The Rascally Wit of A Sometimes Unhappy and Unprincely Man

HOW ELSE but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

I love this Victorian Era Dandy.
He sure knew how to tweak the cheeks of the most dour matron to entice a guilty smile.

He spent time in Reading Goal (Jail) for corrupting a youth and offending the pride of the Marquis de Queensbury (ironically the Marquis was a no-holds-barred barroom brawler when it came to the legal ring).
In our day Oscar would be guilty of the crime of sexual abuse because his young lover was not only a male but a tender-aged young'un as well.
So while I love the rascally heart of this strangely spiritual prodigal profligate, I in no way see his imprisonment as a martyrdom or an undeserved punishment.




















But I do love his twinkling wit and his life long battle with the angels.
Apparently the man who wrote 2 of the most beautiful and spiritual children's stories ever devised (The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince) was caught by those angels as he lay dying in Parisian exile.
He received entrance into the kingdom through the water of Catholic baptism, the prayer of contrition, and the priestly administration of last rites .
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
I for one (if I make it) will delight in meeting this rascally sinner in the garden of paradise.

Chuck Colson On Paying Our Over Due Bills

http://www.informz.net/pfm/archives/archive_347764.html

'The Unpaid Bills of the Church'
or
'HUG A WICCAN THIS ALL HALLOW'S EVE'

October 31, 2006
"Imagine losing all your friends at once," a woman named Margaret Ann told Catherine Edwards Sanders, the author of Wicca's Charm. Margaret Ann was talking about her decision to leave her Baptist faith and become a Wiccan during her college years. "My family ganged up on me and refused to discuss it with me at all," she recalls.
Sanders adds, "All of her friends, except one, deserted her. Not one of the members of the Christian group [on campus] bothered to ask why she liked Wicca. . . . Other Christian students would only talk to her to tell her that they were praying for her."
At another point in the book, Sanders tells the story of what happened to a group of Wiccans in Orange County. As they were practicing a sunrise ritual, a group of Christians surrounded the Wiccans with their cars and blared loud Christian rock music at them.
What's wrong with this picture?..................................

As I said yesterday, Sanders writes that many Wiccans were driven to their religion in the first place by the actions of Christians—like some women who were treated like "second-class citizens" in their churches, and turned to Wicca. Art Lindsley of the C. S. Lewis Institute says that Wicca and other forms of neo-Paganism are a result of "the unpaid bills of the church." The Church is supposed to be a place where everyone is treated with dignity and respect. Our whole worldview is built on the idea of a loving God who created every person in His own image. When we fail to put that worldview into practice, people lose interest in Christianity. ..........................

So how should we as Christians reach out to Wiccans? For one thing, we can take time to study and understand what they believe and the issues that are really important to them—issues like the environment. We don't have to worship the earth to understand why many Wiccans are so concerned about it. But even more importantly, we must live out our own worldview through our actions, treating all people with love and respect. He whom you would change, remember, you must first love, as Martin Luther King, Jr., taught us. And if we do this, we will start paying some of those unpaid bills ourselves.

Beautiful is the moment

Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can do only as much as God makes us able to; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.- Archbishop Oscar Romero, from his last homily, March 23, 1980



The next day, March 24 1980, a right wing death squad burst into the cathedral and gunned Bishop Romero down as he officiated Mass.

He is worthy of a Beautiful People post. I will have to get onto it when I revive the Beautiful People string.

stay tuned.


My 2 cents

The words, the life, and the death speak for themselves.
(martyr means witness.)

Bishop Romero is a hero of the faith,
need I say more?
I love this because I need to know that whatever I accomplish in life, whatever I can contribute, whatever I have, whatever I am is all in God and if my life appears to be a small hill of beans, it is God's hill, and that is enough to make it significant and even beautiful in its own way.

Announcing a NEW Feature

I am starting a new series of posts. You may recall my 'Beautiful People' series using the theme of suffering yet faithful people who exemplified loving commitment and authentic lives. I'll get back to that again in the future but today I am embarking on a new series featuring some of my favourite quotations. Of course many of my favourite quotes come from the 'authentically Beautiful People' I admire...could it be any other way?

I will try to add my 2 cents worth to explain why I like these particular sayings or teachings...but only about 2 pennies worth per quote.

My verbosity on plentitudiness occasions preceding this individual module of infinitesimal time has known no bounds or satiety.

That has got to stop.



Here is my personal guarantee:

"2 cents or it is free!"


"LOSS IS TRANSFORMATIVE if it is met with faith. Faith is our chance to make sense of loss, to cope with the stone that rolls around in the hollow of our stomachs when something we loved, something we thought was forever, is suddenly gone."
David J. Wolpe, Making Loss Matter

About today's quote:
Meaning is very meaningful to me.

Suffering can undermine our experience of meaning but it may also be full of deep mystery (aka obscured meaning).




anyone need a refund?

THIS TIME BEING STOOD UP IS A GOOD THING

Tuesday, October 25, 2006

‘STAND UP’ Count Reaches 23,542,614!

By now you should have heard about the amazing response to the 'STAND UP' campaign that took place a week-and-a-half ago. In case you didn’t, let me share what happened.

In 24 hours on October 15-16, over 23 million people in more than 100 countries collectively called on their governments to bring an end to world poverty! Guinness Book of Records officials called it, "the largest single coordinated movement of people in the history of the Guinness World Record."

Micah Challenge organized church participation in the worldwide campaign, which saw participants from Ghana to Zimbabwe, from Canada to the Emirates, and from Indonesia to Togo taking part.

In Jaipur, India 38,000 cricket fans “stood up” at the start of the India vs England match. In Mexico, several hundred thousand people stood up at football matches led by nine Football Clubs. Hundreds of thousands stood together for one minute at an anti-poverty music concert in Mbare slums in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. And thousands more stood in Times Square, New York, all declaring their support for the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which all 191 UN nations signed onto in the year 2000.

In Sierra Leone, the 'Stand Up' weekend started with a seminar attended by 52 church leaders. Over 500 churches participated in the 'STAND UP'.

In this country, Canadians stood in centres large and small, in churches and parks and schools from Courtenay to Capreol and Charlottetown, from Thunder Bay to Tillsonburg and Toronto. While over 50,000 Canadians were officially recorded, many others also took part. In so doing, they gave a clear message to our leaders to uphold the promises they made in 2000.

It’s a message they need to hear! While a number of nations have increased their Official Development Assistance to 0.7% of GNI as promised, Canada is still only at 0.32%. I truly believe that for a country blessed with so much, it’s time we did the honourable thing. We need to step up to the plate.

Cutting world poverty in half by 2015 and raising the percent of foreign aid giving to 0.7% of GNI were two of the key promises all UN nations agreed to.

The phenomenal response to the ‘STAND UP’ campaign sends a clear message. People care. Canadians care! And I would add, “So does God!”

As we approach the MDG target date of 2015, I assure you that Micah Challenge Canada will be working hard to make that point on behalf of the world’s poor.

In the spirit of Micah 6:8

Paul Robinson
National Coordinator
Micah Challenge Canada
519-688-9445 (o)
paulrobinson@micahchallenge.ca
www.micahchallenge.ca (Canada)
www.micahchallenge.org (International)

“And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” – Micah 6:8
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Review of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion.

From the London Review of Books.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday...................................

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.
A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that........................................
Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need..............................................................
Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.
Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. .........................................................
Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)
Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.
The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. ..........................................
Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism....................................................

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. .....................................................

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals................................................................

The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

A Simple Skeptic's Faith, A Sinful Skeptic's Hope

If someone needs to believe the Bible literally, verbatim and from cover to cover to be a Christian then I don't think any reasonably fair-minded and somewhat educated person could say that Christian faith as proclaimed by most Evangelicals is still an option in our day.

I sympathize with the 'integrity dilemma' many educated and morally concerned people face. It isn't easy to be a believer in 2006 (although I expect it was not all that easy in AD 33). To understand things about the world, history, science and life makes it practically impossible to have the kind of faith that many in the Evangelical world say is needed to be saved. Demanding assent to things that are not true has made the Evangelical faith inaccessible to many honest seekers and skeptics.
It is too hard for me too, but I still confess my faith in Christ. Reading about Jesus in the gospels gives me good reason to declare that God was definitively revealed in the person of Jesus. According to the gospels Jesus taught world-shattering things, he showed a way to break down false barriers of condemnation and rejection, pride and self-delusion, and in short he turned his world (and ours) upside down. In the gospels encounter an internally consistent story (little details that don’t exactly jive really don’t excite or bother me) that tells us about a man who died a horrible death with humility, love and dignity, and who (according to witnesses under pain and execution of death testified to its reality) arose to transform the lives of individuals and empires. The story indicates that He can and hopefully will do this again.
Such is my faith but it is not an entirely good fit with most of contemporary Evangelical Christianity because it centres on Jesus to the extent that it ignores the flotsam and jetsam thrown up in the wake of an evolving progressive revelation that God is unfolding and has been unfolding for the past 15+or- billion years and even beyond time itself.
IMHO much of Old and even New Testament writings are not God's word to us today (and I don't believe all of it was God's word to those contemporary with its composition. Even Jesus taught that much that was considered law was provided by man's hardness of heart and not God's heart and purpose. Paul himself declared that at least some of his teaching was not conclusively and indisputably from God. i.e. and “I THINK I have the spirit.”1 Corinthians 7:40)

We are not going to find incontrovertible evidence of comic book 'poofing creation’. We are not going to find proof that every story in the Bible (indeed even many of those written as historical accounts) will be proven by or even strongly supported by archaeological evidence or convincing inference. We will not likely get the powers of magic that charlatans say they have and that we are supposed to possess.
We will continue to live in a story of God's activity that doesn't lend itself to the kind of incontrivertible proof that some skeptics say they need in order to believe or that many false teachers say is available if we only believe what they teach.

What we have is different. It is the teaching, life, and person of Jesus Christ.

If the words of Jesus do not reach into a person's heart, where our creaturely frame, our frail broken emotions, and our innate mysterious ‘God image’ meet, then faith will be impossible for that person in this life.


HOWEVER;
My understanding of Jesus character tells me that those who genuinely want to know but can not 'get it’ now may very well be given a witness that is sufficient to divide sheep from goat, heaven gifted from hell deserving. Perhaps that witness is the what we call the Holy Spirit and may be that ‘lighted figure’ referred to by people speaking of their near death experiences (NED's). That witness will be our last and best opportunity to see Truth face to face and either chose to humble our selves before it and receive it or to pridefully reject it.
I am not an easy evangelical but I do believe Jesus did teach that it all comes down to this moment of decision. Will we humble ourselves before Him (not before preachers, teachers, evangelists, church leaders, men stealers and those who make merchandise of believers) and acknowledge our need for Him and his mercy and forgiveness or will we insist that our ways are better than the offered grace? In this I am Evangelical through and through.

Grace remains the key and it extends to the interstices between life and death itself. This grace will be equally available to Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, rich man, poor man, wiseman, fool, genius, mentally challenged and all other category of humanity. In that moment of final decision, if God is gracious (and I believe that is the message of Jesus, that God is gracious) then all for whom faith has been impossible in this life will have a chance to see and believe. If they can surrender any bitterness or unforgiveness towards God for the pain in our unfolding creation and the cloudiness of our perceptions in this life, then I expect that they will receive God’s forgiveness, which has been provided to all in Jesus Christ.
To hopeful skeptics and uncertain believers everywhere I want to say that, if get I ‘there’, if there is a ‘there’ to get to, I expect to see most of you ‘there’. At least I hope so, and I think I may have the spirit (but that is a matter of faith isn’t it?) so it may very well be true but only time will tell.

LH

A New Exodus

David Beckman, president and CEO of Bread for the World.

"Hundreds of millions of people who are desperately poor are finding ways to improve their livelihoods and feed their children," he said. But as Beckman noted, "The biggest challenge facing evangelicals is to participate in this GREAT EXODUS, to be aware God is rescuing lots of people from poverty and to help make it happen."
"I hope we see dramatic progress," Beckman said. "I hope it doesn't take 50 years."


I hope so too.

Out of the Bitterness of Death Comes a Certain Sweetness (a riddle)

Judges 14:14 (King James Version)
14And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days expound the riddle.

In the story of Sampson we are given an anecdote about a time that the great Hebrew strongman tore apart a Lion with his bare hands. After returning to the scene of the struggle he found a beehive inside the carcass. He reached in and pulled out a handful of honey that he ate with great satisfaction.
On his return to town he challenged his adversaries to solve a riddle he devised from the experience he just had.

Unfortunately his lover betrayed the secret and told his enemies the answer and so Sampson had to make good on the bet.

Of course he, being the impetuous, hot tempered boy he was, set about tying the tails of foxes together, setting them on fire and letting them loose to burn all the Philistine's crops.
PETA would not likely make Sampson a poster boy for their cause in a million years.

Anyway I have had an experience like this recently.

I was reading about a young pastor and his wife from Saskatchewan who suffered a great tragedy over the past weekend.
Shantelle the Pastor's wife had been battling cancer and it had appeared that she had a remarkable (dare we say miraculous recovery) but over the weekend she suffered a brain aneurysm and died suddenly.
It is one of those things that make you wonder what kind of joke life really is.

But when I went to Shantelle's blog I discovered that on the Thanksgiving weekend (Oct. 9 in Canada) she had posted a piece that so moved my heart.

Her death is making many, many people look at her blog and grieve. But it is also showing those who look with insight, that here is a sweetness even in the belly of death. Perhaps you will see something beautiful in that deep, deep sorrowful place.

Please visit her blog and look over the videos that the bitter news of her death led me to discover.

http://prairierascal.spaces.live.com/blog/

Behold, Out of Bitter Death Comes Bitter Sweetness.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D52rJd9GX10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXipk9yEtaE

Disability, Pain, Rejection, Disappointment I have known a little of each but here is a story that Makes God Seem Real in this World such as it

FATHER and SON

From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay For their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4B-r8KJhlE

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in Marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a Wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and Pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.
Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back Mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. On a bike. Makes Taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?
And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life.This love story began in Winchester , Mass. , 43 years ago, when Rick Was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him Brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.
"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'' Dick says doctors told him And his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. ``Put him in an Institution.''
But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes Followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was Anything to help the boy communicate. ``No way,'' Dick says he was told. ``There's nothing going on in his brain.''
"Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a Lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed Him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his Head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? ``Go Bruins!'' And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the School organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, ``Dad, I want To do that.''
Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described ``porker'' who never ran More than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he Tried. ``Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. ``I was sore For two weeks.''
That day changed Rick's life. ``Dad,'' he typed, ``when we were running, It felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!''
And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly Shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
``No way,'' Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a Single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few Years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then They found a way to get into the race Officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the Qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, ``Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?''
How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he Was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick Tried.
Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii . It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud Getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you Think?
Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? ``No way,'' he says. Dick does it purely for ``the awesome feeling'' he gets seeing Rick with A cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best Time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world Record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to Be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the Time.
``No question about it,'' Rick types. ``My dad is the Father of the Century.''
And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a Mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries Was 95% clogged. ``If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' One doctor told him, ``you probably would've died 15 years ago.'' So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.
Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass. , always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day.
That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.
``The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, ``is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.''
And the video is below....




DON'T MISS THIS VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4B-r8KJhlE



it will rend your heart and make you beieve that perhaps, just perhaps love is at the centre of the universe and it is the most powerful and important thing we will ever know...........and it is enough!

An Inappropriate Use of the Fine Art of Story Telling

Inappropriate

The Road to Emmaus (Where does it lead?)

Duccio di Buoninsegna. Maestà (back, central panel): The Road to Emmaus. 1308-11. Tempera on wood panel. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena, Italy











Emmaus is a village about seven miles from Jerusalem. It became known thanks to an episode confirming Christ's Resurrection and described in St. Luke's Gospel (24:13-35).

After all the unhappy events of the trial, Crucifixion and Entombment of Christ, two of the apostles were going from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus. Christ resurrected joined them and asked about the subject of their conversation. They did not recognize Christ, and told him about the death of Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet 'mighty in deed', about their sadness, and grief, and puzzlement after the women had found the tomb of Christ empty. "How dull you are!' he answered. 'How slow to believe all that the prophets said! Was not the Messiah bound to suffer in this way before entering upon his glory?' Then, starting from Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them in the whole of scripture the things that referred to himself." (Luke 24:25-27). By that time they had reached the village, and the travellers asked Christ to stay for supper with them. Christ accepted their invitation to a meal. "And when he had sat down with them at the table, he took bread and said the blessing; he broke the bread, and offered it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; but he vanished from their sight" (Luke 24:30-31). Without a moment's delay the two returned to Jerusalem, found and announced Christ's Resurrection to other disciples



Are you traveling to Emmaus with the unrecognized Christ?

More From Brother Mennos (Evangelical Extraordinaire)

"The regenerated do not go to war, nor engage in strife. They are children of peace who have beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning forks, and know no war. ... Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed, walls and gates broken down, and human blood shed in torrents like water. But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed. ... Christ is our fortress; patience our weapon of defense; the Word of God our sword. ... Iron and metal spears and swords we leave to those who, alas, regard human blood and swine’s blood of well-nigh equal value."


"We who were formerly no people at all, and who knew of no peace, are now called to be ... a church ... of peace. True Christians do not know vengeance. They are the children of peace. Their hearts overflow with peace. Their mouths speak peace, and they walk in the way of peace."

Evangelical Faith (Amish, Mennonite and Jesus Style)

Sometime ago I posted a piece called
Evangelical Essentials, a "quadrilateral of priorities"
In it I wondered if I could be classified as an evangelical believer. I took comfort in the fact that I still shared the 4 priorities that others had established as minimum for membership.

In this post I take even greater encouragement in a wonderful quote from one of the founders of the Anabaptist pacifist tradition, which include the Mennonite and Amish Sects.

Listen to this great man of God and decide if our modern evangelical priorities are an affirmation or an affront to Mennos's definition of Evangelical Faith.


"True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people."
- Menno Simons

Is this who we are?
Is this what we want to be to the world
and to each other?


I hope so.

Gathering Scattered Thoughts On the Way to Emmaus

On the Road to EMMAUS the disciples could not discern to whom they were speaking.

I contend that we don't have any better eyesight or insight in our time.

Jesus is still in our midst, right before us, in plain sight and yet He is almost completely invisible to most of us who claim to be His disciples.

Everyday, Jesus comes to us in the distressing disguise of the poor, the suffering, and the rejected and we fail to see Him. Fail to honour Him. Fail to fellowship with Him. Fail to love Him.

He is longing for one true act of communion, when in breaking of the bread we finally ‘rightly discern the body’. The present and imminent reality of Christ is in our midst.

Can we not see?
Can we not hear?
Will we not respond?

Perhaps this seeing, and hearing, and responding will be the fulfillment of our salvation because finally we shall see Him as He is and we shall become like Him.

‘Behold your prince comes riding humbly upon a donkey, a cart, a cot, a stretcher, a wheelchair or limping alone on this road of rejection?’

Can you not stand to behold the presence of God in your midst?

‘When ye do it unto the least of these my brethren (fellow sufferers) ye do it UNTO ME!’

The mathematical equation is the simplest one possible. It says the suffering ARE Christ in our midst, yet we walk by Him everyday, too selfish, too insensitive, too preoccupied with our’ more weighty matters’, too proud and too self absorbed to see or to acknowledge Him.

When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen the things that remain?


Isaiah 40:3-5 (King James Version)

3The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:
5And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

Hebrews 12:12-14 (King James Version)
12Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees;
13And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed.

The stone the builders rejected has become the corner

What has been highly exalted in men’s eyes is abhorrent in God’s sight.

Be careful if ye think ye stand lest ye fall.

When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen the things that remain?
When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen the things that remain?
When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen the things that remain?
When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen the things that remain?
When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen the things that remain?
When will we rouse from our stupor and strengthen.........
When will we rouse from our stupor............
When will we rouse .............
When..........
..........................................................................................................................?

LH

A Random World of Good and Evil

How can one make sense of a world such as ours and a race of creatures such as us?

Sometimes we fool ourselves into believing that we have seen it all. A random shooting at a senior high school in Montreal, or a well planned and effectively executed killing spree in Columbine, or 'God Lovers/men haters' flying planes into the Twin Towers, or assorted genocides, ethnic cleansings, wars of all descriptions and madmen with nuclear capabilities, we breath a sigh and suck up our strength to carry on. But then we remember a tsunami of unprecedented destruction, hurricanes and floods destroying entire cities, AIDS orphaning an entire continent and the despair of poverty over the majority of mankind.

Sigh.

And what about the cute little boy around the corner who whose ugly tumours and even uglier treatments disfigured and tormented him for months till finally the disease tired of toying with his little body and his family's hearts and mercifully snuffed the breath of life completely out of him?
Can we take anymore of this?

Like Bruce Coburn in his song Tokyo we complain to God:"Why'd you have to show me that accident scene? Didn't I get enough shaking up?"

We try to comfort ourselves by saying surely we have seen the worst that life can show us and perhaps we can doggedly and blindly stagger on while holding to our faith in an activist and good and powerful God.

But then comes the Amish School House Massacre. This twisted plot to capture, sexually molest and torture little girls before killing them seems to puts an end to our simple faith that God is watching over and caring for and intervening on behalf of sparrows, and lilies and little innocent girls in their modest powder blue dresses.

If God Is, and if He Loves us, How can these innocent children be dead?

When we have thought that human beings have plumbed the ugliest depths of depravity and that there cannot be any lower regions into which a beast or a man can descend, we now have this new unimaginable act of human degeneracy.


It has never been easy to believe in a God who intervenes to defend the innocent and the weak as many would teach is promised in the pages of scripture and sometimes we let ourselves hope that this might still be the case. We try to tell ourselves that if only we looked deeply enough into the present situation or if we hold on in faith a future revelation will reveal the true mercy at the heart of this unexplainable tragedy and perhaps our faith will be justified.

I don't know what to think of it all but I am certain it is impossible to make the propositions of a simplistic, triumphalist Christian faith fit rationally and consistently over the facts of life on God's Green Earth.

The most I can say is that I hope for redemption of this evil.

I am a Christian largely based on my inability and unwillingness to live in a world of unredeemed suffering. Somehow the price of pain exacted upon innocent infants and children, and not so innocent children and adults must be for the purchase of something of ultimate and overarching worth. Because if all this suffering is really for nothing then we all should find an appropriately high ledge, climb upon it, and step away from this wall of pain.

But I can't do that because Jesus has assured us that the worst word is not the Last Word nor the Greatest Word.

I think Christianity still has something we need to hear because of Jesus and Jesus alone. No other figure addresses the mystery of suffering as well as that of this tortured man, hung naked upon a tree, dying between two thieves. That is why I stand before you as a person who believes that if any meaning can be found, it will be found in this man called Jesus.

I have come to believe (hope, really) that the redemption story is still in process of unfolding and life is worth living because the crucifixion of Jesus is not past only. It is past, present and future as well.

The continuing crucifixion is this unexplained and unmerited suffering we see all around us. It is the revelation of the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, in the screams of the women and children of Darfur as they are burned alive in their thatch huts; in the flailing, falling man who in his desperation to escape the 'hell fires' of the burning Towers, hurtles himself 100 stories down to concrete below; and in the bodies of those little Amish schoolgirls as they lay bleeding by the blackboard; and in the broken hearts of gentle, simple folk as they gathered outside the pastoral one-room Pennsylvania school house.

I hope we never see another 'crucifixion' again but I expect we shall awake another day, probably in the not too distant future, and learn of a fresh atrocity so unimaginably evil that it makes the Amish Horror pale in comparison.

If this is not the fellowship of his sufferings and the revelation of Jesus (as the least of these) being physically present to us, then absurdity, and chaos, and death rule at the centre of the universe. And if this is so, then oblivion is better than life.

Where can we find hope or meaning in this absurd world, in this Random World of Good and Evil?

The storyteller who gave us the book of Job painted a picture that makes more sense of the world as it is revealed to us in the morning news and in the revelation of the life of Jesus in the Gospels. In this most profound book, the author reveals a universe that is in a struggle of titanic proportions. The accuser of 'man to God' and of 'God to man', Satan, comes before God to undermine the Lord's attachment to His creation. Satan does this by denigrating the pinnacle of creation, Job a truly righteous man.
Job is accused of loving God only for the things that God provides thereby declaring Job a fickle mercenary and not a faithful and loving servant. He calls him a 'prosperity gospeler'. This denigrates the man Job, all of the rest of creation, and subtly by logical extension it also slanders the author of this creation as well.

God allows the testing of Job to unfold.

In the struggle that ensues it appears that God can in no way refute Satan's vile claims other than to let Job's suffering continue unabated, unaided, unsuccoured.

If we hold to God's foreknowledge and Omniscience we know that God knew the outcome but for some mysterious reason it was necessary for Satan to witness the steadfastness of Job's integrity in suffering even when no help was given and as the Accuser continued to pour contempt upon Job's and God's integrity.

Apparently God needed Job and Job's suffering.

Perhaps He needs ours as well.

We cannot understand why, but it seems to me that we either believe this or we surrender all belief in the face of the suffering we see so abundantly in the world.

The murderer of the Amish children lost a child at birth and apparently he used this as an excuse to avenge himself on God by sexually assaulting and killing innocent children. He reasoned that since God allowed his daughter to die he was justified in molesting, torturing and killing.
If this is not satanic logic and satanic power then tell me what natural cause exists that can make animals act in this way?

This man suffered an evil (the loss of his premature child) but because it was not redeemed by faith and integrity it was used by a greater evil to magnify that suffering and to deliver it upon even less deserving folks.

It appears that in this struggle the devil has won.

But then there are the other ones who suffered in this tragedy. We are now hearing about the Amish grandfather who stood with the surviving children outside the schoolhouse telling the little ones that they must forgive this evil and not think harshly about the man who did it, and about the grieving mother who has invited the family of the perpetrator to come to their child's funeral so they can receive support, comfort and love among the families of the little girls who have just been viciously murdered.



What are we to make of these strange reports?

I think that in the courts of heaven the accuser declared victory earlier this week when first he displayed the bodies the dead children in Newspaper and Television reports around the world. But perhaps today he has had to ask for an adjournment now that the pleas of the Amish families for forgiveness and mercy, not hatred and vengeance, have been presented before the hosts of heaven and the world.

I could not have reacted like these dear Amish families have. I could not have given God a case to present before the hosts that would deny Evil a victory over Good.

But I do see that perhaps there is hope that someday a final victory, a final overturning of the accusations, a final redemption will be won when you and I and the rest of humanity can emulate our Amish brothers and sisters.

God Bless those who suffer and do not hate. They are 'Jesus' in our midst and I believe they are a part of the mysterious necessity that may yet be mankind's Salvation.

It is a hope that is as close to faith as I can see on a distant and obscure spiritual horizon. A horizon that still shows the silhouette of a cross upon a hill. Dark as it is, there is a sun rising (not setting) behind that hill. When that sun has fully risen , I believe that the shadows and the darkness will be become light and the resurrection will be more than a story in our heads about something that happened 2000 years ago.

LH

SIGN IN A " CANADIAN " BUSINESS WINDOW

"WE WOULD RATHER DO BUSINESS WITH 1000 AL QAEDA TERRORISTS, THAN WITH ONE SINGLE CANADIAN"

This sign was prominently displayed in the window of a business in Hamilton, Ontario. You are probably outraged at the thought of such an inflammatory statement. One would think that good Canadians from all across the country would be marching on this business and that the RCMP might have to be called to keep the angry crowds back. But, perhaps in these stressful times one might be tempted to let the proprietors simply make their statement . . We are a society which holds Freedom of Speech as perhaps one of our greatest liberties. And after all, it is just a sign.

You may ask what Canadian business would dare post such a sign?

Answer: DODSWORTH AND BROWN, Funeral Home (Who said morticians had no sense of humor?)