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Posts from the ‘Stories on the Way’ Category

Nov 10

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On the Tending of Sadness

I encounter a wide range emotions each week out at the jail. Anger, resignation, apathy, confusion, relief, resentment, fear, optimism, loneliness, bitterness. And sadness. So much sadness. I sat with a guy recently who had reached his late thirties, was looking back at a ruined few decades, at a marriage destroyed, the dull fog of addictions, violence, kids who won’t speak to him, etc. The list of regrets was long and varied and soaked with pain. He’s turning a corner, and he’s reaching toward faith. But as we sat there yesterday, mostly there was just a lot of sadness.  Read more

Oct 28

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Great Faith 

What kind of faith impresses Jesus? We talked about this question out at the jail this week. The immediate context was the story of the Roman centurion in Luke 7. His servant is suffering terribly and he pleads with Jesus to heal him. Jesus agrees and says he will come, but the Roman centurion says, “No, I’m not worthy to have you come under my roof. Just say the word and he’ll be healed.” To this, Jesus famously responds, “I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel.” Read more

Oct 14

4 Comments

Shout Comfort

I first noticed evidence of Lenny on our church property around a week ago. Some fast food wrappers and cigarette butts. A few peanuts lying around the front entrance. More impressively, a meticulously stacked and folded collection of blankets, clothes, and a sleeping bag against the side of the church. He had also managed to find a big piece of plywood to prop up in our church entrance to shelter him from the elements at night when he slept there. And the elements haven’t been particularly friendly lately, with temperatures near the freezing mark along with wind and wet snow and rain over the past weekend. I cringed to think of who might be sleeping outside in those conditions. Read more

Oct 8

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The Far Country 

Every once in a while out at the jail I run into someone I know or am vaguely familiar with. Someone from childhood, perhaps, or someone who knows of me via someone else or has heard of my church. The connections are usually fairly distant. Recently, however, I was out on one of the units and I ran into someone whose parent I know. Which is a different kind of thing entirely. Read more

Oct 1

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The Helpers of Rahab

A few nights ago, a relatively quiet evening at home was interrupted by a loud crashing sound. I chalked it up to the neighbours bringing in their garbage bins. Empty bins can make a real racket going over curbs. Then I heard the same sound again. And again. And again. I went out on my front porch and cast a glance over to our alley. I noticed our neighbour’s garbage and recycling bins knocked over. I looked back down the alley to our own. Also knocked over. Same story the further back I looked. I looked in the other direction and saw a group of five hooded figures in black a couple hundred meters down the alley across the street, just walking down the alley pushing over every bin they came across. It was like the killing fields for garbage bins.  Read more

Aug 4

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A Time to Burn

I woke up Saturday morning to a smoky haze. It’s been a mostly smoke-free summer here in southern Alberta, so this was an unwelcome way to greet the day, not least because my wife and I were going to be heading off to the mountains to do some hiking. Suffice to say, the smoke dampened my enthusiasm for our little trek. One of the main draws of the mountains is the views, obviously. It seemed like our main view on Saturday would be smoke. Read more

Jul 31

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You’re Invited! (On Getting Hacked)

I was standing in a bar
And watching all the people there
Oh, the loneliness in this world
Well, it’s just not fair
Hey, love and mercy, that’s what we need tonight

— Brian Wilson, Love and Mercy

——

My email address was recently hacked. One day, I started getting all kinds of puzzled texts and emails from people wondering if an email they had received from me was legit. The email contained a picture of an envelope with the words “You’re Invited” on it. Underneath was a green button you could click on to open the “invitation.” “It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would send,” many people said. “But I just wanted to be sure.” Read more

Jul 14

7 Comments

The Results Business

I recently made my way out to one of the units at the jail to deliver a few items that had been requested by inmates. Bibles, writing paper, calendars, devotionals, bible study courses—each must be documented, labeled with a name and a number, and then placed on the window sill at the bubble so the guys can see when there’s something for them. On my most recent trip, one of the guards noticed a name on one of the packages I was putting out which contained a bible study course. He snorted. “That guy’s not here any more. Down in the hole. Guess you were a few days too late with that stuff!” I smiled. Picked up my materials. “Yeah. I guess I was.” Read more

May 28

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Precious Gift

I’ve spent the last few days at a retreat centre in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with a small group of fellow pastors. The setting is magnificent and the weather has been surprisingly cooperative for springtime in Alberta. There’s been plenty of unstructured time for walking in the forests and reading by the river or just sitting and contemplating the vast beauty of all that God has made. It’s been good for the soul. Read more

Apr 14

8 Comments

At Just the Right Time

“That’s it?”

He looks at me with a mixture of incredulity and suspicion across a grungy table in a glorified storage closet at the jail. The setting, even given the context, is unimpressive. A broken vacuum cleaner. A bunch of haphazard toilet paper rolls. Some dust-covered supplies from the pandemic era. A couple plastic chairs. On the other side of the door, the buzzing and clanging and crashing and shouting that is the near-constant soundtrack out on the remand units. Read more

Mar 3

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Hagar

At a church retreat last weekend, we spent some time talking about stories. Our own personal stories, the stories that we have lived into or out of, the broader stories in which we are all enmeshed. And, of course, the stories of Scripture, which for many of us have shaped us in the deepest ways, for better or for worse. It’s fascinating, as someone who is often tasked with selecting the scriptures that we will hear and reflect on each Sunday, to get a window into how people in our church look at the Bible—the stories they are drawn to, the stories that repel them, the stories that inspire them, the stories that confuse them, the stories they struggle to know what to do with or how and when to tell them. Read more

Feb 24

6 Comments

Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined House)

He looks at me warily as he approaches the guard’s station at the jail. He’s thirty-something, huge beard, menacing tattoos snaking up and around his neck and bald head. I stand there, inoffensively, with my clipboard and my death notification. “I’m a chaplain here, just wondering if you’d like to talk to someone about losing your dad?” I motion over to the interview room over in the corner of the unit and start to walk in that direction. His expression doesn’t change. “Not really,” says. He follows me anyway. Read more

Jan 13

7 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany (On Weakness and Strength)

Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files are always a welcome sight when they show up in my inbox. I don’t always agree or resonate with his responses to queries from his fans, but they are almost invariably interesting. Today, for example, Cave responds briefly (often only a word or a sentence) to a wide range of questions from around the world. Naturally, I am always drawn to the ones that have to do with faith. Two fans were fairly disgusted with Cave’s, for lack of a better term, “religious turn” in the latter part of his career. One American fan wondered how anyone with “half a brain would believe in God.” Another, JL from Canada, queried, “Is religion not the refuge of the weak?” Cave responded thus:

Yes, JL, it is precisely that. Christianity in particular.

Read more

Dec 23

3 Comments

“We Cannot Wait Till the World is Sane”

We read the Christmas story out at the jail yesterday. Matthew’s version, all the way through. We read about Mary and Joseph angelic visitations and prophecies fulfilled and Magi from the east bearing strange gifts. We read about a mad king’s maniacal decree, about the slaughter of innocent baby boys, about the Holy Child of Bethlehem being hunted from the day he was born. I had taped images from William Kurelek’s A Northern Nativity on the wall throughout the chapel and invited the guys wander around looking at them while I read. I wanted the Nativity to somehow migrate from words on a page or sanitized religious images to their world, to them, to us. Read more

Dec 18

4 Comments

God is Born

Christmas at the jail is invariably a night of brutal dissonances. Kitschy decorations (Santas, elves, cardboard fireplaces, candy canes) labouring to add a bit of colour to drab concrete and plastic. Christmas carols competing for auditory space with the squawk and buzz of intercoms and the clanging of heavy doors. Ornate words about hope and joy in a place where despair and cynicism come more naturally. In the Christian life, there is always a gap between the hope we proclaim and the reality we experience. This is life in between Christ’s advents. At the jail, the gap just seems exponentially wider. Read more

Nov 19

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Wednesday Miscellany: On Sex and Transcendence

Whenever a topic or cluster of topics keep showing up in different areas of my life and ministry, I eventually decide it’s worth paying attention to and, if possible, try to write something about it. When I can’t quite seem to come up with a solid piece of unified writing, I default to a “Miscellany” post. So, what follows is not necessarily a coherent argument, just a few short reflections and observations picked up over the last little while. Read more

Nov 4

Forty Chickens

Hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born.

— Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

*** 

We were talking about hope out at the jail yesterday. A few guys had shared about how they desperately needed hope, to believe that there could be something different in their future, something besides the same old habits, the endless tired returning to the same endlessly tired dead-ends. One guy looked up with a half-grin that was somewhere between cynical, mischievous, and dejected. “I don’t got no hope anymore. I stole forty chickens and there’s no future for me.” Read more

Oct 21

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On Slop, Sadness, and Shared Humanity

Any given Monday at the jail contains no small number of sadnesses. I feel sad when I see grown men and women who can barely read. Sad when I see inmates being yelled at. Sad when I hear loud crude conversations out the door as the inmates make their way to chapel. Sad when I read incident reports. Sad when I hear stories of the damage inflicted by damaged people. Sad when I see inmates whose birth years are earlier than my kids’. Sad when I hear people tell me that jail is the only place where they feel safe from themselves and their addictions. Sad when I hear about the casual chaos and violence in which so many lives are (mal)formed. Read more

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