Skip to content

Jan 26

10 Comments

Play Without Me

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past day and a half or so in a hotel room while my wife attends a conference. This has afforded me the delightful privilege of uninterrupted time for catching up on a bit of reading, napping, going for short walks. And for watching sports.

I love sports. I have always loved sports, whether this meant playing or watching. As with many Canadian kids, when I was younger it was mostly about hockey, but I could watch pretty much anything—football, basketball, skiing, tennis, track and field…. Even baseball, if I was particularly desperate. Not curling or golf, though. Never those. And not boxing (we had mercifully not yet been presented with the disgusting abomination that is UFC at that point). Even as a child, I understood that one must have standards. Read more

Jan 22

18 Comments

Our “Juvenile” Failure to Love

Among the reasons that I chose to attend Regent College in Vancouver, BC from 2005-2008 was the reputation of their faculty. Eugene Peterson, Gordon Fee, John Stackhouse, Sarah Williams, Rikk Watts, Loren Wilkinson… The list could go on an on. I was not disappointed in my choice, even if I was mildly surprised by how Reformed the theology often was (and how dismissive the conversations could sometimes be of Mennonites and the Radical Reformation in general). My experience at Regent was overwhelmingly good and profoundly life-giving in a wide variety of ways. Read more

Jan 20

8 Comments

Medicine Hat

Part of this past weekend was spent in Medicine Hat, AB where my son had a basketball tournament. Medicine Hat would probably not be thought by many to be a remarkable place. The city’s main claim to fame is probably the world’s largest teepee (the “Saamis” teepee, the Blackfoot word for the eagle feather headdress which was translated “Medicine Hat”) that sits just off the Trans-Canada highway near a historical buffalo jump. But aside from that, Medicine Hat is a lot like so many other windswept prairie towns. There are pockets of beauty, to be sure, but it’s mostly brown, flat, nondescript. There is the now familiar exodus of business and commerce from the downtown area, to the outskirts of town where there is plenty of cheap land for the innumerable fast-food joints and big box stores that pop with alarming speed and regularity, and the vast oceans of asphalt parking lots for the jacked up pick up trucks, SUVs and mini vans that rumble down its streets. Medicine Hat is an ordinary prairie town. Somewhere most people are passing through on their way to somewhere else. Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg, wherever. Forgettable.

But Medicine Hat is not forgettable for me.   Read more

Jan 15

3 Comments

Gravelly Grey

It is the middle of January and I wish it was colder than this. I wish it was brilliantly white and crisp and clear. I wish I could see my breath and that the snow crunched under my feet as I walked. I would prefer an idyllic winter scene.

But it’s well above zero here, these days. There’s a 100 km/hr chinook wind ferociously screaming daily in my face, relentlessly wearing down optimism and good will. All around there are shades of grey and brown. The barren trees bend and shake, wearied by the wind, plastic bags and garbage clinging to their lonely branches. The roads are choked with gravel and salt and the last dirty remnants of snow. The world seems grimy and plain. Read more

Jan 14

10 Comments

On Having a Heart

I was out driving around running errands and listening to sermon podcasts today when I was confronted by one of those religious clichés that drives me nuts. I’m not talking mild irritation here, but full-on, pull-out-your-hair (if one is fortunate enough to have hair) and scream-at-the-steering-wheel-in-self-righteous-indignation nuts. It is a term or a way of speaking that I have loathed for a very long time—a hatred that undoubtedly says more about me and my own private insecurities and neuroses than it does about the term itself or the person who is using it. But still. It is an expression/way of speaking that I really, really don’t like.

You might be wondering what term could possibly inspire such an intemperate reaction. Ok, here it is: “I just have a heart for ____.”   Read more

Jan 13

2 Comments

Vanishing in Order to See

I get a lot of books in the mail, but there are few that I can recall anticipating as keenly as the one that came in a little brown box today.  Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss has been on my radar for a while now, whether due to the almost unanimously affirming reviews it has received, or simply to the nature of the story behind the book: poet/writer/scholar gets cancer in his thirties and begins (begins again? continues?) to chart the rocky terrain from secularism to religious belief.  The story and the subject matter both compel me, but it is the writing that is blowing me away.  This man is, truly, at home with words.  I am reading, and rereading, and reading more slowly than I have in quite some time.  Occasionally, very rarely, I come across a writer whose words leave me thinking, “Yes, I have found a friend.”  One chapter into My Bright Abyss, and I am convinced that Christian Wiman is one of them.

Read more

Jan 9

2 Comments

Love is Our Fixed Address

A few days after Nelson Mandela’s December 5 passing, I checked out his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom from the local library. This morning, I turned the last page. The book was, of course, inspiring, illuminating, heartbreaking, stunning, rage inducing, hopeful, profound and a whole host of other superlatives. Given the subject matter and the nature of the story, how could it not be? Read more

Jan 7

21 Comments

Look at Me, I’m Taking Atheism for a Spin!

So, this one is generating a bit of discussion online today. Apparently Ryan Bell, an American pastor (or former pastor), is going to give atheism a try for a year. He has found himself, over the last number of years, following the well-worn ecclesial trail from orthodoxy to heterodoxy and has arrived at the point where he’s just not sure he can do the whole God thing any longer. He’s not sure what he believes any more, so he’s going to play the field.

Starting with atheism: Read more

Jan 6

4 Comments

You Were Born to Be Loved

I’ve written here before about delightful “holy moments” that I have experienced in the church I serve (see here and here, for example). These are often moments when something unexpected happens, something that spills out of our careful containers of planning and order, something that points simply, poignantly, and powerfully to the hope of the gospel in a way that no eloquent sermon or finely crafted liturgy ever could. I love these moments. Even when I don’t notice them.  Read more

Jan 3

7 Comments

On Newness

I spent a bit of time this morning snooping around in my archives from Januarys past.  This was partly down to simple curiosity. What was I thinking/writing about at the outset of previous years? How have I approached the first post of a new year in the past? It was also due to being faced with a rather uninteresting lack of inspiration in the present. Writers block isn’t something I tend to face with any degree of regularity, but it’s annoying on the occasions when it does make an appearance. Perhaps revisiting themes from New Years past would result in a eureka! moment, and I could stand back and watch the insight and creativity pour forth!

Read more

Dec 28

8 Comments

2013 in Review (And a Thank You!)

So, 2013 is drawing to a close, which means it’s time to take a peek in the rearview mirror and reflect a bit on the year that has nearly passed.  In the blogging world, this means—what else?!—highlighting the most read posts on this blog over the past 365 days or so.  It’s an imperfect tool of evaluation, obviously—a cursory count of clicks and page views hardly provides an accurate assessment of meaningful or substantive engagement—but I suppose it give some sense of the themes that drew people here over the year.   Whenever I look at statistical summaries on this blog, I find myself scratching my head.  That was my most-read post?!  I don’t even like that one!  Why didn’t ____ make the list? Posts that I am convinced are the best thing the internet has seen since, well, two hours or so ago languish in obscurity while others that I dashed off in twenty minutes generate more traffic than I would ever have expected.   I suppose such is the nature of blogging. Read more

Dec 24

9 Comments

On Rushing Ahead in the Story

A few years ago, when I was taking my first steps in my present role as pastor, a church member timidly approached me sometime around mid-December with a question: “I know it’s Advent, and Advent is about waiting, but would you be OK if we sang some Christmas carols during the Sundays before December 25?” The question was probably more pragmatic than theological. Our church doesn’t have a Christmas day service, and the Sunday between Christmas and New Years is usually among the most lightly attended of the year. There simply weren’t as many opportunities to sing these dearly loved songs as some people would like!

Read more

Dec 23

The Offense of Christmas

It’s a strange thing that, as followers of Jesus, we are dwellers in a story.

Religion is often conceived and described as ideology or a philosophy or an ethical system that provides answers to deep questions about the meaning of life and the nature of salvation. But as Christians, we are not given a generic, universal set of principles or techniques or transcendent truths or ethical absolutes by which to live.

We are, rather, thrust into a story—and a grubby, disheveled story, at that. Read more

Dec 20

19 Comments

There is Nothing Ordinary About This

Advent is not about arrival.
Advent is about waiting in hope.
Advent is about prayer for the coming Kingdom.
 
Advent is about saying,
often with trembling lip,
wavering voice,
and with tear-filled eyes,
Come soon, Lord Jesus, come soon. 
 

Brian Walsh, Advent Pain, Aching Hope

 

I sit in a sterile hospital room with a dear old saint who will be spending this Christmas where nobody wants to spend Christmas. Outside is a gloriously clear, crisp, winter day full of snow and lights and pre-Christmas goodness. Inside, there are bare, yellowing walls, cracked ceilings, cheap, generic pictures on the wall. We speak of what the doctors say, of what the next steps will be, about what is going on at church, about who has visited and who will be coming. We speak of what her kids are doing for Christmas. Read more

Dec 19

4 Comments

“A Contracting Sense of the World”

I have a growing section on my bookshelf devoted exclusively to books about how the Internet and social media is changing who we are and how we think. Each of these books says roughly the same thing in different ways. Our (ab)use of and enslavement to our devices is turning us into increasingly shallow, selfish, insular, and inattentive creatures. Our digital habits are making us less productive, more easily distracted, and unable to devote sustained attention to anything that doesn’t come in the form of Internet-sized morsels of information. I have read each one of these books on my shelf. Each time, after I turn the last page, I gulp and think, “Oh man, that was (uncomfortably) accurate. I need to change some of my habits.” And then a week or a month goes by, and I am right back to business as usual, treating my days as little more than a wearisome exercise in managing a never-ending torrent of disconnected, redundant, even useless information. Read more

Dec 17

3 Comments

Making Straight

I think that the main problem with our world right now is that there’s just not enough spirituality.

I had gone to a local café to get out of the office and try to get some reading done, but I quite literally couldn’t help but overhear the preceding assessment/diagnosis of the plight of the planet and its inhabitants taking place at the table beside me. It was a couple of university students, if their meticulously dishevelled and painstakingly ironic appearances were anything to go by. The more enthusiastic of the two—the one doing most of the talking—had evidently taken a few introductory philosophy and religious studies courses, judging by the peppering of his discourse with references to Gandhi, Jesus, Plato, and the Bhagavad Gita (not to mention a reference to that most estimable of Zen masters, Phil Jackson). The other young man seemed more interested in the Shakespeare he was trying to read, but he seemed content enough to allow the spiritual wisdom to pour forth unabated from his friend. Read more

Dec 13

10 Comments

One Fine Mess: A Parable of Grace

I know a girl who loves to laugh. She has a smile that can light up a room and a kind and compassionate heart that loves to seek out the sad, the lonely, the forgotten. She is also, like many kids her age, a little forgetful, a bit careless at times. Her head has been known to wander up into the clouds, far from the more terrestrial concerns that occupy the minds of her parents and other adults in her life. She doesn’t do many things quickly.  She cheerfully lives life at her own pace.

Read more

Dec 12

2 Comments

On Choosing to See

Reading David Bentley Hart makes me happy to be a Christian. The closing few pages of The Experience of God are simply a joy to read. Hart’s diagnosis of our present cultural moment with all of its lightly informed and category-confusing debates about atheism and religious belief is penetrating and razor-sharp (not to mention more than a little unsettling!). More importantly, though, his call to return to wonder at the very heart of existence and gratitude toward its source, is welcome and necessary.

It’s easy to gloss over long-ish quotes, I know. But resist the urge in this case. Hart has much to say that is worth thinking about. And he says it, as usual, in truly arresting ways. Read more

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →