We keep the cost low because we know that for many students, giving up a week of income from working at home is a sacrifice, let alone coming up with a chunk of change to finance the trip. We do fundraise, and alumni of previous trips provide generous support.

Things have changed over the years. In the early years they were called Mission Trips with the accent on changing peoples lives. That quickly fell out of favor because it implied we were coming with answers without even knowing the questions. For a while these Spring Break excursions were called Service Trips with the accent on serving others. The common sense observation, that we demean and insult others when we do for them what they can do for themselves, put this out of favor. As trips shifted from ‘doing for’ to ‘walking with,’ the title Servant Trips gained favor. Now books like, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help, are raising legitimate questions about the assumptions undergirding any of these trips. Recognizing the difference between the time and place an emergency response is needed (New Orleans, Haiti) and those times and places where long-term development is the solution (choose any big city or isolated reservation) will undoubtedly lead to more changes.

When we live out our faith in service to others, it is important to reflect on what we are doing, why we are doing it and who really benefits from 19 years of sleeping on church basement floors, sorting dented can goods, painting walls and peeling vegetables.

It has given me time to watch, learn and think. This is why I call these trips Mission Trips just as we did years ago — but with a new understanding of what this means. Of course we are not taking God somewhere God has never been, and it’s most often the case that the faith of those we serve dwarfs our own. Three weeks ago I spent an hour listening to a homeless man in a Denver soup kitchen tell me how God has blessed his life. It is incidents like this that show us what the trips are designed to achieve: conversion. It’s given me reason to wonder if my iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and flat screen TV enrich or impoverish my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not writing as one who has achieved self-fulfillment. The reality is I need to be converted again and again and again.

Conversion is not a popular notion these days. To say “I want to convert” implies you don’t have your act together, you need to reorder priorities and think about something beyond your own world and problems. Yet, that is exactly what I am saying dear reader. You, like me, need converting. Presumptuous or not, it’s why the University Lutheran Center sponsors these trips: in hopes of converting people — and we do. We’ve converted business majors to pre-seminary students, future lab workers into social workers and we’ve even converted single people into married people, although this was not by design. It’s we who need to be converted, those of us who go on these trips. I’ve been converted every time. Although I soon fall back into my selfish and self-centered ways. Yet, I grow a little more in awareness, in sensitivity, in my ability to listen to another and to see the person in front of me.

The church, during the seven weeks of Easter, reads a gospel lesson citing an appearance of the risen Christ. The disciples were startled and confused each time Jesus met them at a time and place unexpected. Often unrecognized by those who were his closest followers, he would invite them to break bread together. It was there, in the breaking of the bread their eyes were opened.

Thanks for lunch in Denver, Jesus. I look forward to dining with you again.

Some theorize it is a hit of dopamine, generated by our brain. Whatever it is, it is a feeling common to us all: when a song, a smell or a sign brings us back to another time or place. Memories pull us out of the present and back into that other time, that other place, even as we keep driving with those around us unaware we are no longer present. The sign that hovered over the cafe in Kadoka takes me back to a story from many years past.

Thirty years ago I was leading a book discussion group at James Madison University when a graduate student at the University of Virginia shared her writing with us. There were three stories but the only one I remember is, “The Burn Brothers.” Written in the first person, the narrator was a young girl, seriously, though not critically, ill who was hospitalized, her discomfort aggravated by the rambunctious brothers down the hall.

Though seriously burned, they careened down the halls in their wheel chairs raising havoc with patients and staff alike. The worst though, was in the evenings when she was trying to rest and she could hear them laughing hysterically and incessantly.

The story drew me in. I could sense her frustration and share her growing irritation. The story ended abruptly.

No longer able to contain her anger or disgust at their insensitivity and disregard to others, she asks the nurse to tell them to quit laughing.

“Oh honey,” the nurse responds, “their dressings are being changed, they aren’t laughing.”

It’s been over 30 years and I remember the Burn Brothers even now: two boys whose cries were mistaken for laughter.

It may be, it probably is, dopamine, produced in our brain, which makes the connections and spurs the memories. That explains it, but I don’t experience it as a chemical reaction. Rather, I experience it as a mystery and reminder, a mark of our common humanity and our inability to understand our reach across the chasm that separates us.

More than that, it reminds me this is not an abstract philosophical construct but an opportunity to listen carefully to the laughter, and the cries, of another.

My name is Bob and I am an Internet addict.”

“Hi Bob.”

I jerk awake with a start, the reoccurring dream once again startling me out of a sound slumber. Whew…only a dream. I will admit to hovering on the edge of addiction. I am 364 days away from the seniors special at the Hy-Vee Chinese deli, of an era that imagined computers would take over the world much like giant robots, our deepest fears articulated in the film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Still, I compulsively check my email, shop almost exclusively online and, when traveling, plan my next Internet fix with the devotion of an addict.

Some would say our worst fears have come true in even more insidious ways than we imagined as we debate whether our symbiotic relationship with computers is parasitic, commensal or mutalistic. I don’t know about that, but I do know I love my laptop. When my son asks me if nuclear energy is renewable, the first Google hit tells me “…3 Renewable energy sources include the sun, wind, water, … 4 Nonrenewable energy sources include fossil fuels, nuclear power, and minerals.” Sweet.

Google.com is my address book, fetchbook.info my bookstore and washingtonpost.com my source of news and entertainment.

It’s washingtonpost.com that lead me to postsecret.com and grouphug.us. The former invites you to send your secret on a postcard which is then posted on the web site, the latter invites you to make anonymous confessions. Visiting them becomes compulsive, feeding one’s surreptitious desire to know another’s deepest secrets. They are heart-wrenching and heartwarming, scandalous and shocking, vulgar and vile.

Yet, spend thirty minutes at either and you will find yourself feeling drained, empty, disconnected. That which is initially titillating becomes mundane, than boring and, ultimately, sad. One cannot help but sense the author’s disconnectedness, loneliness and angst. Their computer has become their friend and confidant. Spend an hour and you will yearn for human companionship. What kind of solace or absolution does a computer provide? Who are these people who seek intimacy and community from their computers? Am I among them?

I wonder, how does one discern that which is worthy of one’s devotion, one’s time, one’s energy? Does my computer enrich or impoverish my life? Is my answer yours or yours mine?

I spent spring break gutting flood-ravaged houses in New Orleans with fifty-two others. I am rethinking my devotion to that which is incapable of loving back. I am rededicating my devotion to the One who loves first.

Pastor Bob Chell University Lutheran Center bchell@hotmail.com

#1.884581:2116879260.jpg:pastorbob_tc.jpg:Bob Chell, Religion Columnist:Ty Carlson

Do you, like me, have a compelling urge to clean your room, organize your desk or attack an overflowing pile of laundry when faced with an imminent deadline?

As Christmas break beckons and academic pressure bears down, more than a few of you are perusing the Collegian as an alternative to the task at hand. Welcome, I can help!

Not with the task at hand, unfortunately, but with the perennial problem, Christmas shopping. I’m no help with siblings, brothers-in-law or your beloved, but I can tell you with confidence the gift your parents and grandparents would most like to have. Here it goes …

For Grandma: chicks. Fifty or sixty. Not for her-for an impoverished family in Kenya. A hen can lay 200 eggs in a year. For $20, Grandma will love the hundreds of meals provided-and the fact that no dusting is required. (Heifer International, 1-800-422-0474, www.catalog.heifer.org)

For Gramps, a set of farm tools and training for a displaced family to use them: $125. It’s a lot, but then again, it saves lives of real people. Hungry people. (Lutheran World Relief, 1-800-597-5972, www.lwr.org)

Your grandparents listened to their parents’ stories of hunger growing up.

Tell them you are honoring them and their parents. Prepare for tears.

For Mom & Dad: coffee. Not any coffee, Tanzanian Jubilee. They taught you a day’s work for a day’s pay, and will enjoy knowing the growers received a fair price for their labor: only $7.75 and no bitter Starbucks aftertaste. (Equal Exchange, 1-774-776-7333, www.equalexchange.com)

You’re not done yet. That coffee is for Mom & Dad to drink while they read the letter you’re gonna write. The one telling Mom all she’s taught you and how her strength and grace under pressure sustains you, gifting you with confidence and courage. And the letter to Dad telling him you remember the time he spoke up when it would have been easier to keep silent, when he did the right thing, not the easy thing, and how that moment shaped and changed your life.

I guarantee when you go home at the end of May, if you slip into their room when they’re out, you’ll find your letter to Mom in her jewelry box and your letter to Dad in his sock drawer. For sure.

Shopping done, study break over, hit the books. Traveling mercies for that trip home to enjoy the greatest gift, the gift of Christmas.

Pastor Bob ChellUniversity Lutheran Centerulc@sdsulutheran.com

It is Lent. A somber season in the liturgical calendar. Somber, not maudlin. A time for reflection on one’s faith, on one’s failure to live as one wants, as one ought. A time to reflect on the passion of

Each year at Christmas someone tells the story about the year I hated my presents. I was in seventh grade. Mom heard me crying in my room and when she came down and asked: “What’s wrong?” I said, “HERE’S WHAT’S WRONG!” as I thrust out a list of all my presents and why I hated them. The only one I remember now is the pair of purple socks with white polka dots the size of quarters. I wanted the NAVY BLUE socks with white polka dots the size of quarters.

Everyone laughs while I smile. It isn’t told to be mean but as one of the Christmas memories which make us family. I don’t mind, I guess, though it touches a scar which remains tender some forty years later. It brings back the feelings of how it was to be in seventh grade. It was a painful and lonely time for me. I know now it wasn’t my presents I hated as much as me. God may have loved me but I sure didn’t. I wasn’t as popular as I wanted to be. I wasn’t as talented as I wanted to be. I wasn’t popular at all. I wasn’t talented.

In Jesus’ first sermon he told those gathered in the hometown synagogue stories of which they didn’t care to be reminded. He told of the time when all in Israel were starving yet God’s prophet, Elijah, provided food for a foreign widow and her son. He reminded them that the prophet Elisha had healed, not a poor deserving leper in Israel, but a wealthy Syrian army officer.

By telling these stories Jesus as much as said, “You people are too thick-headed to hear God’s message so He finds someone else who will listen.”

In his whole ministry Jesus preached an inverted kingdom, an upside down kingdom, a kingdom where God loves the unlovable, the losers, the outsiders, the oppressed.

He spoke of the Good Samaritan, the illegal immigrant of his day, who helps a man robbed while the religious folks pass by. A son who squanders a fortune only to be embraced by his Father’s love upon his return.

Stories which embrace us when we are the outsider. A ray of hope for a seventh-grader on the margins. A glimmer of possibility for one who is ‘everyone’s friend’ and no one’s love. A lifeline for one denied tenure. Comfort to a single parent with more month than budget.

Stories which outrage us when we are the insider. Stories which touch our tender scars reminding us of those we have failed to love. Dad’s girlfriend. Mom’s new husband. That so-called friend who told EVERYONE. The one in seventh grade whose face stays twisted in disgust as they said those hateful, hurtful things.

Stories which remind us not only we are loved by God but the other. The other whom we do not love. The other whom we don’t want to love. The other whom we cannot love.

Each of our lives is full of stories of which we do not care to be reminded. Stories of our pain. Stories of our failures. Each story unique, as we are unique. Each story universal as we are, each of us, more alike than different.

Jesus’ words challenge us to see ourselves, not only as the outsider, but as the insider; to recall the stories where it was us speaking the hurtful, hateful words.

When it was I who, fearing I would be singled out, did not dare to speak on behalf of the one who bore other’s pain, who had the fears of all heaped upon them in the guise of scorn.

To hear the word not to be burdened with guilt and shame but in facing our failure, to be free of it. Free to accept not only ourselves, but the other, the one we find most difficult to love.

Next Christmas I’m hoping for PURPLE socks with white polka dots the size of quarters.

Bob Chell serves the University Lutheran Center and is a member of the Campus Interfaith Councill. Reach him at bchell@hotmail.com.