States I've Visited, Hung Out In, Merely Passed Through, Totally Avoided, and Even Lived In

On Facebook I've been seeing maps of the United States showing states that people have visited.  For me the map would be almost entirely filled in...only Nevada and Alaska have not had me yet grace their presence.

But not all visits are the same. I got to thinking about all the states I've been to and what I remember about each.  Some I spent just a few hours in...some I have spent almost half my life.  Shouldn't that factor into the equation, quality over simply quantity?  So, here's a ranking of my 50 states visits ranked by the total hours spent in that state.  It's not exact, but it's probably close.  

1. Oklahoma.  I grew up there from the time of nine months through the time I left for college.  Also my parents still live there.  Probably 37% of my life has been spent in Oklahoma.
2. Kansas.  I was born here and have spent most of my adult life here.  32%.
3. Arkansas.  I went to 3 1/2 years of college here.
4. Oregon.  I spent three years here.  I miss being 20 minutes from the ocean and 45 minutes from up in the mountains.
5. Tennessee.  I went to grad school here for two years.  Memphis, not one of my favorite places.
6. Montana.  In college I spent two months on a mission effort in Great Falls.  What a beautiful state.
7. Texas.  My sister lives in Texas and has so for a long time, plus we have taken several family vacations here.
8. Colorado.  So many great memories as a kid of skiing and church mission trips.  This should be higher.
9. Missouri.  I lived within a stones' throw of Missouri for 3 1/2 years.  All the Royals games I have attended should push Missouri up the rankings.
10. South Carolina.  My wife and I got married here and spent a week in this state.
11. Virginia.  My brother lives here.  I've been there a few times.
12. Mississippi.  When I was grad school I preached in tiny backwater churches here sometimes.  And one night my friend Derek and I went to Tunica to see the casinos.  Probably the #1 reason why I don't gamble...casinos are depressing places.
13. California.  I've taken several family trips here, and when I lived in Oregon would sometimes cross the border to look at the Redwoods.
14. Washington.  Also related to Oregon.  Mt. St. Helens is awesome.
15. Hawaii.  Spent six beautiful days in Hawaii a few months ago with my wife.  Laid on the beach.  Listened to humpback whales sing underwater.  This too needs to get higher.
16. Michigan.  Saw a Tigers game once.  Flew there for a wedding once.  It's starting to get thin.
17. Iowa.  Field of Dreams, yeah.
18. Minnesota.  Took two family vacations here.  Neither is all that memorable.
19. Nebraska.  Nebraska probably is near the top of the ranking of percentage spent in that state that I was driving to go somewhere else.
20. South Dakota.  In high school we took a mission trip to the Black Hills.  Mt. Rushmore!
21. Idaho.  My casino friend Derek and I drove to Idaho once so he could do a wedding.  Also, my u-Haul broke down here while moving to Oregon.
22. Florida.  I went a work conference in Tallahassee once.  It rained the whole time.
23. New Mexico.  My wife's G-Pa was buried here, so I spoke at his funeral.
24. Utah.  My sister once lived here.  Mormons and skiing.
25. West Virginia.  I had a job interview here one weekend for a church.  They never bothered calling back.
26. Kentucky.  Ditto.
27. Georgia.  I vaguely recall taking a family vacation when I was a small child here.  I don't remember much about this.
28. New York.  The week after my brother got married I remember going to a Mets game with my friend Rob, and thinking wow, those planes from LaGuardia get really close to buildings.  This was two weeks before 9/11.  Also upstate is beautiful.  Baseball hall of fame.
29. Maryland.  Orioles games while near DC.
30. Delaware. Rehoboth beach.  I think that's how you spell it?
31. Pennsylvania.  A beautiful state I remember from the year after college when I drove around and camped out and tried figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.  
32. Massachusetts.  Cape Cod.
33. Maine.  It's a bigger state than you think.  And did you know that it used to belong to Massachusetts?
34. Wyoming.  Yellowstone national park.
35. Rhode Island.  On said college trip I remember eating at a restaurant here and thinking that it was likely a mob front.
36. Vermont.  On said college trip I remember camping a few nights here and being cold in the middle of July.
37. New Jersey.  On the way from my brother's wedding to New York a few weeks before 9/11, I remember getting stuck on the New Jersey turnpike in a massive Sunday afternoon traffic jam.  If it wasn't for this New Jersey would be even lower on the list.  Atlantic City is a hole.
38. Ohio.  I remember this to be a wholly unattractive state.
39. Arizona.  I remember it was 114 degrees in Phoenix.
40. Indiana.  I have friends from college who live here.  I don't think I've ever visited them.
41. Illinois.  I know I've been to Chicago, but can't recall being anywhere else in the state.
42. Louisiana. My college friend Glen lives there.  Cajun country.
43. Alabama.  No memories but I've taken it as fact that I once went there.
44. Connecticut.  I vaguely remember a waterfall at a place I vaguely remember as Devil's Elbow.  I'm too lazy to confirm that this exists.
45. New Hampshire.  To get from Maine to Vermont you have to drive through New Hampshire.
46. North Carolina.  One day on our honeymoon we thought, hey, we oughta drive into North Carolina.  So we can say we've been there.
47.  North Dakota.  On our second Minnesota trip we drove through North Dakota for an hour.  We ate at a McDonald's in Fargo.
48. Wisconsin.  On our first Minnesota trip we drove through Wisconsin for an hour.  We didn't stop to eat.  No cheese sightings.

For all the Obamacare haters, my personal story (so far)

I know that Obamacare has a bad name amongst many of you.  The recent election was in essence a referendum on it and President Obama, and it was hated.  Conservative talk shows and Fox News regularly campaigns against it, and the coming Republican majority of congress has pledged to end it.   Court cases may soon mean that all that I'm going to write about goes away.   But listen to my story before you decide to keep hating.

My wife and I both work jobs in which our employers are unable and unwilling to provide health insurance.  That's fine...having health care through an employer makes you more attached to those employers than you should be; you face great uncertainties about changing jobs because you don't want to have to change your insurance.  But for us, this freedom to move has meant we needed to buy health insurance ourselves.  When we got married a decade ago, we paid what I already thought was a high amount for insurance and we have kept it for a decade.  It has been pretty good insurance, paying most of the bills when she had her appendix out while out of state and when we had our two children.  But yearly the rates went up, usually 12-15% per year on average.  Over the course of a decade the premium to cover us (and eventually our two children) tripled.  It's not like we were sick much, either...just yearly shots for the kids and a yearly visit to the allergist for our son.  Maybe a few other appointments, but our rates showed us paying much more in than we were getting out of the insurance.  A few times we looked into other plans, but most anything comparable cost even more than we were already paying...so we stayed where we were.

Then Obamacare went into effect.  And for the first time the rates stopped skyrocketing...I think that last year our premium only went up 3%.  We were hoping that maybe with competition the 'affordable' part of the Affordable Care Act really meant something.  But a few weeks ago we got our renewable notice for 2015, and once again the rates went way up: 13%.  We were now going to be paying more per month for health insurance for a healthy family than the combined cost for our mortgage, homeowners insurance, a car payment, and car insurance for both cars.  Something was definitely wrong.

So we decided to use the health care marketplace on healthcare.gov when open enrollment began today.  Could we find something better?  Hopefully.  I started shopping and now had almost too many choices, 32 different plans from 4 different providers.  Some of them were rather cheap, but had lots of out-of-pocket expenses.  Others were expensive (in other words, basically what we were going to pay now), but paid for almost everything (which was not the case with what we had).

I will confess that the signup was not the easiest in the world...it took me almost half an hour to get to the actual health plans after telling them most of my life story.  I think I had to indicate that I was a white male non-Latino a half-dozen times.  But eventually I got there, and all the information about the details of the plan were stated rather clearly.  Again, there were almost too many choices, but we settled on something in the middle of the pack...a decent deductible, a decent maximum out-of-pocket, and decent co-pays.  We also added on a separate dental plan.  All in all, the plan is very comparable to what we had previously as far as costs we will incur through the year.

So, what't the damage?  Compared to what we paid this year, 27% less for both plans.  Compared to what we were going to pay for next year, almost 35% less.  And this doesn't factor in the $1600 in tax credits it says that we will receive for 2015.  (To be honest, I'm not sure whether that's $1600 for each of us or just $1600 for all of us.  I think it's all of us, but hey, that still ain't bad.)  The total amount we will save even with the smaller number comes to over $6800 for our family.

Now, Obamacare may be distasteful for you because of your ideology...should the government be involved with this at all?  I know...keep your government hands off my medicare, you are saying.  But health care companies, like most large companies, have generally shown that they can't be trusted to do the right thing on their own.  When forced into something, they're not going to be able to bleed us as much as they were doing before.  Yes, maybe I could have found all these things on my own rather than through a government website.  But a one-stop shopping area for health insurance that meets certain standards and can't free-market itself into cheating me?  Fine by me.

Or maybe you hate Obamacare because you don't like that it's changing your own insurance.  You are working for a company that is being forced to change their own policies (or even end their policies) because of skyrocketing health care costs.  But let me ask you this...is it Obamacare doing this?  Or is it the last vestiges of a dying employer-based health care system grabbing whatever it can before collapses in on itself?  What's really the really the problem?  Maybe it's just that your company sucks, and is run by somebody upset because he won't be able to afford a third vacation home.  You figure that out.

Maybe there are other, genuine reasons to hate Obamacare.  There are other affects of this that will not be known for awhile.  The bureaucracy of healthcare is only increasing, and that's distasteful to me.  I don't really want to go through the government to get health care, and given other government involvement (hello, VA!) with the health care system, I'm still a bit wary.  Likely direct control of the health care system is not good.  I've been wondering if maybe a single-payer option is good, and let the government run the whole thing.  Probably not.  Quality will suffer and innovation will dry up if that's the case.

Of course I don't know what the future holds with this.  There's a real possibility that it turns into a disaster.  If it tries screwing over me or my family, I'll come back and say that it did so, and find something else and join you in your hatred.  Who knows, maybe this plan will also go up 13% each year and in a few years I'll be back where I started.

For now, though, I'm looking forward to taking that $6800 that I will be saving in 2015 and doing something productive with it.  Maybe I'll demand-side boost other parts of the economy.  Maybe I'll add some extra funds to my kids' college fund or to my IRA.  Maybe I'll give more generously to some charities.  Hopefully I won't have to pay more taxes to support the evil government.   But one thing I do know is that a lot more of my family's money will not be going into the pockets of health insurance companies in 2015.  And that surely is a good thing, right?

Fear in all the wrong places

Several years ago I stopped watching TV news because I hate the fear.  Don't go out at night or you will be raped and murdered!  ISIS!  Ebola!

Fear is everywhere in our culture today, which is remarkable because probably there has never been a more secure time to live.  We're not really in danger of war coming upon us; we have security everywhere we live; and even all the health scares out there usually only come up because people are not as hygenic as they should be.

For all the fears that we could have, are we afraid of the wrong things?  Likely.  So my parents just got back from a trip back east to see my brother and on the way they stopped and saw some old friends.  They woke up the next morning not feeling well, but eventually left.  They arrive back home this week and find out that the people they stayed with died because of carbon monoxide poisoning this week.  Actually one of them is still alive but not expected to live...but you get the point:  this is something serious!  Had my parents stayed with these people for a few more days, this is something that could have actually killed them, something that likely happens in many places.  It's a reminder to me to a)get the furnace checked and b)make sure the carbon monoxide detector is working.

So many people today are going crazy over the fears 'out there'.  Congressmen seek to gain political points by talking them up, newscasters look for ratings by scaring the crap out of people.  'We've got to stop these horrors!', but in the end they forget about the things that are really dangerous.  What of Congress devoted as much as time to making sure every furnace in America was safe rather than criticizing policy about Ebola?  Wouldn't that actually be a more productive use of their powers?

A friend of mine was driving to work yesterday when somebody ran a stop sign and almost killed him.  It could have been much worse: only one fractured vertebrae and a lot of aches and pains.  But a serious wreck nonetheless.  But stuff like this happens all the time...people minding their own business driving to work, when somebody not paying attention causes a major, dangerous wreck.  Where's the outrage?  Why aren't our streets safer?

Carbon monoxide poisonings and car wrecks kill far more people than the Ebola virus in our country.  But one we freak out about, the others we ignore.  Maybe we'd just rather be scared by fake stuff (hello, haunted houses!) than things that are real.  But that's just stupid.

The Double Standard of 'Terrorism'

Last week in the news there was a story from Oklahoma of a man who was angry about being fired.  He walked into the personnel office of his business and decapitated one woman and was in the process of killing another woman when one of the managers came in and shot him.  A horrible story...but what captured the attention of everybody (beyond the beheading...CSI episode alert!) was the fact that he was Muslim, and that he had been trying to talk to people about his Muslim faith in recent months.  Naturally, the question became not whether this was a horrible crime, but whether or not this was TERRORISM.  Whether this was JIHAD.  Whether this was part of the evil holy war that Muslims were waging against us good Christian folks.

Everyday in the news here in our good Christian nation there are stories of bad people doing bad things to bad people.  A man goes in and kills his girlfriend and then turns the gun on himself.  Two school teachers in Louisiana are arrested for having group sex with a 16-year-old student.  A politician is found to have traded political favors for his wife getting a cushy job.  Bad things happen all the time...but how many do we call these people Christian terrorists?  Many bad things are done by good church-going folks, but it's never terrorism when we do it, we think...just bad things done by bad people.  Muslims, we say, are told by their religion to do a terrible thing.  Christians, we say, could never be told by their religion to do a terrible thing.  We overlook the fact that Christians literally 'took the cross' in 1095 when encouraged to go and invade Jerusalem (and many places along the way, Muslim and non-Muslim alike).  We forget that various Christian groups declared war on each other in the centuries after this.

Why is it that we continually call every evil thing Muslims do terrorism (and such a product of the culture of an evil religion), but every evil thing a Christian does to be simply an individual choice?  We set a double standard for these things, and quite honestly it's not fair.  As Christian people we should know better than to engage in hatred and suspicion, of thinking that 'They' are bad unless other wise proven to be good and that 'We' are good unless otherwise bad.  Grace should stop this stupid thinking that find ourselves engaging in.

But here's an exercise to help cleanse you of these things:  Next time you watch a news report of somebody done somebody wrong, ask yourself, are they Christian terrorists?  If nothing is said of their religion, assume that they are.  If 85% of Americans still identify themselves as Christians, surely their Christianity played a part in their evil, right?  Do this enough times and maybe you'll hate Christians too, just like you hate Muslims.  And the culture of fear will have won yet again.

Wednesday morning phone call

I’m lousy at remembering the details of conversations with people, but this is what I remember as closely as possible about a conversation I had this morning. 

I received a phone call this morning from what sounded like an elderly woman.  ‘Are you the traditional Church of Christ’?  Uh oh.  I wanted to flesh this out, so I asked her what she meant.  ‘I mean, the one that doesn’t have music.’   ‘Well, we have music.  We sing.’  ‘That’s what I meant.  I was just wanting to make sure that you didn’t use instruments.’

After she mentioned that she had thought we had two Churches of Christ in our town, we then proceeded to talk about why this was so.  Historically we can see this division being about personality and ‘issues’, but to me, it’s a shameful mark about the disunity of the body of Christ.  Eventually she asked,   ‘Was this the church that was identified with J__ ______’?  ‘Yes ma’am, I knew J__, but he passed away a few years ago.’  ‘Oh, OK, J__ was the man who baptized my husband and me, and I think it was at the church in your town.’

Side note that will become increasingly important:  I didn't know J__ when he lived here, but I have heard stories of his baptizing people, and I'm grateful for that.   But from what I gather he was something of a legalist.  I do know that J__ was a contentious old guy when I knew him, who preached in a small town near here after leaving this church.  The few conversations I had with him gave me the impression that he believed his own church was the only right one, and that there weren’t any faithful, ‘sound’ churches anymore, except his own, including the one at which I preach.  When he died, his little church was only a handful of people who were likely as legalistic as he was.  I’m not sure if it even exists anymore.

After a bit more talk about the two churches, she got to her point.  ‘I was wondering if you were available to baptize somebody today.  My husband wants to be re-baptized because he doesn’t feel that his first one was for the right reasons.’  Oh boy.  ‘We can, but I’d like to meet with him first.  Can I talk to your husband?’

Eventually she put him on.  I could tell he was very hesitant.  ‘So, why do you want to be baptized again?’  ‘When I first started attending church with my wife, she would take the Lord’s Supper and I did not feel as if I was able to do so.  So, eventually I decided to be baptized.  After all these years I don’t feel I got baptized for all the right reasons.’ 

Right reasons.  What is this, an episode of the Bachelor? 

‘Can I ask you something?  Are you a believer?’  ‘Yes, I am.’  ‘Do you believe in God’?  ‘Yes, I do, and in things like that.’  Things like that?  ‘Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins?’  ‘Yes, I do.’  ‘Do you believe you are saved now?’  ‘Yes.’  There were a few other questions I asked along this line, but again, I stink when it comes to remembering this word-for word. 

‘Can I ask you one more question?  Do you and your wife attend church anywhere?’  I was starting to get the impression that he had not attended church in awhile, because I’ve met more than a few folks who justify not going because in their minds no church is truly faithful anymore.  ‘Yes, we attend in W_______, but we live in B_______.’  ‘Maybe you need to talk to the elders or the minister of the church there about this.’  ‘I’m a private man.  I don’t want the show that they have when they baptize somebody, with cameras and all that.’ 

The beginning of the end of the conversation likely came from my response.  ‘One of the truths I have learned about baptism is that it is a very public act.  If you aren’t doing this publicly, then would this really be an acceptable baptism?’  Really, would he keep from his church family that he did this? 

He started pulling away for good at this point and was working to get off the phone.  But as he did I tried pulling this train wreck of a conversation back onto some tracks. ‘Sir, let me be honest with you.  It sounds like you don’t need to be baptized again.  It seems pretty obvious to me that you need to talk to somebody at your church in W_______ about this, the elders or a minister or somebody. Baptism is not your problem.  Trusting in God’s salvation through Jesus is.  In the end baptism is not showing off your own goodness.  It is trusting in Christ, allowing him to save you.’ 

Somewhere in the conversation I mentioned my own ‘imperfect’ baptism at the age of 11, and how I have in the last 30 years grown in my understanding of baptism and the grace of God.  We’re not saved, I told him, because we have perfect understanding.  We’re saved by God’s grace; if I got re-baptized every time I learned something new (and wonderful!) about baptism, I’d have been baptized a dozen times. 

At this point he said goodbye and hung up.  My suspicion is that he (or actually his wife, who likely is the one reminding him of his unworthy baptism and calling into doubt his faith) will be calling other Churches of Christ in the area, a traditional one (we’re all traditional around here, mind you, but that’s a post for another time) that will re-baptize him with no questions asked.  By the time I finish writing this, they’ll probably already be in their car on the way to a traditional, faithful church for him to get dunked for all the ‘right reasons’.   

Over the course of this 10-minute phone call I confess that I never got their names.  I already feel bad about how I handled this, and I am thinking about all the things I should have said, how I should have quoted Scripture about the grace and mercy of God and how only Jesus is our hope, not our goodness.  Hindsight makes us replay these conversations in our mind and makes us feel guilty for not getting it all right.    

But more than anything I feel especially bad, because this man, likely because of his wife’s ‘concerns’, lives his life in a constant fear.  Some go to one extreme in their thinking of ‘Once saved, always saved’…but far too many Christians I have come across over the years think ‘Once saved, barely saved.’  In a way, I can understand why they think like this…they’ve probably heard too many guys like J__ ________ talk about how everybody else is wrong, and you had better be certain you get it all right.  How can you ever be sure of your salvation?  More than anything, though, many never take time to understand even the very basics of God, and ‘things like that’.  Many have taught that faith is not about a relationship with God…it’s simply a list of propositions to believe and actions to prove their worthiness.  They’re so focused on what they think they have to do that they forget what it is that God does. 

I’m not sure what I’m more upset about, though…is it the legalism that brought him to this crisis (which is not entirely his fault), or the fact that he has to keep what he is doing a secret from his home congregation?  Legalism can be cured over time…but to think that faith is only a private matter, how sad is that?  How has he become so suspicious of the family of God that he wants nothing to do with the church when he is being baptized? 

Maybe I'm completely wrong about this.  Maybe I should have just dunked him and made him feel better and gone on.  He doesn't live here, so I'd never see him again likely.  But regardless, I need to pray for this man:  not because he is not saved, but because he doesn’t feel he is saved.  There’s probably been little joy in his Christian life to this point, and even less genuine Christian community with whom he can share his concerns.  And even after he gets re-baptized, probably later today, he still won’t know any of those things.