Yup, that's Al Gore

My friend Jillian and I had the distinct pleasure of going to see former Vice President Al Gore speak at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD this week. (I did my internship at Augustana and Jillian is an alum!) Mr. Gore was the speaker at Augie's annual Boe Forum on Public Affairs. We hit the road on Tuesday at noon and got into town just in time to have some dinner with friends before arriving at the Elmen Center to grab a seat in a full house. The name of his speech was "Thinking Green: Economic Strategy for the 21st Century." Not only was he funny, but it was also very inspiring to listen to him speak about what he calls "the greatest crisis our world will ever face." I've seen the film An Inconvenient Truth, which I believe is compelling enough. But what I found particularly exciting is that Gore's speech did not simply stop there. He went beyond addressing our climate crisis to challenging voters to make informed decisions and to offering practical and realistic solutions for both individuals and corporations.

The former Vice President, Gore argues that protecting the environment is not just a political issue, but a moral one. He believes that everyone can agree that we need to do what we can to stop global warming. I certainly agree with him. And finally he argues that companies and corporations will actually do better financially and be able to create more jobs if they take steps towards minimizing CO2 emissions and reducing waste. It makes me wonder how we at Luther Seminary can become more aware of the ways we affect the environment based on the decisions we make as an institution. According to Gore, it takes very little effort for an individual to reduce or eliminate one's contribution to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. What would it look like for churches and religious institutions to do the same? Does our faith inform our actions when it comes to the environment? I think that it does, and I know many others feel the same way. If you haven't had the opportunity to watch "An Inconvenient Truth" or to read the book, I highly recommend them both. Feel free to post your opinions about this issue!

Against all odds

This is the blog entry I have wanted to write since mid-September. If I had any doubts at that time about whether I was meant to move to St. Paul and attend Luther Seminary, they were pretty well rubbed out by a series of pretty crazy circumstances in the course of one week early in my first semester.

First, there was the day my wife and I walked into a Gander Mountain to ask whether we could buy a replacement cap for our air mattress — we couldn't, but the stocker led us outside to his Jeep, where he handed us just such a cap (which he apparently acquired in a prank on his buddy while camping years earlier). On the way to the Gander Mountain, we stopped at a Toys 'R' Us just in time to grab two Ray Nitschke action figures fresh out of a box to give to our dads for Christmas. The next day, we walked into a Packers-friendly St. Paul sports bar and bumped right into an old friend from my comedy troupe in Green Bay — unbeknown to me, he similarly had moved to the Twin Cities to serve as a youth minister here. A few days later, I attended a training meeting for the seminary's student journal, the Concord, only to discover, in a discussion about how to get permission to use photos from the Internet, that a photo used in a spring 2004 Concord advertisement was taken by another old friend from the Green Bay comedy troupe.

But the most fantastic of circumstances that week in September was an e-mail message from an unfamiliar Luther student named Theresa. She had seen my name in an announcement about this year's Concord staff and wondered whether I was related to a Pastor Behrendt who had confirmed her and whose child she had babysat back in the early 1980s in Pell Lake, Wis. With no small amount of amazement, I e-mailed her back and explained how that pastor was my father and that, since I'm an only child, I had been the baby she babysat. What were the odds that both of us would end up in the same seminary's Master of Divinity program at the same time?

The reason I'm finally writing about this now is that now I can tell the whole story. I got a chance on Wednesday to meet Theresa (the photo is from our reunion in the seminary's campus center), who is in her third year of taking classes part-time while living in Northwestern Wisconsin. She was in town that day to officiate a funeral in her capacity as a part-time hospice chaplain.

The occasion was significant not simply because Theresa was apparently my first babysitter but also because I had heard about her in one of my dad's sermons a few years ago. As my dad recalls it, he was walking door-to-door one day in Pell Lake to introduce himself in his first summer (1979) in his first call as a pastor. He had come across a girl, Theresa, who had gotten the strap of her purse stuck in her bicycle's spokes. While helping to unwind the strap from the spokes, he explained to her that he was the new pastor in town. Soon, Theresa showed up at the church's services, at first by herself, until her parents joined her and renewed their involvement in church. This girl's dedication to God had impressed my dad, and he never forgot about it.

But the "rest of the story" was no less remarkable. When I first met Theresa on Wednesday, it seemed from her confidence, history of devotion and apparent success in juggling her roles as a chaplain, student, wife and mother of four that it had probably been a pretty smooth path that led her to Luther Seminary. Indeed, she had accomplished a lot. Since my dad left her church in Pell Lake for a call in Neenah, Wis., when I was only a year old, Theresa had married a forest ranger, served as an elementary school teacher for a couple years, home-schooled her children and served as director of an Alzheimer's respite and as a certified nursing assistant at the hospice where she now works. All the while, she was involved in churches in the communities where they lived, and people consistently told her what a good pastor she would be (a theme familiar to my own "call story").

But around the year 2000, the path became anything but smooth for Theresa. Grief from her father's recent death from cancer and other family pressures combined with re-emerging stress from her abuse by a relative when she was 6 years old. She became withdrawn and found herself in a terrible darkness — a "black hole," she called it — a sort of hopelessness from which she seemed unable to ever escape. She eventually determined to begin therapy and learned that the problem at root was unresolved pain from the abuse she suffered as a girl (Theresa is happy to discuss all this now).

Meanwhile, the many Christians in her life came through for her in ways big and small, such as providing transportation for her kids and bringing food for the family in the midst of her recovery. As she puts it, each of those Christians offered her a tiny, lit match, one by one, in the midst of her darkness until she had a light in front of her and realized Jesus had been with her the whole time. She emerged from the darkness with an indescribable sense of hope and determination to do something in God's service. Finally, in 2004, while watching a video about the work of clergy amid the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedies, she realized hat she needed to pursue ordained ministry.

Theresa said she isn't sure exactly where the path will lead her from here. She feels well-equipped as a chaplain and has been able to use her own story when counseling people to assure them that, with God's help, they can overcome the darkness in their lives. She figures that after she earns her Master of Divinity degree (probably in about six years, amid her busy schedule), she might work as both a rural parish pastor and chaplain.

It had seemed against all odds that Theresa could have emerged from such a difficult time, but with help from God and the people around her, she did. And it seemed against all odds that my babysitter and I would wind up at the same seminary at the same time, but with help from God and the people around us, we did. Little against-all-odds moments like those I had in September help us to believe more deeply that something special is at work around us and that we, ourselves, have some special work to do. As we shared our stories and fears as fellow seminarians, Theresa shared another such moment that comforted her about her decision to come to Luther: The student mailbox number assigned to her at Luther was the number in the hymnal of the favorite hymn she always hoped to sing when she was a girl in Pell Lake.

Those rare moments can be incredible, but the people who come into our lives everyday can be just as amazing. Getting to meet Theresa and hearing her inspiring story was something amazing in itself, even apart from our brief history more than 25 years ago and the against-all-odds circumstances of our reunion. (Thankfully, she doesn't remember the odds she must have been up against when she was babysitting me.)

I know this is certainly not the only extraordinary reunion to come about at Luther Seminary. Feel free to post a comment and share your own reaffirming moment.

Some thoughts on friendship

Remember that old saying, "You pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends' nose"? Well, ignoring the part about picking noses, I kind of wonder if this statement is true. Can we really pick our friends?

I say this because as I think about all of the people that I have met over the course of my life--as a kid, in high school, college, seminary, on internship, and beyond--it is somewhat surprising for me to realize that the people who have been there for me, the friends who have ended up being an integral part of my life are not necessarily the people I would have expected or chosen if it were truly up to me. Sometimes it seems that instead of me picking my friends, that my friends have actually picked me. Perhaps friendship is an even more intentional relationship than we realize, just not in the way that we expect.

I'm actually really thankful for this fact. I don't ever pretend that I am an expert at knowing exactly what is best for me in all circumstances. I certainly try to be self-aware. I finished my CPE requirement! But it also seems that it is more than a coincidence that such wonderful people have just been plopped down into my life and have actually taken the time to get to know me and care for me. Especially when I am going through something personally difficult, I am always overwhelmed by the kindness and love that my friends show me, whether or not I ask for it. Thank God for friends, both expected and unexpected.

I will ….drive… by faith?

OK , now we all know the phrase “I will walk by faith”; and many of us have told this to ourselves and to others, when situations arise that we have trouble seeing how God is present. This was exactly the case for me Sunday night, when we got hit with our first serious snow storm. I am not a Minnesotan native, and realize that 4-7 inches may not exactly be considered serious. However, when you are driving in the midst of the snowfall, with three kids from your youth group, on streets that are neither salted nor plowed, at night- the snowfall BECOMES SERIOUS.

Due to the windshield icing up, and the debris from the cars in front of me, my visibility was extremely limited. My only saving grace was the taillights in front of me. I imagined them as angels leading me to safety. Two little red dots, the taillights, were all that I could focus on to keep me on the road and in the correct lane. The students and I were about 30 miles away from our own church. We were in Hugo attending a Hip Hop worship service that is put on by Hosannah Lutheran Church. On the way there and on the way home, I just kept praying that God would take care of us.

It was that night that I truly understood what it meant to drive by faith. And driving by faith is a little harder than walking by faith. With driving there are a whole lot of other factors to worry about. Now, we made it home safely, and I have to believe that on Sunday night, many angels were working overtime, watching over and protecting those who had no other choice but to just follow those two little lights in front of them.

Convocation's Feast of Music

Most Lutheran congregations, though they mean well, do not sing as well or as loudly as their music directors and pastors would like. Maybe on Easter Sunday the packed house will punch out a rousing chorus of Alleluias or Christmas Eve they'll yodel the Glorias from Angels We Have Heard on High. And maybe, just maybe, if you have a congregation really into their Lutheranism, they'll trumpet out A Mighty Fortress is Our God on Reformation Sunday. The rest of the year, however, the choir, the music director, a few past choir members and the pastor carry the house.

This is the singing to which I am accustomed. I am used to being the strongest voice in the vicinity of my pew. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I gathered with 500 other Lutheran pastors (mostly men) at the 2007 Mid-Winter Convocation.

Here was the biggest gathering of baritones I'd ever witnessed, all these good ol' boys raised in the church, raised strong and burly on meat and potatoes choruses, their paunches thickened on the home-cooked Lutheran hymnody, standing up for the biggest choral feast my ears have ever tasted. I couldn't hear my own voice the singing was so rich and wonderfully full. For years I had been drinking melodic skim but now vocal cream overflowed from the cup of Luther's chapel. The room was so alive with the sound of singing the sanctuary rang when we stopped.

The volume itself was a blessing. How can one sing of the glories of God timidly? Can joy in the Lord's presence forever be quiet? A laugh and a wail ring purest and most true to their maker's emotion when they are loud and not stifled. Is a refrain any different? When the heart swells so should the voice.

If you ever get a chance to attend Mid-Winter Convocation, certainly slake your hunger for theology and learning at the buffet of classes and workshops offered. Do not miss, however, the sweet desert of praising God with 500 other folks singing their hearts out to the tune of a Lutheran hymn. It is one of the finest melodic meals at which I have ever supped.

Among the Hmong

I was telling Kou how impressed I was. Even as a low-level English student, she had completed her worksheet rather quickly and with little pronunciation help from me. Despite her modesty, I assured her she was doing a great job with a difficult language. As a point of comparison, I shared with her that I only knew one phrase in her Hmong language — "nyob zoo," or "hello."

In mentioning this to Kou, a mother of seven who came to the United States several years ago, I had no intention of improving my Hmong vocabulary. But, typical of the hospitality I had encountered all week in my cross-cultural experience within the St. Paul Hmong community, Kou suddenly began to instruct me in a flurry of Hmong phrases. Before her English instructor at Hmong American Partnership called us all together for lunch, I had scribbled down dozens of Hmong phrases, from "thank you" and "see you tomorrow" to "wash face," "tired," and "I have children" and pronounced them all to a quality that no longer made her laugh.

Although only one of many unforgettable experiences from the past 10 days, this moment on Thursday summed up my underlying realization from this cross-cultural study: that those of us in the ethnic majority can be endlessly enriched by taking time to learn about the culture of our neighbors, and we ought to do so. Even though I already spoke the dominant language and knew the dominant social system in my community, there was no reason to make people like Kou do all the learning. Particularly if we are the good, caring Christians we like to think we are, this sort of thing ought to be a two-way street.

Sadly, I don't know that I ever would have made that realization without this 15-day cross-cultural experience, the likes of which every student in my Master of Divinity program at Luther Seminary is required to complete. I chose to focus on the Hmong population in the Twin Cities since I had some contact with people in the Green Bay Hmong community, particularly when I was a news reporter at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. I have known Hmong people since grade school, but (largely since children tend to integrate more quickly into the mainstream American culture) I never bothered to learn much about their culture. I think that reflects a human tendency not to become interested in someone else's world unless we are forced to become a part of it.

Many of the Hmong were forced to become a part of our world in the United States. Back in their home country of Laos, Hmong people in 1960 secretly joined forces with the United States to fight communism. Through the Vietnam War, Hmong soldiers were instrumental in blocking transport of communist supplies to South Vietnam and rescuing downed pilots. But when the United States backed out in 1975, the Hmong were left to face the communists on their own, and many fled to Thailand and later America to save their lives and preserve their freedom. Estimates are that there are now between 200,000 and 300,000 Hmong people living in the United States, with the Twin Cities home to the nation's largest urban Hmong population, above 60,000.

Knowing that story, I had already respected the Hmong greatly. But now I have learned a great deal more about their fascinating culture, such as their clan structure and the close-knit families that influence so much of their lives (the photo above shows us learning how to eat in the more communal Hmong fashion). Then there are the extensive and often expensive expectations that they face through their traditions and rituals (such as the traditional three-and-a-half-day funeral, which typically draws 3,000 to 4,000 people and costs $35,000 to $40,000, or the intricate marriage negotiations, with an average $8,000 or so paid as a dowry from the groom's family to the bride's). I'll address the fascinating aspects of the Hmong religious landscape in a later blog entry.

We have also gotten to meet and learn from some of the most amazing people from within the Twin Cities' Hmong community. Among them are Dr. Yang Dao, who served on the Laotian Congress and played a pivotal role in limiting the bloodshed after the communists took power; the Rev. Naw-Karl Mua, who in 2003 was captured by the communist government while studying the Hmong groups still hiding in the Laotian jungle; and Kou Vang, a developer and funeral home operator who soon ended up in the Green Bay-area media as a spokesman for his family when a relative was killed while hunting in Northeastern Wisconsin. And in general, the Hmong people we've met have been just unbelievably friendly, in welcoming us to their church or even insisting that we eat dinner at their parent's funeral.

Unfortunately, I don't know that the Hmong have always received the same degree of hospitality from those like me in the mainstream American culture. Clearly, some folks have done a lot to usher in them and those of other refugee and immigrant communities, but I think many of us could go to greater lengths to embrace their cultures as they must embrace ours. I got a real taste of what it must be like for them while finding myself lost in a language I don't understand during Hmong church services and our group exercises; the people who step back to our culture and recognize that we're newcomers to theirs have made all the difference. Now, I feel so much better equipped to help out people of other cultures just because I'll be more interested in where they're coming from. And as Kou reminded me, teaching and learning should go hand in hand for all of us.

It's been a long week

It has certainly been awhile since I have posted anything here at the Life at Luther blog. Like Andy, I definitely got caught up in all the craziness of finals and then the abrupt change into the free-time of Christmas break. Kevin and I went back to our hometown, Rapid City, SD, for Christmas. We had a great time, though we were busy with visiting all of our family members and seeing old friends. My niece Hayley was baptized on New Year's Eve, which was a wonderful experience and a great excuse for the family to order and eat one of those really long party subs from a local sandwich shop! Good times. We were tired, but happy to see our families. Then we jumped back in to classes and work as soon as we returned to campus.

However, after being back here for just 3 days I received the sad news that my cousin had died unexpectedly. It was a complete shock to all of us. I immediately bought a plane ticket and headed back to Rapid City again, only this time instead of going home to celebrate the holidays, I went home to mourn the loss of a loved one with my family. It was, and still is, hard. Sometimes I still can't believe that he is gone. It was especially hard to recognize just how quickly and drastically life can change and no one even sees it coming. It had been less than a week since I had seen my aunt, uncle, and cousin for Christmas, and now our family's world had been turned upside down by this tragedy. My aunt, uncle, and cousins received a heart-warming outpour of support and love from their family, friends, and community. And I appreciate the prayers and support that the Luther community has offered as well. As a part of the funeral service my aunt and uncle asked me to read the following passage:

Romans 6:3-9
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.

A slave to free time

Well, let me be the first of the four bloggers to wish you all a happy 2007. Not to mention a very belated "Merry Christmas."

Although I can't speak for the other "Life at Luther" contributors, I'll explain for you why it has taken so long for me to finally post a new entry. I chalk it up to too much free time. That's right, too much free time.

As Sarah detailed in her last entry, there was a time, right up until around Dec. 21, that most Luther Seminary students were frantically writing final papers and studying for final exams. That was my excuse for a while. But after I turned in my last paper and at last had my freedom — the freedom, which I had awaited with so much longing, to focus on Christmas and relaxation rather than the seemingly insurmountable barrage of course work — I became wholly unproductive.

Let me first say that Christmas 2006 was one of the best Christmases I've ever had. The freedom from course work, not to mention freedom from the real-world work to which I became accustomed in the last few Christmas seasons while working as a newspaper reporter, gave me a great opportunity to focus more than ever on my family and enjoy our celebration of Christmas together. (I'm enjoying that while I can, considering that in a few years, I'll have to lead worship services every Christmas.) I got some really great gifts, including a new computer from my folks (a combination birthday/Christmas/schooling gift) and a fantastic toy diorama of the hatch from my favorite TV show, "Lost" (that's the thing I'm holding in the goofy photo above — I really felt like this entry needed a picture, and the word "LOST" next to my head seems to fit the theme, if nothing else). That gift was from my wife, whose biggest gift from me this year was a Build-A-Bear Hello Kitty dressed in a Milwaukee Brewers uniform, combining two of her favorite things (we're really a mature couple, don't you think?). After we returned to Minnesota, my folks visited for a couple days, as did some friends from the Milwaukee area for New Year's.

But aside from the well-worthwhile celebration, I feel like I've been pretty useless since the semester ended. All this free time has allowed me to succumb to selfishness. I dove into seminary and my pursuit of ordained ministry largely as a means to better help people, and along with that, whittle away at the selfishness that plagues me as a typical human being. And in my first semester, through my studies and dealings with my contextual leadership church, I had been doing pretty well with that. In general, when I'm busy, I have less time to think about myself and can focus on what's best for the world and what God wants me to do. But once I finally cleared all the final-paper hurdles, I really fell back a notch.

Not only have I slipped with my focus on God and my general religious sharpness (I accidentally referred to the Episcopalians as the Presbyterians in a conversation on New Year's Day), but I've also overcompensated for all the work I was doing at the end of the semester by letting fun and my own obsessions get in the way of important stuff. The worst point was when I forgot to arrange for someone else to pick up an elderly woman whom I give a ride to church on alternating Sundays — I determined not to go to church this week since our friends were visiting, and I guess I was just so focused on silly problems with my new computer that I forgot to arrange a ride for her with someone else. When I finally realized my mistake and called her to apologize, she was very forgiving, but the fact that she had been standing at the door waiting to no avail on Sunday morning really stung me.

And then there's the blog. I guess that was the point of this little guilt session. The blog was one of my only obligations in the past couple weeks, and one simple entry just suddenly seemed so arduous that I kept putting it off.

At any rate, I can say with a strange sense of happiness that my free time will be minimized in the next couple weeks. Starting tomorrow, I'm taking part in Luther's cross-cultural experience focusing on the Hmong community here in St. Paul. That should help me keep my mind set on things more important and more fulfilling than my personal enjoyment. And it should be all the more reason for a more timely blog — maybe even with a more relevant photo.