ooooo pretty lights

Here's another picture I took at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue just over a year ago. Since I did not grow up around any significant body of water (unless a dugout where cows drink counts), I am ever grateful to be living within a 15 minute drive of one of the most scenic on-the-water spots in Canada, at least in my opinion, and I make it a point to go there as much as I can every summer to capture that particular day's beauty.

I read a cool quote the other day that I can't find now, but it had to do with the fact that when we go through painful things and hard times and nothing seems to console us, a glimpse of beauty will ease our pain and bring peace where nothing else could touch our wounded soul. I have experienced this often: a note sung with passion, a sunset splashed across the sky, a tree in full autumn explosion, an expanse of clear blue water, a child's smile, a dog's eager embrace, and a friend's touch have provided light and peace where no words or explanations could. Beauty is a characteristic of God that I seldom here preached in any church, but it is such a call to worship and healing that we cannot ignore it. Perhaps that is why I take pictures and write words and sing songs and explore all things creative: I am drawn to the one who created this thing called beauty and at the same time, calling for an encounter with healing for myself and this whole broken world.

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Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become. Besides, I have studying to do. But this weekend, something changed. I read the book of Esther. First, some background: the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years). Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs. This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments. It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ C...

outWORD by Matte Downey

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