Stan Taylor

Wow. Just go read it.

Rafe Colburn’s mother tells of relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina refugees in Orange, Texas. Also, make sure to read her update in the comments.

From Maureen Dowd, regarding President Bush:

Why does this self-styled “can do” president always lapse into such lame “who could have known?” excuses.
Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.
Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.’s prewar reports.
Who on earth could have known that New Orleans’s sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy’s uneasy fishbowl.

The news is all over the people who got stranded (or chose to stay) in New Orleans, but let’s not forget that they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
There are tens (or hundreds) of thousands of others who did get out before the hurricane hit. In the best of situations, these people are displaced from their homes and jobs for weeks to come. In the worst case scenario, their homes and/or jobs are gone for good. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs, and they won’t be going home for a long time if at all.
In Pflugerville, St. Mary’s Baptist Church is dealing with seventeen refugee families, and Katie is helping our church and the greater Pflugerville community to get involved in aiding them.
One of my coworkers said that the parents of one of the children on his son’s soccer team had 12 displaced relatives show up on their doorstep.
And those are just the stories I’ve heard about directly.
Imagine if a bunch of your relatives showed up on your doorstep and needed a place to live and other aid for weeks or months: you wouldn’t want to turn them away. At the same time, you’d be hard pressed to serve their needs yourself.
By all means, give to the Red Cross and other charities, but also see how you can help directly in your own community. With the devastation that this storm has caused, I’m sure you can find refugees in pretty much every community in the US.
Update: Katie heard from a neighbor who works in the middle school that a family in our subdivision had twelve displaced relatives show up on their door. This weekend, we’re going to try to get ahold of the family, make sure they’re aware of relief efforts that are already starting up via St. Mary’s Baptist Church, see what their needs are, and do what we can to get them help.

Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke has an interesting article on men who are sexually traumatized by watching women give birth.
O’Rourke writes:

Today’s women . . . see having the father in the delivery room as a necessary component of a healthy marriage, one in which both partners contribute equally to collective partnership. This is an absolutely reasonable request: Childbirth is scary and painful, and it makes sense to have reassurance and help from the person you’re closest to (and your child’s father). But the belief that men should be on duty no matter what assumes on some level that sex is just like all the other functions that the body performs. What the experience of the men in the therapist’s article suggests is that, for at least some, this isn’t true; for some, the erotic depends on maintaining a distinction between the sexual and the reproductive.

To the traumatized men, but also to some of these women, I say: it’s not all about you!

I’m happy to report that I scored 90% on this eighth grade math test. And I only got the one question wrong due to an incorrect calculation, not because I didn’t know how to figure the answer (not that an eighth grade math teacher would care much about the reason).

Gordon Atkinson has a blog post today about a salesman who cold-called him, trying to sell him address lists to use to solicit new members for his congregation. Gordon makes a compelling argument that his small congregation is just the right size. I see his point, and generally, I agree with him that it’s wrong to equate a congregation’s growth with its success, as so many churches do these days.
But I don’t think that marketing should be a taboo topic for churches. Inviting people into the fold is, after all, one way of spreading the Good News. The point should be, however, that there are many ways to spread said Good News, and counting heads in worship is just one small method among many, and, in my view, a more trivial one.

Sucker, that is…
This morning, I walked the kids to school. Well, Hannah usually walks ahead with her friends and I accompany Samuel. A small crowd of moms and kids was gathered next to the school building as Samuel and I neared. We saw a young cat emerging from the downspout and a mom trying to help it without touching it.
I reached down and scooped up the cat. The woman looked at me and said, “Your daughter was just here. She said that you would pick it up.” I carried the kitten around the school while I dropped Samuel off, took it home and set it up in the spare dog cage. We’ll decide what to do with it this evening.

Sorry I haven’t blogged much lately. Two reasons, one short-term, one longer.
First, the short-term reason: I had knee surgery this past Wednesday.
The longer-term reason: upon my return from vacation a few weeks ago, I made a few resolutions, among them not to surf the web so much. Less time spent wandering the digital back alleys has resulted in fewer things to blog about.

In Japan, a company is marketing nonalcoholic beer to children. Awesome!