Last Saturday we belatedly celebrated Aunt Mary’s birthday. We met her at Applebee’s and had a very nice dinner. We then treated her to CVCA’s production of the musical Annie.

I hate to be repetitive (see the last 4-5 years’ entries on the CVCA musical), but it was once again excellent. I am in some awe at the quality of production we put on at CVCA. I know I am prejudiced because I work there, but I also have seen a lot of theater, so I think I have some background to know good theater.

This year’s production was less of a spectacle that last year’s Beauty and the Beast – it almost had to be; there was no way to go “up” from that production. That is not to say that Annie was stingy or badly staged – it was very well done. There were just fewer spectacular dance numbers, effects, and costumes, and that was okay.

The set was well done – the staging portrayed an orphanage, the great room of a mansion, a Hooverville slum, the Oval Office, and various streets and offices. This is more impressive if you know our stage – it is shaped like a “V” with the point being the backstage area. It does not leave much room for sets.

The pit orchestra was smaller than usual this year, but still had about 10 people in it, most of whom were students. It is hard for me to grasp that we have high-school-aged students who can play so well. Go, pit!

The acting was fun and well done. I thought the casting was excellent. The actor playing Daddy Warbucks even shaved his head. I was not sure about Annie herself at first, but she played the cheerful girl part so well that I was won over after just a few minutes.

I do like being on the “inside” of a play – I know the directors, and I know some of the kids, and I know much of the audience. It is one of the added joys to seeing theater at CVCA. This year, I did not know too many actors – I maybe knew 4 or 5 by name (out of a cast of 30 or so), and only one of them is in one of my clubs. Usually I can know a few more because I end up knowing them somewhat through Meredith and her classes, but that was not the case this year. Still, I had a very good time, and I am looking forward to more CVCA productions.

A few weeks ago at the CVCA Auction, Mer “won” some tickets to Weathervane Playhouse, which is a very good community theater nearby. The tickets were to be used for a Sunday matinee, so last Sunday we headed down into the Valley to go see a play. I did not know what play we were going to see, since Mer was surprising me, but it turned out to be a play I knew nothing about at all, Great White Hope.

The play is a play about a black boxer named Jack Jefferson. Jefferson’s life in the play is based loosely on that of the real-life boxer Jack Johnson. In the play, Jefferson is an up-and-coming fighter who wants to fight for the heavyweight boxing title, and wins it from a white man. The action of the play then explores how fight promoters and even the FBI try to conspire to get a white man to win the title back. The play itself looks at racism and at how one man tries to stand up against the system, at great personal cost.

I really enjoyed the play. It was a “pure viewing” – a term Mer uses to describe seeing a play or movie or reading a book with no exposure to it at all. For good works, a pure viewing is full of the pleasure of discovery. Great White Hope did not disappoint here – it was a compelling drama, and was very well acted.

The lead was perfect for the role. He was a physical specimen, built and completely believable as a world-class boxer. In addition to his physical presence, he was a fine actor, able to naturally say his lines, even when he was working out and punching the punching bag. The leading lady and love interest was also an excellent actor, with a great stage presence and good chemistry with Jefferson. The supporting cast was also very good, with only a few actors who could have worked on projecting into the audience (the actors are unmiked at Weathervane).

There were a couple of minor disappointments with the staging of the play. There were times where either the actor or the director made the choice to have a major character speak with his or her back to the audience. That made it almost impossible to hear at those times, and I am surprised that was not caught in rehearsals. The other problem I had with the play is that it was not clear to me that I was watching historical fiction. Everything in the playbill and in the lobby made it seem as if the play were recreating a historical event. It is not a huge deal, but it was disappointing to be worked up over some of the issues the play raised, only to go home to read more about the real-life boxer, Johnson, and realize that the play exaggerated or even made up some of the most dramatic moments. I don’t know why it bothered me, but it did – I felt as if I had been a little manipulated. I would have liked a playbill note that the play was based on the life of Johnson, and that would have let me know it was a dramatic telling of the story.

Still, I am glad to have seen the play. It was well acted, and raised some interesting perspectives on racism, and caused me to be interested enough in the main character to do some reading on my own. When a play does that, it has succeeded quite well.

Last Saturday was a mellow day, in a strange kind of way. I met up with Nate and Jason down in the Valley to go running. This is not all that unusual, but last Saturday was a 21+ mile run, and since Nate had a 9:00 track meet to be at, we started running at 5:30 am, which is about 45 minutes before you can see very well this time of year. By the time we could really see, we had already run 7 miles. Happily, the towpath is mostly limestone, so it showed up okay in the ambient light. It was still pretty dark.

The run went well, and afterward, I scooped Mer up and headed back to Akron to go to Wally Waffle. This time, I went ahead and ordered the chocolate chip waffle, which was quite wonderful and hit the spot. After breakfast, we were going to go to Aunt Mary’s to pick up her spare daybed since she gave it to us, but it was raining/snowing a little bit, so we gave up on that idea since the bed has to be in the back of a pickup truck. The happy side of this is that it allowed me to take a three-hour nap while Mer went and got groceries.

In the evening, we finally sat down to watch The Bicycle Thief, which is a highly regarded Italian film about a man who needs his bicycle for his job, and the bicycle gets stolen. The entire film follows his quest to get his bicycle back. Now, I have a bad habit of picking up bizarre or mood-killing foreign films. Mer loves foreign languages, so I like to get foreign films for her, but in the past I have picked out a film about concentration camps, a film about an orphan boy taking a train trip that ends with him flying away on a bird statue, a film about a woman billed as loving and individualistic by the write-up when she was really insane in the film, and a film showing the real butchering of a hog. I seem to get good ones. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that at the end of this film, Mer’s verbatim reaction was, “What!?!” which was followed by several minutes of discussion and disbelief. My streak continues.

Last Friday, Mer and I were both feeling a bit tired, so my solution to the Friday doldrums was simple – grab our friend Zach (sadly, Londa was still at work) and head to Handel’s for some pick-me-up ice cream. It was a good time of fellowship with Zach – he always makes me laugh. (I found out later that Zach heroically went to Coldstone Creamery later that night so Londa could have some ice cream too. These are the sacrifices husbands are called to do.)

But, the fun did not end there. I’d had a date planned for Mer for the last month. We piled in the car, and I drove her to Akron, to the bar/club Musica. Mer did not know it at the time, but one of her favorite bands, Over the Rhine, was playing there, and I wanted to surprise her. It turned out to be a night of surprises.

First surprise: I got us there right when the door opened at 8:00 so we could grab one of the few seats in the club. Surprise! They had removed all the furniture, except for a few bar tables without seats. I went next door to the coffee shop and begged two stools so we would not have to stand for a whole hour before the show started. We set up camp at the very back of the room, out of the way. The stage was only 25 feet away, so I figured we would still be in good shape to see. We passed a happy time chatting – Mer informed me about a woman missionary to China back in the 30s; Mer had given a talk on the missionary during lunch that day at CVCA. Around 9:05, I began to get antsy – the show was supposed to start at 9:00. Mer had figured out from the talk of the many many people around us that it was an Over the Rhine show, and she mentioned something about the opening band.

Second surprise: I had not processed that there was an opening band. My early evening was suddenly getting a lot later. The opening act finally went on at about 9:15 or so, and to my happy surprise, they were quite good. Sadly, the place was now so packed with standing people, we could not see the band only 25 feet away. Add to the mix a bunch of 45-year-old people who were drinking like 20-year-olds at a party, and suddenly we could not hear very well either. Which was a real shame, because the opening act really was pretty good. Still, I thought that everyone would settle down when Over the Rhine came on, and all would be well.

Third surprise: Over the Rhine finally went on around 10:15 or so. Sadly, the sound was poorly mixed. The lead vocals were overdriven, and the rhythm guitar sounded as if it was coming through a tin can. Mer and I had stood up and walked to the front of the room until we were about 10 feet from the stage, and we still had trouble seeing because the stage was so low (we could not see well above the heads of everyone who was standing). Over the Rhine even did several new songs, which was great, but we started to get distracted by the ever-louder group of buzzed and drunk people at the bar (which is ten feet from the stage). Finally, after 45 minutes, and with my calf muscles starting to cramp from standing on concrete, I told Mer I wanted to leave. It was a frustrating experience. Why anyone would pay for a pretty expensive ticket to see a band, only to go and get plastered and talk the whole time, is beyond me. It did cement my determination not to see any music in a bar ever again, with the possible exception of supporting friends’ bands.

I’m afraid blogging about my Diakonos spring break trip has tripped me up again. Last year, getting behind on the spring break blogging led me to pretty much stop blogging for months. Happily, I’m only a week behind, and I can get caught up with this entry.

The Friday of the trip was a bit weird for me and my group. I hooked up with Nate’s group, and we were going to go to Kent to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Habitat operates hardware stores that sell donations and construction salvage, and the proceeds go to help build homes. These store are called ReStores, and they rely on volunteer help to keep the stock organized, and that is what we were going to do. The only problem was that they did not open until 10:00, so we were left to ourselves at CVCA after the other groups took off at 9:00. I used the time to go fill up my car with gas. Then, just before we were to leave, Nate told me his van had to swing by Sam’s Club to return some items we had not used for the trip. Since I did not care to go to Sam’s Club, I ran home and got my guitar. The Habitat ReStore is next to Woodsy’s Music in Kent, and I wanted to get my guitar a tune-up, since it had never had one in 13 years. I dropped my guitar off, and then went to the ReStore and talked with the assistant manager. By the time I had finished that, Nate turned up with the van-load of students.

We really did spend most of the day organizing the place. They initially split our group in half, and my half set about building a shelf and then getting the store’s ceramic tiles in order. That took much of the morning. Once we had wrapped that up, we helped the other team get things spiffed up, which included getting furniture placed as if it was on display, and condensing objects to take up less space. We did break for lunch, and continued puttering after lunch. We pretty much went through the entire store. Things kind of petered out around 2:30 or so, and we milled about waiting to be told what to do. I’m not sure if we overstepped our bounds anywhere, but the manager seemed curt with us toward the end of the afternoon. The store folks had us do a few more puttery things, and then we left about 3:30. I swung by Woodsy’s to see if my guitar was ready, and it was, so that was a happy bonus.

I got home about 4:00 and napped again. I made my way over to CVCA, and we had supper about 6:00, which was a help-yourself buffet of BLTs and leftovers. The leftovers were very good, but the BLTs (or BLs in my case) really hit the spot for some reason – I had three.

Entertainment that evening was the traditional talent show. There is a variety of talent, but it is always a good time. This year featured:
– A girl making very convincing cricket noises
– The song “Railway Bill,” in which Bill, during the course of the song, rebels against the song’s author and ends badly
– An original poem
– A recap of trip highlights
– The premier of a new Royal Fools game (I had four Fools on the trip) – it went very well
– The worship band having an open jam session (they called themselves Fleagle and the Sweater Vests, for some reason)
– Craig doing a dramatic reading of some pop song (“Tik-Tok”) that the kids loved
– “Ambush” comedy where the group stood up and told unrehearsed jokes
– The third and final year of the MuCoo rap (Mucha and Cooper rapping about the trip)
It was a very fun time.

For worship time that evening, Craig did not give a talk – he showed us a three-minute video on a guy giving the Christian world view in four panels, in three minutes. He then asked us to do something similar – to come up with a topic and explain it in terms of what we had been talking about – Creation, the Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. Our group decided (after much talk) to look at work – how work was intended to be good (creation), but became hard and burdensome (the Fall), then Jesus did the work we could not (redemption), and we are now working with others and the Kingdom of God in mind, and when the full restoration comes, there will be no more work. The groups then presented what they discussed, which were on:
– work
– family
– church
We ended the evening worship singing, and Craig encouraged us to stick around and fellowship. So, I played a couple of games of Flux before heading home at 11:00, and then I talked with Mer for about 20 minutes or so.

Saturday turned out to be pretty easy for me. Breakfast cleanup took longer than it should have, so I was late getting to the library to hook up with my group. I was supposed to go with two vans to the Habitat for Humanity warehouse to do some work, but each van thought I was with the other, and I got left behind. No big deal – I googled the address and took off. An hour-and-a-half later, I pulled back into CVCA, having given up on finding the warehouse. I could not even find a gas station to ask at. It was frustrating. So, I spent the next three-plus hours cleaning the library at CVCA so that it would be easier when the groups got back. The vans came back staggered, and some were early, so we actually had CVCA in pretty good shape by 3:00 or so. By 3:30, Dubbs told me to take off, that she could handle watching the students until the rest of the vans got back. Since I wanted to get to a store before it closed at 5:00, I took off (I wanted to get flowers for Meredith for when she got back on Sunday).

I went home and took a nap, and then got a sub from Subway and started to watch a Batman/Superman cartoon until Dubbs and her husband showed up. We had made plans to have an unwind evening watching Clash of the Titans (Mer had given me her blessing to see it without her). Sadly, by the time we got to the theater, Nate had a painful migraine, so Dubbs ran him home. I met up with Dubbs’ sister, and we chatted in the theater until the movie started, and Dubbs did show up, only having missed the first minute or so.

So, while the spring break trip was very tiring, I think it was a good trip. I enjoyed working with my colleagues, and the students were great.

Thursday did turn out to be lightly raining during much of the morning, so (after breakfast) I joined up with Jim’s and Craig’s groups, and we headed over to The Front Porch again, to do more demolition work and to help with cleanup inside the building. That put us at a pretty impressive 21 people to work around the building.

I was joined up with three students and given the task of removing a very large bar from the main room where the church meets. Since this bar was behind another bar, it was unlikely or impossible that we would be able to just carry it out past or over the front bar. Also, to get it outside, we would have to got down a narrow corridor and make a corner. Since no one wanted to save the bar (we were just sending it to the dump), I decided the best way to get rid of it was to cut it in half. Enter the magic of the sawzall. Since the bar was made of wood, we tipped the bar up and cut it right in half. That was very satisfying. We then carted out the two halves, and set them next to the (now very full) dumpster. Nate was on his way with his one-ton dump truck, and he was to haul off a lot of construction debris using it.

While I was doing that, other students were cleaning the church room, because the church was having a wedding there on Saturday. Other students worked on the cabinets that were still hanging in the kitchen (and took hours to get down), and still others started to dismantle a very large bar from a back room next to the kitchen. It was quite a busy little place on Thursday!

We broke for lunch, and Rachel had brought along the remaining chicken enchiladas, which were still yummy. With a group that large, we had a lively time eating and chatting during lunch. Once lunch was over, Craig took his group back to CVCA to wash windows, and Jim’s group, Rachel, Nate, and I stayed to keep cleaning.

I spent much of the afternoon mopping the back rooms. There is no telling how long it had been since the floors back there were last mopped, and the water was often brown after mopping just a few feet. In fact, we had to mop the back room five times to get it to come out pretty clean; they were going to use the back room for children during the wedding, so it had to be fairly clean. In the meantime, students kept at it in tearing out the cabinets and the bar, and they washed down the walls in the back room as well. By the end of the day, we had gotten quite a bit done.

On the way home, I swung by a store to pick up a few things. Once I got home and showered, I made a pan of chocolate-peanut-butter bars, as a dessert for the kids later that night. They take about 30 minutes to make, and then just need to chill in the refrigerator. That worked out well, because I needed to be back at CVCA by 4:30 to have another run-though of the play the entertainment committee was putting on, plus we needed to assemble the props we needed. One key part of the play was that teams got written clues twice during the play. Craig’s brainstorm was to hide the clues in plastic Easter eggs and have the kids find them (after all, the detective was the Easter Bunny). That required us to stuff about 100 eggs with clues. We were able to supplement those eggs with other eggs as well – a student’s mom dropped off a bag of eggs filled with candy and loose change; the eggs were left over from her own Easter egg hunt. She had no idea we were having an Easter egg hunt that night, and so that added to the fun. God works in mysterious ways indeed.

After the prep work and practice, I went back to the common room and played backgammon again. After that was a great supper of lasagna and homemade rolls. We really did eat very well on this trip.

Then it was show time. Everyone went to the common room, and all of the characters came in, in character and in costume. There was much merriment at that. We went through the first act, and then had the first Easter egg hunt. I took advantage of the PA system again, and told the kids to distribute themselves around the school, and then they would be told what room the eggs were in. That was how it went for the second Easter egg hunt as well. It was very amusing to see students sprinting down hallways to get to the rooms once they were announced. Anyway, the play was a great success.

For worship time, after we sang some songs, Craig spoke again. He asked us if we had seen the new life of Jesus breaking into this world during our trip. Some of the students shared what they had witnessed, and then Craig reminded us of the arch of what he had been teaching during the week: Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. After Jesus came, God works through and in us to begin the restoration of the “ought” – the better world of the creation. This work does not get finished until God completes it himself, but we can begin to spread the kingdom now. Craig pointed out that every day is Easter for the Christian – we always have access to a risen savior, we always are offered life over death and joy over sorrow. Our response to that varies – sometimes we are Thomas and we doubt. Sometimes we are Mary and are joyful. Sometimes we are Peter and we deny. But, in all of these states, Jesus can and does meet us and satisfies us.

Craig talked about “the return of the king” where we can expect the king (Jesus) to return. He compared it both to Tolkien’s The Return of the King and to Lewis’ Narnia, where we are excited about the return of the rightful ruler. We live with the reality of “will” – these things will happen. We also live with the “already” (what Jesus has done) and with the “not yet” (things still are far from perfect and just).

Our response to this king is given in the Bible – go and make and baptize disciples (followers of Jesus who grow in community), and we are to love God, and to love our neighbors (others). That is the mission of the church in a nutshell. God entrusts this work to us, even though he could do it much better. He does this because he loves us and wants us to grow in faith. Craig illustrated this by comparing it to when his children “help” him unload the dishwasher – it takes much longer than if Craig did it himself, but he loves them, so he lets them help. Also, God does not leave us alone to do this work – he gives us the Holy Spirit to dwell inside us and to help us.

We come to know that the Lord is right when we take the next step and trust in him. We are on a journey together as a community, and when we bring hope to the hopeless and help to those in need, evangelism is easy and natural because you know where your strength comes from. In the end (and in the beginning), we must have the gospel, the good news of Jesus, infuse all of our lives. That is the life-long process of restoration.

We ended the evening in small groups, and then I went home to bed about 11:00.

After breakfast and breakfast clean-up, I hooked back up with Jim Gaul’s group and we headed back to Akron. This time, we went to the home of Duane, where South Street Church is based. The weather was supposed to be cooler and rainy on Thursday, so we wanted to help with outside work while the weather was nice. We met Duane’s wife and an office worker, and they got us going on grounds work. This extended to the street in front of the house and in back of the house – they want to be good neighbors. So, we broke into two teams to go pick up trash along the streets. Jim took the front street, which was fairly busy, but shorter, and my group and I took the residential back street, which was about 2/3 mile long.

Once Jim and his group finished picking up trash, they went back to the house to rake leaves and do general grounds work. We never made it that far. Our group used all three hours of the morning to pick up trash along the road. The kids were good sports – they never complained, and they did a pretty thorough job of getting the trash up. Most of the trash was cigar and cigarette butts and alcohol containers. It was a pretty stark reminder that even when people have very little or nothing, they will still find ways to try to make themselves feel better. It made me grateful that I live so comfortably.

After trash detail, we stopped to eat lunch, where we heard from three people who are helping South Street. The office worker told us how she had stage four terminal cancer when she was 13, but she responded “crazy well” to chemo, and she lived. She felt she had been spared and was looking for ways to give back, so she ended up working for South Street. We met Matt, who works full time as a mason, but when he has spare time, he is starting up a housing ministry for South Street. It is similar to Habitat’s way of working things: the person Matt is trying to help puts in time in fixing up the house, and then gets an interest-free loan to pay off the home. Lastly, we got to meet Harold, who just got out of jail in the last few weeks. He is trying to fix up and move into one of Matt’s houses. He was a pretty amazing guy. He loves God, and as he was facing this last jail time, he prayed to God to take over his life since he had messed it up. The same day he was called to court and the judge let him go (the usual jail time for what Harold did is 6-30 months). Harold has a very real feeling of freedom, and he is a pure joy to be around.

After lunch, we all headed over to Harold’s house to help him do yard work. We helped till up future flowerbeds, cut down brush and small trees, take down an old chain-link fence, rake leaves, and more. We got an awful lot done – there was a pretty noticeable difference, especially in the back yard, which had been overgrown. We got to work alongside of Matt and Harold, and they were very kind and encouraging. An ice cream truck came along and Jim treated the kids to an ice cream. We finished a few things up, and then headed back to school  around 3:30.

I went home and showered and took a nap, and then got back to school about 5:45. I played a game (Blokus) with a couple of students, and then we had supper. Supper was excellent – my favorite of the week – we had really good chicken enchiladas. Boy, were those hitting the spot! Once we finished up supper, we headed down to the library to hear from Duane and Lisa; they were visiting us to tell us about how South Side Church came into being. They talked for about an hour, and it was really fascinating. Duane stressed how sometimes we need to take risks for God, and how we are rarely (or never) sure. We need to pray and listen to advice of others and think things through, but God promises to help us with what we do, not for us to be sure about what we do. Duane compared it to walking with a lamp that only lets you see where your feet are, and where the next step is going to be. You can’t see far off, and that helps us rely on God. Duane encouraged us to move – that God can correct us if we are on the wrong path, but we won’t get on the right path if we are not moving. Duane and Lisa impressed me very much.

After the talk, we went around the school to clean it up – things had gotten a bit ragged in the couple of days we had been there. Again, the kids jumped to it without complaining.

Craig spoke briefly in the worship time that evening. He reviewed what he had talked about, and brought in what Duane had spoken on to represent redemption. So, we had topics of adoration and “ought,” confession and “is,” and now redemption and “can.” Craig asked us to consider what difference Jesus makes, and challenged us not to settle for a “safe” Christianity where we try to retain control. Jesus either is or is not your Lord, and we should try to risk obedience to Jesus. We finished the evening by breaking up into our small groups and talking about the difference Jesus has made in our lives. Then I went home and off to bed.

Tuesday started off well, just based on the fact that I did not have a headache. I got ready and headed over to school around 7:30. I was in charge of the breakfast clean-up crew all week, so getting to school by 8:00 was important so I could lend a hand in cleaning up breakfast. Breakfast ended at 8:15, and generally the vans were scheduled to leave at 8:45 or so, so it never left much time to clean up after 30+ people. I tried to get a jump on the dishes, usually beginning them at 8:00, and the kids generally were very good help, so it was not a bad chore.

After breakfast, I was to head out with Jim Gaul and his team of 7 students. I drove in my car and took a student with me, and pretty much I got lost in the same spot as I did last year – near Dart Avenue in Akron. I finally figured out where I went wrong (Dart has a very small left-hand turn section off of the exit that I was not aware of). So, my student and I got to the site about 20 minutes late. We were supposed to help out a free medical clinic, but when I got there, Jim informed me we had been turned away because they could not use teenaged help. Some wires got crossed somewhere. Jim jumped on his phone, and before long we headed over to the Front Porch, the church home of South Street Ministries.

South Street Ministries is the dream of a husband/wife team who felt led to minister in the poorest part of Akron. The moved into the neighborhood with a 20-year commitment to the neighborhood, and they have been there since 1997. They bought the old Croatian Center, which was for all intents and purposes a bar (several bars, actually – one in each room), and they converted the front of the building into a place of worship, one block away from the county jail. They reach a clientele that is varied and one that often feels uncomfortable in a “normal” church. They have ex-cons, crack addicts, transvestites, and more people that often get missed by mainline churches. They made a decision to keep the informal bar feel, so that it would not be so intimidating to people. Duane, the head of the ministry, described it as a halfway-house between the street and the church. They are doing very cool things there, and it seems to be doing a lot of good.

Anyway, we met up with Nate’s team of kids, and we were there to help the ministry clear out of the building all the old junk that had been there for years, including three bars (over two days). We distributed the kids around, and I finally settled in to managing the dumpster. Since you pay the removal company by the container, it is important to pack it well, so I was in charge of the dumpster. Talk about your Peter Principle in action.

We worked along all morning, and broke for lunch, and Duane told us about the ministry of South Side Church and the Front Porch. After lunch, Nate’s team left to go work on the church community garden at Nate’s church, and our team stayed to continue the clean-up. We spent much of the afternoon in the old kitchen trying to take down cabinets that were nailed into each other and into the concrete wall. They came down very hard, and we left at 3:00 with half of them still in place.
 
Once we got back to CVCA, I went for a six-mile run at Kendal Hills park. It turned out to be a poor decision. It was hot (82 degrees), and I had been on my feet all day. I walked a half mile of the last three miles of the run, and felt poorly for it. It turned out to be my only run of the week – I made a conscious decision to put Diakonos first and leave my running for a week so that I would have more energy for the work.

After I got back from my run and shower, we had a brief leaders’ meeting to debrief on how the day went. This turned out to be the only leaders’ meeting that I made it to – I probably missed more by showering at home. After the meeting was an excellent supper of zucchini and sausage pancakes along with really spicy lentils.

The official entertainment for the evening was to play games as groups, and to rotate those groups every 15 minutes. That was not much time to play a game, but it introduced kids to a lot of the odd games we bring on the trip. I was put in charge of Flux, a card game where the rules and the goals of the game are always changing. The kids were a bit confused at first, but they caught on and seemed to enjoy the wackiness of it.

We then had a time of worship, starting with singing some songs. The band this year was quite excellent – we had two guitar players, a drummer, a bass player, and a violin player. I enjoyed the songs very much.

Craig then briefly reviewed what he had spoken on the night before (Creation and “ought” – how things should be), and asked for examples of hints of that (or the opposite of how things are not as they ought to be) through what we had seen on the work sites. People brought out examples of how senior citizens were using their retirement to help feed and clothe their neighbors, how some saw child disabilities as a brokenness in the creation (not as things ought to be), how hundreds of families are in need at food banks, and more. Craig summed it up by pointing out that God brings redemptive purpose out of brokenness, and we can work alongside of that.

Craig then moved on from how the world ought to be to how it really is. It all resulted from the Fall, which resulted in sinfulness, rebellion, lawlessness and death. There is no life in sin – it is always ashes. We give ourselves over to idolatry, corruption, and deception. This results in separation from God, it hurts others and ourselves, and even creation itself is “groaning” under the brokenness of the fallen world.

Craig stressed that sin does not make creation bad – we can still see beauty in the world and in each other. We end up sensing how God made the world (“ought”), but we live in a world that tends to go the wrong way. Humans cannot solve all of our problems, because we end up trapped in sin or rebellion or deception. Jesus breaks through that and gives us the power to change, but we still must confront sin. Craig suggested that confession is a very useful tool to do this – to find a trusted someone to help you be honest with sin and to help you break free of it. When we share what we struggle with with a trusted friend, it breaks the stronghold that sin has on us.

We then broke into our small groups to pray about and to talk about confession. I encouraged my group to think about confession, but to not necessarily confess deep secrets to our group since you need to be cautions about whom you confess to – usually you want someone you can trust and rely on, and I did not want to force anyone to confess to a group that had only been together for one day. But we still managed to talk about confession and ways that it can help you in being a better follower of Jesus.

Once the group was done, I headed home at about 11:00 to get some sleep. It had been a busy little day.

CVCA has a service-focused club called Diakonos (Greek for “servant”). During the year, Diakonos helps out at a nursing home once a month, and helps at a woman’s shelter once a month. They collect the paper recycling bins during the school year. And, every year during spring break, the group sends a group of students out on service projects – sometimes Habitat for Humanity, sometimes other projects. It is headed up by my friend Craig, and he does a great job at stressing the need for service for Christians and the need for community for Christians. The spring break trip offers both, since the students live and work together for 5-6 days. This was my fifth year in helping with the trip.

Craig has wanted to plug students in to local ministries, and that, combined with the costs of staying other places, led Craig to make the choice to stay at CVCA this year, in the school. The facilities are excellent, and it was a central place to work with local ministries that needed help. This year, the students helped out at a school for autistic children, helped out an urban ministry in Akron, did some work with Habitat, helped out with a community garden at a local church, and also helped clean around CVCA itself. There was plenty of opportunity to be introduced to local ministries.

We started by gathering at CVCA last Monday. Most students were to be there at 4:00 in the afternoon, to set up camp, as it were. I got there early with a group of students in charge of each evening’s entertainment. We needed to run though a murder mystery play that Craig had heavily modified to be bizarre – it featured the Easter Bunny as the main detective, and the suspects were Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Little Bo Peep, Aladdin, “Parry Hotter,” and Cinderella. We were going to perform the play (using scripts – no memorization) on Thursday, so we needed at least one full run-through (and we eventually got in two run-throughs).

The run-through took about an hour. We then joined up with students in the CVCA library, which became our common room for the week. Some students were needed to help set up for supper, and the rest were free to do as they liked. I was able to play a couple of games with students, including backgammon, which I had not played in 15+ years.

We then went down to the cafeteria for supper. We had chicken soup and fresh bread, which was quite good. We had a good time, and a room full of students is a lively thing. We had 29 students and 7 adults, plus Craig’s family, who joined us for supper, so it was certainly an interesting gathering.

After supper, we had the evening entertainment, which was playing Sardines. Sardines is hide-and-seek, but when you find the person who is hiding, you join him or her. I needed to run to my office before beginning my search because I needed some batteries for a camera. I laughed to myself on the way to my office, and Dubbs and another teacher, Miss Williams, overheard me and wanted to know what was so funny. I jokingly mentioned we could use the security camera monitor in my office to see where the hiding girl was hiding. They latched on to the idea, and the humor of it outweighed the fact that we were cheating. Needless to say, we found the girl with very little effort, but we were not the first there – there were already several students crouching behind lab benches. We joined them, and others trickled in over the next few minutes. After about 15 minutes of waiting, there were still two groups of about 8 students that had not found us, so I decided to help. I went back to my office, fired up the security cameras, activated the PA system, and announced to startled students if they were getting “hotter” or “colder.” It was great. What made it even better was that, unbeknownst to me, the students hiding in the room I’d left had decided to move to another room, so I was actually directing the remaining students to the wrong room. It was a good time.

After the game was done, we gathered back in the common room, and Craig had us break into small groups, which was new this year. I was assigned to a group with four students, three of whom I knew. They are good guys. The point of the small groups was to be able to discuss what Craig was stressing during the worship time of the week – that history and spiritual life was broken into four segments – creation/perfection, the Fall, Jesus being crucified, and the restoration that Jesus started – Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. We were to informally discuss the idea of the evening in our small groups. The first night we met before Craig spoke, and we prayed about God’s attributes (goodness, holiness, love, etc.), which are different from what he has done for us.

After small groups, we went sang songs together. Sadly, I had been fighting a migraine for several hours, and I finally had to come home and go to bed – my head hurt a lot, and it was beginning to make my stomach upset. Since I was so close to CVCA, Craig had graciously offered to let me sleep in my own bed each night. So, the plan worked out that I would be at CVCA from about 8:00 am to about 11:00 pm, but then I could come home to sleep. That certainly helped me get more rest than I would have sleeping on the floor of a classroom.

Anyway, I missed Craig speaking on the creation story, and how God wanted that perfect environment for us, and that we have a sense that things are meant to be better than they are now. Craig referred to this phase as “ought” – how things ought to have been were it not for the Fall.

In the meantime, I got home and went right to bed and fell asleep after an hour or so of tossing and turning. The night’s sleep fixed my headache, as sleeping always seems to. That made for a good start on Tuesday, the first day of work “in the field.”

Friday was Good Friday, which Mer and I had off. Ellen still needed to do some work on her dissertation, so we did not plan anything for the morning or early afternoon. We did take a short excursion out in the evening – we wanted to show Ellen Brandywine Falls, which is in a park fairly nearby. Or at least it should be. Mer and I found the falls on a map, but did not bother to print directions out – we knew most of the roads, so it seemed straightforward. So, we headed down into the Valley and headed north along a series of winding roads. About 35 minutes or so later, we found ourselves at the end of a dead-end road with “no trespassing” signs posted. We figured we were only about a half mile or less from the falls, but we backtracked and tried another route and did finally find the falls, after about 45 minutes total.

Brandywine Falls, like many things in Ohio, is not spectacular, but is very pleasant to look at. There are boardwalks that let you see the falls from near the bottom of the falls and from the top as well. It was another beautiful day, so we took our time, but kept to just the falls – we did not have enough time to walk some of the trails around the falls. Once we got back to the car, we tried another way back home, which turned out to be very direct and took about 10 minutes. Live and learn.

Since it was Good Friday, we headed to church that evening. Mer and I were both readers in a tenebrae (Latin for “shadows”) service. A tenebrae service is a somber service that remembers Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and usually ends with remembering the crucifixion – the celebration of the resurrection is saved for the Easter service. Our service was fairly simple – two songs and communion, and then seven readers reading passages from the Bible that talked about the last hours of Jesus’ life. The passages were more than just the accounts of Jesus found in the Gospels – some of the gospel accounts were there, but other passages from the psalms and the prophets were included as well, to help give a broader context to what was happening to Jesus. It was very effective – it worked well to have other scriptures to help wake me up from having heard the gospel stories so often that I sometimes forget how powerful they are. The service went off well, and we left the church quietly and drove home. Once home, we had a little light supper, and watched some more of the ever-present Bleak House.

Saturday was another big day in Lavish Ohio. I went running with Nate and Jason again (16 miles), and by the time I got home, Ellen and Meredith were awake and finishing getting ready. I took a quick shower, and by around 10:00 or so, we were headed south to Amish country.

Mer and I like to take people to Amish country because the land is very pretty (rolling hills), and the food is amazing. To add to these, I decided to introduce Ellen to Lehman’s hardware store. Lehman’s is a hardware store that specializes in non-electric tools and appliances (including gas refrigerators and stoves). Their stuff tends to be very nice, but a tad expensive, but is still worth a trip to look at things. Ellen came away with a salt/pepper mill (on sale for 2/3s off).

Ellen had mentioned she wanted an island for her kitchen, so I stopped at a furniture store. There are a ton of furniture stores in Amish country, as we found out. After visiting our third one, Ellen and Mer had moved from subtle hints about food to Meredith asking us to stop and Ellen making hungry-kitty feed-me noises. I took the hint, and we stopped at Mrs. Yoder’s Kitchen, where we had a very satisfying meal (and ended it with pie – yum!).

After eating, we took Ellen to the chocolate store we found last summer, the one where they sell chocolates for $5/pound and sell very good cookies. Sadly, they were closed. We also stopped at the farm where they sell the fried fruit pies, but they were sold out. I consoled myself with a package of oatmeal cream cookies. We headed into town and visited a gift store that carried a number of wind chimes (Ellen has been looking for wind chimes), and then visited one last furniture store (one that Mer and I are fond of). We then headed northward again, with a stopover at the Amish Door bakery, where I picked up three whoopie pies and a brownie. Amish baked goods are worth the stop.

Since Ellen had not found her island table, we stopped at Pier 1 in Canton to see if they still had one that Ellen had seen (and one that was on sale). They did not have one, but they called around, and the Pier 1 in Cuyahoga Falls had one. So, we stopped there on the way home, and Ellen bought it (for about 60% off). We could not fit it in Meredith’s car, so we headed home and got my hatchback. Once we had it in the hatchback, Ellen discovered the legs unscrewed from the table. Ooops. At least that meant it would fit in her car.

We headed from Pier 1 straight to Akron, to the Coach House Theater. We were meeting up with Brandon and Jen (Brandon works at CVCA and is the head of the theater department), and we were all going to see the play Doubt. Mer and I had seen Doubt as a film last fall with Mom and Marc, and so we were eager to see it as the original play.

It worked very well, better than the movie. The staging kept the focus on the actors, since there were no scene changes. The stage was done up half as a church, and half as an office, with a small courtyard in the middle. The play only uses four actors, so it can be very intense at times. All of the actors did a fine job, but the woman playing the head nun was superb. She was no-nonsense and driven. The actor playing the priest seemed a bit light at first, but he grew more intense as the play went on, and the climactic showdown scene between the priest and the head nun was electrifying. The show had no intermission, so the tension was never broken.

The five of us talked for quite awhile after the show was over, and we all loved it. Ellen had never seen nor read it, so that was fun to introduce her to the play. This was the third time that Brandon had seen it done live, and he said he kept changing his mind as to if the priest was guilty of what the nun accused him of. It really is a well done play. We said goodbye to Brandon and Jen, and we headed home to food and Bleak House.

All good things come to an end, even Lavish Ohio ™. On Sunday, we went to church (it was a very fine Easter service), and then came home. I cobbled together a rudimentary brunch of eggs, homemade bread left over from the Heather Dale concert, and Sun Chips (the ones I forgot to set out for the concert). Once we finished eating, Ellen packed up her things and headed home (about a three-and-a-half hour trip). Mer and I took a long nap (3+ hours). Lavish Ohio can take it out of you. We did not get to show Ellen everything that is wonderful and grand about Ohio, so Lavisher Ohio ™ is now in the works for a future date.