How Can I Benefit From This?.... and a Covington Update

Welcome to Massachusetts!

   Don't worry- you get used to stuff like this, Lou...

   "Refugee" is kind of a misnomer. We generally associate it with someone leaving a country to escape persecution, but it can be anyone who seeks refuge. Still, there isn't a nice term for them yet. "Evacuees," "Displaced Persons," or "Residentially Challenged (what I used to use)" will work for now, but a rose by any other name....

   We are all going to pay for this. Federal funds will pour into the Gulf Coast. Gas prices will rise. National businesses- especially those dealing in insurance- could fail. States that are landlocked a thousand miles inland will suffer the wrath of the ocean storm in some manner.

   But there are benefits, once you get past that whole rejoicing-in-someone-else's-misery stuff. Sometimes you move to a small town where they nevereverever win the local high school Super Bowl- like Bourne High (lol) on Cape Cod...

   And sometimes the recently closed military base(in the woods on the other side of the Cape Cod Canal, nonetheless) gets 3000 or 4000 so of what we'll call "Recent Louisianans." That might just be enough to bring a Super Bowl to Bourne High.

  

   I'm not totally evil. I can give you a Pastor's name in Louisiana who will speak highly of me:

www.trinitychurchonline.net 

   Still, I'd be remiss to ignore a storm related sports story that sort of dropped into my lap in my new Cape Cod home. This blog is about sports, and it has been on a storm related tangent since the month started. If I ignore this story, we're left with nothing but recipes and chatter.

   I don't think I'd be wrong by saying that half of these Recent Louisianans are elderly, and half of that remaining 50% will be children. Maybe a third of those kids will be high school age. Your average, say, freshman class at Bourne High (greatest name ever) may have 60-100 kids. 2 or 3 hundred Louisiana kids will basically double the size of the school.

   Bourne isn't bad right now. They are 5-0, and- I swear- they have 3 kids named Fernandes who are already killing the other schools.  The Canalmen have a large Portuguese population, as do most Massachusetts towns where seamanship was appreciated.

   Keep in mind, Louisiana kids are probably more into football than your average Cape Cod Ckid. Also understand that SE Massachusetts tends to be really white once you get a mile or two away from the ports or the center of Brockton. It would only take one 300 pound sophomore 17 year old Nate Newton Jr, or a gunslinger QB of an Eli Manning cousin to tip the scales in our favor.... we're talking about a complete shift in the local high school football balance of power.

   It's sort of like one of those economic stimulus packages, in a football sense... except that it only benefits the town with the big empty military base.

(Bourne High and Duxbury High are in different conferences, so no conflict of interest exists here.)

   I've seen worse in Massachusetts, which gave America the term, "Gerrymander." When I first moved to Duxbury, the big rivalries we had were with neighboring Marshfield (larger and blue collar), and  Cohasset- which, along with Duxbury, were the snobby rich kids.. I personally kicked a lot of Cohasset assets on various fields and courts during my time as a Player.

   They were usually lily-white encounters- the only black girl I knew in Duxbury was Missy, the daughter of a Reebok VP, and she listened to Debbie Gibson. Other than her, black people were something you only saw when you went to Boston, like skyscrapers. Our Rodney King Race Riot was Missy's father slamming his fist off the BMW dashboard when the verdict was announced during the Business News.... and he was only mad because they interrupted the business news.

   Cohasset was even more, ummmmm, whiter.

   If you need a visual image of Cohasset... rent The Witches Of  Eastwick.  It was filmed in Cohasset. Duxbury looks the same, only richer. You can run into Joe Perry or Tom Brady in a sub shop in Duxbury.   We used to trick or treat at Juliana Hatfield's Mom's house. Lots of 350 year old houses. Big Bucks...

    But when I was a kid, Cohasset ran a Schwerve, as they say in the WWE. Using a program called METCO, they brought students from the urban hell of Dorchester to the more peaceful coastal life of the suburban rich. Amazingly, 3 of these kids were BUTTA on the hardwood, and Cohasset ran off a Globetrotter-esque 4 state titles.

   One of the kids- BC's Bryan Edwards- was playing with thevarsity as an 8th grader, and is still Massachusetts' leading high school male scorer. They also had a 6'8" leaper and a wizard of a PG who later played at Pitt.

   Cohasset- which may have had a 40 kid senior class- could have probably beaten EVERY local college team... Boston College included. They lookedlike the And One Tour Team, and they thrashed Duxbury like a dominatrix every time they played. I am pretty sure they milked METCO for 20 years or so, and may still be doing it.

   The girls team did it, too. I can recall lying dazed on the court as a junior, with a 200 pound girl heading the other way with the basketball I just had....and a whole bunch of girls I knew from their soccer team openly laughing at me from the Cohasset bench.

(Smurf 2006?)

   That was more shady than what Bourne High is about to have happen. Imagine picking a fight after school with some rich kid punk... but when you show up, you find that he's hired Ray Lewis as a surrogate. That's Cohasset.

  Bourne is more of a case where somebody is rewarded for doing something good. Louisiana has a pile of homeless people. Bourne has a partially empty Air National Guard station. Maybe Bourne skims a QB, a HB, a couple o' WRs, two CBs and a DL or two out of all those other people we are sheltering. As this is a soccer town, we'll provide the kicker.

   It's not like we went down there and recruited...and godamnit, should wetell some displaced kid he can't play in our Reindeer Games? So what if a sudden infusion of Dirty Dirty South gives Bourne an unreal edge on the local 100 yards of grass? How many Recent Louisianans do you think friggin' Fairhaven is sheltering?

   How happy I am. It's Win-Win. We have the houseparty- they bring a bunch of food. Everyone goes home happy... except the other local schools, and they have their own blogs to write in. Eff them. We will bathe in their blood.

 

Enough evil. May as well check in with Das Pastor:

 

Friends,

Here is a quick note to keep you in the loop and help you to pray specifically.  Here is a sampling of the human toll interacting with folks in the last day:

1.    A church family lost their house completely in Slidell.  Everything is gone. Yet a couple drove their 5th wheel from Michigan and gave it to them for free.  God provided.  Yea God!
2.    Another family lost their home.  Trees destroyed it.  Someone is letting them live in their home until December.  Yea God!
3.    An attorney lost his entire law office.  The hurricane set off the sprinkler system and it rained inside the building for 2 days.  The building needs to be gutted.  Pray.
4.    My staff helped a tough 80 year old man remove debris.  He started to cry and said thiswas the first time in his life anyone has ever helped him for nothing.
5.    One family stopped into the church after seeing our sign “Free Food, Free Water”.  We helped them and then the team gathered around and prayed for a specific family need.  One hour later they called and said God answered the prayer and their faith was restored.
6.    One man I talked to had yet to hear if many of his New Orleans relatives survived Katrina and he was searching desperately for them
7.    One Middle Eastern man wanted to know if Katrina was God’s judgment on the French Quarter and New Orleans forwickedness.  This question gave me an opportunity to sharethe gospel of Christ.
8.    One of our men had a Mexican young man show up on his property.  He was lonely, disoriented and hungry.  He had bicycled out of Slidellin the hurricane to escape the flood waters.  He had not eaten for days and didn’t know where to go.

The list could go on and on.  Everyone has a story.

Praise:

1.    Power is being restored to neighborhoods immediately surrounding the church.
2.    Relief teams have arrived from California, Ohio, Maryland, and Illinois.  A team from North Carolina comes tomorrow.  A man came from Texas to cook for the teams.
3.    We had a spirit led, God honoring worship service yesterday.  We rejoiced in being alive.  The church is being the church – caring,loving, listening, mobilizing.

Prayer:

1.    Pray for spiritual revival and renewal.  God has our attention.  Pray for a spirit of surrender and yieldedness to the calls of God.
2.    Pray that we let our light shine in such a way that people see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven.  This happens one person at a time.  As one person said, “Jesus is in us.  Now He wants to come out of us.”  The opportunities are endless.  Last night our half dazed, hot and tired neighbors were outside.  With no A/C since the hurricane they weren’t sleeping at night.  After getting a generator in our bedroom, we invited them to stay in our bed and we went to another house.  They were grateful.
3.    Pray for my staff.  Burnout is easy in these situations and we have just set up a rotation to get people out for 2 days at a time.
4.    Prayfor wisdom in setting up organizational structures to sustain the effort over many months.
5.    Pray for our church families who have no jobs or who have jobs now in jeopardy.  Pray for those who lost homes or have great damage.  Pray for wisdom as schools are out and life is difficult.  My guess is that over half the church is scattered throughout the south.  Some people are moving out of state.  Pray for wisdom.

There is so much more.  Got to go.  Ask the Holy Spirit to take my meager prayers and communicate them right to the Father.  He will!

Betting the farm onGod,

Michael

 

http://gurnetroad.com/