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Posts from the ‘Grace’ Category

Oct 17

7 Comments

Look Into My Eyes

Most of this week was spent at a pastors “retreat” in the foothills northwest of Calgary. I put “retreat” in quotation marks because when you are on a provincial committee and the members of said committee are separated by hundreds of kilometres, opportunities to have face to face meetings are rare. Consequently, times when everyone does happen to be together are generally crammed full of meetings, ordination interviews, etc. So, not much of a “retreat” in the restorative, replenishing, relaxing sense of the word. More of a “three days of meetings and workshops and not-making-any-progress-on-the-sermon and falling-behind-on-countless-others” kind of retreat. Read more

Oct 8

2 Comments

The Slow Rewards of Fidelity

Sometimes life has a way of, I don’t know, settling in. Like a fog over the bay, like a dull, sometimes barely perceptible ache.

Maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe it’s the result of seeing too many people hurting because of too many things. Maybe it’s the grinding cynicism borne of a shallow culture where we’re always trying to sell each other things or shout each other down. Maybe it’s the incremental erosion of youthful idealism, the gradual coming-to-terms with the fact that struggle and suffering and uncertainty will always be part of the furniture down here. Maybe it’s the residue of so many unanswered or strangely-answered prayers, so many unfulfilled or strangely–fulfilled promises. Maybe it’s a wondering if I am doing all I could or should in the world, if I am being all that I could or should be to those I love (and those I don’t). Maybe it’s the sobering recognition that I undoubtedly am not. Maybe it’s indigestion. Maybe it’s some combination thereof. Read more

Sep 30

20 Comments

Three Girls (And an Orangey-Brown Dress)

Among the gleanings of my morning tour through Facebook land was the discovery that Tuesday, September 30 has been designated “Orange Shirt Day” by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) here in Canada. Intrigued, I did a bit of snooping around and found the following explanation for the origin of the idea in an article at NationTalk:

Orange Shirt Day is an outcome of the St. Joseph Mission Residential School Commemoration Project and Reunion events that took place in Williams Lake, BC in May 2013. It stems from a story told by former residential school student, Phyllis Webstad, who had her new orange shirt, bought by her grandmother, taken from her as a six-year old girl. She spoke powerfully of how it seemed to her that nobody cared and, in this personal way, it speaks to the many harms experienced by children in the residential schools.

I have no orange shirt, alas, but the initiative has me thinking of a few recent experiences, and about three girls. Read more

Aug 14

16 Comments

Riding the Storm (Or, What to Do When the Internet Explodes in Righteous Fury)

In what is now becoming something like a sacred ritual of the digital age, the following scenario unfolded this week. 1) Something bad happened—in this case, the suicide of a famous celebrity who had long struggled with addictions and depression; 2) People flooded to the Internet to give voice to their opinions about what (if anything) this bad thing meant and what (if anything) we ought to learn from it; 3) Someone wrote something that was perceived to be inflammatory, controversial, insensitive, and wrong about the nature of this bad thing (in this case, conservative Christian blogger Matt Walsh, who wrote a post called “Robin Williams Didn’t Die From a Disease, He Died From His Choice” which has generated well over three million views and over four thousand comments at the time of this writing); 4) The Internet heaved and lurched in a maelstrom of fury and passion, whether in opposition to or defense of said article/writer (in this case it seems to be mostly the former; Walsh has apparently even received death threats over this post); 5) After collectively marinating in this unedifying, soupy mess for a few days, we all moved on to other more fertile pastures in which to expend our self-righteous energies. Read more

Aug 1

4 Comments

“Is it Okay If I Really Like Life?”

 A few observations and reflections as a summer holiday draws to a close…

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My son is convinced that he has discovered gold in the sand. We are at a beach and he sees little flecks of shiny sediment as he digs and builds on a hot summer afternoon. He tries to imagine ways that he might extract this “gold” from the piles he has collected. He asks about how the gold miners panned for gold back in the olden days. He takes a Frisbee and swishes the sand around. He fills up an old discarded coffee cup with his sand, wanting to bring it home. He is convinced there is gold in there—treasure that he, alone of the thousands who have tramped up and down this beach, he alone of the innumerable kids who have built sand castles in this exact spot—has managed to discover.

“There’s no gold in this sand,” I tell him flatly. He is not dissuaded.  He sighs and looks at me with something like pity or exasperation.  You just don’t understand…  Read more

Jun 27

9 Comments

Possibilities

In Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities— new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, however devastating.

— Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory

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I have many conversations with people who find it difficult to believe or people who barely believe or people who want to believe but can’t or people who are embarrassed to believe or people who look down in condescension at those who believe or people who are just bewildered that anyone could believe in something like God or resurrection or hope or any kind of future that is radically dissimilar to the present. This is the shape of our life and imagination in the post-Christian west. Read more

Jun 20

8 Comments

A Battle of Wills

It’s June in southern Alberta, which means torrential rains, spring run-off from the mountains, and flooding. Lots of flooding. We have been back in Alberta for three years, and two of them have been characterized by miserably wet Junes. On Tuesday evening I arrived home to nearly ankle-deep water in our basement, and we have spent a good chunk of the rest of this week hauling out furniture, ripping out carpets, and trying to dry out a soggy and smelly house. Read more

Jun 11

8 Comments

Under a Tree One Wednesday Afternoon

I had many things to write about, all jostling for space in my head as I drove home from a mid-week theology conference near Calgary. Things like the nature of Scripture and interpretation and inspiration and violence and barbarism and inter-textuality and transposition. All these things and others milled about in my head during the two-hour drive south, eager for release, to find expression on the page, to be assembled into some kind of coherent whole.

But it’s funny how a single image or experience, even of the briefest kind, can reduce all of these things to ephemera…

Read more

Jun 4

2 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

I spent last night at Tuesday L’Arche prayer night. It was a celebratory night in honour of a new leader taking over here in the Lethbridge community, so there was lots of food and laughter, singing and smiles. I don’t get out to these prayer nights nearly as often as I would like to, but whenever I do, I am struck in a new way by the simple profundity of this community of people of all kinds of abilities who are committed to living together, sharing life and love, participating in the good news of the gospel of peace and hope. Read more

May 31

1 Comment

Thank You… For Now

The mind of a teenage boy is, I am discovering, a fearful and wonderful thing. Beautiful, strange, unpredictable, irrational, surprisingly generous, unspeakably kind, maddening… All within a few hours, sometimes. Yesterday, I bought my son new strings for his guitars as a few of the old ones had snapped. He came home from a youth event at 10:00 convinced that now was the time to re-string his guitars and not go to bed. His father disagreed and the stage was set for a rather unpleasant end to the day.

But the sun is in the habit of rising anew each day, full of promise and possibility.

Read more

May 27

7 Comments

These Things

It’s been a day of sifting and sorting through the pain that shoots up and out like a geyser from the cracks in the ground of our lives together. The hospital, the seniors’ home, the coffee shop, the parking lot, the playground, the living room… Sometimes it seems that wherever I turn, there is only pain, only confusion, only sadness, longing, anger, regret. Outside the sun shines and the birds sing and all is bright and beautiful, but this is only the surface of things. Inside, just beneath the surface, so much is amiss. So many ugly things, always threatening to bubble up and spill out into the bright and beautiful things.

Read more

May 13

2 Comments

Letter to a Younger Me

A couple of recent things have me reflecting on the nature and shape of pastoral ministry today. First, I spent last week at a Pastors Conference in Vancouver where the theme was “Cultivating Christ-Like Persons of Character & Faithful Ethical Action.” It was good to be reminded of the central importance of character and virtue and the life-giving habits of prayer, solitude, worship, and Scripture in this weird and wonderful vocation called “pastor.”

The second was an email from a younger colleague in another part of the country wondering if it would be ok if they referenced some of our earlier correspondence in a sermon they were preparing. Having little recollection of the specifics of this correspondence, I proceeded to dig it up for a fresh look. It was interesting reading indeed! This person was in the first months of pastoral ministry and was seeking advice/wisdom from those a bit farther down the road.  They framed this request in the form of a very interesting question for me:

If you could write yourself a brief letter (one or two paragraphs) and place it on your desk three years ago as you started on this journey called vocational ministry, and reading this letter was very first thing you did on that first day three years ago, what would you write?

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May 8

10 Comments

Purveyors of Unused Truths

I’ve been spending the week worshipping, learning, walking, sitting in silence, and reconnecting with old friends as I attend a Pastors’ Conference in Vancouver.

[Pastors conference? How did I end up at one of these? When I was younger, the mention of such an event would have evoked images of smiley, hyper-enthusiastic white men walking around with oversized cell-phones holstered in their belts, stalking the halls, greedily “networking” with others and/or triumphantly relaying stories of spiritual conquest and adventure… Happily, I have been disabused of such misconceptions at this and previous conferences 🙂 . It’s been a good and refreshing week thus far.]

Of course one of the problems with these events is that there’s far too much information to take in and process adequately, but one sentence from a few days ago has lodged itself in my brain and refuses to disappear. It was spoken by a psychologist in the context of a talk about some of the problematic areas of being a pastor. Here’s what he said:

All too frequently, pastors can become purveyors of unused truths.

Read more

Apr 23

11 Comments

Religious Professionals

I was driving my son to guitar lessons the other day, trying to keep up while he talked a mile a minute. I was only half listening (shameful, I know), but in one of his stories I caught the word “priest.” This isn’t a word he uses often, and my curiosity was piqued. I’m always curious about how my son understands the weird and wonderful contours of the church/religion-land that his dad happens to inhabit. I think my world is a bit of an oddity to him. He knows that I read books and talk to (and at) people, that I busily bang away on my laptop, writing sermons, writing articles, writing, writing, writing. But I sometimes think he wishes I had a more respectable job. Like building things or selling things or fixing things or growing things… things you can see and touch in the real world. Or teaching zombie apocalypse preparedness courses. You know, something useful. Read more

Apr 11

17 Comments

You Don’t Know What It’s Like

One day, three conversations.

1. I’m at a function where my job is to give a short devotional and prayer before the meal. Pastor-y stuff. You know. I’m trying to be witty, disarming, light. I make some throwaway comment about how I know we’re all hungry and that the soup smells good, but please won’t you just spare 5 minutes or so for the presence to descend? I do my thing. Appreciative smiles, all around. Let’s eat. Read more

Mar 13

2 Comments

Love Finds Us

Lent is a time when we talk often about “wilderness experiences”—about times when things are hard, when God seems absent, when we seem disoriented or stressed or lonely or bored or anxious or whatever. “The wilderness” becomes a kind of placeholder for an experience or set of experiences that happen to us. A season we must endure or grow through, a challenge we must rise to, a test we must pass, a necessary part of the journey of faith.

I think this is mostly an appropriate way to use wilderness language. Mostly.  Read more

Feb 12

3 Comments

One Good Thing

I did one good thing today.  Only one. 

I did some things inadequately and halfheartedly. I mechanically responded to email, returned phone calls, chipped away at the mountain of paper on my desk. I was often bored and listless, and struggled to corral my wandering mind. I yawned a lot, and looked out the window. Read more

Feb 11

1 Comment

We Do Not Know How to Pray

“We do not know how to pray” (Romans 8:26). The whole uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth lies in this: that he knows how to pray, because he knows to whom he is speaking. His greatest miracle was not healing or walking on water or driving out devils, but teaching his followers to say our Father.

—   Benjamin Myers, Salvation in My Pocket

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This afternoon I did a bit of an inventory of recent encounters with the Lord’s Prayer.  Read more

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