So, this morning my friend Robin sent me a link to a cartoonist’s blog name Jon Birch. I spent a few minutes looking over some of his past posts; chuckling at times, thinking at times, and even getting a little irritated. His work is definitely thought provoking and very difficult to dismiss. You should check it out!
One of his cartoons caught my eye and made me think about a conversation I had with my friend Tim a few weeks ago. Read more…
No food allowed.
Why does fasting make time feel like it’s going slow?
Okay, so let me explain what’s going on in my head and heart these days. I think God wants me to fast for a while this summer, and I don’t want to.
Last Monday, Carrie and I, and the kids all headed down to Toronto to visit the Science Centre for a family day. As we were heading down the Don Valley Parkway, we drove by a skyscraper that had some window washers hanging off the side of the building. These workers weren’t the ones that get to stand in those big huge metal cages, but instead they were sitting on what looked like an old wooden swing hanging hundreds of feet above the pavement below. I was pumped. I said to Carrie, that I would love to get a part-time job doing that in Toronto. The truth is, I would probably even do it for free, just for the thrill of getting to rappel down the side of a building like that. I was telling my friend Tim about that and he just quivered. See, Tim is uncomfortable with heights. I was going to say that he is afraid of heights, but that’s not really true anymore. This summer he’s been working on the roof of a house he’s building, so that’s helped a little with his fear of heights, so I’d say that he’s graduated to just being extremely uncomfortable with heights. We all have different fears. Read more…
Why Worry?
I woke up last night at about 4:00 am with my head spinning. You see I’m the pastor of a small church here in Barrie, but we’re a small church with BIG dreams. The problem is that BIG dreams often take BIG money, and that’s not something we have in abundance. The down turn in the economy has definitely been felt by our congregation and we’ve seen a few of our family lose their jobs in the last few months. This is worrisome. Don’t get me wrong. For such a small congregation, we are very sacrificial givers, especially when it means helping someone else out of a tight spot. What has been keeping me up is how we’re going to be able to really move forward and see some of our BIG dreams come to fruition. So I worry.
I guess I’ve also found myself thinking about whether or not I will be enough as a leader to see our BIG dreams happen? Do I have the skills it will take? Do I have the confidence, the wisdom, the energy it will take? These are all questions that I worry about.
So today I opened up my bible and turned to Matthew chapter six and started reading. For ten verses Jesus goes on to talk about the foolishness of worry, culminating in a rather blunt statement:
“Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
I guess the truth is, all my worrying doesn’t accomplish much at all really, except to make me tired today. Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t exactly the kind of place that God likes to keep us just so we always remember that it’s God who does the work anyways. Yesterday I was reading the book, “Plan B” by Anne Lamott and she says, “that God loves to use the impossible because it requires the miraculous.” Well, if that’s the case, then God is going to love using me.
