Oct 7
Yesterday was World Communion Sunday, a day when all kinds of churches from all kinds of places celebrate the sacrifice of love that unites us rather than the myriad petty walls that we are so determined to erect between us. Walls like, oh I don’t know, who gets to participate in the Lord’s Supper? To pick one random example. Read more
I watched the kids play at recess today. I was waiting to pick up my daughter for a dentist appointment, and I was a few minutes early. So I just sat and watched. I noticed a girl, off to the side, standing by the corner of the building, all by herself. Around the corner, other kids were laughing, playing, kicking/throwing balls, wrestling, goofing around. She just stood there, looking at her feet. Playing with the string on her hoodie. Every once in a while she would peer around the corner at the other kids, and then she would quickly duck back, look away, back down to her feet. The bell rang. She waited until all the other kids had left, before slowly making her way toward the door. She never stopped looking at her shoes. It was an utterly ordinary scene. And it broke my heart. Read more
This morning’s tour through the aggregator yielded a couple of pieces that gently admonished self-indulgent blogger-types for their propensity to write about blogging. Nothing too serious, just a kind of slap on the wrist for those prone to indulging their already hyperactive narcissistic tendencies by making oblique (or explicit) reference to their popularity and influence (or bemoaning their lack of popularity and influence), or who commemorate blogging “anniversaries,” milestone posts and comments, or who just generally seem to assume that their blog is quite a bit more important to the world than it really is. Read more
How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Romans 10:14)
I remember sitting in church listening to missionary reports as a kid. I remember all kinds of stories and images of people and places that my young small town prairie self could barely get his head around. It all sounded so exotic. Barely comprehensible, even. I remember reading stories from one of our missionaries in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Stories of snakes and crude village huts and people who looked and sounded nothing like any people I had ever seen or heard—people with strange and (probably evil) beliefs that we were, thankfully, sending (white) people to correct. I doubt any of these missionary presentations and stories passed by without some reference to the passage in Romans quoted above. Read more
There was an unpleasant episode in our house this week. It was a predictable enough story: kids getting used to the back to school routine and coping with new demands, new classmates, new courses, etc. after a long, lazy, largely obligation-free summer, parents attempting to manage the suddenly frantic pace of life with school and sports and the demands of work and church, and unexpected expenses popping up everywhere… In short, life… And into this maelstrom of exhaustion and frenetic activity and inattentiveness/insensitivity to the needs of one another, it doesn’t take much of a spark to light a big, ugly fire, replete with misunderstanding, yelling, name-calling, slammed doors, stunned silence, and tears. Read more
Every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death. The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy
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I’ve written a lot of posts about death here over the years. Usually these are reflections upon the pain and the longing that accompany death, or about what the existence of death and our reaction to its inevitability might say about what it means to be human or about the nature of God and God’s promise. Or these posts represent a personal encounter with death—they are reflections about what it’s like to walk with people through death, or the experience of grief, or whatever. Read more
Many of my days begin with a bit of time spent in an Anabaptist prayer-book called Take Our Moments and Our Days. During this morning’s prayers, my mind was scattered and I was finding it difficult to concentrate, to focus, to pray.
One line caught my attention, as countless others sailed by unnoticed:
You do not leave us alone. Read more
There is nothing more ordinary than suffering.
There is nothing more extraordinary than suffering.
Both of these statements are true.
For me, this has at times felt like the summer of pain, of hard stories. Perhaps it is simply because I am getting older as are the people in my orbit, and as we get older bad things start happening more regularly. Marriages begin to fall apart, mid-life crises make their obligatory appearance, kids go terrifyingly astray, words like “cancer” and “Alzheimer’s” and “Parkinson’s” start forcing their way into conversations, soul-shattering tragedy pops its head around the corner from time to time… Life takes its toll. Read more
At our church, we’ve spent the last two weeks rummaging around in the biblical cupboard, looking at the various metaphors employed to describe God and human beings. It’s been an interesting exercise, at least for me. In both cases, the metaphors are numerous and diverse. God as rock, lion, breath, lamb, light, fire, tower, warrior, friend, and on and on it goes, the biblical writers reaching and straining, borrowing from the world of creation and human relationships to express some partial aspect of who God is and how God works in the world. Human beings as grass, dust, vapour, treasured possession, bride, the apple of God’s eye, each image contributing to the complex mix of transience, sin, glory, and beauty that is humanity. We need these metaphors, to help us learn to see what God is like, what we are like. Read more
The following likely reads a bit raggedy or raw. It comes from a journal entry scratched out in a notebook beside the lake after a difficult day of listening.
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A conversation at a bookstore: “Oh, this one looks interesting… She’s that famous author of ______.” “Yeah, but the story looks like such a sad one…. Why are all the good stories full of so much sadness?”
I don’t know… Art imitates life? We write what we know. Read more
We were sitting around the table on Saturday night with some good friends, and the conversation turned to philosophy. “Philosophy is kinda interesting,” one friend said, “but it can get frustrating. You can never prove anything. You just talk endlessly and go round and round in circles, but never come to any conclusions.” My wife then offered her customary response that tends to appear whenever the conversation veers into philosophical territory—a response borne out of years of laboured conversations with a husband only too eager to drift off into stratospheres of wild abstraction and impossibility: “Why don’t you just go beat your heads against the wall for a few minutes?! It would be about as productive as talking about philosophy.” Ah, my wife. A pragmatist, to the core. Read more
I’ve been working on a sermon this week dealing with, among other things, the metaphors for God that are employed throughout Scripture. Lion, rock, shepherd, eagle, mother, fire, bread… The list is a very long and diverse one, each communicating some important aspect of God’s character and action in the world. Read more
One of the best parts of spending a bit of time in British Columbia each summer is the opportunity to reconnect with the many dear people whose lives we were once embedded in—at least in a more concrete way. It is so often a delight to discover the twists and turns people’s lives have taken, how their kids have grown, the new opportunities they are exploring, etc. It is a privilege to see how the goodness of God traces its way through the many stories we have been privileged to be a part of.
But, as always, there are other stories, too. Stories of relational breakdown, job difficulties, children who have gotten themselves into a bad place. And death. Always stories of death. Read more
This post is part of a MennoNerds Synchro-Blog on the topic of Death, Loss, Pain and Grief, July 14-30, 2013. Check out our page on MennoNerds.com to see all the other posts in this series.
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As I was reflecting upon what and how I might contribute to this Synchro-Blog, it occurred to me to do some snooping around in my own archives. I discovered that I have actually written a fair amount on death over the years. What follows is a compilation of three posts from the past. The first was written after the death of a friend and is a personal expression of the pain of loss. The second is a reflection on death in the context of the pastoral vocation, written after being called upon to do a memorial service at the outset of my new role. The third is simply a quote about death that I have grown to love and deeply appreciate over the years. Read more
I’ve written a number of times here before about some the difficulties I have with prayer (here, for example). I am convinced that prayer is a crucial part of how God works in and through us for the salvation of the world. And yet the questions abound. How does prayer work? Does prayer work? How can we tell? Is God influence-able? Is God reactive? Does God need prayer? How can God “listen” to so many different (often wildly contradictory) prayers at once? What does it even mean to say that the God of the universe “listens?” Read more
So, today is the Fourth of July and, given that many of the news sources and blogs that regularly track originate south of the border, I expect to be inundated with patriotic media today. Or media criticizing, redescribing, and reimagining patriotism. Or anti-American media. Whatever. I expect to see a lot that has to do with America. Read more
As far as Canada Day holidays go, it was a bit of a strange one yesterday. I got a message that there was someone who needed to speak with me. Let’s call him Darren. He had shown up at a local L’Arche residence because it was a former nunnery that had still had a cross prominently displayed out front and he thought it was a church. He was looking for help. A place to stay, mainly. They gave him some sandwiches, some conversation, and a ride to the park but weren’t exactly sure where to go after that. Read more
I have always been a lousy sleeper and I lay awake at night a lot. This proves to be fertile space for all manner of thoughts to flit in and out of my brain, some good and useful, many not so much. I think about my kids and their future. I think about philosophy. I think about soccer. I think about people who are suffering. I think about the meaning of life. I think about the many people who I have been blessed to know and who are a part of my life. I think how we end up in the places we do, doing the things we do and about what the point of it all is. Read more
 | howard wideman on Thursday Miscellany (On Human… |
 | paulhikes on Thursday Miscellany (On Human… |
 | Elizabeth on Thursday Miscellany (On Human… |
| paulhikes on Great Faith |
| Elizabeth on Great Faith |
