Today's 11:11, July 20, 2017

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first and second human beings, respectively, to walk on the surface of the Moon. They were two-thirds of the three-person Apollo 11 crew. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the Moon's surface in the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), astronaut Michael Collins orbited the Moon in the Command Module (CM), which would eventually take the crew back to Earth.

Armstrong was a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio and is part of a distinguished line of Buckeye State aviators, including Dayton's Orville and Wilbur Wright, the inventors of powered flight. Others include John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, fighter pilot, and test pilot; Columbus native Eddie Rickebacker, the United States' flying ace of World War I and one-time president of Eastern Airlines; and Columbus West High graduate Donn Eisele, who flew on Apollo 8.

After retiring from the space program, Armstrong was a professor of engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

The American space program and the Moon landing still inspire me and I still hope that one day that I can travel in space.

"You're from Ohio!"

During a quick run to Kroger on Saturday, I heard a girl complaining to her mom that it was cold. (It was 31 with no wind, bearable.)

Mom said: "Stop it! You're from Ohio; you should be used to it."

Those words were spoken like a true Buckeye, because all Buckeyes know, "If you don't like the weather now, wait a minute...it'll change."

In the meantime, buck up, buttercup.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

General Scaparrotti Takes NATO Command

Mike Scaparrotti, who grew up in Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, where I pastored for six years, is a great leader and a fine man.

Saint Matthew, Logan, and the Scaparrotti family are justly proud of him!

Despite misinformed talk from the campaign trail this year, NATO and other similar alliances and arrangements remain important not just or even primarily for others' security, but for the security of the people of the United States. General Scaparrotti is a wonderful choice for this command.

Please keep him in your prayers, asking God to give him wisdom and safety. Please also pray for his wife Cindy, who is a great person in her own right.



[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

Four books

I mentioned David McCullough's book, The Wright Brothers, in a post last night. I finished reading it a few days ago. It's a great and surprisingly quick read and the first of all the biographies of the Wrights that I have read that have helped this caveman mind appreciate the peculiar insights the brothers had that allowed them to break through to powered, heavier-than-air flight. As I said last evening, like all of McCullough's books, this one is a treat!

Yesterday, I began reading Joseph Ellis' The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution: 1783-1789. Ellis looks at the development of the United States Constitution in the period following the end of the Revolution and narrates the key roles played by the "quartet" of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in bringing the governing document into being. Absent their work, the new republic would have been doomed to chaos and susceptible to foreign conquerors as it labored to get out of debt and establish itself under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation. The Constitution was the second American Revolution. Ellis, as always, writes well, clearly, and insightfully. (This fits with a contention I've often made here that the American Revolution was not completed until the Constitution was ratified.)

I'm also now reading Bill Mowry's The Ways of the Alongsider, a helpful guidebook on how Christians can share their faith with others, life to life. Over the past year, Bill has been my coach in deepening my walk with Christ. He's as helpful in print as he is one-on-one.

And, in the wake of the decision to resume referring to the mountain we once called Mount McKinley as Mount Denali, I'm re-reading Kevin Phillips' short biography President William McKinley. Of all the US presidents to come from Ohio, McKinley was by far the best. Phillips argues that the Canton native was a consequential president in two ways.

First, he upended the partisan logjam that had for several decades produced Republican presidents interspersed with Democratic presidents, back and forth, leaving the country with no clear policy direction for more than twenty years. McKinley created what remained a sustained Republican occupation of the White House, with the exception of a narrow victory for Woodrow Wilson--brought about by Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 run for president on the Progressive Party ticket, thus dividing Republicans--from 1896 to 1932, when Democrat Franklin Roosevelt brought basic dominion for his party through 1968.

Second, McKinley, Phillips argues, is not Mount Rushmore-worthy, but safely near the top of the second-tier of effective presidents. He was, it can be argued, the first modern US president in both domestic and foreign policy.

Phillips' discussion of the unique role Ohio played in nineteenth century America alone makes the book worth reading. The state was the country's greatest center of innovation, business risk, and scientific inquiry, playing a part in world history that California's Silicon Valley later played some one-hundred years later.

I recommend all these books. (By the way, I'm indifferent to the change in name for Mount Denali. A more appropriate memorial for William McKinley can certainly be found.)

Huffman Prairie and the Wright Brothers

After their success at Kitty Hawk, Dayton, Ohio's Wright Brothers still needed to perfect their powered airplane technology. Instead of trekking back to Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, chosen for its twenty-mile per hour average winds and its remote location on the Outer Banks, the Wrights decided to stay in Ohio, relying on the engine forged by their employee, Charlie Taylor, and a catapult to set and keep them aloft.

During the "flying seasons" of 1904 and 1905, Wilbur and Orville Wright experimented at Huffman Prairie, an 84-acre parcel of flat land that became the world's first airport. The brothers took hundreds of test flights there.

Huffman Prairie was about ten miles from the Wrights' home on Hawthorn Street and from their bicycle shop on Third in Dayton. They reached Huffman Prairie via the Interurban trolley that ran between Dayton and Springfield. The picture below shows the spot where the trolley stop was. As you approach the prairie, you travel along a narrow, tree-lined road that must be on the old trolley right-of-way.

Huffman Prairie is now part of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base complex in Fairborn, Ohio. Below is an Ohio historical marker telling a bit about Huffman Prairie. You can walk all around the site where the history of the world was significantly changed.

Below are two views of Huffman Prairie. The second one shows replicas of the Wrights' hangar and catapult on the site where they placed them in 1904 and 1905.

If you haven't read David McCullough's wonderful biography of the Wright Brothers, I highly recommend it. It's a real treat! (By the way, Tom Hanks has bought the movie rights to McCullough's book.)

"If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would tell him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio." (Wilbur Wright)

Go Cavs...but the NBA drives me crazy

Posted this on Facebook this morning (this is a slightly edited form):

The Cavaliers competing in the play-offs and finals has caused me to do something I haven't done in over thirty years: Watch more than just clips of NBA games. 

I've actually watched about ten minutes of live action in the past three weeks! 

Really happy for Cleveland and for Ohio, of course. That's why I've looked in on the games. 

But I love basketball, which is why I don't usually watch the NBA. These recent brief look-ins have reminded me of why. A defender, for example, almost has to set off grenades in the uniforms of an opposition player to draw a foul.  

Basketball is supposed to be a non-contact sport.  

I can understand occasional hand-checks.  

Or brushes and hard stops on pick and rolls.  

But not wrapping arms around opposing players.  

Not armlocks.  

Not barely noted intentional elbows to skulls, resulting in an opposing player's head crashing to the hardwood. 

I don't like any of this and hate how, through emulation, it has infected the college game too. But the NCAA is not yet as bad as the Not Basketball Association. 

Go, Cavs!

Saturday This and That

Things that caught my eye this past week.

Minnesota's last one-room school house...
...and the woman who's been through a lot who keeps it going. Be sure to read the article and watch the accompanying video.

They may or may not be "tragic" reasons as the article is titled...
...but this lengthy piece gives five plausible explanations as to why the world's largest theme park is abandoned.

The silencing of the American college...
...is free speech taking a hit on America's campuses?

And a self-described "liberal professor"...
...identifies similar concerns.

How a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist built a Facebook community...
...from Cleveland.

Art is created in many ways...
I remember reading Charlie Chaplin's autobiography many years ago. Included was a picture of him dressed as his famous Tramp character, standing on an incomplete movie set, with a caption that said something like, "Building a set without an idea in my head." Chaplin improvised his way through what became a classic.

Chaplin didn't always create like this, as the meticulous scripts for some of his talkies show.

The fact that Chaplin was capable both of improvising like a jazz musician or meticulously planning his work testifies to his greatness as an artist. He could do it all, including musical composition.



This article from Open Culture shows us the elaborate outlines of J.K, Rowling for a portion of her fifth Harry Potter book.

The moral: Compelling art is the result of careful planning. Except when it isn't.

(You can click to enlarge the image below.)

$8.5-trillion isn't chump change...
...and that's how much of our money that the Defense Department can't account for since 1996. With Murray Blum, it makes you wonder, "Who does these books?"

'Life's Tragedy' by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a major American poet, African-American, who was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He was a high school classmate and friend of Orville Wright. Wright, with his brother, Wilbur, of course, invented the first functional airplane. There was a lot of intellectual candle-power in Orville's and Paul's class! Dunbar was married to poet Alice Moore. Tragically, Dunbar died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.

This poem is poignant, beautiful, sad, and true all at the same time. It suggests that the greatest tragedy of life is to come close to that "perfect love," the kind "which lays aside its vanity and gives...truth."

(Sources: The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, and The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.)

It may be misery not to sing at all,
And to go silent through the brimming day;
It may be misery never to be loved,
But deeper griefs than these beset the way.

To sing the perfect song,
And by a half-tone lost the key,
There the potent sorrow, there the grief,
The pale, sad staring of Life's Tragedy.

To have come near to the perfect love,
Not the hot passion of untempered youth,
But that which lies aside its vanity,
And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth.

This, this indeed is to be accursed,
For if we mortals love, or if we sing,
We count our joys not by what we have,
But by what kept us from that perfect thing.

© by owner.

The 50 best restaurants in the world?

Supposedly.

But these can't be the fifty best in the world when the list doesn't include...

Carmine's in New York City

The Florentine and Tommy's in Columbus

El Olvido in Seguin, Texas

I'm just sayin'.

O-H...

I-O! Do Ohioans have the most pride in their state? By one measurement, the answer is a decided, "Yes!"

LeBron James and Going Home

"My relationship with northeast Ohio goes beyond basketball. I didn't realize that four years ago. I do now."

That's part of LeBron James' explanation of his decision to go back to Cleveland. It reminds me of the old saying, "You don't know what you've got till you lose it."

That feeling can come to any of us. But not everyone gets the chance to return to the place or the people that constitute "home" for them. James has gotten that chance. Good for him!

(As a lifelong Ohioan, I understand how this place gets under one's skin. I'm very glad to live here.)

Suffering and the Christian

[This was prepared to be shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, this past Sunday, June1.]

1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
“I can see that this is coming as something of a surprise to you.”

Those were the words spoken to me by a cardiologist four years ago, after he’d told me that I’d had a heart attack that destroyed 40% of my heart.

I was surprised.

Actually I was shocked.

I had none of the so-called risk factors. And I had tried to take reasonably good care of myself over the years. But a heart attack had come anyway.

When I look back on the events of that June four years ago, though--the 3:00 in the morning trip to a hospital ER in excruciating pain, the news that Superman (how I’d always thought of myself health-wise) had, of all things, heart disease--I wonder why I was surprised.

Did I think that I was exempt from the human condition?

Yes, I think that I did.

I think, in fact, that we all entertain that delusion sometimes. We rubberneck Interstate accidents with two thoughts coming to the fore at the same time: “It could have been me.” And, “That’s what happens to other people; not me.”

At one level, we are aware of our vulnerability to suffering and pain and death.

At another, we live in denial of our vulnerability, of our humanity.



But we live in a fallen and imperfect world. We are born with the fatal of condition of inborn sin, inborn alienation from God, inborn separation from the source of life. That must, inevitably, lead to suffering and death for every human being who draws breath on this earth.

Jesus raised His friend Lazarus from the dead, but eventually, Lazarus would die again, because there can be no resurrection to eternal life with God as Jesus won on Easter Sunday until we all cross the the threshold of death as Jesus did on Good Friday. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead as a sign that He (and He alone as God in the flesh) has power over life and death. But Lazarus still had to die again.

In other words, none of us is exempt from suffering.

Now, it’s easy for Christians to accept that truth when it applies to the the non-believing world. After all, non-believers haven’t trusted in the grace and promises of the crucified and risen Jesus. They haven’t taken Jesus up on His offer to be with them always, to give them life and that abundantly, to hear and act on their prayers. But the notion that no one is exempt from suffering is a hard pill for Christians to accept about Christians, especially themselves.

When cartoonist Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts and Charlie Brown, learned that he had cancer, he was dumbfounded. “How could God have let this happen this to me?” he asked friends, according to a documentary I once watched on PBS. “I taught Sunday School for years.”

His reaction isn’t unique. To a greater or lesser extent, probably every Christian has wondered about why God has allowed their suffering--be it physical, relational, emotional--when they’ve tried so hard to be faithful.

The book of 1 Peter, from which today’s second lesson is drawn, takes on the question of human suffering, particularly the suffering of those who trust in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. It does so, in fact, more than any other book in the New Testament: 42 times in the 27 books of the New Testament a word which can be translated as suffering or sufferings appears; 12 of those times occur in the book of 1 Peter!

As we’ve mentioned before, the apostle Peter wrote this letter to be circulated among the churches in first-century Asia Minor, a region that basically encompasses today’s Turkey.

From the outset of the letter, Peter makes clear that he’s going to deal with the question of sufferings--and he always uses the plural of that word--the sufferings of Christians. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we don’t know if the Christians in Asia Minor were undergoing official persecution or simply the shunning of friends. But Peter may have had in mind much more than dealing with the opposition of other people to the Asia Minor Christians‘ faith, explaining perhaps the plural usage.

Even if he didn’t have all human suffering in mind, his words on the subject have application to us all, irrespective of the source of our sufferings.

Please take a look at the opening verses of the lesson, 1 Peter 4:12-14 (page 852 in the sanctuary Bible). Peter writes:

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.

For years, some scholars thought that the phrase “fiery ordeal” referred to the Roman punishment of burning Christians to death. But Peter’s letter was written years before that form of punishment was instituted.

Now, I think it’s clear that it refers to the metaphor of the purifying fire that would come to believers in the times before the Messiah, the Christ, fully established His kingdom. Psalm 66:10 refers to a moment of happiness and victory following a time of testing and pain when it says: “For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver.”

“Don’t be surprised!” Peter is telling us, “when suffering and difficulties come to you. As you bear them with Christ at your side, He is using those moments of suffering and challenge to forge your character, to draw Him closer to you.”

Jesus makes clear in the Gospels that God isn’t the author of our suffering. Satan is.

But God can use the suffering of Christians to deepen our fellowship with God in this life and to ready us for life in eternity. 

And, Peter is telling us, Jesus Christ suffers with us.

And the One Who cried out from the cross, “My God, why have You forsaken me?” understands our questions, even when they can’t be answered on this side of eternity.

“Are you mad at God?” I asked a woman who was dying. “I was,” she said. “But I remember that Christ is always with me.”

The Christ Who suffered for you on His Good Friday is also the Christ Who will suffer with you on your Good Fridays, if you will let Him into your life.

That’s what Peter gets to in the latter part of our lesson, starting at 1 Peter 5:6:

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. [Even if this life is filled with the suffering which may come to human beings at any time in this world, we have the hope of resurrection life with Christ, where sufferings will be done and joy will be complete.] Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings. And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.

Listen: Following Jesus is not an insurance policy against the realities of this life. “In this world,” Jesus says to those who follow Him, “you will have trouble...” If that’s a promise we’d rather not have from Jesus, remember that there are other promises that go with that one.

One of those is referred to by Peter here when he says: “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

The God made known to the world cares for you. Among all the little gods and godlets, the idols that have sprung from human imagination, in both ancient and modern times, none cared for human beings. The Greek and Roman idols from which Asia Minor Christians had been freed by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, might, in the mythology about them, manipulate or use humans or fall in love with them or abuse them. But they didn’t care for human beings.

God though, the God Who made you in His image, does care for you, even when you sin. Romans 5:8 says: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Give your sins, along with your cares and your sufferings to Jesus. He will bathe you in the grace and forgiveness of God. He will stand with you. He will stand for you in the halls of heaven as you pray. 

In my thirty years as a pastor, it's been my observation that suffering can do one of two big things to people.

For those with shallow faith, the kind of faith that sees Jesus as a rabbit's foot, suffering alienates them from God and embitters them.

For others though, suffering acquaints them with their weakness...and with God's strength.

In Saint Matthew in Logan, where I last served, was a young woman named Sarah. She learned when she was thirteen that she had leukemia. She fought valiantly through seven years, two bone marrow transplants, and five relapses. Once, when she was in the ICU, observing how she held onto Christ, not as a good luck charm, but as her Lord, I asked if she would preach the following Easter Sunday. Later, she joked that since, at the time, she'd been under the influence of pain-killers, she'd said yes to my request. But it was a powerful moment for us all when Sarah did preach the following Easter and reminded us that our hope is in Christ alone.

You may remember that once, the apostle Paul was suffering from what he called "a thorn in the flesh." We have no idea what it was. But Paul reported that he asked God three different times to take it away. God said, "No. My grace is sufficient. I'm all you need." And God explained to Paul that His power is perfected in our weakness.

Why was Sarah's witness for Christ so powerful? Why are those who suffer and die with Christ by their sides always a more powerful presence in our lives than those who seem to have the world by the string and no need of God?

For one simple reason: It's only in those courageous enough to acknowledge their weakness and need and defeat in the face of life that the full power and grace and life of God can be seen!

It's only in those who understand their own vulnerability and humanity and mortality that the crucified and risen Jesus can be fully manifest and exercise His gracious Lordship over a life transformed by His love. (I hope someday to be such a person of faith!)

Suffering in this life shouldn’t surprise us. But, as we humble ourselves under the Lordship of Christ, we will be surprised by how He can carry us even through the valleys where death shadows us.

Paul, knowing that he would die for his faith in Christ after decades of sufferings and of fighting and wrestling with himself in order to stay faithful to the Lord Who had given forgiveness, life, and eternity to him as free gifts through Christ (the greatest struggles Christians face will be with themselves), wrote this to a young pastor named Timothy back in the first century: “...the time for my departure [my death] is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

Peter's challenge us today is this: To own our weakness and so, let the power of Christ sustain us in this life and prepare us for the one to come. Amen

Easter Welcome

With each Church Season, our congregation's weekly bulletin has a special welcome for visitors. Here's what will appear this coming week, with the Second Sunday of Easter:

Welcome to Living Water Lutheran Church!

We’re pleased to welcome you during this Easter season, which this year began on April 20 and ends on May 25.

Throughout this season, we remember the greatest event in history--Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead--and what it means for our lives today and our lives in eternity.

Living Water is a congregation dedicated to spreading the good news of Easter by our words and our actions. That good news, very simply, is that God has conquered our common enemies as people sin, death, and meaningless living, through Jesus’ death on the cross and His resurrection from death. All who will daily turn from sin and daily surrender to Jesus share in His victory over these enemies. Jesus promises in Matthew 24:13: “...the one who endures to the end [in faithfulness to Christ] will be saved.”

In gratitude for the free gift of new life given to believers in Jesus and from the love of neighbor that God’s Holy Spirit seeks to build within His people, Living Water undertakes a lot of exciting ministries. These include housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, working with other churches to provide Christian sports experiences to young people, and help in rebuilding people’s lives. We do that throughout our church’s service area, which runs from Beavercreek to Lebanon, in Dayton, and in places like Haiti and Memphis, where mission teams of our congregation’s members often go.

Living Water is committed to building its life on three key commands of Jesus. We seek to: love God; love our neighbors as we love ourselves; love our fellow Christians as Christ has loved us; make new followers of Jesus by spreading the good news of the Easter story; and personally grow in our relationship with Christ each day.

We hope and pray that you will feel welcomed by the people of Living Water and that you will plan on being with us again soon.

Happy Easter!

'I Can't Get Started' Made Us Wish Things Wouldn't End

Last fall, the Emerald City Orchestra, a phenomenal community ensemble led by my dear friend and high school chum, Tom Carr, had a very special concert featuring two professional musicians who were at West High School in Columbus in our era, singer Vicki McDermitt and trumpeter Ed Morrison. My brother-in-law, Ken Neff, is also a trumpeter in this ensemble.

'I Can't Get Started,' as originally recorded by Tony Bennett and Doc Severinsen, was covered by the group and served as the encore that left us wanting more!

There were two performances on two successive nights. The night Ann and I attended, we saw many of our classmates and, as always, it was like a family reunion!

You Know You're from Ohio If...

Love this shirt I got a while back. Click on the images to enlarge and be able to read more readily.

I love my Buckeye state!

From the Garden at Adena

Thomas Worthington created a beautiful set of gardens for his home, Adena, near Chillicothe, Ohio. Here are a couple of bad videos I took when Ann and I went to Adnea this year.

Important Spot in Ohio History

At Adena in Chillicothe, the home of Thomas Worthington, "the Father of Ohio Statehood," is a sight that will be familiar to any Ohioan. The story goes that after a night-time of working, Worthington and others, who had been working on the state's first constitution stepped outside and saw rising over the southern Ohio hills, a beautiful sunrise.

It inspired the State Seal of Ohio. In its earliest incarnation, the seal pictured the hills as mountains. But while we don't have mountains in Ohio, parts of our state do have gorgeous hills. The seal was revised to reflect that.

A trip to Adena is always interesting and fun!

Snow in the Church Garden II

You can hear my wife washing a pot in the kitchen and the wood floor creaking beneath my feet as I shift around.

A beautiful sight...wonderful if you don't have to drive in it!

Snow in the Church Garden

Like much of our region, we got snow overnight here in southeastern Ohio. This was taken from our house, looking onto the church garden.

[You can click on the image to enlarge it.]

Logan Christmas Lights II