Skip to main content

lesson from the cable car

January 29, 2007 (date of photo)

This is a cable car in San Francisco, the only USA National Landmark that moves. While I was taking my ride in one from the Powell street BART station to Fisherman's Wharf, I heard one of the brake-men explaining the technology to another train rider. There is a cable running underneath the street that is always in motion. The driver engages a clamp that grabs the cable when he wants the car to move forward and disengages the clamp when he wants to stop (braking where necessary and with all the hills in San Francisco, that is pretty much everytime he wants to stop). While walking any of the streets that still have cable car runs, one can hear the moving cable as a constant hum underneath you and it took me awhile to figure out what that rumble was.

To me, this is a somewhat rough but amazing picture of the Spirit of God. He is always moving and if you know what to listen for, you can hear his rumbling and humming, but you can't see him. However, when someone opens their life and hands and grabs onto Him and what He is doing, they start to move, they are propelled forward, and on the surface, it looks like they have developed great power to climb mountains and overcome obstacles, but they have merely attached themselves to a mighty God - there is no self-propulsion involved.

Look down, go deep, listen for the Spirit, reach out, and hold on for the ride of your life.

Comments

Tobi Elliott said…
wow Matte, your observations about God bring me to tears sometimes with their beautiful simplicity and truth. I think you shoudl put them together in a book. I'd read it!

Popular posts from this blog

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

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.’   Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim