the Saturday list

1. We went to a swing dance class last night. What fun. They made the females change partners all the time so I got to dance with pretty much every guy there. At first I didn't think I would like that, but it was great: you meet lots of new people and learn to follow signals better instead of relying on knowing your partner. And what a difference a confident partner makes!

2. We also slid into the end of a Pink Floyd cover band show at Club Soda. Really quite good. The light show was amazing and the musicianship not bad at all. One amazing guitar solo!

3. This morning was telemarketer frenzy! What are all those people doing up on a Saturday morning calling me? Sorry, I was sleepy and had very little voice this morning so I just said no thank you and wished them a good day.

4. I am out of orange juice again. This has happened TWICE in the last 2 weeks. I must get better at OJ inventory management.

5. I like Dean. We went out to lunch with a friend of ours yesterday and I found myself saying wonderful things about Dean and how I wanted to be there for him. I could tell he really appreciated that. I need to do that more - let my words and actions reflect my affections in a big way. Who do you like? Let the world know!

This is the sky I saw while standing in my front yard on Thursday.

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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

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

outWORD by Matte Downey

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