This is the Good Life

We have been spending most of our days in Johnson, Nebraska, and it seems like time that you, dear reader, got to know a little more about the place. (Here are two websites with detailed information of the kind that you're not going to get from me in this blog.) Some of the area's biggest employers are the nuclear power plant and the prison, neither of which are located in Johnson itself. It has a very friendly small town flavor. Doors are never locked and you will likely find car keys sitting in unlocked cars. (Even their approach to the possibility of prison escapees has that sort of flavor. One strategy is to leave the car unlocked, the keys in the ignition and a candy bar in the front seat. In other words, all an escaped prisoner would want to do is get out of such a small town where everyone knows each other, so just make sure that there's no reason for your paths to cross during their attempted flight.) This is a town that loves to feed people (as my waistline would happily attest to) and very much sees itself as a community. If your house burns down and you don't have insurance, up springs a drive for old furniture and a rental is found that you can stay in for a while without worrying about rent. For the population, there's a fair number of churches in the area, most of which are Lutheran. Some of the churches (Lutheran and Methodist) have combined their Sunday schools to make sure that despite their small size, they can continue to offer it to their youth.

Here's what you first see when you enter Johnson, Nebraska.



. . . And as you get closer . . .



Tonight we saw some basketball games at the high school, boys' and girls' varsity teams. The junior varsity teams also played earlier, but we missed those games because we were busy being fed by the ladies of St. Matthew's. (They were only feeding a total of nine people, including themselves, but it was the sort of meal where they put four sticks of butter on the table, just in case we were feeling a wee mite peckish.) Both of the teams won their games to the hearty approval of the sizable crowd that showed up to support them.



In such a small town, where they have their own school, all of the grades are housed together, K through 12. However, they had some things that really surprised me, in one of their media oriented classes, all of the students were playing around on laptops, they have a class where students work on designing an electric car (they currently have two cars in progress) and in keeping with the Johnson lifestyle, none of the lockers have locks.

Earlier in the day though, we had visited one place where the no locks rule most definitely did not apply, the state prison. We also got to meet with a pastor who is the guy to talk to about things like prison chaplaincy. He was actually called by the Nebraska synod to work with a congregation that is inside the walls of the state prison in Lincoln.It strikes me as something that could be a very challenging ministry, but a challenge that Pastor Barth is up to. I think the man has skills. (There's a bulletin cover used by the Followers of Christ congregation, which was designed by one of the congregants, that I found pretty interesting and appropriate and will share on this blog as soon as I can find a place to scan the image.)

So to sum it all up, today we learned a lot, ate a lot and played a lot. Come back tomorrow and see what we get up to next.