Listen! Do you smell something?

The preacher went long this morning. I had a stern talk with him this afternoon and he assures me it won’t happen next week.


I decided to use glazing points to hold the bead board panels in the frames of the cabinet doors, so I made a run up to Home Depot to get them. (Glazing points - see image above - are small metal clips normally used to hold a pane of glass in the frame of a window. After laying the glass in the frame you use a screw driver or putty knife to push the pointed end of several glazing points into the frame so that the flat side holds the glass in place. Then you putty over the glazing points.) They had six packages of points, 50 per package. I need two packages, so everything is good.

Except the guy told me that when those six packages are gone that’s the end. Home Depot won’t sell glazing points anymore. “Why? How do you put new glass in a window without glazing points?” His answer: you don’t. At least out here nobody has anything but double pane windows that come already assembled in the frame - a complete module.

There’s something sad about that. Fixing a broken pane of glass is one of those home repairs that gives you a real sense of accomplishment, especially once you get the hang of a smooth putty line. I’d never thought about it, but he’s right. That’s a job that disappeared with Al Gore (unless you live in an old house in Michigan).

That got me thinking about other devices gone forever because the object they served are gone. Like those plastic banana-shaped pads you stuck to the receiver of your now-obsolete phone so you could easily cradle it against your shoulder and have both hands free. Or the roll of that special tape with white powder on one side used to strike over a mistake with the typewriter.
Others?

In the meantime I’m thinking about buying the other four packages and selling them on eBay.

Pastor Rick Warren posted a message on the Saddleback Church web site saying they needed $900,000 to bring the church into the black as they enter the new year. In a matter of days the gifts in response to that plea totaled $2.4 million. Pretty impressive! But I think the posting and the response raise some interesting questions.

Rick Warren is a successful pastor, if the size of his congregation is any measure of success. He has a book that sold over 30 million copies and took up near permanent residence on the NY Times Best Seller list. He has appeared as a guest on almost every major TV news show and gave the Protestant invocation at the President’s inauguration. In other words, the guy isn’t wet behind the ears. Rick Warren knows how the system works.

Saddleback Church ended 2009 $900,000 in the red. Pastor Warren could have communicated that need to the congregation through a letter to their data base, an announcement in their services or in their bulletin. But he chose to post it online. When he made that decision he knew it would get picked up by every major news agency, and word of the shortfall would get out to millions more than the number who visit the church web site. (You probably heard about it through the news media.) Was the decision to put it on their site made in anticipation of that happening? Did Warren make a conscious decision about how to communicate their need based on his knowledge of how the system works, how widely the news of their shortfall would be disseminated with the aid of the media?

I have enough respect for the intellect and sophistication of Rick Warren to feel confident in saying the answer is yes. The next question is where it gets interesting: was that appropriate?

I have NO reservations about how that $2.4 million will be spent. Saddleback has a sterling reputation for doing wonderful things around the world to serve the poor and spread the gospel. That’s not the issue. And a case could be made that the media has used Rick Warren to give one of their show’s ratings a nice bump when they think it will work. So why shouldn’t he use them for more honorable ends?

I just think the whole dynamic raises some interesting questions about how the big boys do ministry in the 21st century. It’s a whole different world than passing the (one) offering bag at Pathway Bible Church!