February 19, 2010
Good morning, my dear West Hills family, best and most beautiful good mornings to you all. Praise God for spring, and hope, and our health. Praise God for our beautiful children. Praise God this morning that we have enough to eat, and warm places to sleep. Praise God for his hands on our shoulders, and the warm embrace of his spirit. Praise God for this wonderful community! Thank you all for getting up and getting dressed and driving over here this morning. It gives me great joy to see you all today.
Last winter I got serious with God about my leading to travel the country with a concern for the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. You know who they are: the international peace effort sponsored by Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren, and now twenty years on, a dozen other denominations and faith communities, including our own NWYM. I say I got serious with God about the leading, because I knew I didn’t have the money to do it.
I talked to God about my concern, I said: “I think I know what you want me to do, but I’m broke. If you want me to do this thing, you’re going to have to pull a bunny out of your big shiny black silk top-hat.” And then I waited. Within the month I had an answer: a rediculous long-standing legal mess of several years was suddenly settled out of court – and my share amounted to about $2,000.
“OK”, I said, “We’re on.” Furthermore that spring, you, my friends, came up with an additional $1,000 bucks. But as we all know, money is in fact that green stuff you shovel off the end of the train. I had a few markers to pay off here in town, and I had to spend some money getiting the truck ready and buying used camping gear; and by the time I crossed the California line in mid-may, I was already under a thousand bucks.
I knew that my only hope was to stay was to focus on God’s will and try to keep up. As it turned out, I was officially broke five times on the trip.
There is no way I could tell you all the adventures I had, but here are a few of the high points. From May 7th through September 11th I put 30,000 miles on the little blue truck. I travelled through California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticutt, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, Illinois again, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho. I’m going to count the day trip into Mexico. Everywhere I went I talked to people about the Christian Peacemaker Teams.
I attended three Quaker yearly meetings; in New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island. I hung out, and worshipped with Osage Indian Quakers, Quakers in bonnets in the Shenandoah Valley, Buddhist Quakers, and fundamentalist Christian Quakers. Friends have a long rich history of intervisitation, and I was sometimes almost literally handed off from Friend to Friend and meeting to meeting.
Everywhere I went in the world of Quakers, I met people who knew other people who knew other people. The Peggy Parsons network – she calls it the Q continuum – apparently extends off planet; but she’s not the only one. In Rhode Island, they know who Julie Peyton is, and Colin Saxton, and Ken Comfort, and Lorraine Watson, and David Niyonzima. Margery Post Abbott has friends and admirers everywhere. And I connected with people we know in unlikely places, to say the least. I played a few songs on the same stage with Eric McEuen in Albuquerque, ran into Peterson Toscano in a parking lot in Rhode Island, made dinner for Joy Ellison in Chicago, weeded Maryellen Marino’s garden in Dalton, Massachusetts. In one of the most startlingly clear examples I’ve ever experienced of God’s direct intervention I ran into Derric Watson in Richmond, Indiana; who greeted me like a long-lost brother, put me up overnight, gave me a hundred bucks and sent me on my way.
I did a lot of music. I sang Sunday morning music with Mennonites and Baptists. I taught In The Mornin’ to a hundred un-programmed Friends around a bonfire in New Mexico. I was heckled by other Friends in Rhode Island, and asked to move along in Chicago. In Taos I earned $18 bucks busking, and in Toronto’s Kensington Market a gay man stopped and listened for about an hour and tipped me $20 Canadian. He said, “Thanks for the guitar lesson.”
I did odd jobs for a lot of Quakers too. I painted a pump house in New Mexico and got pretty sunburned. I painted an outbuilding in Hominy, Oklahoma in the most brutal heat and humidity I’ve ever experienced outside of Africa.
I was befriended in Taos by a Swiss-Canadian shaman, artist, and white witch who supported my mission, and loved my music, and loved me. My dear Annemarie who wanted to see Manhattan and Acadia National Park, so we did.
I had setbacks and challenges too. I got a tick in the Siskiyous, food poisoning in Taos, a bad cold in Ohio, and a heart attack in Brooklyn. I almost died on a muddy county road in New Mexico, and I had my guitar stolen in Albuquerque.
There’s one last miracle I have to share. Headed home in early September, at the Catholic Worker House in Des Moines I met a man named Ed, who said, “Tell me your story.” I said I’ve been on a national peace mission all summer, and I’m just exhausted. I just want to go home, and I do,n’t know how I’m gonna get there. He said what’s the problem, and I said I just don’t have the gas money. I’m out of gas. He said how much do you think you need? I said, I don’t know, maybe a hundred and seventy five bucks.
Well maybe we can help he said, and the next morning he had me drive him down to his credit union and he gave me a hundred and seventy five bucks. “and seventy, there’s seventy five,” he said. I… just came undone. I put my hands up to my face and broke into tears. “What’s wrong?” he said. “You… don’t… know me from Adam,” I said. It’s alright, he said. It’s alright.
Last winter I got serious with God about my leading to travel the country with a concern for the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. You know who they are: the international peace effort sponsored by Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren, and now twenty years on, a dozen other denominations and faith communities, including our own NWYM. I say I got serious with God about the leading, because I knew I didn’t have the money to do it.
I talked to God about my concern, I said: “I think I know what you want me to do, but I’m broke. If you want me to do this thing, you’re going to have to pull a bunny out of your big shiny black silk top-hat.” And then I waited. Within the month I had an answer: a rediculous long-standing legal mess of several years was suddenly settled out of court – and my share amounted to about $2,000.
“OK”, I said, “We’re on.” Furthermore that spring, you, my friends, came up with an additional $1,000 bucks. But as we all know, money is in fact that green stuff you shovel off the end of the train. I had a few markers to pay off here in town, and I had to spend some money getiting the truck ready and buying used camping gear; and by the time I crossed the California line in mid-may, I was already under a thousand bucks.
I knew that my only hope was to stay was to focus on God’s will and try to keep up. As it turned out, I was officially broke five times on the trip.
There is no way I could tell you all the adventures I had, but here are a few of the high points. From May 7th through September 11th I put 30,000 miles on the little blue truck. I travelled through California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticutt, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, Illinois again, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho. I’m going to count the day trip into Mexico. Everywhere I went I talked to people about the Christian Peacemaker Teams.
I attended three Quaker yearly meetings; in New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island. I hung out, and worshipped with Osage Indian Quakers, Quakers in bonnets in the Shenandoah Valley, Buddhist Quakers, and fundamentalist Christian Quakers. Friends have a long rich history of intervisitation, and I was sometimes almost literally handed off from Friend to Friend and meeting to meeting.
Everywhere I went in the world of Quakers, I met people who knew other people who knew other people. The Peggy Parsons network – she calls it the Q continuum – apparently extends off planet; but she’s not the only one. In Rhode Island, they know who Julie Peyton is, and Colin Saxton, and Ken Comfort, and Lorraine Watson, and David Niyonzima. Margery Post Abbott has friends and admirers everywhere. And I connected with people we know in unlikely places, to say the least. I played a few songs on the same stage with Eric McEuen in Albuquerque, ran into Peterson Toscano in a parking lot in Rhode Island, made dinner for Joy Ellison in Chicago, weeded Maryellen Marino’s garden in Dalton, Massachusetts. In one of the most startlingly clear examples I’ve ever experienced of God’s direct intervention I ran into Derric Watson in Richmond, Indiana; who greeted me like a long-lost brother, put me up overnight, gave me a hundred bucks and sent me on my way.
I did a lot of music. I sang Sunday morning music with Mennonites and Baptists. I taught In The Mornin’ to a hundred un-programmed Friends around a bonfire in New Mexico. I was heckled by other Friends in Rhode Island, and asked to move along in Chicago. In Taos I earned $18 bucks busking, and in Toronto’s Kensington Market a gay man stopped and listened for about an hour and tipped me $20 Canadian. He said, “Thanks for the guitar lesson.”
I did odd jobs for a lot of Quakers too. I painted a pump house in New Mexico and got pretty sunburned. I painted an outbuilding in Hominy, Oklahoma in the most brutal heat and humidity I’ve ever experienced outside of Africa.
I was befriended in Taos by a Swiss-Canadian shaman, artist, and white witch who supported my mission, and loved my music, and loved me. My dear Annemarie who wanted to see Manhattan and Acadia National Park, so we did.
I had setbacks and challenges too. I got a tick in the Siskiyous, food poisoning in Taos, a bad cold in Ohio, and a heart attack in Brooklyn. I almost died on a muddy county road in New Mexico, and I had my guitar stolen in Albuquerque.
There’s one last miracle I have to share. Headed home in early September, at the Catholic Worker House in Des Moines I met a man named Ed, who said, “Tell me your story.” I said I’ve been on a national peace mission all summer, and I’m just exhausted. I just want to go home, and I do,n’t know how I’m gonna get there. He said what’s the problem, and I said I just don’t have the gas money. I’m out of gas. He said how much do you think you need? I said, I don’t know, maybe a hundred and seventy five bucks.
Well maybe we can help he said, and the next morning he had me drive him down to his credit union and he gave me a hundred and seventy five bucks. “and seventy, there’s seventy five,” he said. I… just came undone. I put my hands up to my face and broke into tears. “What’s wrong?” he said. “You… don’t… know me from Adam,” I said. It’s alright, he said. It’s alright.