Ask The Popcorn Man

REMEMBER WHEN ON social occasions you responded with lightning quick accuracy to the question “What do you do?" You sat easily with family and friends in a circle of equality. That was then. Things have changed. Imagine. You are either unemployed or underemployed but you have memories of "gainful employment." Now you are increasingly angered by the embarrassing question, "...and what do you do?" The circle of equality now seems distorted by your presence. You feel unproductive and unacceptable. "All they need are good jobs," a friend of mine once bellowed. “Work projects - that would improve their images, get them

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Resurrection: Beyond Ghosts and Ghouls

MORE THAN A fact or doctrine, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth embodies personal and historical hope. While reading a variety of viewpoints on the resurrection, I have been alternatively confused, comforted, restored and unexpectedly devastated by this theme. Internally and subjectively the resurrection is an encounter with the epicenter of meaning and significance. Without a living encounter and reliance on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, spirituality amounts to little more than armchair speculation. This strikes at the root of my fears because my intellect hesitates to believe that a person whose bodily functions had ceased, whose tether to

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A Tale of Two Cities

Stealing from the title of Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Watershed's story could be equally called A Tale of Two Wisdoms: God's Wisdom and Human Wisdom (1991-2015). I tell this story not in order to disparage the intellect or learning from a human point of view but rather to show how we might have used these two wisdoms incorrectly. Why and how wisdom gets expressed in our lives is what I have in mind.

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Standing Alone Together

THERE IS A mind-boggling connection between creation and chaos. This unexpected synergy applies not only to creation's emergence from the primordial chaos but is mysteriously operational when people's spiritual foundations have crumbled. It is revealing that the Genesis creation accounts were woven together, as the poetry of the dispossessed, during a time of the exile and crisis of faith. Disorientation in communities and in individuals has a peculiar way of resulting in an inspired movement toward creativity and re-orientation. When we at Watershed were flailing around, wrestling God, shadowboxing in the post ‘91 period, many of us felt on the

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Time and Time

WHEN I IMAGINE my life stretched out in a line from the moment of birth to “closing time” at death, events appear episodic and disconnected. Some experiences overlap, even crash into one another but all occurrences are moving in a uniform direction from the present into the future. Life on the flatline forward has the tone of a child telling a story who punctuates it with "and then... and then... and then...." This straightforward style of living doesn't tell much about where we are at this particular moment as compared to all the rest. A flatliner calendar has the required

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Christianity and Culture

We've been looking at how Christianity is interpreted differently by different groups of people. I find this fascinating because it always seems easy to think that how I define Christianity is simply THE definition that's out there. But there are so many ways. Richard Niebuhr identifies fives ways that Christianity gets expressed in the world: 1) Christ Against Culture - The easiest way to describe this definition is that it's the one that we grew up in. It's the way of the Anabaptists who chose to reject the close relationship that Luther supported between the church and state, and struck

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Marriage and Mary Shelley

I WAS SITTING in Merk's restaurant out on Pembina Highway with Bev in 1990 when I solemnly swore that if I were to do it again, I definitely would not want to be married. At the time I k that marriage left a very sour taste in my mouth. It wasn't only that I hadn't taken care of my marriage of seventeen years well enough to make it worthwhile, it was the whole idea of being married that irked me. I joked about marriage being a socio-economic relationship which was merely functional to get a mortgage

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Ordinary People; Extraordinary Events in Luke

We started with listening to "Cry of a Tiny Babe" by Bruce Cockburn. Marilyn highlighted the fact that, contrary to our intuitive sense of what is right and true, God comes to us through unlikely people and circumstances. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is perhaps the supreme example. Young, unmarried, an unknown from a peasant village in a forgotten part of the Empire, Mary is asked to give birth to and mother the very Son of God, and she accepts humbly! Using N.T. Wright's reflections as a source, the birth of Jesus to a Virgin is one of, if not

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Spirit and Creation Transcript

We're going to start with Spirit in Creation. The bible is usually considered a story of redemption, with creation being a background or secondary story. But Clarke Pinnock argues that they are two very close and intertwined and both very important stories that are there. Even when we're reading redemption stories and parables in the Testament we're seeing the creation story is right beneath it. The Spirit is involved with both stories and we cannot take one without the other. This is what Pinnock says: “Creation is related to the reality of the Son and by incarnation the Son becomes

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