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Posts from the ‘Love’ Category

Sep 26

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(Un)kindness

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

Sep 20

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Why Is It Good to Be Free? (Gil Dueck)

As I vaguely alluded to in my previous post, freedom has been in the news here in Canada with Québec’s proposed “secular charter” and all of the commotion this is stirring up. Freedom from religion? Freedom for or of religion? Whose freedoms win? How do we prioritize?  Of course, these questions extend far beyond the boundaries of Québec cultural and political realities. They are alive and well wherever we turn in our increasingly globalized, post-Christian world.  

I started to write a post about some of these themes, but then came across this piece that my brother Gil wrote a few years back. Not being able to improve upon this, I am reposting it here. His challenge to critically evaluate our love affair with freedom is a timely one, as is his reminder that, for the Christian, love, not freedom, is and has always been our true north. Read more

Sep 13

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How Much 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

Aug 19

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Mixed Metaphor

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

Aug 13

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The Sadness

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.

——

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

Aug 12

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The Only Things That Matter in Life Cannot Be Proved

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

Aug 9

3 Comments

My Friend

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

Jun 27

10 Comments

Why (I) Bother?

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

May 30

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Be Kind to Each Other

I listened to the story of a gay man yesterday. It was a story both tragic and tragically typical. It was a story of knowing he was “different” from his very earliest memories, of being mocked and ridiculed throughout his school years, a story of confusion, anger, and pain, a story of desperately trying to come to terms with an identity that just didn’t fit, a story of a string of unsatisfying relationships, a story of isolation and deep loneliness that persists to the present day.

It was also, of course, a story in which the church played a role. I wish I could say that it was a positive role—that the community that bears the name of the Friend of Sinners had provided a place of refuge and peace for this person… I wish I could say that. But I can’t. We all know that this isn’t how the story usually goes. We know that “rejection” and “guilt” and “judgment” and “fear” and “misunderstanding” are among the words that appear at this point in the story. Read more

May 16

Open Book

As far as I can recall, the last few weeks have contained my first ever interviews. This sounds quite a bit more impressive than it is or was. One was forty-five minutes in a Tim Hortons coffee shop discussing my time in Colombia last year with a local reporter who is preparing a small booklet as part of an upcoming relief sale put on by Mennonite Central Committee. The other was ten minutes or so in front of a camera in Montreal as part of a feature about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission being put together by Mennonite Church Canada. We’re not really talking a big stage here. But still, kind of interesting experiences. Read more

May 14

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What Must I Do to Inherit Eternal Life?

That may be true for you, but how can you say that it is true for everyone else when there are so many different understandings of truth out there 

This is, of course, among the most common questions out there in postmodern-dom and, more specifically, in the context of the religious/ethnic/cultural diversity that is becoming the new normal in Canada and the West in general. Christians are becoming increasingly aware that there is much that is good and true and beautiful in a wide variety of worldviews and practices. We are also alert to the painful reality that the Christian worldview has all too frequently been aligned with the interests of colonialism and other less overt modes of cultural imperialism. It can be a tricky thing, this business of expressing one’s convictions about the particularity of truth amidst all of diversity and historical error and the baggage that comes along with it. Read more

May 13

An “Embarrassing Kind of Love”

I continue to consider it a shame that I have only begun to get acquainted with Brennan Manning now that he has passed away. I am finding him to be a remarkable writer and thinker. Even though at times Manning’s spirituality seems quite different from my own and, on occasion, I even find myself disagreeing with how he puts this or that, he quite stubbornly holds the reality of grace before the reader in an extraordinary and compelling way. Here are a few memorable quotes containing plenty to ponder from my reading of The Ragamuffin Gospel this evening. Read more

May 8

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“You’re Gonna Pray for Leroy, Right?”

The following comes out of an experience I had yesterday. I try to be very careful in deciding if/how to share about stuff that I encounter in my daily work. There are issues of privacy, of course, in addition to the simple fact that not every experience I find meaningful necessarily needs to be shared—especially in an online/cultural context where over-sharing is reaching almost epidemic proportions.  

Having said that, I think it is important to hear the stories of our world and our communities—perhaps especially the unsettling ones. Stories move and change us. At the very least, it’s important for me to hear/tell them. There are so many things that I cannot do in light of the many problems in our world, but one thing I can do is simply to write, to tell stories like this one. It is especially relevant, I think, in light of my recent posts on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (here, here, and here) and yesterday’s post on “Normal Unhappiness.” All the names below have, of course, been changed. Read more

Apr 26

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Symbols

A story from day three of the Québec Truth and Reconciliation Commission…

It was nearing the end of a long day of listening and I was looking for a place near the back of the hall to sit quietly for the last session of the day. Near the back of the room, I was somewhat surprised to see a flip chart stand with a drawing on it sitting in the middle of the aisle. I was even more surprised to see a young aboriginal man wildly gesticulating beside it as he was speaking in a very animated fashion to a young woman with a notepad. I edged closer to get a better look (and maybe a listen). The closer I got, the more obvious it was that this young man was very angry indeed. Read more

Apr 8

15 Comments

Why Do I Have Faith?

Last week, I found a message from a reader of this blog buried off in some dark corner of Facebook-land that I hadn’t noticed for at least a month. It was a message that was both encouraging on a personal level, as well as provocative in the best sense of the word. As it happens, the powers that be in Facebook have thus far prevented me from responding to this message. Every time I try to reply, I get a message telling me that I cannot do so due to some setting in one of our accounts (I don’t have an email address for the person who wrote to me, so I’m at the mercy of Facebook). Rather than wading through the labyrinth of Facebook’s privacy settings, I decided to do the only rational thing and simply write a blog post in response :). Read more

Apr 5

The Light of Life

Jesus said, I have come that they may have life,
and have it abundantly. 
 
Whoever follows me
will never walk in darkness
but will have the light of life.
 

Every morning this week, these words from John’s gospel have framed the morning prayers in the prayer-book I use. They are good and hopeful words with which to greet a new day. They are appropriate post-Easter words. As is the case throughout John’s gospel, there is this wonderful contrast between the light and the life of Christ and the darkness and death we see all around us. Jesus’ words are true and good and full of strength and hope

And then I walk out the front door… Read more

Mar 22

2 Comments

The Final Test

I am scrambling to gather a few odds and ends from my office before heading out of town for a weekend conference.  Downstairs is the mingling of voices and the tinkling of spoons and plates and coffee mugs as a group of people gather for Friday morning coffee and conversation.  I look out my window as a few latecomers straggle in.  One dear couple catches my eye.  There was a stroke years ago that has changed their reality in irreversible ways.  I watch them share a smile as he gently helps his wife out of the vehicle, into the wheelchair, and down the snowy path toward the church.  All around there is the hum of traffic and industry, all of this frantic busyness hurrying by unaware of this simple, unobserved, holy moment—this “ordinary” scene in an extraordinary story that is simultaneously awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, and profoundly hope-filled.  I feel like I should take my shoes off.  Or something. Read more

Sep 17

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God Loves Human Beings—Start with That

Just over three years ago, I threw up a post about a conversation with my son about the word “amen” and whether the “men” part of the word meant that God was only interested in men and not women. It was a rather quick post about the nature of the words we use, how our relationship to them changes over time, and what these words communicate about our views on gender. I didn’t think much of the post at the time. There are some posts on this blog that I spend a fair amount of time writing, but this was not one of them. It was an interesting conversation with my son, a few reflections of my own, and not much more.

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