I'm now working towards becoming a ministerial candidate with the Free Methodist Church in Canada. During this process I will be contributing to a four year old church plant here in the Little City that Could. There's a lot to do and I will continue to work full time at the Mission. As a result, this blog may have seen it's last entry for a long, long time. Work, Church, meeting the denominational requirements, Blogging, Twitter, Facebook - alas, there are only so many hours in the day.

To each and every one of you - to those of you have read, commented, stopped by occaisionally or been here since day one - Thank You

What a long, strange, wonderful trip it's been.

Tonight, after a marvelous dinner and evening with family and friends, the Resident Love Goddess and I drove home in the midnight hour. The road took us through farm fields bathed in moonlight, past silent, stoic barns and country homes, some with lights still burning cheerfully. We were cocooned in the warmth of our car, listening to quiet music by the gentle blue lights of the dashboard. And we talked. Oh my, how pleasant and loving and gentle and fine was our talk.

For the first time in almost twenty years I have real optimism about what life will bring us in the next few years. I have, for the first time in those same twenty years, real, genuine hope. The world is as chaotic, unpridictable, worried and fearful as ever, but I truly sense that the Resident Love Goddess and I are being held in the palm of His hand, that we are deeply, powerfully, wonderfully loved.

And I am so very thankful.

Photo via Illuminated WorldThere are people in the world who have the bible on their desk. I'm talking about the others. Thy're hiding the bible because it's too connected to church. When they get visitors they know it is uncomfortable."

That quote comes from Dag Söderberg, who was the CEO of one of Sweden's largest advertising firms. His mission? To "introduce today’s audience to a revolutionary contemporary Bible, one that encourages dialogue and is culturally relevant, readily accessible and easily digestible for any reader regardless of religious, economic, racial or social background."  The result is a visually stunning bible - an illuminated bible - for our times.

To introduce this bible to Sweden a series of photographs from the bible, with accompaning biblical text, were assembled in an outdoor display in Stockholm. 10% of the city's population visited the display. That amazes me - engaging 10% of the population of a major European city with the bible. I'm guessing that bible sales in Sweden come nowhere close to America by any scale of comparison, but I'm equally astounded by this: "Testament" increased bible sales in Sweden by 50% without destroying existing bible sales in that country.

What happens when an advertising executive illuminates the bible? See for yourself. Yes, there are 'biblezines' out there. This is something altogether different. This is, I think, the start of something new in our world.

Added: More from Bene Diction Blogs On ...and I love the way Bene handled the troll. Class act, that Bene.

Last night the Resident Love Goddess and I sat and watched the season premiere of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.They do some amazing renos for some deserving people - and they deserve to be lauded for the work they do. But what kept nagging at me as I watched the show was something more than the number of times they focused on the various family members crying, or asked questions designed to start the tears, as if to heighten the drama. Underlying the entire show was an assumption that says, "Now you have a beautiful home. Now your life will be good." I can't quite put my finger on it, but after reading Mike's post I can't help but think the problem isn't just that we don't care, which is enough in itself, believe me. It seems like so much more than that - like we're just screwed up on so many levels that everything seems fine. As I said, I can't quite put my finger on it. It's greed, it's selfishness, it's short-sightedness, it's misplaced values and priorities, it's an essential misunderstanding of the message of Christ, it's egotism, it's ethnocentricity, it's... I don't know, it's almost like we have to invent a new word for the complexity and sweep of screwed-upness the world is in. Total Depravity comes to mind, though that term might be overworked in some circles.

I think our moral bankruptcy is, essentially, the absence of any connection whatsoever between our individual rights and freedoms and our collective responsibilities. This may say something about the nature of democracy and it's relentless elevation of the individual above the village. Democracy is the single most pervasive paradigm of our society, having such reach as to have compromised even the gospel of Christ with a cross that speaks to the guilt free life following the sinner's prayer, the apostrophe always before the 's', and never after. I don't know how we can read the Lord's Prayer, or the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments and not recognize the collective nature of those documents. I don't know how we can watch a show like Extreme Makeover Home Edition and not recognize that's something's wrong. I don't know how we can go on like this. 

This week, in our small, fair city on the shores of The Tiny Perfect Lake, two men died. One drowned in a small creek, in less than six inches of water. The other was found in the marina. In both cases a street person drank too much, passed out, fell into the water and drowned. Their names have been withheld pending notification of next of kin and I understand the significance of that. For right or wrong, for good, bad or otherwise, however, these men were members of our community and it feels very much like they are every bit as faceless and nameless in death as they were in life.

I don't know what to say about that, either.

When you are a child your father is larger than life itself. He is inconquerable, immovable, unstoppable, the biggest, most important idea in your universe. He is a moral centre and compass, he is the source of all approval, the guarantor of meaning and value, the source of all love in your home of homes. As our childhood lives evolve we begin to realize - suddenly and shockingly, often - the limitations of our fathers. He can't fix a broken arrow, he can't guess what happened at school today, he's afraid of snakes. His humanity grows in our childhood hearts, and our humanity grows with him.

Later, our childhood almost - but not - quite passed, we will test the limits of his authority, of his character, of his love. We will search him out when we don't need him, and stubbornly refuse his help when we do. We will resist his advice but embrace his foibles as our own. We will begin to hear his voice - his other voice, the one hidden within his great fears and anguish, within his great love for us - and in learning to hear his voice will forge our own. We will strive to be unlike him, never consciously aware of how ridiculously impossible this truly is.

Our teenage years will pass, though, and work and life and loves and responsibilities all our own will arise. We will be cocky, we sons of our fathers, and arrogant and stubborn and proud, and we will, as many times as is necessary, get knocked flat on our backs because of it. We will know our fathers from less of a distance now, much less, having held the very love of our lives in our arms on our wedding day, having held a newborn baby, in all its tiny, messy wonder, and having realized that the overwhelming sudden terror of unworthiness gripping us in that moment is exactly what he felt embracing our mothers, embracing us. He will be real.

Some of us will have our fathers taken from our lives far too early. Some will watch, helplessly, lovingly, as his strength and vitality fade into the parchment paper and dry, brittle leaves of old age. We will think deeply, know deeply and be, at the very depth of our soul, who he is.

I saw my father in a dream this morning, and watched him from a distance. He did not see me, I was hidden from him. Yet in this place of my mind, where dreams are born, where I am so deeply engaged by a crossword puzzle and a newspaper chess problem and the smell of Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke on warm, rough skin, in this place where dreams and reality meld he peers over his glasses and, though he does not see me standing here, I see him, standing there, where he has been all along, inside of me, inside of who I have become.

I find this dream of my father, seen silent and iconic within a ghostly quiet grocery aisle, fading as I stare at my face in the bathroom mirror. With my hand cupped beneath a mound of wet shaving cream I realize, with both certainty and finality, that this is exactly as it should be.

How true that is...

My first reaction is simply to say that I can't write that kind of post anymore. I'm just too tired. My second reaction is that it still doesn't answer the question - "How could a lovinjg God allow this too happen?" I mean, seriously - if this is the work of the people who bear God's name why hasn't he stepped in and done something to make us grasp his vision, to make us understand the consequences of not caring for one another, of not living justly?

Unless, of course, the current economic meltdown is just that...

Of course, none of it was justice at all. The guy who got ripped off is still ripped off. The pain and fear and anger he might be experiencing is just as palpable, just as real. The guy who bore the brunt of the 'justice' is now angry also and almost certainly looking for someone to vent that anger on. What has actually been created is not justice but a spiral of violence that has no way of ending - no way, that is, unless someone, until one of us, says 'No More'.

Can there be justice without retribution? Perhaps if we want to create justice, real justice, not just something that looks like justice or seems like justice but something that really and truly is justice, then we might consider finding those who are a victims of injustice and loving them. Perhaps we might find ways to restore what has been taken from them, to return to them not just the physical things they have lost but the manifest peace, comfort and security that injustice denies, that injustice destroys, that injustice replaces with fear, with want and with the undeniable anguish of the soul. We say love conquers all and we quote the scripture that says this very thing with scarcely a thought for what it means in the dust and grime of the streets we walk every day, with scarcely a thought for the simple reality that justice isn't justice at all until it seeks out those for whom it is denied. It isn't a concept, it isn't a metaphysical construct, it isn't child of the law and the labour of the courts, it's the way we must live, seeking to lift up those who cannot themselves rise, seeking to love those who despair of ever knowing freedom. Justice is love, seeking to be born into the world and it seems to me that the very act of seeking out those for whom justice is denied is an essential characteristic of justice. Justice searches for those who do not know her and it searches for them through us. 

This is what God did in Christ, at the cross, where God's 'justice' became indistinguishable from his love, where Christ's love was given it's ultimate expression in self-sacrifice. This is what it means to be who Christ is. It means we go looking for those who are suffering the weight of injustice, it means that we offer a justice indistinguishable from love and that a love for both vicitm and perpetrator. We're not very good at the self-sacrifice part but, honestly, we're not very good at the 'seeking-out' part, either.

It's getting a little hard to believe that every employer he's ever had refuses to cut him a cheque at the end of his first pay period. There must be a reason why this is the pattern of his life but I can't figure out what the reward is for his behaviour. We all have blind spots - aspects of our behaviour that we hide from our self. But this guy has been living in a homeless shelter or his truck, in an entirely predictable cyclical pattern, for the last four years. You would think he might have had an epiphany somewhere along the way. All his psychic energies, however, are directed towards telling other people what's wrong with their lives.

Without humility, wisdom escapes us.

Well ...No, it's not.

When I was a teenager I worked in a hospital kitchen in our small town. There was an older woman who  worked as a dishwasher. She spoke poor, but passable English with a heavy, east European accent. She was a nervous type of woman, pleasant and smiling, but nervous just the same. She had a number tattooed on her forearm. I did not witness this, but was told by other staff that two police officers had come into the hospital cafeteria for lunch. On seeing them in uniform, our dishwasher was overcome with fear and couldn't finish her shift.

I don't know what her experience was like during the war, but I do know it was about as close to Hell as we humans can create. I know that her experience in that death camp was her particular truth, and God had absolutely nothing to do with it. Cancer is an awful truth. Suicide a terrible truth, as is fear, pain, loneliness and loss. When you're in the midst of any of them they are a truth as powerful and as real as any other and I want you to know these are not - they absolutely are not - from God. No, God's plan was the Garden of Eden, God's plan was paradise, but we had a better idea. It seems to me that our rebellion, in ways both great and small,  is a truth God lives with as well.

Near the end of Jesus' time on earth he took his disciples aside and said he would soon be leaving, but would return for them. He promised that there was plenty of room for all of them to live together, with his father God, in his glorious kingdom. Then Thomas - Oh! Doubting Thomas! - asked how the disciples could join him as they had no idea where he would be.  It was at this moment that Jesus chose to say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.  There may be a lot of different ways to intrepret that statement, given that context, but surely one of those ways is to know that Jesus is promising that no matter what our current truth may be, he is present. War isn't his idea. Abuse, grief, pain, illness, death - none of them were meant to be our truth. But though we don't know the way through our difficulty and pain, though we don't understand where Jesus seems to have gone, though we can scarcely grasp the idea of his coming again, he remains with us, he weeps with us, and for us, and sometimes through us. I think Jesus is also saying that when we face death - when we face that final, great and irrevocable truth, he is the one that has come back from the dead, he is the one that has come back from heaven in that very moment, to meet us as we cross that dark, cold  river.