tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-168759762012-01-11T09:34:54.004-05:00Celebrating what works when the world is falling apart...Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.comBlogger141100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-65259568221060843242008-09-23T13:12:00.011-04:002008-10-09T13:05:50.939-04:00

The November issue of DisciplesWorld is to include an article by California pastor and writer Katherine Willis Pershey. In it she will consider how 30 years ago, Jim Jones managed to lead more than 900 people to their deaths while his congregation, People’s Temple, was still listed in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Yearbook and Directory. I hope you'll read this issue when it comes

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-84150252752957618012008-06-25T23:21:00.003-04:002008-06-26T00:19:41.622-04:00

My last post is dated November 2005. A lot of water under the bridge since then -- literally -- and a lot closer to home than New Orleans. Yet here is my blog, still telling a years-old story as if it had just happened. As if there had not been wars and floods and earthquakes (even one right here in Indiana) and watery storms all over the globe too numerous to even name. As if I had never reached

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1133219435268974112005-11-28T18:10:00.000-05:002005-11-28T18:10:35.316-05:00

I always dread Wednesday at camp – that day when the new wears off and all the happy campers start to get on each other’s nerves. On Wednesday at camp, it’s too soon to know how much you will miss this place and these people – yet too late to live on the euphoria of irrational expectations. I came to Houston anticipating great things. I was called to Houston for three months to help offer

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1132295412003157742005-11-18T01:30:00.000-05:002005-11-19T00:11:51.886-05:00

I could hear the smile in his voice. Todd Williams, pastor of New Covenant Christian Church in Houston, called to say he had just put a 17-year-old boy on a bus home. The trip ends a two-and-a-half year street-life chapter for the boy, who hung out in the near-downtown neighborhood where I work.Badly beaten the night before, this young sojourner had finally had reached his limit. He tracked down

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1131774904364654692005-11-12T00:55:00.000-05:002005-11-12T00:55:04.403-05:00

The phone rang a couple of weeks ago. It was Paul David Longstreth, a soft-spoken jazz piano player, displaced by Hurricane Katrina. He got my name from his dad, a Disciples pastor in Houston with the same name as his son. Young Paul David expressed the gratitude his jazz colleagues feel toward the City of Houston and the cultural community. “Things have been quite good for us,” he told me. “We

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1129613311706056212005-10-17T22:25:00.000-05:002005-10-18T00:28:31.746-05:00

A friend from church wanted to be sure that in the midst of my three months in Houston I still got to spend some time with my family. Right after the board meeting at my church, when my assignment was announced, she slipped me her business card with a note handwritten on it: "Good for one roundtrip airline ticket... call me."This week, I cashed in the gift for a rendezvous with my people in the

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1128916872858215372005-10-09T23:01:00.000-05:002005-10-09T23:01:12.893-05:00

We humans. We live on a planet that reminds us just how small we are: We're ants. Yet we persist in thinking so highly of ourselves. We're tiny mutants bred to believe we are in charge of something; that we have some God-given responsibility for a planet that simply sighs and one of our cities disappears in the vapor. Yet here on this spinning rock in the absolute middle of Nowhere, we pack

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1128810808117034882005-10-08T17:33:00.000-05:002005-10-09T20:33:37.206-05:00

If you play Bingo with Ms. Rita Mae Brousseau, get it right. Wins can be had with five in a row vertically, horizonally or diagonally -- OR by scoring all four corners of the card."Now tha's regular Bingo," she says, dropping the T for extra emphasis. Ms. Brousseau (not her real name) knows. She called the Bingo games back in a New Orleans casino. Pity the poor soul that calls the game at the

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1128404034493639082005-10-04T00:33:00.000-05:002005-10-04T21:22:27.933-05:00

I love pipe organ music. I can sit on an old, hard pew for a long time to hear the majesty of Bach echo from the stones of a well-built cathedral. I love the way it can shake me in my seat, or whisper to me as I pray.So, I gladly visited an Episcopal Church on Sunday. I knew they would not disappoint in the music department.But Rector Jim Nutter climbed into the pulpit at Palmer Memorial

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1128204560002398792005-10-01T17:03:00.000-05:002005-10-03T00:49:46.390-05:00

It's odd, being in Texas. I mean, I grew up in Oklahoma, where we didn't waste a lot of respect on our southern neighbors – not that they cared a whit what we thought of them.But here I am, submitting myself to the hospitality of people who have the reputation for an arrogance that is, as they say, bigger than Dallas. Texas gave us the Bush dynasty and Tom DeLay. Need I say more?Well, yes. I am

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1127968296359146962005-09-28T23:31:00.000-05:002005-10-10T09:53:25.886-05:00

The ministry I officially assist as of today -- Neighbors2Neighbors -- aims to connect "new neighbors" in Houston to "welcoming neighbors" here. As you might guess "new" folk are evacuees; "welcoming" folk are locals. They hope to reach 20,000 families (or roughly 60,000 of the 150,000-plus evacuees) and recruit and train the same number of welcoming families. I grew up in a town of 5,000, so

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1127860852193989892005-09-27T17:40:00.000-05:002005-10-01T13:48:51.976-05:00

I am in Houston now. I arrived at about 2 p.m. today. Once I reached Nacadoches, on highway 59 south, I started witnessing the damage: first a few trees topped off, then massive trees ripped from the ground. Lines went down with some of the trees, so crews were on the highway, here and there, restoring electrical service. Roofs were ripped off and the plastic in huge signs was blown out, leaving

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1127414288418951042005-09-22T13:38:00.000-05:002005-09-22T14:24:01.563-05:00

I heard somewhere that butterfly wings influence weather patterns: a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and, voilá, a few weeks later, thousands of miles away, a hurricane slams the Gulf Coast.In fact, NASA says African weather patterns called Easterly Waves do impact the development of tropical depressions, storms and even hurricanes that hit the United States and the Caribbean. Not exactly

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16875976.post-1127241357056033052005-09-20T13:35:00.000-05:002005-09-22T13:58:41.313-05:00

I want to thank my daughter Chrystina for setting up my blog. She admitted to me a few weeks ago that she was feeling pretty helpless in the face of the tragedy of Katrina. The news just kept getting worse. You know what she means. So did I. So, I stopped what I was doing and wrote her back:Dear Tina,Katrina makes me weep -- a lot. I watch stories that just rip my heart out. I think about how

Patti Casehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11277900761976504775noreply@blogger.com1