Stories from Lockdown

March 30, 2020

Del Mar, CA

 

 

 

Yesterday was a better day. I learned about zoom and connected with local and East Coast friends. Steve Valle on Cape Cod showed me his newly renovated home. Great fun. Bert Edelstein and Karen Helrich with great humor described their safety measures. It brightened up my day.

 

Earlier I had gone to practice my short game. A man stopped to chat from twenty feet and told me I could practice at the Surf Soccer fields a couple of miles away. I checked it out, but the fences around the fields were locked up. 

 

Months ago, Shelia Sharpe, a local psychologist friend, asked Vicki and me if we would give a talk to a group of Del Mar people about our trip to Pakistan in 1996. We agreed and a few weeks ago we made our presentation to thirty people in the home of a local resident. Many stories came out of that month-long excursion to the basecamp of K-2, and tomorrow I will write about some.

 

Tony Spell, the pastor of the Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been conducting services and encouraging parishioners to attend. He sends buses to pick up some members of his congregation. Recently more than 1200 people came to services.  This is how he described his decision:

 

 “This is the America we’re living in now, where people are being persecuted for their faith,” Spell said as he took the singer’s hand.”

 

A psychologist might say that the pastor’s problems with authority are putting at risk the well-being of many.