Category Archives: Day to Day

I am sitting here trying to figure out what it is about Christmas that I look forward to the most.  I think what I really like the most is the whole sense of anticipation that goes with so much of the holiday.  And the memories.

My earliest memories are of family; gathering around the tree; eating at tables stretched out to their full length with extra seating for the kids somewhere; singing and my dad and grandfather playing their violins; always before opening gifts the reading of the Christmas story by my grandfather, now by my father. Christmas Eve began the major part of our celebrations in good old Scandinavian style for our mixed English /Swedish family.  

Mixed in with the family memories are others closely related; Christmas programs and the practices (not always good memories); memorizing the story from Luke; advent candles; early morning Jullotta services.  Always home and church at the centre of the celebrations.  A pastor’s family doesn’t go away at this time of year very often.

Then there is whole set of memories having to do with Christmas in the Congo.  Our little silver tinsel tree that was so shabby but worked to fill a hole of loneliness that first year when we had so much adjusting to do and when Christmas was still a forbidden holiday in the newly named Republic of Zaire.  Learning to do Christmas in the tropics a long way from family.      Learning to absorb other traditions that we were not used to; rice pudding, the Christmas Eve Buffet supper, The 4 am service at the church the drums beating the wake up call after a night of hearing the singing continue till midnight at the church.  Opening homemade gifts or ones that had been purchased in anticipation of this day a few years before.  A bottle of Coke became a gift of lasting remembrance, as did hand dipped chocolates.  I learned to do many things to prepare for the season from curing and smoking my own ham to making tourtière.  There was always sewing either for Christmas or for the new dress or shirt for the school program.  And always the gathering and purchasing of gifts for our household help.  There was no commercialization there were no stores to speak of.  But there was celebration.  And the people of the Congo celebrated, having known what it was like to have Christmas celebrations forbidden for about three years. 

Now, for me, the Christmas season still holds us together as a family.  Everyone will be home at my house on Christmas Eve since we carry on that part of my Scandinavian tradition.  At our supper, we will have ham, turkey, rice pudding and tourtière.  All foods which not only fill our stomachs but refill our memory banks.  Then stuffed we will all go to the Christmas Eve service, (Leo and I may go to the early morning service if there is one, but our kids never were too keen on this tradition.) then back we go to our house for the reading of the story and the gifts. 

It is a crazy hectic season.  But it is so full of good things for me.  I guess we could do without a lot of the gifts and decorations and we try not to go overboard on them.  But the joy that decorating brings to some of my kids I wouldn’t give up for anything.  To others of my kids the giving of gifts and watching the receiver open them is what it is about and that too I wouldn’t give up.  And I would not want to give up the memories that the season brings back or not pass on some of theses good times and memories to my children and grandchild.  And as our family enlarges we incorporate new ways of celebrating that will get passed down along the way. 

Maybe I see a lot of what Christ came to do in the way we celebrate his birth.  We are family together and love each other.  We don’t exclude the ones that may still be quite unlovely, and we take in new members and they become part of how we celebrate too.

I understand that for some people this is a sad and difficult time; that there may not be much to celebrate and that it just seems a commercial rip off. But to me that is exactly why he came.  God incarnate – coming into our world – into our families, into our world that has things all screwed up, even into our sad and depressed lives.  Loving us enough to come.  Sharing our humanness, experiencing our pain.  Being our only reason to celebrate.

Tonight we had the priviledge of attending the CBC’s reading of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol.  The music was done by the Prince Albert Mens Chorus and was well done.  The readings were superb.  And it was fun to have them done by by radio personalities familiar to us.  Leo knows some of the reporters quite well since they are regularly reporting on his antics as Medical Health Officer for our health region, so I got to meet them too tonight.  The reporter who usually interviews him is going off soon to spend six months in Ghana to work on training reporters on reporting human rights issues.  I think she will have a very interesting experience.

Around our staff room table at noon, we were all having soup of various kinds, some home made and some of the canned variety.  Roger, my partner and only male in the office, is actually quite a gourmet cook, sometimes with a tendancy to the exotic. 

So Kathy asked him for the recipe for his squash soup.

“To start,” he said, “you take a leek…”

We lost it!!  Not sure of the soups’ popularity from now on!

I think the experiencing of God in the silence this past week and the anticipation of sharing with the youth some of my thoughts on creation prompted me to write this:

The Sound of Creation

Silence.

The whispers of God’s voice,

So quiet.

You are so gentle, Lord.

You, that spoke into existence

All,

With your voice.

Did it thunder then,

In creation?

Or was it ever quiet?

The moving of a whisper

On the waters,

The division of cell to cells.

Your loving breath of a whisper

Transforming life

Till an unlikely likeness

Was created in your image.

This likeness that has

Stopped it’s ears

To silence.

I promised to give a talk on evolution/creation to the Youth Bible study on Wednesday night.  I am no expert but I do see things from more of a scientific point of view than the guy they have been watching in a video series.  It has never been a central issue for me but I think it can be a stumbling block, especially for young people not yet sure of how to balance what they have been taught in school with what they are being taught in church. 

My God is big enough to create the world any way he may have chosen to do so.  I would just like the kids to understand that it is OK to have lots of questions and sometimes to not have clear answers, but to keep seeking.  They will find that God will be bigger than their questions and that their opinions on how things were done will change as they learn more. 

My God is the creator, of that I am sure.  How he created the world is a lot less clear in my mind.  We are still fairly ignorant inspite of all that we know scientifically to date.  My lack of knowledge does not diminish His greatness.  At the same time my scientific knowledge does not destroy my faith in him.

So here I am waiting for Leo to come home.  His plane was almost two hours late getting out of Toronto – some malfunction in the air conditioning.  But he called an hour or so ago and has safely arrived in Saskatoon.  He was taking the guys for supper and then would head home – so I am guessing he’ll get here around midnight.

This week is going to be busy.  We have lots of stuff going on in the community; a reading of A Christmas Carol and the Peter Pan musical; Christmas parties are happening and there are several meetings.  I also have to recertifiy in my CPR this week. Our office does this together and Tuesday night is the course.  We’ll do Pizza and then right into the course, then right after that worship practice, so I won’t even get home that evening till late.

Those of us who get together to practice and lead worship on Sundays pass a lot of crazy e-mails between us.  It is kind of fun being crazy with a few other likeminded (also a bit crazy) people.  Of course the head honcho, the big cheese, the ring leader of all this is our PR.  He starts it off most weeks.  Even has accused us of being under the influence of illicit substances after certain fiascos on Sunday mornings!  What on earth could he be thinking – just because we missed every cue that we had diligently practiced just 90 minutes before! 

As I said, it is fun getting together with like minded crazy people.  And more often than we deserve, God comes and makes use of what we are doing – even when we do all the songs differently than how we practiced.

I was just musing on what is the meaning of PR – that is what got this entry started.  It just remembered me that PR was the term we used for the really important pastors in the Congo – in our “communauté” the head pastors were the “Pasteur Responsable” or as we usually shortened everything down to it’s acronym – the PR.  So for the CEUM of the ECC (ex-ECZ) in the DRC you Randall would really be the PR.  Now we just have to figure out the meaning of this “responsable” part!!

If you want to see some of the responsible things we are doing in our church, head over to Randall’s blog.  We have been spending a considerable amount of time in prayer this week and it has been very good.  You could even do our prayer walk, in a sense, on-line.  Not quite as good as the real thing but you can get a sense of where we’ve been this week.

Jordon Cooper has a link on his site to an article from Christianity Today – an interview with Eugene Peterson.  It seems to be hitting right where I am at as far as my needing congruence – a good sense of alignment of who I am and what I do.  I think I get too caught up in wanting the contemplative side of my life to take precedence but I am also a person who has been given certain practical gifts and, as far as I know, I need to continue to use them.  I guess I need to find a renewed sense of being useful to God where I am now.  I need to live out my life in this constant tension between the practical work world in which I live and the world of the spirit where I would like to dwell.

I especially liked the following quotes from the article:

“Do not let the word “contemplative” throw you off, Peterson admonished. He is not interested in an isolated life spent pondering high-minded concepts. Instead, the contemplative Christian life can be described by what he saw in Tournier—a life lived with “wholeness, honesty, without contrivance.” One word that comes to mind is authenticity, but the one Peterson used over and over was congruence—the alignment of who you are and what you do, the harmony of the ends you seek and the means you use to achieve them….”

“It’s easier to talk about what Christians do—life as performance,” Peterson said. But the three pieces of Jesus’ fundamental declaration that he is the way, the truth, and the life, must be in perfect correspondence. “Only when we live Jesus’ truth in Jesus’ way do we get Jesus’ life,” Peterson said. Not his truth in our way for the sake of our life….”

“He introduced this baffling paradox of the Christian life. “This is slow work; it cannot be hurried. This is urgent work; it cannot be procrastinated.” In American culture, in which “fast” is equated with “good,” this is a contradiction. What’s worse about the contemplative life, he told me afterwards, is that “most of the time you’re unconscious of it. … The minute you start thinking about it, you mess it up; there’s a sense of always having dissonance.”

I do want my life to be in proper alignment – to be living Jesus’ way, to be doing what I do the way I do it because of Jesus living in me. 

I think there is a lot of truth to the statement about the contemplative life best being lived unconsciously.  I begin to lose the purpose he called me to when I start to worry if there is perhaps a more contemplative life for me somewhere.  I need to live in the “now” doing the jobs he has placed right in front of me. Sort of need to keep my feet on the ground, hands in the mouths, eyes on Jesus.  Above all keep my eyes on Jesus.

Tonight I went over to the church again to walk the prayer walk.  Each time I go it seems to change me in a subtle but sure way.  It is as if I am an onion and each time I go God takes off another layer – getting to my core.  I’m not sure what we’ll get down to – what is really at the core of me – what God sees there that he wants to do something with.  I guess God knows exactly what is or isn’t there.  It’s more a problem of me not knowing what he wants or even what is there for him to want to use. 

There has been something going on within me over the past few months, maybe longer. This blog is probably part of that. A sort of dissatisfaction with the staus quo of my life.  Looking at new ways of expressing my faith and wondering where I need to go next.  Does he have any more adventures in store for me?   I guess I don’t want to become complacent or so cozy in my little corner of faith that I settle for less than he has for me.  I like it that life is an adventure.  I like the thought that God may have some new task for me or may want me to explore new ways of growing deeper in my faith.

But I find it so frustrating that this part of my journey is so lonely.  I wish I had someone to teach me more.  I read and try to study but it is hard to find someone who will teach me more about what I am reading and who can explain some of the things I am experiencing.  I don’t want to start going off in weird directions spiritually or, on the other hand, simply spinning aimlessly because I have been following my own footsteps in circles like Pooh and Piglet rather than following God.  And I think this is an easier trap to fall into than I would like to think.  I am afraid that my looking for new experiences is the easy way out and distracts me from accomplishing what God has right before me – that maybe God still has a use for me doing what I am doing now.  Or does he have some of both the new and the old in his plans for me?

The women I am studying The Jesus I Never Knew by Yancy with are a big help.  It is good to be with a group that is interested in growing in faith.  But I feel so inadequate to be any kind of a leader because I am still searching for so much more in my own faith.  I sort of feel like a toddler in front of a candy dish wanting more, more, more of the experience of knowing God.  And then in the back of my head there is this little voice that says – “Grow up and act more sedately.  You’re too old and experienced to get all excited or even want to get excited about God.  And for heavens sake use more spiritual language when you speak to him!”

So I will go again through the prayer walk, looking for some sort of clarity as I sort through these questions in my life.  It is very good to have a place to go – a sacred space for me these days.

In preparing for a week of prayer at the church, I came across this poem.  It is one that I have read before and it touches me each time with an awareness of Jesus’s incredible love for our fallen world.

The Coming

R. S. Thomas,   Wales, 1913 –.

And God held in his hand

A small globe.  Look, he said,

The son looked.  Far off,

As through water, he saw

A scorched land of fierce

Colour.  The light burned

There; crusted buildings

Cast their shadows; a bright

Serpent, a river

Uncoiled itself, radiant

With slime.

                   On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky.  Many people

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For a vanished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs.  The son watched

Them.  Let me go there, he said.

R. Atwan, G. Dardess, P. Rosenthal, (eds)  Divine Inspiration  The Life of Jesus in World Poetry, Oxford University Press, 1998 , p. 7

Last week we got news that the brother and sisters of our boys, Patrick and Christian, have been refused visa’s to join us here in Canada.  All we and their parents would like is for them to be able to get a good education.  It  is hard to do that in the Congo, even though their father makes big sacrifices to provide for the best education he can.  This is especially true for the girls and I believe the girls are the biggest worry for Jacques now.  The boy can possibly make it through school, but for girls – getting an education is frought with huge risks – all the demands that can be made on young women in a sexually promiscuous society. 

The news we were afraid would throw the brothers into despair has been taken in stride so far.  But we know that they are disappointed and frustrated by the seeming injustices that are heaped upon those from Africa who apply for any sort of entry into Canada – even if it is just for a visit.  The judgement is usually made that there is not enough reason for the person to return to Africa.  Sometimes they are right but in this case, we feel they are deciding the case based on presuppositions. 

So we have about two months to ask for an appeal.  I guess we will do that.  More paper work ahead!