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Posts by Ryan

Jan 22

22 Comments

Prayer: You Place a Reservoir Within My Heart

Perhaps surprisingly, given my occupation and the fact that one of my main (and most rewarding) tasks on any given Sunday is leading our congregation in prayer, I often find prayer difficult. The reasons for this vary. Sometimes I am paralyzed by the relative insignificance of my own needs when compared by the suffering others are facing (this week has been an especially difficult one for prayer, given the situation in Haiti). Sometimes I don’t know what to pray for. Sometimes I don’t know what prayer accomplishes—in my own life and character and for those I pray for. Sometimes I am simply lazy and undisciplined. Sometimes the silence of heaven wearies me. Read more

Jan 20

14 Comments

In Every Arrival, a Leavetaking

I promise to return to less morbid topics shortly, but after returning from my grandfather’s funeral, hearing of the passing of a member of our congregation’s mother, and continuing to watch the ongoing crisis in Haiti unfold, death is on my mind.  I believe it was C.S. Lewis who once said that the ability (and burden) of being aware of and anticipating our own deaths is uniquely human.  Regardless of how we may feel about it, death is something we have to learn to live with. Read more

Jan 15

39 Comments

Our Portion is Charity

Like many, no doubt, my heart has been heavy and my prayers have seemed hollow for the country of Haiti this week.  Words seem so small and insignificant in the face of such devastation and pain, but I was glad to have come across these, written by David Bentley Hart after the 2004 tsunami, this morning: Read more

Jan 13

11 Comments

Sing

My grandfather died this morning. On one level, his death came as a mercy and was not accompanied by the shock and tragedy that so often accompany a loved one’s passing. But on another level, my grandfather’s death—like all deaths—is a shock and it is tragic. We wear death very poorly, as human beings. We try to ignore it, sanitize it, romanticize it, keep it arms length, or any number of other strategies, but we’re never very successful. Read more

Jan 12

1 Comment

To Become a See-er

One of the blogs I have come to deeply appreciate over the last little while is that of Winnipeg singer/songwriter Steve Bell.  Steve is an enormously talented human being whose music I have admired for some time and who I have gone to see in concert whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself (most recently, I saw him perform at Regent College last September).  I began following Steve’s blog last year and have discovered that his talents are many and diverse!  Not surprisingly—he is, after all, a songwriter—Steve has a way with words and his posts often leave me with much to ponder. Read more

Jan 11

46 Comments

A Religious Response

Some of the toughest questions I have been asked as a pastor are some variation of the following: Why is God allowing this to happen to me?  The life situations that prompt these questions can range (and have ranged) from the relatively insignificant to the profoundly traumatic and unsettling, but the brute existential fact underlying life on this planet is that things do not always—or even often—go as we want them to.  If one chooses to believe that a good God presides over a world that so frequently and sometimes agonizingly frustrates even the most basic human desires and aspirations, the questions of theodicy become even more acute.  If God is in control and he’s supposed to be so good, why all this misery?  Why any misery for that matter? Read more

Jan 8

25 Comments

Avahontas? Pocatar?

There has been a lot of analysis and critique of James Cameron’s new blockbuster Avatar over the last few weeks, from withering indictments of its pantheistic proselytizing to paeans to the latent themes of redemption it contains.  I’ve not yet seen the film (although I intend to), but from what I’ve read and heard, while it is a stunning visual spectacle, the story is fairly predictable and unoriginal. Read more

Jan 8

12 Comments

The Small Ways

The first weeks of January are often times full of big plans, big promises, big expectations, and big dreams. It was good to be reminded by Walter Brueggemann this morning of the significance of “smallness” in God’s economy. This is from Prayers for a Privileged People: Read more

Jan 6

5 Comments

Googled Out

Well, we’re sitting here in the Calgary airport waiting to catch a plane back home and I’m continuing to make my way through Douglas Coupland’s JPod.  I’ve been meaning to get acquainted with Coupland’s work for some time now and the Christmas holidays have provided the perfect opportunity.  JPod follows the (fairly pathetic) lives of a bunch of twenty-something computer programmers who work for a gaming company as they traverse the dreary landscape of postmodernity.  So far, it’s been an interesting read full of memorable passages. Read more

Jan 4

7 Comments

Paying Attention

A New Year is upon us and it seems like as good a time as any to take a step back and think about any goals, hopes, expectations I might have for 2010.  I’ve never been one for making New Year’s resolutions, but if I could isolate one thing that I would like to characterize the coming year to a greater extent than it has any of my previous years it would be this: I would like to pay better attention. Read more

Dec 31

10 Comments

Life

Last year I began the New Year with a quote from Frederick Buechner so why break with tradition?  This one seems appropriate given some of the discussion that took place around my previous post.   It is from an entry called “Life” and comes from Wishful Thinking: Read more

Dec 23

49 Comments

A Christmas Story

Tuesdays are usually a bit different than other days for me. My wife works from 2-9 pm so I pick the kids up from school and work from home. Or at least I try to. Of course, there are inevitably numerous distractions, minor crises and irritants to put up with, as well as such essential tasks as dinner preparation, help with homework, the circus of bedtime, and any number of other things to deal with. Suffice to say, that Tuesday afternoon/evening is not typically the most productive time of my week. Read more

Dec 22

2 Comments

Christmas is Grace

Well, I’m up to my ears in Christmas Eve and Sunday sermon preparation this week, and after that we’re off to Alberta to visit family until early January so the posting might be a little sparse around here for a while. In the meantime, I thought I would share another memorable quote from Frederick Buechner. This comes from Whistling in the Dark: Read more

Dec 17

8 Comments

Un-sin Us

There was a memorial service at our church yesterday and as is often the case at these events, one of the songs that rang out was “Amazing Grace.” It’s a song that people love to sing—a song that touches us on a deep and personal level. For a variety of reasons, it is a very appropriate song to sing during times of mourning and remembering. Read more

Dec 15

12 Comments

On Empathy and Exclusivity

I couldn’t help but be curious when I saw the title of Vancouver Sun spirituality and ethics columnist Douglas Todd’s latest article come through my reader this afternoon: “Embattled Clergy Could Use Christmas Empathy.” Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I read on to discover why I might be the appropriate destination for someone’s Christmas empathy. Read more

Dec 9

64 Comments

Making the Best of It (and a Short Story)

While we’re on the topic of Christianity and culture/how to engage those who think differently than us in a pluralistic postmodern world (and while I remain in shameless self-promotion mode), I noticed yesterday that Direction (an MB publication that describes itself as somewhere between an academic journal and a denominational magazine) has just made their Spring 2009 issue available online—an issue that contains my review of John Stackhouse’s Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. Read more

Dec 8

19 Comments

Transforming Christian Theology: Conclusion

The fourth and final entry in my discussion of Philip Clayton’s Transforming Christian Theology (parts one, two, and three). Read more

Dec 3

4 Comments

Waiting

Advent is about waiting for the God who comes. There is no more central conviction to the Christian faith that we worship and follow a God who has come, who continues to come, and who will come. At the same time, there is probably also no more central experience to a life of following Christ in the in-between time—the time between his first and second Advents—than waiting.  Christ has come. Christ is coming. But still, we wait. Read more

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