Sunday, August 18 - Kenosha, Wisconsin
I sit in this recreational vehicle by myself and yet not at all by myself. The vehicle is parked next to St. Mary's Lutheran Church - immediately next to its walls in order to draw electricity from its generous people; here I slept last night; here the sun shines with strength and warmth on a cool morning; and here, precisely here, just outside my metal wall, St. Mary's is conducting an outdoor worship service. I've risen from sleep. I'm having coffee at a small table: in the midst of a worshiping people! Let me peep out. So close! Folks are casting shadows against my little house. The air is still. They are dressed casually, in pastels and creases. Their folding chairs are arranged in perfect rows. They are not a grave people, in fact. There was laughter as they assembled, easy conversation - and now there is a fine and mighty voice as they sing, "I was there to hear your borning cry."

What a morning! What a way of waking!

I am in the midst of the Church. I have never left it. Yesterday I pedaled from Evanston, Illinois, to Kenosha Wisconsin, just short of 50 miles; pedaled in greater heat than I knew (the mid-90's), my eyes stinging with a streaming sweat, my thumb with its nail (at 18 miles an hour) trying to scrape the sweat away, but popping out my right contact lens instead....

Yesterday I circled several times around a loop outside the ELCA headquarters, left my wife waving there and, behind a police escort, cycled off into Chicago and away, not to return home again until October 21; yesterday evening, sore and tired and nervous about my responsibilities today, I felt far away from my familiar context, my people, my places - not unlike Abram when God called him away from his kinsfolk, his house, his past and all, to travel to "a land which I will show you."

But this morning I wake in the very "midst" of God's people, while they are doing wonderfully: praising their God and my God; welcoming me home, to *their* homes, and making their homes "my" home.

*How far have I gone, after all? And when I am, by the strength of my own pegs, at extremist distances from Valparaiso, how far will I be, after all? For I am moving within a great company, all my kinsfolk by the mercies of Jesus, whom St. Mary's is worshiping outside and inside my metal wall.

They don't know it yet, but when I speak to them this evening, I am going to thank them for a wake-up call better than any (for it was a call to worship, the finest wakefulness).

But right now I have one or two most personal things to accomplish. It's a challenge, performing my ablutions in the midst of pious people "quietly" enough not to interrupt their pieties with impious noises.

Walt