outWORD by Matte Downey

Home made blueberry pie Last night we invited author, David Brazzeal, to lead 15 of us in what he calls a Prayer Tasting. The idea is that we eat a 3-course meal together and between courses, he talks about prayer and guides us through numerous prayer exercises. David likes to draw an analogy between enjoying a delicious meal and conversing with God: neither should be boring or rushed or just a rehash of the same old flavours day in and day out. He suggests that there are a cornucopia of ways to pray and together, we explored a few of them. Appetizer : Strawberry spinach salad with almonds, Emmental cheese, and homemade dressing. After the salad disappeared into our bellies, we were treated to the reading of a psalm to some instrumental music. The combination of dramatic inflections together with haunting, beautiful, dynamic music meant that the words snuck past my left brain (the thinking and analysing side) and let the heart and emotion of the psalmist touch me at a deep level...

When this happens, I have to choose which grammatical sin I'll have to make in order to send a tweet. Social media is very good at letting you know how much traction or clout you have, whether that is measured in likes, comments, retweets, numbers reached, followers, or shares. I like connecting with people via Facebook, I like writing this blog (most of the time) as a way of honing my communication skills while putting some ideas out there on subjects I am thinking about. I occasionally post on Twitter (my least favourite platform) and I love to post pictures on Instagram chronicling the interesting views I come across in life. At times, I do check how many readers on a particular blog, how many followers I have, and how many likes or favourites a post got. But it is a bit like seeing your salary in comparison to every one elses. Whereas before you might have been absolutely fine with how much you earned, when you see the numbers, discontentment is not far behind. Numbe...

Part of the crowd at Vineyard Columbus Last week I attended the Vineyard Church USA national conference in Columbus, Ohio. Around 60 nations were represented and over 4000 people were present. I won't try to give you a rundown of the week or the speakers or their talks. Check out the video  archives  of the main sessions if you want to get a glimpse (only available for a limited time, I am told). The highlights for many of us were Thursday morning's talk by Dr. Charles A. Montgomery on breaking down barriers (it starts at 1:35) and the worship led by David Ruis and Noel Isaacs from Nepal on Thursday evening (a particularly poignant lament song starts at 1:03). The stuff that happened on the platform, in many ways, was just a small part of the experience. God doesn't need a microphone to speak nor does he require a crowd in order to be present. Our loving God is with us in so many ways if we have ears to hear and eyes to see. I came to the conference believing that I...