Tod Bolsinger

Truly Transforming Missions: The Final R

I arrived back at Los Angeles International Airport late in the evening.  By the time I picked up my car where it had been parked at a friends house for better than a month it was after midnight.  The often busy boulevards in the San Fernando Valley were empty as I drove home.  But whenever a car approached me, or even past a wary pedestrian, I kept absent-mindedly honking my car horn.  Over and over again, without even thinking about it, I just kept honking.  The cars must have thought something was wrong, the pedestrians wondering if I was suffering from road rage.

In LA, we just don’t honk.  At least not that often.  To honk is like yelling.  It’s almost always considered rude unless it is a genuine emergency. 

But I had just returned from a month in Haiti.  And in Haiti, everyone honks.  When I was in Haiti in 1985, many of the roads were newly paved for the first time.  Because of that, many of the villagers who were used to hearing cars noisily bumping down dirt roads were unwittingly getting injured by walking out in front of cars that were now passing by in virtual silence on the new pavement.  So, in order to be safer, everybody honks.  You honk when a car is coming at you, you honk when you are passing a boy who is walking his cow down the middle of the road.  You honk when you are approaching a women with five kids and only two hands, and a bundle of clothes on her head.  NOT to honk would be considered rude.  And dangerous.  And unfriendly too.  (You also honk in order to say hi.)

After driving in Haiti for a month, I now “naturally” honked when I drove in Los Angeles.  At least for a day or two…  Within no time I was back to my “honk-less” ways. 

It took me a month to learn a new habit, but less than a week to unlearn it.  To return to “normal”.  To go back to the way I was.  What happened to how I had been changed?

Taking up the gauntlet thrown down by two professors who questioned and discussed the genuine and lasting effectiveness of Short Term Missions, I have suggested that there are (at least) three elements that must be part of every Short Term Mission trip to make it truly transformative for both mission trip participants and those who receive them.

Relationship: the longer, deeper, more frequent and mutual interactions between teammates who go, churches that send and those who receive, the better.

Reflection:  Especially on returning home.  The more the mission trip causes all parties to reflect on their cultural and spiritual assumptions, the more that we reflect on the gap between our stated beliefs and our expressions of faith, the more we reflect on the differences between our life and faith at home and that of our new friends made in mission contexts, the better.

Now for the final R.  Reintegration. The more that we can consciously and deliberately reintegrate the lessons we have learned, the awareness gained and that spiritual focus we maintained on a mission trip into our “home” life, the more transforming the experience will be. 

For many of us the changes that occur on mission trips are in far more significant areas of life than driving and honking.  Spend a few weeks in a foreign mission field and you begin to take up the ways of that land, the examples you have seen, the lessons you have learned in life-enriching and awareness-building ways. 

But soon after returning home we "lose" it. 

While on a mission trip, we will think nothing of praying for someone in need, sharing my faith with a stranger we meet, identifying ourselves as Christians (and missionaries to boot.)  But put us in a coffee shop at home and we quickly pull back into our own little worlds, fearful of sharing our faith, forgetful that wherever we are, all believers are always missionaries sent into the world. 

For STMs to truly transform, then we need to maintain relationships and continue our reflections until the very convictions that became clear to us while on the trip become part of our lives at home. Again, this puts the onus on what happens AFTER the trip.

A conviction that God wants us to feed the hungry in Africa can lead to service in a local soup kitchen.  Two weeks of regular prayer and Bible study with mission teammates can lead us to join a small group when we get home.  The experience of overcoming biases to learn from Christians of other cultures can lead us to question our unquestioned assumptions of what Christians “look like” in North America.  And so on. 

Next post I will finish this with some things we can do to live out these three Rs and make our missions truly transformative.

Malaria, Missions and the Meaning of it all

In an odd way, one of the most personally impacting moments of my most recent mission trips was the most unremarkable: swallowing a pill.  At home, this is something I do without thinking.  A multi-vitamin each day, Advil when aching, some herbal boosts when the immune system needs a jump start.  But for a few days before, everyday while in Africa and then for a few extra days after returning home, I took Malaria medicine. 

Everyone told me that the medicine that I was taking was the expensive one.  I was warned that if my insurance didn’t cover it (it did), that it could cost a couple hundred dollars.  As I took the single pill every day, I was keenly aware that I was ingesting a medicine that would very, very likely protect me from a disease that was literally killing millions of Africans each year.  All because I had both health insurance and the means to afford it. 

I was also keenly aware that these 21 pills cost what an African family makes in income in a year. 

So, here I was, a short-term missionary in Africa protecting myself and my son at the cost of two years salary for an African.  Meanwhile a million people die of Malaria every year, my missionary friends drank tonic water (for the small amounts of quinine) and told stories of what having Malaria is like.  (One of the missionaries told of contracting the disease over 150 times.)  What do I make of that?

I found myself looking up articles on Malaria, scanning websites; I even posted a blog report on Malaria day (with virtually no interest from any commentators).  What certainly was off my radar before I went to Africa was now becoming a growing personal concern.  One of the reasons that I supported the efforts of The ONE Campaign is because of Jeffrey Sach’s conviction that it will take a world-wide effort to make Malaria medicine and prevention available in Africa.  (The same $7 mosquito net that we slept under around every bed in Africa would do more than most other treatments to slow the infection rate dramatically.)

Beyond Malaria and the means to make the medicines more readily available, what is clear is that I was now thinking, praying and reflecting about issues, world circumstances and people that I had rarely thought about before.  According to one of the missiologists who corresponded in the recent Christianity Today articles, these very kinds of mission-field reflection hold more potential for long-term life transformation than just pondering the topic at home.  (If “relationship” was the first “R” for truly transforming mission trips, then “reflection” is the second.)

“(Short Term Mission) provides a fertile setting for Christians to reflect on such things as witness, service, community, sacrifice, spirituality, poverty, materialism, suffering, hedonism, self-denial, justice, racism, ethnocentrism, inter-ethnic relations, globalization, stewardship, and vocation,” wrote Robert Priest of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. “I’ve been impressed that while STM may not automatically produce desired results, the right sorts of STM, carried out in the right sorts of way, and accompanied by the right sorts of reflections have potential for good.”

His colleague, Kurt Ver Beek agreed and at the same time, reiterated his conviction that the reflection begun on the mission field must continue at home. 

“Monthly meetings with our groups after returning to the U.S. newsletters about the progress and needs of the people we visited, Bible studies on the country or theme of our trip, are just a few of the ideas that can translate a one-week experience into life-lasting changes in prayer, giving, and lifestyle. Sadly, very few STM experiences are currently emphasizing this sort of follow up. This is where I believe we should begin experimenting and see how STM participants are changed.”

These two professors would say that perhaps even more powerful than taking Malaria medicine was my now far more conscious awareness of what it means that I CAN take Malaria medication.  Also, the fact that the medicine I took required me to continue the doses even when I returned home, encouraged my reflections for a few days after the trip.

In my case, my family and I went to the rainforest of Belize three weeks after I returned from Africa.  We were once again on the same Malaria medication and this time taking it for another 21 days.  If nothing else, the “physical discipline” of the taking a pill became a “spiritual discipline” of lingering longer on the thin line between the security and medication available to me and my family making it possible to venture into many places in the world in the name of Christ where others are dying because they can’t venture out.  And that is certainly worth reflecting on…

Next Post: The Third R--Reintegration

Sharing a Showtime Story

I received an encouraging email from Ricky Ray Taylor, a reader of my most recent book, Showtime: Living Down Hypocrisy by Living out the Faith.  Ricky graciously gave me permission to post his letter. 

Tod, 

I am an avid reader with a complete library of just about every book I've read since graduating college in 1992... Rarely do I deem to take the time to fully comprehend what I read in order for it to drastically affect my life.  Being relatively "new" in discovering the Power of God in my life - the sub-title of your book - "LIVING DOWN HYPOCRISY BY LIVING OUT THE FAITH" -caught my eye. 

Here is why:  Since being saved in '96, it has truly been a process of growth - not change - but growth...  YET, the changing of my outward appearances was still a slow process.

Then I read your book.
Then I read it again.
I've outlined and highlighted just about all of it. 

I feel as though I was led to this book because it fit so perfectly into a life of someone who was 'on the fence' towards living a Christian life yet, was still hesitant to bring it to fruition.  Rather than "hiding" so many of my references to my "walk" as a Christian - I have now put them at the forefront of my presence.  I used to HIDE my signs of being a Christian because since I stepped out of line so often, I was scared of being labeled a HYPOCRITE.  This accusation by onlookers would have been rightly substantiated.  I "felt" it as much as I wanted to "be" it - but the fear of having others witness my shortcomings made me keep my mouth shut.  This made it easy for me to sin without being labeled a hypocrite. 

I finally decided that I did not want to live like that anymore. 

I am a CHRISTIAN and for the rest of my life I will STAND AS ONE no matter who watches or who cares or HOW I may be judged.  By doing so, I am propelled and MOTIVATED to live a more Godly life and am obsessed in letting others know!

Thanks Tod!
Ricky Ray Taylor
www.BoxerDRILLZ.com

Thank you, Ricky. 

The Three R’s of Truly Transforming Mission Trips.

Educators everywhere know about the “Three R’s”.  The Three R’s represent the most basic fundamentals of schooling: “Reading, (w)Riting and (a)Rithmetic.”  The Three Rs are the subjects that everyone in every school should have.  Sure, science, history, geography, music, art and so on are important and neglected.  But if you had a less than ideal education environment and had to limit the curriculum, you’d be sure to include the Three Rs.  These three subjects are considered so vital that to fail to offer them is to fail the student. 

For the last several posts, I have been responding to a set of articles posted at CT’s weblog that questioned the value of Short Term Mission trips.  The authors, both professors of missiology and sociology have looked at some research that went beyond the self-report of mission trip participants (“It really, really changed my life.”) to measure what changes actually occurred in both their lives and the lives of those people who received their mission trip and ministry (Uh…not much.)

But neither professor is eager to abandon STMS as a whole, they instead want to see mission trips be better integrated into an ongoing process of discipleship that is focused even more on what happens after the trip than before.  And to that end, I want to put forth the “three Rs” of Truly Transforming Mission Trips. 

I want to suggest that even more than WHAT is done on the trip (evangelism, building project, medical mission) is the discipleship context for the doing.  Even more important than meeting a need, responding to a crisis, experiencing a different culture or just “doing good” is maintaining a discipleship focus that actually transforms those who participate more and more in conformity with the character and mission of Jesus Christ.

Last post I touched on the first R: Relationships. 

For Mission Trips to truly transform the lives of all the participants (both those who go on the trips and those who receive the “missionaries”) then a basic rule of thumb is that the greater the amount of ongoing relationship, reinforced relationship, deepened relationship, the better.  (The article authors offer a nice discussion about the difference between bonding and bridging capital and how mission trips should encourage both.) 

This should not be surprising, because we see it most demonstrably in the mission of Jesus.  Jesus spent more time building a community of disciples than he actually did preaching the gospel or healing people.  When he sent his disciples on their first “mission trip” (Matthew 10) the first instructions he gave them was to go where people welcomed them.  If there was no desire for relationship, then there would be no mission. 

In the same way, our church has begun to reevaluate its mission partnerships based on whether the missionaries offer us opportunities for ongoing mutual relationships.  Is there a community of people in the mission field who will partner with our church?  Would they be willing to come visit us?  Can we keep in contact?  Will there be ongoing communication between us?  Can we send teams at least every year?  Will this be a genuine partnership where we are mutually transformed by the partnership?  We also have invited other churches where we have some ongoing relationship (like the churches pastured by my covenant group members) to join us in the partnership. 

Our involvement in the Y-Malawi Partnership was based exactly on these criteria and on our trip to Africa we even spent considerable time and expense to build relationships with each other, other team members from partner churches and our mission partners in Africa.  Indeed, we paid the expenses of the leaders of the African ministries to join us for two days at a game park where we deepened our friendships and talk and prayed together about our partnership. 

Now to be sure, most every one who comes back from a mission trip says that they will maintain contact and friendship with the people they met.  And by and large, most don’t.  They mean to, but once they get home, “real life” gets in the way of these new “relationships.” 

The same thing happens with members of mission teams.  They might be eagerly spend time preparing to go on the trip, raising money or sacrificing vacation time to go, but the minute they get off of the plane, they find it difficult to get together to even share photos or remember stories over dinner.  (This is exactly what happened to our Africa team.  We had one dinner together when we returned and our second dinner will be next week, a good three months since our return.)

The research suggests that the less a mission trip is an isolated experience and instead an expression of a building relationship between the members of trips, the churches that send them and the people who receive them, the greater the long-term impact on both those who go and those who receive the mission team. 

Relationships are also, in the end, easier to sustain than some emphemeral commitment to "missions".  When I have a relationship with someone we work together to strengthen the bond, to mutually encourage each other and to grow in Christ.  Just this past week I received pictures from one of our partners, Louise Laubscher of Fishers, Trainers, and Senders Ministry in Malawi.  The people in the pictures are holding Bibles that I personally hauled all the way to Africa in one of my bags.  Louise sent us the pictures to say thanks and to encourage us.  (I got to tell you that one picture like that and I am ready to swim back to Africa carrying the Bible in my teeth.) 

One last thing, it is this priority on relationships that has made me skeptical and cautious about encouraging of the ONE campaign.  My skepticism is about any government run or widespread program that simply wants to add more money to the crisis of poverty and disease in Africa through bureaucracies.  I would much rather see ongoing grassroots partnerships between communities of Christians both in Africa and the western world.  But, it was because of my relationships with some Christian leaders (including those at World Vision) that convinced me that part (not all) of what our friends in Africa needed would only be met by larger governmental involvement.  The ONE campaign raised awareness, brought the issues of Africa to the table of the G8 leaders and encouraged lively debate. Indeed, crippling economic debt, and widespread medication for Malaria and AIDS are solutions beyond what “relationships” can achieve. 

But at the same time, wearing a wristband, watching a concert on TV or emailing the President is not the same as having a relationship with a family that is struggling to survive.  Awareness and experience open the door to transformation, but only relationships truly transform.

Tomorrow the second R: Reflection

Living Care-fully at Both Ends of Life

Two of my blogging friends wrote thoughtful reflections on being caregivers for the one's they love.

Bill Rice and his wife Tera are celebrating the birth of a baby girl.

Steve Norris and his wife Nancy are caring for Steve's aging parents.

Both posts make inspiring weekend reading.

And I'll return to my topic on Monday.

Can you tell which thing is not like the other?

I am continuing a series of reflections on Short-Term Missions and how they can be an effective part of a truly transforming church.  Taking up the conversation in a series of articles by CT, two posts ago, I asked you to consider which of the following Short Term Mission scenarios is not like the other and why.

1. A church has a tradition of taking its high school students to Mexico with a para-church ministry to build houses in a kind of Holy Spring Break.
2. A small group of medical professionals travel to the Philippines to run a week’s worth of medical clinics in poor slums.
3. Volunteers join in rebuilding efforts after a disaster in a third-world country.
4. A church sends a group of members to the same village in Africa ten years in a row, the ministry they do differing depending on the needs of the villagers.

So, (drum roll please)…the answer is #4. 

All of the mission trip scenarios are good and noble activities.  Even honoring to God, I’d say, and certainly well-worth doing.  Please don’t hear any implied criticism of the motivations or activities in any of these types of mission trips.  I’d encourage any of my church members to take part in any of them. 

But #4 is the only one that has built into its organization the crucial element that Ver Beek and Priest say is essential to insuring that mission trips truly transform: ongoing committed relationships.

Relationships within the team members (they are all from the same church) and relationships between the church sending the team and the village that has received them for ten years in a row.  And implied in the phrase “the ministry they do differing depending on the needs of the villagers” is a kind of relationship where the sending team is more interested in genuinely serving the needs, goals and intentions of the villagers than having any agenda of their own. 

In scenario #4, mission trips are based not on the desire of North American Christians to “do some good for the less fortunate”, but instead to develop relationships and partnerships between the church and the village that will be mutually beneficial, lasting, and responsive to the leadership offered by the villagers (who themselves no more of what they need than well-meaning westerners often admit.)

For mission trips to make a genuine difference, both in the lives of those who go and those who receive the missionaries, the focus must be on more than any adventure to take, task to accomplish, need to meet or good thing to do.  It must be on genuine partnership, growing in discipleship and mutual relationships that encourage the sending church, those who go and those who receive to all be more aware of God’s work in their midst and God’s call on their lives. Priest describes this as teams who return “year after year, slowly building stable, enduring and reciprocal ties.”

Now, while preferring scenario #4 (and indeed, making that scenario the model for both the Y-Malawi project and our church’s increasing forays into missions) I actually want to spend a bit more time arguing for the benefits of scenarios 1-3 and how those kinds of trips could be tweaked to be more truly life-transforming. 

Benign Missions

While you are trying to get that Sesame Street Song out of your head, let me continue with my series.  In a recent set of articles, Kurt Ver Beek of Calvin College and Robert J. Priest of Trinity Divinity School engage an email conversation based on Ver Beek’s findings that in general Short Term Missions projects (in the words of the first article) “don’t do much at all". 

In short, while those who go on mission trips say that their lives are demonstrably changed by the experience, people surveyed after they return home from a trip, are by and large no more spiritually mature, financially supportive of missions, prayerful for missions or more likely to become career missionaries from the experience than if they hadn’t gone.  Ver Beek’s study of 127 North Americans and 78 Honduran for whom the Americans built homes after the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 found “that neither group had experienced notable changes.” 

Now that is not to say that the experiences weren’t significant to the people involved.  Universally, people who take on these kinds of mission trips consider them extremely meaningful and even life-transforming.  But the data bears out the reality that for most people a trip in and of itself doesn’t change them much at all.  (Not even in terms of attitudes toward other cultures.)

So, then what does Ver Beek suggest?  That STMs are harmful and that we should abandon them all together?  No.  (Indeed, he tested for that very concept and found that STMs are by and large benign and even appreciated by the people receiving ministry)

Well, then shouldn’t we change the way trips are run?  Yes, but that’s not as important as we think.  How about better orientation preparing people before they go?  Everyone says that. 

No, Ver Beek centers his suggestions on what churches do after people return from mission trips. 

“STMs by themselves do not produce lasting change in North Americans, Hondurans, or Kenyans. I think they need to be part of a larger framework—especially after the experience—that can translate a one-week high into lasting changes for all involved.”

Ver Beek writes in another of the email exchanges:

“I'm beginning to see that short-term missions is like the rest of life. We go to a conference or a summer camp and leave excited to pray every day, exercise four times a week, and reorganize our closets. But then we get home to find we are behind at work, the kids have soccer practice, and we have to pay off the credit card. Our new-found motivation tapers off. Participants in short-term missions have a similar experience. Immediately after returning from a trip, participants intend to make changes in their life, but usually fall back into old routines.”

I have to say that while I am sobered by Ver Beek and Priest’s conversation but not surprised.  For every person who tells me stories of how a mission trip changed their lives, I know of dozens where people have “lost the fire” so, so quickly.  Even those of us from our Africa trip less than 12 weeks ago have already bemoaned that our day to day experience influences us more than even the power of the experience of our trip.  As on one of my teammates said, “I really want to go back again, soon.  I feel like I am losing all I gained.”

Ver Beek suggests that the key is structures that integrate the STM experience into a person’s and a community’s ongoing discipleship.  But what kind of structures would that be? 

That is where I’ll pick up tomorrow. 

By the way…if you haven’t chimed in on my “Big Bird Goes on a Mission Trip” post, take a crack at it. 

Big Bird Goes on a Mission Trip

Remember that old Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong, can you guess which thing is not like the other, before I finish this song?” 

Well, give it a go.  Which of these is not like the others and why:

1. A church has a tradition of taking its high school students to Mexico with a para-church ministry to build houses in a kind of Holy Spring Break.
2. A small group of medical professionals travel to the Philippines to run a week’s worth of medical clinics in poor slums.
3. Volunteers join in rebuilding efforts after a disaster in a third-world country.
4. A church sends a group of members to the same village in Africa ten years in a row, the ministry they do differing depending on the needs of the villagers.

So did you figure it out?  Which one is not like the others and why?  (And why does it matter?). 

You take a guess and next post I’ll continue on with my topic of what kind of Short-Term Missions really make a difference.

STM #2: “How Old Should A Missionary Be?”

In a recent set of CT articles, two missiologists raised several questions about the effectiveness of Short Term Missions.  In my last post I began some reflections about responding to these questions.  Today, I want to take up that discussion in earnest, by starting with a gathering I attended last evening.

My son Brooks and I went to a home in a brand new community, to meet with a small group of people who are part of a brand new church.  The community (Ladera Ranch) is so new that the address for the house I was visiting was not even listed on the map software for my nifty new hybrid car with cool GPS navigation system.  The church is so new that they still meet in a school and according to the Presbyterian Church way of doing things aren’t even “officially” an established church yet.  But here we were sitting in a living room together talking about how Village Presbyterian Church could be part of the Y-Malawi Partnership.  Brooks and I shared our experiences of traveling to Malawi and showed some pictures and then answered some questions.  This brand new church that is itself a “mission project” of our presbytery and 7 local congregations was meeting to discuss how to get their still small, but growing band of people involved in a mission partnership in Africa. 

For me this was one of those key moments in ministry.  My church, San Clemente Presbyterian, was one of the 7 churches that helped found Village Presbyterian.  I served on the search committee that called Steve Wright to become their organizing pastor.  Steve and I are in a covenant group together and Ladera Ranch is a neighboring community.  Indeed, two families who were part of SCPC are now part of the core at VPC.  (Steve is also a fine blogger, also.)

But even more than the personal connections, I couldn’t help but feel that I was in the middle of a discussion that was so healthy, so right, so well…Christian. 

Here was a church of people who are so concerned about being part of the mission of Christ in the world that they are weaving into their earliest experiences as a church a commitment to mission throughout the world.  They were not focusing just on how to make themselves, stronger, how to grow larger, or how to raise money for their budget, but how to be involved from the very beginning in the work of Christ in the world.

Indeed, this morning, Village Presbyterian Church is conducting their very first Vacation Bible School outside in a park with 43 children.  That alone is worth celebrating!  But their theme for the week is teaching that God loves children all over the world, and wants to use children like them to care for children in places like Africa.

I tell this story today, because frankly, I am awed and privileged to be associated with Steve Wright and the people of VPC in Ladera Ranch.  They are themselves a “mission project” (a new church development) who are seeking to draw people into the grace and mercy of Christ through the establishment of this church. 

In new churches, the core of committed people is very small, the resources are tight, every event is a new challenge, just holding worship every Sunday when you have to set up, conduct the services and tear down the equipment every week is a tiring commitment.  We all would “excuse” them for thinking that becoming involved in Africa might be for a later season of their life together.  If there was ever a group of people who have a “right” to pass on caring for the world while they “take care of their own,” it has to be a “new church development.”  But not this church. 

While they still have plenty of discussion about whether the Y-Malawi Partnership is the right partnership for them, right from the beginning, every person who comes to VPC will know that they are a community of people who want to not only care for the people of Ladera Ranch, but they want to “be Jesus for the whole world.” 

I also share this story because I believe that what VPC (and the Y-Malawi Project Partners) are attempting to do is change the grid of assumptions about short-term missions and create far more effective partnerships for both the renewal of the North American churches and the good of our friends in Malawi.  Missions aren’t just something that “old” and “established” churches do to “give something back”, but are part of the ongoing life of a church that needs to be established right from the very beginning. 

What Pastor Steve Wright is doing at VPC is insuring that mission and relationship go together as part of the DNA of the church.  That STMs will not be just “peak experiences” where people respond to a need or a tragedy, but instead involvement in mission and partnership with friends in it for the long term will be part of the ongoing discipleship of the church.  Which is exactly the recipe for making missions more effective. 

But more on that tomorrow.

Today, please pray for the VBS at VPC.  And if you happen to be reading this and live in Ladera Ranch, California, I encourage you to check out VPC, God is doing something great there. 

Blog Sloth...

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa...

I know that my blogging has been sporadic lately.  And I apologize to those of you who have been waiting for the next installment in my musings on mission and community.

Truth be told I was caught up in prepping to "compete" in the Camp Pendleton International (Olympic Distanc) Triathlon (my fourth triathlon and I use the word "compete" VERY loosely...).  I finished and still was able to stand upright to preach the day after. (This picture is from my first Half-Ironman last year.)

I have also been completely absorbed in watching Lance Armstrong utterly dominate the Tour De France field.  It is frankly the greatest sporting achievement ever. Lance, a cancer survivor, is poised to win the Tour (a 21-day bike race through the Alps, the Pyrennes and the French Countryside where competitors average 100 miles of riding per day) for the SEVENTH CONSECUTIVE TIME. (The previous record before him was five.)

If you haven't watched any of it yet, by all means try to see some in this final week.  (It is being shown on OLN.)  This is more amazing than Babe crushing a baseball, Michael dropping three pointers, Tiger at the PGA cruising to a 21 shot lead.   

Then yesterday, faithful sidekick, George Hincapie wins his first stage in the tour ever. Teammates like Hincapie are called "domestiques" (the French word for "servant") and their selflessness is a wonderful example of selfless teamwork. It was a great story.

If I was in charge of the world everybody would get the month of July off every year to do nothing but watch the Tour and then go for a bike ride. And since today is my day off I am going to do just that....