The good news is, the fire station is just across the street

Long time readers of this blog will immediately know why this front page story from the Portlaned Press Herald (albeit below the fold) is upsetting to me. Just before my illness, Monday night "Stump Trivia" at Bingas Wingas had become a fixture in my life, and once I was released from the hospital I continued to play as often as I could...which meant basically whenever I could get a few friends to play along. My brother got to be so infatuated with it that he even started to stay over a day on his weekend visits when he could, so that we could play together.

In fact, most of my friends who experienced Trivia started to feel a little enthusiastic about it. When my good friend Chris was here last summer visiting from Seattle with his family, we played together two weeks in a row (the second week with his daughters), and actually won prized of hats and tee shirts for them to take back to the west coast with them. But my best experience was playing with both my brothers and my sister-in-law when they were here visiting in June. It was amazing to me how quickly they recognized the strategy of the game, and how easily we settled into a working routine of play with each of us understanding our roles in processing the questions and generating either the right answer (or on occasion a correct guess). It was like we'd been playing together for months, even if it was only the first time any of them had played at all.

More recently I've been playing with a small group of church members, either with or without my brother. And I've lost track now of how many times I've won prizes playing this silly game. My favorite prizes were always free Portland Sea Dogs tickets, followed by "Binga's Bucks" and Bingas gear (i.e. hats and shirts). There often seemed to be plenty of beer paraphernalia available from our local breweries as well, but it always somehow seemed to evade me, Likewise, one of the traditions of game is to chose a different, unique, and sometimes a little risque name for the team; may favorite was (and remains) carpe scrotum (which I understand has now been picked up as a permanent moniker by another trivia team playing another night in a different bar) It means exactly what you would think it would mean knowing that carpe diem means "seize the day!"

Bingas has been important in my life in a few other ways as well. I was eating lunch there one day with my father when it occurred to me how annoying it was to have to reach up over my head just to eat a wing, and knowing that I was eventually going to have to climb up on a stool in order to preach from the high pulpit again, I decided to start small and see If I could manage to climb up into a bar stool first. I could, and so you might well say that my return to the ministry started from my decision to sit first at a bar (rather than the other way around).

But the other thing I always appreciated about Bingas (at least before I was diagnosed) was that it was somewhere close to my home where I could always get a quick bite to eat and watch a game without being immediately identified by what I did for a living, rather than simply by the fact that I was a "regular." In Ray Oldenburg's terms, it was a "Great, Good Place" -- a Third Place (apart from home or the office) where I could relax and "be myself" without always needing to be my ENTIRE self. Where I would be recognized with a nod of the head by the other regulars, and enjoy many of the pleasures of being in community -- good company and lively conversation, for instance -- and still go back home in the evening and back to work in the morning without worrying too much about what went on there in my absence. Pubs, cafes, bookstores, even hair salons all share some of these characteristics -- as can urban churches when the "chemistry" is right and the ministry of "Radical Hospitality" is correctly understood. Of course, churches can be much, much more than this as well. But being "a great, good place" for a few hours on a Sunday morning (or perhaps a Wednesday evening) isn't such a bad thing for a church to do well. And at places like Bingas, I also started to learn a little more about what that looked like.