The New Life in New Orleans

Fifteen years ago, there was this hurricane. Yes, I wrote a novel about that time in the life of some New Orleanians. I titled it The New Normal. In 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, that phrase seems to be on everyone's lips. Even selling a few copies of the book on Amazon, presumably from people searching on the phrase and finding it.  Back then, an entire city emptied out as people fled to other places. Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water and uninhabitable. The parts that didn't flood were mostly in higher areas closer to the Mississippi River -- hence the phrase "the sliver on the river." I live in that sliver, and my house missed the flood waters by four blocks.  I wasn't pastor of the First Presbyterian Church at that time -- Cliff Nunn was -- but I had a close relationship with the church. The buildings flooded. Close to three feet of water in the sanctuary, the offices, and the preschool. The nasty dirty water stood in the heat in those buildings...

I love a good time travel yarn as much as the next fantasy/science fiction fan. Back in the nineties, there was a tv show called Quantum Leap. Scott Bakula starred as Sam Beckett (wink, wink, for you English and theater majors out there), a scientist who was being hurled back and forth in time in a period that covered the years of his own life. His mission was to try to change events in the past so that bad things going on in the present could be fixed. More or less. The show was popular because, well, many of us have a deep longing to be able to fix mistakes that were made way back when. (For the record, Sam's attempt to stop the Kennedy assassination failed. As you may have noticed.)  And in our own lives, many of us have tried to go back and make right what once went wrong, as the introduction to Quantum Leap would tell us each week. But here's the rub: while it may be possible sometimes to make amends, or to do that thing we once wanted to do but never did, it's never t...

When you don't have a professional film crew and a permit from the city to shut everything down around you, filming a video outdoors in your neighborhood can get a little tricky. Today's video is short. Filming had to be halted and restarted several times because of a barking dog, a rattle-y truck going by, and a repair crew welding an iron fence next door, using a generator. As we were filming this take that you'll see below, I saw the repair truck for the welding company slowly backing up the street toward me, and I figured I'd better wrap this thing up quickly. So, the point I intended to make not quite so briefly, is that in a time when everything seems out of our control -- like in the middle of a pandemic, when just about everything is shut down (except for people who repair iron fences, apparently) -- we may be surprised to discover that we don't HAVE to be in control. God's got this! It's going to be okay! Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Let i...