Psalm 103:15 Our days on earth are like grass...

This Sunday September 11 I had in my reminders a note to call my cousin Jeannine in Fresno. Jeannine has been struggling with chronic pain and an inability to cope with the vicissitudes of life.

Unfortunately, by Saturday September 10 she had already passed away. The cause of death was a gunshot wound, and the Fresno County Coroner has ruled it a suicide. She has no children and no surviving parents, so I and my siblings are the closest kin.

Although she had made arrangements for the care of her small dog Carly, all her other affairs are in disarray. I am in contact with the coroner's office.

For He knows how weak we are; he remembers that we are only dust. Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. The wind blows, and we are gone--as though we had never been here. But the love of the Lord remains forever with those who fear him.

MINISTRY UPDATES; HIKING AND CAMPING

Hi folks. The irregular updates for my ministry to the Least, the Last, and the Lepers has moved to my West Coast Blog (formerly my Gulf Coast Blog): http://resurrectiongulfcoast.blogspot.com/

Much has been happening, although I am way behind on my posting. Check it out!

Summer Update: Life and Ministry in Pasadena

Howdy, folks,
Spring sprang right past me, so here's my latest doin's now that it's summer.

MEDICAL STUFF:

While I was caring for my mom, she fell again twice and had other medical problems, so it became clear that it was no longer safe for her to be living alone. We found an excellent nursing care home just a few miles from my sister's house and she seems to have adapted well to it.

In the meantime, I went in for my Total Hip Replacement (left hip) on March 15, and from there to a rehab facility. The photo to the right is in the rehab place after I had graduated from the wheelchair to the walker, and again from the walker to the crutches.

The lovely folk at Saint James Anglican in Newport Beach kept me in prayer during surgery and recovery, and made a prayer blanket for me (shown at left) in which every knot that held it together represented a prayer for my effective operation and safe recovery. I was deeply touched.


MOVING STUFF: After a few days at my sister's house, I hit the road to Southern California via the scenic route.

This is a rare sight--the spillway at the Oroville Dam with water actually flowing from it.

For all the time that my sis has lived in nearby Paradise, the level of Lake Oroville has been so low that there was more shoreline than there was lake. The end of the boat ramp at Lime Saddle, for instance, was a hundred yards from the water. So seeing the lake full again was a memorable local sighting.

We've been going to visit Mom in the care facility regularly.

My sister visits more than once a week, and has many details to watch over for her overall care.

My brother drove down from Oregon twice to visit, which was well appreciated.

Even my daughter drove up from Southern California to see Mom. From that visit, here's my sister Lucy, my daughter Amber, and my brother-in-law Garrett.

I've made the trip back to northern California once, and I'll be back again next month to visit Mom and make it to an appointment with my surgeon for the aftercare of my hip replacement.

MINISTRY STUFF: In Pasadena, besides trying to find a place to live, I've been working with Father Charles Myers, who's launching an urban church ministry. "Saint Michael's in the City" has started up weekly services on sort of a shake-down cruise preparing for a grand opening, we trust, in the fall.

I have been preparing to teach the 12-step class, "Common Solution Recovery," which was developed by Church Army at Branson, Missouri, and which I taught for almost a year in Mississippi to homeless Hurricane Katrina survivors who were struggling with addictions. The same scourge afflicts Pasadena, and some in the addicted and recovering communities here are desperately looking for the Way Out. The class will get a big boost from the new book We Have Recovered written by Stephen Baughan, the new director of Church Army USA.

I travelled with Fr. Charles to the Anglican Men's Weekend held in the San Bernardino Mountains. This event was sponsored for years by Saint James Anglican, but this year it became hosted by the Western Diocese of the Anglican Church in North America. Our speaker was Archbishop Greg Venables, who flew up from Argentina to deliver a powerful message to almost 200 men from all across the state and country.

Here's a sampling of the men that attended. Fr. Charles is always easy to spot in a crowd, and this photo is no different: he's the one kneeling in front.

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MORE MOVING STUFF: At the men's weekend I had a lovely bed to sleep in, but in Pasadena I had not yet found affordable housing. I learned that Pasadena has the second highest rental rates in Los Angeles County, surpassed only by Santa Monica on the beach.

Here's my interim housing: the campground in Millard Canyon. This is situated right along the rushing creek, about a hundred yards from the parking lot.

I was not ready yet at this stage for prime time backpacking, so it took quite a few trips back and forth to bring in my tent, food, and cooking gear, etc.

After one false start, I found a room to rent. I'm now ensconced in student housing at William Carey International University, which rents about a third of its dorm rooms to non-students.

My room was designed for two students, but they rented it to me as a single. It's roomy enough to divide in half, using my bookshelf as a room divider.

This is my "office" area, which has a nice window I can look out of if I face to the left. I found some flowers to put on the windowsill to spruce it up a bit.

And here's my bookshelf and Biblical Reference Library with my "bedroom" behind it.

This is the payoff for lugging 500 pounds of books across the continent, and for disassembling then reassembling the lovely bookcase that was made for me in Mississippi by one of the men in our recovery program.

Included in my library is the complete Inter-Varsity Press commentary on the Bible, which I put on the bookshelf over my office desk. On the bookshelf Above my bed you can just barely see my grandfather's violin, which I someday hope to learn to play.

HIKING STUFF: But I'm still on the road to recovery from my surgery. (I'm told that full recovery will take a whole year)

My first backpacking excursion was to Sierra Saddle, a picnic spot on the trail above Millard Campground.

This photo shows some of the trees burned in the devastating Station Fire of 2009, in which 525 square miles of forest were destroyed. Millard Canyon is in the background.

But the vegetation is bouncing back.

Here are the robust plants along the side of the fire road leading up the mountain.

They are shown here at the height of the blooming season.

This was also the peak blooming season for many of the annual flowers,

I called this place "The Best Spot On The Trail."

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On this first backpack outing, I camped here beside Sierra Saddle a few hundred feet above Pasadena.
I pitched my tent between the two pines on this ridge at center photo, with Millard Canyon on the right and Pasadena on the left.
I didn't fully deploy the rainfly on my tent because no rain was predicted and I wanted to be able to see the views from inside.
But at 4am I was awakened by heavy raindrops on the tent, and scurried to pull the rainfly into place. It continued to rain on my tent the rest of the morning. However, when I got up in the morning, all of the ground was dry except for immediately around my tent! I thought, "What is this, Gideon's fleece?"
What had happened was that the coastal fog had been rolling across the ridge all morning. The needles on the pine trees sucked the moisture out of the fog, and each needle then dripped its collected water down onto my tent as raindrops.

Below is a view of Pasadena as the evening fades into night and the city lights begin to appear.

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A couple weeks later I did make it farther up the trail, all the way, in fact to Mount Lowe Trail Camp (alas, no photos). It's a 3,000 foot climb and a 6-mile hike, and it took me SIX HOURS in my not-yet-recovered condition. I'm going to have to do that again and better my time.

On a later day trip I hiked up the trail that hugs the hillsides near the bottom of Millard Canyon and leads to Dawn Mine.

This is Millard Falls, a popular site which is closed because the creekside trail was destroyed by the heavy floods after the Station Fire.

It's a 40-foot waterfall, and when you can reach the bottom of it, you can stand in the pool directly under the falling water.

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Another sight along the way to Dawn Mine is this double waterfall, high up a side canyon above the trail.

This is also visible from the upper trail which leads to Mount Lowe campground.

I have seen this spot many times, but this is the first time I've seen water in it.

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My most recent hike (last week) was up the Arroyo Seco along the Gabrielino Trail.

This is Gould Mesa Trail Camp, just an hour-and-a-half (at my pace) up the trail.

This week I'm hoping to base camp here and try to get farther up the Gabrielino trail, perhaps all the way to Switzer Falls.

There are a number of bridges on the trail for autos, but many of them, along with the roads around them, have been destroyed by the recurring floods.

This is a more recently-constructed bridge, built to accomodate the equestrian traffic on the Gabrielino Trail.

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"Arroyo Seco" is Spanish for "Dry Gulch," an appropriate name only for the lower reaches of the canyon after the City of Pasadena has sucked all the water out of it for its thirsty citizens.

The lower portion of the arroyo is the pathway for the nation's first freeway, now numbered Interstate 110. With its tight curves and abrupt on- and off-ramps, it is a challenging drive during rush hour.

Once above the intake point for Pasadena's water plant, the creek crossing shown at right is more typical of what will confront a hiker on the Gabrielino trail.

Some of the crossings are quite a bit more challenging than this one, especially for me as I work with strength and balance limitations on my surgery recuperation trail.

At the Gould Mesa camp, there is a road that leads off the side, climbing to meet the Angeles Crest Highway (California 2) just above the city limits of La Cañada Flintridge.

There I found this sign with a map to the local trails. (However, there was no place to park for anyone who wanted to read the sign, much less hike the trails.) Yet the sign reminded me of driving and coming across the place where the Gabrielino Trail reaches the crest of the Angeles Forest and wishing I had time to hike the trail.

So I think that's exactly what I'll do. Little by little, I'm going to see if I can reach each section of this 28.5 mile trail. Watch this space(click here) for the photos!

God bless you all,

Rolin

A Long Winter Update

Hello again, Dear Friends,

It's been quite a while since I've updated you all on events in my life and ministry. But I have found a few quick minutes I can relax in while watching over my dear 95-year-old mother here in Paradise, California.
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When last I left you I had promised some photos from my travels to date. This post will make good on that promise, and bring you up to date on my travels since then, and on the exciting ministry opening up for me ahead.
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After I had driven to Georgia and back to drop off Alex with his mom, I returned to Pennsylvania to pick up my 500-pound Biblical research library (in the tubs at right) and my office furniture and kitchen goods.
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Including the weight of the trailer, I was towing about a ton of stuff behind my little Chevy Cobalt. I had not realized that the vagaries of the highway system would have me crossing the continental divide three times. But the little Cobalt never complained, and in spite of the Rocky Mountains, i averaged about 30 miles per gallon for the whole trip.
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I drove through to Minnesota, where I slept the first night after passing through fifty dollars worth of toll gates on the Interstate Highway System. Sometime that next morning I crossed over the upper Mississippi River, and took this photo. Dams and spillways such as this one, with the boating lock at the right, have made the upper Mississippi into a navigable commercial waterway.
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Many more long miles brought me onto the great High Plains prairie land, with expansive vistas such as this view promising many more long miles ahead.
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The next stop was Mount Rushmore National Monument, which is approached from the east via a steep up-and-down route. The Cobalt had all the gears it needed to haul my load up the hill, but I was not comfortable with the extra strain on the little car's brakes when coming down the other side. I used the back way (to the west) to get out of the Monument, and my brakes were much happier for it.
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Next on my itinerary was the Little Big Horn, and its National Monument commemorating the epic battle between George Armstrong Custer's soldiers and the Lakota, Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne people who had been inspired by the spiritual leader Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull had heard a message that said, "Because they will not listen, I give them to you."
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After camping overnight in a marvelous, pristine campground in the Bighorn Mountains (alas, no photos), it was time to move on to Yellowstone. After all the news about the bears and the bison of Yellowstone, who knew that the park was centered around a 136 square mile lake?
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I camped at Big Thumb campground at the lake's edge and cooked a leisurely breakfast before setting out to watch Old Faithful spout off. There was a walking tour available to the half-dozen other geysers in the same basin, but my bum hip was acting up and i elected to stick nearby and read the literature at the exhibits.
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It turns out that Old "Faithful" is not quite so faithful as advertised in the post-pioneer days. Each time there is a significant earthquake, it rearranges the eruption frequencies of the nearby geysers. Rather than once an hour, Old Faithful erupts about every hour-and-a-half, with a variable wait time inbetween. The rangers post the expected time of the next eruption, but they don't know when that will happen until after they have observed certain characteristics of the most recent eruption. A ranger watches the early part of the eruption with fieldglasses from their post before calculating the time of the next one.
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But it is a sight to see when it arrives, and the watching crowd joins in by erupting in cheers.
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From Yosemite it was an endless car-trek across the vast wasteland of northern Nevada to Paradise, California, where I put my stuff in storage and ditched the trailer. Then on to southern California, where my spiritual advisors had apprised me of a new ministry opportunity (see more on this below).
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On the way back I drove through Yosemite, that kraal-space where inquiring four-legged residents of California can come to marvel at the teeming hordes of humanity congesting the canyon floor. The view, however, is stunning.
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Back in Paradise, I had time to visit Lime Saddle Campground overlooking the western branch of the Feather River and Lake Oroville, only some seven miles away from my sister's house. Here the morning alarm clock is the wild turkeys gobbling as they pass through the campsites. The deer, of course are much quieter, This doe, however, spent some time snorting and huffing at me to warn me not to mess with her two babies.
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Access to Paradise from nearby Chico is via "The Skyway," which begins as a four-lane divided highway, then travels north some 45 miles, ending up as a dirt fire road reaching the hamlet of Butte Meadows. There I found Cherry Hill campground, where I hung out and rested amongst the tall timber for a few days.
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This tall timber adorns the foothills and peaks of the Sierra Nevada and associated mountain ranges which separate the Sacramento Valley from the deserts to the east.
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Cherry Hill camp rests alongside the headwaters of Butte Creek, spawning ground for the largest spring run of salmon in California--and well treasured and protected by the California folk. I enjoyed the music of the rushing waters for each day and night of my stay there.
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On the western boundary of the Sacramento Valley lies the tall timber of the Mendocino National Forest, astride the coastal mountains that separate the valley from the Pacific Ocean. This is the little-known Whitlock Campground, a free campsite at 4,300 feet elevation. From here I had a clear view of Mount Shasta to the northeast.
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If you travel west a bit deeper into the Mendocino National Forest, you can find a peak or a ridgeline from which you can watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. However, this is the only national forest which does not have a single paved road that traverses it from one side to the other.
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Meanwhile, Alex's mother in Georgia was running into major problems with her trucking business. Alex was flown to live with his older sister in California, who had cared for him when he was a toddler. Alex has settled in to his new life, and has been meeting California relatives that he had not known before.

Here are Alex and Sis when I joined them on a tour of one of the Channel Islands off California's coast.
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Back to Southern California to confirm my call to ministry there. This is Monte Cristo Campground, the only one that has been reopened after the devastating Station wildfire of three years ago. The firefighters must have defended this creekside stand of ancient white oak, which I am eager to see once it is back in leaf this spring. It lies just a few miles from Pasadena, which is near the foothills of the Angeles National Forest.

MINISTRY UPDATE:

Through the good graces of two of my spiritual advisers, I have been put in contact with the Rev. Charles Myers in the western diocese of ACNA. He has been given a vision for Saint Michael's, a proposed church plant in the Pasadena area. An essential part of this vision is outreach and support for the addicted and recovering communities. Fr. Chuck sees an associated AA post as an essential partner in this mission--and I just happen to have experience in planting and establishing an AA post.

I can also foresee the startup of Church Army classes in the 12-Step solution, and Steve Baughan, the National Director, is seeing to it that I get the materials that we will need. In addition, I am in contact with the Rev. Mark Hall in Bakersfield who knows these classes well. He and I can see ourselves in collaboration with one another to advance ministry to addicts and alcoholics in Bakersfield and Pasadena.

The long and the short of it is: I see myself moving to Pasadena as soon as possible to get started--or conversely, to catch up to where Fr. Chuck is. I know the terrain there well, because I was the director of a Men's Home for recovered addicts for a year there.

But I'm not ready to move yet. First I need to receive Total Hip Replacement surgery to alleviate the debilitating pain that has been really slowing me down. I now have a date for that: the surgery is scheduled for March 15 in Paradise, and I'm guessing a month's recovery before I'm ready to hit the road to Pasadena.

So I guess I'll close this overly long post with a request for your help: Please pray for the new ministry of Saint Michael's, pray for the addicts and alcoholics of the Pasadena area, and pray for me as I go into surgery.

Thank you so much for listening,
I love you all
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