hanging out with real people. Yes, as the story of Simeon shows Jesus was God from the time he was a baby, but somehow like Jimmy Buffet in the mass marketing of it all I think we have it wrong.

Three and 0, 0 and 3

2006-12-11T10:31:00.000-08:00

Just an update on the team that we are 3-0, but the varsity is 0-3 which is probably more important. We play 5 games in the next 8 days, and as of this weekend they promoted my best players, so I'm guessing my perfect season is in trouble, but I'd rather see the varsity get over the hill at this point than to win 9th grade games.

Interesting ideas kicked around on Sunday between church and our small group. Basically, it all came down to a challenge that to live fully as Christ would have us live we must live boldly and follow where many others may not go. Part of it came through the story of the wise men in a sermon, and part of came out of John Ortberg's, "If You Want to Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of the Boat" DVD that we discussed in small group. Somewhere in there I kept getting the message that I'm currently out of my boat, but where God wants me to be, and fighting against it sucks the joy out of what he is doing in my life. Lots of other related thoughts.

Christmas is really kicking up. Seems to bring about so many emotions in people and things for me can pretty high and low which I don't think is uncommon. I'm sending out prayers that the highs would be real, we would count our blessings in the low spots, and get an unexpected call from a friend when the lows get too low.

One and O

2006-12-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

The Watertown Mayer Basketball 9th Grade Girls basketball team is now 1-0, which surpasses my win total for last year before Christmas by 100%. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with coaching, I have a phenom 7th grader who turns broken plays into 3 pointers.

In other basketball news the 5th grade girls are 1 and 1 after two games this weekend. The middle daughter went 0-1 from the field but is showing some improvement and is a lot of fun to watch.

The 8th grade boys play only once before Christmas and a dance scheduling conflict looms large in possibly changing the date of the game. Priorities - it's good to have them when they are convenient.

Also, got some time with great friends on Saturday. It's great when God provides some unexpected moments with people we care about.

Cat vs Griz and other nonsense

2006-12-05T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'll admit that I love to terrorize my niece by pretending to big the world's biggest Grizzly fan, but the bottom line is I just don't give it that much thought. Once you move out of state if either school does well good for them. For instance I was in Dickinson, North Dakota over the Thanksgiving weekend and it was fun to watch UM Western hand it to Dickinson State.

However, I've been watching some of the posts on the Cat-Griz rivalry on the Billings Gazette website and some of these people are nuts. They have way too much time and energy wrapped up in finding denigrating ways to refer to one school or the other.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks it is interesting that Myles Brand can keep a straight face while testifying before Congress that the NCAA should remain tax exempt. If I had a few extra million dollars I'd take a run at creating a new league. The NCAA is simply a big business monopoly. It may not be all bad, but let's go ahead and call it what it is. It may even be the lesser of several evils, but it comes with it's own problems.

Then again, I may be just having a cynical day but it is kind of ironic that Dr. Brand is talking about how it is really for the good of the athletes in front of a body that says it is really for the good of the "people". I have a hard time believing that either one of those things is true anymore.

Long time no blog

2006-11-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

The real estate market in Minnesota would be picking up based on the very small evidence I have. This week two houses were sold by friends who had moved on to different jobs in different states. We are still praying that a few more friends can sell.

I've been thinking a lot lately again about what I want to be when I grow up. It seems that I've never shaken this idea that stories are what really matter. I watch modern America and the world and I wonder if we haven't lost the power of stories. Someone made the point in an article recently that we should take some lessons from the "Left Behind" series even if the theology is tragically flawed. The story brought people in and captured imaginations. Over the course of the past few months I have seen two of my kids devour "Eragon" and other books because they are still captured by the story in print. Not sure what that means, but interested.

Happy Thanksgiving

2006-11-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note because I wanted to post this week before Thanksgiving. A lot to be thankful for in recent days. Apparently through no fault or effort of my own I'm raising a "boy genius". We had parent teacher conferences this week and both the girls and the boy are doing really well in school. What's even better to hear as a father is that Cole's teachers really seem to enjoy him as a person.

This week we are headed back to Dickinson for a few days. It's strange to think that three or four years ago we thought we needed at least a week to travel that far and now we are willing to travel seven hours and it is almost a day trip.

Bait and switch

2006-11-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

In today's Billings Gazette there was an article stating that Jon Tester did not get the seat on the appropriations committee he was promised. I'm sure somewhere in the fine print of that promise was the word eventually or someday get on the appropriations committee, but that didn't make the headlines when it was promised. It seems like the Democrats succesfully undermined one of Burns main selling points without having to really mean it. Would the Republicans have done the same - absolutely, but it just further shows that their doesn't seem to be a lot of room left for good guys in politics.

Also, it does make a difference. There are things that happen in committee that don't happen anywhere else, and although Max will keep the dollars flowing somebody just turned down the spigot considerably.

Election

2006-11-08T14:06:00.000-08:00

If this blog is my practice session for becoming a pundit, today is pretty big mea culpa. I really did think Conrad Burns would win in Montana. Not that I'm a huge fan (though he is the lesser of two evils) I just thought at some point things would swing back that direction.

One of the things that struck me as I listened to rhetoric out here last night was how little was being said. A freshman Senator from Minnesota more or less promised to lower taxes on the middle class, make healthcare affordable, get troops out of Iraq, and make the world safer within five minutes of being elected. Of course, she can't do those things and their is no real plan, but as people we may have gotten to the place where the world is just too complex and the promise of a better way is enough.

I was actually a little disappointed when I went to the polls I didn't know more. In two years when I get the chance to do it again I hope I don't make the same mistake.

Winter coming

2006-11-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

Since my last post was a little darker, I thought I'd take a moment today and ramble on about the fact that I don't think you can truly get to know Minnesota, particularly Minnesota natives until their is a little bit of winter in the air. Sure, Minnesota looks like a fun place to live with cool things to do in Minneapolis and all the lakes during the summer - but just wait until the four months of big freeze.

I notice the natives are starting to get a little gleam in their eye. They seem to know that those of us not from here are about to start complaining real complaints about not being able to feel limbs. Don't get me wrong, native Minnesotans complain too, but they seem to do it with a kind of glee, like complaining about having too much fun. Most Minnesota natives are much to passive aggresive to express their real joy that the frozen dark has once again returned to the land - and the rest of us are miserable.

Worlds

2006-10-31T13:46:00.000-08:00

I was driving home the other night on a less than stellar day at work thinking about what it means about me as a person that I can understand (or pretend to understand) both the Indigo Girls and the Pauline epistles. I don't understand either well, but I know that I have heard some truth, that is something that is real in both. Paul Simon and the Apostle Paul are both pretty clever lyric writers, though I do not lose sight of the fact that the Apostle Paul was talking about a new level of truth, the level of truth that came in the man Jesus.

What I'm continuing to try to put together in my 30's in the worlds that I live in and I have lived in. As stated, I still don't like losing, I'm a conservative in the world and a radical in my workplace, and I'm looking for the capital G - God and the capital T - truth and the more I am part of the "Christian" subculture I'm not sure there aren't better places to find those things. Authenticity is part of what I've been thinking about but it is more than that.

Part the problem is as you get older the yuck just gets harder. Within the last week we have heard from family and friends about some people that are really struggling. Divorce, crime, etc. take a toll on those around us, but we let days slip by without reaching out and asking for forgiveness, a hand up, or just to let somebody close know we love them.

I have spent the better part of a couple of days being really angry about a work situation. Am I right, I don't know. Chances are somewhere between my point of view and anothers is the truth, but the bottom line is that I don't want to waste my time feeling that way.

This is my most personal post, and for both of the people that might read this I'm not sure this is a nerve that is more raw than should be exposed, but I think it's worth getting out of my head.

I can't quite figure out how to be 33, but I know I have been blessed beyond what I can ask or imagine.

Visionary or Maybe not

2006-10-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

Having one of those days where I can't figure out if I'm an misunderstood visionary or full or crap. If you were to take a vote I'm guessing I don't want to know the results, though feel free to vote by comments.

Professionally, I think I have some idea of where we need to go and I'd like to at least participate in a discussion. But right now we are at a place where everybody is staking out their territory, and gorging themselves on a pie that is much too small. There isn't a clear sense of vision or something greater than us that drives us to excellence or even points of agreement. Having said that, maybe I'm just wrong.

A few more items of note. One is that I can't quite figure out why, but I still like winning. I've started playing noon ball pretty regularly again and I can't figure out exactly why but I always like winning better than losing. No one, absolutely no one in their right mind would care about noon ball - yet?

Also, it's always nice to hear of people from the past that are doing well. In recent days a guy who lived on my dorm floor was named to the staff of a CBA which is pretty cool, and I have run into someone else via email that I was happy to hear is doing well. Makes me think about the lost generation that I'm a part of, somewhere between the baby boom and boomlet known currently as Millenials. But I'm not sure what it makes me think.

Very wrong

2006-10-18T13:58:00.000-07:00

O.K. so I was very wrong. Conrad Burns is likely going down in a fairly large fireball of glory. My wisdom of a month ago about the political bent of Montana was largely for lack of a more creative phrase - a bunch of crap.

I'm not sure how that magic weekend known as MEA has come, but it has. In both Montana and Minnesota it happens to fall on the same days so it seems like the world has off work, when actually I still have to come in tomorrow.

A programming note - Steven Wright is back and has an upcoming special on Comedy Central. This guy used to be hilarious and from a recent NY Times article still seems to have it. One of my favorite one-liners of his is, "What's another word for a theasaurus." If you see it on, stop and watch I hope he's still worth it.

Montana writers - best and worst

2006-10-17T13:48:00.000-07:00

On Monday of this week Bill Foley of the Montana Standard in Butte wrote a relatively decent journalistic piece. Today, however he's back to sheer and utter nonsense with a lot of reliance on the word, "sucks".

I realize I'm getting somewhat older, but one things that seems to be standing out to me right now is that we have somehow lost the ability to write. I'm the pot calling the kettle black, because rarely do I take the time and discipline myself to plan and rewrite like I should. I've been reading novels again lately, and I'm struck that good writing doesn't just show up on the page. I'm reading newer Larry McMurtry and just finished a great book by Annie Prouloux. The writing is great in both, though McMurtry has gotten a little weird with age.

All of this is kind of a diversion right now, but of all the things on my mind this seemed to be the only thing that I felt like writing about.

Strange days

2006-10-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

We are still waiting to hear from Montana, but for now it seems as though my grandfather is doing well. Hard to know what that means, but for now living with a little mystery is probably better than the alternative.

As a quick political note, the NY Times Magazine ran a piece on Governor Schweitzer this weekend. It is a site that requires you to register, but well worth the registration. It is amazing to me how people characterize Montana. A lot of things in the article don't say much about the Montana I know, but maybe I have it wrong. One of the things that jumped out at me was that Gov. Schweitzer better be careful not to believe his own press. Ever since Mike Mansfield left Washington there has been a long line of would-be national figures from Montana, most recenlty on the Republican side of the aisle in Marc Racicot, another Governor beloved as much in the beltway as within the confines of Helena. I will admit Racicot is a national figure now, but the electoral system and a variety of factors will probably always make Montana political figures interesting circus acts as political pundits fill air time waiting for the real candidates.

Another less than interesting note about Montana in the news today was that the Sports Illustrated's website named the hazing incident in Montana as its daily "Sign of the Apocalypse". Less embarrasing to the state than the article I read today about Wisconsin's marching band, but overall not a good sign.

Overall, it's windy, it's cold and I'm looking forward to a Friday night watching "Lost" on tape. If I survive the after work run.

Looking for better days

2006-10-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

The posts are likely to get kind of random for the next week or so. We will be taking and unscheduled trip back to Montana for my grandfather's funeral. He is currently in the hospital, but not expected to make it. He has had a long battle with cancer and we incredibly sad but thankful for the time he got. He seemed to have defied the odds and predictions a number of times.

It is times like this when I understand a little bit of the high cost of being an expatriated Montanan. So many of things that are close to the heart are within a 200 mile radius of Bozeman, Montana.

This is the big one

2006-10-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Here is a more recent photo of the kids.

One of my memories of old TV is Red Sanford grabbing his chest and saying "This could be the big one," whenever he needed to fake a heart attack to get out of something. Tonight, I try and become a runner, and as Red used to say, "This could be the big one."

My wife now runs five miles with relative ease, and she will be my partner, so I'm pretty much figuring that I'm done for. The good news is that it is 60 degrees and about perfect here. Also, on Friday we will be hosting about 10-20 junior and senior high kids in our house for something the church calls "hang time". It could be an adventure.

The Gift of Free

2006-10-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you just get lucky. Yesterday I sat seven rows back just outside the left field foul pole and watched the Twins play the A’s in the first round of the playoffs. It was simply great atmosphere. The Twins ended up losing, but not a fan moved until the final out. The tickets were free, the dome dog for lunch was free, parking was free – all in all further proof that God gives us much more than we deserve.

Speaking of the gift of free, the family is looking forward to a Minnesota Symphony Concert on October 15. It will be great to take the kids to their first symphony concert at a concert designed specifically to introduce kids to the symphony. Should be fun.

There was another story today about the Pat Davison case in the Billings Gazette. I’m a little surprised how sad the whole story makes me. I only know one of Pat’s accuser’s and I think part of me is struck by the fact that I always thought of Pat as a pretty decent guy and at least one of the parties accusing him is not somebody I would choose to ride an elevator with if I could avoid it. Part of me keeps remembering talking to Pat in his office with the picture of the Pope in the background. The personal toll and side of this story will likely not be told, but I would guess that it is a fascinating and sad story of misguided ambition and a lot of small unethical decisions that led to a pretty big fall.

Picture experiment

2006-09-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've decided that blogging is a little like talking to myself, only harder on my fingers. However, those wacky college kids I work with (for) seem to think it's all the rage so I will continue the experiment and try to figure out how to harness the power for good.

Part of the experiment is figuring out pictures, so I am going to attempt my first picture insert here:

Fabulous. On an entirely unrelated thought if you haven't checked out Flickr at flickr.com it is a pretty fascinating photo posting site. It's fun to put in stuff like "Deer Lodge, Montana" and do a search because you end up with pretty wacky stuff. Also fun because my friend Phil has a picture from my wedding which seems weird, but the rest of his phots show how a guy can go a long, long ways from Deer Lodge, Montana to sailing outings on the east coast.

Fall is great

2006-09-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how nice the fall is in Minnesota. No knock on Montana, because I'm sure it is great there too right now but the sheer beauty that comes out in these days almost makes living in the great midwest worth it. Tonight we get to drive out to a small park on a lake and watch my son run cross country, and there are a lot of goods things about that, but just the trees and all make it pretty spectacular.

Also, as a note to self I'm realizing that I'm a poor political and personal prognosticator. Conrad Burns most recent ad was featured on You Tube. I think he may in fact be in political decline, the folks particularly in Bozeman better consider the giant sucking sound of federal dollars going somewhere else - because they don't give that kind of money to guys with flat tops.

Best times?

2006-09-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

As I was waking up my kindergartener this morning I realized that this might be the best time in my life. O.K., so having said that there are a lot of things that aren't really right. I have a career that feels like I made a critical mistep somewhere along the way, financially things are shaky at best, and everyday part of my brain is dedicated to wondering how my granfather's health is. But, as I look at the ages of my kids and what they have going on I get the sense that they just don't get much more enjoyable than this. So far I don't have to worry about dating, cars, or too many other evils out there and I get to spend a lot of time with all of them. (The upside or blessing of bad career choices maybe?) They still think I'm pretty O.K., they laugh at my jokes, yet they can all make themselves cereal and more or less pick out their clothes for school in the morning.

All in all, I'm realizing that though there are many storms in life, I'm lucky to have both my immediate and extended family.

Organizational yuck

2006-09-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

A guy by the name of Marc Cohen had an album during my high school years and in a song he said, "My friends will ask me how I'm doin, and I can't lie to em', not feeling fine today."

I seem to be trapped in a organization where I am supposedly a "communication expert" who is consistently miscommunicating. Here we don't discuss or dialogue, there are just directives and middle management is supposed to jump. In the end, that may be the definition of middle management, but I know that for the effective organization there is something more. In the effective organization there is a moment where communication is co-creation and everyone contributes to an idea and it becomes great.

Somehow the image of a garden just came to me. If I water, somebody else plants, somebody else weeds, somebody fertilizes, etc. then in the end we can have a pretty good garden. My image of the current professional garden I am in is that we are each busy trying to care for our one seed, each trying to grab the hose or the fertilizer or the rake and when the harvest time comes we are going to find that we will starve because we are each harvesting one small kernel where there could have been an abundant harvest.

School Daze

2006-09-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

After spending the weekend with 194,000 of our closest friends at the Minnesota State Fair labor day has passed and the kids are all in school. It's a weird year because for the first time we have no kids at home or daycare during the day. I'm not old enough to have three kids in school is one of my issues, but there are many others. One thing is that school seems to be the place where every fall both my kids and my money go. The good news is that the kids are doing well. The youngest couldn't wait for us to leave her at kindergarten. The middle is a big middle schooler and feeling the joy of being a big kid, and the oldest kicked off his first day of school by placing 14th at a cross country meet. He is running a mile in under 7 minutes which may not seem that impressive unless you have seen his father run.

Fall is a great time in Minnesota, and it's actually a pretty long season here. It's not as long as winter, but then again nothing is.

By the way - alligator tastes like chicken.

State Fair and Free Stuff

2006-09-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

This weekend my family and I get the opportunity to attend the "Great Minnesota Get Together", otherwise known as the State Fair for free. Well, somewhat free. My son won tickets which is a great blessing because just getting inside the gate will set a family our size back about $40.00. So this year, we are taking the tactic that we each have a $7.00-$8.00 food budget. The rule is that each person has to buy one thing each that we can share and one thing each that they want to try on their own. My son wants to try fried alligator and the girls are scared that will be the thing he wants to share. Without the free tickets, we just couldn't go so it's a pretty big blessing that we get to go do this.

Having said that, as a stranger in a strange land I accused my wife last night of going native Minnesotan on me when she wanted to put something out in the yard with a "free" sign on it. You see it all over out here, especially in rural areas. It's not uncommon to drive down the road and see an old dresser here and especially baby stuff here or there. Like a good agriculture state, the harvest of free goods seem to peak during the fall as garages need to again accomodate vehicles. Sometimes, the stuff isn't free. Another common site is an older snowmobile or car parked along a farm road with a big red "For Sale" sign purchased for the local hardware. I'm not making a judgement, it's just one of those, "You know you are in Minneosta when. . ." signs.

A friend once talked about having spiritual "gift of free". They just seemed to come into stuff, whether it was cars, movies, vacations, whatever. Who am I to complain, I'm going to take my "free" stuff and run.

Water and sadness

2006-08-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

This weekend my family and I got to spend the weekend at a lake in northern Wisconsin. It is the kind of family place with a small cabin, canoes, a dock, and a fire place at night. In short, it was pretty wonderful. That is an experience that nothing in Montana really prepared me well for. In Montana the constant with water is that their is not enough and rarely is there enough to recreate in atleast above the knees. I remember one very long afternoon trying to float the Clark's Fork outside of Deer Lodge that mainly consisted of five or six of us trying to push cheap rubber rafts along the bottom.

I was sad to read this morning that it looks like Pat Davison is having some trouble. The Billingsgazette.com had the story that I read. Not knowing what did or didn't happen I don't want to comment, but Pat was always pretty fair with me. Unfortunately it looks like the combination of money, politics, and friendship are proving once again that they just don't mix.

Memory Lane

2006-08-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

In today's Missoulian they had two articles that caught my eye. The first is an interview with the football coach at Missoula Sentinel. I knew Pete many years ago and he has to be the most charismatic person that I have ever met. Pete could pack more into a weekend than was wise, but it was always an adventure. I'm glad to see that he is doing well in Missoula.

The other article was about the Missoula Children's Theater summer performing arts camp. I have a lot of great memories of the people there from the five years I was a part of the program as a camper and as staff but the detail that really brought back the memory was the fact that they duct tape pillows to the low hanging ceiling beams so that performers don't hit their heads. For some reason, that detail in the article absolutely triggered every detail of what it was like in that dining hall to rehearse for three straight hours (or more) while the lake sat outside calling our names. Sometimes the rain has the same effect on me, bringing back the MCT memories of one two week stint when it rained all the time.

My favorite MCT story is when I was the camp director and one of the counselors came to me and told me the story of two girls on the first night. One of them said, "I think you're my best friend." The other replied from the top bunk, "You're my best friend too." To which the first asked, "What's your name again?"

While I remember a lot of names from MCT, the truth is that I don't have contact with anybody (other than my brother) and I suppose that is part of age. At seventeen or twenty one the intensity of emotion is so great that you just can't imagine not knowing these people in the future, but I'm left to wonder how they are, and pray that they are doing well.

2006-08-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

On MSNBC.com today they had an interview with Jon Tester. I think this story is a good example of how people outside of Montana don't really get the complexity of the state. This is set up as pretty much a good vs. evil story, and as a communications professional there are plenty of tricks up the sleeves of both campaigns. It is set up as a classic city mouse vs. country mouse story, but ignores the fact that Conrad Burns has been running as the quintessential cowboy outsider in D.C. for more than a decade.

I have visited Conrad at his office in D.C. and I have visited Max and Denny. None of them would know me by name, but I was part of a small delegation and got to see them in action. The bottom line is that Tester can talk about "necessary evils" in his interview but nothing is more necessary in the Senate than seniority and connections and Conrad has them. It would be foolish to tell people who to vote for, I've seen plenty of reasons that if I had the honor of voting in the great state of Montana I wouldn't vote for either of these guys, but if anyone thinks that voting out Conrad won't significantly affect the federal money that flows to the state of Montana they are absolutely kidding themselves. Right, wrong, or indifferent, Conrad has been incredibly effective at getting money for projects in the state, and the evidence would show that he is just now coming into his own. "What if the democrats control the Senate?" It won't matter, Burns will have the bargaining power of being in the minority and even from his minor party status he would be able to direct far more federal dollars than a freshman Senator from a state few people can name and even fewer care about.

Another interesting media question for me is how anxious will Newsweek be to talk with Tester a few weeks into his term. I have enough friends and I've seen enough to know that honeymoons in D.C. often end before they start.

Politics, Tester or Burns

2006-08-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

On MAGNIFIES today they had an interview with Jon Tester. I think this story is a good example of how people outside of Montana don't really get the complexity of the state. This is set up as pretty much a good vs. evil story, and as a communications professional there are plenty of tricks up the sleeves of both campaigns. It is set up as a classic city mouse vs. country mouse story, but ignores the fact that Conrad Burns has been running as the quintessential cowboy outsider in D.C. for more than a decade.

I have visited Conrad at his office in D.C. and I have visited Max and Denny. None of them would know me by name, but I was part of a small delegation and got to see them in action. The bottom line is that Tester can talk about "necessary evils" in his interview but nothing is more necessary in the Senate than seniority and connections and Conrad has them. It would be foolish to tell people who to vote for, I've seen plenty of reasons that if I had the honor of voting in the great state of Montana I wouldn't vote for either of these guys, but if anyone thinks that voting out Conrad won't significantly affect the federal money that flows to the state of Montana they are absolutely kidding themselves. Right, wrong, or indifferent, Conrad has been incredibly effective at getting money for projects in the state, and the evidence would show that he is just now coming into his own. "What if the democrats control the Senate?" It won't matter, Burns will have the bargaining power of being in the minority and even from his minor party status he would be able to direct far more federal dollars than a freshman Senator from a state few people can name and even fewer care about.

Another interesting media question for me is how anxious will Newsweek be to talk with Tester a few weeks into his term. I have enough friends and I've seen enough to know that honeymoons in D.C. often end before they start.

Circumstances

2006-08-22T06:28:00.000-07:00

This morning as I was doing some devotional reading I came across the idea that God sometimes doesn't want us to change our circumstances, he uses our circumstances to change us. That seemed to be a good thought for the morning and a good thought when so many of the circumstances of life are up in the air, or at least not what I had expected. In talking with a good friend the other day I said something about that fact that none of the changes I expected to happen in May last year have happened yet. Many of the situations I thought would resolve have not, and many other things have simply changed.

On an entirely different, but maybe related note, last night I caught my first bass and it was rather unexpected. I went down with my youngest daughter to a small fishing pond located at the end of our street and basically just threw the line in the water. The bass hit it hard and fought it up all the way to the dock. I don't think I really realized what had happened until I took it off the hook and released it back into the pond.

So the unexpected happens. More often than sometimes I think I would like, but the truth is that sometimes the unexpected is great.

New School

2006-08-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

Today, on campus the soccer players have been added to the football players and by the end of the week freshman will start moving into campus. There is something about working at a college that just seems better when the students are around. There is a vitality to the campus when people are here and one of the problems in higher education is that most of our campuses go so unused during the summer months.

The ebb and flow of the higher education life is one thing is a blessing and a curse. This weekend we helped a good friend and a great guy move his family to another college. It is our third day this summer spent as moving help. Unfortunately for faculty and staff at colleges moving is a pretty common occurence. Though we seem to have some kind of unfortunate record with 11 different moves in our (almost) 13 years of marriage, it is not uncommon, but this summer has been particularly hard. I can count between six and seven people that I really respected and cared about that won't be here this year, and it gets harder to muster up the energy to invest in new people.

It makes me wonder about that time when most people never traveled more than a 100 miles from where they were born. I haven't lived within 100 miles of where I was born in over 10 years, and realistically it is probably a lot more before I'm back. And if I could go back - what would I do?

I'm hoping to master pictures soon so I can spice up the blog.

Opening salvo

2006-08-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

It is turning fall in the Midwest all of the sudden. After a long two weeks of vacation in Montana where the mountains were big we are back and the fall rain has started. I also know that fall is coming because as I log onto the billingsgazette.net I see fires raging throughout Montana, an annual rite of passage in my short time on this earth.

I'm starting this blog to explore the creation of culture and how a place gets into our hearts along with the people. For my family and I that place is Montana, but right now we are missionaries in Minnesota. Minnesotans don't think they need missionaries but then again I'm not sure there have ever been a people group who thought they needed missionaries.

So, in this blog I hope to explore a lot of things.

I'm hoping to gain a few readers along the way, because as someone said to my yesterday, if you don't have readers, you are really just talking to yourself.