Worth A Thousand Pictures

I'm writing this on my son's machine because ours is still under the patient ministrations of Clair at StarTek. He says he can get it to work and if not, he'll shoot it. That I'd rather do myself. We had Windows 2000 installed on the old beast to give it a new lease on life and somewhere something went wrong and it got stuck in a loop. It would run through all of the startup routines and get to the point where you could see the windows at the end of the tunnel. Then it would start over again. It was maddening. You'd get so close , then... nothing. Back to where you started. We've been going to a church for about a year now that we really love. Great teaching, very cool people. A very warm and welcoming congregation of people who love God. So this Sunday, we started a new teaching series built around Bill Hybels' new book, Just Walk Across the Room, which I highly recommend. It's all about taking the small steps toward people who we don't know. Taki...

Why did it have to be at the top of a mountain on a hot day, carrying all that wood? His father wasn’t young anymore (had he ever been?) so Isaac took the load of wood himself. Abraham went ahead, finding the path, carrying the fire for the altar. This was a long, long way to come to make a sacrifice. Isaac had seen his father make sacrifices to his god before, and it was always the same. He’d build an altar, stone on stone ‘till it was right, lay it with wood – first the tinder, then the kindling, then the fuel. He’d choose the very best lamb he could find, sometimes that took hours, talking to the shepherds, looking at hooves and skin. If he couldn’t find the one he wanted, he’d buy one from a neighbour. That could take a day or two. Once he’d found the one he wanted, he’d tie its legs with rope, lay it on the altar. He’d cut the lamb’s throat quickly so it wouldn’t suffer and light the fire. A complete waste, except it wasn’t. It was a gift, a symbol of...

Until recently (in heart-time, if not calendar-time) I was very involved in a church that pursued the “seeker sensitive” model of worship. We spent many volunteer hours each week talking and e-mailing and meeting to plan services that would connect with the “unchurched” (assuming, of course, they chose to sacrifice their Sunday morning to darken our door). We cared (and I’m sure they still do) very much that we not miss our possibly only opportunity to communicate God’s love to just one of these folks. We prayed and worked until 2:30 am on Powerpoint and song arrangements and skits and talked endlessly about how to make our ‘transitions’ better, so as not to be a distraction to what the Spirit might be doing. How can we be non-threatening? How can we engage their emotions? How can we welcome them, without being in their faces? We talked of excellence and building community and “worship”. We went to conferences, purportedly to “team-build”, but effectively to steal a few ideas that we c...

Noah was the last one out. The last person, anyway. The animals were all still there, behind him in the ark, restless, smelling the fresh air and seeing the full light for the first time in a year. (A whole year! Gone.) There was a lot of work to be done, bringing them out and sending them on their way. They’d need to build corrals and cages out here for some - goats, sheep, camels, rabbits, birds. They’d want to take them along when they set out for home. God would look after the rest. He’d never been up a mountain before. He was a farmer, after all. From up here, it looked like the world went on forever. Maybe this is what God sees. He thought he had a rough idea of where they were and figured that if they set out that way and followed that ridge they should come to the big river, if it was still a river… He felt that old familiar wrench. What would the world be now? What about his house, that he’d built of mud bricks, room by room, with his own hands, and helped by his...

BANG!!! Followed by nasty smelling smoke and silence. A few frantic phone calls... "You can't fix it until WHEN? You think it might just be WHAT? It'll cost HOW MUCH?" We've had problems before - crashes, hangs, uninstalls, re-installs, hardware failures, software failures... This was our first explosion. Apparently, computers have transformers, or something, and they can blow. Kablooie. Kablam. And then what? What am I supposed to do? I have slides to prepare, I have songs to chord. We have suppliers and customers to contact. I'm stuck in the sewers in "Grim Fandango" and I want to know what happens next. Where did the florist disappear to and how can I get him to give me some ammo? I have to resist the temptation to sit in the chair and play with the mouse. That would just be pathetic. r

I grew up on a farm. We called it Glen View Acres. We kept hoping somebody would ask us why we called it Glen View Acres. If they had, we would have taken them to the kitchen window, pointed across the road and said, “See that trailer? Glen lives in that trailer. We see him, sometimes.” Nobody ever asked. We thought it was hilarious, but unless you were in on the joke, you don’t even know there was one. I’m starting to think that Easter is like that. Those of us who are Christ followers look at the pink bunnies and pastel cardboard tulips and chocolate SpongeBobs and shake our heads sadly and go to church. We wish somebody would ask us why we’re shaking our heads, why we’re going to church on a Friday morning so we could tell them. Because we really do have something to say. Something that matters and is good and true. But nobody asks. We really, really, really need to ask ourselves why nobody asks. r

After Adam and Eve left the garden, Eve became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. Cain's name means "To get". Later, Eve gave birth to his brother, Abel. Abel's name means "Life". Abel was a shepherd. Cain worked the soil. In time Cain brought some of his harvest as an offering to God. But Abel chose the best from the best of his flock. God was very pleased with Abel's gift, but not so much with Cain's. So Cain was very angry. God asked Cain, "What right do you have to be angry? If you've done something wrong, make it right. Don't let yourself be hijacked by sin. You can overcome it." Cain wasn't in the mood. While he and Abel were out of sight in the fields, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him... Cain was exhausted. He sat alone in the near corner of the field, a nearly empty waterskin on the ground beside him. It was his best field, freshly harvested and turned over, under the stars, alone with the moon and the cricket...

You know how it is when you read about something and hear about it and see it on TV and it seems kind of cool, but not something that will ever actually cross the horizon and enter your world? And then it does? So you try it? And you end up asking yourself either, “Where has this been all my life?”, or else “What was I thinking?” Been there, done that. Recently. 1. We were in our usual favourite grocery store in TO recently (NASR Foods, Lawrence Ave. E.) Very middle eastern and interesting. The shelves are full of stuff in cans with labels written in what I, as a very white person, assume to be writing. Many of them seem to be varieties of fruit or coffee. They also sell hookah pipes and belly dancing regalia along with the appropriate music. We found in the cooler a thing called Laheem Ageen. Kind of a meat and spices on bread thing. We gambled on a bag and we love it. 2. Down the road is a major chain grocery store that caters to its ethnic microcosm and often has the same kinds of e...

Correct me if I'm wrong: In order for an ecosystem to be healthy, it must be diverse, with everything from redwoods to fungus. In order for a body to be healthy, it must be diverse. The leg and the pancreas are not interchangeable, nor are they easy to mix up. In order for a community to be healthy, it must be diverse. It needs teachers and children, doctors and politicians and somebody who doesn't mind driving the garbage truck. So far, so good? Then why, somebody tell me, is the diverse, multicoloured, varicultured Church necessarily unhealthy? The Northumberland area is blessed with churches that serve as centuries old shade trees, as flamboyant wild flowers and as wheat and fruit, sheltering people in need, modelling joy and exuberance and feeding the spirit and mind. Would we be better off with something that has all the eco-diversity of a putting green (and about as much personality)? Division and "war" come in with self-righteousness, self-importance and judgem...

This time, they found him by the river. He always came in the evening, just before the sun went down. Sometimes, they heard him first, moving through the brush and they’d follow the sound until they caught up. Sometimes, he’d sneak up behind them, surprising them and they’d begin their visit with laughing together. But often, he turned up by the river. Below the waterfall, where the grass was soft. Where he’d taught them to find clay and shape it, and to dry the reeds and weave them and to skip rocks and to swim. Tonight, he was sitting on the grass, his back against a tree, feet dangling in the water. His hands were working a lump of clay that he’d dug up from the bank and he smiled up at them as they came. The man and the woman sat down, too, he with his back to a sun-warmed rock, she beside him, leaning. “What would you like to talk about tonight?” asked the One, who was just The One. The man glanced at the woman and, when she shrugged, he said, “You could tell us the story again.” ...

We’re back. Back on the comfy side of the border. We spent a week and a half driving to Florida, having some fun and driving home. Bye bye palm trees, hello snow. Bye bye grits, hello plum sauce. Bye bye Waffle House, hello Tim. It was a lot of fun. Sort of my first experience with doing what normal people do on vacation. Winter sun, January sun screen, white sand and pelicans. Being amazed by things that others take for granted. While we were away, we had a chance to spend a day at what is billed as (probably truly) the happiest place on Earth. Had a great time. Went on one ride I should have skipped. Although, having actually had the experience, I’m wondering whether I may have eliminated a recurring nightmare. Time will tell. Family consensus is that the scariest ride was the one where you go boating on a serpentine path through endless rooms filled with frightening smiling animated dolls singing a happy-happy song over and over and over and over… Near the end we found ourselves in ...

Most of these pieces are things I've written when the mood struck me. Starting in March 2008, we started having a monthly Breakfast to augment our weekly Dinners at the Motel. Part of those Breakfasts has been a story that I write each month just for that occasion. I've been trying to follow some of the Beatitudes and to write about what they'd look like in the lives of real people.