After my night of planning an ingenious (if unwieldy) plan, Pickles managed to appear when I was explaining it, dropped a net over my head, and escaped. He's too fast. But I am way ahead of him. This afternoon, my package from the Acme Corporation arrived and Sven is already at work putting it together. . . but meanwhile, today I drew the story of Elijah standing for the real God against the 850 opposing him who believed in a false god.

We added a driving accompaniment to "People, be strong in the Lord and His mighty power," with specially ordered and very expensive instruments . . .

And there were the most wonderful crafts. The gummy shells . . .

And making marshmallows (the recipe from the Phantom Gourmet show on PBS) . . .

. . . and the making of petecas . . .

. . . though some think the feathers could be put to better use as a fashion statement:

A rebuilding the altar of the Lord game . . .

. . . which sometimes went better with the help of a friend, . . .

. . . or the (beachball) boat on the turbulent Sea of Galilee:

On hot days, though, sometimes water is best, whether Elijah pouring water on the altar . . .

. . . conserving every precious drop, . . .

. . . or, well, those accidents that just SEEM to happen with those water balloon Bible verse memory games . . .

Snack time sometimes looks like a high society social event . . .

. . . but may actually be quite a serious time for discussion:

And then, there are those times when I wonder if certain counselors have been out in the sun just a little too long . . .

I must get back to the rocket sled construction with Sven, but mum's the word. Pickles is a clever bird and likely has many more dastardly ideas up his wing! But this rocket sled can't fail. I know, because the Acme Corporation told me so. And the Acme Labs have many satisfied customers, including my friend Wile Ethelbert C____________ (last name withheld for internet privacy purposes) who recommends them warmly.

Uncle Pinky

Monday Morning at Backyard Bible Club

And what a start it was! Alarming news about the wily "Pickles" Penguin, even reported sitings. But I, Uncle Pinky, the proprietor of this fine Water Park, suspect it was the results of the blue gelatin in today's snack.

And, yes, there were games, and much yelling and running and jumping and the usual silliness.

And the counselors who went above and beyond the call of duty . . .

Not to forget intense noodling.

Or the games to help learn the Bible verse of the day.

Talking about what the Bible verses mean.









Craft Time!

Crossing the Red Sea, just one example how God's love watches over those who are His.

Busy at work am I, with a counselor to give me special help in planning for Tuesday . . . remember to wear the Penguin-proof clothing . . . .

Backyard Bible Club is coming . . . but?

So, I make my way back from an afternoon appointment and find the door to my office closed with a sign which I did not put there:

I open the door ever so carefully and I find a meeting is already in session:

They were very polite and all, but it was obvious that I wasn't invited.

Now, I must say that the wily Mrs. Pichulo looked less surprised than Sven (the church pool manager) and I did.

And to what might these signs point?

And, does any one really have any idea how many of those p . . . p . . . (penguins) . . . THOSE THINGS can be found around the church? I know but I'm not telling . . . . yet.

Uncle Pinky

JetBlue comes Through . . . sermon addendum

Jet Blue delivered my errant duffle bag back sometime between 5:30 and 7:00 Monday morning. Interestingly, there was a note in it about the TSA having looked through it. Apparently, my worn Hawaiian shirts were a threat to national security (actually, it is good, in my view, to know that these checks happen and, as one who has nothing to hide (okay, some of the shirts are a little over the edge of good taste, A LITTLE), I do not at all mind what others might seem to think is intrusive. Anyway, what follows is an excerpt from the review by Nick Hornby to which I referred in Sunday's message. Hornby writes clever This is an excerpt, first published in 2005, now available in his book Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. San Francisco: Believer Books, 2006. I've probably not gotten this right, but it seems to me that Believer is a magazine several generations younger than me (whose original "working title" was "The Optimist."), and is aimed at those intellectuals in their twenties to forties. Nick Hornby himself is a great writer but, like the magazine, not a Christian.

Anyway, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is clearly a modern classic, and it hasn’t even been in print for five minutes. It’s a beautiful, rich, unforgettable work of high seriousness, and you don’t need to know that the book has already won the Pulitzer Prize to see that Robinson isn’t messing around. I didn’t even mind that it’s essentially a book about Christianity, narrated by a Christian; in fact, for the first time I understood the point of Christianity—or at least, I understood how it might be used to assist thought. I am an atheist living in a godless country (7 percent of us attend church on a regular basis), so the version of Christianity I am exposed to most frequently is the evangelical U.S. version. We are a broad church here at the Believer, and I don’t wish to alienate any of our subscribers who believe that gays will burn in hell for all eternity and so on, but your far-right evangelism has never struck me as being terribly conducive to thought—rather the opposite, if anything. I had to reread passages from Gilead several times— beautiful, luminous passages about grace, and debt, and baptism-before I half-understood them, however: there are complicated and striking ideas on every single page.

Gilead is narrated by a dying pastor, the Reverend John Ames, and takes the form of a long letter to his young son; the agony of impending loss informs every word of the book, although this agony has been distilled into a kind of wide-eyed and scrupulously unsentimental wonder at the beauty of the world. It’s true that the book contains very little in the way of forward momentum, and one reads it rather as one might read a collection of poetry; it’s only two hundred and fifty pages long, but it took me weeks to get through. (I kept worrying, in fact, about reading Gilead in the wrong way. I didn’t want it to go by in dribs and drabs, but it seemed equally inappropriate to scoff something containing this amount of calories down in a few gulps.) This column has frequently suggested that a novel without forward momentum isn’t really worth bothering with, but that theory, like so many others, turned out not to be worth the (admittedly very expensive) paper it was printed on: Gilead has turned me into a wiser and better person.