We are wrapping up Christmas activites here at Forest Grove United Methodist Church. I have many good memories from this year, ranging from an especially engaging Christmas Eve service to a very successful outreach program for needy families to heartfelt, beautiful seasonal music and stories. We even got some snow during Advent this year, a rarity here in the temperate rain forest of western Oregon. The snowy weather came at just the opportune time to cause us to postpone a Christmas benefit music concert. But we finally pulled it off last Sunday, January 1, on, by my count, the 8th Day of Christmas. The program, like everything else this year, seemed especially beautiful, heartfelt, and magical. Christmas day, the First Day of Christmas, came on Sunday this year, a rather inconvenient time, oddly enough. Christmas is so very secularized that going to worship on Christmas morning is harder than usual. To make it a little easier I decided to invite folks to come to church "as you are", even if that meant still in jammies. We set out an array of costumes and props so we could, impromptu, reenact the Christmas story with a narrator telling the tale. I felt delighted to see more folks than I expected arrive early, a lot of them still wearing PJs, and dig right in to the costumes. In short order our congregation became shepherds, magi, angels, innkeepers, animals, Mary and Joseph, and even a star. This photo sums up my delight in this relaxed, church family day. One of our dear older ladies found a fuzzy critter costume that fit her and so she came to the manger of Christ as gentle beast. I smile in my deepest heart thinking about that. This is a church where you can, indeed, be who you are, or who you remember you were, or who you've always wanted to be. The memories of smiles, laughter, and joy in the telling of the story of the birth of Christ, where absolutely everyone continues to be welcome, are now added to my most precious of heavenly treasures.

BTW credit to Tim Gunther for this shot. Tim is a member of our congregation and a pro photographer (shootme@timgunther.com). He portrayed Joseph, who had a terrific sight line to some wonderful photos. If you want to see more you can visit the church FaceBook page. Bring up the website, umcforestgrove.org and click on the FaceBook icon. See you next time! God bless.

Here is a footprint story to amuse. A few summers back my wife and I tent camped in Grand Teton National Park. As we arrived at Jenny Lake campground the host told us there had been little worry about bear activity in the sites, however a big bull elk had been pestering folks by nosing around the tents. Feeling relieved about the absence of bears, we just smiled about the critter named Buddy the Elk. We set up our little mountaineering tent on the graveled pad and began to bask in the shadow of the mountains. We put up folding camp chairs in a flowering meadow and read and dozed. I heard a twig snap, and footsteps . . . doe, a deer, crept behind us close enough to touch. Sweet. (Also, foreshadowing, yes it happens) So by the end of the day we are feeling very relaxed and head for sleep as the sun sets. We sleep head to feet side by side in our snug, tiny blue tent. Our custom is to read for a while, which we do with glowing iPads. Laura gives out first and falls into a happy slumber. I continue reading my exciting and somewhat scary adventure story. Then I hear footsteps. Clop, crunch. Shuffle. Gravel grinds under very large feet, attached, by the sound, to something uncommonly large and heavy. The animal, whatever it is, stops on my left side. I sense something very large looming outside, only the thin fabric of the tent between us. Is it a bear? Where is the bear spray? Drat, down at my feet. I calculate how quickly I can unzip from my mummy sleeping bag, pick up and arm the bear spray, unzip the tent, and shoot. That action is not advisable, as there would be snarls, teeth, claws, blood and pain involved. Should I wake up Laura? I find I can’t move, and my heart is pounding, boom boom boom in my head. I close my iPad and lay still as stone. Clop, shuffle. Crunch. Scuffle. The whatever moves on. I lay in silence and breathe for some minutes. The crisis seems to be over. Of course now I am wide awake. So I open my iPad and resume reading. The story continues to be hair raising, probably not the best choice for the moment. After a few minutes, I hear . . . Clop, crunch. Shuffle. LOOM. Now the giant animal is standing on the other side of the tent, with Laura in between me and IT. I freeze again. I hold my breath. I quietly close my iPad. This is worse! Now if I try for the bear spray Laura will get eaten first! I am motionless, wondering how to wake my partner up without making any sound. In the absolute darkness I hear a big huffing breath from outside. I suck in a deep breath and hold it. I am just about to shout! But I don’t. Shuffle, Crunch, Clop. It moves away. Now I just continue to lay there in the dark. Time passes, and I fall asleep. (I also may have fainted). I sleep as though dead. The earth spins. Dawn comes. I crawl out and emerge from the tent. What a lovely, crisp, sunny morning! The sky is blue, and the Grand Teton is a towering morning glory. I fire up the camp stove and start the coffee brewing. I look at the site next door and see a lone orange mountaineering tent set up, with no sign of the young camper who arrived alone yesterday evening, California plates. Laura rises, we have our favorite camp coffee, and after a while meet the camp host again. I have already told Laura about the night visitor, and we inform the host as well that a beastie visited last night. She said it was certainly Buddy the Elk, who loomed at our absent neighbor, a wilderness rookie, after us, scaring him so badly he abandoned his tent, ran to his car, and drove into Jackson to sleep in a hotel. So, Buddy is attracted to the curious, big glowing mushroom things lit up by iPads, phones, and the like. He acts like a huge, antlered moth. He only stands and looks. He doesn't mean any harm. He is just following the light, maybe like the rest of us should.

I took some time to exercise, sprucing up around the church, and found myself singing "Come and fill my heart with your peace; you alone O Lord are holy . . . Come and fill my heart with your peace; Alleluia." After singing that a few times I opened the back door to sniff the air and spotted a magical creature tip-toeing along the sidewalk by our parking lot. A fox? It has a horn and wings. A foxicorn dragon? Whatever it is, it gave a big smile. As an answer to prayer, I will think of it as a manifestation of peace. When I thanked it for occupying our neighborhood, it thanked me, in return, in a small, musical voice. Its paw when it gently shook my hand was velvety soft.

I feel myself galvanized today, determined to be a contributor to a safer, more humane world. Rather than live and preach against what I disagree with, taking a negative, adversarial view in an American culture which has grown more dangerous in recent times, I hope to keep walking forward with my head up, eyes clear, and my arms open to conciliation. I invite my friends and readers to join me in a commitment to living by three simple rules. They are easy to remember, harder to practice, but potentially transformative. The three simple rules are: First, do no harm. Second, do good. Third, always stay in love with God. Doing the first well is an important beginning. I appreciate what Ruben P. Job says about how this practice of doing no harm affects my relationships with adversaries. "Each of us knows of groups that are locked in conflict, sometimes over profound issues and sometimes over issues that are just plain silly. But the conflict is real, the divisions deep, and the consequences can often be devastating. If, however, all who are involved can agree to do no harm, the climate in which the conflict is going on is immediately changed. How is it changed? Well, if I am to do no harm, I can no longer gossip about the conflict. I can no longer speak disparagingly about those involved in the conflict. I can no longer manipulate the facts of the conflict. I can no longer diminish those who do not agree with me and must honor each as a child of God. I will guard my lips, my mind and my heart so that my language will not disparage, injure or wound another child of God. I must do no harm, even while I seek a common good." I hope you will join me.

The rain has poured buckets on us here in Western Oregon this October. So wherever I choose to walk on grass or ground I sink and squish. I am not happy with the sogginess, but mushrooms are. I spied a large, orange cap across the church lawn and squelched over to investigate. The warm, wet conditions hatched a batch of very large mushrooms. King boletes are edible and delicious. Raccoons had chawed the largest one mostly to bits, but left a smaller one, a mere 10" across, well enough alone that I could pick it. I dismantled it in my kitchen and set bits to dry in our food dehydrator. The house has a wonderful, rich mushroom smell. I am not fond of grey skies and showers in general, but remembering, from my childhood wanderings, the fun of mushroom hunting in the woods lifts my spirits. When it rains, wonders appear.

I don't remember the exact moment I decided to begin walking, but I do remember deciding to get up on my feet because my knees hurt from crawling. I've covered a lot of territory and left a lot of footprints behind me since then. I muse about this sometimes, and my thoughts go this way . . . let's imagine what would happen if person who rarely sits down averages a humble 3 miles per hour on average for 8 hours a day. In about three years of steady progress that person could walk about 24,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the earth upon reaching their fourth birthday or so. Magic is applying, of course, from the get go, so not only can our walker keep moving seven days a week but they can also move equally well on water or land. More magic on the way . . . Suppose this child spied with a little eye the moon up in the sky and set off to get there. About 240,000 miles and thirty years later they could put a footprint in the lunar dust, and after another thirty years could arrive back on earth as a sixty year old. That's my life to now, and walking to the moon and back would be quite satisfying. But since we've already suspended the laws of life and physics and are well into fuzzy math let's go on . . . If we set our sights on visiting the sun, somewhere beyond 90,000,000 miles off, we could stroll there in a short 10,000 years. Suppose we get there and, finding our little star interesting enough, decide we want to check out the next nearest star for comparison. Alpha Centauri is around 300,000 times farther away from earth than the sun is. Moving on, we will arive in about 3,000,000,000 years . . . which is a span of time many times greater than the existence of the universe. If I want to see any more stars in my galaxy I'll have to speed up a bit since there are billions of them. And there are billions of galaxies besides this one, at unimaginable distances away. Which gets me thinking . . . in a creation so vast, isn't just about anything possible? Maybe all good things start with baby steps.

So, I laugh at myself when I realize I have a lot of shoes. This small hoard from a guy who often forgets to wear them, whether taking out the trash in the rain, tromping in the garden, even showing up for church meetings (I'm the pastor! Well, what would Jesus do?) My son Phillip gave me a hand-me-down pair of black Vans last year, which started me down a path (hah) I have tread a long way on. Those first ones are now comfy camping and beach shoes. But I now have acquired four "dress" Vans I wear with different outfits. I'm hoping to get a pair for each color of the church liturgical seasons to wear as I lead worship on Sundays. I've already mostly abandoned my regular oxford-style dress shoes, though of course I keep a black pair and brown pair. At some point I decided I needed some Converse All Star tennis shoes, too. As with the others, I haunt Good Will until my size comes in. After a few months my black, low-top All Stars showed up. Now I have a continuing urge to create a rainbow set of these. I would never buy all these shoes new, of course. The Converse sneakers I wore for gym in Junior High only cost a couple of dollars; now they are stylin', are made in Korea, and most importantly cost more than canvas and rubber should ever be worth, in my frugal mind. So, besides finding myself amusing, I have also felt guilty about having so many shoes, and at odds with myself for having a brutal time ever throwing a pair of shoes away. I still have five or six old pairs of running shoes, for instance. One is still for running; the others are stashed for camping, several sitting in a chest on the porch, saturated with with mud and stained green from mowing the lawn. Yet why do I need three of those? Another curiosity: Boots! I have one pair. I hate them and avoid wearing them even when it would make sense to do so. You'd think boots are a good bet for hiking in rainy weather. I'd rather wear sneakers and have wet toes than stuff my feet into boots. Pedal Claustrophobia! Unhappy feet, unhappy me. Well a light bulb lit the other day when yet again I stood snooping the shoe racks at Good Will. Why Oh Why am I drooling over a pair of metalic silver Converse All Stars I absolutely do not need, yet am too cheap to pay out the $20 bucks for such an obviously AWESOME ride? I am also, in this process, preoccupied with an urge to buy shoes for my boys. So there is the clue. This is one of those things that shows up from a formative experience growing up. When I started elementary school, I got one pair of shoes, which usually happened to be Redwing boots, to last the whole year. I don't remember having any other shoes; yes we were poor at the time. So I don't like boots to this day. I dislike dress shoes because my first pair, over which we made a great fuss because it was such a big financial move, hurt my feet. I like canvas tennis shoes because of good memories in P.E. class. I cringe to throw away a pair of shoes that still have life in them, no matter how grungy they get, because of a neurotic insecurity about having shoes to wear at all. I like going barefooted because it is one answer to the shoe question. Who needs them, anyway? And of course I love to give shoes to my own children. Lots of them! Even if they roll their eyes. But I'm happy they love shoes for the simple sake of feeling good in them. So Dad can be silly. Does this scratch my itch about shoes? Naw! There is still room in the closet!