This weekend has been very busy and very hectic and it all revolved around Church activities. Saturday morning I was up and at my church around 7:45am where I met with and had breakfast and took communion with well over one hundred fellow members of my church. This was deemed “One Great Day of Service” where we split up into teams and did work around the church that needed done and work in the community. The community work included building a retaining wall for the local food bank, some project for the local pregnancy crisis center and yard work for a couple of senior citizens.

The work crew I found myself on was yardwork for one of the senior citizens. This poor man’s house was nearly taken over by kudzu. For those of you who may not be familiar with kudzu it is a vine that branches out and covers everything. It grows at a fantastic rate and was originally introduced into the south from Asia as a means to control erosion. We cut and pulled kudzu off of the house and managed to get a buffer zone between the kudzu and his house. This took about four hours with ten of us working.

We had a huge pile of kudzu along with some other weeds that were trimmed back and we were worried about what we would do with the trimmings. We looked up and saw that the local power utility had a crew trimming growth away from the power lines and they were hauling a chipper to cut up their waste. We asked and they gladly consented to chip and shred up the cuttings and yard waste we had.

Around 1:00pm we finished up and headed back to the church for lunch. The sandwiches and cookies were great but I really needed a massuese. My back was sore. I checked around to see if I was needed for anything else and when I found out I wasn’t I headed back home and took about a forty-five minute nap. After the nap I planted some shrubs I had bought last weekend, cleaned up and went back to the church to meet some people for another function which I can’t go into much here other than to say it involved communion and encouragement for some fellow churchmembers.

Yesterday morning I had to get up early enough to go over some material for my Sunday School class. I was taking my turn leading the class which is a discussion group. Our current series is John Ortberg’s “If You Want to Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of The Boat” which isn’t a bad series. After Sunday School I left the class for our prayer room. I had agreed to pray for the 10:55am service during the thirty minutes between Sunday School and the service. I then went to the service and listened to my pastor give a sermon on David and his affair with Bathsheba. What a parallel can be drawn between what David did wrong and current affairs.

After church I went home, had lunch and another nap and went back to Church for Disciple Bible Study. I’m taking the first class, Disciple I. This is another discussion group and it’s about an eight month course. I’m on week 6.

Now, I suppose you are wondering what brought this “What I did over my weekend” spiel. Well, everything I did this weekend I did it with people that I didn’t know a couple of years ago and everyone of the people I worked closely with this weekend would meet me in Salt Lake City with $10,000 in forty-eight hours, no questions asked, if I were to call them up unexpectedly and tell them I needed that of them. I would gladly do the same for any of them. Every person I had close contact with this weekend will sit and listen to my questions, my ideas and my thoughts on God, religion, philosophy, life and morality without judging me or telling me I am going to hell for any of my apostate thoughts or ideas. This is a community that loves me as I am, warts and all. This is a community that I wouldn’t have met and been received by had I not joined in corporate worship with them.

My friend, Dan, is responsible for this coming to mind to share with you. He always seems to have something to say that relates to something close to what I’m thinking about at the moment to inspire me to something. Sometimes I share that with you.

Growing up in the early sixties I remember people building fallout shelters and a fear people had of Soviet missles being launched at the US. The decade hadn’t passed before those bomb shelters were being converted into storage space and the worries of Soviet missles was greatly diminished. There were other, more pressing evils out there and it seemed that even though the US and the Soviet Union still had thousands of warheads pointed at each other it was pretty much decided that the fear of mutually assured destruction would prevent them from ever launching.

The cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it went whatever worries we had about nuclear weapons. Even though India and Pakistan joined the Nuclear Club neither country was showing any aggresive animosity toward anyone but each other so we still felt sort of safe from nuclear weapons being used by anyone. Destruction by nuclear weapons was just things that movies were based on.

Then North Korea started making a noise. For years, though, all of the tantrums that Kim Jung Il were throwing were good for was just to make eyes roll. Last night that changed.

North Korea is now a member of the Nuclear Club. Even China, who often just laughs and pats little Kim Jung Il on the head when he pull his tantrums is now showing concern. Talk is surfacing in Japan about talks of rewriting its constitution to allow for possible preemptive strikes when done in conjunction with other countries and arming itself with nuclear weapons. Even suggestions that South Korea may now be motivated to posess nuclear weapons of its own are circulating.

Someone is trying to alleve our fears over this with this:

Analysts say North Korea probably has enough fissile material to make six to eight nuclear bombs but probably lacks the technology to devise one small enough to mount on a missile.

But how long will it take to reduce the size of their device down to where it will fit in the back of a truck to be launched against US soldiers manning the frontier between North and South Korea? I don’t think we are looking at much more than a couple of years before they will have developed a warhead capable of being launched by one of their missles that you can bet they are currently working on improving.

I don’t want to scare anyone with my take on this but I do want people to recognize that we need to find out what it’s going to take to make the Chinese stop worrying about a unified Korea if we really want to get things back under control in this region. My biggest concern isn’t a nuclear North Korea, it’s a Nuclear Japan with a new constitution 40 years from now.