Dec 09

If I had a hammer

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A few weeks back, I had a post encouraging you to think about attending Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program next summer.

I followed that up with a post about why going out of town (or out of the country) for a short-term missions experience complements, rather than competes with, the ministry you and your church do in your hometown.

I didn’t really have any master plan for this when I started, and you may be sick of it already, but I think I’m going to continue on with some posts exploring some more specifics. I’m going to start with individual posts exploring the various ministries in which you can participate at AIM.

Mountain T.O.P. was started in 1975 as a youth ministry, with church youth groups as volunteers, and the youth summer ministry (YSM) remains the largest and best-known part of Mountain T.O.P. But as years went on, the Mountain T.O.P. staff saw needs in the ministry’s service area that were beyond the ability of youth volunteers to meet. YSM volunteers perform minor home repairs such as building a wheelchair ramp, but there are people in the service area, which includes some of the poorest communities in Tennessee, who have much more severe housing needs.

Adults In Ministry was started in 1989 as a way of extending Mountain T.O.P.’s impact. Major Home Repair has been, and continues to be, the biggest part of the AIM program.

Like the other AIM programs, MHR is open to anyone, regardless of gender, age (well, you have to be an adult, but beyond that it’s pretty broad) or experience level. MHR, by its very design, has professional contractors or other highly-skilled volunteers working side-by-side with 70-year-old grandmothers. Everybody learns something. The newcomer may learn some practical skill like how to use a circular saw. The professional contractors, I suspect, sometimes have to learn how to bite their tongues.

But no one – no one – should count themselves out of MHR based on lack of experience. The program loves to get highly-skilled volunteers, don’t get me wrong, but it is designed to be a good experience for anyone.

The heart of that experience, and one of the reasons it’s so compelling, is in the concept of team-building. While Mountain T.O.P. exists to be in ministry to the people of the Cumberland Plateau, it has a secondary goal of meeting the needs of its volunteers. That secondary goal is the reason for some of the ministry’s policies and practices, developed over the past 36 years of ministry.

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Dec 04

Grease is the word

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I was in the mood to make jerky – but I’ve been trying to watch my expenses. No whole muscle jerky, unless I can find a suitable roast on some sort of deep expiration-day sale. I couldn’t find one today. I went looking for ground beef and found the store-ground meat, made from trimmings, for a cheap price. Unlike most of the ground meat, which tends to be ground off-site, the fat content isn’t labeled for these trimmings.

Fat is necessary for a well-marbled steak or a flavorful burger, but for jerky it’s best avoided. It’s not necessary to jerky’s flavor. More to the point, fat goes rancid long before the muscle, saturated with salt, sugar and other preservatives, would ever go bad. So if you’re making whole muscle jerky, you want a lean piece of meat and you want to trim any fat you can find. If you’re making ground meat jerky, you want the leanest beef you can find – sometimes labeled as “diet” or “extra-lean” ground beef.

But it’s not a complete catastrophe if there’s some fat in your jerky, especially if (like me) you end up consuming and/or sharing the jerky soon rather than setting it aside long-term. When there’s fat in the ground meat, it often beads up on the jerky as it dehydrates, and you can come through with paper towels once or twice during the drying process and blot some of it away. I am making the jerky at the maximum temperature setting on the dehydrator (instead of the next-to-highest, my usual choice) in hopes that will help render some of the fat in this fashion.

With ground meat, for safety reasons I generally use commercial seasonings containing some sort of cure – not as much fun as throwing together a marinade for whole muscle jerky, but perfectly acceptable. I added a little red pepper flake for extra kick.

Nov 29

Hit the road

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A couple of weeks ago, I had a lengthy post about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program and why you – yes, you – should join me there next summer. If you missed it, I’d consider it a personal favor for you to read it now. I’ll wait here until you get back.

Anyway, I was walking at the rec center today, thinking about that post, and realized there was one issue I meant to cover and didn’t cover in great detail, although I sort of got got close to it a couple of times. It’s a pretty big issue, one I’ve encountered whenever I talk about Mountain T.O.P. or whenever I talk about my foreign mission trips. It’s more relevant than ever right now, because of the tough economy.

People from all over the eastern U.S. come to Mountain T.O.P. camps, but sometimes when I talk to my own friends and neighbors here in Tennessee about it, I get a response – sometimes implied, sometimes stated outright – that it makes no sense to go to Grundy County (or Kenya!) to be in ministry when there are needs right here in our home county.

It’s exactly right that we have needs, serious needs, right here at home. We see that more clearly at the holidays than at any other time of the year, although the needs themselves are year-round.

But the first point I want to make is that it’s not an either-or situation.  Listen to the very last words Jesus spoke to his disciples before his ascension:

Acts 1:8 (NIV) “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus calls the disciples to be in ministry in their home city, in their region, and beyond.

It needs to be said, immediately, that what you do on a mission trip, domestic or foreign, is not a substitute for, or an alternative to, being in ministry in your home community the other 50 or 51 weeks out of the year. And, in fact, many of the people I know who are most passionate about short-term missions are also heavily-involved in various ministries, non-profits or community outreach in their hometowns. One of my good friends from both Mountain T.O.P. and LEAMIS trips, Jan Schilling, is a great example of this. One week, she’s in Kenya making charcoal; the next week, she’s back home in Smyrna working for Habitat For Humanity or an animal shelter or doing some other type of volunteer work.

The “Mountain T.O.P. song,” which the ministry has adopted as its theme song, makes allusions to this; we can’t live on a mountain top, but we can take our mountain top experiences home with us and share them “in the valley below.”

It’s also important to note that there are different types of needs in different places. I would never make light of poverty here at home, but then again there’s no comparison between being poor in Bedford County and being poor in the Kibera slums outside Nairobi. The poorest person in Bedford County has access to clean water, free school for the kids, emergency room care, and various types of public assistance. People in Kibera live in tiny huts, crammed together like sardines, with filthy water running between them, in constant danger of being attacked or robbed.

Grundy County is much closer to Bedford County than to the Kibera slums, but even in that case the needs are different. Poverty in Grundy County goes back decades, and there are conditions which are short-term hardships for us but a way of life for them. There are cultural differences, geographic differences and vicious cycles that apply in the mountains that make it different from life here at home.

In some ways, it’s not a matter of one person being needier than another. You’d go crazy if you tried to rank or prioritize the needs of every cultural subgroup in Tennessee, much less Planet Earth. But when we recognize that there are different types and levels of need, we recognize the value in exposing ourselves to different cultures and different types of ministry.

Short-term mission work takes nothing away from local ministry. But I’m going to go further than that: I think short-term mission work enhances local ministry.

The primary purpose of a short-term mission trip is the ministry being conducted, the people being served. But an important secondary benefit of a short-term mission trip is that it often serves as a time of spiritual development and refreshment for the volunteers themselves. I know it has served that purpose in my life; I sometimes feel selfish for going on such trips, because it seems as if I get more out of them than I put into them. There is something about the process of separating yourself from your regular routine, immersing yourself in intense Christian community, making obedience to God your primary focus, that can be powerfully inspiring and uplifting. As a former Mountain T.O.P. board member, I’d like to think that Mountain T.O.P. is organized and operated in ways that maximize this effect, but it’s by no means unique to Mountain T.O.P. or any other specific organization.

I think that process requires getting away from your regular surroundings. If you lived in Grundy County, I’m not sure Mountain T.O.P. would have the same impact on you as a volunteer. Frankly,  I think you have to get out of town to get the full impact of being in short-term mission.

If that sounds interesting to you, get in touch with me or go to the Mountain T.O.P. website for more information.

Nov 27

A grueling regimen

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Several years ago, Alton Brown did a “Good Eats” episode about oatmeal, and extolled the virtues of steel-cut or “pinhead” oats. At the time, I couldn’t find them anywhere in Shelbyville. At one point, a Quaker version of the steel-cut oats appeared in one of our local stores, but then it disappeared. Then, a year ago, I discovered McCann’s, first in a canister and then in a box. Now, perhaps in response to the McCann’s product, the Quaker steel-cut oats are back on the shelves here as well. I bought a canister last week.

I probably need to eat these more often than I do.

Oat grains, in order to be cooked to an edible consistency in a reasonable amount of time, have to be broken down in some way. The Quaker oats of your youth, and the instant oatmeal packets you might enjoy, are made from rolled oats – the oat grains are flattened between metal rollers.

Steel-cut oats, instead of being flattened, are cut up into smaller pieces. The result is similar to traditional oats in flavor but has a much more substantial, chewy texture, as opposed to the mushy texture of rolled oats.

The trouble is that traditional steel-cut oats, like the Quaker product, take longer to cook. McCann’s has a quicker-cooking version. I did find online that the traditional steel-cut oats can be made in a rice cooker, which is convenient if not quick.

Alton has a recipe for cooking steel-cut oats overnight in a slow-cooker, although it does me no good because it makes four servings, and cutting the recipe down probably wouldn’t work right in the slow-cooker.

If you like oatmeal, but you’ve never tried steel-cut oats, you need to. Try the quick-cooking version, or get the traditional version and make it overnight or on the weekend or a day off work.
Nov 25

It’s time to get things started on The Muppet Show tonight …

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I was over at my father’s house this evening, and so my tersely-worded Facebook review of “The Muppets” was posted via cell phone:

Muppets FTW. Exceeded my high expectations.

I probably don’t need to say much else, but I wanted to anyway. My father, my brother and sister-in-law from North Carolina, their two children and I went to see the movie this afternoon in Tullahoma, and I could not have been more pleased. It was entertaining, respectful of the franchise and yet imbuing it with a fresh new energy. Like the reboot of “Star Trek” a couple of years ago, it was intended to be accessible to newcomers while rewarding to old fans, and like “Star Trek” it succeeded wildly on both counts. I have no idea to what Frank Oz might be referring when he implied it was disrespectful to the characters or canon. This was no more a departure from previous Muppet projects than some of those projects were from each other.

Most important of all, it was just good fun. My nephew, who sat next to me in the theater, told me he knew I found it funny because I laughed at it so much. Absolutely. He and his five-year-old sister loved it too.

Anyway, it was hard not to feel a tingle of excitement when they recreated the opening credits of “The Muppet Show” for the big screen.

I don’t want to give too much away, but there were fun celebrity cameos. I’ll spoil just one, and it’s one you have to look quickly for anyway: When Kermit tries to get the old gang back together, Fozzie is performing in Reno, Nevada, as the only authentic part of a seedy Muppet tribute band, the “Moopets.” I had to laugh when I recognized that the drummer, dressed to look like Animal, was Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. (Speaking of Nirvana, there’s a performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” later in the movie that has to be heard to be appreciated.)

Kudos to Jason Segel for what was obviously a labor of love as producer, co-writer and co-star. Amy Adams is wonderful, too, and Chris Cooper is fine and funny as the scenery-chewing villain (including a somewhat-unexpected musical number).

Also, if you’re a Pixar fan, be sure and see “The Muppets” in the theater because there’s a “Toy Story” short subject before the movie – a nice play on the relationship between real toys and the little toys that come as premiums in fast food children’s meals.

Nov 22

Popularity contest

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I have to admit it – my votes for J.R. Martinez in this week’s finale of “Dancing With The Stars” had nothing to do with his dancing. I had the show on, but I was (as usual) working on the computer at the same time, and I can’t say that I was watching all three routines carefully, or that I would have been qualified to judge between them even if I had.

TV talent competitions are as much about likability as about skill; they are, in part, popularity contests, for good or for evil.

So, here were my choices:

* One of the stars of a sordid and silly reality show, built around the fame of the dancer’s sister from her widely-populized sex tape.

* An actress and daytime talk show host. I got no problem with her as an actor, but her daytime talk show (like Maury Povich, and Jerry Springer, and countless others) was one of those that makes hay out of voyeurism and exploitation of such topics as “cheating husbands” and what have you.

* A combat veteran, injured and disfigured in the service of our country, who, rather than collapse into despair and self-pity – as I certainly would have done — became a motivator, encouraging his fellow injured veterans and then becoming a leading motivational speaker. He has been honored by veterans groups and serves on the board of an organization for burn survivors.

J.R. could have pulled out a folding chair and remained seated on the dance floor for five minutes, and I’d still have picked him over Ricki Lake or Rob Kardashian. I make no apologizes.

Nov 20

Prime ‘Primetime’

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I wrote this blog post two weeks ago, after the episode of “America In Primetime” having to do with changing male role models. But everything I wrote is even more applicable to tonight’s final episode of the documentary, about the role of TV “crusaders” from The Rifleman to Hawkeye Pierce to Dexter Morgan. A couple of tonight’s interviews stated outright, in self-congratulatory fashion, that the moral ambiguity of today’s TV is in every way universally superior to simpler heroics. As I wrote two weeks ago, I think there’s a place for the dark and gritty, but I think it’s a fallacy to always assume that grittier and darker automatically equals more valid – or even more realistic, since any type of dramatic storytelling is inherently unrealistic.

Tonight’s episode built up to, and ended with, “Dexter,” and it’s interesting that some of the producers of other shows actually feel that Dexter’s serial-killer-with-a-code goes too far. Even the producer of “The Shield,” the main character of which is a corrupt police officer, felt that he couldn’t endorse Dexter Morgan as a sympathetic central character. (I don’t get Showtime, and I’ve never seen “Dexter.”)

Anyway, my disagreement with some of what the interview subjects had to say takes nothing away from my appreciation of the documentary – all four episodes. It was well put together, insightful and watchable.

Tonight’s episode included a favorite story of mine about “M*A*S*H.” The writers had crafted a script in which Hawkeye and B.J. conspire to give a gung-ho officer, who keeps taking his men into harm’s way, a needless appendectomy in order to keep him from putting any more enlisted men at risk. Mike Farrell, who played B.J., objected to the script. He felt that a doctor would never take a scalpel to a healthy man, even for this purpose, and he and Alan Alda had a heated argument about it. They finally realized that their argument would make compelling TV. The script was rewritten to have Hawkeye and B.J. disagree as passionately over the issue as Alda and Farrell had.

I had long known that the creators of “M*A*S*H” hated the laugh track which was imposed upon them by the network. They did manage to get the network to agree to forego the laugh track for scenes inside the operating room, and for occasional special episodes (I think at least one, maybe both, of the faux documentaries with Clete Roberts was without a laugh track). What I did not know was that the show ran without a laugh track in the U.K. Hugh Laurie of “House” revealed this during the documentary tonight, saying he thinks British viewers took the show more seriously as a result.

Nov 16

Why AIM? Why you?

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I’ve posted or Facebooked several times lately about Mountain T.O.P. Adults in Ministry. Last summer, I went to two separate weeks of AIM (just to be clear, I’m only suggesting you do one). It was the first time in several years I’d been to the summer AIM ministry. I’d been a couple of times to fall AIM weekends, and those are great as well, but to me there’s something special about the kind of community that forms during a week-long event. Plus I have a passion for two programs that are only offered during summer AIM events. I had forgotten just how much I missed the program, and it meant a lot to me to be there.

I’d really like to take some more folks with me in the summer of 2012. I’m already trying to lay some groundwork at church. I already go to church with two Mountain T.O.P. regulars, Andy and Edna Lee Borders; Andy is currently on the Mountain T.O.P. board, just as I used to be. But we’ve never been able to make that connection to convince others to take the plunge. I’d like to change that this year.

But if the reader will indulge me, I’d like to widen my net a little bit, and invite you – yes, you – to join me next summer.

George Bass, the founder of Mountain T.O.P., used to say that trying to describe Mountain T.O.P. to someone who’s never been is like trying to explain what a banana tastes like to someone who’s never eaten one.

But I’m a writer, and I like explaining things. So I’m going to endeavor to explain what this program does for me and why I think you would enjoy it as well. But first, here’s the brand new AIM video, which will take  you about four minutes and change to watch:

 

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Nov 13

Gummy cuisine

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I was a huge fan of the original Japanese “Iron Chef,” and for a good while I was a fan of “Iron Chef America,” especially because of the involvement of Alton Brown.  But as Food Network became obsessed with a glut of food competition shows, I got tired of the phenomenon. And, strangely enough, I was never really a fan of “The Next Iron Chef,” although I can’t really explain why. One of the few times I did watch it, a chef who I thought behaved like a total jerk (*coff*JoseGarces*coff*) ended up winning. Yes, it’s a cooking contest, not a popularity contest, but that’s sort of the point – I’d rather the producers pick an Iron Chef who is both talented and likeable.

Anyway, when Cooking Channel debuted – with everything I used to like about Food Network – I started watching it, and now I rarely watch Food Network at all. (Even Alton’s “Good Eats” reruns have moved to Cooking Channel).

But tonight, with nothing else to watch and not ready to go to bed just yet, I’m watching an episode of “The Next Iron Chef.” This season, unlike previous seasons, is an all-star edition featuring well-known chefs, most of them already current or past Food Network or Cooking Channel personalities. (They stole that idea, like much of the “Next Iron Chef” format, from “Top Chef.”) They’re preparing two dishes – one sweet, one savory – and each of them has been assigned a movie theater snack or candy as a secret ingredient. Alex Guarnischelli, who apparently won last week’s episode, got to choose her own candy – chocolate-covered raisins – and then assign each of the other chefs with their treats, which included cinnamon “red hot” candies, gummies and those super-sour-coated sweet candies, as well as popcorn and root beer. Surprisingly, Chuck Hughes got poor marks for his popcorn dishes; you’d think that popcorn would have been the least-objectionable of the options for savory cooking.

Anyway, this episode is relatively entertaining, and several of the participants – like Guarnischelli and Michael Chiarello – are chefs whose programs I’ve enjoyed in the past. I might tune in again some time between now and the finale.

There was also a foodie theme to “The Simpsons” tonight, with guest voices from Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.