'blessings' Tagged Posts
Parental Leave: a Time to Serve
My office is all packed up, the bookcase is bare, I am not leaving the church but while I am away on a 10 week parental leave a new office is being built and our new music director is taking over my current space. Things are changing rapidly around St. Andrew’s Duncan and around my house. 10 weeks with four little boys (and summer vacation in full swing no less!) and a recovering wife? I suppose it would be easier to…
Bill Rodgers, the Marathon, and Jesus this Christmas
I have been reading a book about the great American runner Bill Rodgers who won the Boston marathon four times and the New York city marathon four times, not to mention whacks and whacks of other races. I’m reading it because I like running and as someone who is slow and has never ran a full marathon I stand in awe before fellas capable of sub 2:30 times in that event. What caught my attention, though, is how dissatisfied he…
Love Worth Giving. Living in the Overflow of God’s Love – Max Lucado 2002
A Love Worth Giving. Living in the overflow of God’s Love. Max Lucado. 2002. Here is another book that was left behind by my predecessor here at St. Andrew’s (can you tell I’ve about used up my book allowance for the year?). This book again just proves how far behind I am on my reading. Other than very short pieces I have never even read Max Lucado, call me busy I guess. This book is still available and for that…
Thomas Turns 3
Today is Thomas’s third birthday, I have now been a dad for five and half years. This is a sweet time in life, when my boys still think everything I say is gospel and they still want hugs, bedtime books and stories, and nighttime cuddles. It is a real joy to spend so much time with them and to share so much love with them. They each have special kisses just for me and they, of course, inhabit a special…
12 things I learned in Year One
This week marks the one-year anniversary of my time as an ordained minister plodding away on Vancouver Island so I thought I would offer 12 thoughts in no particular order. People are nicer and more generous than you think. The popular perception is that people are bad (and yes we do live in a broken world with a lot of pain) and that we need to be protected from each other and we might as well save our breath because…
Sharing Old Stories Can Be So Sweet
The other night we had some folks over to our house for a few drinks. One of the couples are in their sixties and they did something that is often overlooked and underappreciated. They told us their stories from when they were younger, stories of hard times that could be told with laughter and a glint in their eyes now that they are so far removed. IT was beautiful to hear these tales, and marvelous to see how they interacted,…
When Kids Break Your Heart
I pray for my boys just about every night. I do it not because I am a minister and not because I think myself especially pious, but because I am pretty hard on myself when it comes to fatherhood. I worry that I don’t love them enough, that I won’t sacrifice enough for them , and that I truly have very little knowledge as to how to prepare them for the world. Heck, I don’t even know if I am…
Sabbath and Sand castles
I was once in a meeting that was called to adjourn rather abruptly. We weren’t done our work, and the man who called for adjournment was a high-powered type of guy, very serious, the kind of guy that gets work done and that you are happy to have on the committee. As we were leaving I asked why he called the meeting short, “I have kids and we have a date to build sandcastles tonight, and those things don’t build…
It’s Simple Really
This past week I stumbled upon a blog post about living more simply. It stated that the average North American house has something like 300 000 objects in it and that there is a movement of people trying to get their number down to under 1000. They suggest the things we own in reality own us; and they propose a bunch of ways to lower our number. One way, if you are interested, is to spend a month progressively getting…
It Takes a Village
This past week our boys Oliver (5) and Thomas (2.5) have lost the ability to go to sleep. It was never really their strongest feature but with the elongated days things have been getting a little out of hand. Our stories of little boys with coughs that turn into superpowers allowing them to cough at a bus to move it and save a group of people go on into the night as our boys ask for more and more stories.…
Mentors in the Line of Fire
It’s been noted that the Apostle Paul spelled out mentoring as his leadership model very simply, “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). This past week I have been thinking about the people who poured themselves into me to help me to be in the position I am in today, a position where I get: to preach about my faith and beliefs weekly, to walk alongside both those experiencing great joy and those who…
Windows into Heaven and Flowering Trees
In response to hearing that amidst a famine God was about to act so that the very next day food would become so cheap no one would believe their luck a lord said to the king “Behold, if the LORD would make windows in heaven, might this thing be?” (2 Kings 7:2, KJV) The poetry in that stopped me today. Partly because I can hear the longing in the man’s voice, the voice of one who has had trouble feeding…
The Oval Drive Nagleian Community
When I was really little I lived on a street called Oval Drive, it was an oval shaped road with small houses built co-operatively by a group of veterans (my grandfather among them) who had received a special land grant. The Oval was a special place to live, the adults knew each other well, I remember them walking through each others’ back yards on summer evenings, drinks in hand (most non-alcoholic because they couldn’t afford booze). They would play cards…
The Hospitality of Jesus
One of the things I like about Jesus is how he was ready to help others, to show a sign of love and kindness, even when he was tired and even when he wasn’t sure where the strength or the energy was to come from. Not only that, he did this trusting in the best of the other, by that I mean that he could see past the surface, beyond the easy reality of those who came before him, and…
My Mother’s Family Didn’t Have a Lot of Money
My Mother’s family didn’t have a lot of money, but I didn’t know that. When I was a kid I knew I had two grandfathers, both of whom worked at Carleton University in Ottawa. One was an associate professor and the other a painter (more like a college student than a Picasso, he painted the walls of the school). As a child I looked at them both with fondness thinking of them as equals, both were amazing to me, both…