Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

let me start out by saying i was raised to never hit a woman... ever. i think husbands and boyfriends who hit their spouses are pigs and cowards. but lately i have been noticing an equally disturbing trend in domestic violence. wives beating their husbands.

i was commenting about this to someone recently and they immediately went on the offence. they started out by saying "he probably deserved it." by this standard all manner of abuse would be sanctioned. they went on to say further, "well what did he do to her?"

it's interesting. when i have been involved in domestic situations where a wife is battered those questions never come up. ever. they are political suicide to ask, bordering on slander. yet it seems perfectly acceptable to ask when the victim is a man.

i would have to admit that i hear of an alarming number of situations involving a battering wife. it's shocking and something you never talk about. after all, what kind of a man would complain? is he a wimp? surely she was protecting herself.

certainly not always. i have heard of men being hit with the car, beaten with cast iron, knives being thrown, kicked between the legs, faces slapped on a regular basis. men who are afraid of their spouse, demoralized and emasculated.

it is a horrible thing when relationships end in violence and it is certainly no more acceptable for a woman to be physically violent than a man. i am afraid that someday a man will retaliate after being struck by a female - then beat her up -charge her with assault - and win. this could open up the doors to rampant abuse and violence.
it's time to stop the cycles of violence wherever they occur.

John Stott describes the statue of the Buddha he has seen while visiting Buddhist temples in Asian countries, ‘his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world.’ He contrasts this image of detached serenity with ‘that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God forsaken darkness.’

New Zealand poet James K. Baxter wrote in Autumn Testament:

King Jesus, after a day or a week of bitching
I come back always to your bread and salt,

Because no other man, no other God,
Suffered our pains with us minute by minute

And asked us to die with him.

THINGS THAT IT TOOK ME OVER 50 YEARS TO LEARN - By Dave Barry

Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.
You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.

and my fav...
Thought for the day: Men are like fine wine. They start out as grapes, and it's up to the women to stomp the crap out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.

the real world sucks.
when i was a kid my world was a pretty and happy place. i truly believed everyone loved me and the world continued on its merry way. things were swell.

when you are young you tend to believe that people are generally happy. as an adult you begin to think that people are generally unhappy. you rarely hear the good news, it's clouded by the concerns, pressures and heartbreaks of the grown up world. you come to understand the fallenness of humanity, even without religious training. you get tainted.

as a pastor i have met very few people who do not struggle with an inordinate degree of insecurity. we are an insecure generation. we don't like our bodies, we hate the way we sound on a microphone, we feel unworthy and unaccepted.
we are a mess.
and week after week we climb into pews all over the country and pretend we are getting better. even though pulpits now spew truck-fulls of self esteem it doesn't seem to make a great deal of difference. years pass, generations age, and still the painful lack of self-acceptance seems to linger.

for some reason, though we know god thinks we are amazing, it has a hard time sinking in. we live in a real world where we are constantly bombarded by negative critique. the one is theology, the other seems to be actuality. we live a double life and wonder if we are growing at all.

then little by little the strongholds in our minds sometimes give way. the older we get the more we begin to wonder, mostly on a subconscious level, if the opinions of others really matter as much as they used to. i see my friends gradually begin to come to peace with themselves, though often 'too little - too late'.

somewhere there has to be a solution to the incredible insecurity that we carry with us.
somehow the theology needs to make it's way into our life.
somehow the truth of our value needs to make it's way from our heads to our hearts.

i am not there yet but have become conscious that i am my own worst enemy (and that is saying a great deal!). the self-loathing needs to be settled. the sense of inadequacy must give way to a more objective and tender definition of who we are. i truly believe the greatest battles are the ones inside each of us - the battles to accept and to be free - to be at peace and to learn to love ourselves - to look beyond our obvious shorcomings and see the essence of god's handiwork within.

it is a battle. perhaps the greatest challenge we will face in this life.

for me, however, there was a mental wall between religion and god. i could walk around inside religion and never, on any sort of emotional level, understand that God was a person, an actual being with thoughts and feelings and that sort of thing. to me, god was more of an idea. it was something like a slot machine, a set of spinning images that dolled out rewards based on behavior and, perhaps, chance. the slot machine god provided a relief for the pining guilt and a sense of hope that my life would get organized toward a purpose. i was too dumb to test the merit of the slot machine idea. i simply began to pray for forgiveness, thinking the cherries might line up and the light atop the machine would flash, spilling shiny tokens of good fate. what i was doing was more in line with superstition than spirituality. but it worked. if something nice happened to me, i thought it was god., and if something nice didn't, i went back to the slot machine, knelt down in prayer, and pulled the lever a few more times. i like this god very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. but the fun never lasts...

it starts with what Augustine calls “undeceiving ourselves”. Recently we were at the west ed mall and there was one lone holdout to a grosser time. One man wearing a speedo. If you wear a speedo we need to be honest with you. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s pretty much naked… and not in a good way. It’s time to let it go… to undeceive yourself. You aren’t French. Let it go…

Peter: Well, I'm gettin' something really special too. And by special I don't mean special like that Kleinaman boy down the street. More special like... like Special K, the cereal. Hey, what do they do with the regular K? And for that matter, what ever happend to K. Ballard? You know, if you said mallard and you had a cold, it would sound like ballard.
Brian: Do you listen to yourself when you talk?
Peter: I drift in and out.

Peter: Oh my god, Brian, there's a message in my Alphabits. It says, 'Oooooo.'
Brian: Peter, those are Cheerios.

Peter: I'll handle it, Lois. I read a book about this sort of thing once.
Brian: Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn't nothing?
Peter: Oh yeah.

Peter: I got an idea, an idea so smart my head would explode if I even began to know what I was talking about.

Peter: Lois, um, go get the medical dictionary and look up "fork" and "lung."
Lois: Why?
Peter: Time is a factor, Lois.

Peter: A guy at work bought a car out of the paper. Ten years later, Bam! Herpes.

Peter: Fox has one of those new reality shows at eight, 'Fast animals, slow children.'

When she worries she says things like 'I told you so,' and 'Stop doing that, I'm asleep

Peter: The two of you will one day bless our home with the pitter patter of sweet little grandchildren as ugly as sin.

Moments.
I forget a lot of things. Those who know me best accept the fact that I have a poor memory, though an excellent short term memory. I can, for example, memorize a speech effortlessly but have a hard time remembering where I was when I wrote that speech.
For most of us, life is routine. I find that I tend to forget much of what goes on in the routine moments of my life. Some of my friends can tell you what they were doing on most given days, I struggle to remember what have done this week.

But there are moments. Moments that stick out in my mind that I will never forget.
Getting caught doing drugs by my young bride.
‘endo’ing a Grand Torino.
Waving my hand through the clouds as I jumped from a plane in Ft. McMurray.
The day my dad dropped me off at boarding school.
The day I knew I was going to be alone.
Leading music a couple of weeks ago.
Standing out in the monsoon with two friends in Costa Rica.
The heat in Costa Rica.
Watching my two sons perform at a coffeehouse.
Climbing Yamnuska.
My first church service at New Heights.

Moments. Good and bad. Parts of my life I can never forget.
Lately I’ve had a series of moments. Crystal clear memories of incidents that I probably will never forget. Lessons and comments and times with friends and some less friendly that have touched me on a personal level and stick out in my mind.

Someday I will look back over these years and only remember the moments. The memories and the acquaintances will fade from recollection. All that will remain of much of this year will be only faint footprints.

I wonder how I will gauge my life today. Will I look back and wonder why I was so intensely engaged with things that won’t matter? Will I think fondly of people or will I be consumed with animosity for some? Will I wonder what I could have done differently or will I accept the way things were?

So much of our lives are spent reflecting in hindsight.

15 year cake for me this weekend. never again.

went to rockos with the kids again. i hate it there. i feel sick. never again... until next saturday.

When I was my son ben’s age I had the sweetest summer job. For a couple of summers I took care of a herd of riding horses for a group called Teen Time. I got paid to ride horses for the summer and feed em etc. I used to saddle up my horse Santana and ride out every morning and play with the herd. It was a hard job but someone needed to do it. I remember when I was learning to ride. The guy told me it was important right away to let the horse know who was in charge. So I did. The horse was in charge and I let him know it. I was 130 pounds, it weighed 7 or 800 pounds. I told it where to go then it illuminated me as to where we were really going. I was afraid of it and Santana knew it. I was more like a figurehead. I sat on top and looked very proper. I pretended I was riding the horse but in actuality it was letting me sit on it while it did its thing. We both understood the relationship. So it is with life. We give the illusion that we are in charge. We make plans and schemes and act like we are riding high. Yet in actuality we spend much of our time just hanging on.

A traveler once came upon a wise man who was sitting at a fork in the road throwing a stick into the air. "What are you doing?" the traveler asked. The wise man replied, "Trying to decide which way to go." The traveler looked confused. "But why do you keep throwing that stick in the air. It keeps pointing in that direction." "Yes I know, but you don't understand," the wise man replied. "I want to go this way!"

read jordon's synopsis of the Robert McNamara interview here

caroline has a great pic from susan's big "becoming a real pastor" day here.

"I'm a scribbling, cigar-smoking, wine-drinking, Bible-reading band man. A show off (laughs)...who loves to paint pictures of what I can't see. A husband, father, friend of the poor and sometimes the rich. An activist traveling salesman of ideas... Chess-player, part-time rock star, opera singer, in the loudest folk group in the world..."
--Bono's self-description in Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas.

via

when I was at Dakau Concentration camp they said that the locals, after the war, claimed that they knew nothing of the camp and the genocide. the problem with this claim was that the ovens and the camp were only yards from the town. the ash from the burning corpses landed on their homes, the shots from the executions rang in their ears. the parade of prisoners arrived in their towns. the local Nazis bragged about it in the taverns and played fox and the hound with prisoners in the town square for sport. the locals were commissioned to deliver food to the camp and dig the graves for those murdered. but they had no idea what was going on right?


it can be argued that to stand up against the Nazis would have been suicide, that there is nothing one person could do. ever heard of Anne Frank, or Dietrick Bonhoffer, or Cory Ten Boom or the French underground, or the resistance fighters, or of the thousands of Germans who hid and fed the Jews when to do so meant certain death.

the point is not to gross you out but to point out that we all have two choices in life - to go with the flow or to swim upstream. it is easier to go with the flow. we are not supposed to cause any waves, be politically correct and don't question policy. it’s another thing to be a rebel for a reason.

i see so many who just blindly accept whatever they are told, who march to the beat of television psychology and never question the mess we are creating. like Adam it is easy just to eat the apple, don't question the source.

in the 1960's there was this guy named Dr. Spock. he worked with kids and had some radical beliefs. he said it was wrong to spank your kids, evil to dictate their beliefs, stupid to tell them how to behave and wrong to stop them from experimenting with things like drugs etc. and a whole generation ate it up. if you didn't you were just wrong. just wrong.

i heard that ten years later Spock did a 180 and totally said the opposite of what he had said in the 60's. but the damage had already been done. to millions of kids.

i've got nothing against Oprah's guest list but how many of us will blindly follow the latest trend believing it is the holy 10 commandments. as a counsellor i get people who, from time to time, call me up because they know someone is struggling with a particular issue and they are watching that problem being discussed on Dr. Phil or Jerry Springer or whatever. they phone me to inform me that i should get the struggling person to watch the show or buy the book or listen to the tv advice. it's on tv, it must be valid, right?

i am often amazed at how blindly people follow whatever is popular. it only took a few actors and a group of radicals to convince north americans that spanking was wrong. never mind the vast array of psychology that lends credence to behaviour mod, learned response and cause and effect teaching. i'm not telling you that you should spank your kids, just that you need to question the drivel that the media throws at you. don't buy into something just because it is popular. don't assume that the information you are getting is valid.

people of faith are just as guilty as anyone else. we line up to buy "the prayer of jabez" because some unnamed source realized you could use it like a genie in the lamp. spongebob is clearly gay. even our end-times theology has been dictated to us more by Hal Lindsey than by the bible. the boys in the vans with the 666 written on it are coming to get you. it's in the bible... somewhere. we hear the "flavor of the month" preacher talk about some issue and we run out to buy the book. it can't be wrong if everyone else thinks it's right, right?

...ever dream you're going to the bathroom only to wake up and you really are going to the bathroom? and the stewardess is laughing her head off...

i feel sick... yup, ate at rockos again.

i try to take my boys every saturday. it's a ritual. a tradition. no matter what the weekend holds we try to make time. and we always order the same thing. and we always feel mildly sick after. some traditions should never be broken.

rockos is a greasy spoon. it's a dive. we always sit in the same booth on the right. the one with the 2.5 foot rip in the seat. it's tradition.

there are so few traditions left anymore. we seem to live in a world devoid of routine, for the most part. families go about the pace of life and rarely seem to find the time to be together. in our home we have certain traditions - the kraft dinner christmas ornaments, the summer canoe trip, the boondock saints. rockos. in a world of changing mores and friends it's important to build relationships within the family. relationships of friendship, not just routine and discipline. i certainly don't have it all worked out, but i do have rockos.

and it really doesn't matter that i'm feeling mildly 'puke-ish' right now. it will pass... i hope.

from ben's blog:
Quote from the first episode of Corner Gas...
Brent: Maybe shes changing the cafe into a drug lab so he can get the kids hooked on the crack cocaine and the crystal meth, because you know what comes after that.... marijuana.... then jazz music, forget about it !

THE tiniest baby in the world - who weighed less than a soda can - has survived.
She went home on Tuesday after nearly six months of care in a hospital in Maywood, Illinois in the US. She weighed 500g at birth and was 30cm long. She now weighs 3.8kg and has grown to 48cm. The babies were delivered by caesarean section 14 weeks early after their mother very high blood pressure. - AP

what a double standard. i remember being in Fort McMurray, AB and talking to a radical feminist about abortion. she would spout off constantly about a woman's right to choose, the lack of legitimacy of a fetus, blaah, blaah blaah.
then she got pregnant.

at only 6 or 8 weeks pregnancy she started picking out baby names and bragging about the upcoming event. the women around her were innundated with baby talk. so i approached her.

in typical scott williams subtlety i lambasted her for her behaviour. i mockingly asked her why she would be naming a useless fetus. it was just tissue, after all. she took it less than graciously. what a double standard.

this baby was 3.5 months premature. by many standards only a fetus in the womb. but suddenly, as if by magic, it appears in the open air as a real person. i wonder if the questions of humanity, murder and the integrity of personhood aren't really the issues at all...

i was driving home yesterday listening, ever so briefly, to the uproar mounting with regard to our last prime minister getting golf balls with his name on them. some thought it was an imprudent use of tax-payer dollars. others commented that is sent out the wrong message. still others just considered it tacky.

this is not the first time i have been channel surfing and heard about this 'scandal'. people seem to be more than willing to waste radio and tv time talking about something that is, for lack of a better word, incredibly petty.

hundreds of thousands of people will die this year from war, starvation and cruelty and we are obsessed with golf balls. other world leaders have villas and ranches and consorts and we're worried about little white balls.

people are petty. they fixate on small issues in the lives of others and don't take the time to care about the huge issues of the heart. it's epidemic.

churches can be petty too. just attend one for a while and you'll figure that out. they fight over carpet swatches while homeless people are denied access. they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort, and money too, on things and projects that don't matter.

breaking the cycle of pettiness is almost impossible. breaking the patterns in my own life is far more doable.

just saw paris hilton on the tube... very briefly....

reminded me of this sex pistols song from lori:

There's no point in asking
You'll get no reply
Oh just remember a don't decide
I got no reason it's all too much
You'll always find us out to lunch


Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty we're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
A vacant


Don't ask us to attend
'cos we're not all there
Oh don't pretend 'cos i don't care
I don't believe illusions
'cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
'cos we know what we feel


Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty we're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty we're vacant
Ah but now and we don't care


There's no point in asking
You'll get no reply
Oh just remember a don't decide
I got no reason it's all too much
You'll always find me out to lunch
We're out on lunch


Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty we're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty we're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty ah
But now and we don't care
We're pretty
A pretty vacant
We're pretty
A pretty vacant
We're pretty
A pretty vacant
We're pretty
A pretty vacant


And we don't care

Q: What's the difference between a catfish and a mother in law?
A: One's a scum sucking bottom dweller, and the other one is a fish!

more of ben's mother-in-law jokes here.

DEAD KENNEDYS LYRICS
"Holiday In Cambodia"

So you been to school for a year or two
And you know you've seen it all
In daddy's car thinkin' you'll go far

Back east your type don't crawl
Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On your five grand stereo
Braggin that you know how the niggers feel cold

And the slums got so much soul
It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear

It's a holiday in Cambodia
It's tough kid, but it's life
It's a holiday in Cambodia

Don't forget to pack a wife
Your a star-belly sneech you suck like a leech
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch so you can get rich
But your boss gets richer on you
Well you'll work harder with a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day

Slave for soldiers til you starve
Then your head skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need my son:Is a holiday in Cambodia

Where people dress in black
A holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll kiss ass or crack
Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot [etc.]

And it's a holiday in Cambodia
Where you'll do what you're told
A holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul

thanks lori

Some time ago, Nance and I were taking a cross country flight back when we only had two real small children. We have three now, but at this time Laura and Mallory were about 3 and 1 1/2. We’d taken up the whole back row of our plane on this long flight because nobody wanted to be near us and it was littered with dirty diapers, crackers, crumbs and spilled milk and it didn’t look good and didn’t smell good.
You know you’re in trouble when the flight attendant comes up and says, “Would you mind if your kids played outside?” We were wondering why we brought these kids with us on this trip, why we had these kids in the first place and a guy a couple of rows in front of us, turned back and surveyed the damage and he said to me, “Are those your two kids?” And I thought about it and I said, “Yeah, those are my two kids.” And he said, “My wife and I would give anything in the world to have two kids.” I said, “You don’t have any kids?” He said, “No, we have five kids, we’d give anything in the world to have two kids.”
It’s kind of a funny thing about us. You take the stuff we treasure in life the most, people that we love, families that we cherish, and they often get more messed up than anything else.

there is no end to what some of us will go to in order to look good on the outside. It’s no big deal when you’re talking about what kind of boxers you buy to wear outside your shorts. It’s a big deal when it leads to pride and worse.

i remember when I was 14 trying to smoke. a buddy and i snuck a pack of smokes from my mom and went off to smoke em 'in hiding' in case the smoking police caught us and told our parents. it was very cool, we lit up and started to suck. we were cool... for about a second until the smoke reached my lungs and my body went, “not in here!” i felt like i’d been hit in the chest by a baseball bat. we both hacked and barked and i almost barfed and after about 30 seconds it calmed down and i looked at my friend and said, “pretty smooth huh?” (i’d seen that on a commercial). i think my buddy around this time was slipping into cardiac arrest.

we worked away at that vial thing, hacking and gagging and my eyes were tearing up and flushed and my throat felt as though i’d been eating the sidewalk. but we were looking cool.

...until I turned green on the way home and threw up on my bike and drove into a ditch and kind of passed out for a bit on the road to the air force base.

but it was a small price to pay for cool, right. and after a few dozen i didn’t get sick anymore and i was set. course i couldn’t play sports much anymore and i stunk and it took my dad about 3 minutes to catch me and apply the hand of justice to the backside of reproach. but i was cool. i belonged and i was better than other losers who couldn’t handle their smoke.

a lot of us pridefully try to fit in, in order to be someone. we badmouth other tribes and other groups and look down our nose at lesser churches or clubs or jobs or social groups. and the problem is, it doesn't seem to get much better the older we get.

As Martin Luther King once said, “I am not there yet but I can see the mountain”.
For my journey it is going to involve learning to love myself more, and I’m probably not alone. We need to find emotional health. We need to learn to be fully loved, yet not give our identity to other people. So many of us are tempted to lock down our hearts. lest we be hurt – then conversely consume another to satisfy our craving for love. We placate our incredible need for unconditional acceptance by crying out to be heard in a world that rarely can offer us what we so desperately need – agape love.

"I don't even know what street Canada is on."- Al Capone

"He who limps is still walking."- Stanislaw J. Lec

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"- Abraham Lincoln

If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you. Steven wright

When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.-- Steven Wright

"Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."- Alison Boulter

i was watching Booknotes on CSPAN the other day and got caught up in an interview with a literary critic from the New York Times. the interviewer asked the critic why he thought the Harry Potter series was selling so many copies. "wish fulfillment", the critic answered. he said the lead character in the book could wave a wand and make things happen, and this is one of the primary fantasies of the human heart. i think this is true. i call it "clawing for eden." but the bible says eden is gone, and as much as we want to believe we can fix our lives in about as many steps as it takes to make a peanut butter sandwich, i don't believe we can.

i remember watching that television show "i dream of jeannie" when i was young, and i wondered how great it would be to have a jeannie of my own, comple with the sexy outfit, who could blink a grilled-cheese sandwich out of thin air, all the while cleaning my room and doing my homework. i realize, of course, that is very silly and there is no such thing as a genie that lives in a lamp, but it makes me wonder if secretly we don't wish God were a genie who could deliver a few wishes here and there. and that makes me wonder if what we really want from the religious formulas are the wishes, not God. it makes me wonder if what we really want is control, not a relationship.

identity theft is on the rise. you can hear the warnings on the tv, the internet, at your local bank. your financial advisor will tell you to change your pin number every few months. make sure you shield your hands when you punch in that number at the petro-can. don't give that number out. tear up your visa slips. don't give out personal information over the phone. make sure you check your bank statements... the list goes on and on.

identity theft is not just an issue for your financial portfolio. it is one of the defining characteristics of relationships. there are no end to the demands at work, home and school to change who you are. the name of the game is conformity.

want to be popular? conform. want to get your way? conform. want people to love you? conform. don't make a scene. don't stick out. don't be controversial. fit in.

become something you aren't for someone who won't accept you the way you are. it doesn't matter if God made you unique - it's more important to be popular. it's peace at any price.

God made you an original... and most of us die a copy.