Today and tomorrow, I’m doing something I’ve done many times over the years, but there never used to be a name for it –“Stay-cation.” Tomorrow morning I’m supposed to be interviewed by Stacy Harp over at Active Christian Media, so I figured that, since I’d certainly take that morning off rather than do it on the job, I might as well take Monday too and make it a long weekend.



Yesterday was the 150th anniversary celebration of my home congregation, Hauge Lutheran in Kenyon, Minnesota. This was a special edition of the annual service held at the Old Stone Church, our original building out in the country. This is how it looked.

I’d been asked to give a short historical talk. I did that, and it went all right (I’ll post the text tomorrow). Pastor Horn got to preach from the high pulpit, which you can see over to the right in this interior shot.

A tall pulpit like that seems out of place in a church of our tradition, where we take the Priesthood of All Believers very seriously indeed, and our pastors have learned to keep any expectations they may hold about exalted status locked in a chest in the cellar. But Pastor Horn says the people who built those old churches knew their business. When you’ve got a balcony, he says, you’d better have a high pulpit, or the people in the nosebleed seats won’t hear what’s said.

Which suggests that they may have missed a lot of my talk, delivered from the podium at the center of the picture.

Then again, that may have been to their advantage.

Afterwards the pastor and his family, along with numerous Walkers and Walker affiliates, gathered at the home of one of my distant cousins for lunch. This was a new home, which I’d never visited before.

And it was located in a part of town I’d never seen before.

To fully appreciate how remarkable that last statement is, you’ve got to realize that Kenyon is a town of 1,600 people. It was 1,600 when I was a kid, and it’s still 1,600 today.

How does anyone manage to miss an entire neighborhood in a town of 1,600?