Rick Warren on fire to help others

His voice hoarse and choked from a week of breathing the smoky Southern California air, pastor Rick Warren spoke Monday in Amarillo, talking to reporters about his church’s efforts to aid the firefighters and victims of three blazes raging nearby.
Warren, who pastors Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. He is the author of the best-selling book “A Purpose-Driven Life.”
Just minutes after arriving in Amarillo and being ushered into the Amarillo Civic Center, Warren held a press conference, but did not talk much about his PEACE Plan for global missions. Instead, he spoke about what was foremost on his heart.
“Many of our people had to be evacuated,” he said.
There were 18 fires in the area around San Diego and Los Angeles. Three of those were burning up in Saddleback Valley. The 120-acre campus of his church served as a staging area for firefighters as well as an evacuation center.
“We fed about 400 to 500 firefighters during the week,” he said.
His church — which he said has nearly 100,000 members and 22,000 in attendance on Sundays — sprang into action all across the area when the wildfires broke out. He said they sent trained chaplains to evacuation centers and sent out volunteer teams to do disaster relief.
“We were almost as quick as the Baptist Men of Texas,” he quipped, referring to the emergency response group of the BGCT.
As he spoke and took questions from the press, he remained vibrant and jovial despite the weariness that was showing in his pale blue eyes.
Warren took some time to express his ties to Texas, noting his father and daughter were born in the state, he went to seminary near Dallas and a Texas Baptist church was the first one to sponsor the upstart Saddleback Church 27 years ago. Because his father was the 18th born of 20 children, he has many relatives across the Lone Star state.
He said he was looking forward to talking about missions and his missions-oriented PEACE Plan. The theme of the annual meeting was “Missions — Together We Can Do More.”
“I think it’s one of the things we can do well together,” he said. “Texans have a long history in missions.”
He said in the middle 1800s, missionaries were sent out from New York City to evangelize Texas. Now, “Texas should be sending missionaries out to New York City,” he said.
In the PEACE Plan he spelled out before more than 2,000 conventioneers that night, he said the masses should be sent out locally and abroad to do mission work. He said churches need to “release the latent, pent-up power that’s sitting in our pews today.”

My Second Life experience

Until I was given the assignment to do a story about Second Life, I had never heard of the virtual reality phenomenon.
Apparently neither have most people in Amarillo. Yet this 4-year-old online game boasts 9 million members, is making more than $1 million a day and is growing rapidly.
To explain Second Life in the space allotted here is, well, virtually impossible. In a nutshell, it’s a fantasy world where one can live a true second life as anything or anyone imaginable in a world where anything is possible. OK, there are limits, but in the real word you can’t fly, teleport, change your skin, eyes or hair on a whim or have the body of a hot model.
To try and understand what Second Life is all about, I downloaded the game and created a character. In choosing a name, you must select from a limited number of last names but can pick whatever first name you want. With the help of Troy Rydalch, the corporate information technology guru who had to set up the game on my computer, I ended up creating an avatar called Spock Maximus.
You can try Second Life for free, but eventually you will need to earn or buy Linden dollars, the inworld currency. Since this was on the company dime, I had to settle for a free ride.
Getting Spock to come to life was difficult. My home computers were too outdated to support to graphics-intensive 3-D game. The firewall on the system at the Amarillo Globe-News created a few bugs we had to work out. When I first got Spock up and running, he kept right on running. By the time I figured out how to stop him he was miles from shore and several feet above the ocean.
I had a problem which allowed me to only make a few moves before Spock would go offline. When he did, he would just continue to walk through walls, mountains, water, you name it. I couldn’t move him forward or backward, but I could still spin him around, zoom in and out and make him twist is arm.
There were two times I got the game to work properly. The first time, my new virtual friend, Eliz Watanabe, teleported me to her lounge. She was visiting with friends and I dropped in on the conversation. One of her friends was casually changing hair styles and clothes. The items would simply take on whatever she wanted to replace them with. One time she was bald with Princess Leia buns on the sides.
When half of one of her shirts materialized on her back only, I got an unexpected look at just how anatomically correct the avatars are.
That is one of the major pitfalls of Second Life. It is very sexually oriented. There is a teen version of the game, but the adult version is hard to play without getting a virtual eyeful. I learned that on my second outing. I don’t know where I went, but I saw a lot of shops that were essentially peddling porn.
There was one store that was selling Star Wars things. I could have purchased the Millennium Falcon or R2-D2 if I had any money or something to do with them.
As I explored Second Life I found that time vanished in a hurry. It is too easy to get caught up in a virtual life. It was fun to play, but I came away feeling dirty. I was ashamed at having seen some of the stuff I did and having so quickly lost two hours of my real life.
The game is over for me, probably for good. Spock Maximus was an interesting character, but he is now in cyber hibernation, where he’ll spend the rest of his pixilated life.
For some people, Second Life is a good thing. Most video games are addictive to me. I know enough to stay away from them like a recovering alcoholic knows to stay away from the bottle. I wish Eliz Watanabe and her friends Fingers and the clothing-challenged lady all the best.
If you’re thinking about getting into Second Life, remember that it will become what the name implies. You must learn to do it in moderation and to not let it interfere with the real world around you.