Ending Well

So much has happened that it seems crazy to even try to explain. Let’s just say that I have had a wonderful time in Netherlands and I am sad that it is coming to an end. I have learned so much about myself and I have been doing my best to take advantage of this time of rest and exploration, but frankly I have also been having so much fun.

I have been to Köln, Germany, Christmas parties, celebrating birthdays, visiting cathedrals, and dancing with gypsies interlaced with a plethora of laughs. I have to say that all of these things have happened randomly, without provocation. Through all of this I have made some amazing friends, some

I feel I am destined to know for long time, others it may have been for this time to help me hold together my breaking heart while it healed. Although I said many tear-filled goodbyes yesterday, I am so grateful to all the gentle souls that I was able to love and who loved me. Maybe it was fate, or luck, but I have to say it was amazing.

I hope that you have as much fun in the new year as I had in the last few weeks.

Season's Greetings

12 More Shopping Days!

I found these items. If you are desperate for a gift these might do.



Biker Jesus...riding high!




Mother Mary Memory Stick

Airplane Spirituality

My friend Wes White wrote this and posted it on Open Source Theology. I just love the way he thinks.


I only just recently returned home to Glasgow, Scotland after a long three week trip to the USA that included four multiple-leg airline flights. On Monday coming, I fly once again to Amsterdam, The Netherlands only to turn around on Wednesday and fly back. So I'm learning a lot about what I now refer to as "airplane spirituality." Here's just a couple thoughts on it for your consideration. (There might even be a bit of application hidden within.)

1) Traveling on airplanes reminds us that healthy Christian spirituality is as earthy as it gets. On long overseas flights, human beings have the audacity to develop bad breath, for example. Some actually bring along brush and paste and hazard the experience of minuscule airplane toilets in order to retain some semblance of hygiene. But most simply resort to popping mints, spraying sprays, or freely engaging various other forms of cover-up. Suddenly liberality with chewing gum finds itself in vogue. But it is all an attempt to mask something that we really need not hide. Being human is earthy, and in that is glory. St. Augustine ( City of God, bk.9, ch.1) referred to it as the blessed recognition that we are "intermediate beings," finding ourselves most truly when we happily locate ourselves somewhere between the beasts and the angels. Humans who affirm their "intermediateness" are able to appreciate the baser as well as the more sublime aspects of life, and to find God in the mix of both. My friend, Rodney Clapp, puts it this way: "Christian spirituality comprehends not only the sparkle in our eyes but the grime under our fingernails." (Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders, 177.)

2) I am regularly amazed at the contorted bodily positions people can assume in order to seek a bit of sleep on a long flight, especially when the plane is full to capacity. Sleeping is otherwise a rather private affair where drools and snores and involuntary escapes of bodily gases are preferably protected from public attention. Not so in the cramped spaces that usually define the intimate communion of long-distance flight. Some who would generally never be seen with a hair out of place soon give in to unbelievable displays of tangles and tousles out of sheer desperation to resemble an horizontal posture. It is intimate communion indeed! After all, at the end of a long and crowded flight we have all slept together. But it reminds us that spirituality, Christian spirituality particularly, cannot be healthy if it is only a private matter. In fact, Christian spirituality proves its muster by its sociality, for we claim that all humanity derives its essence from the Trinitarian God who is socially defined. Miroslav Volf and others ( see, for example, God's Life in Trinity ) have been reminding us of late about the perichoretic nature of God's own sociality. I am more and more convinced that one of the best ways to both demonstrate and test the genuineness of the give and take of perichoresis is by attempting to sleep on airplanes, where community is voluntary to be sure, yet anything but arbitrary.

True spirituality is earthy. True spirituality is social. God, I think, is discovered and experienced in both. So don't be afraid to fly.

Remembering Connie

Two days ago would have been a friend’s 43^rd birthday and last September would have marked 19 years of friendship. Sadly my friend Connie passed away two years ago.

I always remembered her birthday because it is on the 8^th of December, the Holy Day of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (10 years of Catholic education sticks with you). We always had a chuckle at such a coincidence because believe me we were not saints! Connie was the kind of friend who loved life and laughter, she always lived full of zest and joie de vie, I guess that is why it is so hard to accept that so many of her last years shared by an entity that slowly stole her life. My dear friend Connie struggled with Hodgkin’s Disease for many years before it took her last breathe.

I could always count on her to listen and make me feel that I could call on some secret confidence. For years I watched her pull courage out of her sleeve on numerous occasions - she was one of the most self-assured people I have ever met. She never claimed to have all the answers, but she was determined to grapple with the questions until a solution materialized. When we were in our teens her passion was to be a great mother, and was not afraid to let people know even though we grew up in an environment that told us girls that we could do and be anything. She somehow knew that she was signing up for the toughest job on earth, and made no apologies when people tried to get her aspire to loftier pursuits. Connie did go on to get a degree and work with mentally handicapped adults, but that were just what she did not who she was. She loved her children with all her heart and excelled as a matriarch. Connie also valiantly faced teenage pregnancy and adoption in high school, a painful annulment and single-parenting before she began her fight against cancer.

Most of all I miss her laugh. Connie was filled with so much of it and our friend Jennifer and I loved to coax it out of her. We were known to spontaneously combust with giddiness as we constantly found ways to entertain ourselves and others. Mostly we were just three silly girls, who used our laughter to carry us through the pain and hardships of teenage misery and young adulthood. Even latter in life when you found two or three of us together there was always laughter as we remembered the great mouse burger caper, being locked in the choir closet and late night excursions after pizza night. We always talked about the serious things of life too, but all too often the eyes of children and spouses rolled as they tried to decipher a story between the peals of chuckles and tears. It kept the little women in us alive and allowed us to touch something innocent within our hearts as we faced a world that was not always kind to dreamers.

For the past two days, I have been thinking about my friend and missing her voice and smile. I was fortunate enough to speak with her about a week before she died and I can remember the conversation like it was yesterday. Her breathing was laboured but she wanted to talk and share what had conspired in our lives in the months since we seen each other last. We shared life our while expressing gratitude and love. She sounded so strong at the time recently returning home with a good prognosis; I never thought that I would not see her again.

I guess I am missing her for selfish reasons as I am in transition and she was one of those people you could just laugh with about your predicament. Today I caught myself laughing out loud as I recalled some of our stunts, right in the middle of considering some proposals for my future. I must have needed to take the edge of the stress, and like a true friend she was there in my heart, helping me to laugh at my fate and reminding me to enjoy where I am at this moment.

I miss you girlfriend.

From Delusion to Decision

I am re-reading Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion” this week; this second go round only confirms what I felt after reading the lengthy introduction to his premise.

I am really thankful to for the professor’s honest missional tome on how this atheist views God in any form as immaterial. Unlike many theocentric writers, Dawkins was honest about his desire to convert you over to his side based upon his research and personal experience. I cannot tell you how many times I role my eyes when I pick up a book on a subject like leadership penned by a Christian compatriots who claims in his introduction that he uses Christian principles throughout the book but has no intention to sway the readers to his viewpoint. Sceptical you may say, but I tire of the subsequent use of the what I would call “Christianese” to the point that I feel like I am sitting through a sales pitch for condos in Florida while on a “free vacation.” If you want to sell me something come right out and say it, and Dawkins did.

He goes head to head with some of the more traditional tenants of apologetics and I have to say that I found myself agreeing with him more often than not. After I shared laughs with his take on what I could only see as misguided or outdated attempts to prove God is really with us, I also felt a twinge of shame. This book could another public nail in the coffin of the rational evangelical movement of Christendom that a large portion of the body is determined to resuscitate. Somehow Christianity went from a community with a purpose, to an institution, to a well guarded rationale that is deemed untouchable. Is belief so fragile that we feel the need to exempt it from testing and reshaping of our perspective? Weren’t the Bereans commended for testing the scriptures in order to get at the truth?

Many believers celebrate when science proves itself erroneous, but doesn’t that make us a bit hypocritical? After all believers endorsed crusades, slavery, the flat earth theory and much more in the name of God’s providence and gladly excommunicated, killed or silenced anyone bold enough to stand against those beliefs. Many of those traditions or schools of thought have proven false and yet there are many heels are dug firmly in the ground. Dawkins' book reminds me that we are living in a time when absolute ideas are being shattered and to speak with certainty regarding a matter of belief may be irresponsible. Faith is believing in what one cannot see or prove, so should we be so fearful of being challenged? Can’t we just say we do not know, when that is simply the case, they way that science does when she cannot find the proof for a well thought out theory?

He also addresses children, stating that until a person is of an age of critical thinking and rationale one cannot use the label Muslim, Christian, or Jewish children so easily. They can be children of Jewish parents, but in the matters of faith, they have not really chosen. I have to agree with this premise as well. Faith is not something you are born with, it is something you choose on a continual basis. It only makes sense to me that one cannot really make a choice without understanding what they are choosing to embrace and what they are letting go of. I know that it may not be possible to grasp every consequence of a decision at the time it is made, but an informed decision is made based on some sort of assessment.

Faith as I understand it is living and dynamic and should not be taken lightly nor is it for the faint-hearted. It is something other, that I am not sure I can quite explain. Even though I am making a second pass at this book, I have to say that I chose to believe, even after Mr. Dawkins’ valiant attempt to sway me otherwise. But I can say that reading his book has changed the way I believe and the way I view people who do not share those beliefs. It also affirmed my faith, yes I said affirmed, because it challenged what I accepted as truth while also giving me the words to back some things I believed to be rubbish. Even though we are still approaching life from different perspectives and disagree about some things, I did see “The God Delusion” as an invitation to re-examine faith, enter into a dialogue and an opportunity to dispense of some dead wood. It also gave me a chance to challenge my faith and decide to hold onto to it, in spite of how others might view my decisions. That is something that Dawkins’ may not have perceived, but it is the effect it had on this foolish follower.

A Night in a Pub with Friends

Upon returning to Den Haag, I walked in on the tail-end of a Christian Associates meeting filled with familiar faces. After they were done I got to exchange hugs and quick stories.

Although I was tired from my road trip, I was excited to see old friends. I could not refuse an invitation to spend time with Marty, Wes and Kevin, my 30 minute old friend. We walked to Wes’ favourite local pub to engage in some deep conversation interlaced with the sweet smell of tendered tobacco. Once we sat down we all brought out our favourite implements of relaxation – pipes for the boys and cigars for this girl.

We puffed away and got to know each other again and for the first time. Deep thoughts were shared in the form of dreams and questions while disco and 80’s music wafted through our casual atmosphere. Our words became the dance that floated on the notes of the songs as we stepped into the shallow end of the profound issues around becoming a community that is a character rich spiritually-formed kinship, steeped in a sound post-biblical theology and an intentional missional mandate. ( I am sure I have over simplified but there you have it). a conglomerate that is rich in creativity and safe for people to express their interpretation of God’s expression through their lives. Conversations like these encourage me. Talks of this nature give me the courage to make my own noise in the universe.