Elliot Ritzema

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  • Sioux Falls to Rapid City

    Sheesh, I really need to finish writing about this road trip before it becomes a distant memory.

    On Sunday morning in Sioux Falls, SD, my brother and I got up and went to my buddy Dave’s church – First Evangelical Free of Sioux Falls. It was good to see where Dave had come from, church-wise, and it seemed like a nice enough church. The people were friendly, and it seemed like your typical evangelical church in terms of its architecture and style of service: large, clean building, not a lot of decoration, service very sermon-centered. I’m not trying to find fault with that here; I just noticed it because it was quite a bit unlike the Anglican church that Dave goes to in Vancouver. Dave preached, and did a bang-up job of it too, I might add.

    On our way to Rapid City (which is at the western end of the state), we went east instead of west for a few miles. The reason for this is that I had never been to Iowa before, and Sioux Falls is right on South Dakota’s border with Iowa. So we drove across the river and, predictably, we saw a “Welcome to Iowa” sign right next to a cornfield.

    After taking a picture, we were on our way west on I-90 to Rapid City. Not too far away from Sioux Falls, though, we stopped in Mitchell to have a look at the famous Corn Palace. Every year, they decorate the Corn Palace, inside and out, with corn. Here is Mt. Rushmore made of corn:

    And a few other murals inside:

    My brother standing outside:

    With all that corn around, I got the hankerin’ for some:

    And then, we were on to the Badlands. From I-90, there is a loop that heads south from the highway, through Badlands National Park, and then back up to the highway. We took this loop, stopping along the way at various pullouts and the visitors’ center to take pictures. It wasn’t the best day for hiking, even if we had been interested: it was blazing hot.

    The end of the Badlands loop brought us to Wall, SD, home of Wall Drug Store – and little else. We stopped at Wall Drug and picked up a few things, and then headed on to Rapid City.

    Once we got to Rapid City, we checked into our hotel, had dinner at a ’50s-style diner across the parking lot, and relaxed in the room until it was time to go to bed.

  • Colbert Report: Washington’s 2nd District

    This post goes out to all my family and friends who don’t know much about Bellingham, the city where I now live.

    Washington’s 2nd District on the Colbert Report

  • Wauwatosa to Sioux Falls

    On Saturday, August 23, my brother Jas and I drove from Wauwatosa to Sioux Falls, SD. Jas had driven this stretch of I-90 several times before, since his brother-in-law is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. After Rochester, though, we were both in a place we had never been before.

    At a rest stop, we got to see how country singles meet:

    Austin, MN is the home of Hormel, the maker of Spam. While passing through, Jas and I stopped at the world’s only Spam Museum:

    They had a Wall of Spam just inside the entrance:

    They also had a Spam Counter, which told us how many cans of Spam had been sold since its introduction in 1937.

    Brett Favre was also there, eating a burger, with a milk mustache, and wearing a Spam jersey that he had signed:

    There was also a video screen that repeatedly played the famous Spam sketch from Monty Python.

    It ended with a gift shop, as it should. The museum itself was free.

    Then we continued driving through southern Minnesota:

    And we ended up in Sioux Falls, where we had dinner and stayed with my buddy (and former roommate) Dave from Regent. Oh, and we also went to see the Falls:

  • We Could Talk, or Not Talk, for Hours

    Is it just me, or is this title really funny?

    (It was found at the FaithWorld Reuters blog)

  • August 2008: Books Read

    It’s that time again to make a public mental note about what I read in the past month. With the road trip and all, though, there wasn’t much going on in August, reading-wise.

    1. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. Reviewed earlier here.

    2. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. In recent years, Steve Martin has been less visible as a movie star and more visible as a writer. It used to be that the only writing peep you would ever hear from him was the occasional humor piece in the New Yorker, but now he writes novels, plays, essays, and now: autobiography. This is an entertaining read, and a quick one; I finished it in just two days. In it, he tells the story of how he was drawn to stand-up comedy as a young man, and how he moved away from it after several years of success. Along the way, he writes about his relationship with his parents, his life among young entertainers in Southern California in the ’60s and ’70s and – this is interesting to me, as a Christian – his romantic dalliance with the future Stormie Omartian. I have never read Omartian’s books, but I have seen them on display in Christian bookstores. They generally begin with the phrase, “The Power of a Praying…” and then the phrase is completed with any one of a number of possibilities: Wife, Husband, Parent, Babysitter, Second Cousin, etc. Martin writes about their relationship taking place well before she was married or became a Christian, but nevertheless – it’s interesting.

    3. How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Mark Strauss. This book is the third in the “How to Read the Bible…” series, and I read it in preparation for a class I will be teaching at my church this fall about where the Bible came from. I decided to add a section at the end on translations, since there are many people with many opinions on this. There are those who think that the King James Version descended on a cloud from on high, there are those who think that gender inclusive language amounts to liberalism sneaking in the back door, there are those who just want a translation that makes sense, etc. No matter what your opinion might be, I recommend this book highly if you want to get a grasp on what the issues are in Bible translation, and why there are different translations in the first place. Their chapter on “Gender and Translation” alone is worth the price of the book. In the interest of full disclosure, I will make clear (as Fee and Strauss make clear in the book) that both the authors are on the translation committee of the TNIV (as well as others). This is one of the versions that has caused a kerfuffle over its gender inclusive (not “neutral,” as the authors point out) language.

  • Louisville to Wauwatosa

    After spending a day and a couple of nights in Louisville, I drove through Indiana, and the Chicago area, to Wisconsin to visit my brother and his family.

    The drive was relatively uneventful, but I will make a few comments:
    1. Based on what I saw during the day I was passing through, I would not recommend speeding in southeast Indiana. I probably saw 10 cars pulled over by the police within the space of an hour and a half.
    2. If you want to save on gas mileage, move to Indiana. It’s flat, and the speed limit on the highway isn’t 75 like it is in the western states (It’s lower).
    3. Don’t EVER drive through Chicago, if you can help it. Especially if there is construction going on. And there always seems to be in the summer months.

    After I got to Wisconsin, I spent some time hanging around with my sister-in-law and two nephews until my brother got home from work.

    The next day was an eventful one. I went to the Milwaukee County Zoo with my sister-in-law and nephews, where we saw some orangutans:

    and Calvin and I rode the train:

    Then I got in touch with my friends from Regent, Ryan and Tony, and we all went on a tour of the Miller Brewery. At the beginning we were shown a video which began with the words: “From the beginning, man has longed for Miller Time.” From there, it mentioned “Miller Time” perhaps dozens of times. The tour was fun (and we got free samples at the end), but it was mostly good to catch up with Ryan and Tony:

    Later that day, my brother and I went to Miller Park to see the Brewers play the Pirates. The Brewers have been selling out lots of games lately, so it was fortunate that we were able to get tickets. It was a great night: I had a brat with “stadium sauce” on it, and the Brewers won, 10-4.

    You couldn’t ask for a better day. The only thing that could possibly have made it better would have been if Bernie Brewer (the Brewers’ mascot) still slid into a huge beer mug after a Brewer hit a home run, like he did at the old Milwaukee County Stadium.

  • Fayetteville to Louisville

    My road trip from North Carolina to Washington began when I got into my little ’99 Mercury Tracer and left Fayetteville, NC on a warm August day. On my way out of town, I took this picture to show people in the northwest that an “ABC store” is a liquor store.

    I don’t think they have anything they call “ABC stores” in Washington, but some have been influenced by visits to Hawaii to associate the name with the convenience store chain there.

    I drove northwest until I hit highway 40 around Winston-Salem (home of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company – hence its name sounding like two brands of cigarette). Just north of town, I stopped at a Bojangles‘ fast food restaurant before I got too far north and wouldn’t see them anymore. Bojangles’ is famous for its chicken and biscuits, though I tend to make sure to get sweet tea and a sweet potato pie whenever I go there. I didn’t go to Bojangles’ very much when I was growing up; I just took it for granted. But when I went to college in Richmond, VA, just far enough north to be out of Bojangles’ orbit, I began to grow nostalgic for it. Now, whenever I go back to North Carolina, I make sure to stop there at least once so I can get a kick out of looking at the menu and seeing side dishes called “fixin’s.” It was a good thing that I stopped at this one, because it was the last one I saw on the trip.

    I then continued north on highway 52 toward Mount Airy, which is the hometown of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for Mayberry. I’ve been through there many times before on my way to and from Michigan to visit relatives, but this trip I cut over to interstate 77 before I got there. I took I-77 north to Charleston, WV and got off the highway to look at the capitol. I’ve gone back and forth between North Carolina and Michigan perhaps dozens of times, and each time I looked out the window at the West Virginia capitol, which is only a few blocks from the highway. On this trip, though, I stopped and took a look around.

    And boy, am I glad I did! For one thing, they have this great statue of Senator Robert Byrd in the rotunda. If you just glance at it, you could almost convince yourself that he has a Ziploc baggie in one hand, and is pointing at a pile of feces that his dog left on the floor. Or maybe that’s just me.

    I drove west from Charleston on interstate 64, and this stretch of road (as well as during my time in Louisville) I encountered some of the worst driving of the trip. I experienced more people cutting me off, and changing lanes without signaling, during this stretch of the trip than any other time. Including when I was driving through Chicago. Unbelievable.

    In spite of crazy West Virginia and Kentucky driving, I made it to Louisville, where Ryan and Sarah, friends from college, recently moved. They were great hosts, and took me around to see the city. That night, we went to the Ohio River as the sun was setting:

    The next day, I went on a tour of the Louisville Slugger museum, stopped by Churchill Downs, and visited Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Just in terms of appearance, it is worlds away from Regent, where I went. For starters, they have more than one building. It looks more like a small, southern liberal arts college than anything else, though it did remind me a little of Princeton seminary, which I visited several years ago. The only building I went inside was their student union building, where I browsed around the bookstore for a while and got a couple of books.

    After Ryan got off work that afternoon, the three of us went to the Jim Beam distillery, just south of Louisville. It is one of the many distilleries that are part of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and the nearest one to Louisville. It wasn’t bad, though they apparently don’t give actual tours of the distillery. They do let you inside the old Jim Beam home, though, and they do give samples. If I’d had a little more time, I would like to have gotten to the Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, KY. There, you can dip your own bottle in the red wax they seal it with.

    After that, we went to a place called Kaelin‘s for dinner. There are many places that claim to have invented the hamburger, but Kaelin’s is the only one (that I know of) to claim to have invented the cheeseburger.

    I did not eat one. Instead, I had something else for which Louisville is famous (but which I had never heard of before this trip): a hot brown.
    If you have never had one, and you’re not a vegetarian, my advice to you is: do.

  • Obama the Bible Scholar

    Like a lot of people, I watched Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech last night. I don’t have the time or inclination to go over the whole thing and say what I liked and what I didn’t, but I will tell you what stuck out to me the most: his use of scripture at the end.

    What he said was this, according to a transcript of his speech at ABC News:

    Instead, it is that American spirit – that American promise – that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

    A couple of paragraphs later, he said:

    America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

    What he is quoting here appears to be 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, and Hebrews 10:23. Here they are, in context (NRSV and ESV):

    For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

    Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.

    In the first Bible quotation, the thing that is “unseen” is eternal glory, not the “better place around the bend” that Mr. Obama refers to (though it should be said that he didn’t refer to the Bible explicitly. This could perhaps be excused as simply a verbal allusion). In the second quotation, the hope we confess is the hope that we can appear without guilt before God through the intervention of our high priest, Jesus. I’m not sure what hope Mr. Obama was talking about. Presumably, it was not that.

    Lest you think that I’m just being hard on Mr. Obama, I am not. I think that it is unfortunate whenever any political figures take the Bible out of context and use it for their own ends. This has a very long history, but in recent memory, the national political figures who have earned the most notoriety for doing this have been Republicans. Here is a quote from a speech given by President Bush in 2002:

    “And the light has shone in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.”

    This is a quote (sort of) from John 1:5 (NIV): “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” In context, the “light” is the light that Jesus provides. In President Bush’s use, the light appears to be the United States, the darkness appears to be the enemies of the United States, and overcoming appears to refer to the triumph of the United States over its enemies.

    Ronald Reagan is also well known for his references to the United States as a “city upon a hill,” which was a reference to Matthew 5:14, in which Jesus says to his followers (NIV): “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” When he referred to this in his speeches, though, he made clear that he got it not straight from the Bible, but from Puritan John Winthrop. It was Winthrop’s idea to apply this scripture to his group of Puritan immigrants to America; Reagan went further and applied it to the United States as a whole.

    Mr. Obama is also continuing a tradition of quoting the Bible in the service of American political ideas, and I wish that he had decided not to. This is troubling to me as a Christian and an American because it does two things: 1) it quotes the Bible out of context and contributes to popular misunderstandings about what the Bible says. It takes words like “hope,” which have definite meanings in biblical context, and uses them to signify something else, often something more vague. 2) It tends to identify the Bible, the church, and Christianity with one particular party, platform or nation.

    One of the many detrimental effects of this idolatrous civil religion is the perception of the United States abroad. If our leaders quote the Bible in public, and justify our actions as a nation using biblical passages, then people abroad will tend to think of us as Christians and will tend to associate Christianity with everything about American culture, including those things that Christianity condemns about American culture. The gospel is already scandalous to the world. I don’t want to put more stumbling blocks than necessary in the way of people accepting it.

    In the end I think, with Abraham Lincoln (whose biblical allusions were in general more measured and helpful than many of his successors), that we should be concerned not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God’s side. When we quote the Bible out of context, applying the language of God’s people to the United States, we pay lip service to God while refusing to come face-to-face with him. It seems to me there is a verse I could quote about that, and I hope I don’t quote it out of context:

    The Lord says:
    These people come near to me with their mouth
    and honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me. —Isaiah 29:13 (NIV)

  • Road Trip Recap

    Whelp, we finished with the road trip on Tuesday, my brother flew back to Wisconsin from Seattle this morning, and I’m back in Bellingham. It was a fantastic trip; I posted some photos from it on Facebook yesterday. If you are not on Facebook (or if you are, but haven’t gotten around to seeing the pictures yet), here is a link that you can use to look at them:

    Bros on the Roads – Road Trip 2008

    I’ll get around to blogging about specifics later, but for now here is a brief overview:

    Number of states visited: 14

    Number of new states visited: 3 (Iowa, South Dakota and Montana)

    Number of new states for my brother: 3 (South Dakota, Idaho and Washington)

    Number of total states visited in my life: 41

    Number of state capitals driven through: 4 (Charleston, Frankfort, Indianapolis, Madison)

    Number of state capitols visited: 1 (West Virginia)

    Number of miles traveled: 3324.5

    Amount spent on gas: $411.42

    Gallons of gas consumed: about 110

    Cheapest gas: $3.37 / gal

    Best mileage for a gallon of gas: 35.55 mpg (I was driving through wonderfully flat Indiana)

    Worst mileage for a gallon of gas: 25.34 mpg (driving through mountainous western Montana. Also, speed limits in Western states tend to be higher, so we burned more gas going the same distance)

    Number of monuments to alcohol visited: 2 (the Jim Beam distillery and the Miller Brewery)

    Number of national parks visited: 3

    Worst drivers: Kentucky and West Virginia

  • Bros on the Roads

    After hemming and hawing and plotting and analyzing for over a month, I decided not to buy a scooter. I thought that buying a scooter would be a good idea for a long time, partially because I care about conservation, but mostly because I am cheap. In the end, though, I decided that given my current circumstances, I had better not do it. The main thing about my circumstances that led me to abandon my plans of zipping around town on something that got 70 mpg is the fact that I don’t have any other mode of transportation. While having a scooter sounds fun during the summer months, and maybe even some of the fall months, the thought of skidding around in the frost and drizzle of a Northwest winter was harrowing.

    Instead of buying a scooter, then, I am going to spend a slightly smaller amount of money flying across the country, retrieving my old car from my dad, and driving from Fayetteville, NC back to Bellingham. By the time I get it to NW Washington, it should have about 100,000 miles on it. It’s a great little car; never had any problems with it. Probably has at least another 60,000 miles in it. I fly out from Seattle early Sunday morning. Here is the proposed itinerary:

    Spend a day in Fayetteville, visiting my parents and packing the car.

    Drive to Louisville. Visit Ryan and Sarah. Maybe visit Slugger factory.

    Drive to Milwaukee. Visit brother, sister-in-law and nephews, and maybe friend Tony. Go to a Brewers game.

    Drive to Sioux Falls, SD with my brother Jas. Visit my friend Dave. Watch Dave preach at his church.

    Drive to western South Dakota. Visit the Corn Palace. Visit the Badlands. Visit Mount President Head.

    Drive to Montana. Visit Little Bighorn Battlefield.

    Drive to Coeur D’Alene, ID. Visit friends.

    Drive to Spokane. As brother is big Bing Crosby fan, visit Bing’s boyhood home. Pick up some Bing memorabilia.

    Drive to Bellingham. Jas flies back the next day.

    Blog about the whole thing.