sompthings not right

I have not been feeling quite right for a few days. I don't know what it is, but my chests feels like Tea is standing on it and I am hit with unexplainable fatigue at about 5 in the afternoon. Yesterday it was pretty bad and I was afraid it was pneumonia again (no no no don't want to do that over), but I realised I was missing the key symptom of fever, so I resisted the urge to let the fear become the sickness, and decided a bit of rest and good eats should get me over whatever it is.

In other areas of life, things are just a bit off and I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. That makes it really hard to do anything about it. In our little church, something seems to be lacking or changed or not done with the same intensity or focus. I talked to someone recently who had the same feeling about their work. Last night I watched an episode of "House" while waiting for Dean to get home and as always, the doctors were confronted with a mystifying case - unrelated symptoms and no idea what was really going on. One doctor said it was most likely cancer so they radiated the woman. Shortly after that she developed further symptoms which made it clear she was fighting a bizarre infection and by giving her radiation treatment, they had wiped out her immune system which she needed to fight off the infection and in the end, she died (sorry about that depressing story, but there is a point). They were so desparate to do something that they did the wrong thing and harmed her instead of helping her. Now I love medicine and doctors and wonder drugs and all the rest, but they only help the body with the healing process - they cannot be the healing. God designed the body to heal itself and if we can just get the obstacles out of the way that are stopping it from doing just that, the healing will come.

When you don't quite know what's going on, I think the best thing to do is ask God and wait. Nobody likes waiting. We would rather be flailing our efforts about and doing something, even the wrong thing, rather than waiting for the situation to clarify or God to intervene. But our good intentions (or shall I call them guesses?) can wipe out the very thing God is bringing about to rectify the situation. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait on the Lord.

This wonderful dog was caught enjoying the water on the quay at Ste-Anne's last summer. Andy, Emma and Dean's feet stand watch.

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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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