Emeril's Sans Menu

David E. Crosby, Pastor
First Baptist New Orleans
December 18, 2007

We ate at Emeril's last night--and ate and ate. The couple who hosted us would not let us use the menu. Instead, they insisted, "let's have the chef decide what we will eat."

Actually, I did not know you could poach yucca. Nor did I know that caviar was crunchy or how delicious it would taste on lobster. And I certainly had never tried veal medallions laid over filet mignon.

The scallops were delicious with the shrimp bisque, that’s for certain, and they went nicely with the follow-up appetizer of yellowfin tuna on flatbread. The crusted sea bass was better than any fish could be, swimming in the crab sauce.

Desserts were light with six specialty ice creams, the house-specialty banana pie, a frozen lemon tower, and other delights I cannot properly identify.

All in all, we talked and tasted and munched for two and a half hours. Others might have stayed longer, but no one ate better.

I have concluded that we are served best if we let the chef decide what we will eat. I never had a meal like that one!

It made me think about God, laying out his spread for us every day. We treat his goodies like a crass buffet, picking our way through the offerings. We think we know what we want.

We ought to sit down and let the chef decide what we will eat.

The experience at Emeril’s turned out so wonderful because the couple we were with knew the executive chef. They were friends. The meal just got better and better as the night progressed and Chris worked to bless us.

God wants to bless us, too, with the best he has to offer. His blessings are perfectly designed for our particular needs.

Next time you pray, “Not my will, but thine be done,” don’t be afraid or dismayed. Instead, tell yourself, “He loves me. I’ll let the chef decide what I eat.”

Lord, Give Us a Sign!

By David E. Crosby, Pastor

First Baptist New Orleans

December 18, 2007

I will meet with our councilwoman today to talk about building our church sign on the interstate. We need a favorable vote of the entire city council to proceed with this important project.

Our church facility was built with large events in mind. Our city specializes in large gatherings: conventions, parades, and festivals. Our church will host the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in a presentation of the Messiah Thursday night. We just hosted an overflow crowd for the New Orleans Music Hall of Fame featuring Trombone Shorty and his jazz band.

The city council will vote on our proposal Thursday. This council meeting is likely to be raucous because it will also include a decision about proceeding with the demolition of several public housing complexes.

Put us on your prayer list. Our church has been working on this project for five years. We need a sign!

The dome of the temporary emergency shelter for the homeless is now part of the landscape for commuters on the Pontchartrain Expressway. Many people from far and near have joined hands to help provide these expanded services to our bourgeoning homeless population.

The president of Catholic Charities in New Orleans, Jim Kelly, told me recently that he thought the homeless situation in our city would continue to worsen for the next several years. Among his reasons for this prediction are 1) the lack of affordable housing in the area, 2) the ending of FEMA rental support nationwide for storm evacuees, and 3) the storm-related loss of almost all residential programs for the mentally ill and drug-addicted.

Kelly also predicted a growing number of women and children living on the streets.

The emergency shelter is only days away from being available for occupancy. Furniture is already secured and ready to be moved in.

Pulling the Ropes Together

By David E. Crosby, Pastor

First Baptist New Orleans

December 15, 2007

Stretching the canvas across the aluminum skeleton of the tent required teamwork and coordination of effort. Half a dozen recruits pulled the ropes as half a dozen others fed the canvas upward and over the crossbars.

The skin is now on the building, and the end walls are nearly completed. Insulation, carpet, and air conditioning must be installed before furniture can be installed. Then we will be ready for guests!

Teamwork is an essential part of Kingdom work in post-Katrina New Orleans. We knew this before the flood, but we have become convinced of it since. Few things are more important than coordinating our efforts and working together.

This truth crosses denominational lines—and all other artificial lines drawn between believers in our city. On the front lines of the mission field believers experience a little bit of heaven that those camped way back behind the stuff cannot really comprehend. We discover and receive the blessing that we are not alone in our efforts to bring the lost to Christ and the world to the Savior. We discover our brothers and sisters—fully spiritual family in every way—who are part of other camps and units in the army of God.

Any time we experience a reality on earth that we know will not exist in heaven we have discovered a time-bound, earth-only reality. Racial, economic, and denominational divisions are just such realities. They exist here for various reasons. But these categories and subgroups will not exist in heaven. So you learn a little bit about heaven when these lines are gone and all believers are lifting the same canvas together.

The watching world also learns something about us at these heavenly moments. They learn that the church of Jesus Christ is larger than its earthly divisions. They learn that we can work together. They already know from our bad press that we can criticize each other and complain about one another.

Surely Jesus must have smiled as he saw our patchwork crew erecting the tent for the homeless. I think he was blessed to know a little answer to the prayer for unity he so passionately voiced to the Father the day before his death.

Many hands have come to work on this project. Many people are interested in a variety of ways. We encourage and solicit your prayers, labor, and gifts as we move forward to provide a warm bed and hot meal for every willing resident of Duncan Plaza now without a roof, sanitation, or security.

Emergency Shelter Takes Shape

The homeless population in Duncan Plaza will soon have ample accommodations, prepared meals, showers, sanitation, and security.

A pilot at First Baptist New Orleans, Bill Nix, has led a team of college students and First Baptist members in the construction of an emergency shelter that will house 126 people. The shelter will operate through the winter and a portion of the spring.

Flyers have been distributed to all residents of Duncan Plaza alerting them to the provisions for them at the New Orleans Mission. About 150 persons have been spending the night in and around Duncan Plaza many of them sleeping in tents and many others sleeping under building overhangs, porches, or under the stars.

The mission has also rearranged its facilities to accommodate about 30 homeless women and children. The population in Duncan Plaza is roughly 85 percent men.

The bathroom and dining facilities at New Orleans Mission are able to accommodate a large number of residents—around 300 nightly. The occupancy of the mission has been much lower since Hurricane Katrina damaged the buildings.

The homeless are now invited to come to the mission for shelter and food. Case workers are also available as are drug rehab programs. Everyone who dines at the mission is required to attend worship during the hour prior to the meal. Every worship service includes a presentation of the gospel.

Mission president, Don Cooper, a member of First Baptist New Orleans, insists that residents hear the good news about salvation in Christ. Don was saved and his life transformed when he received Christ as Savior. He knows that many of the homeless deal with debilitating habits and behaviors that can only be changed through the power of Christ.

Pray that God will use this crisis of homelessness in New Orleans to bring men and women to himself. And pray that our attempt to address this very public and difficult situation in our city will call attention to the Christ of Christmas, the Savior of the world, and bring him glory.

Creeping Pain and Progress

By David E. Crosby, Pastor

First Baptist New Orleans

December 11, 2007

I have been creeping around the church and the house lately nursing a strained back muscle. I wish I could say that I pulled a muscle giving a hand up to someone in need. But I was on the second tee box.

I don’t know all the ways in which my legs and arms are connected to my back. I can tell you that the discomfort has traveled around my body from one spot to another without any pattern apparent to me. This morning my knee felt a pinch.

The Apostle Paul observed that when one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers (see 1 Corinthians 12). I have been thinking about that truth since the fateful swing. When the back is hurt everything hurts.

A counselor told me this week that estimates of post-traumatic stress disorder in the City of New Orleans run as high as 11 percent. That percentage has risen to unprecedented heights since the great flood rather than decreasing, as one would expect. Post-traumatic stress was evident in less than one percent of the population of New York City months after 9-11.

Everyone here feels it. A senior adult in our church told me Sunday that his life was still out of kilter though he could not explain why this was so. “Something is wrong,” he said. “It’s hard to put into words.”

The body is hurting. I know that for sure. This widow still lives with friends. That couple still works every weekend restoring their flooded home. The teenager on my right is attending his third high school since Katrina. The single on my left just bought a home after months of displacement but fears the challenge of increasing insurance and utility costs.

Every Sunday I discover a new victim of the stress. Addictive behaviors, particularly gambling, are threatening the fortunes, families, and lives of many people living in the devastated Gulf Coast. I wish all gambling establishments would voluntarily close their doors until our people can recover a sense of hope in the future. Right now they are just easy targets.

Janet and I enjoyed a preview of a Broadway musical hopeful last Saturday and had dinner with the troupe that performed. It was a great evening. The singers performed two numbers for the congregation Sunday morning. The musical “Angels,” aimed at Broadway, will launch from New Orleans with the “Broadway South” signature.

Mayor Nagin has cleared the way for the erection of a temporary shelter for the homeless, I learned by email this morning. So we will mobilize volunteers over the next three days to help provide warm and healthy environs for more than 100 homeless persons living in our parks and streets.

We are making progress here, but not without pain. The greatest encouragement is the tremendous sense of family that pervades the church and even our neighborhoods. People we love share our pain and our triumphs. The body hurts with this twisted back, but we know we are on the mend.

City Hall at Sea Level

City Hall at Sea Level

By David E. Crosby, Pastor

First Baptist New Orleans

Pearl Harbor Day

The metal detectors were beeping as I paused to survey the tent city of Duncan Plaza clearly visible through the glass doors of the central foyer in City Hall. I was there to pray, which seems an especially good idea when the downspouts of City Hall dampen the living space of the poor.

I was sitting in the city council chambers waiting to invoke the Deity on behalf of us all when a hundred chanting advocates of public housing marched in with signs protesting the coming demolitions. I shook hands with my friend, Marshall Truehill, who escaped arrest but cannot escape his burden for people on the fringes.

This influx of the city’s poorer residents caused me to change my prayer. I had intended to remind God and the City Council that the poor have little opportunity to speak to decision-makers. My contemplations waiting on a quorum were more about the thick blanket of poverty and homelessness draped over the city’s center of power.

Amid but not affiliated with the chanting protesters, Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard walked into the room accompanied by two Jefferson Parish councilmen. Their presence lent support to a plan for pumping rain water to the river from the 17^th Street Canal. Politicians from the adjacent parish were not leading this pump-to-the-river charge, however. Lawyers, engineers, and officers from neighborhood groups, all off the clock, presented and defended the strategy.

Where but here do ordinary citizens volunteer their time to spearhead alternative routes for runoff as elected officials trail along and try to get up to speed? Maybe this is normal behavior in human communities.

Regional concerns like flood control still overlap enough that no single local political entity can get arms around it all. Thus emerge groups like Pump to the River and Women of the Storm. Concerned citizens pull together coalitions of public bodies to prompt discussion and effect change, supplementing and sometimes overriding weak public institutions still floundering in the flood.

Citizenship in New Orleans should require at least one trip to the City Council. Order in the chamber is impressive and secured by strict rules enforced by City Council President Arnie Fielkow. This stands in happy contrast to years gone by when city council meetings seemed more like a circus than a deliberation of elected officials.

But the larger context is still circus-like. Groups march in and out. Entourages arrive and depart. The powerful rub elbows with the poor. And everyone chases a vision of something better in the city that care has not forgotten.

This most recent council meeting featured a strange mixture of passions and problems that could only have collided in our post-Katrina world. The tenured and storm-weary citizenry, daily inundated by talk of levees, runoff, inadequate housing, and coastal restoration, easily lose sight of the unique and historic nature of our discussions and struggles.

We were always the most interesting city in America. Where else are traffic reports all about bridges and boats? Now we are interesting in spades. This view from the once-toppled levees is only available here, and it fades a little every day as the fog rolls in.

We continue our vigil below sea level, reinforcing the levied perimeter, re-establishing the grid of human support, and praying for victory over tidal waves.

Doing Today What You May Need More Tomorrow

Once upon a time a man in our church ordered 30 chicks in the mail. When they arrived they were cute and small, but they grew bigger every day.

He taught his girls how to feed the chicks, and they played with them, held them, and loved them. When he slaughtered some of them to eat, his girls were very upset, so he didn't do that again. The chicks grew into chickens, and I inherited a couple when he dispersed them to his friends.

These chickens, Thelma and Louise, were peculiar. Normally, a grown chicken will run away from a human. Not these two. When you approach them, they squat down and get ready to be picked up. The girls picked them up and held them daily when they were tiny chicks, making an indelible impression on their vulnerable chicken psyches.

That is why Eden, my granddaughter pictured here with the patient Road Island Red, was able to capture and hold a grown chicken.

Jesus said to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing (Matthew 23:37).

The Bible stresses the importance of following God while we are young. The patterns we establish in our youth will likely hold throughout our lives.

Everyone should practice the obedient response to God's call. Finding refuge today in the Father's love and strength will make it easier to do the same tomorrow. And resisting today the call, comfort, and support of the Heavenly Father may create mental and spiritual distance during tomorrow's downpour from the only true refuge.

Homeless Tent Project

The homeless situation in Duncan Plaza next to City Hall is at crisis stage. The space pictured here will accommodate an emergency shelter in a climate-controlled tent for 126 men. Don Cooper, president of New Orleans Mission which will administer the project, is talking on the cell phone to the tent company to expedite the process.

We are expecting even more homelessness in the short term in our city. Jim Kelley, president of Catholic Charities, told me yesterday that the next five years are likely to see even more homeless persons in New Orleans with an increasing percentage of them being women and children.

The homeless population is composed of a variety of groups.

1. The chronically homeless compose about 25 percent of our homeless population, according to Unity for the Homeless.

2. A large number of the homeless are those dealing with addiction problems and/or mental illness.

3. The situational homeless are those people, often families, who are the "working poor." They live from one paycheck to another. If that paycheck is disrupted because of transportation failure, children being sick, or problems with the employer, they have no safety net.

4. The new homeless in New Orleans are often those who had housing previous to the storm but who lost their homes and their support network of family and friends. They cannot afford the new rents.

We are working today and all this week to address not only the immediate need before the cold weather settles in but also the longterm need in our city.

People who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord cannot sit this one out. If our heart reflects the heart of our Lord, then we will not be idle when people are hurting. Even though they are strangers to us, we will try to "take them in," as Jesus taught us (Matthew 25).

Dad and Fam

My father, Russell Crosby, has been preaching God's word since he was 20 years old. After two heart attacks and quadruple bypass surgery, he quit preaching.

That was seven years ago.

Sunday he preached again to his congregation in Turnersville, Texas. He took up that pastorate about two years ago.

I called him Monday morning. "Dad, did you preach Sunday?"

"Yes, I did, David."

"Did you sit while you were preaching?"

"You know, I haven't even thought about it," Dad replied. "I sat last week when I preached, but yesterday I stood up through the whole sermon and serving the Lord's Supper. It's the first time I even thought about it."

Dad's heart works at about 15 percent efficiency. It's been doing that since it was damaged during his last heart attack. He gets tired easily, of course, and he uses oxygen when he can at the doctor's suggestion.

But Dad's greatest medicine is preaching. He sounds better and feels better when he can enter the pulpit and do what he has done all of his adult life--share the truths with others that changed things for him forever.

The Thanksgiving gathering of the Russell and Donna Crosby Family happened this year in Killeen, Texas, at the First Church of the Nazarene where my brother, Joe, is worship leader. Ninety-two family members attended and a dozen others. Dad shared again the story of his own spiritual transformation through faith in Christ. He urged everyone present to follow Jesus Christ as Lord. He talked to us about how faith in Christ was the linchpin of our family.

I am glad that God gave me the gift of parents who were passionate believers in Christ. This rich spiritual heritage has made all the difference in dealing with life's questions and troubles as well as its joys and triumphs. In fact, I find that I love life itself in large measure simply because I have learned a little bit about loving God.

Dad has lived with lots of spiritual passion all these years. His conversion as a young adult was instant, total, and permanent. His perspective on faith in God, his frequent explanation of it, and his implementation of that faith in his own daily life, was the single greatest influence in my own spiritual formation and that of the larger family unit.

I preached on Psalm 34 this past Sunday. I paused as I read these words: Come, my children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Whoever of you loves life, and desires to see many good days...

And I thought to myself--and then said it out loud to the congregation--loving life is not only possible, it is obligatory for those of us who fear the Lord.