Power

When my Grammy Phoebe had dementia, she lived with my family. Sometimes I would accompany her on outings, like to get her hair cut or to buy something at the mall. I was a young teenager and if the inherent self-consciousness of being 14 weren't enough, I had the added benefit of moving at the pace of an elderly, confused women. I was always sure we were causing a scene, and I would be simultaneously apologetic to the people we were inevitably inconveniencing and agitated at my grandmother for her sloth-like ways.

***

My eight-year old neighbour came to sit next to me in church the other Sunday. He is fidgety at the best of times, and it church this seems magnified. When we sang hymns, he stood up on the pew and belted them out at the top of his little lungs: "JOY TO THE WORLD," as if in a competition for singing volume. I didn't want to tell him to be quiet, because, hey, he was a boy singing in church. I was afraid he'd never sing again if I told him "Shh." But I began to notice the annoyed glances of other parishioners, as his singing drowned out the slightly more reserved congregation, and I couldn't wait until it was time for him to go to his Bible class downstairs, and be disassociated with me. 

***

My friends and I had planned to go to a concert together, and the day of the concert, one friend learned that her university classmate, a close friend, had passed away. I asked if my friend still wanted to go to the concert. She did, and we drove the two hours to Moncton with not much talk about the heaviness we all felt. We tried to enjoy the concert the best we could, stopping at McDonald's, greeting friends from away with smiles, and taking in the music of a favourite artist. But during a slow song, a song about the joy we can have through Christ, the tears came, and we stood in the centre of a throng of people at a concert, surrounding our grieving friend. I have never been good at knowing what to do at times like these, and I just hugged her, trying to ignore the quizzical expressions of others around us. I am not good at comforting people. It makes me uncomfortable. 

***

When my mother had her stem cell transplant, she stayed in a place a block away from the hospital. It is a kind of a hotel for people who need to be close to medical care. I joined her for some time as her primary care partner. Every morning, we walked at a snail's pace to the hospital for the morning's appointment. At this time I had strained my knee and my mother was thin and pale and hairless and so we walked together slowly, the cancer patient and the girl limping with a cane. People had to pass us on the street. Once someone offered to carry my bags for me, which, as an able-bodied person, had never happened to me before. I was taken off-guard and insisted on carrying them for the few more steps into the building. 

***

These are just a few stories, and I have many more. They are stories of times I wished away the ugliness and the mess and all that is different and uncomfortable in the world. They are times I wish I could be seen with someone powerful instead of someone powerless, times I wanted to say to people, "This isn't me. I'm normal. I'm successful. I fit into society just fine." They are situations that make me really uncomfortable and that I would rather avoid. 

This Christmas, I am reminded, gracefully, of the kinds of situations Jesus chooses to be in. Jesus embraces the very situations I try to avoid. He, though human, forgoes that human habit of striving for upward mobility, and instead makes himself so vulnerable that he has to be delivered by a woman. This is the Christmas story: the Creator being fed at the breast of a new mother. Jesus your King is born. And it continues: he seeks out the messy, ugly corners of life that I like to forget about. He weeps with Mary and Martha for their brother Lazarus, even though he was just about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He chooses to suffer with his friends first. He eats dinner with Zacchaeus, a reviled tax-collector. He welcomes little children when people think he should be doing more important things. In one of my all-time favourite stories, he is on his way to heal a rich, powerful person's daughter when a bleeding woman, a social outcast, touches his garment. The Bible says she was healed just by touching his robe, but Jesus goes farther than physical healing. He stops. He asks for her story. He calls her daughter.

Jesus came and spent time with the powerless. He entered situations of pain and suffering and did not think about how that may affect his position in society. I need to be reminded of this, daily. I post articles on Facebook and hope they make me sound smart. I am a compulsive name-dropper, eager to advertise my connection to a Very Important Person, because that means I am important, too, right? Sometimes I read books just so I can say I've read them, or buy books just because they'd look good on my shelf. And I am even afraid to write these confessions, because I wonder: Does this make me seem insecure? What if people think I am insecure? 

So I confess: yes, I am insecure. I grasp tightly to power and status because somewhere inside, I still believe that is what brings success in this life. And daily I need to be reminded of what is truly important: to love God and to love others, even (especially) in the uncomfortable places. 

***

I can't say this is entirely original. It was inspired, a lot, by the Bible, of course, and by some things I have read online lately:

How No Ache or Fear or Division Can Steal our Merry Christmas [with Spoken Word Poem: “An Advent Lament & a Brave Merry Christmas”] 

Excerpt: "God knows suffering. He chose to be born in the middle of a genocide. God knows suffering. He chose to be born as a refugee.

God knows suffering. He chose to come from a place where people said no good thing could come from. God knows suffering. He chose to be poor. He chose to absorb pain. He chose to be powerless."

Listening well as a person of privilege: Solidarity first, collaborative problem-solving later 

Excerpt: "When you’re used to living life on the clean, paved sidewalk of society, it can be uncomfortable to descend into the muddy ditch of oppression in order to stand in solidarity with the oppressed.  In their haste to escape their own discomfort, privileged folks can choose the easy route: to fix the oppressed person’s problem ASAP, thus ridding the privileged person of the discomfort of standing in the ditch or even the awareness that such a ditch exists."

Jean Vanier’s comfort and joy: ‘What we have to do is find the places of hope’

Excerpt: "So, the greatest thing to calm anguish is the knowledge that we are loved. Not for what we do or have done or for what we will do, but in ourselves. The more we lose, the more we come close to the reality of what it is to be human. Which is to accept our weaknesses, to discover that they’re beautiful. So many people are running around doing lots of things, but they’re controlled by anguish."

Where is Jesus' heart?

I have been angry and confused since those Paris attacks on Friday.
I am angry because the world seems to be reacting the exact way ISIS wants them to react.
I am confused because many of the people who are now saying NO WAY to letting refugees in the confines of our borders are people who follow Jesus, just like me.
For me, caring for the vulnerable people of the world is one of the most important parts of following Jesus. When I hear other Christians who do not say YES to welcoming refugees, it does not compute. I wonder: are we serving the same Jesus?
The answer is yes, of course. Jesus is always good, no matter how much his followers just don't get it. He is disappointed, but not fazed, by quarreling within the ranks of his disciples.

But, if you are a Christian and still on the fence about welcoming Middle Eastern refugees, please join me. I am going to share my reading of the Scripture and my understanding of who Jesus is. It is this understanding that influences why I think helping refugees is important. What is your understanding? What is holding you back? What do you think is the proper thing to do?

Hannah's Selected Gospel Commentary (pretty sure this is going to be accepted as seminary required reading one of these days. IV Press, call me).

Jesus is born. Oooh Christmas! Wow, Herod really hates this kid. He really needs to loosen his grasp on some of that power he loves so much.
Jesus and his parents flee to Egypt. I guess that would make them refugees.
They get to go back. The king is dead, long live the King! Also, I just noticed something that probably a ton of other people have noticed before me-- but do you think Jesus returning home from Egypt would have reminded the people about the Hebrew's rescue from Egypt? God is legit the best storyteller ever. Like I love Sarah Koenig and all but GOD.
Jesus gets baptized. As if he needed to. But that is important. The Kingdom of God is near! What is the Kingdom of God, anyway? Hopefully Jesus will help clarify this.
Nope. He just tells a bunch of stories and heals people and whatnot.
Oh wait. There may be some meaning in those stories and actions.
I think Jesus needs a better HR person. OK honestly Jesus. I don't want to be mean or anything, but those disciples of yours don't seem to be the sharpest tools in the shed. And why did you bring in a tax collector? Seriously. Nobody likes tax collectors. That seems obvious.
Wait a second. I am not seeing anything in here about Jesus being white, or anything about his eye colour. Why do all the paintings show him like that? Now that I think of it, he probably looks a lot more like those people we call terrorists. I bet he'd get "randomly" selected for additional security screening at the airport.

Jesus does not seem to like the Pharisees. It's a two-way street, though. The Pharisees really don't like Jesus. It's like they are following him around, all creepy-like. He might just be mad because they are stalkers, always waiting for the next chance to trip him up. Except Jesus owns them every time. When will they learn?

I wonder why he's angry with the Pharisees. It's scary because I see myself in the Pharisees in a lot of the stories. I am a lot more eager to accuse other people than myself. The scribes and the Pharisees have a whole lot of knowledge, but they  aren't using it in the right way. They are using it to make themselves important instead of being humble and loving others. They are scared to let go of all their customs because they are afraid there will be nothing left when they do-- no real connection to God at all. And Jesus sees through this 100 percent.

The Pharisees are threatened by Jesus. They are threatened because he has all this authority-- to cast out demons, to heal, to calm the sea-- and yet is totally free of all their nonsense. He has no worries about being powerful. He is not grasping on to his own power or pride or wealth. No denarius, don't care[ius? I am so so sorry]

He deliberately makes time for the least powerful. He stops on an urgent visit to an "important" person's house to heal an "unclean" woman, a social outcast. He visits a town and invites himself over to the most unpopular person's house for dinner. A man was born blind and every assumes he or his parents did something bad to deserve it. Jesus is like "nope," but that question becomes irrelevant anyway because Jesus heals him. A prostitute washes his feet with expensive perfume and her hair and Jesus acknowledges her gift, while the Pharisees look on in horror. You just don't DO that.

Ugh. That really irks the Pharisees and the Teachers of the Law. 

Not to mention those enigmatic stories he keeps on telling. When someone said "blessed is he who will eat a feast in the Kingdom of God", I bet they weren't expecting such a long reply from Jesus. I wonder if they got that the story was about them-- it seems pretty clear to me, but then again, I have the benefit of hindsight. I wonder if Jesus was trying to give them a chance, then. I wonder if he was saying "There's still a chance to receive the invitation. But these are the kinds of people you'll be dining with. You have to be OK with that." 

And the story of the lost son- did they recognize themselves as the older brother? Maybe, but maybe not. The older brother's main character trait is cluelessness. He has the opportunity to get to know the Father the whole time but never takes it. He misses the point of his Father. It's not about the farm, son. It's about me. 

When Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats- that must have really irked them. Sheep and goats are really pretty similar, when you think about it. It's not like he was comparing sheep to pythons or a Kitchenaid mixer or something. And yet the behaviour and the outcome of the sheep and the goats in Jesus' story are radically different. I think Jesus is acknowledging that it can really seem like people can know him, but they might just not get it. And the difference is in how they respond when confronted with need. 

So anyway, a few powerful people decided they wanted Jesus dead. Jesus knew this was going to happen, because being the Son of God, he had a lot of inside information. So he had a meal with his disciples. He asked them to remember him.

They did not do a very good job at remembering him. First Judas betrayed him for a couple of bucks. Typical. His priorities were not straight, at all. Then the others just kinda left. Peter even denied that he ever even knew Jesus, though he said he wouldn't do it.

Jesus died anyway. This is the part that always gets me. It must have felt, then, like nobody cared. The people who had been hanging around him for two or three years had disappeared. He had tried to teach them and he wondered if it failed. He knew he had to die because that was the plan. It would be the ultimate display of love to the world. God, as man, dying, to make right all we had done wrong. A selfless act to negate all the selfish acts. And did he still think it was worth it, when everyone he knew either hated him or left him? He had done nothing but love people and this is what they did. Love threatened their power, their comfort, and their familiar way of doing life. Nonetheless, Jesus somehow loved them all and loves me and you too, so he died. I can't even imagine how much it hurt. What great lengths he went to love us. He did not ask if we deserved it. He just did it. 

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He's alive. Did you really think that would be the end of the story? Of course not. He did not stay dead long. Jesus' authority can't be stopped by death. He eventually went up to Heaven, but gave believers the Holy Spirit so that we can carry Jesus' authority within us at all times.

Whoa. I know. A lot of times I am like the Pharisees and try to ignore it. But sometimes it just can't be ignored. The Holy Spirit, like Jesus, like God the Father (because they are all one and I don't even know how that's possible but I have given up even tying to define what is and is not possible with God), cares about the vulnerable and the outsider and the poor and and marginalized. That's where God's heart is. And because I listen to the Holy Spirit now and again, that's where my heart is moving.

That's my reading of the Gospels. This is what I think Jesus was trying to say to the Pharisees and the scribes and his disciples and the poor and the sick and the outcasts: My Kingdom is really great. You'll be missing out if you're not a part of it. But you'll have to give something up to be in it. You'll have to give up your pride and maybe your wealth and any part of you that thinks you deserve it. My goodness is so good that nobody deserves it. And when you know that nobody deserves it, you know that everyone needs it. The ground is level at the foot of the cross. So now that you're free from worrying about saving yourself, you can get busy loving others. It does not matter if they might hurt you or hate you or curse you-- because it's not about you and it's not about them. It's about Me. 


 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 

Voices

I deal with overwhelming things by writing. Here is something I wrote last night as I watched news reports come in about the Paris attack. 

On Friday November 13, 2015, seven gunmen attacked three restaurants, a concert, and a stadium in Paris.

And we ask:

What twisted ideology made them do it?

They all were born to mothers, born into a family.

And at some point in their life they had to choose between good and evil.

And perhaps sometimes they chose 'good.'

Perhaps sometimes the choice was between 'good' and 'almost good,' and perhaps sometimes the lines between the two became blurred.

Perhaps sometimes there were voices: people they talked to, books they read, radio shows they listened to, and these voices told them what was and wasn't good. 

And maybe these voices were not true.

In fact, these voices were liars.

The voices lied until the men did not know the difference between 'good' and 'almost good', so what was 'almost good' they called 'good.' 

And they continued to listen to the lying voices until the line between what they called 'good' and what was truly evil became blurred.

Until, finally, one day they called what was truly evil 'good.' 

There were too many lying voices, or too few truthful voices.

And the lying voices lied because they, too, did not know the truth.

And why did the lying voices not know the truth?

Because they, too, had listened to lying voices. And on and on, until here we are, in a Garden, and a man and a woman eat a fruit. 

The first lying voice still holds many in this world captive.

The only way to combat lies is with truth.  We must speak the truth in love. 

Love > Fear

If you have been around me lately, you know there are three main things that are taking up the majority of my time these days: my full-time job (which I love!), my research (which never seems to be on schedule), and refugee sponsorship. Sometime, I would love to talk to you more about those first two items. We could sit down for coffee and/or tea or over Skype and have a long-overdue chat. And then you could tell me what's going on in your life, and we would probably make some comment about how everyone else our age seems to have their life together and we can barely remember to floss our teeth.

But what I really want you to know about is the third thing--refugee sponsorship--and how God is changing my heart, and the hearts of others in my community, to be more like His.


I have told the story of the situation in Syria a lot of times, and honestly there are a lot more sources that can do it better than I can. And I hope you already know. Syria is not the only place in the world where people flee because of violence, but it is in an emergency situation right now, making international action inevitable. This video concisely explains the whole mess.

One of my favourite classes I took at university was an Old Testament class. And one of the best parts of that class was the discussion of the prophets. When we think of prophets today, we think of people who know how to tell the future or say "The end is near" or something like that. But in the Old Testament, prophets were the ones who spoke to God's people, speaking what God had to say to them at that moment. And these prophets did not always have good things to say. God didn't really speak to them and say "You are doing a terrific job. Keep up the good work." Mostly they didn't do a terrific job. I can relate to this. Being the people of God is tough.

When God spoke through prophets, it was usually reminding them of the people they were called to be. They reminded the people who God was, and who they were. They reminded them what being the people of God looks like in the everyday, flesh-and-blood, dirt-under-the-fingernails life.

Excuse me while I act as prophet.

This is what I know about God: I know that he is more loving than any of us could ever be. I know that he cares about people on the outside of society. When I was speaking to kids at camp this summer, I explained to them that Jesus is God, and that means that when you read about everything Jesus did when he was on earth, that tells us about who God is. And what did Jesus do while he was on earth? Well, for one thing, he welcomed the very people the ruling class of the day saw as outsiders. Jesus chose to spend time with and to heal the very people who the insiders said would never be the people of God.

Which is good news for all of us in the church, because deep down I think we all know that we are outsiders. We are all broken beyond repair, born separated from God. We all know that if it weren't for Jesus, we would still be there on the outside of God's kingdom. Also we all know that we aren't really broken beyond repair, that in fact Jesus has healed us and is healing us. Once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God. Once we received no mercy, but now we have received mercy.

One of the best-- if not the best--gifts that God gives to believers is the Holy Spirit. Church, we are carrying around God's Spirit. When we have the Spirit, we get to know more about God's heart. He speaks to us. He transforms us, making us more like Him.

In the light of the Syrian refugee crisis, let's listen to God's heart within us. God's heart is different than our heart because while we are attracted to beautiful things, God's heart is attracted to ugly things. I don't mean that God loves the ugliness. I mean that he loves the things that are difficult to love, and he is in the situations that we naturally tend to avoid.

I have no doubt that God's heart right now is in the Middle East. There are four million refugees coming out of Syria and millions more within the country who have lost their homes. The government of Canada has committed to receive 10,000 Syrians by September 2016. Make no mistake. This is barely anything. Canada has not raised the quota of refugees to welcome; our government is simply putting Syrian refugees ahead of others. I think some people in our country are scared of refugees because they may be Muslim, and Muslim is different. And they may not speak English, and English is the best. And they may take away our jobs, because we expect the government to provide jobs for us.

Please pardon the sass. But there is a lot of fear around this issue, even from those who do truly want to help. But fear and love are polar opposites. We cannot love well when we are afraid of the people we are loving, or afraid of not having enough, or afraid of our lifestyle changing.

Because welcoming people who have no homes is scary. It is very scary. It may change the way our everyday lives look. But God's call is to make love the priority in our lives. I cannot stress how unlikely this is, but there is an extremely slim possibility that we may welcome a terrorist. But Jesus calls us to love our enemies.  Jesus did a lot of scary things in order to love his enemies. He died an ugly, painful death out of love for us.

There is really no getting around it. Loving people, especially people different than us, is hard. But it is very, very necessary.

So that is why a group of outsiders who have been welcomed in--aka Christians-- have gathered together in a living room and prayed and talked and dreamed and decided. We have decided to take on the challenge of welcoming a family to our little town. We have decided that no matter what happens, God has called us to love. This involves us giving up a lot of time, money, energy, and resources. It involves emotional ups-and-downs. It requires us to put aside our differences for the purpose of showing God's love. We are outsiders who have been invited in to God's kingdom. We know that all we have is from God, and we don't deserve one bit of it. And so we say: "Welcome. Come inside."

Come home: Reflections on camp

Video to go with blog post here.

Throughout my life, camp has been transformational for me. From the Ashram to Mount Traber to Malagash to Kingswood, there is something special about disconnecting from the world for a little while and making a conscious effort to connect with God together. Over the years, I have been a camper and have taken on a variety of leadership roles at camp. Earlier this month, I got to take part in camp once again.

A few months ago, I got a call from a board member of Malagash asking me if I would be willing to direct a week of camp. That involves planning programs and organizing activities. I was so thrilled to be asked, and gladly accepted! A while later, I got another call with another request- would I be willing to speak at camp?

Last summer at Kingswood, I had the opportunity to speak in chapel a few times. Sharing with these kids and adolescents was not only something I loved doing, the campers actually seemed to respond to it. When I spoke, I felt like something inside me came alive. There is a joy in doing something that you are good at, that you enjoy, and that helps others.

But you see, this fellow who called me-- he had no idea that this was true for me. He had never heard me speak, but he had just trusted that voice inside of him, what I believe was the prompting of the Holy Spirit. And the best part was, I would get to both direct and speak- all in partnership with very dear friends of mine. I could not have planned a better situation.

But of course I could not have planned it. It never would have occur to me. I have been listening to a worship song lately, a love song, if you will, from Jesus. And these are some words:
I have a plan for you.
I have a plan.
It's gonna be wild.
It's gonna be great.
It's gonna be full of me.

The week at camp happened a couple of weeks ago. And it was wild. It was great. It was full of God.
Despite challenges like my co-director recovering from a serious concussion and a visit from a big furry friend, I felt God's presence strongly that week.

In our Skype conversations about planning for camp, we somehow came up with an audacious plan: we would live out the story of the prodigal son.

The plan was as follows.

A young man who lived near the camp and had been going there for years would join as on the first day of camp. He would hang out with the kids, getting to know them a bit. But then, on the first night, he would say camp is no longer for him, that he has better things in store... and leave.
Throughout the week, the children would "travel" to different countries and get clues to where he had gone. 
Then on the last night, he would come back. We would all [hopefully] welcome him with joy and open arms. There would be a huge celebration.
Then, we would tell them the Parable of the Prodigal son and reveal that we had been teaching them a story about God the whole time.

Although we had not really firmed down many of the logistics of our plan, it was executed incredibly- even better than we could have ever hoped.

When our "prodigal son," Noah, left on Sunday night, the kids had a variety of emotions. Some chased after him. Some were sad. Others were mad. Others, confused: why would he leave such an awesome place as Malagash?

We had a ton of fun throughout the week, but every day kids would ask "Where is Noah?" or "When are we going to find him?" or speculate that they had just seen him in the lodge, in the woods, or at the beach. Sometimes they would pray for him to come home. We wondered if we were taking this too far.

On Thursday, it finally was time for him to come back to camp. We planned to smuggle him in to the beach while the kids were at the lodge. Then, while they were all standing in front of the lodge, he would walk up from the beach. What would the campers do? Would they be happy that he's back? Mad that he left in the first place? Would they even remember what he looked like after four days?

The anticipation was like that moment at graduation right before they call your name, except this time I was not worried if I would trip on the stage. I just wanted to see what the kids would do when they saw Noah come walking home. I could not wait until the moment they saw him. We looked at the clock: 4:30. It was time. We started pretending to explain a game to the children, just buying time. They did not know what was to occur.

And then-- all at once. The messenger, running up, ringing the bell, shouting "He's back! He's back!" as if announcing the end of a great war. The collective turning of eyes towards the ocean-- and the running as dozens of little feet sped toward their lost Noah, coming home. 

I have always loved homecoming stories. The Incredible Journey is possibly my all-time favourite movie, and all because of that one scene at the end. I don't want to give it away, but the pets come home. And I cry every single time. I think we all respond to homecoming stories. There is something very right about them- about returning to the place we belong, and the immense joy that goes with that.

All week long, we had told the children the oldest and greatest story ever told:
The Bible, we had said, was a story about who God is and his plan for the world.
We had told them about how God had created the world to be good.
We had told them about how God created us to be in relationship with him.
We had told them about how we had run away from that relationship with him.
We had told them about how God had given everything to restore that relationship.
We had told them that they are a part of this story.

All week long, they had been learning about God's love for them: from the chapel sessions to cabin devotionals to the everyday happenings around camp: it all pointed to God.

And now they were running towards the lost son.

That evening, we had a huge party. We decorated the lodge. We got them to dress up in their camp best and wear party hats. We gave Noah the seat of honour. We served them their food as if we were waiters. And later that evening, we told them about the prodigal son. We told them that we can always come home to God- and He will always welcome us.

There will always be a place for you at my table.

In all this teaching campers how much God loved them, I was overwhelmed with His love yet again. He is the Father in that story in Luke 15, the Father who waits. The Father who runs, the Father who celebrates. He is the Father who lets me spend a week with a bunch of nine-year-olds even when I thought I was getting too old for this camp stuff. He is the Father who delights to give His children GOOD GIFTS. And, just like the son in the story, I love what God gives. And, just like the son in the story, sometimes I forget what the real gift is. At camp, I was reminded once again: God himself is the real gift. Returning to our home-- right relationship with Him-- that is the most precious thing of all. 

Back to the Garden

"This was Adam and Eve's perfect world. Not just fruit and fig leaves, but an entire race of people stretching their cognitive and creative powers to the limit to build a society of balance and justice and joy. Here the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve would learn life at the feet of the Father, build their city in the shadow of the Almighty, create and design and expand within the protective confines of his kingdom. The blessing of this gift? A civilization without greed, malice or envy, progress without pollution, expansion without extinction. Can you imagine it? A world in which Adam and Eve's ever-expanding family would be provided the guidance they needed to explore and develop their world such that the success of the strong did not involve the deprivation of the weak. Here government would be wise and just and kind, resources plentiful, war unnecessary, achievement unlimited and beauty and balance everywhere. This was God's perfect plan: the people of God in the place of God dwelling in the presence of God"
-Sandra L. Richter, The Epic of Eden

This summer, I am gardening.

It began with the transplants. Some things need lots of time to grow, but our Canadian summer is often an afterthought of the year, as if in parenthesis in a sentence. Fall Winter Spring (Summer) . So we planted the onions and the peppers and the tomatoes in neat trays with soil from a bag, and we placed the trays in a climate-controlled greenhouse.

Some seeds we planted outdoors, right into the ground where they will live, tilling the ground first to break up the soil. The tiller made the garden, formerly a desolate strip of brown ground, seem alive, with straight rows and labels at the end of the rows. Peas. Snowpeas. Carrots. Lettuce. Everything has a different way to plant it, a different depth, different distance apart. I cut up seed potatoes and put them in the ground, careful for the eyes to be pointed towards the sky. The old giving birth to the new.

In June, for the first time, we enjoyed the bounty from our garden as the rhubarb ripened. In fact, we had more than enough rhubarb: enough to stew and can, enough to make into rhubarb muffins and rhubarb cakes, and a lot to give away. Now, we are enjoying strawberries. Each time we visit the strawberry patch, more are ripe and ready to harvest.

I have loved gardening this summer, and even though I don't do half as much as my parents do, I still enjoy it, and I still see God's kingdom in everything.

I have been reading The Epic of Eden, a book about how the Old Testament, and the Bible as a whole, is a story about bringing us back to the garden. God had a vision of what the world will be like. The fall from the garden in Genesis 3 did not change that vision, and God is trying to restore us, to redeem us to being the people of God, in the place of God, dwelling in the presence of God.

I like that the Garden of Eden is, well, a garden.

Because gardening teaches us a lot about who God is.

Gardens are beautiful. The Kingdom of God is beautiful.

Gardens take a lot of effort to plant and maintain. Our lives, lived intentionally with the goal of seeing God's glory, also need discipline.

We can't really control how our gardens grow. Sometimes, we take away all the weeds, we plant the correct distance apart and depth, we plant at the right time, and then things just don't grow. A frost comes and destroys the plants. A bird eats the seed. A deer nibbles at the leaves. Sometimes we don't know the reason. And sometimes, though we don't do anything much, a plant grows. We cannot control God's spirit. He only needs us to obedient: we prepare the soil, we plant, but it is God who makes the plant grow. It is the same, you see, with the Kingdom. We wait, and he comes.

We get rid of the bad stuff. Weeds. Potato bugs. Have you ever opened up a cob of corn only to find a worm has eaten half of it? That is the worst. It is the same with God. The fruit is no good if we don't remove the things that ruin the fruit. This is true in our own lives. There are rotten things that want to grow in our hearts. We must not let them. And we must remove them quickly, before they take over. The longer we let the rotten things grow, the harder it is to get rid of them. Anyone who has ever put off weeding their garden can tell you that.

We garden together. In my family, gardening is a communal activity. For me, it is a way to learn from my parents. It is the same in the Kingdom. Being a Christian isn't a solo activity. You can do it solo, but pretty soon you reach the limitations of yourself and your knowledge. I don't think I could garden solo. The ivy plant that died on my dorm room windowsill is a testament to that. My parents are passing on their knowledge about planting and harvesting, and one day I will teach someone.

We share our harvest. I've been helping out with my church's youth group this summer, which I love. One night I brought a few bunches of rhubarb with the hope that someone could take it off my hands. It was fun to share the rhubarb with some international students who had never tried our sour treat! When God gives us gifts, it is no fun to keep them for ourselves. And if my family's garden is any indication, he delights to give us so much that we absolutely have to give it away. My family has a thing for squash, for some reason. Squash don't take too much effort to grow and they tend to produce a lot of fruit. So every year we fill our cold room with mostly squash. If we tried to keep it all for ourselves and eat it throughout the year, it would decay. The only good thing is to give it away.

Everyone can garden. Our neighbour, just a young boy, came over one day when we were planting the leek and onion transplants. He helped us place them in the rows. We have other neighbours who are retired who spent hours a day in their garden. Young and old can garden. When I was in Mozambique, mostly everyone in the country had their machamba, a little plot of land where people grew produce for their family. Gardening is universal. All ages, all ethnicities, all ability levels-- everyone can garden. Just as everyone can know God, and be fully a part of His Kingdom.

And the final point about gardening and the Kingdom of God:

There is always enough.  Do you know how small a carrot seed is? It seems like it will not be enough. God makes it into enough. He takes what little we have to bring and multiplies it, makes it abundant.

*Inspired by Jesus' parables that tend to have lots of references to gardens, agriculture, growth and the like.*

Thy Kingdom Come

 Where there is no vision, the people perish
 Proverbs 29:18

In my last post I talked about what it's like to be a young person in Nova Scotia.

Now, I will write a little bit of my vision of what Nova Scotia could be like. Here in Nova Scotia, we may find it hard to see beyond the current issues. People are growing older and communities are dying out. Young people are leaving. Rural schools are closing. You all know the story. It seems that there is no way out of this quandary.

I am not attempting to find a way out of this predicament. What I am doing, though, is sharing a vision. This is a vision for prosperous, resilient communities. I am not drawing a map of how to arrive at this destination, but I am sharing some of the characteristics of what my dream for Nova Scotia is.

So please. Dream with me.

My dream Nova Scotia has a far more localized economy. This economy is less reliant on fossil fuels and more reliant on neighbours. It is an economy based not on competition but on cooperation. Instead of always trying to get more stuff, we do more with the stuff we have. It is an economy where waste is minimized. It is an economy where, instead of exploiting our natural resources, we use them within reasonable limits. We will make the world a better piece of ground.

In my dream Nova Scotia, the economy and the community are interconnected. We will make things together. We will know the people who make our things. We will share resources and ideas. Those in need will find a place to work, to eat, and to be a part of a loving community. The mentally ill will find support networks; my dream Nova Scotia has nobody on the margins. It is a place where First Nations people work, live, and sing alongside Acadians, African Nova Scotians, immigrants, all of us. My dream Nova Scotia has a mosaic of cultures, and none is better, but all are celebrated. In my dream Nova Scotia, the old and the young support each other.
My dream Nova Scotia also has a lot of singing and music and other artistic expressions of beauty.

Hopefully you can get the gist. In my dream Nova Scotia, everyone has a place. Prosperity is found not in having more wealth, but in effectively spreading and using the immense wealth we have. As Wendell Berry says "What we need is here."

The truth is that my dream for Nova Scotia is pretty idealistic. Actually, my dream for Nova Scotia is rooted in spirituality. More specifically, Christian spirituality. Even more specifically, Jesus' Kingdom.

I believe that these dreams will only come true through a true spiritual revival in our province.
I believe only God can change people's hearts.
I believe true, thriving community can only come through a shared commitment to following Jesus.
I believe Jesus is calling us to start living in the kind of community I have just described.

As a Christian, I ask "What does loving my neighbour look like?"

Loving my neighbour looks like repenting for the injustices of the past (think Africville, residential schools, Home for Coloured Children...) and working actively for justice today.
Loving my neighbour looks like changing my attitude from "I deserve" to "What can I  give?"
Loving my neighbour looks like cultivating community. It looks like inviting people over for a meal, even if they are outside my typical social group. It looks like giving up an evening of Netflix in favour of investing time with children.
Loving my neighbour looks like praying for my community. It looks like calling on Jesus to change the lives of people in our province; to give our leaders wisdom; and most of all, to continue to change my heart.
Loving my neighbour looks like making things, and sharing things, whether it is growing vegetables in a garden and sharing it, pickling homemade salsa, making bread and eating it together, homebrewing beer, constructing a bookshelf, sewing a blanket, or drawing a picture.

Ultimately, loving my neighbour looks like putting the needs of my neighbour before my own. 

See why I dream? Imagine if everyone in Nova Scotia had this Holy Spirit-empowered attitude. Our economic and social structures would TOTALLY change for the better. Someday, God's Kingdom will be come, and His will will be done, fully, on earth as it is in heaven. Until then, dream with me. Pray with me. Let's start cultivating Kingdom community.

What it's like to be a young person in Nova Scotia

Figure from the Ivany Report (2014)

If you are in Nova Scotia right now (or even elsewhere in the Maritimes/Canada), you know that we are in pretty hard times here. The statistics are grim when it comes to unemployment, cuts to rural services, and youth out-migration, but statistics don't tell a story. I can tell you a story. I am not complaining or griping. I don't think the world owes me a living. But I am not sure people outside of the Maritimes, or even older people in the Maritimes, quite understand what it's like to be a young person here. So, take a walk in my shoes...

Imagine you grow up in a mid-sized town in Nova Scotia. Your parents are not well-off, but you always had enough. Your family vacations always consisted of camping and cottaging trips around Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and you grew up with a strong sense of place and belonging.

There is no doubt that this is where you belong: where you know the spot to forage for fiddleheads in the spring, and where every family gathering inevitably ends up with someone playing the piano, someone playing the fiddle, and everyone tapping their feet. There is hodgepodge at the harvest and church suppers with strawberry shortcake in the summer. It was where you know every pothole in the road, where the beach is never more than an hour away, and where wooden houses in every shade of paint line the streets.

And everyone in your high school can't wait to get out of your town. But most people, after high school, don't go far. There are the few adventurous ones who go to Ontario, Alberta, the States, overseas, but most stay close to home: the agriculture college, Mt A, St FX, Dal, SMU, MSVU, NSCC, Acadia... we are fortunate to have so many of the country's best colleges and universities within a couple of hours of our town.

And you go to one of these places, and you excel, just as you did in high school. Since you were young, everyone told you that you were smart, important, that you were going somewhere with your life. And you got on the dean's list, were involved in campus leadership opportunities, got jobs in the summer, and enjoyed your university experience.

Then university is over. You have an honours degree and a few thousand dollars in student loans, and you feel like you can do anything in the world. You are a Christian, and you feel God may be calling you to be a missionary, so you try it out, and right after you graduate you move to Mozambique for three months, living cross-culturally and doing linguistics research for a Christian organization.

But even when you are halfway across the world, you ache for your Nova Scotian home, and you wonder if you were ever meant to leave. So you come back, you live in your little university town that has become your home and you look for a job. You apply for perhaps fifty jobs before landing a job as a server. It's an OK job, but it's not the kind of job you thought you would have when you graduated and thought you could do anything in the world. You feel like you have so many more skills and talents to offer.

After working as a server for a while, you realize that you are not being a very good steward of the education and skills that God has given you. So you begin to explore other options, and eventually decide to go to grad school. But of course grad school is in Ontario.

So you spend a year away from Nova Scotia and the whole time, you miss it dearly. You wonder if you are having trouble letting go. You keep in touch with your friends from high school and university. There is your university housemate from Saskatchewan who wishes she could stay in Nova Scotia, but returns to Regina to get a job. There is your friend from high school who has a bachelor's degree and works as a cashier. There is your classmate from university who moves to Halifax to get a job but after months of searching, still has no stable employment. There are your many friends who have relocated to Alberta to work in towns like Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Edmonton, Calgary. There are your friends who have a degree in teaching and who have just been substituting for years. There is your friend from New Brunswick who works in Ottawa, and longs to move home to the Maritimes, but knows she will not find employment in her field here. There are your friends who work in the arts and move to cities like Vancouver and Toronto, where there are many more opportunities.

The narrative is always the same: you wish you could stay in Nova Scotia. But there are just no jobs.

You return home, triumphantly, half a master's degree under your belt, and ready to do research on Nova Scotia's rural areas. But you also need a job, and you search. And the search is discouraging and you wish there were jobs in somewhere other than Halifax, but the majority of jobs in your field are in the HRM. And you wish you had gone into something sensible, like engineering, nursing, or the trades. But when you were young you thought you could do what you love and get paid for it too, and so you studied economics, theology, and languages. You do not doubt that you are bright, talented, creative, and hardworking. But you start to feel like these things are not valued in your beloved home province.

It is hard not feel bitter when you see, for example, a local organic milk company start, struggle, and then eventually fail, in part because of regulations that are heavily influenced by the two other competing milk companies in the province, both owned by out-of-province entities. It is hard not to feel bitter when you see the province turn a blind eye to dangerous levels of emissions from a large pulp factory, just because, apparently, this factory (unsurprisingly, owned by an out-of-province entity) "creates jobs," and threatens to leave. Meanwhile, the forests of our province, softwood and beautiful hardwood alike, are getting literally ground to a pulp, and the woodlot owners get a pittance of what the wood is really worth. It is hard not to feel bitter when the government cuts assistance to students and to workers in the film industry, yet offers twenty-two million dollars to RBC-- again, an out-of-province company. Did I mention the CEO of RBC makes about 7.5 million a year?

The statistics show that Nova Scotia needs young people. Workers, on the whole, are growing older and retiring earlier, and the people to fill those jobs are moving "Out West," where they can actually make a decent living. We need our young people to stay, but we act as if we just do not value them. Each year, we get thousands of keen, bright young graduates out of our many post-secondary institutions. And they toss their graduation caps in the air and drink one last round of Keith's and then they board a plane for Anywhere But Here, and their highly-skilled labour, as well as their consumption, is enjoyed by places other than Nova Scotia. And you drive in the countryside and you pass countless abandoned homes and businesses with "for sale"signs in the window, and you feel helpless, like you are a passenger on a sinking ship. But you love this ship. And with your bailing bucket you try to fight the ocean.

Figure from the Ivany Report (2014)