30. Time To Expand Our Vocabulary
In this rough way, the German question was finally settled. By the end of the year 1871, fifty-six years after the memorable gathering at Vienna, the work of the Congress had been entirely undone. Metternich and Alexander and Talleyrand had tried to give the people of Europe a lasting peace. The methods they had employed had caused endless wars and revolutions and the feeling of a common brotherhood of the eighteenth century was followed by an era of exaggerated nationalism which has not yet come to an end.
Feel free to read
more on the names in caps yourselves. That paragraph from Hendrik
Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind (originally published
in 1921 and the first winner of the Newbery Medal the following year)
gets me in mind of our Western North Dakota Synod Conference in
Bismarck this weekend, the one at which Martha and I were voting
delegates, and besides the election of a bishop – in this case, the
re-election of our bishop Mark Narum to another six-year term – and
the debate on and passing of five resolutions and the two-session
workshops we attended on improving our church,
a lot doesn't stick
out to me. Oh, we did have a great music group comprised of musicians
from all over the United States whose name lends itself to the first
new vocabulary word I promised: glocal. It's a mashing
together of the words “global” and “local”; the formal term
for that is portmanteau and other examples are smog
from “smoke” and “fog” and and motel from “motor”
and “hotel”. “Glocal” may not make it into the next edition
of your friendly neighborhood dictionary, but “portmanteau”
should already be there, and I'm not being pretentious about that.
And WHERE, you may
ask, were Sarah and Jeffrey our doting offspring while Martha and I
were with Kim and Pastors Janet and Gerald this Friday and Saturday.
Thursday night after I'd gotten off work we fed them and then brought
them packed to their grandparents (Martha's dad and mom) Robert and
Sharon to stay there until Saturday afternoon when we'd be home …
then we had to go back home to bring their school backpacks that they
had forgotten. So Friday morning we started out EARLY after filling
our van's gas tank (really, we haven't FILLED IT in a while)!
Martha and I got home Saturday afternoon and we came to our niece Breanna's graduation party still in full swing with family and friends coming in and going out – Pastor Gerald and his wife LuAnn were even able to drop by after visiting a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. And food, of course food. And after church Sunday I got to start my second job, working weekends at Marketplace deli closest to my house! And by the end of my shift, I no longer quite felt like an elephant on roller skates. Meanwhile, I can't wait to not have to wake the kids for school beginning Friday!
I am always being
made new, David
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