Skip to content

Archive for

Jan 29

11 Comments

If You Believe…

As I’m trying to get the kids lunches packed, homework in backpacks, shoes, jackets, gloves, toques, and who knows what else ready to go by 8:35 this morning, I noticed one of my daughter’s math worksheets lying on the kitchen counter.  Normally, my eyes are not particularly drawn to anything math-related (I think my kids are already pretty much bumping up against the ceiling of their father’s mathematical competence in grade two!), but for some reason I spied the following question and answer: Read more

Jan 28

42 Comments

What Life Asks of Us

I just got back from a very enjoyable trip to Saskatchewan (I heard it was nice this time of year) to visit my brother and his family and play some hockey. Among other things, it gave me the opportunity to do something that I’ve never had the chance to do before: observe my brother in a classroom context. I sat in on his Intro to Theology class Monday morning and left with much to think about. Read more

Jan 20

1 Comment

What’s on the Other Side?

Last Friday a pastor from the mainland phoned me up and asked if I would be willing to do a graveside ceremony for a family who was returning the body of their loved one to Nanaimo for burial. I still find it very strange to be entrusted, in however minimal a fashion, with these significant events in people’s lives, but I also find it very difficult to to say no to a friend. So, today I was off to say a few words at the burial of a stranger, hoping and praying that something I said would be of some comfort to those present. Read more

Jan 15

9 Comments

At Home

I had an interesting conversation this morning where I was asked the following questions: “When people look at Christians, what should they see that sets us apart?  Are we just a club of “nice people?”  There are lots of nice people in the world, after all—Buddhists, atheists, Hindus, and many more.  Why become a Christian rather than some other option?”  It was one of those moments where you think you should have something profoundly insightful to say based on your years of study and unusual sagacity and clarity of thought, but where what comes out of your mouth doesn’t exactly qualify. Read more

Jan 12

8 Comments

Reading Project: The Resurrection of the Son of God

If you’re anything like me, you tend to accumulate books far beyond your capacity to read them.  In my case, these books tend to migrate from the nice brown Chapters box (always so exciting to see these boxes arrive!) to the coffee table in our living room (where they are daily in plain view, crying out: “read me”) to a pile of books on another table in the living room (a pile in which they steadily descend to the bottom over a period of weeks), to my office where they sit on the side of my desk where my “really should have a look at this” file is located, to the top shelf of my desk (in order to make room for other things I really should have a look at), and finally to my bookshelf, their final resting place, where they sit side by side with any number of other books which have undertaken the same sad journey.  It’s kind of pathetic. Read more

Jan 5

5 Comments

The Epic of the Universe

One of the more beautiful quotes I’ve come across in quite some time—from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

Jan 1

7 Comments

Chaos and Grace

I finally finished Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed last week. It’s a heart-wrenching and tragic story. One reviewer compared it to Dostoevsky’s novels and while I’m not sure I would go quite that far, it certainly does share similar pathos-inducing qualities. In the story, a normal, reasonably happy life for a normal, reasonably happy couple is slowly and steadily reduced to a tale of pain, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and anger. There is hope, as well, but in very measured and cautious doses. Read more