goodbye and white

This afternoon I signed my name a few times, and so did Dean, and we are no longer home owners. This morning one of my close friends, who had been staying with us for a week as she was between places, left to journey back to her family in B.C. She is leaving her life in Montreal, not sure whether she will return or not. It has been a day of goodbyes, goodbyes that leave one hanging, as none of us know quite where we will land next. This place can be unsettling or it can help me focus - my choice.

Tonight I have 3 more house guests coming. Tomorrow I have an event where I am acting as producer/set-up person/refreshment coordinator/public relations/host. Saturday we look at some condos downtown, then head away for a quick meeting and a bit of a getaway at our friends' cottage up north. Next week I will start sorting and packing. Life is clumping up again, as it tends to do when change is imminent. Like labour pains, there usually seems to be increased activity and stress just before the birth of something new in our lives. It is a pattern I readily recognise by now and even embrace. The increased pressure makes me stop and ask God for help, it reminds me that only a few things are truly important, and it offers me the opportunity to mature in many areas, specifically grace (oh, how I hate being a whiner and complainer and fault-finder at times like these) and trust (relax, this really is out of your hands to a large extent and either you mean what you say when you talk about God providing for you or you don't).

I had a dream last week in which I was working with some young and energetic creative souls on an ad campaign. They presented an idea for an all-white ad and I immediately understood what they were trying to accomplish and thought the idea was brilliant. Not every one was convinced, so I explained it to the people who were hesitant, namely the bosses. The concept was simple. Everything in the ad, whether it was a photo or video or any other visual, was white, totally white. The thing we were trying to sell was then placed in the all-white setting and naturally, every eye was drawn toward it, no matter how small it was in the picture or how much in the background it served. The idea was not to make the product appear bigger and better than it was (like so many ads do), but to place the object in a natural setting, removing all the distractions so that the focus was on it alone. Like I said, brilliant!

I need a giant white paintbrush in my life. Not to attempt to erase any of its parts, but to tone down all those bits that take more attention than they merit and blur my vision with busyness. I need all those distractions to fade into the background so that I can truly focus on the beauty and simplicity and awesome, sometimes small but always bright, nature of this life I have been given.

What do I want my life to point to? What do I want others to see first when they glance at me and my situation? Everything else must become white.

This is the view from my backyard...for now.

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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