I am excited to announce that my book, BLUEPRINT- for the Christ Follower and Collective of Christ Followers will be available next week – if you are sick of the “How-To” Christian books that look at how to decorate and landscape so that your life as a Christ follower and your collective of Christ followers (church) looks good, if you are looking for a book that helps you create a structurally sound spiritual life and church, Blueprint is for you!
We teeter on the edge, hoping and praying that things will get better. It has been a hard year for everyone and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. How many of us entered 2020 with reservations? How many of us, even the most negative of us, could have imagined what has happened? The answers to these questions really don’t matter. If you were worried, if you did imagine a year like the one we are having, what difference would it have made?
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I must apologize for not keeping up with my blog reading and writing. I hope to return to regular writing and reading next week after I am fully settled into my new job as transitional pastor at Covenant Alliance Church in Orangeville ON Canada.
Just so you don’t think I am lazing around doing nothing I have posted a link to my sermon from last week!
If I were to create a novel or a movie about my life, I would never contemplate a chapter or scene that seemed to go on forever with what appears to be no purpose or relevance to the journey. I don’t mind the unexpected twists and turns but what could only be described as meaningless pain and a whole lot of nothing doesn’t fit any Hollywood blockbuster or literary masterpiece I know of. I guess my life, other than the odd moment here and there, couldn’t be turned into a great novel or a movie. Nothing fits neatly into the template of good entertainment. Nothing lends itself to an outcome that will, as far as I can tell, justify the nothingness of waiting and the pain of life itself like we see on the screen or in a book. If my life was a TV show, movie or novel, I would, at some point fully understanding why things have gone the way they have, why answers seemed hard to come by, why suddenly and seemingly without reason, life changed for the better or worse, but I have come to accept that there will be many things this side of eternity that will remain unexplained.
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I sit and wait for God to let me in on His, up until now, secret plot for my life. I have heard it a thousand times or maybe only one hundred times, as a matter of fact I don’t know how many times I have heard it and I don’t know how many times I have preached it but I do know that yes, no or wait are the only possible answers to my requests. So I sit and wait with nothing to do but wait until wait becomes a yes or no or maybe a no not now becomes a wait a little longer or a yes for now becomes a no for later or a wait becomes a…
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It is tough to tell the difference between socialism and Christian service. It shouldn’t be, but it is. On the surface many of the programs implemented by governments to help the poor are aligned with the biblical directives about the poor. This compounded with a view that any time a government utilizes one person’s money to help another you are heading down the slippery slope into communism creates the battleground in which we find ourselves today. I live in what some Americans call a socialist country, Canada. It is interesting because most of the rest of the world would say we are capitalist. Within our country we have those who would say we are on our way to being fully socialist and possibly communist while others would say our country favours the rich and holds down the poor. As they argue over what we are and what others are, those calling themselves Christians end up trying to create a faith that fits either capitalism or socialism neither of which are defining ideologies of a follower of Christ.
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