Evendays

They ran like the wind on Saturday afternoon. It was unseasonably warm, so the times were about 90 seconds slower than expected, but they managed the hills and the 10K (6 miles) while some of us just watched, cheered and clapped, snapping off the quick picture or two.

Wife finished in 49:27, 11th out of 169 in her category. It was her first “out-of-the-top-10” finish in a while, but she was competing with younger ladies.

Son 2 cleaned up with a 41:50, finishing 28th out of 226 in his category. I can just run 8K in that same time period. Which means he is that little speck off in the distance…

Congratulations to both of you! May God give you many more kilometers on the road of life.

I hope it’s all downhill from here… Wait, what I meant was…

Mark 11:11ff brings us the quick, action parable of Jesus cursing a fig tree that was naturally unable to give fruit. The riding-on-a-donkey King, the one who comes “in peace”, then goes to the temple and turns over tables and chairs, chases out sellers AND buyers, merchants and worshippers, and forbids city-dwellers to cross the sacred ground with their wares.

When the disciples come across the fig tree the following day, it’s ready to be cut down for the fire. Jesus then tells them to put their faith in God.

A couple of thoughts:

• Judean Kings would sometimes do what Jesus did. Good King Hezekiah cleaned out a temple full of idols. Jesus used his prerogative as blessed king to “whip” away, if but temporarily, the rottenness of first century Judaism.

• The judgment of the fig tree becomes a judgment of sterile religion, maybe even of sterile worship. There are echoes of O.T. prophets in the air:

When I saw your fathers,
       it was like seeing the early fruit on the fig tree.
       But when they came to Baal Peor,
       they consecrated themselves to that shameful idol
       and became as vile as the thing they loved (Hosea 9.10).

So how much of a “prophet” should the preacher be when he teaches from this text?

Just wondering…

There are two big supermarket chains in Switzerland. One is COOP (pronounced COE-OPE). The other is Migros. Both have big, orange logos. Both offer bargain lines of products, from cell phones to nights at the club to credit cards. The two companies fight it out every year for the hearts of Swiss residents.

Migros (pronounced ME-Grow — I know, really bad grammar) has worked out a deal with an up-and-coming rock group to host a 40,000 seat concert. The only way you can attend the concert is to win a lottery. And the only way you can win the lottery is if you have a Migros fidelity card. They will be “giving” away the 40,000 seats to 20,000 winners.

This is quite a coup. For the afore-mentioned rock group is non other than the Stones. Yes, that mossy, wrinkly, Super Bowl halftime entertainment band will be making a stop in Lausanne. Hosted by the biggest grocery store chain in Switzerland.

Just imagine if Costco brought you the Eagles… If Walmart presented Genesis… If Kmart sponsored Kiss… Makes me want to stay home and order from Amazon.

I sent out my “mission” newsletter on Thursday. It’s an email that goes only to people who’ve requested it, which tells about stuff here with the church and how we are trying to reach out to the community.

115 people are on the email list. I ended up getting 8 responses right away, all of them bounce-backs from comcast.net. (Enmity with the Swiss server “bluewin.ch”, I guess.) Since then, I’ve received 5 personal responses.

One thing we foreign church workers can do is learn to communicate better with our sponsors, supporters and those far away who pray for us back. It’s one of the reasons for this blog: To keep in contact with people as they pray for the Lausanne work and our family.

But people are flooded with emails. (10 Africans have asked if they could give me 15% of a gazillion dollars, and that’s just this week!) I receive mission reports from Cambodia, Lyons, Mauritius Island, Marseilles, Geneva and Strasbourg. I read them all, and respond to them all (except for Geneva). I know, I don’t have a life.

Any suggestions? Should I not worry about it and keep on sending the email newsletter? Is there a way to make it more interactive?

I will respond to your comments…

I’m not a Yankee fan, but loved these comments by Gene Wojciechowski about A-Rod :

Rodriguez isn’t going to keep this up. If he does, he’ll finish with 116 homers and 301 RBIs. I guarantee you, Hank Aaron will fly cross-country to see that.

I read that on Friday morning. I read that on Friday night, he hit two more dingers.

What’s going on?

 

Dad, Sons 1 and 2, and I have all read a stack of books about WWII. And with that knowledge, you walk on the sands and see through the mind’s eye the landing craft dumping their human cargo onto the beach. And man, these beaches are deep with hundreds of feet to the embankment. You “see” those enemy soldiers doing all they can to keep you on that beach. To never let you off of it. Ever.

Most of the French language tour books about Normandy consecrate just a few pages to the landings and even though that’s regrettable, it’s understandable. For Normandy is more than a battlefield. It’s a place where people worked and farmed and fished and raised families and holidayed long before the débarquement (D-Day), and it’s right that those same everyday activities continue, even on the beaches and in the fields and along the hedges where so many gave their lives. To turn the entire area into a memorial would defeat the purpose of the invasion.

The cemeteries scattered around are an appropriate enough memorial, as are the everyday activities of the people who live in Normandy, people who still live free…

At least politically free.

The Germans had fortified the entire Normandy coast with heaven weaponry and machine guns. Most of the heavy canon were not knocked out by air, but by sea (the battleship Arkansas and two French ships took out these canons after a day-long battle) or by ground troops (think Pointe du Hoc).

At Colleville, the French have given to America a large plot of land above Omaha Beach. 9,387 US soldiers are buried there. You will also find a wall inscribed with the names of over 1000 soldiers who went missing in action during the Normandy campaign. It is moving to walk the pathways that lead along the beach cliffs past thousands of white crosses, along with the occasional Star of David, which sprout out of the well-kept lawns. Both Wife and I where surprised by the number of French visitors, young and old, who were visiting the graves. The cemetery is beautifully maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Over 20,000 Germans are buried in this simple cemetery near Cambe. Several thousand of the grave markers simply read: Ein Deutscher Soldat. It is small, austere, and a place for deep reflection.

You can click on all the pictures of the last few days for enlargements.

Daughter and Son 2 caught up with us after lunch at the Peace Museum. They’d just been to the temporary exhibit about the Hitler Youth. Son 2 told us how teenagers had massacred inhabitants of a Normandy village after the resistance had derailed a train those same youth were on. It took the German Army Police’s intervention to keep the whole village from being exterminated.

Pegasus bridge is now the name of the Caen Canal crossing where Major John Howard and his men landed their gliders just after midnight on June 6. (Stephan Ambrose wrote an entire book on this one operation.) The British successfully took the bridge and held “on till relieved”. (For those of you who’ve watched The Longest Day, that command is repeated in a haunting voice 4 times during the film… It becomes unintentionally comic!)

Sword beach is just a short drive away (as is Ouistrehem, where the French led a bloody attack on the German’s communication center). Dad carefully collected sand from that beach (as he did from all the beaches). Then we headed down to Juno and Gold, where the children flew a kite in gale force winds while us older folks sipped coffee in a nearby hotel lobby.

We just put the parents on the plane in Zurich this morning. The vacation turned into a blog (and email) holiday too, which wasn’t intended. Thanks for dropping by to the same old post.

We spent most of our time in Switzerland except for the 5 day trip to Normandy. The region of Basse Normandie (yes, there is an Haute Normandie too) was a well-known tourist destination long before June 6, 1944… Just think Mont Saint-Michel and the birthplace of Guillaume the Conqueror. Though the water is cold, the wide beaches off the Côte de Nacre served rich summer vacationers, (though less popular than those of the French Riviera).

Check out the link for a map of the area if you need a reminder of locations and distances. Zoom in and out to find the 5 landing beaches (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword) along with the infamous cliffs at Pointe du Hoc (west of Omaha beach).

Most battlefield tours of the area begin at the Peace Museum (or Peace Memorial) in Caen. It’s a wonderful museum that covers not only WWII, but the build-up to war from 1918 on. It’s fascinating and “global”, keeping the interest of history buff and novice alike.

The parents are here and we left for Normandy this morning. Dad has always wanted to see the landing beaches. So I’ll be out of the blogging world till at least Friday. 

Thanks for stopping by… and see you on Friday.