The bears are awake and they're hungry. The Forest Service has issued warnings not to attract the bears with food or garbage; due to the unseasonably warm winter (on this side of the Divide anyway) the bears' normal Spring food is in low supply, and they've taken up a life of crime - breaking and entering to take OUR food. I've actually only seen one bear since we moved to Colorado, and that was in the summer of 2009 when I was fishing with my friend Mike McCoy in Cheeseman Canyon. We supposedly have a few bears that hang out in our neighborhood, but short of putting out a good supply of ALPO dog food I don't expect to see them. Someone suggested that I make a wooden sign with the words, "Bears like people; they taste like chicken."
The SMART team is now up and running at church. SMART stands for Security and Medical Response Team - I added the "A", because otherwise it would be the SMRT team which doesn't sound nearly as cool. Our goal is to have three security guards and one medical responder present at every service. One of the local fire stations has agreed to donate a full medical/ first aid kit, as well as a used AED device; you have to love the heart of this community to look out for each other. There is a part of me that genuinely hopes we never have a need for the SMART team to intervene in a medical or security emergency... but there's another part of me that is just waiting for that day. I guess it's my crisis management background, or just the fact that I tend to be a sheepdog by nature. Either way, we'll never really know how well prepared we are until a real emergency happens.
Tonight I will be teaching the second sermon in the new series: "From First Corinthians to First Coloradans". The church in Corinth had written to Paul with a whole series of questions, but he doesn't even start to respond to what they wrote until chapter 7. Up to that point, he has to deal with the REAL problems that he heard about from someone from Chloe's household. Just like human nature - there's the problems we are willing to talk about, and then there are the real problems several layers deeper. Seems like the sooner we can get past all the smokescreens to get to the real issues, the sooner we can begin with healing and reconciliation. Daphne is helping Mike to teach a marriage workshop this weekend that should be fun - I think there's 80 or 90 people who are signed up so far. Mike will do most of the teaching, but at some point the men and women will break into two groups and Daphne will take the ladies. She's spend a lot of time working on the 30 minutes she's responsible for, and I know she'll do a great job. More on that after this weekend.
I almost forgot to mention the fires: we've had several small fires in our area recently, and this summer is gearing up to be a very dangerous one for wildfires. We're about 30-40 inches below our normal snowfall in Conifer, and the forest is tinder-dry already. The strange part of this is that all the ski resorts on the other side of the Continental Divide have had record years of snowfall - over 400 inches in some cases. I've already cut down several trees that were a little too close to the house, and I plan to buy a second water hose to cover the back deck. We'll be keeping our eyes peeled for smoke!
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