WHEN WAS I truly happy? The happiest time of my life dovetails with the time when I felt the most stress and suffering. With the loss of both my job and my first marriage, 1991 was my Annus horribilis and my most blessed year. That year I discovered what it was to be loved and to love through the lens of God's compassion and forgiveness.
As is my obsession, I read enormous selections, and some whole treatments of who Jesus could possibly be culturally, theologically and historically. There were loads of interesting but mostly disappointingly partial treatments. Nothing gave me anything like the assurance I needed to take the step toward saying who Jesus is for me.
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
Luke is a Gospel of Reassurance. It describesthe suffering of discipleship, that Christ is forming us, that we are called to be witnesses of redemption and forgiveness to the world and that we are called to participate, through listening to the Spirit, in the creation of the Kingdom. On Wednesday we began our look at the book of Luke, our focus for 2007. Luke is the best book for learning about discipleship and learning how to live in community. There are a number of different sources that will inform our study including commentaries from Darrell L. Bock (The NIV Application
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
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
When I think of covenant, the first thing I think of is food. Not just because I like to eat but primarily because of what eating together reminds me of. Because you don't eat together with enemies, you eat with friends. With morning snack beforehand and a potluck afterwards, our meetings together are bracketed by eating together.