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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Nov 28

10 Comments

Stand Up!

I’ve been thinking about resilience today. I am hardly the first to comment on what seems, on the surface, to be an incongruity at the heart of life in the twenty-first century West. In global and historical terms, we are in uncharted and unprecedented waters when it comes to material comfort, life expectancy, medical care, connection options via technology, discretionary time for entertainment, recreation, and much more besides. At the same time, we are the most heavily diagnosed and medicated, depressed, chronically anxious population on the planet. There are exceptions, of course. There always are. But, again, in very general terms, the preceding describes a phenomenon that many of us recognize. Things have, in some ways, never been better and yet we’ve never been less able to cope. Read more

Nov 8

4 Comments

Thrashing Around in Narcissus’s Pool

The opposite of love is not hate but self-love. The opposite of faith is not atheism but self-deification. Both love and faith (love of God) offer true freedom–release from the harshest prison, imprisonment from oneself.

——

So begins a chapter entitled “Narcissus’s Deceptive Pool” in Tomáš Halík’s I Want You to Be. I’ve long thought that the opposite of love is fear. But the more I read and reread this statement, the more I was convinced that Halík was on to something. Read more

Nov 6

10 Comments

Blessed Are the Poor

God can be funny sometimes. In an inconvenient and mildly irritating way.

During a sermon writing break on Saturday, I took the dog for a walk. As I was nearing home—only about a block or two away—I saw a strange thing, at least for small town southern Alberta. A shopping cart full of miscellaneous items—bottles, clothes, a sleeping bag, etc.—covered in tarp sitting in the middle of a snowy sidewalk. As I was passing by, I looked down the lane and saw a man sitting under a blanket against a building. The weather was, well, arctic.

I’m not proud to admit this, but I walked on by. An excellent Levite, I am. Read more

Oct 31

4 Comments

Jesus Hangs in My Honda      

Jesus hangs from the mirror of my 2002 Honda Accord. He’s up on his cross, arms outstretched. He’s skinny. His knees are knobby and his ribs are showing. His face is directed downward. He looks sad, lonely, defeated. A few beads up from Jesus on the cross, his mom looks down at her baby boy. I doubt she imagined that her son would ever end up with arms outstretched on a Roman cross, sadly looking down at and forgiving those who didn’t know what they were doing.

I picked Jesus up a few years ago in Jerusalem. Read more

Oct 28

1 Comment

Fifty Years

Fifty years is a long time. Enough time for a civil rights movement, a sexual revolution, a Cold War. Enough time for an institution or two to fade into relative obscurity, for a few givens to become anything but. Enough time for the Internet to become a thing. Easily. A few generations. Half a century.

Fifty years is a long time a long time to live with a hole in your soul. Read more

Oct 25

5 Comments

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Human Being

Two recent conversations have me thinking about what I want to be when I grow up.

The first was with a recruiter for a Christian university over coffee a few days ago. I asked her about common questions that she gets from parents considering post-secondary education for their kids. She sighed, and listed off what was an unsurprising itemization of the requisite programs and degrees that would get their child the right kinds of jobs in the future. We mused about how little interest students (or educators) seem to have these days in things like virtue or being properly formed as human beings. Education is about dumping facts into brains so that these brains can then go out into the world and make money. You can figure out what kind of a person you want to be on your own time. Or not. So it seems, at any rate. Read more

Oct 24

9 Comments

“I Float in Mighty Waters”

In the course of a given week, I consume and produce a lot of words. I read books and articles, newspapers and blog posts, denominational publications and the detritus of social media. I send and receive what feels like roughly a billion texts/emails/messages per day. I pour forth my own stream of words via this blog and other forums. Many days, it feels like I am drowning in words. I suspect I am not alone in this. To say that in the digital age words are cheap and ubiquitous, disposable and forgettable is to simply add a few more to the pile. We have become grazers on words, rarely pausing to let them affect us in the ways that they should or could.

Every once in a while, though, a few good words will penetrate the fog of dull half-attention and listless consumption that is so easy to default to. Read more

Sep 21

3 Comments

Sparrows

My wife tells me that I shouldn’t read the news because the news makes me sad. Or angry. Or confused or helpless or despairing or apathetic or cynical. Or some toxic combination of all of the above. She’s probably right. She’s right about a lot of things. Read more

Sep 14

9 Comments

The Word of God

The following conversation took place via text message with my daughter this afternoon. She’s taking her first Bible Survey class in high school, and she had some good questions for dear old dad. It is reproduced here with her permission (C = my daughter; R = me): Read more

Sep 12

Threatening Days

It’s not been a pleasant few weeks for our dear planet. Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean, an earthquake in Mexico, monsoon floods in southeast Asia, and now wildfires ravaging my own little corner of southern Alberta. These are just the stories that are presently dominating our attention. It doesn’t take much digging beneath the headlines to encounter the uncomfortable truth that awful things are happening all the time all over the world, whether it’s nature venting its fury or human beings manufacturing and multiplying our own. These are indeed threatening days.  Read more

Sep 8

17 Comments

A Hell of a Thing to Believe

Human beings spend a lot of time arguing about whether or not our beliefs are true. Even in these strange days where “I feel like” seems to have replaced “I think that” as the ultimate, ahem, trump card in a given dispute (how can you argue with a feeling?!), we still invest a fair amount of intellectual, emotional, and rhetorical energy into arriving at truth and convincing others of what we believe to be true. Even amidst of the mountain of lies that can sometimes seem to overwhelm our socio-political discourse, the truth of the matter still seems to matter to us.  Read more

Aug 23

16 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany (Detritus of Summer)

The end of summer (sadly) draws nigh and, like many, I have spent these dwindling days of August attempting to tidy up the clutter, whether it’s physical, mental, or spiritual in nature. I’ve tried to achieve a bit of focus, clarity, and equilibrium before September arrives This has meant tackling my physical desk, rearranging unread books and recycling correspondence that has been rendered irrelevant by inattention, and trying to wrest a bit of order out of the chaos of random files and documents on my computer’s desktop. Things need to be put in their proper place, after all. Here are a few bits and pieces whose proper place is, evidently, another “miscellany” post.  Read more

Aug 9

13 Comments

I Don’t Like it When People Yell at Me

 

The first thing I notice are the big baggy pants that hang loosely off his small, wiry frame as he approaches my window in the thrift store parking lot. We’re out in smoky British Columbia this week visiting family and friends and looking forward to my wife running a half marathon on the weekend. I’m reading a book in the van while my wife snoops around inside. I perform a quick visual inspection of my guest. Teeth, missing or crooked; a nose that looks like it’s been broken one time too many; probably half a year’s worth of dirt under his fingernails. He looks like he’s in his thirties, but he could be younger than that. I know that years hang heavier off those who wander up to strangers in parking lots looking for help.  Read more

Jul 28

3 Comments

Maybe There’s a Good God

A friend of mine is a therapist. Sometimes she tells me about difficult conversations, painful stories, helpless moments. She’s always careful to keep things confidential and to protect her clients, of course, but even nameless sadness needs to go somewhere.  Sometimes she asks me to pray. And I do. Pray, that is. Because I almost never know what to say. Read more

Jul 20

You Would Think That, Wouldn’t You?

I ran into an old acquaintance in the grocery store last night. We hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty years when we were students at the same college. He had flown in from out of province to visit his ailing father. Our talk followed the well-worn grooves that these conversations tend to slide into: what do you do, tell me about your kids, what about church, college seems like a long time ago, I guess we’re getting old, smile, wink, sigh. Read more

Jul 12

4 Comments

My Old Bible

I found my old bible last week. Actually, to be precise, my wife found it as she was doing a massive purge of the basement bookshelves. Our sixteen year old twins are working at camp this summer so we spent a few days with hazmat suits and masks in the dark and terrifying underworld attempting to restore a sense of order (or at least hygiene) to the chaos of teenager-land. And there, amidst the clutter of dusty kids’ books that hadn’t been cracked in years, was my old black, leather bound NIV bible. My name engraved on the front. Duct tape barely holding the spine together. An inscription inside indicating that it had been presented to me by my grandparents on Christmas Day, 1985. Thinking back to what an ungrateful wretch of a child I could be, I cringed to think that I might have been more excited to discover this bible last week than I was to receive it as a ten-year-old.   Read more

Jun 28

3 Comments

I Didn’t Choose This

“If there was one thing that you would say to the church or if there was one thing that you would want Christians to know about your experience as a gay man, what would it be?” This was the question that I recently put to a friend on a warm summer evening near the end of a wide-ranging conversation that had covered everything from his experience of coming out to the controversies around Pride celebrations in our community to the sexualization of identity more broadly to his experience growing up in a conservative evangelical church. His answer surprised me a little, both for its content and for its brevity. He needed little time to think before saying, simply, “I didn’t choose this.” I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t say much more. I had asked for one thing and one thing was what I got.  Read more

Jun 6

2 Comments

You Only Believe in Science!

There’s a well known scene in the 2006 cult classic Nacho Libre where Nacho, a hapless monk who aspires to be a Luchador, and Esqueleto, his emaciated unbaptized sidekick, are in conflict about life and religion and fame and fortune and why they’re so terrible in the wrestling ring. At one point, Nacho blurts out, “I’m not listening to you—you only believe in science. That’s probably why we never win!” Read more

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