inside my winter house

1. It is snowing and/or raining again - I can't decide. We got hit with a nasty storm called a Nor'easter last night and this morning Dean almost got stuck in our driveway because there are 6 inches of wet slick white muck on it and the city snowplow had made that more like 18 inches of solid vanilla slurpee sludge at the end of our driveway. Today I am thankful for a house that keeps out cold wind and wet falling things. I am tempted not to venture outside, but I do have to mail something. By the way, this is not a picture of my house (though it feels like it today), it is a tent on the ice of Baie de Vaudreuil, taken February 28, 2007.

2. My ideas of hell are being challenged (not that I actually had really firm beliefs regarding this topic, I just avoid it mostly and try to focus on God). Interestingly enough, I wrote my thesis on this topic back when I graduated with my B.Th. and was commended for my good research but did not receive top marks because I failed to come to any real conclusions. The truth is...I don't know. The Bible is not conclusive on this topic and the glimpses we see of death and the afterlife and punishment and judgment have been too mixed with centuries of religious systematic theories for most people to be able to separate the two. I do know that hell has never been the point, but I also know that what I believe about hell will reflect what kind of God I believe in.

3. There is nothing like a good ole' Annual General Meeting to make you thankful and more aware of God being active and present and very much involved in every person's life in our modest church group. Last night the theme came through quite strongly that God is challenging us to trust him. Two men spoke of having their job security taken away this past year and realising it was God calling them to put their trust in him instead of their abilities. Two women spoke about making bad choices in relationships and realising that their value must come from God, not from how men treat them. I agree with Stephane wholeheartedly: not trusting God tires you out.

4. I dreamt about my cat, Tea, last night: One morning, I decided to put her outside and leave her there. She was out all day and returned home in the evening. The next day, I dropped her off in an unknown place and left her there (in real life, she NEVER leaves the house). We were driving around in the evening when we saw her coming towards our car from the side of the road. She had managed to find us and track us down even when we were driving! I let her in the car and I could see she had been in a fight as her ears were nicked and her fur matted and missing in places, but she seemed in good spirits and happy to see us. I realised that she would alway find her way back to us because she had a very keen sense of smell or whatever it was that allowed her to track us - she recognised where we were or had been. I thought it was a silly little dream until I started to write this and realised this also is about trust and being able to recognise and see God wherever he is and always make your way back to him.

5. I am drinking lemon and pear juice as I type - hmmmm, not my favourite combination of flavours, but a nice change.

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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