steve bauer

Baptized child of God, husband, dad, pastor at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Gibbon, MN.

[CSNTM @CSNTM]

#ManuscriptMonday Dated to around 200 CE, 𝔓46 is the oldest surviving manuscript of Paul's letters.

Explore more images: https://t.co/yCj3CoHU2m

[ToonHive @ToonHive]

Legendary voice actor Peter Cullen, best known as the iconic voice of Optimus Prime in the ‘Transformers’ franchise, has sadly passed away at the age of 85.

(via TMZ) 🕊️

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Everyone knows Washington, D.C.'s cherry blossoms came from Japan.

Almost nobody knows the story nearly ended in a bonfire.

In 1910, Tokyo sent 2,000 cherry trees to America as a gift.
Inspectors found them infested with insects.
President Taft ordered every single one burned.

Two thousand gifts. Ashes.

Imagine the diplomatic disaster. The wounded pride.

Here is what Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, actually did:

He apologized. For the condition of his own gift.
Then his city grew 3,020 new trees, healthier and finer,
grafted and inspected and perfect,
and sent them across the ocean again.

Not a word of resentment. Try again, properly.

Those are the trees you photograph every spring at the Tidal Basin.
Two of the 1912 originals are still standing.

But the story doesn't end there. It comes full circle.

The parent grove in Japan, on the banks of the Arakawa River,
was devastated during World War II.

So in 1952, America cut budwood from the Washington trees
and sent it back to Japan, to resurrect
the very grove the gift had come from.

When a flood damaged the Japanese trees again in 1982,
Washington sent more cuttings home.

Read that again.

The daughters of the burned gift saved their mothers.

Today the two rivers, the Potomac and the Arakawa,
are officially sister rivers.
Their trees carry each other's blood.

One hundred and fourteen years of two countries
quietly taking care of the same flowers.

That's what sincerity looks like
when you give it a century to bloom.

[steve bauer @bauer_power1]

@prosandhans I use mine all the time

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

A nine-year-old named Mason knocked on my door and asked if I would come to his school for career day.

"What is career day."

"You come to my class and tell them what you do."

"What do I do."

Mason looked at me with the patience of a boy explaining a door to a man. "The samurai thing."

I prepared a presentation. I practiced it for Mason on my porch. He stopped me twice.

"You're doing the voice."

"What voice."

"The movie voice. Just talk."

A firefighter went before me. He brought the truck. I want it noted, for the record, that he brought the truck.

The questions of fourth graders are the most honest interrogation I have ever survived.

"Do you have a sword?" I do not bring it to schools. "Why not?" Laws. "That's fair."

"How much money do you make?" Less than the dentist. "That's bad." It is not great.

"Do you know my dad?" I do not. "He knows YOU." This was never explained.

Then a girl in the front row, who had said nothing all hour, raised her hand and asked the question I have been asking myself for years.

"Are you a real one?"

I have been asked this by strangers online a thousand times, and I keep a shelf of clever answers ready for it. But something about that room — the small chairs, the girl waiting — made every clever answer leave my head at once.

"I do not know," I said. "I am trying to be."

The girl nodded, as though I had passed something. Mason nodded too. The teacher, Mrs. Alvarez, did not correct me and did not rescue me. She let the answer stand in the room like a flag.

The class has a hamster. It watched my entire presentation from its wheel, running. I never learned its name. It is the only audience member whose opinion I still wonder about.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Alvarez handed me a stack of thank-you notes, written in crayon, in the giant handwriting of people who have not yet learned to lie.

"Dear Mr. Samurai. Thank you for coming. You were the only one who said I don't know. I didn't know that was allowed."

One of them had a drawing of me. I am taller in it. My sword is enormous and, I must note, present, despite the laws.

It is on my refrigerator now. In this country, the refrigerator is where a family puts the things that matter.

The dentist has a billboard on the highway.

I have a refrigerator.

[G. K. Chesterton @GKCdaily]

Some of the most civilized and highly organized cultures, like Carthage at its wealthiest, had human sacrifice at its worst. Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

[Amy Mantravadi @AmyMantravadi]

My son’s medical condition (autism) is not a political card to be played for cheap points or a new front in the culture war. It is the daily reality of caring for him. It is a vocation assigned by God: to love this child well.

[Peter Gurry @pjgurry]

Our latest article @TextandCanon is on the incredible Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Among its firsts, it’s the first printed Greek NT, the first print Greek lexicon, and first printed multi-language, multi-column Bible. https://t.co/S6iZ75DrXM

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

In 1897, the U.S. Army wanted to know if bicycles could replace horses for infantry. So they took 20 Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry – the Buffalo Soldiers – and gave them a mission: ride from Fort Missoula, Montana to St. Louis. 1,900 miles.

The “Iron Riders” carried 60-pound packs, rifles, and one spare tire each. They crossed the Rockies, the Badlands, and the Great Plains on heavy, single-speed bikes with no roads. Private John Findley fixed flats with strips of his own shirt. They drank from cattle tanks and were refused water in Wyoming towns.

It took 41 days. They averaged 52 miles a day. When they rolled into St. Louis, the white newspapers called it a “stunt.” The Army said “impractical” and shut the program down. But the Iron Riders proved it could be done.

Their commanding officer wrote: “No horse could have made it. These men did.”

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

In June of 1944 the US Navy did something it had not managed to do since the War of 1812. It captured an enemy warship on the open ocean and kept her. The ship was a German submarine, U-505, and the wildest part is what happened next. The Navy hid the entire thing from the world for over a year. This story ends in Chicago, and here is how it got there.

It started with a captain named Daniel Gallery. Almost every commander out hunting U-boats had one simple job, sink them and go home. Gallery had a stranger idea rattling around in his head. He wanted to board one and take it alive. People told him it could not be done. A submarine that has been hit floods in a matter of minutes, and any crew still aboard could scuttle her or fight. He drilled his men on it anyway, over and over, until they could do it in their sleep.

June 4, off the coast of West Africa. Gallery's group pins down U-505 and hammers her with depth charges until the German crew is sure she is finished. They blow to the surface, throw the hatches open, and start jumping into the sea. On their way out they crack the valves to send her to the bottom, so the Americans cannot have her.

Now the clock is running. A small boat from the USS Pillsbury races over. A young officer named Albert David climbs down into a submarine that is actively flooding, that could explode at any second, not knowing if armed Germans are still waiting in the dark. He goes anyway. Two sailors follow him. Down inside, with water rising around their legs, they shut the valves by hand and stop her from going under. Then they start grabbing everything they can carry. Codebooks. Charts. And an intact Enigma machine, the exact cipher device the Allies had been bleeding men and ships to get their hands on.

Here is the part most people never hear. The real prize was never the submarine. It was the secret. If Germany ever found out U-505 had been captured instead of sunk, they would change every code overnight, and everything the Allies were quietly reading would go dark in an instant. So the Navy made her vanish. They towed a 250 ton German submarine across the Atlantic without a word. They held the captured crew apart from all other prisoners and listed the boat as lost, so that Germany and even the sailors' own families would believe U-505 went down with all hands. An entire warship, hidden from an entire nation.

Albert David, the man who went down first into that flooding hull, received the Medal of Honor. It was the only one given to a sailor in the Atlantic in the whole war. He never got to enjoy it. He died of a heart attack in 1945, before the world even knew what he had done.

Then the war ends, the secret comes out, and the Navy decides U-505 has served her purpose. The new plan is grim and simple, tow her out and blow her apart for target practice. Gallery cannot stand the thought of it. He is a Chicago kid, born and raised on the Northwest Side, and he wants her to come home. So he fights for it. The Museum of Science and Industry raises the money, and in 1954 they tow this captured U-boat thousands of miles up through the Great Lakes to Lake Michigan. Then comes the last impossible move, hauling a submarine across Lake Shore Drive to the museum grounds. And they pull it off.

She was dedicated that year as a memorial to the thousands of American sailors who never came back from the Atlantic. U-505 is still in Chicago today, sitting indoors, where anyone can walk right up and put a hand on her hull.

So the next time somebody tells you an idea is impossible, remember the captain who decided he was going to board a sinking submarine, keep the biggest secret of the war, and then park his war prize in his own hometown. He was right on all three counts. Go see her. She is really there.

[steve bauer @bauer_power1]

The freeze punishes haste (!)

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[CSNTM @CSNTM]

#ManuscriptMonday Lectionary 1957 is a Gospels lectionary written in majuscule script from the 10th century. CSNTM photographed this codex at the Chester Beatty in Dublin in 2013.

See images in the Digital Manuscript Collection: https://t.co/oqtClSq16b

[Diane Langberg, PhD @DianeLangberg]

It is a grievous failure of those who claim to be the people of God when they not only fail to be a sanctuary for the traumatized but also create the need for one.

[steve bauer @bauer_power1]

!

[Emanuele Scieri @EScieri]

Proud of my team’s work on Codex H.

https://t.co/UaZn9tZRWR

[steve bauer @bauer_power1]

@TheMuppetPastor I think she’s on something

[YoDanno #DragonlanceDragonlance @YoDanno]

Did You Know…

If you are playing this game called Dungeons & Dragons, you are being programmed?

Also, you have joined the occult, and are learning actual spells! Just like Ouija boards 😆

[steve bauer @bauer_power1]

@kevinpalbrecht Time to polish up the parsangs

[steve bauer @bauer_power1]

Best top comment ever

[Jake Rainwater @JakeRainwater]

This tweet and top comment are sending me.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Suzanne Vega, 1994.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The most iconic line from this book is: We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

[Tapani Simojoki @tapanisimojoki]

The most significant Lutheran layman of the 20th century?