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Posts from the ‘Random Musings’ Category

Mar 31

26 Comments

Phone Call

I have learned, over the course of nearly four years being a solo pastor in a small church with no office staff to handle phones, to be wary of answering calls with unfamiliar area codes. At best, these tend to be automated telemarketing calls or faxes (there are people out there who still fax, apparently) and I can easily hang up the phone and move on with my day. At worst, they are eager representatives (frequently relentlessly cheerful young women with southern drawls—unless it’s Promise Keepers calling) from large, usually American, religious organizations who are seeking my/our support for some upcoming event or initiative or massive multi-site networked “experience” that will revolutionize my ministry. These calls are much more difficult to extract myself from. I am never rude, but I’m afraid I don’t give them much by way of encouragement. Usually by around the second minute of our phone call, I can sense the exasperation bleeding through the line all the way from Tennessee.  Read more

Mar 27

Hiding

Like many, I’ve been following the story of the Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who deliberately crashed the plane he was co-piloting from Barcelona to Dusseldorf into the French Alps this week, killing himself and 149 other precious human beings. It is a disturbing story, on so many levels. We read, we watch, we listen with mouths open, aghast. What could possibly drive someone to do such a thing? We struggle to make sense out of the senseless. We sift around in the wreckage, as it were, trying to find something—anything—that might allow us to place this event into intelligible moral categories.  Read more

Jan 28

5 Comments

The Last Shall Be First

There is much that we hope for, we who have cast our lot with Jesus of Nazareth. We hope for mercy, forgiveness, new life, eternal life. We hope for the promise of a new heart that—against  all odds!—beats in sync with our Maker, as promised by the prophet Ezekiel. We hope for the relief from pain, for relational wholeness, for freedom from the burden of crippling doubts and unmanageable burdens. We hope for heaven, whatever that might mean. We hope for justice and peace, shalom for all of creation, for lions with lambs, for swords into plowshares, for a new heaven and a new earth. We hope that we will be loved and healed and restored, despite all that we have contributed to the brokenness of a broken world. We hope for no more tears.  We hope to be with God. And to be able to stand it. Read more

Dec 31

5 Comments

Twins

Something a bit different from the usual fare, to end off the year…

Over the last week or so, a handful of people have drawn my attention to a recent episode of The Current (a current affairs program on CBC Radio here in Canada) that talked about twins. Most readers of this blog will know why this program would have been deemed to be of interest to me. I am myself an identical twin, and am the father of fraternal thirteen-year-old twins. This morning, the day after my twin brother and his family departed after a Christmas visit, I finally sat down and listened to the podcast. And now I find myself reflecting on twinhood (Twindom? Twinitude?) on this, the last day of 2014.

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Dec 30

4 Comments

2014 in Review

In a month or so I will have been writing in this space for eight years. As the years go by and the posts accumulate, it becomes increasingly interesting to track which posts grab people’s attentions and which do not, which have “staying power” (a tenuous term for, if ever there was one, in the context of our rapidly shrinking, social media-shaped attention spans) and which fade into online oblivion pretty much from the moment I press “publish.”

Speaking of pressing “publish,” I did so one hundred and sixteen times in 2014, which works out to nearly ten posts per month or two and half per week. And of those one hundred and sixteen posts in 2014, here are the five that caught readers’ attention more than the other one hundred and eleven, along with a brief description of each. Read more

Dec 11

47 Comments

Lament for a Small Town Bible School

The official news showed up where all things show up these days: on my Facebook feed. Right there next to cheesy inspirational slogans and idiotic videos and family photos and passive-aggressive politicking…

It is with profound sadness and regret that the Bethany College Board of Directors announces that the conclusion of the 2014-2015 year will mark the end of the ministry of Bethany College in its current iteration.

It wasn’t a surprise to me—I had seen this sad news coming for quite a while, had been talking with my twin brother (the academic dean) about it for months—but I was surprised at the way my heart sank when I read the announcement. Surprised by how surprised I was to see the words on the screen.   December 10, 2014. The day the news came that another small Canadian Bible school—an institution that has been around since 1927­—would be closing its doors. Read more

Dec 4

10 Comments

Rough Ground

A photographer friend of mine often reminds me of the importance of paying attention to the world around us, of capturing ordinary moments in ordinary places on ordinary days. I’m not much of a photographer, but I would like to be a better payer-of-attention. Lately, I often find myself just sitting and staring, recording images and impressions in my head, trying to remember, trying to write them down…

One of the places I sit and stare is the downtown library. I spend a decent amount of time here. I read while my daughter is at swim club, while my son is at guitar lessons, when I have an hour to kill between supper and a meeting, when I need to get out of the office. The library is a very interesting place to sit and stare…  Read more

Nov 26

11 Comments

Hunger

Rocky is third in line for lunch at the soup kitchen. He has a big red face, crooked aviator sunglasses, and a navy blue tracksuit. His jacket is opened wide to reveal a gaudy silver dog chain that hangs down to the middle of his chest. He’s got a bunch of faded tattoos peeking out from the bottom of his sleeves, and the word “Elvis” tattooed across the side his neck. Read more

Nov 15

2 Comments

Personal Best

Swim meet, wintry November morning… My daughter and I dutifully bundle up and are out the door and on the road by 7 am. One and a half hours down the prairie highway… The pool is packed, the swim teams assemble with all their coloured caps and logo’d hoodies and impressive looking warm up gear… The top 40 pop music leaks drearily out of the speakers… The parents yawn and clutch their coffees and stare at their phones, waiting, waiting for the first race…

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Nov 12

6 Comments

A Day in the Life

To be a pastor is to periodically find oneself on the receiving end of sorts of bemused and confused sentiments. Many people in post-Christian Canada have few categories for something as inexplicably odd as a “pastor.” Understandably, they have questions. So what do you actually do all day? Do you like just hang out with people for a living? Do you read the Bible all day? 

My personal favourite from the “things people say to/about pastors” file came earlier today (third time in the last week or so): Must be nice to just work for twenty minutes on Sunday! Read more

Oct 21

4 Comments

Broken Down

I look out my office window this morning and see a rusty, mud-streaked old pick up truck with a creaky-looking camper on the back stagger and wheeze its way into the church parking lot. Such sights in the church parking lot rarely portent good news, and this particular appearance will prove no different.

A broad-shouldered middle-aged man ambles up to the path and into the church. I greet him at the front door. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat, a dirty denim jacket, and a big pair of grubby riding boots. The smell of manure is almost overpowering. He has a grizzled salt and pepper beard and when the smiles he directs my way is full of gaping holes where teeth ought to be. “Hi there, my name’s Sam,” he says. “I’m in a bit of trouble, and I’m wondering if you might help me out….”

I sigh, inwardly. Someone’s always in a bit of trouble.… Read more

Oct 9

8 Comments

F*** Everything (Except Me)

I was listening to a radio program this morning about tattoos. Specifically, the co-hosts were discussing whether or not it was permissible to refuse employment to someone because of tattoos in prominent places—places like faces and necks and whatever other places people are finding to ink themselves up these days. Even more specifically, the co-hosts were wondering about if said prominent tattoos contained offensive messages. “What if, for example, someone had a tattoo in a place that was impossible to ignore that said, ‘F*** the World?’” asked one co-host to the other. What if, indeed. Can people who choose to decorate their bodies in such ways expect to be hired in public roles, for example? Do employers have an obligation to ignore such things and focus only on competencies? Murky waters, these are… Read more

Sep 26

15 Comments

These Words

About four years ago, our family got a little white dog named Woodchuck. A neighbour on Vancouver Island was looking to find him a different home, and so, after a sober, rational family conversation—a conversation which consisted mainly of me saying, “I don’t want a dog” and my wife and kids saying, “who cares what you want, dad, it’s three against one”—the decision was made. Woody was in our house the next day.  Read more

Sep 9

7 Comments

Our Selves Drift Away

The other day I was racing around some big-box type store, scrambling to get all the back-to-school stuff for the kids. We had adopted a “divide and conquer” mentality with my two kids going in one direction and I going in another for different things, and agreeing to meet at the front till. As I was standing breathlessly in the line up, having emerged relatively unscathed from my close encounter with the panicked hordes of desperate parents, I noticed one particular item amidst all the pencils and paper and geometry sets that I didn’t recall being on the list.

 A bottle of Coke. But not just any bottle of Coke. This one had my name all over it. Literally. Read more

Sep 2

12 Comments

Kindness Matters

And so, another summer is gone and it’s back to school. This morning we coaxed and cajoled two reluctant teenagers out the door approximately three hours earlier than they had grown accustomed to being anywhere or doing anything over the course of the summer. Out the door for another year of glorious personal growth and social interaction and intellectual stimulation. Or something like that. Judging by the looks on their faces as they trudged out the door, about the only thing on their minds were the beds they had been unceremoniously dislodged from. 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…

——

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

Jul 23

11 Comments

When Bad Things Happen

We’re house sitting for friends in North Vancouver so the mornings have been long and lazy, full of novels and coffee and games with the kids and sunshine on the patio overlooking Indian Arm, and more coffee… It’s been wonderful.

Yesterday, my morning reverie was interrupted by a few soft knocks on the door. At first I didn’t even hear them, so faint was the sound they made, but they were persistent. Eventually I clued in that those faint sounds at the door meant that, you know, someone was there and that this someone who was there probably wanted me to come to the door to see what they wanted. Read more

Jun 24

6 Comments

“No, I’M Gonna Pray!”

It’s the last Tuesday of the month, which means it’s our church’s turn at the local soup kitchen. It’s so easy for “the soup kitchen” to become a kind of generic placeholder for ooey-gooey charitable goodness, like “the short-term missions trip or “the Christmas food drive.” It’s all too easy to forget that there are real human beings on the other end of our shiny good deeds—real human beings with faces and names and stories, real human beings with real sadness, sin, and and struggle, real pain and distress, and, yes, real humour, insight, and wisdom.

A few snapshots, then, of one Tuesday, in particular… Read more

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