I’m trying to work out some issues with my father and your prayers are coveted. Thanks.

Aaron and Andrea on the ski lift.

It’s been an incredible couple of days and I’m very grateful to Andrea’s parents for making this trip possible. They are an amazing couple and I’m glad to be a part of their family.

My wife (in the blue), mother-in-law (in the pink), and I decided that trails are for sissies and went on an adventure through the trees. I took another video which turned out much better than the last one. I tweaked the export settings so the quality is much better with a minimal sacrifice to file size. Plus this one is much more fun to watch. Pay no attention to the heavy breathing behind the camera.

Justin & Amy at Jesse & Elaine’s Wedding, uploaded by justinbaeder.

I have a beautiful, wonderful wife.

…that death is a part of life. NPR had a fantastic interview with a Catholic priest on the Terri Schiavo case and the dying process.

Michele Norris talks with Father John J. Paris, professor of bioethics at Boston College, about Catholic doctrine concerning the end of life. He discusses church teaching on the subject and a 2004 statement by the Pope on administering food and water to patients.

My favorite quote:

Let me tell you what I learned from my grandmother, a woman of enormous faith, who, when one of her elderly sisters was dying and she’d lost the ability to eat…my grandmother was feeding her little sips of soup. And if a doctor were to come in and propose we could put a little flexible rubber tube right down [my aunt's] nose and throat and feed her, she’d say “Glory be to God, have you lost your senses? The poor woman is dying. What is your tube going to do for that?” And then in her Irish manner, she’d tell them where to put that tube.

The question is, was my grandmother systematically starving her sisters to death out of ignorance or out of malice? The answer is neither. She was understanding that they’re dying, she was understanding as the Vatican declaration puts it “the human condition,” she was understanding that life itself is not an absolute good, and she as a faith-filled person said “God is calling her home,” and who are we to impede that?

You can hear the entire 4-minute interview here.

I can’t say with any authority or certainty that this is a precise parallel to the Terry Schiavo case. I can say that, as a person of faith, I believe that God did not create people to live forever, in any state. We will face innumerable bioethical concerns as medical technology continues to advance, and we must keep the normalcy of death in mind as we make these decisions.

Catholics seem to understand dying and have a balanced, compassionate view. If a person can no longer swallow the “cup of water” that Christ asked his followers to provide, surely we can do the next best thing and let the dying return to God in as much peace as possible. I do not think euthanasia should be an option, because it is a decisively unnatural act. But death itself is as natural as birth, and should be treated with dignity and not hatred.

The Stranger has an interesting article by Charles Mudede on the gradual disappearance of ghetto neighborhoods in Seattle, where real estate prices are driving low-income residents into the southern suburbs.

Mudede is from Zimbabwe, and he has this to say in comparing Harare with Seattle:

What made the Central District and Columbia City more miserable than any of our home country’s High Density Areas - that’s Zimbabwean for slum - was the almost complete lack of businesses that serviced basic needs. Even in the most impoverished parts of Harare, you could always find a shop tha sold things you actually needed to live (beds, blankets, a variety of home appliances); in the most impoverished corners of the Central District and Columbia City, all that thrived were businesses that sold things you could very well live without.

The ‘hood had stores that shelved snacks with zero nutritional value, raggedy porn videos and magazines, and the cheapest booze a human being could possibly stomach. If a business wasn’t a convenience store filled with useless things, then it was either a bar that required a great deal of courage to enter or a beauty business (barbershops for males; nail boutiques for women) that promised to make you look like a million bucks with the little you earned at your minimum-wage job. In these desperately poor parts of town, you could get your nails done like a queen at five different locations, but you had to work hard to find a place that sold toothpaste. Link

Mudede is writing of his impressions upon arriving in Seattle in 1989. Since then, the CD has cleaned up considerably, and Columbia City has experienced nothing short of a rebirth. There are now chain drugstores in every neighborhood which provide the small appliances and basic goods that people need to live. However, they’re all along Rainier Avenue, with very few stores (other than “useless but convenient” stores) in the neighborhoods off to the side.

If you go into one of these drug stores (Bartell, Long’s, Rite-Aid, Walgreens), you will find people of every ethnicity and social class. The neighborhoods that were once mostly black are now truly diverse, though the high cost of living is pushing the demographic trend in my direction (yuppie caucasian). You can buy toothpaste and hair dryers and do-rags and cans of soup, not just cigarettes and 40s of Olde English 800 (which, in case you didn’t know, is not furniture polish like Old English).

The real problem today, sixteen years after Mudede arrived in Seattle, is the lack of access to healthy food. Every store sells chips, crackers, and other never-spoiling carbs loaded with partially hydrogenated soybean oil and calories but no real nutrients. It’s not that fresh fruit, veggies, and other good foods aren’t available; they just aren’t convenient. And when you’re a kid with the munchies and no baggie of carrot sticks from mom, Doritos are the easy answer. So they eat them. And they eat candy and soda. And we wonder why they’re fat.

It will probably take a big federal grant or something to get healthy food into our convenience stores in the Rainier Valley. Any ideas?

Andrew Jones asks this question, and has a heck of an answer. He is rebuffing criticism of the emerging church from D.A. Carson and Al Mohler, leaders of major Southern Baptist seminaries. Mohler’s concluding allegation says

“The worldview of postmodernism — complete with an epistemology that denies the possibility of or need for propositional truth — affords the movement an opportunity to hop, skip and jump throughout the Bible and the history Christian thought in order to take whatever pieces they want from one theology and attach them, like doctrinal post-it notes, to whatever picture they would want to draw.”

While it’s true that postmodernism allows one to do this, that’s a far cry from saying emerging churches are doing this. In fact, as Andrew points out:

I was taught at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in a storytelling class by Southern Baptist missionary John Langston that the way to avoid hopping and skipping all over the Bible was to take a more NARRATIVE view of the Scriptures in their entirety as the unfolding story of God. And not only should we read the Scriptures in their written genre (80% is narrative story) but also we should COMMUNICATE it as story also. I was a pastor who preached propositional 3 point sermons in churches for 7 years. And then I switched to a more storytelling narrative style of reading and communicating the bible. And someone please correct me if i am wrong, but I feel I am doing far less jumping around and piecemealing Scripture then when I was preaching propositionally.

An implicit challenge lies in Andrew’s remarks: We need to make sure we’re not misusing narrative devices and “big-picture” views of scripture to make it say whatever we want. We can’t be so postmodern that we deconstruct Scripture. If we really want to have a go at deconstruction, we should allow scripture to deconstruct us.

Canoe Men of Lake Washington, originally uploaded by justinbaeder.

This is Aaron and me at the UW Waterfront Activities Center a few weeks ago when he visited. We had fun canoeing around for about an hour with Amy and her sister.