First You Plant Radishes

First, you plant radishes and pull weeds.

You start alone, with four planting beds, a broken down house and guest cottage, an empty chicken pen, and a whole lot of weeds, stumps, and rocks. Out back is a quarry and a woodlot.

Your goal is a renovated house and guest cottage, many more planting beds with orchards and vegetables in abundance, pens filled with chickens, geese, turkeys, black and white sheep, goats and cattle. In the end you hope to own a thriving business, with a truck stop, railway station, boat dock, sawmill, brick factory, canning factories, textile mills, dairies and bakeries. Your spouse and grandma and grandpa have arrived to help out.

But first, you plant radishes and pull weeds.

Start where you are, use what you have, and take one step at a time to a better future.

What holds true in the computer game Farm Up is surprisingly true in real life.

We can get overwhelmed with the mess. Income too low, expenses too high, the cupboard is filled with junk food that’s well past its expiration date, the basement and the living room and the office are filled with boxes of who-knows-what, and the mountain of dirty dishes wobbles and threatens to become an avalanche of pots and pans and broken plates with every footstep that passes.

So you eat out, and your waistline burgeons outward.

This is no hypothetical situation—it’s where I was just seven or eight short years ago.

I was hoping for a bit of magic.

A lottery win. A full time job. A fairy godmother.

Then I could afford to move into a bigger house, hire someone to sort through and organize my junk, pay off all my debts, and hire a personal trainer and a personal chef to help get my weight under control. Most importantly, I’d be able to hire someone to dust and vacuum and clean the cat litter and sort the garbage into the proper bins.

But I didn’t win the lottery, and my research has shown me that winning wouldn’t have done me any good. Most lottery winners end up right back where they were within seven years of winning. Many are worse off, because they’ve lost the support system that helped them when they were just barely getting by. Even people who earn lots of money don’t often keep hold of it—I’ve read that many professional football players declare bankruptcy within twelve years of retiring.

Winning the lottery doesn’t work for the same reason that crash diets and New Years’ resolutions don’t work.

The habits don’t change. The inner self doesn’t change. You can clean up the mess around the person, but unless the mess inside changes, the mess outside will reappear.

So you start where you are, and take it step-by-step, as I vowed to do seven years ago.

I started by taking out the garbage and doing the dishes. Little by little, my house became more peaceful. My financial situation improved. I started writing and painting and crafting again.

I have learned how to create lasting change in my life. Little by little, too, I have learned when to hire others or ask for help, and when I can go it alone.

I have a personal trainer, but I have become my own personal chef. My mom has moved in, and I have found ways for her to help out.

I don’t have the big business represented by the transportation hubs and the factories or even the vegetable gardens. Not yet. But they will come.

In the meantime, I have radishes to plant and weeds to pull.

No More Sermons!

Not that I'm not going to preach any more sermons, mind you. I've got regular preaching dates that span the entire year at Melville United Church, and a couple of my friends, my mother, my daughter, my ex-husband, and even the cat are saying that it might soon be time for me to seek ordination. Maybe.

But I've started a new blog specifically for sermons, and this one will be about...

Well, building an awesome life!

Look for the first post of the New Year coming sometime early next week.

In the meantime, you can mosey on over here to check out my latest posted sermon. (I have a bit of a backlog, so I'll be posting regularly here too.)

Zero To One: A New Wineskin

Preached at Melville United Church, August 28, 2016

Scripture: Luke 5:36-39

I was born in August of 1960.

The world was changing. The United States elected its first Catholic president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Smoking was linked to heart disease in middle-aged men. Xerox introduced the first commercial document reproduction machine. And despite their astronomical price of $219.95 for a 23-inch black and white television, there were over one hundred million sets in use world wide. The FDA approved “The Pill.”

In other ways, the year 1960 was much like the years and decades before it.

65 out of 100 children lived in a family with their biological, married parents, where mom stayed home and dad worked. Only one child in 350 lived with a single, never-married mother.

80 percent of Americans thought that people who wanted to be single were “sick” or “neurotic” or even “immoral.” Only 28 percent of the adult population was single—divorced, widowed or never-married. Gay men and lesbians were not only sick and neurotic and definitely immoral, but criminals as well, according to the laws of the time.

Almost everyone went to church on Sunday, and stores and entertainment venues were closed.

The FDA may have approved the pill, but it wasn’t legal or available to single women.

The average cost of a new house in 1960 was $12,700. A man in manufacturing in Canada could expect to earn $1.98 per hour. A salaried worker on average earned $116.41 per week. Given a forty-hour work week for that manufacturing worker, the average house cost just over three years’ worth of wages. A worker would earn the equivalent of about ten loaves of bread per hour, and it would take him over one hundred hours to earn the cost of that television set.

Back then, a moderately-priced computer cost about one million dollars and took up several rooms. Those are 1960 dollars, unadjusted for inflation by the way. Only government agencies, universities, and large corporations could afford a computer, and they rented out time on it to smaller entities by the hour, charging thousands of dollars a day.

It’s now 2016, of course, and the world has changed.

The average wage of someone working in manufacturing is now $21.06 per hour, according to Statistics Canada. Interestingly enough, if that worker buys the store brand of bread, he or she is still earning approximately ten loaves of bread per hour. Despite moaning and groaning to the contrary, food and wages seem to have kept pace with one another.

As for technology: that 23” black and white television has become a quite modest Insignia 32” 720 pixel High Definition LED Smart TV, only two hundred and nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents, on sale this week, only at Best Buy! Instead of over one hundred hours, it now takes the worker a little shy of ten hours to earn wages equivalent to the price of a decent television. And my Moto G cell phone, which I got for free when I signed up with Wind Mobile, has more computing power than that one million dollar gigantosaurus from 1960.

It’s not all good news, though. This week I looked up the average price of a house in Guelph. A modest house is now selling for about four hundred thousand dollars.

In wage terms, that’s about ten times a full-time manufacturing salary. But it’s obvious from the Stats Can data that a lot of workers are not working at full time permanent jobs, even in manufacturing. The average yearly salary is just over 30 thousand dollars, which is about 75% of a full time salary. Which makes a house worth more than thirteen times the yearly salary of a manufacturing worker.

In 2016, only 22 percent of children are living in homes with a mom and a dad where mom stays home and dad works. Another 22 percent live with single moms, and half of those moms have never been married.

Single adults are no longer seen as sick or immoral, and comprise about 44 percent of the adult population. It’s no longer illegal to be homosexual, and transgendered people are slowly making headway with respect to human rights.

Most people don’t go to church on Sunday. Stores and entertainment venues are open not only on Sunday, but sometimes 24/7. Even most banks are now open Saturdays.

Not that anyone uses a teller anymore. A worker is often paid electronically, pays the bills electronically, and pays for purchases electronically. In today’s world, you can be broke and get rich and go broke again, all without ever handling a single piece of cash money!

The world has changed. The reality that my children inhabit is vastly different from the one that I encountered as a young adult, and even more different from the one that many of you encountered when you were their age.

They meet their mates online, even if they’re old high-school friends. They play games online, get their news and weather and sports information online, they shop online and very often work online (and from home).

Most of our young women now attend college or university, and over 50 percent of university graduates are now women. A high school diploma is a necessity if you want to work at Linamar, or even get promoted to a junior management position at McDonald’s.

With student debt skyrocketing, and house prices soaring, fewer young people are able even to dream of owning their own home. Not that it’s always practical anyway—our society is much more mobile that it was, with the average person moving about every five years.

Everything seems to have changed…

Or has it?

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s in the United Church, I remember a little bit about the services. There was an opening call to worship, and some prayers, and three or four hymns, and two or three scripture readings, and a sermon, and the offering, and an anthem, and a prelude and a postlude. Sunday morning, ten-thirty to eleven-thirty, in the same building. Everyone sat in the same pew they sat in the Sunday before. Kids went off to Sunday School.

The hymns have changed, and we’ve changed the words to the prayers, and our theology has evolved. Most churches now don’t have the children go off to Sunday School right at the start of the service, but have them stay for a short while. We’ve added a children’s time.

But we still gather every Sunday morning, often in the same buildings we were meeting in then. We still have prayers, sing hymns, listen to the sermon, put money on the plate. And in most mainline churches, the people in the pews are the ones who were there ten and twenty and thirty and even forty or more years ago. We’re just older.

And we wonder why, with “all these changes,” our children and grandchildren aren’t coming to church. Where are all the young adults? We need them—to fill our pews and help us feel less alone, to bring their kids to our Sunday Schools, to put their money in the offering plate, to learn and perpetuate the values and traditions we hold so dear.

I was introduced a couple of weeks ago to the concept of “zero to one.” It’s a way of talking about innovation. Ordinary innovations are most often of the form “one to n,” which in commercial terms means it’s “new and improved.” We add features, or tweak existing features slightly in order to improve a current product.

Think of your basic kitchen stove. When I was a kid, our stove had four burners on top, and an oven on the bottom with two elements. If we wanted to broil, only the top element came on, and if we wanted to bake, they both came on.

Today's kitchen stoves are substantially the same, with a few tweaks. They’ve got digital clocks and timers so that dinner will start cooking when you want it to start cooking. You no longer have to guess whether or not the oven is up to temperature—the sensor beeps when it’s finished preheating. Some stoves have flat glass cooktops instead of those spiral electric burners most of us are used to.

That’s the “one to n” concept—adding to and improving a current product.

Zero to one happened for cooking with the advent of the microwave oven. The only thing my microwave has in common with my stove is a clock, a timer, and an electric plug. It uses the electricity to heat the food directly, instead of heating up the whole oven beforehand and cooking indirectly. As a result, it’s much faster.

It’s not a replacement for my stove. There are things my stove does well that my microwave doesn’t (like produce a luscious roast of beef or a wonderful peach pie), but there are things that my microwave does much better than my stove. For example, I can cook oatmeal, NOT the quick kind but the large flake, yummy kind in large batches in ten or more minutes on my stove, or I can put 1/3 of a cup of oats and 2/3 of a cup of water in a bowl and microwave it for three minutes, and it never burns.

In the church, we’ve been concentrating for nearly forty years on changing our services to hopefully bring in more young people. We’ve changed the music, we’ve changed the theology, we’ve experimented with different Sunday School curricula. What we haven’t done is changed the basic structure. We’re trying to appeal to millennials with a wineskin that appeals to their grandparents. And they’re mostly not buying it. The new wine, the spirit that is contained in our young people, is pouring out of and away from our old wineskins.

We need to ask ourselves why, in an era where the average working family is in debt up to their eyeballs and may never be able to afford a house, why are we asking those folks to contribute to the upkeep of buildings that are locked up most of the week? Why are we asking them to commit an hour or two of their precious spare time every single Sunday morning when many of them are working two or more jobs, often with irregular and unpredictable schedules?

Don’t get me wrong. We do need the church as it is. We need it because the fastest growing age group in Canada is the over-80 age group, and those who have tasted old wine prefer it to new, and are better fed by it. We need it because some of our young people have tasted the old wine and find they prefer it.

But I believe we need a new expression of church as well, one that can hold the new wine that is the spirit bubbling through our 20- and 30-year olds.

How will it look, this new wineskin?

I don’t know, but I have some ideas. With real estate currently priced at record high levels, and with it trending steeply upwards rather than down (I just read that in the first six months of 2016, the house prices in Guelph are up ten percent over last year), more church congregations will be landless. Many may not even meet physically more than three or four times a year. An active internet presence, with blogs, Facebook, Twitter and whatever comes next will be a big part of their ministry.

And I believe they will teach that personal spiritual practices, personal scripture reading, and personal reflection are more important than weekly bible studies and participation in church-run programs.

This last was brought home to me when I was reading an article about Willow Creek Church yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the mega-church to end all mega-churches, with eight different locations. It’s basically a denomination in its own right. The mega-church model is one that requires intense participation—in addition to the “celebration services” every Sunday, each member belongs to one or more small groups that meets weekly.

The leadership team of Willow Creek conducted a qualitative study, which means they were asking not about how many people were participating, but about whether the activities in which they were participating were helping them grow spiritually.

They found, to their surprise and dismay, that participating in lots of church-run programs did not predict whether someone was progressing spiritually, or whether they were becoming more of a disciple of Christ, or whether they loved God or people more.

Bill Hybels, Willow Creek’s founding pastor, summarized the findings this way:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back, it wasn't helping people that much. Other things that we didn't put that much money into and didn't put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

Hybels confesses:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

In other words, spiritual growth doesn't happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.

That’s actually really good news. I know a fair number of young people, and one thing that stands out to me about that generation is their passion for self-development, and having seen how computer technology has been used to transform education and gaming and shopping and banking and just about every other aspect of life, I can see how it might be used to help our young people develop as Christians.

When Jesus talked about new wine and new wineskins two thousand years ago, the Jewish culture was transitioning from temple to synagogue. Jesus preached on hillsides and plains, and asked no-one to sacrifice any animals. He did not follow all of the strict Jewish traditions around what one ate and when and where and with whom. He reached out to outcasts who would be turned away from even the most progressive synagogue. He was pouring new wine, one that was for everyone and not just a chosen people, and it needed a new wineskin. And so the Christian church was born.

A few hundred years later, Constantine wanted to unite an empire of disparate peoples, and he did that by embracing a faith that was for everyone, and not just a chosen few. The church transitioned once again, from being on the fringes of society to being the glue that held society together. The Roman Catholic church was born.

When the printing press was invented, and literacy rates in Europe soared, the church changed yet again to accommodate those who could and did read scripture for themselves. The Protestant Reformation was born.

And now, we find ourselves in the digital age, with a world that is beyond the imagination of the dreamers of the past. The church as we know it will transform yet again, but the faith of our ancestors, transmitted to us through the ages, is as alive and vibrant and new as ever. Amen.

Poetry Jag!

I joined a writer's group in the fall, and every month we have a theme on which we all write. A couple of months ago, the assignment was to write a "For Sale" ad in 100 words or less. Mine came out as poetry. (Note that in the second example, the legal disclaimer wasn't part of the word count.) I wrote the poems days after the death of Prince, who is the "legend" referred to in the second poem.

Immortality Can Be Yours!

For Sale: Immortality
Don't believe me?
Tell me--
Do we remember Sun Tzu for his victories by the sword?
His battles are forgotten,
his sword turned to rust,
but The Art of War lives on,
read and studied still today.
Two thousand years and another half thousand,
and the name Sun Tzu lives on.
(Not that he actually wrote the book--
it is enough that he has been given credit.)
The pen is indeed the mightier.
For sale: Immortality.
Available at your local Dollarama--
a notebook and a pen.
Two dollars and fifty cents (plus tax).



Reflections on the Death of a Legend

For Sale: Fame and Fortune.
Ten million views on YouTube!
A hundred thousand followers on Twitter!
Many thousands of friends--
if only on Facebook.

Your Name In Lights!!!!

Two payment plans available:

Get it now:
ZERO DOWN!
(Balance payable in four installments:
Your self-respect,
your morals,
your soul,
your life.)

Or put it on layaway:
Small daily installments of blood, sweat, tears and toil required.
(With balance of
your soul
your life
payable upon delivery.)

CALL THE NUMBER ON YOUR SCREEN NOW! THIS OFFER IS TIME LIMITED AND MAY NOT BE REPEATED!

(Legal Disclaimer: Read the fine print before you buy. Side effects may include family and marital discord, alcohol and drug abuse, anorexia, plastic surgery, depression and suicidal thoughts and actions. This product is not recommended for pregnant and nursing women, children, people with children, or anyone who is already happy with life. Purchaser agrees to assume all responsibility and liability for any negative repercussions, listed or unlisted. Purchaser agrees to pay agent fifteen percent of all gross revenues earned while this contract is in force.)

I Believe

The colours flow from the tube:
Cadmium Red
Ochre Yellow
Burnt Sienna
Cobalt Blue
The ever-so-descriptive Mars Black
The ubiquitous Titanium White.
Pure ribbons of paint
Mix
And become a rainbow.
Taken up by a brush and applied to canvas
A world emerges:
Green trees and brown fields and blue sky and puffy white clouds.
Sunset.
Moonrise.
If there is no such thing as magic,
Then what is this?

Things We Found in the Fire

Reading: Acts 2

My son David preached yesterday, and his sermon reminded the congregation that the images surrounding Pentecost of "tongues of flame" aren't always comfortable ones. In ordinary years, the average congregant might perhaps equate those flames with the warmth of a fire on the hearth, or in a wood stove. Perhaps we might think of roasting marshmallows over a campfire or a candle-lit dinner with a loved one.

Warmth, beauty, sustenance--these are the associations we might make with the fire and flames of Pentecost in an ordinary year.

But as David pointed out, this isn't an ordinary year. Fire still rages over vast areas of Northern Alberta, and the entire city of Fort McMurray has been evacuated. "Only" two lives lost (if one can describe anyone's death as "only two lives"), and those in a motor vehicle accident, not in the fire itself. But eighty thousand people are now homeless and unemployed, and many of those will never return home or work in Fort McMurray again. Parts of the city have been destroyed by fire, while much of the rest will likely sustain damage from the smoke and heat.

Tell the people of Fort McMurray or anyone whose home, business, school or place of worship has been consumed by fire that flames are warm, sustaining and nurturing! The truth is that those small, tame fires are merely seeds of something that can grow to be much bigger. Given the right encouragement, a campfire can consume a city.

Believe it or not, those raging, out-of-control fires are necessary. A forest fire is nature's way of clearing out dead growth and underbrush, and preparing a nutrient-rich seed bed for new life. Certain pine cones will only open to release the seeds within when heated to extreme temperatures. Numerous species of animals and birds, including deer and black bears, thrive in the aftermath of a forest fire. The death and destruction of the old brings about life for the new.

And so we come to a bunch of men and women, some hundred and twenty persons in all, hiding, meeting in small groups, comforting one another and grieving for the past, as those in transition are wont to do.

Then roaring through their gathering with the ferocity and violence of a Northern Alberta forest fire comes the Holy Spirit.

Come, Holy Spirit. Come.

If we had any knowledge of the true power of that invocation, many of us would never utter it again.

That roaring power immediately destroyed that tiny gathering of Messianic Jews. They began babbling in languages they'd never learned to speak. Onlookers accused them of being drunk--at nine o'clock in the morning! The tongues like fire raged, burning away their protective cocoon. They left the room where they were gathered and began to witness to the people of the city. They stopped speaking their own language, and told the story of the Risen Christ in tongues that their listeners understood.

And within days, one hundred and twenty Messianic Jews became over three thousand Christians. The raging fires of Pentecost had given birth to the Christian Church.

We sit in our pews today, and we have once again dwindled. Two thousand years of traditions and doctrine and being embraced by the political establishment have grown up around the pillars of our faith, sometimes choking them, and certainly smothering new ideas. We have become more afraid of losing our positions of influence with the governing bodies of our countries than we are of losing our evangelistic roots. Many of our churches today are insular, pursuing what they perceive as "their God-given mission," in isolation from other congregations of the faithful and from the world. The majority of congregations today aren't any bigger than that scared little group of first century Messianic Jews, and many of them are much smaller.

And so we huddle in our little congregations on Sunday mornings, speaking our own languages, preaching to the converted, and fearing the future.

Come, Holy Spirit. Come.

Burn away our fear and shame. Make us drunk with the possibility of new life. Blow away our cloak of respectability, and teach us to speak the languages of the masses outside our door.

Teach us to prophesy. Fill us with dreams. Boot us out of our sanctuaries and into the world. Impel us to act.

Prepare us as a seed bed to nurture new life.

Come, Holy Spirit. Come!

RIP Dad

It's finally over.

Two years ago (shortly before my son went berserk) my father slid all the way into dementia. He'd been showing signs for a few years, but sometime around Christmas he attacked my mother as she was sitting at the table. A couple of weeks later, he attacked my sister-in-law. My younger brother only found out because he'd phoned Mom to tell her that his son had been in a serious snowmobile accident (he recovered).

My brother called me, and we urged Mom to put Dad into a nursing home. Instead, she decided to ask for home care. The night before the home care assessment was to happen, Dad struck again, this time attacking my brother. They called 911, and Dad was taken to hospital. I'm told that once there, he got out of bed, wandered around a bit, then got back into bed.

He never walked again.

When I visited on the weekend, he was unable to speak coherently, and I wasn't certain he recognized me.

He was in the hospital for a few weeks, but once his condition stabilized, he was moved to the long-term care wing. At that point, his OHIP-subsidized stay ended. Unable to pay both a mortgage and my Dad's costs, Mom put the farm up for sale.

At this point, my brother and sister-in-law, who were both hoarders, both chain smokers, and both alcoholics, were living with my parents. Neither had worked in years, they lived out in the country, and it was winter. They were present for every single showing, and there were many at first.

Unsurprisingly, no offers on the place were forthcoming, despite its being over a hundred acres of bush in cottage country.

My brother and his wife did manage to get away on the long weekend in May, and I brought a friend up to the farm to clean. We did what we could, and by the end of the weekend the kitchen, front entrance, and bathroom were decluttered and cleaner, if not exactly clean. We put odor eaters in every room.

Then my brother and sister-in-law came home and immediately dumped their bags on the kitchen table, sat down in the living room, lit up and popped open beers.

Despite this, the next week garnered an offer, conditional on an acceptable home inspection.

A crack in the foundation was discovered.

Instead of purchasing the inspection report (it was offered for less than half of the cost of the inspection) and selling the place as-is, my mother elected to travel into major debt territory and call in a contractor to fix it.

My brother decided to stay and "help" the contractor, despite the fact that he'd lined up a place to live and a job in Welland, where his buddy lives. My brother still insists he saved my mother money, but I calculate her loss at thousands of dollars. He actually slowed down the contractor (he didn't follow through on jobs he'd been assigned), and I would not clean while he was in the house.

In order to encourage him to leave, and to save a little money, my mother cut off the satellite service. They watched DVDs instead. By this time, Mom had moved in with me, at least part-time, and we were making weekly three and a half hour trips (one way) to keep an eye on how things were going. My mother threatened in June to cut off the electricity, but before she needed to carry out that threat, the company hired to clean out the septic tank discovered major problems, and the water was shut off.

That forced them out, but by then it was the beginning of July, and the house was off the market. We'd missed the big wave of people wanting to buy in that area (by July, most of them had bought or were waiting until the following spring.) Cleaning began in earnest. I traveled up to the farm at least once every week with anyone who would come along to help. We emptied out the trash (seven dumpster loads), took about twenty car loads of stuff to the thrift store, and brought piles of stuff home. I filled up my basement, then a storage locker. We cleaned tar and ash and soot off of just about every surface. We cleaned mouse poop out of the pantry and every single cupboard. Then Mom decided that the kitchen needed to be redone.

Finances became critical. I was spending over a hundred dollars a week going up to the farm, and I had to take out a ten thousand dollar loan in my own name in order to keep the contractor working and the other wolves at bay.

Finally in October, with the house mostly cleared out and a new septic system and foundation, as well as the beginnings of a new kitchen, the house went back on the market. Being in vacation country, there were few showings during the fall and winter. And one of the showings resulted in one of the "prospective buyers" returning on his own, driving over the new septic bed with his pickup, and appropriating some of the tools my brother had left in an unlocked outbuilding.

The house did sell the following spring--Mom received two offers on the same day! The major debts were paid off, and we finally were able to sleep at night.

Meanwhile, Dad had been moved to a nursing home in Fergus, about half an hour from where I live. It wasn't great, but it was close enough for Mom and I to visit often. After about a year, Dad was offered a place in a better home only ten minutes away.

At first, Dad would often be awake when we visited. Sometimes he would recognize us, and sometimes he wouldn't. Once he even had a somewhat coherent conversation with Mom, but by winter of 2014 he'd stopped talking entirely. He did enjoy music therapy right up until the end, but he didn't respond to much else. Most of our visits in the final few months of his life were very short.

My brother and sister-in-law, surprisingly enough, are doing reasonably well. For the first time since they married, they have their own place, and my brother found a decent job which lasted for well over a year. He was recently laid off, but he's looking for work, as well as calling his former boss, hoping for a recall. They have friends and they do volunteer work. Life isn't perfect, but they are now adults and no longer anyone's responsibility but their own.

Dad died on Monday, February 15th, 2016 after a short illness. In the week preceding his death, my younger brother and his wife, my son and his husband, and my daughter all had a chance to visit and say goodbyes. His funeral was not large, but friends and family came from all over, including one of my childhood friends I hadn't seen in over thirty years, and a first cousin once removed who I'd never met, but who lives less than ten minutes away.

It's finally over, and new life begins for my mother, brothers, and me.

I'm glad.

I know Dad never wanted for this long drawn ordeal to happen. I'm sure he's glad too.

Lessons from Olympic Hockey

I'll confess up front--I didn't actually watch any of the Olympic hockey games straight through. That being said, I do deliver the daily paper, and this being Canada, the fortunes of our teams have been front page news after every single game. It's very hard to miss, even if you live in a cave, which I don't.

The men's tournament has left me with some thoughts about life in general. The US and Canada, arch-rivals that they are, were both undefeated until they met each other in the semi-finals. However, the roads to the semi-finals seemed quite different from where I watched. The Canadian team, despite being one of the two favourites to win the gold, seemed to struggle. Their wins were not easy ones. The US team, the other favourite, won their games easily and went into the semi-final game with a confidence that the Canadians didn't have.

At least, that's how it felt here in Guelph. Before the semi-final game, those I talked to did not seem to feel that the outcome of the match was a foregone conclusion, and everyone agreed that Team Canada would have to tighten their collective laces if they wanted to advance to the finals. The US team, on the other hand, seemed to be brimming with confidence.

We all now know the outcome of the story, and our men came home with gold medals around their necks.

The US team, however, went on to lose their match with Finland for the bronze in spectacular style. It almost seems as if they gave up. Go for gold, or go home seemed to be the attitude.

Now, as I said, I'm not really "up" on all the news, and I don't know any of the players personally, so I don't have the inside track. I only know what it looks like from my little corner of Ontario. Nor am I trying to put down the US team or boast about Canada. I think, if Canada had lost the semi-finals and the US had won, that Finland still would have had more than a slim chance to take the bronze. The US and Canadian teams aren't really all that different, nor are our attitudes towards winning and losing.

What I really got from this tournament was the awareness that being really good at something, and having it easy (especially in the early rounds), is actually a disadvantage when the going gets rough, as it eventually most definitely will.

In my own case, I managed to make it through grade school, and high school, and undergraduate and even graduate school on the strength of my native intelligence and my ability to write well. Those were the preliminary rounds of life, and I aced them. Not one single assignment that I can remember submitting in all those years of school was anything more than a first draft. Very few of them took more than a day or so to write. Including a few twenty page tomes!

And now I'm out here in real life, and like so many others who did exceptionally well in school, I'm foundering, not because I can't work, but because I never learned HOW! I'm like the writerly version of the US team. I can write well, very well indeed. But when push comes to shove, I can't muster the effort to even go for the bronze, especially since I'm well aware that I have the talent to go for the gold.

So what have I learned from these last two weeks of hockey, skiing, hockey, skating, hockey... (You get the picture. Sometimes I think there's only one winter sport that matters to most Canadians...)

I need to lace up my skates, so to speak, and get my moves on. I'm 53 years old. I have stories to tell you, stories you will never read if I don't get to work and write them down, revise them, and PUBLISH them. I have to accept that maybe I won't win the gold. Maybe my stories won't win me the fame of J.K. Rowling or Tolkein or even Dan Brown. Maybe instead, I won't even win a medal.

But it's certain that I won't even be in the game if I don't start clicking the keys on my keyboard every day. It's certain that if I don't write and revise and publish, I won't even have a shot at the tournament, let alone a medal.

And I need to remember, as the US team does (and all of the members of all of the teams that didn't even make it past the preliminaries) that even making it to the Olympics (or to the level of being a published author) is so rare as to be an incredible acheivement on its own. Only one team, or one person, can be the top in anything. Almost all of the rest of humanity must be content with less than the gold. That doesn't make our efforts any less worthwhile.

In the Silence Wisdom

This morning I read a blog post by a young woman who had facial reconstruction on Thursday. She writes:

"So, I had a lot of plans for my days off. I was going to finish writing my book, enjoy some comfy time on my couch with snacks and movies, and enjoy the peace and quiet.

REALITY CHECK.

Or, what I could really be doing, is nothing. NOTHING."

She goes on to say that, "But as I am learning more and more, I plan, God laughs. Maybe this is what I needed. Time for reflection. Time to be trapped in my head a little bit. Time, for once in my life, to focus on absolutely nothing but me, and just process. I can't say that I have ever in my entire life had time to focus on just me."

Her words resonated deeply, when less than an hour later, I was sitting in church singing "If you follow and love, you'll learn the mystery of what you were meant to do and be." (I Am the Light of the World, by Jim Strathdee)

And of course, a scripture verse came to mind, from 1 Kings 19:11-13:

[The Word of the LORD] said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (KJV)

Her words resonated deeply because on Wednesday, I spent thirteen hours sitting in an emergency exam room, watching my youngest, who was zoned out on Atavan and codeine, as they tried to figure out why he had suddenly changed from a good-humoured but autistic young man into a raging demon who literally broke down walls (and other things). They did x-rays, and ultrasounds, and urine and blood tests, and...

Everything came back normal. The best we can figure out is that he MIGHT have an ear infection, which was what the emerg doctor said Monday morning. But the antibiotics hadn't made any noticable difference by Wednesday, which was why we ended up back in emerg. With a police escort, I might add.

At any rate, while he was lying zoned out on the bed, I had time to sit and think and read.

And to contemplate where I had been and where I was going to go. Those thirteen hours of being mostly alone in my head constituted a watershed moment for me.

First off, I finally came to accept in both head and heart that I would never, ever be able to take a job outside the home again. While this behaviour is definitely not normal, even normal events mean that someone (meaning Mom) has to be home. If the weather is bad and Robin can't go to work. If he's got a cold, or a dentist or doctor appointment. Even if he does go to work, I need to drive him there at nine, and pick him up at 3:30, and be on call in between those hours in case there's a problem.

My head knew this, of course, but my heart was saying, "But I've got these nifty degrees, and I'd love so much to work for a non-profit or a church or something. Maybe even just part time? Please?"

Reality? I've had trouble this week finding time to deliver my papers. And sleep. And do the dishes and the laundry.

So, in the silence, God was with me. "What are you doing here, Ruth?"

And out of the silence, a new seed was planted. Reading two recent books on how to make both a life and a living, and thinking about my real mission in life. About why I am where I am. About what I am doing here.

I am, of course, here to help myself, my family, and my brothers and sisters around the world to live a better life. I have particular skills that I have developed over the years, and some innate talents and passions that have always been there.

I can write about these, and help others develop them. I can speak, and preach, and do other things.

Partway through, I realized that I have family members who might be willing co-conspiritors, most notably my sort-of ex-husband ("sort-of" because we're separated, but not divorced, and we work together to raise our family and keep things running smoothly). Sitting in emergency gave us time to talk about that, too.

He read the first little bit of the book (Be a Free Range Human, by Marianne Cantwell) while I was at lunch, and remarked when I got back that he now had a clearer idea of where I was trying to go. We talked about some ideas I'd had, and even though he has no plans to quit his job (he loves it, even if he does complain about it daily), he's on board to help out as he can and encourage.

Out of the silence wisdom, and a fledgling idea that just maybe will lead to a better life for myself and others.

And a lot of work. I have no doubt about that, but I'm up to it.

I just need to remember to take time every once in a while to listen in silence, to hear God speaking, so that the path and the purpose will remain clear.

"Fan" is Just Short for "Fanatic"

Okay. I've been promising this post to various people for years now, and I figure I might as well start off 2014 right and get 'er done.

The question has always been, "Ruth, why are you so enthused about Lord of the Rings."

Okay, so the word "enthused" might be a bit bland and lifeless compared to the reality. I've read the books at least once every year (usually starting in January) since I was seventeen. That's a lot of reads. The first time I read it, I hid the books under my desk and read during math class. Which might have something to do with the fact that I had to repeat that class the following year, but no matter. It gave me another year of math class to read the books. Again. I've gone through at least four complete sets of the books.

When the animated version of LotR came out, I watched it several times, and was beyond disappointed that it was never finished. I waited, and waited, and waited for someone to do it right and make the movie.

Let's just say that Peter Jackson et al. & Cineplex Entertainment have made a bundle off me and leave it at that, shall we? Or perhaps I should tell you the whole truth.

Fellowship: 19 viewings in theatres. The movie came out in December. I was still searching out second run theatres and larger multiplexes in June and July to see it.

Two Towers: 17 times in theatres. The Two Towers is actually my favourite of the books, but my least favourite of the movies. Not sure if it's the fact that as the middle movie it has no real beginning and no real end, or the fact that the music wasn't as great as the others.

Return of the King: Overboard on this one--21 times in theatres.

All of those numbers include a "Triple Tuesday" where I saw all three movies (including the extended versions of the first two) in the theatre, one after the other. That day, I earned the everlasting enmity of my dearest only daughter, because I was sent to buy five tickets, and there was only one ticket left to buy. I wasn't going to leave it unbought, was I? And since I'm the one that could drive, and I wasn't going to pick her up at one in the morning after SHE watched the movies and I didn't, she was left at home to sulk. She's been sulking for ten years now, but never fear! She may talk to me next year, if I manage to get to the tickets for The Hobbit triple showing in time to get more than one.

And of course I own all the DVDs, both theatrical release and extended editions, complete with bonus discs.

So the question is, "Why?"

I mean, other people like the books, and more like the movies. But they're not fanatics about it, or if they are, they're clearly not in my league. Well, most of them aren't, anyhow. The existence of this house proves that some folks are more fanatical than I am, or at least proves that some fans have more money than I have.

It has to do with the nature of the story itself, and the depth of the story and of the world it takes place in.

The world of Middle Earth was not thought up in a week, in preparation for NaNo. It wasn't developed over the course of a year, with cultures and differing political and dress codes sketched out. It was developed over a period of twenty years. The world has a history. And myths and legends that are not only stories the characters tell one another, but part of the fabric of the tale. Frodo's starglass has a history that starts long before the book begins, and continues long after it. Aragorn and Arwen and Galadriel and Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippin and Gimli and Legolas aren't just characters, who maybe have brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers who are named, but instead who have complete genealogies mapped out in the back of the book, complete with little stories of some of the more notable ancestors and descendents. Geography isn't just there for scenery shots, it has a real bearing on the story and how it develops. And it goes without saying that a book where there are different languages not only for each species, but also for each country within the species (Rohan and Gondor, or the differing elvish languages, for example) seems much more real than a book where the characters travel from country to country and the only thing that really changes is the mode of dress.

It's that depth that helps me lose myself. Reading Lord of the Rings is not really like reading a book. It's more like going away on vacation to an exotic world, one to which I'd move in a heartbeat if it were a real one. (I have this fantasy about opening a retreat for writers called Rivendell.)

The other thing that hooks me is the nature of the story itself. Epic fantasy, by definition, is the story of good versus evil. But most of these stories seem to me to be lacking in the reality department. People are complex, and no-one is ever all evil or all good. Tolkien gets this right. Even Sauron was not always evil. Saruman was not always evil. And those who are definitely good, people like Bilbo and Frodo and Gandalf and Aragorn, are tempted and seduced by evil, and may not always overcome it completely. There are wrong and right actions, but there is also grace and forgiveness offered, and sometimes even received.

Even more important to me is the way in which the bad guy is overcome. Even in my own writing, the good side and the bad side tend to use the same weapons, and they tend to be deadly. The real message of Lord of the Rings, one I've actually preached in a sermon, is not that might makes right. The real message is that the only way to defeat the enemy is to throw away the power that is so tempting to misuse. To throw away the Ring of Power. Because to use might to assert your dominance won't free the slaves or save the environment or bring in universal peace and prosperity. It will just replace one dictatorial government with another.

Tolkien knew this, and so do the wisest of his characters.

Gandalf: "No! With that power I should have power too great and terrible... Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good."

Galadriel: "And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen... All shall love me and despair!" When Sam later urges her to take the ring saying, "You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folk pay for their dirty work," she replies, "I would! That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!"

In contrast, the "heroic" characters, Boromir the brave warrior captain of Gondor, and his father Denethor, a wise and respected leader of men, fail at the test. They lust after the power contained in the Ring, so much so that they cast aside all honour in attempts to gain the Ring by force. Yet Tolkien shows them to be not evil, but pitiable. They simply cannot envision a world where peace can be achieved by anything except strength of arms.

One fact that's fairly well known but conveniently forgotten by many if not most readers is that Lord of the Rings is not just fantasy fiction, but Christian fantasy fiction. Tolkien doesn't talk much about God in the books, and about Christ not at all, but the entire framework of the world reflects a Roman Catholic cosmology (I could go into depth about it, but that would be an entire book's worth of pretty dense comparison, I think), and the basic moral ethos of the main characters (Gandalf in particular) comes right out of the New Testament.

One speech of Gandalf's stands out in this regard. Frodo has just declared that it is a pity that Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he first had the chance, and Gandalf says, "Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity." Gandalf is telling Frodo that pity and mercy are not gifts you give to the person you are sparing, given because you feel sorry for the other. They're necessary for the survival of your own soul. When Frodo finally comes face to face with Gollum, he understands this truth: Gollum is what he will become if he fails to show the same pity and mercy that Bilbo showed.

Lord of the Rings is not a perfect book. In my head, I know that. There are a few parts where I cringe: one in particular where Tolkien uses the phrase "like an express train" and my little hobbit self wants to ask, "What in Middle Earth is an express train?" I would have liked to have more stories about the women in the book, particularly Galadriel and her granddaughter Arwen, who are not nearly as self-effacing as Lord of the Rings makes them seem. (But you'll have to read The Silmarillion in order to understand just how badass Galadriel really is). The language can be a bit dense for some, and the descriptions are a little too long in parts, even given that the book was written by someone with a Victorian mindset. But in all my life of reading, I haven't yet found another book that comes anywhere near as close to perfection as Lord of the Rings. (We'll leave the Bible out of consideration here, because they're not really in the same class of reading for me.)

And believe me, I've looked.

Called By Name

Preached at Alma United Church on November 3, 2013
Text: Luke 19:1-9

I was delighted to meet Marion at presbytery in September and to be asked to take the service today. I have to admit, at first I tried to pass it off to David, not because I don't want to preach here any more, but because I'm trying to step back a bit and let the kids take over. When Marion said that at least one person had asked specifically for me, I had a niggling suspicion that y'all just wanted Allison and her cello (A side note here: she drives now and if you ask her nicely, she may occasionally show up on her own!), but I really was pleased that you folks here at Alma (or at least one of you) wanted ME!

On thinking about this, I recognized how important it really is for me, and every other person alive, to feel valuable. To feel like we belong. Like we contribute something to our group, to our country, to our world.

Our New Testament reading today is one of many readings that could have been used to make this point--it just happened to be today's lectionary reading.

Zaccheus is a tax collector. Not one of those Revenue Canada types that goes by the book and acts within the laws of a democratic country, but the official of a military government who had little oversight and less pay. Not anyone's idea of a good friend, at least not anyone who was poor and trying to make a living.

But underneath the skin of the hardened cheat beats the heart of a human being, and Zaccheus wants what every human who has ever lived wants: love, recognition of his personhood, a chance to grow and change, an opportunity to contribute to society.

Jesus looks up into the tree where Zaccheus has perched, and sees not the cheating bastard, but the human being underneath the mask.

And Jesus calls Zaccheus by name, and tells him that he is to have the honour of hosting dinner for thirteen.

Zaccheus is so grateful for this recognition that he converts on the spot.

Now, I'll have to say that I'd be the first to be a little leery of an on-the-spot conversion, but Jesus does something here that modern pop psychologists are only now beginning to recognize as a valuable strategy for winning an enemy to your cause.

He asks for a favour. Not a huge one, but one that is within the means of Zaccheus.

The psychologists say that asking someone who dislikes you if they can do a small favour for you actually makes them like you more! Why could that be?

Well, it seems that human beings have a built in drive to contribute. If I don't like Heather, and I block her out and never let her do anything the least bit helpful for me, she's not going to say, "Oh, Ruth never bothers me--she's great!" Instead she'll think, "Ruth doesn't like me. She has no use for me!"

We see this in the bible time and time again. God in the Old Testament and God through Jesus in the gospels, asks for the strangest favours from the strangest people.

"Hey there Big Noah! Could you build a boat for me?"

"Hey there, Abraham! Could you do me a favour--take your wife and cattle and go for a bit of a walk?"

"Come on, Moses! Just go up to Pharaoh and ask him! The worst he can say is no, right?"

And Jesus: "Follow me! Andrew, Simon, James, John! Put those nets down--we're going on a tour of the area!"

When you ask them for favours that are within their capabilities, most people don't feel put out, they feel valued.

But we, like the humans of Jesus' time, often lump people into categories, and two of our categories could be described as "People You Can Ask For Help," and "People You Don't Ask For Help."

And our second category often includes folks like Zaccheus, who have done harm to us or to others. Folks like the woman at the well, whose lifestyle is in opposition to our deeply held values. Folks like the illiterate fishermen who work with their hands, not with their minds. Folks like David, the adulterer. Folks like Samuel, who are "just children." Folks like the Good Samaritan, who are not of our ethnic or religious background. Folks like Saul, who actively persecute Folks like us.

We put limits around who we ask for favours, and likewise put limits around who we can or will become friends with. When we do this as Christians or as a church, we also put limits around who we will allow to experience God's saving grace. And we put limits on who we allow to experience their full potential as human beings.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. She told me that her church has no paid clergy. Rather, every week, three members of the congregation are assigned a topic to speak on. My friend has social anxiety disorder, and her first question when she was checking out the congregation was, "Would I have to do this? Because I don't think I can..."

The answer was, "Yes. Everyone has to do this."

She was given coaching and encouragement, and has spoken to the congregation on a number of occasions. She said that when she talks, everyone goes silent. You can hear a pin drop.

I asked her if this was normal for all the speakers. She told me, "No. Only when I speak."

At a recent conference, she was asked to be the keynote speaker and give a 45 minute talk. She tried over the two months before the conference to prepare for the talk, and every time she finished a draft, she felt God say in her heart, "It's not quite right." She went into the presentation with fifty pages of notes that stayed in her briefcase. She talked until she was finished, then looked at the clock. Exactly forty-five minutes had elapsed.

This woman is so shy that if she came into a United Church and sat at the back, I'm not certain anyone would know her name until about the third or fourth month of her attendance, if then. And she was asked to speak in front of her church. And she discovered a gift she never knew she had, and she's been affirmed as a valued member and speaker by others who have been touched by her stories.

Needless to say, she's a devoted member of that congregation.

Sometimes we get so caught up in either doing things ourselves, or asking our friends and proven allies to help us that we forget that there's a whole world of people out there, waiting to be asked for help. We don't always need to be the givers. We don't need to lecture Zaccheus, we need to involve him in our ministry. We don't need to stone the adulteress, we need to listen to her story and ask her to spread the news. We don't just need to buy fish from the fishermen, and feel good because its sustainably sourced. We need to ask them to preach, to heal, to follow.

Christianity is under siege. We've been told that, and its true. We're no longer the "state religion." People of other religions and no religion are demanding that their voices be heard.

If this siege knocks us out of our privileged way of doing things, then it's quite possibly the second-best thing ever to happen to Christianity after Easter. If we stop relying on sermons and lectures and biblical texts and residential schools to convert the so-called heathens, and instead use those sermons and texts and education to convert ourselves, if we stop giving "charity" and instead ask for equal partnership and help, we'll begin to actually live the life that Jesus called us to two thousand years ago. And the Christian church will once again begin to thrive.

Amen.

Postcards from Everywhere Part I: The Project

Sometime late last spring, or perhaps it was early in the summer, I was thinking about my role in the church. I'm not ordained, I'm not going to be ordained.

I don't even really want to be ordained any more.

I'm a writer. I'm also a researcher, with an interest in many things, among them the role of the church and religion in today's society. So I thought that I might do a bit of a project: for one year, on the first Sunday of every month, I would "travel" to a different church, and sometimes even a different denomination or religion, not to critique, nor yet to steal ideas (though I'm hoping that my home church will learn and grow from this project), but simply to witness what is happening in my area an beyond. To absorb and learn from others who, like me, feel the need to pay respect to the holy on a regular basis and in a group setting.

The project quickly gained traction. I mentioned it to a friend who I thought might be interested in accompanying me on my journey -- she enthusiastically agreed, and had her own set of reasons for doing so.

I mentioned it to one of our ministers, who mentioned it to the others, and the word came back to me that it might be nice if I wrote "postcards" from wherever I travelled to, so that others might journey along with us.

Hence the "Postcards from ... " Project.

Those of us who go to church every Sunday almost always fall into a bit of a rut. We go to the same service if our church has more than one. We sit in approximately (or in some cases exactly) the same seats as we always sit in, and talk to the same people every week. There is comfort in routine.

However, there's a danger, too. We become blind to our faults. Things like not realizing just how much of our ritual and language is incomprehensible to outsiders. If a church is looking to grow, especially if it's hoping to reach out to the unchurched, this is a fatal flaw that needs to be noticed and corrected.

Things like how we always talk to the same people, and often don't even see the new person, until one day we do. Then the conversation goes something like this:

"Hi! Are you new here? I haven't seen you before."

"No, I'm not new. I've been coming here for three months!"

Embarrassing and off-putting for the new person.

Things like not telling folks at the beginning of the service simple things, like where they can find the nursery or where they can find the bathrooms.

Yet those are the things that make people feel at home.

So I'm taking one Sunday every month (more or less, as you'll see) to become an outsider.

I've already learned that church folks are eager to have you share their worship experiences. When I mention the project to others, I get the response, "You should come to my church!" That's heartening -- it means that most people who go to church really are happy in their communities.

I've also learned there are many more than a year's worth of churches I want to visit, and so the project is likely to take a couple of years at least. (And that's just those within an hour's drive of home!)

So come join me on my journey! Heather and I are already three months into the project, although one postcard will be from a church I preached at, and another will be from a joint service recently held in Guelph for all the United Churches. But I have some interesting and (I hope) valuable observations for each of these, so I'm going to write them up and post them too.

God bless you all!

Fuck the Disadvantages!

I've come to believe that when it comes to opportunity and advancement, there are only two types of people in the world: those who whine, "Poor me! I have it so hard!" and those who say, "Fuck my disadvantages, I'm going to succeed anyhow."

When reading biographies of successful people, one comes to realize that while the trappings of "success" may vary from person to person, the path never varies. They set a goal, and go for it.

A few examples:

Alan Corey graduated from college with a degree in a subject he didn't really have any feeling for, and with no idea what he really wanted to do with his life, and an email address that had folks thinking he was a sex-happy bisexual woman. Not exactly hugely disadvantaged, but a lot of young men in his situation end up asking customers, "Do you want fries with that?"

He got a job in New York in a call center, and ended up sharing an apartment in the projects of Spanish Harlem. He wasn't making much money, and he wasn't spending much, either. He furnished his room with discards picked off the street.

This is where it gets interesting. Instead of saying, "Poor me! I'm living in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the entire country!" he revelled in the chance to learn a new language and enjoy a different culture. Instead of saying, "Poor me! I'm living in a dump with discarded furniture!" he thought, "Wow! I've got a really cheap apartment here, and I'm saving money by the fistful! I think... I think I'd like to be a millionaire! By the time I'm thirty!" He was twenty-two years old at the time, and by the time he turned thirty (actually by the time he turned twenty-nine), his net worth exceeded one million dollars. And his call center job was the only steady work he had.

You'll have to read his book, A Million Bucks by 30, in order to find out exactly how he did it, but I'm going to move on to another entrepreneur. (I've since found out that the real estate down-turn caused him to lose a lot of that net worth. Nothing loathe, he set out to rebuild his wealth, and succeeded yet again. Fuck the disadvantages indeed!)

Kevin O'Leary, entrepreneur, television star, investor. Dyslexic, alcoholic father, part of a broken family at a time when such a thing was rare and somewhat scandalous. His father died of a heart attack at 37, his grandfather died of the same condition at age 45.

Poor Kevin!

Not really. If you read his book, Cold Hard Truth, or if you're a fan of Dragon's Den or Shark Tank (or even if you know what they are), you'll know that Kevin is far from poor, in any sense of the word. He makes a lot of money doing what he loves, and has (as far as I can tell from his book) a very wonderful, supportive family.

Because he said, "Fuck the disadvantages, I'm going to succeed!"

It isn't just "First World" folks who succeed, either. Kakenya Ntaiya is a Maasai woman from Kenya. She was engaged at age 5. At age 14, she underwent ritual gential mutilation, a rite of passage that in her culture usually leads to marriage and the end of education. She had put it off for as long as she could, and before she agreed to undergo the ritual, she bargained with her father that she would be allowed to finish high school after the ceremony. He agreed, because if he hadn't she would have run away.

She finished high school. She got a scholarship to a college in the US. She got her PhD in education, and went back to her village and opened a school for girls, which, after only four years, ranks among the top in its district. Fathers are starting to realize that daughters can do wonderful things in the world, too. And the girls who go to her school are fed three meals a day, have books, safe housing (they live at the school), and extracirricular activities. Perhaps most important of all, they are free from the terror of female circumcision and early marriage.

Fuck the disadvantages, she's going to succeed anyhow!

When reading about successful people, a single quality comes to the fore: persistance. The chutzpa to say, "Fuck the disadvantages! I'm going to do this, and I'm going to keep working at whatever it is that I need to do in order to succeed at it."

Passion's important, but lots of people have things they really love doing. I have a friend whose son is passionate about music. In fact, I know lots of people who are passionate about music. I know some folks who are not only passionate, but very talented. But unless they're persistant, unless they keep going in spite of difficulties, they usually end up doing something else.

I have a friend with an exceptionally good band. Nominated for a Juno award. A voice compared to Karen Carpenter. Scouted by EMI.

And that's as good as it got. Instead of pushing forward and doing whatever it takes to make it to the top, she's teaching music and directing the church choir, and he's a salesman. Other band members have other careers.

Now that's all good and fine, if their passion is not to be a top selling country band. (And in this case, I think the band members really are just out for fun.)

But if their passion really does lie that way, they'll have to start giving it a higher priority in their lives.

So I'd say to my friend's son, who at eighteen is now on his own and working at a part-time minimum job: You want a career in music? How many hours a day do you practice? How many days a week?

Or in the words of Kevin O'Leary's stepfather, George Kanawaty, "What are you willing to do in order to be?" Are you so passionate about having a net worth of one million dollars that you'll eat ramen noodles for six years solid, have cast-offs for furniture and clothing, spend date nights at home in front of the DVD player instead of out at the movie theatre? Do you want your music career so much that you'll put in an eight hour day at work, then come home and practice for hours, write your own songs even if you and others think they suck, and sell, sell, sell? Do you want to write that novel so badly that you'll give up playing video games every day for a month (November, co-incidentally), and get up a half hour or an hour early to get some words down on paper or on your screen?

Do you want what you want so much that when the inevitable roadblocks come, you'll say, "Fuck the disadvantages!" and bulldoze your way through, or will you sit down and cry, "Poor me!"

Because there are as many types of success as there are people (I wouldn't want Kevin O'Leary's life, and he wouldn't want mine), but there's only one path. You have to figure out what you want, and go out there and get it!

If You're Unhappy and You Know It, Gnash Your Teeth

Yesterday's paper contained a fascinating article (at least, I found it fascinating) about the new "World Happiness Report" that the UN released for the first time last year, and the second time last week. After analyzing data from 150 countries, the researchers discovered that six factors accounted for 75% of the variation in happiness between nations.

Per capita income, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption, having someone to count on in times of trouble, and personal generosity are the six factors that mostly determine whether the residents of one country are happier than their neighbours.

What's interesting is that all six of these factors are in some sense controllable by the individuals in most countries. Sure, we can't necessarily control (at least not directly and immediately) the corruption in our governments, but we can control it in ourselves, and the influence can spread to our nearest and dearest, and then to the wider community. It's all in how we respond. If we refuse to act in a corrupt manner in our own dealings with others, we provide an example of honesty for others to follow. If we name corruption for what it is when confronted by it, others begin to realize that even if they "get away with it" now, honest folks are aware of what's going on, and eventually they'll get caught.

That's where this blog comes in.

Over the years, I've written about everything from cooking to preaching, but what I really wanted to do when I started was help people find resourses within themselves to gain control of their lives and to be happier. I wanted to do this because I was (and still am) myself on the path to building myself an awesome life. Folks have responded positively to this blog. I have three other blogs (two of them still live) and none of them has gotten quite the response that this one has. (And before you point it out, I'll freely admit that I'm not yet in the "big league" as far as blogging is concerned. I'm only saying that this blog appears to be the most relevant to other folks.)

I've learned that there's actually a career path for what I want to do--it's called Life Coaching.

I'd like to use my knowledge, skills and experiences (all of which I have in abundance) to build a business helping people to reach their goals and live happier lives. I know where my strengths lie.

Eventually, I plan to add personal coaching to my repetoire, but I'd like to start with more general media like blog posts, videos, and e-courses because not everyone needs personal coaching, and those who do need or want personal coaching can start with the courses and blog posts, and be more able to get full value out of the personal sessions.

What I don't know is what areas my readers would like me to cover. That's where you come in. If you would be so kind as to respond in the comments below with what you'd like to see me address, I'll start working on blog posts, videos, or even an e-course that will help you.

One Small Step

Our local paper this week published an article about a young University of Waterloo student, Sujay Arora, who has developed an app for women in India who wish to hail a taxi. As recent news stories have disclosed, travel on public transit is not always safe, especially for women in countries where patriarchy and general disorder are more prevelant than rule of law and caring for fellow human beings. The app would allow women to book a cab of their choice--it even has a "W" button for hailing a woman-driven cab--as well as texting the details of the cab ride to a friend or family member, so that someone knows where the traveller is and who she's with in case of trouble.

Arora's dream is to have every cab in Waterloo and New Delhi have his company stickers on them. He knows that his app won't end violence against women. "It is a really small step," he is quoted as saying. But I contend that that small step is really important.

A journey of any kind, whether to the local grocery store or to a world where everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, colour, religion, or socio-economic status can live in peace, is made up not of giant leaps, but of small steps. And the most important step of any journey is the first--the step that commits us to leaving the place where we are and going to a new one.

Arora's app certainly isn't the first step towards ending violence against woman. Although at times it seems like we're going backwards, the freedom women have today, especially in Canada, is huge compared to what we have had in the past. And the rage surrounding the recent rapes in India, as well as the move to make rape committed by soldiers a recognized war crime, indicate that the movement towards freedom for women is much more global than it has been.

Arora's app is important for the safety of women in two cities (as of now), but it's important for another reason. Charitable agencies around the world are spending a tremendous amount of money and effort to educate and empower women and girls, but those efforts will fail if we don't also teach men and boys that being a man does not mean you need to be violent, possesive, or "in charge". Arora's app is important not only becaus of what it does, but because of who developed it.

A young man realized that violence against women is the fault of the perpetrators, and our society, and went beyond vigils and protests to actually do something about it. A small step? Perhaps, but if every man(and woman)who thinks likewise went beyond tears to action, those small steps would add up pretty quickly.

My motto for the past few months has been a quote by tennis great Arthur Ashe: Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. If, like Sujay Arora, we all lived that quote violence against women (not to mention a host of other social and environmental ills) could very well end in our lifetime.

Be A Blessing

Text: Luke 10:38-42

Preached at Algonquin Provincial Park on July 21, 2013 & at Riverside Glen on July 28, 2013


This familiar story of Jesus visiting the sisters Martha and Mary comes up every three years in the Revised Common Lectionary. Despite coming up in the middle of summer, it's a very familiar story to most of us
here today, I'm sure.

With well-known stories like this, that have many layers, and with limited time to preach a sermon, often the message just stays on the surface. For this particular story, here's the condensed version:

Martha is the "traditional housewife" character. With Jesus here for a visit, she immediately sets out to show her hospitality by cleaning the house and cooking a delicious meal, in short, doing those things that women have done since forever to welcome a guest.

Mary assumes the more traditionally "male" role, sitting at Jesus' feet, listening to him teach.

Martha is upset that she's doing all the work, and she complains to Jesus, asking him to tell Mary to get up off her rear end and help her.

Far from siding with poor, beleaguered Martha, he rebukes her, saying that “Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her.”

And preachers before this have said, as I have said before this, that sitting with your guest and paying attention to her is more important than providing a spotless home and an elaborate meal.

We preach that because it’s true. The key component of hospitality is attention to the guest. If you’ve ever been a guest at the home of a Martha, and spent your before dinner and after dinner and even during dinner time wishing that she would just SIT DOWN and stop fussing about things that either don’t matter or could be done later, you’ll know the truth of this.

But the lessons from this short passage go deeper than this, as the Marthas amongst us might suspect.

Do not those of you who naturally tend to show your hospitality by providing food and comfort feel somewhat slighted by Jesus’ words? Perhaps even a bit angry?

Our churches benefit greatly from the efforts of Martha—the men and women who cook, serve and clean up the many meals that are part of church life. The women and men who raise money for missions and local church support, who paint and repair and sometimes even construct our buildings. The number of Marthas in our congregations often exceeds by a large margin those who prefer to attend bible studies and prayer groups, those who are the Marys, learning at the feet of Jesus.

Is all that work unnecessary busy work? Should we, as some churches do in this day and age, dispense with the meals and the rituals and the buildings, and just sit together and learn?

My own experience suggests that the Marthas of our churches do some critically important work, and my reading of scripture suggests this. Churches that rely only on study and worship seldom, in my experience, grow beyond the house church stage, nor do they tend to have very long lives. The Marthas who feed and house the church play a vital role in both the temporal and spiritual growth of the church.

Nor does scripture advocate a life of ascetic contemplation and learning. We have the letter from James exhorting us to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only.” Work without faith is often empty busy work, but faith without works is dead.

And there is the story that comes just prior to this one in the Gospel of Luke, the story of the “Good” Samaritan.

The priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side were well versed in the laws and customs and scriptures of the Jewish people. But they are not the heroes of this story. Instead, it is the outcast Samaritan, who puts his faith into action, binding wounds, transporting the injured, providing clothing and food and housing for the man until such time as he should recover by donating his hard-earned money who is the one Jesus holds up as an example of faithfulness to scripture.

So I don’t think Jesus was rebuking Martha for her doing, but for her being “worried and distracted.” For her complaining.

In my own life, I’m somewhat of a Mary by nature. I’d much rather read and study and learn than clean the house or cook a meal, and over a period of about fifteen years, my house and my body had fallen into a somewhat shocking state of chaos. It didn’t help matters that I was brought up by a Martha who constantly complained that he (yes, Martha can be male!) was the only one who did all the work and if he stopped cranking the world would stop turning, whilst simultaneously complaining that any effort we made to help out wasn’t good enough if it wasn’t absolutely perfect. And it was never perfect. I learned to hate the very idea of housework. I couldn’t cook, didn’t clean, and well, you get the picture.

A year and a half ago, a friend referred me to FLYLady dot net.

The FLYLady, Marla Cilley, is a woman whose mission (and being Christian, she does consider it a mission) is to bring peace to homes around the world, one step and fifteen minutes at a time. She has a whole bunch of baby steps that, taken one at a time, will allow anyone who follows them to gradually gain control over their physical environment.

She has two over-riding principles: commandments, if you will, that, if followed, can change your attitude and thereby your life.

The first is: DON’T BE A MARTYR.

You are doing this because YOU signed up, so don’t nag or complain to your husband, wife, kid, roommate, dog, cat, gerbil, or hapless furnace repairperson.

Just do what you need to do, without bitching or complaining.

And the second is like unto the first: BE A BLESSING.

You are not just making a bed or folding laundry or cooking a meal or decluttering the living room. You are blessing your home, your family, your world, and yourself. You are blessing your God.

What difference would it have made if Martha, instead of self-talk that must have included curses for Mary’s “laziness” and lack of action, could have said to herself, “I am blessing Jesus and Mary and myself by preparing this delicious meal. Mary has her time with Jesus now, but when we sit down to eat, he’ll be grateful for this food, I’m sure.”

What difference might it have made if she’d realized that perhaps the sweeping up and washing dishes and making the bed weren’t important enough tasks to take her away from her guest, and she left them for later, instead taking time to sit and listen to Jesus?

We live in a world that can daze and confuse us if we let it. There are, at any given time, so many tasks we could be doing, so many things we could be buying, so many experiences we could be having, and of course, we then need to work longer hours to pay for all this extra amusement.

We are busy and distracted by many things, when there is need of only one thing.

Perhaps that “one thing” may take the form of listening to and learning from another human being, or it may take the form of preparing a meal to nourish the body of oneself or others. Perhaps that one thing might be doing the laundry, so that your child has clean clothes to wear. Or perhaps that one thing is stopping by the road to help a dying or lost stranger.

It’s all summed up by that one phrase, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

Be a blessing, and bless the world in your own way. Accept the uniqueness of others, and accept that there is more than one way to show love and hospitality, and that not everyone will do it your way. Realize that you don’t have to do it all, that you can’t do it all, and concentrate on that “one thing” that’s most important to you at this particular moment. Take joy in the fact that whether what you’re doing is noticed or not, that whether others or helping you or you’re going it alone, what you do matters.

Amen.

Paying Tribute to a Fallen Officer

I've lived in the city of Guelph now for twenty-two years, and in all that time I can count on the thumb of one hand the number of police officers that have died in the line of duty. Two weeks ago was the first (and hopefully the last) time our community has had to mourn a fallen officer. Constable Jennifer Kovach died while en route to a call. Her cruiser went out of control on an icy curve and crashed into a bus. Thousands of police officers, firefighters, EMS personnel and citizens, not only from Guelph and the surrounding area but from across the continent, turned out to honour her last Thursday, at a funeral that saw a parade down one of our main streets, and the local arena filled to overflowing, with those not able to find a seat accommodated at the River Run Centre close by. The funeral was broadcast live on local television. And it had at least one local letter writer asking why the spectacle. In a letter to the Guelph Tribune, David Nash asks: Is not the life of a construction worker, who died "in the line of duty," just as precious? Or the pilot who died in Alberta, or the fishermen who died off the east coast? Why no elaborate, state-funded funerals for them? Was this simply not a display of "statism", and not an honour to the deceased constable at all? Now, Mr. Nash does not come off as someone who denigrates police officers, or does not appreciate what they do. He is, instead, asking a valid question, one which I struggled to answer myself in the days following the funeral. And I believe that no, the death of a police officer is not the same as the death of a construction worker, pilot, miner, or fisherman. No, the funeral was not a display of force by the state, but a fitting tribute to one of those few who are asked to give up much and risk all to keep the rest of us safe. A fisherman, a construction worker, a pilot, a miner--all of these occupations are covered by laws designed to keep them safe. While the death of any of these workers is indeed a tragedy worthy of note, it is not quite the same as the death of a police officer in the line of duty. Because a police officer, a firefighter, an EMS worker or a soldier are all lacking one thing that the rest of us take for granted--the right to refuse unsafe work. A police officer's work is by definition unsafe. Constable Kovach was rushing to the aid of another officer who was confronted by a routine traffic stop turned into a drug bust. She did not have a right to refuse this dangerous assignment--it's a condition of her employment that she engage in potentially life-risking actions. On the other hand, the construction worker and the fishermen and the pilot all had employers who were bound by law to keep them safe, and were themselves responsible for telling those same employers that they would refuse to work if the work was deemed unsafe. In addition, the construction worker, the pilot, the miners, the fishermen, if employed by someone else, all have the right to strike to improve working conditions. Constable Kovach did not have that right, either. Persons working in such an environment necessarily develop an extremely close bond. When your life depends on the actions of your comrades, you draw closer to one another for mutual protection. When one of those co-workers dies in the line of duty, it can be much, much more devastating than the death of a co-worker might be to an ordinary worker. I saw the pictures of lines of officers, firefighters and other uniformed personnel to be not a display of statism, but a display of solidarity for a fallen comrade. Each one of those uniformed personnel was intensely aware at the moment the hearse passed them that they could be the next one so honoured. As for the fact that her funeral was state-funded, I feel that is only appropriate. Our police officers and other emergency personnel give up a great deal in order to keep us safe. They give up the right to strike, the right to refuse unsafe work, and even the right to work sane shifts, as someone must be on duty 24 hours a day, every single day of the year. They give up Christmas and Easter and birthdays and holidays with their families. Constable Kovach gave up her right to be with her family to celebrate the birth of her brother's new daughter in order to work the shift that killed her. They deserve our public honour and recognition.

Nothing Lasts Forever

A note to my readers: I haven't posted in this blog for a while, because I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it. I've decided that I will indeed continue posting in this blog, but that it will be for sermons and scholarly reflections, whilst my other blog, Yeshanu's Fabulous Over Fifty, will be home to my reflections on life and living. This sermon was preached on March 14th (the date is important, as you'll soon find :) ), at LaPointe Fisher Nursing Home. The texts used are Isaiah 43:16-21 and Mark 12:38-13:2. Nothing Lasts Forever I opened my fridge today to check what was in it, and found, in the back, a container of sour cream. Best before February 2, 2013. Knowing me, it was probably lucky that the date wasn't February 2, 2012. I then checked my library account on line, and found that I had a whole whack of books due March 13th, and as you may know, today is the 14th. Not good. The big news today, of course, is the papal election. Pope Francis I is the 266th leader of the Roman Catholic church, and has observers asking: Is this a new era for the church, or same old, same old? No one knows--the only thing certain is that Pope Benedict is no longer in charge, and Pope Francis is. In our lifetimes, we have seen many changes. Things we thought or even hoped would last forever have proved to be transient. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the USSR is dissolved, Apartied has ended. The World Trade Center was destroyed, and has been rebuilt. People we thought were good and noble have proved to be, well, just people like us, and sometimes not very good people. Conrad Black, honoured by the queen herself with knighthood, was disgraced and spent time in jail. Martha Steward, that goddess of the household, reputedly decorated her jail cell very nicely. And we won't even talk about the myriad of politicians and Hollywood stars and prominent ministers of God who have been brought low by scandal and corruption. Our gospel reading this afternoon has Jesus teaching in the temple, and he warns against worship of that which is human. Don't desire to be like the so-called holy people, who walk around in fancy robes and have the best seats at the table, he says. Their fame won't last, and they will be condemned for the evil they do. He watched people put money in the temple treasury, and he tells those he is teaching: Do you see those rich people? They put in lots of money, but it's only a little bit to them--they still have lots of money left to live on. But that poor woman, who puts in just two little copper coins? She's given everything she has, and that's really impressive! Then he looks around the temple at the walls. Do you think these walls are strong? he asks. They are, but they won't last forever. In a few short years, every single stone will be thrown down. Isaiah, in our Old Testament passage, was preaching to the people of Israel in exile. The Babylonians had conquered and divided the people, and the people were mightily discouraged. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? they lamented. And Isaiah tells them that the Lord says: Don't worry about what you've lost. I will do something new. Something better is coming. Nothing lasts forever. Not the Roman Empire, nor the World Trade Center. Not fame, or fortune, or disaster, or slavery. Only God is immortal and eternal, and God's love. As we sit here today, we wonder about the church and its future. Argentina, the land that gave rise to Pope Francis, is a land where more than 90% of the population identifies as Roman Catholic, and where fewer than 10% go to church on a regular basis. It's a familiar story in many places in the world today--as education and income increase, people feel that God is no longer relevant, or that God does not even exist, and they put their time and energy into making what they consider to be a better life for themselves and their families. Until the stock market crashes. Or a military dictator takes control. Or floods invade even New York City itself, hallowed ground of capitalist America. Until once again, a beloved or respected leader or financial advisor crash-lands, victim of overwhelming greed or lust or love of fame. Is there any hope, or do we travel towards a cross with no resurrection at the end? I am about to do a new thing, God says to us. I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert to give drink to my chosen people. And the temple has fallen, and the Roman Empire as well, but faith in God endures. In Christ, God has done a new thing, and we Christians are the result of that. But the wind of God's change does not stop, and new things keep arising. The Reformation gave rise to new things. The Second Vatican Council gave rise to new things. Liberation Theology gave rise to new things. The United Church of Canada, to which I belong, gave rise to new things. And new things inspired by God are continually arising, often in the most unexpected places, changing what was into what shall be. Nothing of this world endures forever, and God is continually at work, creating new things. So I say to you, do not mourn what is gone, or worship things of human making. Rely on God, and God's love, and you can't go wrong. What has passed is gone forever, for good or for evil. But God's love, God's promise, endures forever. God is making new things, better things for us, in this life, and in the life to come. Amen.

The Aliens Are Back, And They're Breeding!

I went to the bookstore with my mom last week, and lo and behold! Gini Koch's newest Alien book had actually arrived! (I'd looked for it just after release date, and every Chapter's store but the one I was at had a copy or three...)



So I picked it up, and saved it for reading on my three day holiday last week. (As a Christmas present, I had a room booked for me at a hotel an hour and a half from my home. Not so I could do any tourist-type things, but just so that I could relax in a room with a jacuzzi and a big bed and a television with lots of channels. It was wonderful!)

As soon as I was unpacked, the book was opened. I read it in the chair, in the jacuzzi, in the bed. I read from the time I got there at about one in the afternoon until I finally finished at one in the morning. By which you can tell it was riveting.

So, first off, the bad news. I'm not, and have never been, a Jeff fan. So sue me. He's too perfect, except for the jealousy thing, which I find disturbing more than endearing. Second, he may be a ladies' man, but I'm not a man's lady.

Which is to say, I'm a die-hard Kitty fan. I'll fight Jeff for her. :D

Seriously, any woman who reaches into her purse to find weapons with which to kill the bad alien superbing and comes up with a ball point pen or hairspray, and then actually proceeds to make it work--that woman is my type of woman! No other description needed. I can work with her music choices--I'm pretty open to anything that's not rap, even if I do prefer Beethoven to Aerosmith.

And it's pretty obvious where she gets her mojo from--her mother is awesome, too, and her long-suffering father is totally true-to-life in his eye-rolling glory. (And Kitty, don't worry that you never really knew what your parents did for a living. Does any child really know her parents before she becomes an adult? I sure didn't!)

Of all the guys in the book though, I have to say I prefer the humans over the aliens. Chuckie is a great character--revenge of the nerds, and all that. Reader is just plain hilarious.

And I just realized I have to take that back--there is one alien who gets more words in this book than he has in previous books, and it's all to the good. Richard White, the Pontifex, steps off the page and into reality as an extremely able partner for Kitty, who once again is left to save the day. He's the only alien so far that's made me want to turn straight...

I do have to say that getting Jeff out of the Armani and into jeans (which does actually happen in this book) is a Good Thing, and amusing to boot. Hope it happens again. (Hint, hint.)

All in all, this one was a very fast-paced and captivating read. The best book of the series so far, in my opinion, though it beats out the first by only a hair. Lots of action, lots of really gut-busting humour, and a bit of truly flesh-creeping horror thrown in. I can't wait for the next one!