As tomorrow is my last day with SomeCompany, I want to take this opportunity to say goodbye.
I have enjoyed my time with SomeCompany both professionally and personally, with the friends I have made here. I will miss SomeCompany but am looking forward to new challenges that await me in my new position.
If you wish to stay in touch, my email is bob@somecompany.ca
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,
Bob
Quiet times as we have construed them do not work for most people. I suggest people set aside longer periods of time less frequently. We must have space for extended periods. Intensity in any discipline is so important. A shower ever few days is much more effective than a few small drips every day.
Our culture is starved for community. It is hungry
for genuine intimacy since we no longer have the basic
social structure, skills or time to learn how to
develop it. Genuine intimacy requires deliberate and
dilligent practise. Simply to have the name church
does not mean we are a real community. Most churches
are quite atrocious when it comes to truly welcoming
strangers. If our churches will truly be Church and
nurture profound intimacy and generous hospitality for
which our culture is desperate, it will require
schooling, sanctification, sacrifice and suffering.
Spent a couple of hours on Saturday at Heritage Park with some folk from the Calgary Flickr Group. I've tagged pics from the adventure as CalgaryFlickrMeetUpDec05. "What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments- arguments that insisted most of the Gospel were suspect, for, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts- lacked coherence... Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all." ("Christ the Lord", by Anne Rice, pg 313, Knopf Canada)Yes that's the same Anne Rice who was all the rage in the Goth sceen when I was growing up with her Vampire novels.
Before I shaped you in the womb,
I knew all about you.
Before you saw the light of day,
I had holy plans for you:
A prophet to the nations--
that's what I had in mind for you
While we're told that the Carter's are true Christians, we get no direct evidence of their faith other than their love for June and Johnny. [side note keep your eye on Ma Carter there's a great moment with her and a shot gun, but if you blink you'll miss it.]
OK so on the spiritual side Walk the Line loses it's nerve and swerves. You should still see this movie. Joaquin Phoenix is Johnny Cash. Reese Witherspoon as June Carter carries a perfect romantic tension that's slow, beautiful and painfully honest.
Other than the lack of Gospel tracks, the selection of Cash tunes in the movie is well done. I particularly enjoyed Joaquin's take on Johnny Cash finding his voice at the begging of the movie. Hearing Johnny Cash classics on the sound system at the teater is a treat in it's self.
Go see Walk the Line. Enjoy the Love story and the music. Then pick up the The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash to fill in the blanks.
- Peace
So, since we're out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we're free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it's your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you've let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you've started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!Romans 6:15-23I'm using this freedom language because it's easy to picture. You can readily recall, can't you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing--not caring about others, not caring about God--the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God's freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?
As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you're proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.
But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.
In Kelowna with LT, Mike and about twenty other folks takling about
Faith, Hope and Love in a liminal space. Wish you were here. Random
details when I get back.
-Peace
The hotel we'll be at this weekend says it has free wifi. So I should
be able to blog updates from my Ipaq. Gmail works well from my ipaq
so I thought I'd test the blog via email feature.
- Peace
Forcing religion on the young, even though it makes no sense to them is a major reason why they graduate from Church about the same time they graduate from high school and do not return for twenty years, if ever.From Willard's discussion of Pearls Before Swine: when good things become deadly in The Divine Conspiracy. One example of where Willard takes quite a different view than most. Here he focuses not on the swine being the issue but the pearls. A pig can't eat pearls, what else would they do but attack one who feeds them pearls.
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Sarah took this while wating for the bus. I think it's breathtaking. Yes I'm a proud dad! She's set up her own flickr account.Further support for this palace-temple conceptualisation is found in the final act of creation: the forming of humanity, male and female, in the image of Elohim. Long the subject of debate, the image of God language makes a great deal of sense within the palace-temple context. After all, what is the last thing placed inside the deity’s house, if not his image? So here in Genesis 1 on the last creative day, Yahweh fashions his own image and places it in his palace-temple.
...
This, it seems to me, is nothing other than the ancient version of the recently formulated Anthropic Principle, which in its various forms reflects the fact that the fundamental structures of this world, the observed values of its cosmological and physical quantities, appear to have been fine-tuned with human existence in view. To observers both then and now there are strong hints that this creation was designed for us. And Genesis 1’s answer, it seems to me, is not so much concerned with the "how" in the technical or mechanical sense as it is with the "who," namely, Yahweh.
On Saturday Rawleigh and I rode the 43 km from the top of Goat Creek (up in the mountains, south of Canmore) to Banff and back to Canmore. It's one of my favorite rides. It's mostly down hill. We did it in about 2 hours 45 minutes of ridding, about 3:20 including stoping for pics. We left the Element at the bottom in Canmore. I've posted 76 pics.Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah; "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." This turns everything we ever thought about God around. We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late night bull sessions about God. We drop into church from time to time to see what is going on with God. We indulge in an occasional sunset or symphony to cultivate a feeling of reverence for God.
But that is not the reality of our lives with God. Long before we ever got around to asking questions about God, God has been questioning us. Long before we got interested the subject of God, God subjected us to the most intensive and searching knowledge. Before it ever crossed our minds that God might be important, God singled us out as important. Before we were formed in the womb, God knew us. We are known before we know.
...
All wise reflection corroborates Scripture here. We enter a world we didn't create. We grow into a life already provided for us. We arrive in a complex of relationships with other wills and destinies that are already in full operation before we are introduced. If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God.
My Identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.
Starting in mid-October CornerstoneFestival.com will become a much more exciting and interactive place to be. For starters, we'll begin hosting several discussion boards covering music, movies, and current events. And that's not all--you'll have a chance post to reviews and rate select albums, concerts, TV shows, books, and films each month. Please check back soon to sign up and get involved.
Loved it. Absolutely loved it. First, about the fact that the movie is an extension of a failed television series: On the ride home I wondered aloud how it would be received by someone who'd never seen the episodes of the TV show. Jennifer informed me that she'd forgot most of the characters and almost all of the plot lines, so I'd guess it won't be much of a problem for anyone else.
The movie is nothing if not intense to watch. By the time the credits started to scroll and the house lights faded up, I was experiencing the rather odd mix of exhaustion and adrenaline. The pace is even and quick and the transitions from side splitting humor to absolute shock and/or disbelief are sudden and often jarring. Make no mistake; this movie is absolutely exhausting to watch. Probably a few too many of the boogie-man type gotcha's for my taste, but just as many of those shocking moments are from unexpected plot twists that will have you elbowing the stranger next to you asking "did that really just happen?"
In summation: well written dialog, both witty and sincerely human, coupled with exciting action in a quick paced story line, make for a Grade A movie going experience. Whether or not you were a fan of the TV show Firefly or completely new to its characters and worlds, Serenity will have you wanting to join the crowd of fans begging for the return of the series. My suggestion? Go see it on the big screen.
Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples--when they see the love you have for each other
Is Evolution a Creation Myth? It depends on how you define the words "creation" and "myth." Sometimes the word creation implies the existence of a creator. In other contexts, however, the word creation implies the thing has come into existence or been created and how it came into existence or was created. Perhaps it would be better to say, therefore, "Evolution is a myth about origins -- about the universe, how it came to exist and how it came to take on the attributes we now observe."
David and TW are busy working on the new Pedro The Lion album. We'll be posting a few demos along the way. The first one is called "The Devil is Beating His Wife" and you can hear acoustic and electric versions on our page at PureVolume.com. Keep in mind that these are rough demos... the final versions will be much different. Check back often for more new songs.as seen on pedrothelion.com
I started working on 3rd St early 2004, this bell was on the corner of 3rd and 5th ave sw. People, including me would ring it every once in a while. This spring I noticed the clapper had gone missing. It hasn't been replaced. I don't know if it was vandals or bureaucracy that silenced the bell, but a silent bell is a sad comment on the state of our collective spirit. I'm sure Robert G. Peters for whom the bell is a memorial would not be impressed.Instead The Exorcism of Emily Rose is a thoughtful and carefully crafted movie using elements of horror to tell it's story. While there are moments that will make you jump, most of the story is told with a very understated, almost documentary style, making the horror elements much more effective than blood or gore ever could. It was very much like watching a mystery, it's not clear till the end what point the movie is trying to make or how this drama will end. Just when I thought I had it figured out there was another angle to consider.
I find that I can't buy into the movies explanation of why Emily is afflicted, and I don't want to give to much away by explaining it. However I did enjoy that there is more than one spiritual battle going on here and they're not all big obvious forms of evil, but some mundane and systematic forms as well. This layered approach gives the movie an authenticity and depth often lacking from movies about the 'devil'.
I should tell you I have given two free tickets to see the preview. Steve went with me and enjoyed it as well. I'm taking my daughter Sarah to see it this weekend, it's well worth seeing.
- Peace
As a cartoonist I'm expected to make social commentary, using satire and humour to ridicule wrongdoing. Sometimes though, both words and pictures fail. That some humans in New Orleans began preying on the weak and helpless at the first opportunity is a blistering indictment on how little we've progressed as a species. I'm still numb from the stories of serial rape followed by throat-slitting in the women's restrooms in the Superdome. There are times I am convinced that we don't know how to live in this world.[link]
See if this situation rigs a bell: a manager tells you to build a proof of concept to test the look and feel of a new application. You hack for a week straight, day and night, producing some of the ugliest code you have ever seen to make the Big Demo. After all of your hacking, the meeting is a huge success and everyone loves your prototype. Then someone asks you how long until the application is deployed. You respond with a reasonably worked estimate of six to nine months. The feeling in the room quickly changes like someone just stopped the music in a bad 80s show. No one understands why its going to take nine months to build something that they already see in front of them. No one is happy anymore. Uh-oh.
Billy Graham had never met a pope until John Paul II invited him to Rome in 1981. Ushered into the papal apartments by the Vatican's famous Swiss Guard, Graham marveled at the pomp. He and the pope chatted like long-lost friends for half an hour, swapping photos, gifts, and travel stories. Before Graham left, John Paul II reached over, clutched Graham's thumb, and told him, "We are brothers."
I thought this guy's sign was brilliant. Most panhandler signs are tales of woe, this guy's sign read: Friend killed by Ninjas. Spare ¢ for Ninja Lessons. An outrageous take on the woe is me sign. He saw my camera and hid his sign, so I told him I'd pay him for the shot. He put it back and I snappedd the shot. I then paid him $3, and he was happy with that. Ssaid he'd use it to buy lunch. I guess Ninja's only work for small change.Most men and women in North America today are equally uneasy with poetry and prayer. Insofar as we let the culture depersonalize us -- turn us into nonrelational technicians and consumers -- we lose our capacity for intimacy both in language (poetry) and before God (prayer). The recovery of either prayer or poetry doesn't guarantee the recovery of the other, but it certainly encourages it.
in the end, you simply can't sell a beauty product without somehow playing on women's insecurities. If women thought they looked perfect -- ?just the way they are -- why would they buy anything?from When Tush Comes to Dove By Seth Stevenson, a good article on Dove's new add campaign.
These Dove ads say it's cool to be round and hefty ... so long as your skin is taut and firm and perfect. But what's that, you say? You love your real curves, but you've got a little cellulite? Girl, run out and buy our hocus-pocus cream right now! Those cottage cheese thighs are vile! Dear God, cover them up!
When wolves left an area near Banff, elk became more common, a meadow replaced willow trees and songbirds were replaced by sparrows, biologists say in one of the first large studies of the role of predators on the land they live on.
We got a call from the Calgary Police service this morning.it's often tough for me to venture onto other blogs. My reading addiction takes hold and I loose track of time. With Kiihnworld and IdeaJoy especially, I get hooked into linking and surfing farther than I should. They always provide such enticing links that I have to force myself to stick with blogs that donÂ?t link, lest I travel into the hinterlands of cyberspace. When I go to their sites, I start taking some quiz on what kind of 1960s TV show I am, then I'm looking at comic book characters, then I'm reading Augustine, and I get lost and never update my checkbook or send out the invoices that I originally sat down to do.That's from a post where he's lamenting that his wife knew about google maps before he did, Thanks to IdeaJoy and Kiinworld.
Finally, the last thing I'll say for the people who don't believe in cycling - the cynics, the skeptics – I'm sorry for you, I'm sorry you can't dream big and I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe.
If there's anything Sufjan Stevens has learned from Christian rock's lectures, or for that matter from 2,000 years of Christian narrative, it's that the best mix of sacred and secular comes by contextualizing lived experience, offering narratives of God's impact on broken lives rather than open-ended invitations to be part of the story. In his songs, the faithful doubt and doubters are not cast aside. There's a place for the dismayed secularist, perhaps even a chance to strike up a chat with a boy in a hoodie about the seemingly irreconcilable gulf between Christian rock's intentions and the alternative nation's focus on resulting aesthetic objects. Now that there's good Christian rock, it's an argument worth having.
 | You scored as Emergent/Postmodern. You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.
What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com |
