My favorite movie since I first saw it in high school has been African Queen, starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

In case you don’t remember the 1951 classic directed by John Huston, Hepburn plays an English spinster who is in rural Africa as a Methodist missionary along with her brother the minister.

Following an unexpected German raid on their mission church at the start of World War I, Hepburn’s brother and the native tribal people die and she escapes with riverboat captain Bogart in his ramshackle tramp steamer.

They go on a super-dangerous escapade down two treacherous rivers (the Ulanga and Bora) before they face off and win against a 100-ton German warship called The Louisa.

The part of the movie that has long disappointed me is when they get mired in leech-infested swamp muck, thinking they’ll surely die, and Hepburn prays, “Dear Lord, we’ve come to the end of our journey. In a little while we will stand before you. I pray for you to be merciful. Judge us not for our weakness but for our love, and open the doors of heaven for Charlie and me.”

As a Believer, I think, “Boy, Hollywood always, always, always has a way of throwing a monkey wrench in whenever the do a supposed Christian movie!”

Here’s Hepburn playing this stalwart missionary, battling evil in the face of all obstacles, and they have her sounding like a faithless non-believer at the prospect of her own death—where she’s pleading for her very salvation!

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A friend emailed me yesterday to caution me he “was not sure about the tone” of my last post (read at bottom) and said I sounded like I might be depressed again. The funny thing is I really wasn’t in a bad mood when I wrote it and I didn’t realize it came off that way until he pointed it out.

What even my own family has a hard time understanding about me is I like being a hobo, always heading into a new adventure. If anything, my return to Chicago a year ago has been difficult for me because it seems like “old hat” after having lived there 10 years in the ’90s before I left for New York City in 1999.

Truth be known, I can’t see myself anywhere but in Chicago at this stage in my life. It’s home, not New York.

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A truly off-the-wall character from my childhood who’s been in my head lately is Johnny Appleseed. (Editor’s Note: To read my profile on him click on the “Back Issues” icon until you reach the November 4, 2005 article entitled “Sowing Class”).

Appleseed was the ultimate free-spirit hobo, leaving his family home in Massachusetts at age 23 in 1774 to go cross-country with the dream of planting apple trees while spreading the gospel.

He roamed the untamed countryside barefoot—even in the dead of winter—in a tattered, patched coat with a Bible buttoned inside it, using his head to haul around the cast-iron stewpot he did his cooking with.

Of course, wouldn’t you know, I found out some 15 years ago that Appleseed was really a follower of the Swedenborg cult. Among other things, Swedenborgians (dating from the mid-1700s) believed the devil was simply the “personification of human evil” and hell was “corrupted human society.” There’s obviously no telling whether Appleseed was really saved or not.

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Among my very favorite Bible characters is the eccentric-acting prophet Ezekiel, a contemporary of Daniel who obviously knew him personally.

Ezekiel was carried into Babylonian captivity the same time Daniel was and lived most of his life (in the time period of the book of Ezekiel) with Israel in captivity.

Jordan affirms, “In that deportation, when Nebuchadnezzar took the princes and leaders and all the educated people in the land of Israel, that’s when Ezekiel and Daniel were carried away captive. They lived contemporaneously with Jeremiah.

“The prophet Jeremiah was prophesying in Palestine when Nebby’s army came and took Israel away. Ezekiel is over in Babylon and Jeremiah stays and preaches in Palestine and they both basically say very similar things to Israel.”

The thing about Ezekiel was he was made to do all kinds of strange things as a sign from God to Israel.

“You think preachers today are weird,” reasons Jordan. “In chapter 3 there in Ezekiel, by being given the spirit of dumbness, he can’t talk. He has to bind himself up, shut himself in a house and then not talk. All these signs he does are little sign-pictures for the nation Israel. They demonstrate what God’s doing with Israel.

“In chapter 4, Ezekiel has to lie on his right side for 430 days, then switch over on his left side. God tells him, ‘Go out and lay on your right side, then roll over and lay on your left side. Now, 430 days is a long time! He goes along and then God tells him he has to shave his head.

“Then you’ve got what they call Ezekiel Bread. He’s got to go out and make this bread and do all this stuff. In one place, he’s actually got to take dung and mix it in (with the bread) and eat it!

“The humiliation the prophet suffers is just for a sign. All these crazy things. What he does in Ezekiel 24:15-23, his wife dies and God says, ‘You can’t mourn for her. Don’t be sad.’

“In one place, God says, ‘Go over and knock a whole in the wall and then take all your luggage and throw it out through the hole and climb out through the hole and walk off through the desert.’ Well, once again, it’s for signs. The sign is, ‘You guys are going to go into captivity. Take your bags and head out.’ ”

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Here’s the post from April 7:

When I called today and told a friend in Chicago that I was planning to move again at the end of the month, this time to a rental apartment nearer the lakefront and closer to downtown, she said, “Boy, I don’t even remember what it’s like to move. I’ve only lived three different places in my life.”

I started thinking about how my 43-year-old life has been filled with one move after another. Before I was even six years old, my father moved my family from my hometown of Akron, Ohio, to San Jose, Costa Rica, where he and my mom trained for a year to become missionaries in the jungles of Ecuador (another two-plus years).

Upon returning to the United States, we lived out of a fleabag hotel in Miami, Fla. as my father contemplated where to go next. We ended up camping out inside my grandmother’s house in Akron for a year before moving to a small farm/resort town in north central Ohio (Loudonville, pop. 3,200) that none of us had ever heard of before.

I lived there until I left for college, first attending Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and then transferring late in my freshman year to Ohio State University, where I lived in various dorms and later (in my junior year) moved to off-campus housing.

The rest of the list goes as such: Cincinnati (as a summer copy editor/features reporter intern at the Cincinnati Enquirer); Cleveland (as a summer sports reporter intern for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper); Sayre, Pa. (my first permanent job as a bureau chief for the Elmira Star-Gazette newspaper); Lexington, Ky. (as a contributing writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader); Detroit, Mich. (as a sports copy editor “tryout” for the Detroit News); Chicago (where I worked as a feature reporter and columnist for the Naperville Sun before moving into trade journalism, living in six different apartments, including one in Naperville, in the space of nine years); Brooklyn, N.Y. (as associate editor for Graphic Arts Monthly, a trade magazine covering the commercial printing industry), Manhattan (where I continued in the same job for three-plus years and then worked independently out of my home for three years); Arab, Ala. (where I lived six months in a trailer out in the country) and then back to Chicago last spring.

Currently I’m in Zavalla, Texas, visiting once again a friend (who is the sole parent of five grandchildren) I stayed with for two solid months last fall. It feels like home right now. Last summer, I stayed for three months in the home of married-couple friends in Bloomington, Ill. It felt like home at the time.

I guess the moral of this story is I don’t feel like anywhere is home anymore. It’s gotten me over this whole idea of “home.” It just doesn’t exist in my world, especially since I took the big road trip out West and slept in my car for days and days on end, interspersing it with necessary motel stays. Home, at that time, was literally wherever I put my head on my pillow at night. And I stayed on city streets for a lot of it!

More and more, I see heaven as my real home and down here as just “whatever-it-is-for-the-moment.” I just want to get to the point where I can really, really say, “I’m over it! Who cares!”