Dedication of John Carroll Collier's The Sower

 

My wife Kimberly and I decided a couple of months ago that we needed to be present for last Saturday's dedication of John Collier's (my father-in-law) sculpture for his alma mater, Central Christian College, located in McPherson, Kansas.  It was an incredibly meaningful trip in a multitude of ways.  First, we were incredibly proud of John's wonderful work and happy to be able to be part of its dedication.  Second, with this particular college having a close connection to both the Collier and Ferrell families, it was interesting to connect and learn more about the family history in this way--not to mention meeting more of my wife's family.  Third, as you may know, this community suffered a terrible tragedy just a few weeks ago on a soccer field filled with children at play.  We have all become so inured and accustomed to these evil events on the evening news, and there is something powerful in visiting a community like this after a traumatic event like this.  You don't see dour people raising their fists at God, but just everyday souls trying to continue to put one foot after the next as best they can and love their neighbor.  We also learned of a family connection to the heartbreak, and it is all just incredibly sad.

We did not arrive smoothly in McPherson, by the way.  On our little journey to Kansas, we managed to (1) miss three consecutive flights in Denver due to someone’s apparent medical emergency delaying our plane's arrival at the gate, (2) experienced new adventures in jogging across terminals to mismarked departure gates, (3) learned from TSA, after a full search minus only the foot massage, that some camera cleaning chemicals are also used in explosives. (No, don’t know specifics thanks to national security.)  After changing from Salina to Wichita, no rental cars were available at the airport, and our rental price jumped by leaps and bounds. Only bright spot: United Airlines put us up at a nice hotel and gave us meal vouchers (after everything was closed), but the hotel did have a few food items available.  So, it felt like a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles kind of adventure.

The Sower, based on Christ's parable from Matthew 13, was definitely worth all of the trouble of the journey, and we were so glad to have come.  The family we had not seen for years was welcoming as well, and the bright blue Kansas skies were a nice reprieve from the darker November skies of Oregon.  It was my intention to use a newly available piece of software called FilmCraft to create a video of my GoPro recordings as well as select photography from our trip.  I was able to get the video features to work fairly well in this open-source software, but when I tried to insert photos like I used to in iMovie...it did not work well.  Besides not having any kind of pre-set viewing pattern for still images, the software kept insisting on displaying my photos for periods ranging from five minutes to five hours.  So, I decided to proceed with a video-only production for now.  Unfortunately, subsequent versions of the video kept reporting ghost images remaining in the video.  All in all, I can't recommend this software at this time.  I was also rather disgusted with the commercially available sacred music tracks for videos such as this. If you would like to access the photos, you can view the Flickr album that's now available.  

Apologies for a lack of stability at times with the videography.  I have issues with my left leg that sometimes cause problems when standing for long periods of time.  While kneeling helps (I am Catholic, after all), it doesn't help the picture's perspective so much.

The FilmCraft video will be placed below as soon as the processing is complete, and I have successfully transferred to YouTube.