Good morning ladies and gentleman. I come to you this morning from East Bristol where I am
embedded in a queue of customers waiting their turn at a place called Weber Tires.

While I wait to be ordered into action I'll describe this place as best I can. East Bristol rests
just north and east of booming Sun Prairie. But you wouldn't call this place booming. Other
than a Roman Catholic Church, this tire place offers the only boom in town. Mostly picturesque
farms surround this burg.

Weber Tires does only one thing - tires. Want a break job? Forget it. Need a new muffler - not
here. Oil change? Nope. Air filter? Nope. Car wash, tune up, wipers? Nope, nope, and nope.
It's all about tires.

The place is also one of the last bastions of true equality. Here a late model SUV parks next to a
rusty Econoline van. There's lots of pick-up trucks. Some are full of manure from a hard
working farmer. And it's first come first served. No use calling ahead for an appointment. Even
the President would have to walk in and have his name written on a piece of cardboard by the
lone female who works there. "What kind of car do you have?" she would ask. "Somebody will
be with you in a minute," she would tell him.

The wait begins. One time I came here on a Saturday morning in November. The first major
snowfall of the year was predicted for Sunday. I'd known since September that I needed new
tires before the snows came, but procrastination got the best of me. Apparently a goodly portion
of the northeast Dane county had been infected by that wait-til-tomorrow disease. What a line!
What a wait!  Three and a half hours.

Today the line is shorter. There's my call. "Berggren, brown Concord." Time to sign off.
Around here, you snooze you lose.

Pastor B.

It happens every spring. Or at least it's been happening since I was old enough to push a lawn
mower. The subject today is dandelions versus lawn mowers.

I've never lived anywhere that didn't have soil that supported a yard bouquet of dandelions. A
specialist at UW-Madison said recently that the upper Midwest has the best conditions in the
world for dandelions. The role of the dandelion in the great scheme of nature is to find a
foothold in newly disturbed or bare soil. The plant has roots that quickly go deep and protect soil
from erosion until other slower growing greenery can take over.

However, it would seem that someone forgot to tell the dandelions that once my lawn has been
established they're job is over. They never leave. They continue to populate. And now the
worthy plant has become a problematic weed.

Now, I'll admit, in the yellow-orange stage a lawn full of dandelions kind of perks up the place
after a long winter and the ugly raw of March. But then comes stage two - the fluffy white head
that every kid in the neighborhood enjoys blowing into the wind thereby planting the tricky little
weed into the neighbor's lush, green lawn.

The real uglies begin at stage three - an empty dandelion flower head sticking up like some
eighth grader raising his hand to ask to go to the bathroom. I've never measured, but I'm sure
they extend four to six inches above the rest of the field.

One would think, or maybe it is just my warped thought, that these weird stems laying out their
necks to the guillotine would be easy pickings for my five horsepower, sharp-bladed lawn
mower. Like a lunatic I run over these churlish scrubs with my teeth set and the desire to behead
in my heart.

When the task is done I look in the wake of the mower and see the even trim of a well manicured
lawn. The mower eventually is put away, the merciless job complete. Then in an hour or two I'll
be back surveying the greensward for whatever reason and see what I can barely believe. The
naked stems have returned. They wave brazenly in the wind as if thumbing their noses at me.

Like the Queen of Hearts my mind screams, "Off with their heads." Ah, but after all these years I
know it is futile. Dandelions know how to duck.

Pastor B.

The wayside rest. Before the Interstate Highway system ribboned the country with four lanes of concrete, America traveled on two lane roads. Itchy legs and full bladders required a stop now and then. Since fast food restaurants had not been invented yet, the choices for stopping boiled down to a grimy gas station (full service but the restroom hadn’t been touched in months) or the occasional wayside rest.

The wayside usually consisted of two outhouses (one for men and one for women), a hand pump, and a couple of picnic tables. I can only speak for the men’s outhouse, of course, but I’m pretty sure there was usually enough toilet paper. Hand washing meant wrestling with the long handle on the pump and moving fast enough to get a few drops of water on your hands because the pump stopped. You dried your hands by shaking them vigorously and then wiping them on your pants.

The tollways along the bottom of the Great Lakes presented my first non-wayside traveling respite. I think they were called "oases" in the early days. They included a buffet, service bays, gas pumps, just a few munchies, and restrooms with a hand dryer on the wall the blew hot air.

It’s the hand dryer that caught my attention. I suppose I thought it was the greatest technological invention since the lightbulb. I wanted to stop at every oasis in Indiana just so I could go put my wet hands under the warm dryer. The button required a kind of punch, and the timing was pretty much guaranteed to turn the dryer off about 10 seconds before your hands were dry.

Over the years the hand dryer has spread like a virus. The tollways and freeways are still the main places I run into them, and now they have another commonality. As I said, I can only speak for the men’s side. It seems that on those dryers that have written directions, somebody has perpetrated the same defacing crime. Where the first direction says "Push button", someone has scratched out the last two letters so that it says "Push butt".

Who thinks of these things? It’s all part of male bathroom humor, I know. The humor over body parts and body functions begins in kindergarten for boys and ends.... Well, okay, I’m not sure guys ever tire of grossing each other with more humor about parts and functions. So live with it. The next time you’re drying your hands and notice that the directions have been defaced to "Push butt", just do it and get it over with.

A few weeks ago we had a little trouble with our Web site. Some virus protection programs flagged our homepage as a virus threat. You can imagine how that would turn people away from clicking on oslc-elca.org.

A call to our Web hosting company revealed that there was no real virus on the page that they could find, but something was triggering the warning. Relieved that our Web site didn’t pose a danger to you who click to this page, I was now concerned about the message and what was causing it.

The process of elimination began. One by one I removed items from the page. The nasty message continued to appear. Finally, after removing what I think is called an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, the message stopped popping up. And what was the feed? It was the Daily Bible Verse that sat in the lower left of the page. It seems that the ELCA churchwide offices are no longer providing the feed, and the dead code triggered the virus protection program.

Imagine that. The Bible caused a virus.

Of course, Bible reading is like a virus. Through the printed word the goodness of God can be planted in your heart. A text from scripture can lie dormant for awhile, and suddenly at the right time explode into a full fledged faith moment - a virus that changes you forever.

I know time for scripture reading can be scarce, so let me repeat what I’ve said before - if you can only find time to read from the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that’s good enough. Believe me, there are enough faith viruses in those four books to last a lifetime.

Scripture may no longer be causing a computer virus for us, but I hope it keeps changing all of us who read it.

As a side note. . . . Today is the 34^th anniversary of my ordination at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Pastor B.

Guess what? You know that adage that tells us that research has shown that we should drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water each day to stay hydrated? It appears that modern researches searching for the original research can’t find it. They’ve searched and researched for the research but the search has been in vain.

So, someone asked, how much water should a person drink so as to stave off dehydration? Isn’t there a definitive number out there somewhere?

As a matter of fact, no. There is no definitive answer other than to say we don’t really need to be carrying water bottles with us everywhere we go.

So how should we know if we need to add water to our bodies which, by the way, are 60% water?

Answer: "listen to your thirst", according to a researcher.

Now, to be honest, I cannot recall ever hearing my thirst talk. In fact, I don’t think it’s ever made even a grunt or a moan. So I think the person is saying "listen to your thirst" really means when you get thirsty go and get something to drink. Turns out that your body has its own monitoring system and really doesn’t need to be told how much to quaff each day.

Wow! Imagine that. Our bodies tell us we need water by making us thirsty.

All together now - Duh!

Pastor B.