Sometimes I Write

Remember that show in the 90’s on MTV “Road Rules”? A bunch of young adults traveling in a Winnebago across the country meeting challenges, eating at fun places, and laughing their butts off all the time, except during the occasional drama of disagreements and personality clashes?

Yeah…That’s not us – except for the drama part. Traveling long hours with three little kids stinks! Fun places to eat? Only if there’s a playland and french fries involved. Meeting challenges? How about a potty training two year old who tells us she has to pee about five minutes after we’ve left the gas station or restaurant. Oh, and we’re driving a Dodge Caravan – MUCH smaller than a Winnie! Our laughter for the day came when we heard the five year old in the back seat filming his own “Bounty baby wipes” commercial. Ofcourse we had to pull out the real video camera and have him repeat the whole thing. I wonder if a letter to Bounty is in order? As absorbent as Bounty is…they should make diapers and pull ups for long road trips!!! It was a long drive, but we did have fun singing along with Switchfoot and bobbing our heads and seat dancing with Will Smith. Sorry, no toe-tapping country this trip. Mr. and Mrs. Traveler in the little blue Taurus thought we were amusing!

Camp Cornerstone was great! I was a little nervous about being the head girl’s counselor even though I’ve been doing it for years at the high school camp. I didn’t know what to expect as far as drama/issues from the junior high girls. Except for a few situations, I found it to be just like Zenith. (I loved both weeks.) To me it was a chance to get to know more teens, encourage more counselors, hang out with my youth ministry friends, and learn how to Myachi. (more on that later.)

After camp we spent the weekend in Tulsa with old friends and Benny spoke at their church on Sunday about Dry Bones. It was amazing! The message just flowed out of him with power and passion. It was a Holy Spirit thing! He showed the video of DB from the street kid’s perspective, and everyone was visibly moved by it. What an opportunity! We were able to spread the message to more people, share our need and the ministry needs, and be blessed by this congregation we’ve never met. A few people joined our financial support team, and many more promised prayer covering for us and the ministry. God is amazing in the ways He provides for us. Even at camp we had a few of our ministry friends tell us that they’d like to be a part of our support team.
(Thank you God for putting my fears to rest. Amen.)

Sunday morning was typical for me. I was super busy getting the kids ready for church all the while wondering if what I was planning on wearing would be o.k. First of all, we have three growing kids to clothe and I’m last on the list for new clothing. Second, I’m a northern girl and I had heard that at a lot of the churches in the south women just don’t wear pants. Most of the time I have a “deal with it” attitude, but sometimes I try to please everyone else – you know – when in Rome… The funny part is that here we were sitting in services and the scripture reading up on the screen was,

“So don’t worry about having enough food or drink or clothing. Why be like the pagans who are so deeply concerned about these things? Your heavenly Father already knows your needs, and he will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the kingdom of God your primary concern.” Matthew 6: 31-33

Benny and I just looked at each other and laughed. A little heavenly reminder I suppose. I have so much more I’d like to share, but my fingers are falling asleep at the keys, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. What’s with all of the Rome references? I haven’t a clue. Good night!

These are a few of the many beautiful roses growing in my front yard. I wish I could take credit for them, but I can’t. God is amazingly creative and generous with the colors, smells, and variety of ways he blesses my life. The lady who lived here before us blessed me by planting these and many other types of flowers along the front and side of the house. I smile everytime I see them! May something just as beautiful touch your life today!

This is Kyle. He LOVED fishing and his boat, which Max “helped” him fix up. I believe Angi took this in Canada last summer. Kyle was a funny guy and this picture is sooooo him! The t-shirt he’s wearing is now part of the memory quilt I made for Angi.

This is the t-shirt quilt made from all of Kyle’s favorites. I’m going to see if I can get a better picture of it at camp this next week. My new friend Maudie is standing behind the quilt, on the desk, holding it up for me – it’s not light!

The orange square underneath the NYC 13 shirt is the dedication square. It is the picture posted above with these words below it:

Made with love in memory of

Kyle Allender

Adoring Husband and Faithful Friend

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called “Monday Night At Morton’s.” (Morton’s is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein’s Last Column…

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?

As I begin to write this, I “slug” it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is “eonlineFINAL,” and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a “star” we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad. The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament…the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin…or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

I can hear the fireworks exploding about a mile away at a local park. Though I can not see the multicolored bursts of light, the sound takes me back to the many 4th’s that I sat amazed at the pounding in my chest as each one lit up the sky. Benny took Max and Zoe to observe this traditional celebration this year. Baby Pete and I are home – he’s in bed and I should be.

I’ve been putting this off and I’m not sure why. It’s stupid really. I have had what I’m pretty sure is a bladder infection since I got home from camp. I started doing the whole homeopathic remedy thing and started feeling better so I eased up. (The pills taste awful!) Now I’m in more pain than I was before. I spoke with a nurse friend of mine and she told me what I need to watch for. My symptoms aren’t that severe yet, but I fear they will be without some divine intervention. So please pray for quick healing. I leave again for another week of camp on Friday and I want this little problem gone. I’m not against going to the doctor, but our KS insurance expired 4 days ago and we have not yet been approved for the CO plan I applied for. If I get worse I’ll go anyway, but I’m really hoping prayer and nasty tasting pills with lots of fluids will do the trick. Is it ever convenient to be sick? No! But I seem to do it at the most inopportune times. I layed around all day today reading and doing a lot of nothing. Is that really resting?

A quick story for you…
We were talking to Max the other day and Benny asked him if he knew our new phone number yet. He said he didn’t so we practiced it for a few minutes. Then B asked him what he would say if someone asked him who his parents were. He said our names with a smile. B asked him what he would say if he needed to tell somebody how to get a hold of him in an emergency. Max didn’t know so B prompted him by saying, “tell them my name and what I do”. Max said, “Benny Nowell and he works for Dry Bones Denver in Lakewood”. Then I said, “and what does mommy do?” Max smiled and said, “Blog”. Little stinker! Benny laughed so hard I thought he would choke. I almost choked him myself!