I’ve been amazed at the quality and depth of the questions that have been texted in each evening for Q & A with David Asscherick this week. True, there were the frivolous and trite  ones—“How fast does David run a 5K?” “Can you have a class for your sound effects?” “What is your tattoo of?” etc.

How about a break from the inane kabuki theater that Washington politics has turned out to be? Besides, by the time you read this there is hope that some sort of political compromise will have been reached to deal decisively and realistically with the government shut down and debt ceiling limit.

They say the young Pakistani sixteen year old, Malala Yousafzai, has an inside track to the Nobel Peace Prize this year. We’ll know in a few days. If she wins this much heralded prize, she will become the youngest recipient in its illustrious history. And why not?

It’s not like we haven’t been here before. Those who can remember back to 1995 recall that the government was shut down in November that year by our perennial two-party squabble. The reason I remember is because I happened to be in Honolulu for a prayer conference, when the morning news announced that the U.S.

Our Tokyo 13 mission completed, yesterday Karen and I were two thirds of the way up the world’s tallest tower, the Tokyo Skytree. At 634 meters (2080 feet) the Skytree is only exceeded by Mt Fuji in the hazy distance.

There is a crisis quietly unfolding far away from the headlines of Syria’s chemical attacks, North Korea’s erratic leadership, California’s raging wild fires, and this nation’s economic unraveling. The crisis concerns the land of my birth, the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan.

For days now America has listened and relistened to the fifty year old black and white video rendition of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” impromptu homily on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The news bulletins out of Syria this week have cast a desperate pall over the already bleak Middle East. Observers on the ground in Damascus reported that the Syrian government launched a major WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack on its own hapless citizens in the suburbs of that ancient city.

Here at summer’s end they’re now telling us that brushing our teeth and washing our hands are threatening our prized Great Lakes. And let’s be honest—what would Andrews University be without Lake Michigan? (Union College, of course!) What’s up with this headline?

On the occasion of this farewell for the first woman pastor to serve the Pioneer Memorial Church, I would like to digress from the usual focus of this Fourth Watch blog and reflect on the pastoral ministry of Esther Knott and the journey of women in ministry during her sixteen years of spiritual leadership in this congregation.