Category Archives: Reflections

October 30, 2010 · 8:45 am

Wisdom

From Proverbs 8 (ESV)

22 "The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work,
   the first of his acts of old.
23Ages ago I was set up,
   at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24When there were no depths I was brought forth,
   when there were no springs abounding with water.
25Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
26before he had made the earth with its fields,
   or the first of the dust of the world.
27When he established the heavens, I was there;
   when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28when he made firm the skies above,
   when he established the fountains of the deep,
29when he assigned to the sea its limit,
   so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
   rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his inhabited world
   and delighting in the children of man.

And from John 1:1-5

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

It is hard to entertain new names for God.  And yet Wisdom is not exactly a new name.  My theology prof recommended reading these two passages together as a devotional reading.  So I did and as I read, I also read with the hope behind the words of Proverbs 8: 17  “I love those who love me,  and those who seek me diligently find me.”

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Filed under Quotes, Reading, Reflections, Studying, Theology

October 26, 2010 · 7:03 am

Two Old Men

I sit beside two
Old men
Who talk.
The value of words
And music
Can’t be overestimated
Among the young,
Their students.
And my listening
In?
Does it count as
Eavesdropping?
Or is it only my
Wishing for company
And finding it
In the overhearing?

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Filed under Poetry and Stuff, Reflections

July 9, 2010 · 7:20 am

I sit here

and I ponder; how does one pass on values?  I must pass on a practice.  That is easy enough.  We begin booking patients with the new guy and I cut back my hours so that if they need treatment, they make the next appointment with him. 

But values and the uniqueness of the practice that is linked to how we care for our patients – that must be passed on too.  And can it be?  Is it learned by watching?  Or is this something that is just there inside the individual?

Fortunately, I think I have some good material to work with.  That is one of the reasons we took on this particular young guy.

I suspect there is no clear cut answer.  But it is something I must work at answering. 

So, I sit here and I ponder and pray that somehow it can be done.

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Filed under Dental, Reflections

May 20, 2010 · 10:46 am

excuses

I think I have been silent here too long. 

My excuse is that I don’t have the energy to say anything significant.

Which probably means that I need to take some time to just distance myself from the books I am studying and begin to participate in life again.  I need to watch a good movie or something. 

Maybe it is just time for a good long vacation.

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Filed under Day to Day, Reflections

April 14, 2010 · 1:07 pm

Comfort

We never seem to be free of struggles – for jobs, for safety, for our economic situations – for life itself.   It just is hard at times and way beyond our control. 

I tend to want to fix things but there are times when nothing will really repair the broken situations.

So, I guess we learn to make the best of bad situations and go on with life. 

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

– Matthew 5:4

At least I don’t have to go it all alone – and that is something I am trying very hard to hang on to right now.

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March 27, 2010 · 7:44 am

Thoughts on Creation arising out of my studies

Marc, in a recent post, mentions the whole controversy of evolution /creation. I’m really not up to arguing the validity of creation methods. In fact I think the controversy has diminished our understanding of the first few chapters of the Bible. As Christians, we hardly use these chapters for teaching because we are afraid to get into the various controversies regarding God’s methods of creation.

Recently my seminary studies have included this part of the Bible – the interpretation of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, which Genesis introduces. One of my assignments involved comparing the Creation accounts in Genesis with the Babylonian and Egyptian creation stories. I’ve known for a long time that other creation stories existed but I have never read or studied them so the assignment to dig into them was interesting. (They are challenging reading though since the stories I read are translations of some old, old records.) You can find some of them here and here.

One of the authors of a text we are using likened the familiarity with these stories, which would have been passed down orally in the history of the ancient people of the near east, to the way in which most young people would be familiar with the accounts of evolution today.

Continue reading →

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Filed under Quotes, Reading, Reflections, Studying

February 7, 2010 · 10:43 pm

My Saturday Blessing

As a congregation we go to make and serve soup about every 6 weeks or so at the Salvation Army Outpost down on Central Avenue. Yesterday this was our responsibility again. MJ was there early making the soup. I got there at about 10 am. There are things to do ahead of time – buns to cut, butter and prepare. Tables to set up, coffee and juice to make. There were about nine of us – all ages pretty much – getting ready.

We served 150 or so bowls of soup. It was great soup too. I had a bowl myself sometime in the course of the day.

At some point in the process of serving bowls of soup, I sat down to chat with an older woman who had brought her own package of what looked like chicken strips and fries. Maybe she was just there for the coffee, who knows. But she was there and not a real part of the usual street people crowd. I made some small comments about the weather asking how she was doing, etc. Just small talk to say how are you.

She began to chat, telling me about her husband who was now up in a nursing home. Perhaps her own memory not so sharp any more since she couldn’t remember the name of it, just that it was by the hospital. She had children who “followed the Lord” going on some mission trip to someplace that she couldn’t remember either. She sort of rambled on for awhile and I found myself having to make a deliberate effort to give her my attention.

I wondered a bit if I should take my leave from her and get back to my business of serving soup but she seemed lonely and needing to talk. So I figured that talking to some lonely woman was at least as important at that moment as serving someone food. So we talked and as I finally got up to go back to work, she thanked me for the visit saying, “I don’t get to talk to someone very often. I’m just an old woman and most people don’t bother to be nice.”

That was my blessing for the day.

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Filed under church, Day to Day, Reflections

February 2, 2010 · 5:39 pm

A lost boy or just a loser?

Thank God that my children are not total idiots like the young guy I saw today. He was squeezed into my full schedule as an emergency. Got in a fight Saturday in Edmonton. Says proudly that, yeah, he threw the first punch and the taxi driver is charging him. But he won – so he says.

Except he has a front tooth pushed back a few millimetres so that now he can’t really close his teeth together. And that tooth is (surprise, surprise) dead and needs a root canal and braces to realign it – or it will need to come out. Oh, yeah and a black eye.

His idea of winning is totally lost on me.

Sounds to me as if he is one big loser – or at least horribly lost.

Can’t help reflecting that this guy is so far from the kind of human being that I believe God intended any person to be. Evil comes in different forms but causing such human waste is part of how I see evil at work.

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November 11, 2009 · 8:16 pm

Acedia

I have a book that is presently my before bedtime reading; Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. Great book, especially as I see that it is an affliction (or sin) that besets me too. Last night what I read was profound. I usually don’t read stuff out loud to Leo but this was good. Acedia is often called laziness or sloth but as the author understands it, it is much more than what those words mean to me. She describes the concept of sin as something given to us to encourage us to believe that we are made in the image of God and to act accordingly. (p.114) Then she quotes the words of preacher Fred Craddock which “define the sin of sloth so clearly that it stings like a slap in the face.”

What we casually dismiss as mere laziness, he says, is “the ability to look at a starving child…with a swollen stomach and say, “Well, it’s not my kid”…Or to see an old man sitting alone among the pigeons in the park and say, “Well…that’s not my dad.”  It is that capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don’t care.

She goes on to describe some of the injustices that do happen in North America by people hardened to other’s suffering.  And then continues with this profound insight:

But even as such outrages are exposed, we are beset by a curious silence: the more that societies ills surface in such evil ways, the less able we are, it seems, to detect any evil within ourselves, let alone work effectively together to fix what is wrong.  The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre finds that while our “present age is perhaps no more evil than a number of preceding periods…it is evil in one special way at least, namely the extent to which we have obliterated …[our] consciousness of evil.” … Acedia, which is known to foster excessive self-justification, as well as a casual yet implacable judgmentalism toward others, readily lends itself to this process.  (114-115)

I had never thought of Acedia in these terms before; never thought of it as that kind of profound indifference and callousness that sets in and keeps us from keeps us from acting as people changed by Jesus.

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November 2, 2009 · 7:53 pm

I still have so much to figure out.

I am thinking through – or trying to – my personal theology of work and daily life (my understanding of God’s relationship to my world).  Trying to figure out and appreciate the activity of God in the daily parts of living; you know, my relationship with Leo, the family, visitors, the grandkids, study and work and how my faith mixes with all these things; where God is in this ordinary daily stuff and what he wants from me.

I do not have it all sorted out.  So this might just sound confused or extremely boring and I really do not want to bore you.  So skip this if you want to read someone who has it all put together.

Sixty years and I still have so much to figure out. Continue reading →

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Filed under Day to Day, Family, grandchildren, Reflections, Studying, Writings