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Dec 31

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2019 in Review

Well, here we are, on the cusp of a shiny new decade. December 31 is, of course, a quite natural day to reflect back on the year that was in the world and in one’s life. It’s also an opportunity to have a glance in the rear-view mirror in the life of this little blog. Incredibly, next month will mark my thirteenth anniversary blogging. I don’t think I ever expected that I would still be writing here in the year 2020. It is a testimony either to my stubbornness or your patience (or both) that this blog has survived as long as it has, particularly as the sheer volume of online content continues to wash over us in wave after indecipherable wave, and as our attention spans continue to be eroded by Twitter. Read more

Dec 24

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This Child is Born for Us

Around mid-afternoon on this Christmas Eve, our city was shrouded by a dense fog. It had been a quite pleasant day—mild, for December on the prairies, sunny, calm. It felt like late fall rather than the dead of winter. And then the fog descended. It was so thick that at times I could barely see twenty metres in front of me on my drive to church for our Christmas Eve service. Read more

Dec 17

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Tuesday Miscellany (On Going to the Gym, Pillow Forts, Trust and Change)

Last June, I decided that I had reached that stage of life where some changes to my routine were going to be necessary. I had injured my knee a few years ago, and due to a perfectly calibrated combination of apprehension, apathy, and procrastination, I had not gone the surgery route. One day, a friend who had been through a similar knee-injury gloriously vindicated my indecision by saying, “Forget surgery, just hit the weights. You’ll be fine.” I very much liked the “forget surgery” part of this injunction. The “hit the weights” part? Well, not so much. But, you know, mid-life and all. I figured that I had reached a point in proceedings where some maintenance was going to be required to stay active and reasonably healthy. So, off to the gym I went. Read more

Dec 13

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Come

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my favourite songs each year around this time is Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. There are endless versions of it, of course—this year, I’m enjoying Future of Forestry’s take on the grand old hymn—but I’m at least as drawn to the lyrics as any particular rendition of it. There are few songs that convey the depth of human longing and the beauty of the Christian hope like this one. Read more

Dec 11

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What if Someone’s Keeping Score?

Like many, I’ve been watching the comedy series The Good Place over the last few years. The show is set in a heaven-ish place designed as an afterlife reward for, well, good people. It’s a show that actually manages to tackle some fairly weighty conundrums of moral philosophy (What is the nature of goodness? How is it achieved? What does it say about us that we so naturally understand life as an arena for moral scorekeeping) in a fairly interesting way. I’ve not yet watched the last season (hurry up, Netflix!), but so far, it’s been entertaining fare. Read more

Dec 3

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Are You Looking at Me?

A strange thing happened on the way to work this morning. A blue minivan came flying up beside me on the highway and then abruptly slammed on the brakes to match my speed. I glanced over, puzzled. Was it a friend trying to get my attention? Had I cut this person off? Was my fuel cap open and flapping in the wind? My gaze was met by a woman and (I assumed) her young son in the passenger seat. She was leaning across him, gesturing wildly at me, pointing at me with two fingers, seeming to indicate that she was watching me. Or something. I really don’t know. I stared at her, more bewildered than before. Before I knew it, she had raced off ahead of me. Read more

Nov 27

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Life Expectancy

I don’t know, I guess I kinda just feel like something’s missing in my life… you know how people talk about that God-shaped hole or whatever…?

The person on the other end of the phone was young, a member of the disappearing (in church circles) and much-coveted millennial demographic. I was initially taken aback. I had been anticipating a riveting morning of responding to emails and doing a bit sermon prep while a blizzard raged outside. But wait, what’s this? A spiritually sensitive young person calling a church to ask halting questions about God, meaning, life?! It’s the kind of scenario that many pastors assume doesn’t really happen anymore. Except, well, maybe to other pastors in other places with bigger churches. Read more

Nov 15

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The Deepest Refrain

Lord God, you love us, source of compassion

These words provided the restorative refrain near the end of a Taizé service I attended with our local L’Arche community on Tuesday evening. Over and over again, we sang. Lord God, you love us, source of compassion. Until it was drilled down into our bones. Until the words wore down our defenses and settled into our souls. Until we could just about believe this most incredible of things.

We are loved. I am loved. By God. Read more

Nov 12

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On “Weather Events” and Other Absurdities of the Digital Age

On Friday afternoon, as I was spinning my wheels on a sermon that just wasn’t coming, I did what I tend to do when the inspiration tap seems to have run dry. I began to click aimlessly around the internet. It’s an inspirational strategy, I know. Feel free to take notes. At any rate, I checked a few soccer scores. I scrolled half-heartedly through Facebook and Instagram. I visited an inbox that somehow, frustratingly, wasn’t magically whittling itself down. And I checked the weather. Read more

Nov 6

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The Crowd

On Saturday afternoon, I was gloriously lost in the crowd. The scene was the Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany, where I was watching the match between the home team, Eintracht Frankfurt, and German and European powerhouse FC Bayern München. I was there with a group of lifelong friends who had convened in Europe to reconnect and watch a few soccer games.

The previous weekend we had been at a game in Madrid, which was fantastic, but the atmosphere in Frankfurt was electric. At times, the entire stadium seemed to be shaking and roaring in lusty approval as Eintracht demolished the hated rivals from Bavaria 5-1 (for non-soccer fans, Bayern would be kind of like the New York Yankees of German football—the phenomenally wealthy team that poaches everyone else’s best players and who everyone loves to hate). Even though we were ostensibly there to see Bayern (they are our German friend’s team and they have a kid from Alberta with a fascinating and inspiring story playing for them), it was a riotously good time and an experience to remember. Read more

Oct 22

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On Division and Negativity

Like many Canadians, I had an eye on the national election last night. Election results and commentary provided the background noise throughout the evening, as I had dinner with my son, as I went to the gym, as I watched a bit of soccer and talked with my wife, and as my head eventually hit the pillow. To the surprise of probably no one, the end result of a nasty campaign characterized by polarizing rhetoric, majoring on minors and minoring on majors, name calling, fearmongering, avoiding issues, peddling partial truths or simply outright lying, was a minority Liberal government. This was what many pundits and pollsters predicted and for a change they got things pretty much exactly right. Read more

Oct 11

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Smells Like Teen Spirit

I’ve been pondering connections between David Bentley Hart and Nirvana this afternoon. As in, the band, not the state of blissful detachment from desire and suffering. Apparently, psychologists have discovered that our musical tastes begin to take shape as early as age thirteen or fourteen and by the time we’re in our early twenties these tastes are locked into place pretty firmly. One study indicated that “popular songs released when you’re in your early teens are likely to remain quite popular among your age group for the rest of your life” and that many of us stop listening to new music entirely after around age thirty-three. This probably explains why I struggle to appreciate the throbbing, migraine-inducing EDM that drifts up from my son’s corner of the basement. Read more

Oct 1

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Whatever Makes You Feel Better

A thought experiment for your Tuesday afternoon.

Scenario A: You’ve been experiencing pain. Maybe it’s arthritic knees or chronic migraines or the fallout from an injury. You go to your local clinic. The building is sterile and clean. It is filled with all kinds of humming machines, urgent activities, and the myriad accoutrements of a modern, technologically advanced health care facility. Your doctor is well-groomed and wearing a white lab coat. On her office wall hang impressive-looking degrees from prestigious universities. She analyzes your symptoms, perhaps does an X-Ray or an ultrasound. Images are produced, diagnoses pronounced. Your doctor writes a prescription on official letterhead and sends you off to the pharmacy where you encounter a few more white lab coats, a bit more buzzing technological efficiency. Eventually, you depart with a sealed bottle of pills with detailed instructions on the label. Read more

Sep 25

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Fearfully Religious, Religiously Fearful

Like many, I’ve been following with interest the story of Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist whose words and actions have been galvanizing young people (and beyond) and dominating the news in recent days. Hers is a voice that speaks clearly and forcefully for a generation that is sick of platitudes and political inactivity when it comes to the looming climate crisis on the horizon. She is unafraid to speak fearlessly to the rich and the powerful—to demand action for the sake of future generations who will pay the price of the reckless and wasteful inattentiveness of we who preceded them. Read more

Sep 24

5 Comments

Emotional Days

It’s been an emotional morning. No, not in that way—nothing bad has happened to me, nothing special is tugging at my heartstrings or causing me elation, sorrow, or confusion (at least no more than usual). Nothing like that. But it’s been a morning where the theme of “emotions” and how they operate in our thinking, our self-understandings, our politics, and our collective discourse has popped up a few times in my quick tour of the news and social media over breakfast. Read more

Sep 19

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Our Poisonous Purity

The big news this week here in Canada is that a nearly-two-decades old photo has surfaced of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—heroic champion of diversity and inclusion and tolerance and fierce critic of their opposites—in brownface at a costume party. For scandal-hungry media covering an election campaign grinding along in a rather pedestrian and uninspiring fashion, with candidates trying desperately to make voters’ choices seem like something more sensational than they are (do we prefer a center-left or center-right government this time around?), this is of course pure gold. It was front page news on every major news media site this morning and I expect the commentary will continue for days.  Read more

Sep 10

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Tell Me What to Think

So, a millennial, a baby boomer and a Gen-Xer walk into a bar… —or, a church picnic, as it happens—and a surprising collision and confluence of assumptions and expectations ensues. At least it did on Sunday afternoon. The topic of conversation was critical thinking and its presence/absence in the world and the church. I’m painting in broad strokes in what follows, so I’ll have to ask your forgiveness and patience in advance. With a few stereotypes operating in the background, some surprising and not-so-surprising themes emerged in the conversation. Read more

Sep 5

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On Simplifying

Early September is one of a handful of “new years” that many of us use to orient or mark time. The beginning of another academic year is experienced as a new beginning for many, particularly those with kids. January 1 is another, obviously. For Christians, the First Sunday of Advent would be yet another, as we mark the beginning of another year lived according to the story of Jesus. These are logical points on our calendars and in our lives for us to recalibrate, reorient, recommit, or remind ourselves of important truths. Read more

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