I'll bet someone at the Lutheran Youth Group head office is going to get fired over this. I'm in New Orleans this week for the spirit industry's premiere insider trade show, Tales of the Cocktail, and we're sharing the hotel tonight with a few hundred of Jesus' most devoted teens, here for a Christian youth conference. You really couldn't pick two more opposite groups to occupy a space.
Everywhere you go there are throngs of giggly, pimply, eager youths holding booklets that say "Jesus Saves," pouring in and out of the elevators, flanking the pool, and standing on the front steps. We were told we - the evil doers - had booked the entire hotel for the week but apparently that doesn't start until tomorrow. So for now, chaperoning moms in headbands will have to keep averting their eyes, and likely using the masses of tattooed, Hawaiian shirt clad, bearded, hat wearing "freaks" surrounding their precious treasures as examples of what could happen to you if you were to go astray!
Me? I'm somewhere in the middle. Not into Jesus, as you know, but spiritual in my own way and not against organized religion because I think for those who aren't as maybe independent and curious as someone like I am, it's a way to get some of the benefits of spirituality, without too much downside. I mean, there were the wars... and the concentration camps... but today's religious right in the U.S. (or at least the Lutheran teens sharing the gym with me today) seem pretty harmless. Live and let live. Isn't that the foundation that New Orleans seems still to be based on today? A city mired in racism, and yet everyone, even those on the down side of it, seems sort of OK with it.
I ran 4 miles at the gym this afternoon, overlooking the Bayou, after counting boxes in an oven of a warehouse. The gym was air conditioned, and had a fan, and I used the fan built into the machine, but it was still hot. I drank a liter of water - no joke - in 49 minutes. My toe-related foot pain came and went, and was worrisome, as was my mental and physical fatigue. I've lost ground. No place to go but up. Not going to let work get in the way of my training this week. 4 more miles tomorrow and the next day, and then 10 on Saturday. Keep me accountable, will ya? Because beignets, the pool, and bottomless free cocktails are going to pose a mighty distraction!
Back at ya tomorrow, y'all.
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