Coats for Cheap - make a difference...

another year comes to a close. another year older. i've been thinking about how short life is lately.
and i've been thinking about forgiveness.

it seems somehow natural to put things behind you on this night, to move on. it's easy to say, harder to do. so much baggage is accumulated. too many memories, too many episodes.

is forgiveness the hardest part of life?

i hope in 2007 we can learn to forgive. i hope i can. i hope some people can finally let me go, you know who you are. i hope a few can forgive me for things i've done, and for things they think i've done. i hope i can move on in life. i hope i can forgive my outstanding accounts.

i have been incredibly blessed. i have 3 amazing kids. a great wife, fantastic extended family. i have some friends i love with passion. i have mates i can tell anything to. i am lucky. i have a job. actually 4 of them now but 2 actually give me money. i have a warm home and great parents. i am luckier than i deserve.

welcome to 2007. there are a few bridges to build, a few to mend, and a few to burn. that is my prayer for this year. i hope this year i will also come to peace with my station in life, and boldly dream again for the future. i am glad i have a future.

i forgive you.
please forgive me.

merry freakin christmas

Goof: An insult. A fighting word. A complete idiot who has no pull in the prison. In Ontario - a child molester.

called a friend a "goof" while working today. didn't realize it was... what it was, in the prison world. where i work is one stop from the joint. one quick stop. luckily i was corrected in private before i screwed up in public.

... what a goof. (i don't live in ontario)

Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

just fyi for those who have asked whether i have work yet... the answer is yes. and way too much apparently.

interesting findings.

via jordon

"Some people will never learn anything...because they understand everything too soon."
Alexander Pope

i was tagged by jordon to do this stupid "5 things people don't know about me" thing. i thought jordon was above such petty indulgences, preferring to fill his blog with useful bits and informative content. sadly, i am mistaken.

i wanted to ignore his challenge but then i might be accused of not being one of the cool crowd, or being rebellious or opinionated. i am nothing if not compliant. in a world of strong opinions i like to think of myself as a staid, rational, traditional voice...

so, in order to fit in, here is my list:
5 things most people don't know about me -

1. i have never purchased a lottery ticket. not ever. as the comedian said, i think of lotteries "as a tax on the stupid".

2. my ordination was, shall we say, sketchy to say the least. at the time i needed 2 years of full-time church service to qualify for ordination but they needed to fill a quota or something so they counted my time as a top 40 d.j. because i also did a religious show on sunday mornings. i had actually served less than 5 months in full-time church work.

3. i lied to get a job with youth for christ. i was 19 and applied for their wilderness canoe guide job with high-risk teens. they needed someone with extensive wilderness and whitewater canoing experience. i think i had actually only been on one or two trips to that point.

4. i am slightly claustrophobic. i start to sweat in malls and have a hard time not panicking during christmas shopping.

5. i was once asked to try out for the saskatchewan roughriders as their place kicker. i didn't know anything about football, but was scouted while playing a pick-up game with friends by the scout dude for the roughriders. i actually went to a practice and kicked. didn't seem very hard at the time. but then i quit... for a girl.

i went to a 12-step meeting on friday. i’ve had 16 years of 12 steps but i haven’t gone in a while and when the occasion arose, a 20 year cake for a friend, i decided to attend. it has been too long.

i had forgotten again how profound the whole deal was.

it was a special meeting in celebration of a significant milestone for my friend mark. at the meeting people shared what has been going on in their lives and in this case, what mark means to them as well.

you’ll see a lot of leather at a meeting, a lot of smokers, a lot of swearing…. and a great deal of honesty. people in the program constantly astound me with their humility and brokenness. they have few illusions of grandeur. and it is a profoundly spiritual event. perhaps more spiritual than church.

every testimony begins with confession. “hi, i’m scott and i’m an addict.” every person begins by telling us that they have messed up, are in need of help and support. after that, any testimony is bound to take on a certain relevance and honesty. i wish church was like that. the pastor got up, or the music dude, and started the day with, "hi i'm scott and i'm a sexaholic, i’m a liar, i’m afraid, i’m weak or a druggie, or whatever." imagine how different church would be. how vulnerable. how real for once. don’t you think it would tear down a lot of walls? destroy pretention? shock and challenge?

and once a year, every one of us should have a meeting where the people we love get together to tell us how awesome we are, how well we’re doing, and encourage us to keep going. now that would be church…

"Risk, as we have seen, is indispensable to any significant life, nowhere more clearly than in the life of the spirit. The goal of faith is not to create a set of immutable rationalized, precisely defined and defendable beliefs to preserve forever. It is to recover a relationship with God."
-- Dan Taylor

Anti-tree move sparks debate

Judge's removal of holiday icon termed 'unfortunate'

The judge's administrative move was "unfortunate" and "represents a misunderstanding of what we are working so hard to build here," Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday, noting Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and other faiths' celebrations are marked at Queen's Park. "We enjoy the wonderful privilege of building a pluralistic, multicultural society," he said, adding no one should be "asked to abandon their traditions." "

It doesn't offend anyone when we celebrate Diwali at Queen's Park or celebrate Hannukah ... That's part and parcel of who we are."

Provincial Conservative Leader John Tory didn't mince words, calling it "political correctness gone crazy."

over the past couple of months, at the suggestion of a fairly successful high-tech relative, i have been applying for the temporary internet reading job at google. i have, systematically, applied with a few different resumes and a few different email accounts. i have been thorough, i have been persistent. google sucks.

i wonder when it is that a business begins to lose touch with their vision for why they started their company in the first place. when was it that they stopped caring about customers and personal contact? like many other multi-nationals google has digressed into a nameless face of form letters and auto-responses. though those same auto-responses assure you that they will be in contact, they have absolutely no intention of pursuing anything- platitudes designed to temporarily placate and distract.

for years i pastored churches and know what it is like to placate people so that they will leave you alone. many ministers make promises all the time they have no intention of following through with, there are simply too many demands and not enough emotional energy. it is easy to make a promise you have no intention of keeping and, like google, it's easy to pretend you are still fighting the good fight. how often we blow off appointments with a last minute call, when we had really no intention of meeting that commitment anyway.

google is a casualty of it's own success. maybe many of us are as well.

but they still suck.
but that doesn't mean i'll go back to msn as a home page. they suck worse.

i spent 5 christmas's alone.
5 christmas's as a single dad.
they made an indelible impact on my life.

i opened the christmas boxes yesterday and a wave of nostalgia and pain hit me. i was startled because i was decorating with my new bride, and i am supremely happily married. but, like a smell that takes you back in time, opening the box sent me to a place i want desperately to leave behind - the bleak midwinter not so long ago.

it was christmas of 2000 and i spent most of it in tears. one of my friends, chad mossing, came over and spent most of his christmas parenting my kids and keeping me from killing myself. many things i have forgotten, but i remember decorating the tree that day with crystal clarity. that christmas i learned what it felt like to be a single person at christmas. it is a lesson i can never forget. even if i tried.

there are many of you that are single this christmas, during the season where every commercial points to romantic bliss, where the songs and the sights and the services all remind you that you are alone. while others go home to a warm naked body and tender kisses, you will hang out with friends and then go home... alone.

i had two christmas's absolutely alone and they still haunt me.

i feel for you this christmas.
i am not so far removed that i don't hear the echoes of the past. many of you are better adjusted than i was for most of those years; but there is something particularly disgruntling about the single life this time of year.

this christmas eve i will be with the most beautiful woman i have ever known. we will laugh and sing and pray and celebrate together with a house full of relatives; and with some close friends. but i know with absolute certainty that sometime that night i will feel the tension, if only for a moment. i will think of you and maybe even get choked up. i will remember chad and the coke- can christmas tree, remember the loneliness and the pain.

i won't forget you.

We know you have tried to get us to church. That's part of the problem. Many of your appeals have been carefully calculated for success and that turns our collective stomach. ("Sarah, a gen X church visitor" quoted by Earl Creps in Off-Road Disciplines, Page 151.)

They're just not buying what we think we're selling. Roy Williams wrote this almost exactly three years ago

...today's teens are rejecting Pretense. Born into a world of hype, their internal BS-meters are highly sensitive and blisteringly accurate. Words like "amazing," "astounding," and "spectacular" are translated as "blah," "blah," and "blah." Consequently, tried and true selling methods that worked as recently as a year ago are working far less well today. Trust me, I know.

more here.

there are new churches starting all the time, some around here. and almost all of them still buy into the 80's marketing concepts. it still works... if all you want are warm bodies in the seats. church marketing works, for stealing sheep.

building authentic relationships with non-church people takes a lot more time.

my beautiful wife, who apparently shares a birthday with wendy cooper, turns 39+ today.
happy birthday annette.

I have steadily realized that releasing this is something I need to do on a personal level and perhaps sometimes we need to do on a corporate level. Not a fake thing where we make people do it or appeal to their wacky emotions, but a real thing that lifts the weight of what we are carrying. This is my prayer for myself.
I don't totally know how to do this, and with some memories I'm not willing to yet. That's me being honest. I hold to some things to protect myself from a repeat occurrence...it's tough to do that without letting it be a stone tied to my foot as I try to swim. I don't know yet how to balance that, but it will come.
the rest here.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.

the rest of the startling truth here?
via kevin

In The Whisper Test, Mary Ann Bird writes: I grew up knowing I was different, and I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate, and when I started school, my classmates made it clear to me how I looked to others: a little girl with a misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth, and garbled speech. When schoolmates asked, "What happened to your lip?" I'd tell them I'd fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. Somehow it seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to have been born different. I was convinced that no one outside my family could love me. There was, however, a teacher in the second grade whom we all adored--Mrs. Leonard by name. She was short, round, happy--a sparkling lady. Annually we had a hearing test. ... Mrs. Leonard gave the test to everyone in the class, and finally it was my turn. I knew from past years that as we stood against the door and covered one ear, the teacher sitting at her desk would whisper something, and we would have to repeat it back--things like "The sky is blue" or "Do you have new shoes?" I waited there for those words that God must have put into her mouth, those seven words that changed my life. Mrs. Leonard said, in her whisper, "I wish you were my little girl."

Annette and I watch a few shows together, mainly so that we can hang out. One of the shows we watch is called take home chef. Annette likes it because this cute Australian guy with a tight shirt does it, I like it because I keep hoping when the show is over she’ll settle for me as a convenient substitute.

John Santic asks four great questions about mega-church ecclesiology, including this one:

How is mission to be understood within your ecclesiology? Is God's mission in this world to entertain the bored? Or is it about learning to act against injustice, feed the poor, care for the brokenhearted, and heal the sick? If church is all about getting people to come, then how does the pattern of being "sent" that we find in the incarnation fit into the picture? If a boring church is a sin, is not an entertaining one a sin also when we consider what the work of Christ was all about? Where does the call of Isaiah 61 fit into the picture?

from dying church

"People who are drawn to the emerging church generally place high value on ambiguity and mystery. They reject the notion that God's Word is clear, and anyone can understand its meaning. That means every doctrine you and I find precious is subject to new interpretation, doubt and even wholesale rejection. Everything is being questioned and deconstructed. Unlike the noble Bereans who used Scripture to test what they were taught and refine their understanding of the truth, people associated with the Emerging Church regard God's Word as too full of mystery to warrant handling any truth in a definitive way."

As I read this I am asking "What emerging church is he possibly talking about?"

"The result is a movement that thrives on disorganization, lends itself to mysticism, distrusts authority and dislikes preaching, feeds intellectual pride and recognizes few (if any) doctrinal or moral boundaries. You can see why the movement is so appealing to college-age people young people - it is fleshly rebellion dressed in ecclesiastical robes."

Again, as I read this, I am thinking "Who in the world is he talking about? " That is so unlike any emerging church I have ever been to. It is describing something that really doesn't exist.

read the rest of dan's article here.

As I started to click the links it was error message, after porn site, after domain name for sale. Most of the sites that seemed to be around at the start of the conversation are all down and most of the church plants that started with so much promise and too much flash in their design are gone as well.


its the statistic no one really wants to acknowledge - that most new starts are simply bluster and bluff and empty noise after a few years - a good idea that could not be sustained. while in toronto last week talking to church planters they told me that a majority of their new churches failed ... somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4/5. hundreds of thousands of dollars, years of dreaming and sweat and tears - gone.

there are lots of reasons people can point too, the most tenuous of which are the "spiritualizing" reasons about god's will or the character of the persons involved. but that simply does not wash scripturally and judges the motives of people who have had the best of intentions and hearts.

it's a reality. one which is easier to sweep under the rug than expose to the light of critique and reason. and in the wake of such a reality are hurting people and broken dreams.

from time magazine:

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

The richest two per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth, according to a study released today.

Sweat Shop Fashion Show Planning Meeting

Sweat Shop Fashion Show Planning Meeting

fire station burns down

stolen from van

I love the story that one of my friends tells about a woman who came in to his office for counseling. He found out that she was really messed up. She had messed up her family; she had messed up her marriage; everything was in a shambles. He tried to get at the core of her problem.

Lo and behold, among the things that had traumatized her as a child was something that happened when she was in the 4th grade. She had a teacher who despised her. To say that things did not go well is an understatement. She came in one day late for class, knocked over a vase, and it fell on the floor. Water and flowers splashed, and the vase was broken. The teacher screamed at her, “Sarah, you’ve done it again. Do you realize that no one in this class likes you?” it sounds like fiction but it really happened.

The teacher had this girl come and sit in the front row, and then said to the other students, “would each of you come up to the blackboard and write on the blackboard things that you find wrong with Sarah?”

One by one, her fellow students came and wrote terrible things on the blackboard as the 4th grade girl sat there trembling and crying. It so traumatized her that her life was a mess after that.

The pastor said, “Sarah, are you sure that everybody came to the blackboard?”
She replied, “I think so.”

“Close your eyes, Sarah. Look at that class again, because in the back there’s one last person in that classroom. It’s Jesus. He gets up; he comes to the front of the room. He picks up the board eraser and wipes away all the dirty, ugly mean things that are written there, then picks up the chalk and writes, “Sarah, you’re wonderful, and I love you.”


William Gladstone, in announcing the death of Princess Alice to the House of Commons, told a touching story. The little daughter of the princess was seriously ill with diphtheria. The doctors told the princess not to kiss her little daughter and endanger her life by breathing the child’s breath. Once when the child was struggling to breathe, the mother, forgetting herself entirely, took the little one in her arms to keep her from choking to death. Rasping and struggling for her life, the child said, “momma, kiss me!” Without thinking of herself the mother tenderly kissed her daughter. She got diphtheria and some days thereafter she died.

Real love forgets self. Real love knows no danger. Real love doesn’t count the cost.

Two friends had grown up together, best friends. And when WW1 broke out, they joined the army together. They were assigned to the same fighting unit and together went to the front to face the enemy. One of the later wrote:

One night while on patrol, our unit was ambushed. Shots rang out from all directions. Fortunately, most of us fell into the ditch that served as a trench and provided us with protection from the bullets that whizzed overhead.

Then, out in the darkness, I could hear my friend, Jim, calling for help. He kept on calling my name. he kept on crying, “Gerry! Come and help me! Gerry! I’m dying! Help!

My captain ordered me to remain put. He told me that there was no way I could save jim and I would only get myself killed.

But Jim kept calling me and I kept begging my captain to let me go. Finally, in exasperation, he gave up and said, “okay! If you want to get yourself killed, go ahead!”

I crawled across the ground in the darkness, got Jim and dragged him back to the ditch. After pushing him to safety, I fell into the ditch on top of him. It was then that I realized that Jim was dead.

The captain yelled at me. “See! I told you there was no point in going out there. You risked your life. And for what! He died anyway.”

But I told my captain that I had done the right thing. “when I got to Jim,” I told the captain, “he was still alive. And the last thing he said to me was, “Gerry, I knew you’d come.”

You can count on true friends. They are hard to come by. They take time to nurture. They are far rarer that most people think. Real friends love you with God’s love. They aren’t shocked by your sins. They don’t run when you get in trouble.

Everybody wants a friend like that. The question is, will you BE a friend like that.

talk is cheap.If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing.If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.Love never gives up.Love cares more for others than for self.Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.Love doesn't strut,Doesn't have a swelled head,Doesn't force itself on others,Isn't always "me first,"Doesn't fly off the handle,Doesn't keep score of the sins of others...