If you haven't read last week's blog post, then you need to scroll down and do that before you read this one. This post is a sequel to that post.
How blind I was not to realize what was going to happen on Friday. We’d seen a bad omen earlier in the day but just didn’t recognize it as such at the time. The whole family had walked the dog down to Kroger so we could get a few movies at the Red Box out front. On the way back home, we saw a muskrat rooting around over by the veteran’s memorial at the VFW. Wildlife + War. I should have picked up on it, but I didn’t. I didn’t realize the portal in our house was going open again that night, which would call me --and Romy the Bat Slayer-- back into battle.
We’d had two good nights of sleep in the Miller household. Apparently we had grown complacent already because it caught us off guard when at about 9 pm, exactly 48 hours after the blood match that was reported in last week’s blog post, the portal to bat-hell burst open and another bat flew into our living room and then upstairs. Wyatt and I were in the living room, coincidentally enough watching a Lego Batman cartoon, while Danielle and Josselyn were upstairs in Josselyn’s room. Wyatt and I saw the bat at the same time. I yelled out, “Bat! Close the door!” loud enough for Danielle to hear upstairs. Wyatt curled up on the couch and released a ceaseless scream that sounded like an amplified version of the sound a lobster is supposed to make when it’s dropped in boiling water. Danielle’s maternal instincts overrode her anti-bat instincts and she came out of Josselyn’s bedroom to check on Wyatt. When she did that, she saw the bat had flown into our bedroom—the historic battleground of yesteryear (Tuesday night). She slammed the door, escorted Wyatt into Josselyn’s room, and then shut the door, leaving me alone out in the hallway. I wouldn’t be alone for long though. I’d never gone into bat-battle by myself before, and I wasn’t going to start now. I needed to suit up and then track down my old comrade, the legendary Romy the Bat Slayer.
That night, Romy wasn’t waiting for me outside the bedroom door. I had to go looking for him. You wouldn’t think the Van Helsing of the cat world would be too hard to track down, but he was nowhere to be found. Eventually though, through a mutual friend, I tracked down the old orange tabby codger. He was living down in the Keys, flying under the radar by shacking up in an old houseboat with a cute little Calico named Cookie. When he saw me get out of the cab he sighed and then yelled out, “I’m too old for this *meow,* Everett! Get back in that cab and go home!”
Even though he didn’t want to see me, we’d been through so much together that he invited me onto his houseboat for a saucer of milk. There was a little black-and-white TV on and I could hear it in the background. It was the beginning of an old 80 ’s TV show. I listened to the intro: “In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team." How appropriate.
“We need you, Romero.” I said. Few people know his real name. “The family needs you. We’ve got another bat in the bedroom.”
“What about Skunk Breath?” he asked, his voice dripping with disgust.
“His name is Eli, Romy, and he’s a good dog.”
“Why don’t you take that big oaf in there with you if he’s so good?”
“I don’t need a dog in there with me Romy. I need you.”
“I’ve got a good life here,” he said. “You’re on your own this time.”
Disappointed, I got back in the taxi and then flew back to the bedroom door. When I landed, I couldn’t believe it. Romy the Bat Slayer was standing there waiting for me. “What changed your mind?” I asked as I patted him on the back.
“I had a dream last night,” he said. He was very serious, not purring at all. “A dream I couldn’t ignore. I stood at the enormous doors of the hall of great feline warriors of generations past. It is called Meow-halla. The doors opened and I was greeted by a beautiful female saber-toothed tiger. Her eyes were intense and she wore the blood of mastodons as makeup. She escorted me into the great hall where I saw the legendary cat warriors like the enormous and green Battle Cat who had battled Skeletor with He-Man. The Thundercats were there too, and hundreds of others. They were lapping warm milk out of golden bejeweled goblets.” As Romy spoke, I noticed a tattoo he’d gotten just above his paw, on his furry forearm. It was of a bloody dog snout. He’d surely gotten the tattoo to commemorate his survival after he’d been pinned down during the first of the Yellow Labrador Offensives back in the winter of 2012. Tears came to his eyes as he continued. “The Saber Toothed maiden told me that if I went into this battle, whenever I die, whether it is today or years in the future, there will be a spot for Romy the Bat Slayer in Meow-halla and there will be a black suitcase for me to curl up in and sleep for all eternity.” He paused to gather his emotions. “This is it, though, Everett. One last battle. We shall live together or we shall die together. Regardless, we will be together as brothers in arms.” We embraced as only those do who have survived what others have not. I opened the door and Romy the Bat Slayer walked into the room, claws out and head held high. The door shut ominously behind him and I waited until it was safe to join him inside.
I threw my rake into the room, then covered my head with my shield, and dove inside, slamming the door behind me. Romy wasn’t doing what I expected him to be doing. He was lying on the bed, looking quite comfortable. I gave him a look that said, “Really?” and he responded with a look that said, “I’m storing up my energy for when the cat poop hits the fan.” The bat was circling fast above us, like a vulture on methamphetamines. Like the bat on Tuesday, this was not the small animal you are probably picturing. This bat was enormous. It was so big it looked like the illegitimate lovechild of a wookie and a griffin or maybe like a silverback gorilla on a hang glider. Against my past experience and Romy’s opinion, I decided to attempt the humane thing again by opening up the window to see if I could get the bat to fly out. I had no plans to eat the bat or to mount it above my fireplace, so I wanted to let it go peacefully. This time I opened the window from the top down (we have those fancy new windows) so the bat’s flight pattern would take it close enough so it might fly out. It kept flying in spastic circles, coming closer and closer to my head, but refusing to fly out the window. I started to get the feeling that it was no coincidence that this particular bat was in our bedroom. It must have something to do with the bat I killed on Tuesday, some sort of family vengeance. This suspicion was confirmed when the bat flew close to my ear and I heard him yell out, “My name is Bat-nito Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”
I gave him a couple of minutes to fly out the window, but he still refused. He had come for revenge and he wasn’t leaving until he got it. I wondered if he was having trouble getting out because of the light in the room, so I decided to turn out the lights and duck down on the ground. When I would turn the lights back on, he’d be gone. That was the plan anyway. I flipped the light off and crouched down. I could hear the flapping of the wings every time he flew by, as well as the threats he breathed out at me each time. He cursed my children and my mother. I turned on the lights and couldn’t believe what I saw. There were now two bats flying around the bedroom! Another bat had flown in the window when the lights were off. “Holy Meow!” Romy screamed. “What’s next, a witch on a broom?” I lunged for the window, slamming it closed so no more reinforcements could fly in. I got it closed in time, but now Romy the Bat Slayer and I had two bats flying over our heads.
The second bat was more aggressive than the first. He was obviously Bat-nito’s bigger, less stable brother. This new bat flew close to my head one time… just once. The next time he came around the room, he met the business end of my battle rake. When his body hit the floor, I felt the house shift a little on its foundation. In that moment, Sun Tzu went back in time and wrote an introduction to The Art of War that said, "If you do not have time to read this book, just watch what is about to happen and you will get the gist." With blood-lust running through my veins, I swung on Bat-nito with my battle rake. He bounced off the rake and then against the wall. He fell behind the dresser. I used Wyatt’s fishing net to pull the bat, who was releasing blood curdling screams, out from behind the dresser. When I got him out, the beast tried to take off again. But in that moment, Romy the Bat Slayer, the feline of legend, jumped off of the bed… in slow motion. It was like Matthew Mcconaughy in Reign of Fire, jumping through the air yielding a battle ax and landing on a dragon’s back. With the power of a hundred lions Romy roared out, “For Meow-halla!” as he soared through the air. Romy landed with his claws on the bat’s wing, pinning it down. The bat opened and closed its fanged jaws. Romy stared him in the eyes in a scene that was not unlike when Sigourney Weaver comes face to face with the alien and it has thick strands of protoplasmic saliva connecting his upper jaw to his lower. I raised the battle rake above my head and brought it down upon the struggling villain, ending his reign of terror. Bat-nito Montoya was dead.
Romy and I stood above the vanquished griffin-wookie and caught our breath. For just a moment, the earth paused on its axis, just to mark the importance of the moment. We would find out later that an elderly 21-year-old bobcat, a medicine-cat of the Igmu Tribe of Native American felines, had a vision in that moment, which resulted in his tribe giving Romy the honorary Igmu name of “Thunder Whiskers.” We would also later hear that in that moment a renowned Danish painter received the inspiration for a portrait of a Bengal tiger and a fearless warrior standing over the carcass of an annihilated mythical flying beast with a leaf rake stuck in its black hellish heart. Roughly translated, the Danish title of the portrait means “Demise of the Wing-ed Sasquatch.”
I scooped up Bat-nito’s brother and chunked him out the window with the disrespect that goon deserved. But with Bat-nito it was different. We respected him as an adversary, and understood his motivation. We considered collecting firewood and building a funeral pyre for him and pushing his burning body out onto a cold Scandinavian lake to send him off to his own eternal hall of warriors, Bat-halla. But instead we chose to just drop him out of the second story window more gently than we had his brother. The battle was won. But now the portal had to be closed.
Romy didn’t say much to me after all the smoke had cleared. He collected his payment from me (a second can of cat food), told me, “This was the last one, Everett. I’ve earned my golden goblet of milk in Meow-halla. So don’t come looking for me again. Cookie and I are thinking about sailing around the world, maybe visiting the Great Pyramids to see the cat hieroglyphics.” After Romy the Bat Slayer walked off, I opened up the door to tell my family the news that they were free once again. After they finished weeping from gratitude, Danielle agreed to go on a brief journey to retrieve the magical tool I needed to close up the portal to hell that had opened around the pocket door between the living room and dining room. When she returned with the duct tape, I completed the job. Finally, it was time for a well deserved night of sleep.
Although we got to bed very late Friday night, we slept well. Sunday night we crashed early and slept like babies. Then on Monday morning, my day off, fifteen minutes before my alarm was to go off, Danielle startled me awake. “I’m sorry to wake you up early, but down in the dining room, there’s another… bat.”
Monday, August 26, 2013
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
We have had some adventures with wildlife since we moved here 20 months ago. We saw our first black squirrel here, and then another one the next year. Last summer, my dog, Eli, and I came upon a family of beavers living in Paint Creek just off the trail behind Kroger—about a block from our house in the middle of town. Not long after that Danielle, during the time when we didn’t have a back fence, called me at the church office and said, “There’s a beaver in the backyard.” Well, my wife is good at a lot of things, but zoology isn’t necessarily one of them. It was a muskrat, a good sized one at that, but it eventually moved on. Not long after that Eli and I were on a walk on Temple Street. It was dark, but he saw something under a bush so he dove under the bush, practically dragging me in with him. When he came out from under the bush he had a black cat in his mouth. Oh wait, I thought. That cat has a white stripe down its back. The skunk sprayed my feet (I was wearing flip flops) and it sprayed all over Eli, including inside his mouth. Needless to say, Eli let go of the skunk as soon as he could. Then it wasn’t too long after that that Danielle woke me up in the middle of the night saying, “Everett, there’s a bird in the room. Get it out.” Then she put her face under the covers. The instant I opened my eyes, I knew that was no bird. I’ll give Danielle the benefit of the doubt on this one, though, because she’s blind as… well, a bat when she doesn’t have her glasses on. A few minutes later the bat got itself trapped in our narrow back stairway and our heroic old cat Romy (a 13-year-old orange tabby of about 17 pounds) jumped into the air and swatted it down, injuring it. I came in as the cleanup crew and threw it out in the alley trashcan. Romy’s heroics that night shall be remembered for generations in the words of epic poems written by bards that travel the world to sing of his victorious exploits.
All of that happened in our first twelve months here. But all had been quiet for the past several months… until Tuesday night.
Tuesday night was the all-important night before the first day of school for Josselyn (daycare/preschool at the Methodist Church), Wyatt (2nd Grade), and Danielle (elementary reading intervention aide). My sinuses were full and pounding and I couldn’t fall asleep. So at 11 o’clock or so I got out of bed and moved onto the couch in our spare bedroom, what we call “The Wii Room” because all that usually happens in there is that Wyatt plays video games on his Wii. I read until about midnight, then turned off the lights and fell asleep… for a few hours at least. At about 4 am I hear a loud flapping not far from my face. I started awake to see a bat within a foot of my face. It is bouncing off the large plate glass window right above the couch on which I was lying. A very unholy word came out of my mouth and I covered myself up with the quilt. As I rolled onto the floor I tried to pull up in my brain all the action movies I’d ever watched to figure out what might be my next move. I heard a meow and saw that old Romy the Bat Slayer was tracking the bat. I tracked Romy’s eyes to keep track of the bat’s flight patterns. I watched as Romy’s eyes turned toward the room in which Danielle was sleeping. I thought, “I’ve got to get in there.” But then, much to my surprise I saw Danielle standing in her doorway, presumably returning from the restroom. “Get down!” I yelled.
“What?” she shot back, blearily.
“Get on the floor! Now!”
She continued to stand there. “Why?”
“Because there’s a big-@#%* bat flying around in our room!” She hit the floor in a hurry. “Get in the Wii Room and shut the door. I’ll deal with this,” I said, my words oozing with chivalry. She shut the door just as the bat flew out of our room and into the hallway. Thankfully the kids’ doors were closed. I shut our bedroom door to make sure it couldn’t get back in there. It flew downstairs and started circling the living room. Romy the Bat Slayer, who can’t go downstairs because of an old feud that apparently exists between cats and dogs, stood on the stairs and watched it dizzily. I looked down and saw the dog, who was lying on the couch, looking up in the air, but seeming to be rather uninterested. He put his head back down and closed his eyes. When our dog is a little older he would be a great candidate to play the role of a sleeping dog on the porch of a small town sheriff’s office. I went down the backstairs, wrapped up in a quilt, grabbed a broom, and headed for the living room. This was not the best place to do battle—the ceilings are too high and there is no way to block it off from the rest of the house, but I had to meet the enemy on the enemy’s terms. However, when I went in there it was nowhere to be found. I turned on all the lights and looked around. Nothing.
I assumed the bat had flown back upstairs so I went up, still wrapped in the quilt to where only my face and my hand, which was wielding a broom, were showing. As I made it to the top of the stairs, Wyatt’s door opened and he stood there petrified at the sight of a ghost holding a broom. “What’s happening?!” he yelled.
“There’s a bat in the house,” I said, as I dropped the quilt and spoke as calmly as I could. He looked up toward the ceiling.
“But I really need to pee!” he cried out. I had to agree to stand beside him at the toilet as a guard while he went to the bathroom. He then got under the quilt with me and I escorted him to our bedroom, where he crawled in with Danielle. I shut the door behind me and did another sweep of the house. Nothing. At about 6:15 am I finally fell back to sleep. My alarm went off at 7. Several times throughout the day, I searched for the bat. Still nothing.
I was exhausted last night. I’d come off of two nights of little sleep (the first because of allergies) so I took some Benadryl to help with the allergies and to help me fall asleep. I was in bed reading by 9:15 pm. The kids were already asleep behind closed doors and Danielle was downstairs watching TV. After about twenty minutes of reading the Benadryl had kicked in, so I put my book down and was about to reach over to turn off the lamp when I heard, “Everett! Everett! The bat is in the living room!” Before I could even get out of bed, the bat flew through our bedroom doorway, missing me by just a foot or two. Even though I was drugged, I thought fast enough to crawl out into the hallway and shut the door behind me. The bat was trapped in our bedroom and now I had time to come up with a plan, put on better armor than a quilt, find the right weapons, and locate my trusty sidekick, Romy the Bat Slayer.
I came downstairs and briefed Danielle, who was on the couch hiding under a child’s size blanket that said, “Sports All-Star” on it. I put on some flannel pants, my tennis shoes, a fleece jacket, leather gloves, a ski mask, and Danielle’s sunglasses (the big bug-eye sort of glasses). I was fully armored. I went out to the garage and it was like the cornucopia of weapons in the Hunger Games. I grabbed Wyatt’s children’s fishing net (too small really) and as I was leaving the garage I decided to grab the leaf rake. When I came back in the house I decided I could use a shield (Wyatt and I had just watched Captain America on Monday). I was ready for battle looking like a cross between a yard landscaper and a ninja. Before I could go upstairs, Danielle made me pose for a picture for her to post on her Facebook page. I went upstairs to find Romy the Bat Slayer sitting just outside our bedroom door. The old warrior was ready for battle. I briefed him on the plan. “Okay Romy. I’m going to send you in first. You’re going to track the enemy. I’ll army crawl in and I’ll be able to track the bat by watching you. I’ll make my way across the room, open the window, and then the bat will fly out. It’s as easy as that." He used his paw to make the sign of the cross on my forehead, we bowed our heads in prayer and he gave me a letter (signed with a paw print) to send to his mother if he didn’t come back alive (okay, maybe that last sentence didn’t happen).
I opened the door enough to let Romy in, then I shut it again to make sure the bat didn’t get out. I was still out in the hallway. I’m a little bigger than Romy so I was afraid I wouldn’t quite get in the door without letting the bat out. Finally, I just yelled out “Geronimo!” (in my head) and dove into the room, slamming the door behind me. Now my trusty steed (by that I mean cat) and I were in the cave (bedroom) with our nemesis, the great dragon (bat). Beneath the Ohio State stadium cushion, I had my own little phalynx formation going. I yelled out to Romy, “Give me some coordinates!” I actually did yell that to my cat. I crawled across the bedroom and opened the window and screen. All I’ve got to do now is wait for it to fly out, I thought. No problem, right?
Well, I figured out that the window was lower than the bat’s flight pattern. Romy was on top of the bed, jumping as high as he could and swiping at the bat. He was missing it by five feet or more. Romy the Bat Slayer isn’t going to be able to handle this one, I realized. And the window plan isn’t going to work. To top it off, Romy saw the window was open and found that very interesting. Seeing as I didn’t want my cat to jump out of the second story window, I had to shut it. I wasn’t going to be able to handle this in the humane Tibetan Buddhist kind of way. A scene from the classic 80’s post-apocalyptic film Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome entered my mind. I could see Tina Turner standing above the two gladiators yelling out, “Two men enter. One man leaves.” There was going to be no retreat, no peace treaty. It was either me or the bat.
In that moment, I dropped my shield a little and got my first good look at the bat. Immediately, I wished I hadn’t done that. This one was not like the bat the year before. This one was big. It was like the size of Dracula when he is only halfway through changing from a vampire into a bat. It was big enough to terrorize a medieval village and carry off small children to the castle of an evil wizard. It surely returned each morning to a lair filled with the bones of cattle, horses, and bounty hunters. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure it was a bat for a moment there. I’d found the world’s last pterodactyl. It was like the Loch Ness Monster had grown wings. It was that big and it was starting to get ticked off. As I came face to face with this Jurassic predator, Danielle was downstairs on the couch posting about it on Facebook.
Having just watched Captain America, I decided to fling my shield at the bat. I figured it would be like in the movie. The shield would hit my enemy and then the shield would bounce off the wall and return to me. Crouched down below the flight level, I flung the shield. It missed the bat by two feet and landed on the other side of the bed. I was exposed. It was now or never. As I stood to my feet, the yawps of the great armies of the past filled my ears. Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, George Washington, and George Patton all thought to themselves, “If only I could have been more like him.” Shakespeare called out to me, "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." In that moment, the spirits of Japanese Samurais, Chinese Kung Fu Monks, the Knights Templar, Aztec Warriors, and the 300 Greeks at Thermopylae gathered in that bedroom. Garnering their strength I swung the rake and in a single stroke (after four or five strokes before that single stroke) I connected with the prehistoric beast and it fell to the carpet vanquished. Smoke rose from the body as I scooped it up in Wyatt’s bright orange fishing net, opened the window, and pushed it off the cliff into the great abyss (down into the side yard). As I closed the window, the villagers came out of their homes and thanked me for saving their families and farms. They began the preparations for a feast of venison and quail in the chieftain’s mead hall, and the bards began to add to the epic poem that tells of the legend of Romy the Bat Slayer and his master Everett the Brave. Everyone would sleep safely in the Miller house that night.
Okay, since this is a pastor’s blog, I usually try to have some sort of spiritual lesson involved. However, this week I’m not sure there’s any spiritual lesson in this whatsoever. I guess this story is a little bit about what it means to be a man. Strangely enough, feminism suddenly disappears when there’s a bat flying around your bedroom in the middle of the night. There’s certainly a lot more to being a man than that though. Maybe this is the spiritual lesson: for everything there is a time and a season… a time for leaving bats alone so they can rid your neighborhood of mosquitoes and a time to hit a bat with a rake and throw it out the window. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible though. How about this: you just spent the past ten minutes reading this post and hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you laughed. Hopefully you didn’t worry or fret about your life during those ten minutes. Maybe that’s the spiritual lesson—you should be willing to stop and have a good laugh every now and then. I read another pastor’s blog recently that ended with these words, “1 Corinthians 10:31 reads, “'So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God’… Simply enjoying life as a redeemed human who puts God first glorifies God. God takes pleasure when we enjoy ourselves. Why complicate it?”
I like that. Why complicate it? I hope you had fun reading this. I certainly had fun writing it, even if I didn’t have fun living it. May you have a blessed week.
In service to the Gospel,
Pastor Everett.
All of that happened in our first twelve months here. But all had been quiet for the past several months… until Tuesday night.
Tuesday night was the all-important night before the first day of school for Josselyn (daycare/preschool at the Methodist Church), Wyatt (2nd Grade), and Danielle (elementary reading intervention aide). My sinuses were full and pounding and I couldn’t fall asleep. So at 11 o’clock or so I got out of bed and moved onto the couch in our spare bedroom, what we call “The Wii Room” because all that usually happens in there is that Wyatt plays video games on his Wii. I read until about midnight, then turned off the lights and fell asleep… for a few hours at least. At about 4 am I hear a loud flapping not far from my face. I started awake to see a bat within a foot of my face. It is bouncing off the large plate glass window right above the couch on which I was lying. A very unholy word came out of my mouth and I covered myself up with the quilt. As I rolled onto the floor I tried to pull up in my brain all the action movies I’d ever watched to figure out what might be my next move. I heard a meow and saw that old Romy the Bat Slayer was tracking the bat. I tracked Romy’s eyes to keep track of the bat’s flight patterns. I watched as Romy’s eyes turned toward the room in which Danielle was sleeping. I thought, “I’ve got to get in there.” But then, much to my surprise I saw Danielle standing in her doorway, presumably returning from the restroom. “Get down!” I yelled.
“What?” she shot back, blearily.
“Get on the floor! Now!”
She continued to stand there. “Why?”
“Because there’s a big-@#%* bat flying around in our room!” She hit the floor in a hurry. “Get in the Wii Room and shut the door. I’ll deal with this,” I said, my words oozing with chivalry. She shut the door just as the bat flew out of our room and into the hallway. Thankfully the kids’ doors were closed. I shut our bedroom door to make sure it couldn’t get back in there. It flew downstairs and started circling the living room. Romy the Bat Slayer, who can’t go downstairs because of an old feud that apparently exists between cats and dogs, stood on the stairs and watched it dizzily. I looked down and saw the dog, who was lying on the couch, looking up in the air, but seeming to be rather uninterested. He put his head back down and closed his eyes. When our dog is a little older he would be a great candidate to play the role of a sleeping dog on the porch of a small town sheriff’s office. I went down the backstairs, wrapped up in a quilt, grabbed a broom, and headed for the living room. This was not the best place to do battle—the ceilings are too high and there is no way to block it off from the rest of the house, but I had to meet the enemy on the enemy’s terms. However, when I went in there it was nowhere to be found. I turned on all the lights and looked around. Nothing.
I assumed the bat had flown back upstairs so I went up, still wrapped in the quilt to where only my face and my hand, which was wielding a broom, were showing. As I made it to the top of the stairs, Wyatt’s door opened and he stood there petrified at the sight of a ghost holding a broom. “What’s happening?!” he yelled.
“There’s a bat in the house,” I said, as I dropped the quilt and spoke as calmly as I could. He looked up toward the ceiling.
“But I really need to pee!” he cried out. I had to agree to stand beside him at the toilet as a guard while he went to the bathroom. He then got under the quilt with me and I escorted him to our bedroom, where he crawled in with Danielle. I shut the door behind me and did another sweep of the house. Nothing. At about 6:15 am I finally fell back to sleep. My alarm went off at 7. Several times throughout the day, I searched for the bat. Still nothing.
I was exhausted last night. I’d come off of two nights of little sleep (the first because of allergies) so I took some Benadryl to help with the allergies and to help me fall asleep. I was in bed reading by 9:15 pm. The kids were already asleep behind closed doors and Danielle was downstairs watching TV. After about twenty minutes of reading the Benadryl had kicked in, so I put my book down and was about to reach over to turn off the lamp when I heard, “Everett! Everett! The bat is in the living room!” Before I could even get out of bed, the bat flew through our bedroom doorway, missing me by just a foot or two. Even though I was drugged, I thought fast enough to crawl out into the hallway and shut the door behind me. The bat was trapped in our bedroom and now I had time to come up with a plan, put on better armor than a quilt, find the right weapons, and locate my trusty sidekick, Romy the Bat Slayer.
I came downstairs and briefed Danielle, who was on the couch hiding under a child’s size blanket that said, “Sports All-Star” on it. I put on some flannel pants, my tennis shoes, a fleece jacket, leather gloves, a ski mask, and Danielle’s sunglasses (the big bug-eye sort of glasses). I was fully armored. I went out to the garage and it was like the cornucopia of weapons in the Hunger Games. I grabbed Wyatt’s children’s fishing net (too small really) and as I was leaving the garage I decided to grab the leaf rake. When I came back in the house I decided I could use a shield (Wyatt and I had just watched Captain America on Monday). I was ready for battle looking like a cross between a yard landscaper and a ninja. Before I could go upstairs, Danielle made me pose for a picture for her to post on her Facebook page. I went upstairs to find Romy the Bat Slayer sitting just outside our bedroom door. The old warrior was ready for battle. I briefed him on the plan. “Okay Romy. I’m going to send you in first. You’re going to track the enemy. I’ll army crawl in and I’ll be able to track the bat by watching you. I’ll make my way across the room, open the window, and then the bat will fly out. It’s as easy as that." He used his paw to make the sign of the cross on my forehead, we bowed our heads in prayer and he gave me a letter (signed with a paw print) to send to his mother if he didn’t come back alive (okay, maybe that last sentence didn’t happen).
I opened the door enough to let Romy in, then I shut it again to make sure the bat didn’t get out. I was still out in the hallway. I’m a little bigger than Romy so I was afraid I wouldn’t quite get in the door without letting the bat out. Finally, I just yelled out “Geronimo!” (in my head) and dove into the room, slamming the door behind me. Now my trusty steed (by that I mean cat) and I were in the cave (bedroom) with our nemesis, the great dragon (bat). Beneath the Ohio State stadium cushion, I had my own little phalynx formation going. I yelled out to Romy, “Give me some coordinates!” I actually did yell that to my cat. I crawled across the bedroom and opened the window and screen. All I’ve got to do now is wait for it to fly out, I thought. No problem, right?
Well, I figured out that the window was lower than the bat’s flight pattern. Romy was on top of the bed, jumping as high as he could and swiping at the bat. He was missing it by five feet or more. Romy the Bat Slayer isn’t going to be able to handle this one, I realized. And the window plan isn’t going to work. To top it off, Romy saw the window was open and found that very interesting. Seeing as I didn’t want my cat to jump out of the second story window, I had to shut it. I wasn’t going to be able to handle this in the humane Tibetan Buddhist kind of way. A scene from the classic 80’s post-apocalyptic film Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome entered my mind. I could see Tina Turner standing above the two gladiators yelling out, “Two men enter. One man leaves.” There was going to be no retreat, no peace treaty. It was either me or the bat.
In that moment, I dropped my shield a little and got my first good look at the bat. Immediately, I wished I hadn’t done that. This one was not like the bat the year before. This one was big. It was like the size of Dracula when he is only halfway through changing from a vampire into a bat. It was big enough to terrorize a medieval village and carry off small children to the castle of an evil wizard. It surely returned each morning to a lair filled with the bones of cattle, horses, and bounty hunters. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure it was a bat for a moment there. I’d found the world’s last pterodactyl. It was like the Loch Ness Monster had grown wings. It was that big and it was starting to get ticked off. As I came face to face with this Jurassic predator, Danielle was downstairs on the couch posting about it on Facebook.
Having just watched Captain America, I decided to fling my shield at the bat. I figured it would be like in the movie. The shield would hit my enemy and then the shield would bounce off the wall and return to me. Crouched down below the flight level, I flung the shield. It missed the bat by two feet and landed on the other side of the bed. I was exposed. It was now or never. As I stood to my feet, the yawps of the great armies of the past filled my ears. Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, George Washington, and George Patton all thought to themselves, “If only I could have been more like him.” Shakespeare called out to me, "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." In that moment, the spirits of Japanese Samurais, Chinese Kung Fu Monks, the Knights Templar, Aztec Warriors, and the 300 Greeks at Thermopylae gathered in that bedroom. Garnering their strength I swung the rake and in a single stroke (after four or five strokes before that single stroke) I connected with the prehistoric beast and it fell to the carpet vanquished. Smoke rose from the body as I scooped it up in Wyatt’s bright orange fishing net, opened the window, and pushed it off the cliff into the great abyss (down into the side yard). As I closed the window, the villagers came out of their homes and thanked me for saving their families and farms. They began the preparations for a feast of venison and quail in the chieftain’s mead hall, and the bards began to add to the epic poem that tells of the legend of Romy the Bat Slayer and his master Everett the Brave. Everyone would sleep safely in the Miller house that night.
Okay, since this is a pastor’s blog, I usually try to have some sort of spiritual lesson involved. However, this week I’m not sure there’s any spiritual lesson in this whatsoever. I guess this story is a little bit about what it means to be a man. Strangely enough, feminism suddenly disappears when there’s a bat flying around your bedroom in the middle of the night. There’s certainly a lot more to being a man than that though. Maybe this is the spiritual lesson: for everything there is a time and a season… a time for leaving bats alone so they can rid your neighborhood of mosquitoes and a time to hit a bat with a rake and throw it out the window. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible though. How about this: you just spent the past ten minutes reading this post and hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you laughed. Hopefully you didn’t worry or fret about your life during those ten minutes. Maybe that’s the spiritual lesson—you should be willing to stop and have a good laugh every now and then. I read another pastor’s blog recently that ended with these words, “1 Corinthians 10:31 reads, “'So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God’… Simply enjoying life as a redeemed human who puts God first glorifies God. God takes pleasure when we enjoy ourselves. Why complicate it?”
I like that. Why complicate it? I hope you had fun reading this. I certainly had fun writing it, even if I didn’t have fun living it. May you have a blessed week.
In service to the Gospel,
Pastor Everett.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
A Mechanical Bull Made Me Shave My Beard
I shaved my beard off this morning for only the second time in the last six years. The last time I shaved it off, about three years ago, my high school youth group exerted their greatest power—peer pressure—on me and I began growing it back that very day. So today, my chin is feeling the fresh air for just the second day in the past 2,190 days or so. Wyatt was the first to come down the stairs and he didn’t even notice. He was more concerned about getting SportsCenter on the TV. Josselyn woke up next and she saw me from way up stairs and noticed immediately. Danielle always kind of liked the beard except when I let it get kind of long and I’d start talking about Duck Dynasty a lot or when I’d say things like, “I’m thinking about growing a handlebar mustache or maybe a pointed beard.” Josselyn was really concerned with why I shaved it. She wanted answers!
So why do I shave it off? Was it because it was too hot? Yesterday was a pretty hot and muggy day but there have been hotter days, so that’s not the reason. Was it because it was too itchy? Well, it had been kind of itchy for some reason but I don’t think that’s it either. As I was doing it I don’t think I really knew why I was changing my appearance after six years. Then after I was finished shaving and slapped on some aftershave lotion for the first time in years (it’s still burning three hours later) I realized what probably happened that made me shave the beard.
In September we are going to have a garage sale. In preparation for this we’ve been searching the house for anything we don’t use anymore (or never did). Yesterday I opened up a cabinet door in the living room to see if there was anything in there; I was confronted by a stack of photos that we’ve never organized. I sat down to flip through them. I looked at photos of the kids when they were babies, of Danielle when she was pregnant, of Danielle and me in Charleston, South Carolina on vacation (before the kids). It took me down memory lane. Then I came to a couple of photos from way back in February, 2000. Danielle and I were dating at the time and we were at party that was thrown by her sorority. The party was way out in the country outside Stillwater, Oklahoma (home of Oklahoma State University) in a barn that had been converted into a party hall. These particular pictures of me involve western wear and a mechanical bull. There is one photo of me mounted on the bull before the lever has been pulled. Full of youthful vigor (and some liquid courage) I was sure that John Travolta in Urban Cowboy had nothing on me. The next photo, which was probably taken about three seconds later, is of me getting up off the mat. I’m smiling and I’m holding a cowboy hat. I’m so young and unencumbered by the cares of the world. I look good, the best I've ever looked. I felt like a cowboy in that moment, with my little cowgirl there snapping a picture of me. As I was looking at the photo, lost in the memory, the kids started yelling at each other and Danielle asked me if I’d ever gotten around to cleaning out the cat’s litter box. I glanced back at that photo before I put it back in the cabinet and didn’t think about it again. Coincidentally enough, the next morning I’m shaving off my beard.
Two weeks from today I turn 35-years-old. I’m not that 21-year-old wannabe cowboy anymore. I’m too busy getting a bowl of cereal for the kids or going to work or helping Danielle come up with a grocery list or figuring out how we’re going to save up enough to put the kids through college when all the money seems to go out every month. My hair is thinning… except for in my ears and on my shoulders where it is all of a sudden appearing. My pants are tight and Danielle and I are telling each other things like, “You can’t shop in that store anymore. They sell clothes for young people.” What is happening?
But, you know what, while today may not be the most exciting day I’ve ever had, it is the best day I’ve ever lived. The reasons for that are many. Danielle and I have been married for 12.5 years and our marriage is stronger than it has ever been. We have two healthy, smart, beautiful, and funny little kids. We have a good dog and a faithful old cat that we’ve had throughout our entire marriage. We have a loving church family. We live in a great house in a nice town. I have a vocation that allows me to live a life of great meaning. Danielle is finding her calling in helping kids learn to read as a teacher’s aide at Cherry Hill Primary School. I haven’t ridden any mechanical bulls lately, but life is good; it’s really good.
I am finding the truth that is in those famous words of scripture from Ecclesiastes 3. For some reason we wait until somebody dies to read these verses:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11He has made everything suitable for its time.
Life ebbs and flows. Not everyday is happy. Not everyday is exciting. There are valleys and peaks. This is life. If you're looking for a high everyday then you'll either be disappointed or you'll resort to drugs to fake it. The key to life is not having good days every day or staying young or acting like you’re young even when you’re not. The key to life is having a relationship with God that is so strong that it permeates every day of your life—the days when you’re twenty-one and riding a mechanical bull and the days when you’re about to turn thirty-five and you can’t think of anything better to do than to shave off your beard that you’ve had for six years. God is with us, each and every one of us. We don’t have to understand how this works to know it is true. Even the greatest theologians of all time don’t really know how this works. They just like to speculate about how it works, but they don’t really know any more than the rest of us. Somehow through the Holy Spirit, God in Jesus Christ is with you today—this day!—and no matter what happens today—good or bad, tragic or joyful, mundane or exciting—God is with you, God loves you, and God wants to use you to share this message with others.
I haven’t ridden any mechanical bulls lately. But that’s okay. When my kids jump on my back, I am the mechanical bull now. Because of Jesus Christ, I get to live each day with God, with my family, with my church family, and with my friends. I have joy! My prayer is that you know the joy that comes through a relationship with God and with the family of faith. If you do not know that joy, then I invite you to send me an email at emiller@fpcwcho.org or come to worship here with First Presbyterian Church at 10:15 am on Sunday and I will be more than happy to share that joy with you. I'll be the guy without the beard, the one who looks like he just might have been a cowboy in the past. Okay, that's wishful thinking. I'll be the guy without the beard, the one with thinning hair and the growing belly, the one with the smile on his face.
Have a blessed week!
So why do I shave it off? Was it because it was too hot? Yesterday was a pretty hot and muggy day but there have been hotter days, so that’s not the reason. Was it because it was too itchy? Well, it had been kind of itchy for some reason but I don’t think that’s it either. As I was doing it I don’t think I really knew why I was changing my appearance after six years. Then after I was finished shaving and slapped on some aftershave lotion for the first time in years (it’s still burning three hours later) I realized what probably happened that made me shave the beard.
In September we are going to have a garage sale. In preparation for this we’ve been searching the house for anything we don’t use anymore (or never did). Yesterday I opened up a cabinet door in the living room to see if there was anything in there; I was confronted by a stack of photos that we’ve never organized. I sat down to flip through them. I looked at photos of the kids when they were babies, of Danielle when she was pregnant, of Danielle and me in Charleston, South Carolina on vacation (before the kids). It took me down memory lane. Then I came to a couple of photos from way back in February, 2000. Danielle and I were dating at the time and we were at party that was thrown by her sorority. The party was way out in the country outside Stillwater, Oklahoma (home of Oklahoma State University) in a barn that had been converted into a party hall. These particular pictures of me involve western wear and a mechanical bull. There is one photo of me mounted on the bull before the lever has been pulled. Full of youthful vigor (and some liquid courage) I was sure that John Travolta in Urban Cowboy had nothing on me. The next photo, which was probably taken about three seconds later, is of me getting up off the mat. I’m smiling and I’m holding a cowboy hat. I’m so young and unencumbered by the cares of the world. I look good, the best I've ever looked. I felt like a cowboy in that moment, with my little cowgirl there snapping a picture of me. As I was looking at the photo, lost in the memory, the kids started yelling at each other and Danielle asked me if I’d ever gotten around to cleaning out the cat’s litter box. I glanced back at that photo before I put it back in the cabinet and didn’t think about it again. Coincidentally enough, the next morning I’m shaving off my beard.
Two weeks from today I turn 35-years-old. I’m not that 21-year-old wannabe cowboy anymore. I’m too busy getting a bowl of cereal for the kids or going to work or helping Danielle come up with a grocery list or figuring out how we’re going to save up enough to put the kids through college when all the money seems to go out every month. My hair is thinning… except for in my ears and on my shoulders where it is all of a sudden appearing. My pants are tight and Danielle and I are telling each other things like, “You can’t shop in that store anymore. They sell clothes for young people.” What is happening?
But, you know what, while today may not be the most exciting day I’ve ever had, it is the best day I’ve ever lived. The reasons for that are many. Danielle and I have been married for 12.5 years and our marriage is stronger than it has ever been. We have two healthy, smart, beautiful, and funny little kids. We have a good dog and a faithful old cat that we’ve had throughout our entire marriage. We have a loving church family. We live in a great house in a nice town. I have a vocation that allows me to live a life of great meaning. Danielle is finding her calling in helping kids learn to read as a teacher’s aide at Cherry Hill Primary School. I haven’t ridden any mechanical bulls lately, but life is good; it’s really good.
I am finding the truth that is in those famous words of scripture from Ecclesiastes 3. For some reason we wait until somebody dies to read these verses:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11He has made everything suitable for its time.
Life ebbs and flows. Not everyday is happy. Not everyday is exciting. There are valleys and peaks. This is life. If you're looking for a high everyday then you'll either be disappointed or you'll resort to drugs to fake it. The key to life is not having good days every day or staying young or acting like you’re young even when you’re not. The key to life is having a relationship with God that is so strong that it permeates every day of your life—the days when you’re twenty-one and riding a mechanical bull and the days when you’re about to turn thirty-five and you can’t think of anything better to do than to shave off your beard that you’ve had for six years. God is with us, each and every one of us. We don’t have to understand how this works to know it is true. Even the greatest theologians of all time don’t really know how this works. They just like to speculate about how it works, but they don’t really know any more than the rest of us. Somehow through the Holy Spirit, God in Jesus Christ is with you today—this day!—and no matter what happens today—good or bad, tragic or joyful, mundane or exciting—God is with you, God loves you, and God wants to use you to share this message with others.
I haven’t ridden any mechanical bulls lately. But that’s okay. When my kids jump on my back, I am the mechanical bull now. Because of Jesus Christ, I get to live each day with God, with my family, with my church family, and with my friends. I have joy! My prayer is that you know the joy that comes through a relationship with God and with the family of faith. If you do not know that joy, then I invite you to send me an email at emiller@fpcwcho.org or come to worship here with First Presbyterian Church at 10:15 am on Sunday and I will be more than happy to share that joy with you. I'll be the guy without the beard, the one who looks like he just might have been a cowboy in the past. Okay, that's wishful thinking. I'll be the guy without the beard, the one with thinning hair and the growing belly, the one with the smile on his face.
Have a blessed week!
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Book Review: Toxic Charity
I just finished reading Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to Reverse It) by Robert D. Lupton. According to the blurb on the back of the book, “Robert D. Lupton is the founder and president of FCS Urban Ministries (Focus Community Strategies) and the author of Theirs is the Kingdom: Compassion, Justice, and the Christian Life; and the widely circulated ‘Urban Perspectives.’” He is a longtime member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and I had the opportunity to hear him speak at the PC(USA) Big Tent Event last week in Louisville.
The overall gist of Mr. Lupton’s work and of this book is that “hand out” type of ministries should be reserved for emergency responses. Whenever a need is identified as chronic, rather than emergency, churches and other organizations need to respond differently. Communities must find ways to help people to help themselves. Continual “hand outs” result in dependence and a loss of dignity for the recipients. Mr. Lupton has discovered this and lived this out for decades by moving into impoverished inner city neighborhoods that would scare off most of us. He writes, “Little affirms human dignity more than honest work. One of the surest ways to destroy self-worth is subsidizing the idleness of able-bodied people. Work is a gift, a calling, a human responsibility. And the creation of productive, meaningful employment fulfills one of the Creator’s highest designs. Because of that, it should be a central goal to our service.” Also, at the lunch in Louisville he talked about how much money we waste on mission trips going to do things for people. Instead, he says, we should take the money we would spend going and use it to provide paid work for locals to do what we would have done on the trip. He also says that we should never go on mission trips with bags full of gifts to give to people when we get there. Instead, we should take wallets full of money to buy what they have to sell, whether goods or services. We should participate in their economies. That’s how we can help them.
At the lunch, one person asked Mr. Lupton if he was really preaching American capitalism instead of biblical Jesus-centered ethics. It was a good question. I felt that Mr. Lupton’s answer was equally good. He spoke about how we are all created in the image of God, who is a creator God, and how God gave us work to do (Genesis 1:26-31). He said that he believes that unfortunately very often charity is more about the giver than the recipient. Mr. Lupton expressed that many well-meaning church folks are very upset by his observations and claims because they realize that to actually work toward community development instead of toward a continual type of “hand out” charity takes much more investment, work, time, and a willingness to trust the poor to come up with the solutions to their own problems (albeit with the support of those of us who have access to more resources than they do). Giving things away makes the giver feel good. People are hesitant to give that up. I really like what Robert Lupton has to say. I’m just not sure how to actually implement it. A big part of it is actually building relationships with the folks we are serving now and finding out from them what the real needs are. Who would know better than they?
I don’t have the answers for Washington Court House and I'm not sure that Mr. Lupton does either, but I think he has some very interesting ideas. I have no trouble giving food to retired folks, children, single moms, and our neighbors who are mentally and physically handicapped (although I like the co-op idea). But in my mind, the men should be working. But that begs the question of where? What blue collar jobs are there in this town? There are so many root causes: lack of blue collar jobs, drugs, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates to name a few. Those are all connected. If we don’t deal with those root causes we’ll be handing out food to more and more people and we’ll be doing it into eternity. Robert Lupton would say that until we start empowering people to deal with those issues themselves with the help of our resources then we’re just spinning our wheels. Again, I think he’s right; I just don’t know how to deal with the root causes.
Toxic Charity is a very valuable read. It will challenge you. It will make you angry. It will convict you. It will make you ask questions. That's what a good nonfiction book does. Another book in the same genre is When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.
Pray for our town. We need it.
I hope you have a blessed week.
Pastor Everett
The overall gist of Mr. Lupton’s work and of this book is that “hand out” type of ministries should be reserved for emergency responses. Whenever a need is identified as chronic, rather than emergency, churches and other organizations need to respond differently. Communities must find ways to help people to help themselves. Continual “hand outs” result in dependence and a loss of dignity for the recipients. Mr. Lupton has discovered this and lived this out for decades by moving into impoverished inner city neighborhoods that would scare off most of us. He writes, “Little affirms human dignity more than honest work. One of the surest ways to destroy self-worth is subsidizing the idleness of able-bodied people. Work is a gift, a calling, a human responsibility. And the creation of productive, meaningful employment fulfills one of the Creator’s highest designs. Because of that, it should be a central goal to our service.” Also, at the lunch in Louisville he talked about how much money we waste on mission trips going to do things for people. Instead, he says, we should take the money we would spend going and use it to provide paid work for locals to do what we would have done on the trip. He also says that we should never go on mission trips with bags full of gifts to give to people when we get there. Instead, we should take wallets full of money to buy what they have to sell, whether goods or services. We should participate in their economies. That’s how we can help them.
At the lunch, one person asked Mr. Lupton if he was really preaching American capitalism instead of biblical Jesus-centered ethics. It was a good question. I felt that Mr. Lupton’s answer was equally good. He spoke about how we are all created in the image of God, who is a creator God, and how God gave us work to do (Genesis 1:26-31). He said that he believes that unfortunately very often charity is more about the giver than the recipient. Mr. Lupton expressed that many well-meaning church folks are very upset by his observations and claims because they realize that to actually work toward community development instead of toward a continual type of “hand out” charity takes much more investment, work, time, and a willingness to trust the poor to come up with the solutions to their own problems (albeit with the support of those of us who have access to more resources than they do). Giving things away makes the giver feel good. People are hesitant to give that up. I really like what Robert Lupton has to say. I’m just not sure how to actually implement it. A big part of it is actually building relationships with the folks we are serving now and finding out from them what the real needs are. Who would know better than they?
I don’t have the answers for Washington Court House and I'm not sure that Mr. Lupton does either, but I think he has some very interesting ideas. I have no trouble giving food to retired folks, children, single moms, and our neighbors who are mentally and physically handicapped (although I like the co-op idea). But in my mind, the men should be working. But that begs the question of where? What blue collar jobs are there in this town? There are so many root causes: lack of blue collar jobs, drugs, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates to name a few. Those are all connected. If we don’t deal with those root causes we’ll be handing out food to more and more people and we’ll be doing it into eternity. Robert Lupton would say that until we start empowering people to deal with those issues themselves with the help of our resources then we’re just spinning our wheels. Again, I think he’s right; I just don’t know how to deal with the root causes.
Toxic Charity is a very valuable read. It will challenge you. It will make you angry. It will convict you. It will make you ask questions. That's what a good nonfiction book does. Another book in the same genre is When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.
Pray for our town. We need it.
I hope you have a blessed week.
Pastor Everett
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