We Have Power

A few hours shy of six full days since the power outage began for us, power was restored to our home. At the time, we were with friends in Cincinnati celebrating the Fourth of July. There are still people here in our community and in other places without power and I'm keeping them in my prayers tonight. I'm also saying prayers of thanks for the utility workers who are working 16-hour shifts to restore power to a huge area that, just one week ago, was hit with hurricane-force winds.

Of the southern Ohio communities through which we traveled today, Wellston seemed to have been particularly hard-hit. Utility poles were pulled out by the winds and a portion of the downtown area was closed to traffic.

Keep all those hit by last week's storm in your prayers.

Please also pray for the Ohio farmers and farmers in other states facing this summer's drought.

Praying for the People of Tuscaloosa...

...and all the most recent victims of tornadoes in the South. May the acts of nature be followed by the compassionate acts of God prompted in His people.

4-27-11 Tornado Tuscaloosa, Al from Crimson Tide Productions on Vimeo.

By the way, here are links to pictures taken recently of a tornado in the Eastgate area of Clermont County, where we lived for seventeen years, here and here. All of Ohio has gotten rain this April, where we've had only six days without it. But the Cincinnati has been particularly hard-hit, including much severe weather.

On Griffey Trade: What He Said

My brother, Marty Daniels, has the best take I've read on the trade of Ken Griffey, Jr. from the Cincinnati Reds to the Chicago White Sox. For most of the eight years Junior played in Cincinnati, Reds fans didn't deserve him. Junior, we'll miss you...but go win a ring!

See here, here, and here. (Linked sequentially.)

[Picture from The Cincinnati Enquirer. Click to enlarge.]

"This is the old left hander, rounding third and heading for home"

For decades, that was Joe Nuxhall's signature goodbye on the Reds radio network. Nuxhall, who, at age fifteen, became the youngest major leaguer in history, went on to be a Reds announcer for decades, a fixture of the Cincinnati landscape. Nuxhall has died. Below is Pullitzer Prize-winning Cincinnati Enquirer editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman's touching tribute to Nux.


Nuxhall was never a great broadcaster and was only a mediocre career pitcher, his 1944 entry into the Major Leagues no doubt helped by the wartime shortage of able-bodied ball players off fighting in the European and Pacific theaters. But he was an indelible character who loved baseball and loved the Cincinnati community. Nux, the man, was greater than the sum of his parts. He will be missed.

A Cincinnati Weekend

We had a gorgeous weekend here in the Cincinnati area. While temps reached the mid-90s, the air was, for Cincy, atypically dry, with gentle breezes.

My wife and I took full advantage of the conditions...and the breaks in our schedule. Yesterday, we took a walking tour through portions of Cincinnati's Eden Park and Walnut Hills areas.

For those unfamiliar with Cincinnati, Eden Park and its surrounding area is a gorgeous place that sets atop one of the city's many hills. It provides great views of the Ohio River. There are majestic urbanscapes rivaling anything you might see in places like San Francisco. (A city I really love, by the way.)

Walnut Hills is an area with a rich history. While it has lots of bright spots, it's also afflicted with urban blight. There are also friendly people there, as my wife and I saw yesterday when many residents, sitting out on porches and front lawns said hello.

Walnut Hills is the place where Reverend Lyman Beecher lived with, among others, his daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Beecher was president of Lane Seminary, a Presbyterian institution active in the Underground Railroad, which helped blacks escape slavery in the South.

The activities of the Beechers underscore a fact that seems often overlooked by contemporary social historians. And that's the absolutely essential role Christian faith has played in calling society to more humane and moral ways of living. Granted, many people misuse Christian faith to uphold dehumanization. But authentic Christianity always calls us to love God and love neighbor.

Close to the Beecher home, which can still be toured on three days each week, is the first African-American neighborhood in Cincinnati. Its original residents were former slaves. A prominent resident there, the son of a slave who had bought his own freedom, was Wendell Phillips Dabney. You can read more about him here.

The tour we took is one outlined in a fabulous book I've mentioned before, Walking the Steps of Cincinnati by Mary Anna DuSablon. And therein lies an interesting tale. Cincinnati is built on what appears to be hills. But as du Sablon writes:.

..Cincinnati is really a City of Valleys; valleys carved in a rolling plain formed more than two million years ago. This "indented edge" of the midwest plains, higher than [the Ohio River] Basin, is the crest of an upward fold in the rock called the Cincinnati Arch...

Starting in the 1800s, Cincinnatians began building stairways to facilitate going on foot from community to community in the area, putting them on the sites of footpaths that had already been established. Later, trolley cars and "eventually...five inclined railways" went up and down the Cincinnati "hills."

The steps, of course, were replaced by the automobile as a major form of transportation in the area and they largely fell into disuse, except for those used by hundreds of religious pilgrims who ascend Mount Adams each Good Friday.

Fortunately, the city of Cincinnati is committed to maintaining the more than 400 stairways that criss cross the area and they make for fabulous walking tours of city and its diverse neighborhoods.

This morning, as we prepared to go to worship, my wife, no baseball fan, suggested that we head down to Great American Ballpark for this afternoon's game between the Reds and the Cleveland Indians.

Our son went with us and what a great game we saw! It was a pitcher's duel that began as a battle between each team's ace: Aaron Harang for the Reds and C.C. Sebathia for the Indians. The game went into the 12th.-inning before the Reds won it, when Alex Gonzalez hit a single driving in Chad Moeller.

I mentioned to my wife as we drove home that we probably did more of Cincinnati this weekend than we have in years, partaking of the particularities of the core city of the area in which we've lived since 1990. It was fun!

In a world that's become increasingly homogenized, it's great to remember that communities and countries can still retain their unique characteristics and that often, it's differences that make them...and even individual people...special!

[THANKS TO: blognetews.com/Ohio for linking to this post.]

Last Week's Ice and Snow Storm

Two weeks ago, on February 6, we got hit with a fairly heavy snowstorm here in the Cincinnati area. One week later, freezing rain along with more snow arrived.

The second storm left behind it scenes of terrible beauty. Beauty, because, as my wife put it, the treetops looked as though they had been dipped in silver. But terrible in that the burdened trees and electric lines gave way in many area communities. Branches and whole trees fell onto power lines, meaning that about 100,000 homes in our area were without electricity, some for as little as an hour-and-a-half and others for several days. (Places north of us, like Columbus, were hit with more snow than ice.)

The ice also took the life of a little girl in our community. While playing outside on a snow day, a large branch fell and killed her.

But if you were able to safely observe the scenes left behind by the recent storms, there were some incredible sights. These are some of the pictures taken by my son, Philip, here in our neighborhood just last week.

[By the way, another Cincinnati area pastor has some interesting reflections inspired by our ice storm here.]