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Posts by Ryan

Apr 23

2 Comments

His Will is Done

[T]he proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well.  And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all is not well but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God.  In the end, his will, not ours, is done.  Love is the victor.  Death is not the end.  The end is life.  His life and our lives through him, in him.  Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream.  

Christ our Lord has risen.

Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

Apr 22

8 Comments

How God Gets What God Wants

An interesting quote for Good Friday, from William Willimon’s Why Jesus?:

[T]he cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us.  This is all validated by God raising this crucified victim from the dead, not by dramatically rescuing Jesus’ failed messianic project, nor certifying that Jesus had, at last, paid the divine price for our sin.  Rather, it showed the world who God really is and how God gets what God wants.

Apr 19

39 Comments

Right and Wrong

This morning I came across an interesting lecture over at TED Talks by journalist, author, and “wrongologist” (apparently there is such a thing!) Kathryn Schulz called “On Being Wrong.” If you’ve got 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth checking out. Read more

Apr 16

29 Comments

State of Nature

This morning, I noticed with interest that Holy Post, the National Post‘s religion blog, has decided to disable comments on their posts for a while due to the bad behaviour of commenters (curiously, comments are allowed on the post announcing that comments will no longer be allowed!). Read more

Apr 15

2 Comments

Witness to Surprise

My previous post was, perhaps, a bit long on what I don’t (or didn’t) like about the word “pastor” and short on what is good and positive and substantive about the vocation.  Chalk it up to my incorrigible “glass-half-empty” perspective :).  Or something like that.  At any rate, my estimation of the pastoral vocation has been on a long and steady trajectory of rehabilitation, not least due to my encountering of inspiring examples of what it can and should be along the way.   One of them, Frederick Buechner, captures much of what I was trying to convey in my post—both the potential pitfalls inherent to the position as well as the wonderful opportunities and privileges that can be part of a life with and for God and others—in this passage from Telling Secrets: Read more

Apr 12

15 Comments

Unlikely Pastor

I finished Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor last night while waiting for the kids to finish up at piano lessons. It was a good book (if a little more hortatory than one might expect from a memoir) and I am grateful for the window that it provided into the life and career of a man I admire greatly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, over the course of reading Peterson’s memoir I have found myself reflecting often upon this peculiar vocation called “pastor” that I have found myself in, how I ended up here, and what I understand it to be.   Read more

Apr 10

3 Comments

Atheists Don’t Have No Songs

Just because it made me chuckle on this rainy Sunday afternoon…

(h/t to Waving or Drowning)

Apr 7

2 Comments

(How) Is God in Control?

One of the benefits of having a blog is that, aside from feeding your ego through the ordinary rhythm of writing about whatever you want whenever you want and plastering it all over the internet, you can use it to draw attention to yourself at any and every other convenient opportunity as well :). Like, say, when an article of yours is published. Read more

Apr 6

43 Comments

On Justice

Every Wednesday in my neck of the woods, a handful of guys get together to talk and pray about God, life, work, marriage, and whatever else happens to come up before breakfast. One member of our group is a lawyer, and today we got on to the topic of justice and the irregular and inconsistent nature of its application in the Canadian system. To cite just one example (among a handful we talked about), there were back to back court cases where hunting an animal out of season resulted in a (much) more severe punishment than a clear cut case of spousal abuse. Amazing. Read more

Apr 4

11 Comments

A Good Sleep

Every night, bedtime prayers with my kids conclude with some version of the same phrase: “And help ____ to have a good sleep with no bad dreams.  Amen.” This is the non-negotiable conclusion to all bedtime prayers in our house. Should I omit or modify this peroration in any way, this transgression will be swiftly brought to my attention, and I will be enthusiastically exhorted to rectify the situation. The day is not complete, it seems, without entrusting our sleep and the subconscious cogitations it may or may not contain, to the care of God. Read more

Apr 1

6 Comments

Death is an Affront

Today was an interesting day, characterized by a number of rewarding yet demanding conversations with passionate and intelligent people wrestling with some of the deepest and most painful questions of life.  Among these questions, was the question of death—how we are to understand it, certainly, but, more importantly, how we are to live with and despite it, especially when faced with the loss of someone close to us.  Words often seem like meagre tools indeed when faced with the monstrosity of death, but as I sit in a quiet house ushering another day out the door, reflecting upon what it held, and snooping around in some old books, these words about death from Peter Berger hit home: Read more

Mar 30

23 Comments

Silence

I couldn’t help but grimace as I read the headline from Douglas Todd’s recent article in the Vancouver Sun (“Evangelicals Mostly Alone in Believing God Punishes with Earthquakes“).  It highlighted, once again, the lengths we will go to to find (or manufacture) moral meaning in times of chaos and suffering. Combined with news of some painful things happening in the lives of various people in the various domains of my life and work, I have been thinking a lot about the silence of God these days, and how we are to live and think and speak about God as people of faith in a broken world. Read more

Mar 28

48 Comments

Good Question

Well, I finished Rob Bell’s Love Wins on an airplane this weekend. First reaction? It’s not bad. My suspicions that the storm this book has generated has a lot more to do with how it was marketed and the frantic and reactionary nature of the world of social media than with the content of the book itself were certainly justified. I may write more about Love Wins in the next little while. Or I may not. We’ll see. My sense is that the internet is getting tired of this whole thing. Read more

Mar 25

7 Comments

Regent Spring/Summer School 2011

Well, as difficult as it is to believe it as I sit here in a coffee shop in snowy southern Alberta where we are visiting for the weekend, summer will soon be upon us.  And while there are obviously many ways that you could spend your holiday time, one of the best, most re-creational ways to spend a week or two this summer might just be a course at Regent College. Read more

Mar 21

23 Comments

On Blogging

Over the last few weeks I have noticed a feeling of unsettledness and mild disorientation as I begin my morning ritual of coffee and a trip through my news reader/aggregator. At last count, I have over 130 subscriptions to various blogs and news sites, some of which are (incredibly) updated 3-4 times daily. I have no idea if this is a “normal” amount of information for the technologically-savvy to wade through on a daily basis in our brave new cyber-world, but the sheer volume of words I make some attempt, however minimal, to regularly keep up with is proving increasingly unwieldy. Read more

Mar 16

24 Comments

A Relentless Divine Reach

In light of what’s going on in Japan, the theological controversies dominating the headlines these days can seem fairly trivial (to put it mildly), but I did want to post an intriguing quote from William Willimon’s Why Jesus? I’m not terribly interested in the question of whether or not Rob Bell believes in a hot (or long) enough hell to satisfy the demands of this or that understanding of orthodoxy, but I am, and have always been, very interested in (and dependent upon) the “relentless divine reach” of Jesus: Read more

Mar 13

7 Comments

“We Are Asking God to be God”

Each week at our Sunday services, before the children are dismissed, we take time to recite the Lord’s Prayer together. As with anything that is done repeatedly over long periods of time, if we are inattentive it can come to seem mechanical and tedious. Rather than being a vehicle for shaping and inspring us as Christ’s followers, it can come to seem like little more than part of the furniture. Frederick Buechner reminds us why we ought not to allow this to happen: Read more

Mar 11

22 Comments

Thinking and Praying

A post from 2009 called “Our Thoughts Are With You” has been getting an unusual amount of traffic today due, I can only assume, to people’s wrestling with how to think and respond to the unfolding tragedy in Japan. I have received a few emails today loosely related to the question of how (if at all) we are to talk about suffering, whether from the perspective of belief in a providential God or not. Do we attempt to “explain” or are all such attempts offensive by definition? Do we say we are praying? Thinking? Do our hearts go out to those affected? Our minds? Our hands and feet? Our wallets? We see images and hear stories like the ones coming out of Japan, and feel we must have something to say. So… what?

To be sure, it is always somewhat perilous to force words into the context of suffering (I think of Job’s “miserable comforters“), but I thought I would re-post an edited version of the original today. Read more

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