Guess who's not the only blogger anymore!

As the holdover from the original team of Luther Seminary students who began this blog a year ago (or, as some of you know me, "that guy who has been senselessly rambling on his own for most of the summer"), I have been given the distinct honor of introducing the rest of the new blogging crew for 2007-08.

First, let me say thanks for the many great contributions over the past year by Sarah Sumner-Eisenbraun and Marissa Calcaterra, who have each now graduated from Luther Seminary, and Aaron Werner, who has moved on to internship.

Now (drumroll, please), I'm pleased to welcome:

• Meta Herrick, a Master of Divinity senior.
• Brian Julin-McCleary, a Master of Divinity middler.
• Simone Tyler, a Master of Divinity junior plus.

Hooray! There you go. (You can stop the drumroll now. Really, you could have ended with a rimshot awhile ago.) Meta, Brian and Simone will be introducing themselves in more detail soon. So here's to another great year of stories from seminary life — many of which won't even be mine!

Thanks be to God. (Seriously, would you knock it off with the drumroll?)

August showers bring monster flowers

So the daisies have finally returned. With a vengeance.

For Tracy and me, one of the enduring pursuits of the summer has been to successfully nurture a healthy bunch of daisies. Tracy is daisy-crazy. Our wedding was full of daisies — and also the color purple (though that was more my fixation). But we've never really tried to grow the little dandies.

It started this spring, when Tracy got a tiny, little pot with some daisy seeds from the dollar section at Target. Some little green sprouts started to pop up, but they quickly died during a weekend that we were away from the apartment. It was pretty sad.

Then we decided we should get some real, pre-grown daisies, among other flowers, for our deck. We bought some nice ones from Linder's Garden Center on Memorial Day weekend. They're called Soprano White daisies, which is kind of a misnomer since they're purple (hooray!) in the middle and underneath (also, they neither sing with high-pitch voices nor perform an entertaining mix of Mafia and family activities).

But within a couple weeks, the flowers on the daisy plant disappeared. Over the many weeks that followed, if I wasn't working to resurrect my laptop, I was helping Tracy to vigilantly water and tend to our friends on the deck. While the marigolds thrived and the petunias bloomed up like bonkers, the otherwise healthy daisy plant produced no flowers.

For Tracy's birthday about a month ago, I offered to buy her a new daisy plant in lieu of a bouquet. We went back to Linder's but found no similar daisy plants left in the greenhouses. We ended up talking to a couple of Linder's gardening experts, who instead directed us to a $5 jar of PROThrive BloomEnhancer, which, as I just realized, is manufactured in Milwaukee. No wonder it worked.

And it did work. Within a couple weeks, we saw a single daisy finally bloom. A week ago, just before leaving for our big summer vacation in Kansas City, we celebrated a healthy bunch of blooms as Tracy administered the latest round of the fertilizer.

When we returned on Monday night, the daisies, apparently thanks to the recent rain, were getting out of hand. They had apparently overpopulated their own flower pot and had begun to grow horizontally in an apparent invasion attempt on the neighboring pot of petunias (also plentiful and purple). To avert a war, I deflected the invading daisies upward with a blockade of plastic knives in the soil.

As the rain has continued, the number of daisies and the size of the plant have continued to increase exponentially. Tracy, shown with the daisies this evening, had to prop the plant up against our lawn chairs to keep it from growing out into the parking lot downstairs. It is really something to see — the photo hardly does it justice. And here for half the summer we thought we wouldn't see another daisy. You've got to thank God for the little things like this.

I can only imagine how well the daisies would be growing in ... Purple Rain.

Please forgive me for the cheese-ball ending. I really, really had no intention of building up to that awful punchline. It just happened. You have to believe me.

A county fairy tale

First Things First: For those of you who are getting sick of my one-man Blog and Pony Show, relief is coming soon. Joining me soon will be three new Luther Seminary bloggers who are sure to boost the credibility and entertainment value of this space considerably.

That said, you're stuck with only me for a little while longer, and I'll continue to ramble on about my summer escapades. This latest rambling comes on the topic of the county fair.

Like so many things that normal people experience from a young age, the county fair eluded me for much of my childhood. For one thing, the Brown County Fair that took place near Green Bay, Wis., was underwhelming at the time. My parents took me to the nearby Outagamie County Fair once when I was in grade school, but thanks to an apparently sadistic carny's imposition of a nauseatingly long ride on the Octopus, I was in no hurry to go back. (I eventually did in 2003, but it was only to see Meat Loaf peform).

My perspective on the county fair experience has changed since my wife, Tracy, got her job at Dakota City Heritage Village in Farmington, Minn., last year. Dakota City's historic village and museum are part of the Dakota County fairgrounds, and the Dakota County Fair becomes the main event for Dakota City and its dedicated corps of volunteers in circa-1900 clothing. Tracy works roughly 12 hours a day throughout the seven-day fair, so I've tried in the past two years to visit her as much as possible. And last year, I had a pretty good time.

Maybe it was just because I wasn't up to my ears in a New Testament Greek course this summer, but this year's fair, which ended Sunday, was just a ridiculous amount of fun for me. My first visit of the week came on Wednesday, which happened to feature the demolition derby. I had never understood rural America's fascination with this spectacle, but I have to say that after two rounds of car-nage, I was more accepting. My favorite entry was, of course, the shiniest, nicest-looking car of the bunch. It was a 1980s model with a bright yellow top and blue body — something like the Swedish version of the General Lee. It was a wrecking machine from the get-go and survived a rear-ending that turned everything behind its back wheels into a spoiler. Amazing!

My visits on Friday, Saturday and Sunday were even better. For one thing, I got two chances to see Tracy maneuver the biggest string of farm equipment through Dakota City in the daily tractor parade. And if I weren't impressed enough by her ability to handle a 1956 John Deere Model 60, a steel-wheel wagon and a New Idea hay loader (and without running over any kids, I might add), I was certainly wowed by the array of four amazing new exhibits that Tracy has put together in the last few months. Seeing her work teach people history and help them relive days gone by with their grandkids does a husband proud.

Particularly impressive was her major exhibit on the history of immigration in Dakota County. Her work on that exhibit also put her in touch with some local Filipino-American families who in the course of their correspondence agreed to serve some mighty tasty Filipino food at the museum. It was through these friendly folks that I met Gian, an amazingly smart and entertaining fourth-grader who taught me much about both Filipino culture and his favorite cartoons.

There were many other highlights, such as the small wonders created by some other gifted folks that were on display in the 4-H buildings and the remarkably crafted, locally created Chautauqua performance on the Dakota City grounds, this year highlighting the entire history of Dakota County's railroads. Plus, my inside look at the sitcom-like antics of the Dakota City staff and volunteers in their period clothing was just priceless. And priceless is just about right, since, thanks to my connections with the curator, the only thing I paid for at the fair was a Saturday lunch of chicken fingers.

Yep, it turns out there's something magic about a county fair. Of course, the Minnesota State Fair is coming up at the end of the month. But I'll take the small-town charm of a demolition derby or tractor parade over a hyped-up string of big-name concerts any day (uh, unless Meat Loaf is involved).

Either way, I'm staying off the Octopus.

A certain destination

None of us can really know when we set out for a destination whether we'll make it there. Nothing has driven that fact home for me as directly as the collapse of Minneapolis' Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River yesterday evening.

It was a rare night when I was tuned in to the 6 o'clock news, and I was among the first to see the images of the inexplicable catastrophe. Like so many others, I just kept watching and anxiously pondered anything I could do to help. And I could only come up with one course of action: prayer.

I'm thankful to God that it wasn't even worse. I got chills late last night when I considered what could have been ... if the bridge would have collapsed when the school bus carrying 60 children was in almost any other spot on the stretch of highway or at a time when all the bridge's lanes were carrying traffic. Sad as it is, the fact that the toll at this moment stands at four confirmed dead, 79 injured and 20-30 missing makes it seem to me as if God was somehow at work in minimizing the tragedy.

I'm also thankful for the countless people who have been doing their own part to save lives. All the rescuers, police officers, firefighters, medical workers, civilian heroes and others offering support in so many ways. I'm thankful to the friends and relatives who called or e-mailed Tracy and me to make sure that we were OK. And I'm thankful that apparently no one from the immediate Luther Seminary community was directly affected — there have been a number of close-call stories and what-ifs floating around campus today.

All that sunny-side stuff said, the gravity of the situation can't be avoided. A lot of people obviously died, and it seems unlikely that all those being treated will survive. They'll never make it wherever they were headed. And so many people are in pain and still don't have answers about who, how and why. But again, that's where prayer comes in. And where God comes in.

There was a somber mood in our daily chapel service this morning on campus, a little more than 2 miles away from the collapsed bridge. There were some really relevant prayers, Scripture and hymns right out of our worship book. Psalm 39 echoed our anxieties of uncertainty: "LORD, let me know my end and the number of my days, so that I may know how short my life is. You have given me a mere handful of days ... truly, everyone is but a puff of wind." But a prayer for travel reminded me that God is "our beginning and our end." With God, through Jesus, we have a certain destination. And as the hymn by Thomas A. Dorsey concluded most chillingly and yet comfortingly:

"... At the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand. Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home."