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Posts from the ‘Random Musings’ Category

Dec 10

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Thirty Things I Like About Christianity

We are halfway through Advent, and I’ll confess to occasionally feeling just a little bit restless and uninspired.  The same texts from Isaiah and the gospels that we rehearse every year.  The same rituals and routines, the same hopes and promises voiced, the same baby in the same manger with the same cast of characters.  The same hymns and readings.  Over and over again.  Consequently, I was delighted to come across Ben Myers’ post today called “Forty Things I Like About Christianity” over at Faith and Theology.  It was a lovely reminder of the beauty of this faith, this God, this story that we are a part of.

And it inspired me to scrawl out my own list.  This list is by no means exhaustive.  These are just some of the things that came to mind this morning.  Feel free to add to the list!

(I’m not as smart or sophisticated as Ben Myers so I stopped at thirty :).)

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Nov 14

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Thursday Miscellany

Let’s see if you can follow the Thursday afternoon rabbit trail….

I spent part of this afternoon hearing the story of an Anglican minister who recently participated in the El Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. We talked about the nature of pilgrimages, about history and tradition and communion with saints who have gone before us, about silence and prayer and participating in something deep and wide and long…

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Oct 8

14 Comments

“They Wanted a Child of Their Own”

As an adoptive parent, you sort of get used to hearing little phrases flying around about kids that are mildly irritating. Usually, you give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they didn’t mean anything by their careless usage of language, but some days… well, some days, it just bugs you. Today, for example, I encountered these words: They wanted a child of their own.

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Sep 25

6 Comments

Speaking Personally

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

Sep 18

6 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

I’m sitting here on a grey, rainy Wednesday morning thinking that it’s high time I wrote something here.  It’s been over five days of silence on this blog, which, if the social media experts are to be believed, is a virtual eternity fraught with all kinds of weighty perils.  I am surely running the risk that readers will look elsewhere, that traffic will decline, that my “brand” will suffer, that I will fail to “build upon momentum” or any number of other hazards that come with blogging too infrequently.

So, right.  Time to write.   There are certainly no shortage of potential topics. Read more

Aug 22

8 Comments

Up and Down

My infallible WordPress stats counter tells me that this blog recently passed the 700 posts and 8000 comments mark. We had a little party, WordPress and I, which consisted mainly of the WordPress minions showering me with randomly generated congratulations and what I imagine were intended to be inspirational quotes. I’m not too proud to admit that I choked up a little. So touching, that WordPress would take the time…

At any rate, the passing of this momentous milestone means—that’s right, you guessed it!—it’s time for another tortured, myopic reflection upon the nature of blogging where I predictably vacillate between self-congratulation and self-flagellation and various other points in between. If you’ve seen this movie before, please feel free to ignore the following and put your next ten minutes or so to more profitable use elsewhere.

Seriously.

Still here? Ok, well on with the show, such as it is… Read more

Aug 20

12 Comments

Finding Our Place

If you’ve been around this blog for any length of time, you will know that I am a big fan of Frederick Buechner. I admire the way he writes, the way he pries open a space for faith in a cultural context often characterized by skepticism, doubt, and even hostility to God. His book of sermons, Secrets in the Dark, is often one of the first places I turn when I am feeling like the well is dry and the inspiration just isn’t coming.

Having said that, I have always had a bit of an ambiguous relationship with what is perhaps one of Buechner’s most famous quotes: Read more

Aug 5

8 Comments

The Club

Among my discoveries on two long days spent on my recently acquired motorcycle was that I am now part of a club. I’m not sure if it qualifies as an “elite” club yet or not, but we have our own equivalent of a handshake and everything. Every time you pass a motorcyclist on the highway you will be greeted by “the wave” from your fellow “two-wheeler.” Well, most of the time. More on that later.

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Aug 3

4 Comments

Two Silences

For the better part of the last two weeks, my vacation morning routine has looked roughly the same. Wake up (usually at least two hours before the rest of my family), make a pot of coffee, proceed to the patio overlooking the ocean at our friends’ place in North Vancouver, and begin to leisurely sift through the newspaper or a novel while basking in the sun-drenched early morning silence. It’s been delightful. The patio, the sun, the coffee (mmm… Kicking Horse), the gorgeous ocean view…. But especially the silence. Read more

Jul 29

3 Comments

On Capturing Moments

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If we have a memorable experience in the age of smart phones and social media and don’t digitally capture and share it, did it really happen? Read more

Jul 20

11 Comments

First World Problems

We’re hanging out in North Vancouver over the next few weeks (house sitting for some friends who are off to Europe) so I’ve been straining to acclimatize myself to lazy mornings on a sun-drenched patio overlooking the ocean with good books and strong coffee, leisurely strolls through lush mountain forests, meandering through breathtakingly manicured multi-million dollar neighbourhoods on the way to pick up some bread for supper, etc., etc. It’s been challenging, but I will do my best to bravely soldier on. Read more

Jul 11

4 Comments

Me, Myself, and I

This afternoon, I was browsing around The Pessimist website and briefly flirted with the idea of actually buying something. What, you might ask, was I doing on this site? Well, aside from the fact that it’s a great website (see “The Pessimist’s Guide to Working From Home” which, in addition to being flat-out hilarious, pretty much exactly matches parts of my experience), it’s mostly a sad and predictable story of bouncing around from link to link and then, fifteen minutes later thinking, “Um, how did I get here and what am I doing?!” I didn’t buy anything (although I still kinda want to), but I did get to the “checkout” stage where I was greeted by the following delightful message:

Your shopping cart, like your impoverished soul, is empty.

How can you not appreciate such humour? Read more

Jul 2

18 Comments

“We’re Gonna Be Surrounded by Angels”

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

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

Jun 17

Blank Screen

As I was driving back from a guest-speaking trip to Edmonton yesterday afternoon, I observed myself doing a funny thing. Every few minutes, I would restlessly pick up my phone and look at it. For no reason at all. It didn’t ring or ping or otherwise summon me to attend to its latest deliverance. It just sat there, silently. But I was quite sure that somewhere in Internet-land there was something going on that I needed to be aware of. Someone was writing something or responding to something I had written or posting something that I probably ought to be aware of. All of these hypotheticals can (and did) get pretty exhausting. Read more

Jun 14

5 Comments

On Loss and Life

This morning I am grimly staring in the mirror at a large red scab that is rapidly moving toward full bloom almost directly in the middle of my forehead. An uncomfortable reminder, this, of the previous evening’s activities when, instead of making contact with the soccer ball as I had intended, I rather abruptly introduced my forehead to an opponent’s skull. This ugly scab seems somehow uglier as I reflect upon the game itself. Up 2-1 in the second half, then conceding three goals in about 10 minutes to lose 4-2—two of said goals almost entirely due to giveaways by the guy with the blotchy red forehead.

Sigh. Read more

Jun 12

4 Comments

No One is Born Bad (or, Babies are Really Cute)

If I ever do bite the bullet and buy a PVR it will almost be exclusively due to my hatred of television commercials. The prospect of skipping over every moronic attempt to sell me something is a delicious one indeed. But I’m also cheap. What to do? Such are the weighty conundrums of my life.

Anyway, I usually try to hit the mute button when the commercials come on, but I was a little slow on the draw the other night while the kids and I were watching the hockey game. And once this commercial started, well, there was no way the kids were letting me mute it. This comes to us courtesy of People for Good: Read more

Jun 6

10 Comments

The Way We Walk

I went for a walk at lunch today.  A frustrating morning… needed to clear my head, to think, to pray.

I often walk on a weedy red shale path alongside an irrigation canal that snakes behind our church on the outskirts of town.    There’s not much of a view to speak of.   Some farmland, an agricultural research facility, a big motor sports dealership, a meat processing plant off in the distance.  Off in the other direction I can hear the hum of machinery and industry where a new hotel going up across the highway.

But in the spring and the summer, there is water in the canal.  And I like to walk by water. Read more

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