June 2005

Toledo to Chicago after church Sunday night, June 5. Stayed the night with Mud in Bartlett. Off to the northwest 8 A.M. Monday morning.

Through southern Wisconsin and La Crosse. The crossing of the Missisippi from La Crosse, Wisconsin to Winona, Minnesota was stunning. Neither coast has anything riparian approaching the grandeur of the Mississippi. I woke up the kids near midnight on the way home just so they'd have two memories of crossing the Mississippi.

Southern Minnesota was a treat. Northern Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area is my favorite wilderness on earth. But though I attended college in St. Paul, southern Minnesota always struck me as a wasteland. It's not. In early summer it's Edenic. The farms are beautiful, the fields green, the towns quiet like the western suburbs of Chicago in the sixties.

By Monday night we were into mid-South Dakota--one of the five states I'd never visited up till then. Eastern South Dakota was beautiful, bucolic in its hills and fields. We crossed the Lower Brule River at dusk. I wish it had been light. The river was beautiful in twilight and I'd like to have seen its full splendor. Overnight in a great little motel in Kadoka, South Dakota.

The Corn Palace in Mitchell S.D. It's a wash which is a better visit--the Corn Palace or the Badlands.

Tuesday the Badlands were our first order of business. Yuck. Unimpressive. I'd seen National Geographic-like pictures of Badlands cliffs and valleys and assumed them to be 1) high cliffs and canyons ala southern Utah, and 2) made of rock. Unnh unnh. Bleached clay and puny. Not worth more than an hour, though we gave it two. I can't emphasize enough the great disparity between my mental picture of the Badlands and the reality. Stunningly different. I had thought them majestic, like Polychrome Pass in Denali or the red rock canyons of Southern Utah--worthy of an entire week. They're hardly worth an hour.

The family atop one of the Badlands' measly mountains of mud.

On to Mt. Rushmore. The mountain looks like the pictures. Probably the best part of the visit is Rushmore's visitor's center which has been constructed with an Albert Speer-worthy dramatic majesty--columns, pillars, grey granite all leading up to the mountaintop temple of the great men. It's worth stopping to see the public architecture and Rushmore itself is free. Of course, the National Park Service sold the parking concession to a private company, which means you pay about $8 to park--but, in the small mercies category, the parking ticket, the attendants assure you, is good for a year. Don't try to give it to a friend, however. They somehow capture the digits of your license plate automatically and print them on the ticket as you're approaching the booth.

Final stop on Tuesday: Jewel Cave National Monument. Jewel is the second longest cave system in the United States (care to guess the longest?) with approximately 150 miles of explored caverns. Our National Park membership got us a free twenty-minute tour down the elevator in the visitor's center to a large cavern 200 feet below ground. We also reserved places on a "Lantern Tour" of the cave at 4:30 P.M. The lantern tour took us in the only discovered entrance to the cave, down steep old staircases, through dark caverns, well into the cave. Fantastic trip. Highly recommended. Skip the Badlands and do Jewel Cave.

Jewel Cave

After Jewel, we hightailed it to Sheridan, Wyoming, before stopping for the night.

More soon.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)

Dad Taylor had a disconcertingly dismissive attitude towards cars. They were vehicles for transport--only.

My Dad, on other other hand, approached them with a slight touch of the romanticism typical of American culture. This meant that when Bayly cars approached 100,000 miles, we could expect a new car in the driveway, soon. Nothing snazzy, yet Dad took delight in each of them. Most memorable for me was the 1967 VW Bug Dad bought new that went from him to my older sister, Deborah; then finally to me. When he brought it home from the dealer, Dad was proud of that car. I don't think he ever said it was cute but that was the feeling you got as you watched the proprietary sparkle in his eyes. It was red and had a sun roof.

But Dad Taylor had a completely utilitarian philosophy of transportation. The way he figured it, a car was a deal if you put $1,000 or less into it each year. So budget the $1,000 and you're done with the business. This meant that a car with 150,000 miles on it that took less than $1,000 a year to keep running was a bargain no matter what it looked like. Until the last year or two, Dad drove a very old--what, Buick or Chevy?--that looked like it had sat in the desert for ten years and then been resurrected.

And Mom? She drove Honda Civics for the last fifteen years or so, and when the first one was passed down to a grandson it was no plum of a gift. It had been well used and still is--my son, Joseph, now drives it and you see the picture of it above. Granted, it didn't look quite that bad when Mom first gave it to Chris, but it was well on its way.

Mom and Dad never gave in to materialistic idolatry, not even in the cars they drove. Thoughts of a car suited to their station in life never entered their brains, so far as I know. Back in the eighties, one of Dad's executives bought a Mercedes and parked it in the Tyndale House parking lot each day, often quite near Dad's latest jalopy. It might be that ten years of seeing that Mercedes gave Dad an idea he'd like one too. So in the late eighties or early nineties Dad went out and bought a brand spanking new Mercedes Benz. The next day he returned the car to the dealer and nothing more was ever said about it (other than something about it not having enough acceleration).

No wonder, then, that Dad and Mom supported so much of the Lord's work around the world. Completely unpretentious yet never miserly, they were extravagant only in giving to the Lord and they disciplined whatever desires they had. Dad returned the Mercedes Benz.

So far as I know it was the only new car he ever owned.

Just took this screen shot. It's what happens just now if you try to go to Overstock.com. Delightful honesty.

A little over a year ago I visited my dear friend, David Wegener, his wife, Terri, and their four children--Elizabeth, Mary, John, and Sarah--in Ndola, Zambia. Under the auspices of the PCA's Mission to the World, David teaches at the Theological College of Central Africa. Our daughter, Michal (along with an almost-adopted daughter of ours, Annie Walker) were just completing three months of classes under David's instruction. In the afternoons they volunteered at the orphanage just down the road from the Wegeners' home.

This was my first trip to Africa and I loved it. When asked for my general reaction, I'd say it made me aware of how small the United States are. Not small spatially or financially, but small in spirit. Maybe better, how 'insular,' 'provincial,' or 'parochial' we are.

One of the best ways of peering into the African way is to examine the different perspective on money and wealth so pervasive across Africa. Had I voiced my ignorance prior to experiencing it, I would have used words such as 'irresponsibility,' 'dishonesty,' and even 'theft.' There's no doubt such words are appropriate for Africans, just as they have been for all other people across the ages. Hence the Eighth Commandment "Thou shalt not steal."

But my daughter, Michal, began to discipline my prejudices as soon as I arrived, and my education continued upon arriving back home. Someone sent me a copy of an article with a title something like, "An Anthropologist Looks at the African View of Wealth and Money." Although I'm not sure, I suspect that article grew into the book David Wegener here excerpts in his most recent newsletter to supporters.

If you'd like to receive the Wegeners' newsletter, Vine and Branches, and support their ministry through money and/or prayer, you may write David at dwegener at mtwafrica dot org. Here then the promised excerpt:

Mark Noll, interviewed in Christianity Today about a new book he's authored, "The Rise of Evangelicalism," says of Evangelicalism:

Almost universally, what evangelicalism has been great at doing is bringing life back to cold religious form. But, evangelicalism is a parasitic movement. The great evangelical leaders are not theoreticians of institutions. Some of them are very good theologians on questions of personal salvation. They're not theologians of culture, they're not theologians of society. There are problems with the Christian outreach that is just the theology of society, but there are also problems when the individual attention is so strong that culture and society is lost sight of.

Why people continue to pay Dr. Noll to describe Evangelicalism remains a mystery. He's long cast himself in the role of Evanglicalism's arbiter elegantium. But as he so frequently reminds us, there's little of elegance about Evangelicalism. We're simple people, easily led. And for the masses there is the indefatigable Ron Sider who has faithfully plucked our consciences since before Dr. Noll received his PhD. What more can Dr. Noll provide?