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Posts from the ‘Stories on the Way’ Category

Mar 7

3 Comments

As If Nothing Had Yet Been Done

It was cold last Sunday, and it started to snow minutes before the morning’s activities at church were to begin. I threw on a hat and some gloves and went outside to shovel the entrance to the church and a few of the closest parking spots. I like shoveling snow. My job requires little of me physically, and I enjoy expending a bit of energy. I had also been struggling to tie up a few loose ends in my sermon and I figured getting a bit of fresh and frosty air might clear my head before church began. Read more

Feb 14

8 Comments

On Sticking to the Script

In order to commemorate Valentines Day—a holiday I hold in only slightly higher esteem than World Turtle Day (May 23, apparently; mark your calendars)—I read a thoroughly depressing article about love and relationships. Naturally. The article was called “Unraveling Love Stories” and it reads as something like an apologia for the mid-life crisis and all the desperate and destructive flailings that it spawns. Read more

Jan 25

5 Comments

Small Things              

We live in excitable and noisy times. Our heads are daily filled with big ideas, big objections, big reactions, big fears…

 I’ve been trying to pay attention to smaller things.
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Jan 3

9 Comments

“I Don’t Really Care If I Die”

I was precariously winding my way through snow-covered streets in my neighbourhood a few days ago, trying to keep moving so as not to get stuck. At one point, I glided through and unmarked intersection coming out of an alley, and just as I crossed the sidewalk I noticed a young man less than a meter from my side window. I wasn’t going fast—certainly not fast enough to do any kind of damage—but it still felt like a bit of a close call.  Read more

Dec 24

6 Comments

Holy Night

Last night the kids and I went Christmas caroling with some friends from church. For whatever reason, I haven’t done this much over the years. But my daughter had been enthusiastic about it all week. And my son, well, we bribed him with the prospect of pizza after our caroling was done.  Read more

Dec 1

5 Comments

Inshallah

Over breakfast this morning, I watched a video called “Welcome to Canada,” produced by The Atlantic. It is a fascinating window into the lives of Syrians who have fled their country and found a refuge in our nation. This particular story takes place in the Vancouver area and follows a young Syrian man who came to Canada in 2014 as a refugee, and is now doing what he can to help the most recent wave of refugees who have arrived in 2016. The outlines of the story will be familiar to anyone who has been following the news over the past few years, but is no less poignant for being familiar. Obviously.

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Oct 24

3 Comments

An Ordinary Sunday

Midway through last week, someone encouraged me to periodically attempt something like modern “retellings” of Jesus’ parables during my sermons. In other words, rather than drily “explaining” the stories Jesus told, just try to tell the story in a new way. So, I gave it a shot yesterday. These stories are based on Luke 18:9-14, the famous parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. What follows is, it should be noted, a work of fiction, even if it is obviously informed by various stories and experiences I’ve encountered along the way. Read more

Sep 28

12 Comments

Truth-Telling

There was a headline yesterday, the day after the big US presidential debate, that made me despair of being a human being in the twenty-first century. I guess to be precise, it was a tagline underneath a headline, but it was no less depressing for being in a smaller font. The tagline wasn’t found on some trashy tabloid website where you would expect to find a predictable parade of click-baiting garbage. No, this was a national mainstream media article. The offending sentence read thus: Find Out Who Lied About What and Why. Read more

Sep 13

4 Comments

Canadian Values

A funny thing happened after church on Sunday. One of our church members politely pulled me away from another conversation with the news that, “There are some visitors that want to talk to you.” I’m a little weary after the service at the best of times, but this past Sunday was even worse. I was coasting on fumes having just arrived home from Europe a day before and having been up for approximately eight hours by the time the service rolled around. My head was aching and my eyes were heavy. So it took a bit of effort to summon my best pastor smile and introduce myself to the beaming thirty-something year old couple that stood before me. Read more

Sep 9

2 Comments

Greenland

I was talking the other day with someone about the quirky ironies of the names of things. It’s weird, for example, that Iceland is actually pretty green. At least in summertime. And Greenland actually seems to be mostly ice. Why wouldn’t they call “Greenland” “Iceland” and vice versa. A strange thing, that.  Read more

Aug 23

8 Comments

Dream On

Schlaflosigkeit. The German word for insomnia.

Our family is currently visiting dear friends in Germany and my body is performing its usual stubborn revolt against the rude imposition of foreign time zones and unfamiliar schedules. I’ve been tossing and turning since five am after only falling asleep around one. Eventually, as always, I give up. Sleep has never been the kind of thing I can force. Read more

Aug 20

3 Comments

On Possibility

Last night, I drove out to the mountains to pick up my son from a twelve-day wilderness/adventure/education camp. As the sun set over a gorgeous summer evening in the Rockies, we were treated to a closing program that gave us a glimpse into what the past twelve days had looked like. Rock climbing, white-water canoeing down the North Saskatchewan River, a twelve km ascent to the top of a mountain, not to mention daily jogging, yoga, team-building exercises, leadership training, coaching on integrity and character development, personal reflection, and journaling—it was quite the itinerary! It sound like the kind of camp that no small number of adults (like, roughly 100% of us) would profit immensely from, never mind 15-16 year olds. Read more

Aug 12

1 Comment

Joy and Thunder

My wife loves thrift shops. She spends hours in them, unearthing all manner of hidden gems for herself, for the kids, for me. I, on the other hand, do not love thrift shops. Not even a little bit. Where my wife sees endless possibility and the challenge of hunting down a good bargain, I see a warehouse full of stuff that other people (quite rightly) didn’t want. On the rare occasion that I find myself in a thrift shop with my wife, I usually end up spending ten perfunctory minutes drifting through the book section and then resignedly making my way to the parking lot to wait until my ordeal is done. Read more

Jul 28

4 Comments

Dispatches from Summer Camp

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m spending this week hanging out with a bunch of 8-12 year olds (and older kids serving in various other capacities) at a summer camp northwest of Calgary. I’ve been speaking at chapels in the morning and evening, eating with the staff and kids, swimming in a freezing cold river, sitting around fires, and and generally loitering about the place for the rest of the time. At the risk of stating the obvious, speaking to young kids does not exactly represent my natural habitat. But it’s been good to be dragged out of the comfortable and familiar for a stretch. Read more

Jul 14

6 Comments

Long Way Home

I did a very embarrassing thing this morning. I purchased Def Leppard’s latest album. This is not the sort of thing that any self-respecting human being of the twenty-first century ought to admit to, I know. A quick glance at my recent purchases in iTunes reveals a much more acceptable (I hope) repertoire: The Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, Basia Bulat, Radiohead, Of Monsters and Men. This is probably a more accurate gauge of where my musical tastes have drifted over the years. Def Leppard is the paradigmatic example of the unimaginative late twentieth century glam rock that was the soundtrack of my small-town high school experience. They were big hair, big power chords, soaring engineered harmonies, and mawkish power-ballad-y lyrics about love biting or breathless paeans to endlessly getting rocked or adrenalized or something. In response to the screaming query from 1988’s massive hit “Armageddon It”—Are you getting it?—I can only reply, “Yes, yes, apparently I really am a-getting it.” Or I just got it, at any rate.  Read more

Jul 1

3 Comments

Interference

She had the remnants of tears in her eyes when I saw her as I rounded the corner and pedaled down the alley toward my garage. I had come from a friend’s house where we had spent the Canada Day holiday afternoon watching the European soccer championships. It was a glorious day full of red and white maple leaf flags on the front lawns of our small town, the glorious sunshine lighting up the day after a ferocious thunderstorm. Summer had arrived and all seemed well in the world. But not for this young woman. Read more

May 13

3 Comments

I Saw Death 

I seen the body, you know.

She’s maybe ten years old, a beautiful little girl with a blonde hair and a black dress. She has tears in her eyes and her face looks tired from crying. Her uncle is gone. There was a head on collision and a fire and then the descent of all kinds of family from all kinds of places and then the shedding of rivers of tears and now a church and a service and the long  goodbye begins… Read more

May 9

4 Comments

Lake of Fire

I read an article a few days ago… one of those articles that asked people what they liked or didn’t like about the church… what they expected or didn’t expect from their pastors… what they wished for more of… or less of…. Some of the words that came up frequently were words like “honesty” and “authenticity.” Ok, then. Well, in that light…

When I was younger, I imagined that people who inhabited the “pastor” role had some specific set of skills that made them uniquely suited to sift through the wreckage of human pain that they encountered. I imagined that they strode confidently into rooms where people were coping with tragedy and death and doubt and loss and grief and crushing pain and anger and fear armed with just the right words for the job, just the right bible verses, just the right insight into when to give someone a hug and when to give them space, just the right prayers, just the right ability to project just the right combination of warmth and decisiveness and spiritual authority (whatever that might mean), just the right combination of attitudes and attributes to make bad situations somehow better.

And then I became a pastor. Read more

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