Monthly Archives: December 2006

Radio Guy

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I just got out of my car, where I was listening to a fellow talk.  He was a columnist for a major American newspaper for twenty years, which suggests that he knows something about… something.

He was speaking about Islam, the “war on terror”, Jihad, and more.  In his critique of Islam, he stated that many of its principles and values are not conducive to much of what Western civilization is all about.

That re-sparked the thought I’ve often had…

How much of Western civilization is conducive to the message of Jesus?

How much of what we hold as “life as we know it” would not receive the time of day within a kingdom where Jesus reigned as Supreme King?

Add to that the reality that my life (or yours), as his follower, is to be a mini-kingdom in which he rules, and we just left “hypothetical” in the dust.

Thanks Radio Guy.

Loving this Tune

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An album by Andrew Peterson has been getting steady playing time lately.  It’s a Christmas album of his own songs, and it’s got a fantastic flow from start to finish as the songs really follow the flow of the Scriptures, right from the early Old Testament stories, through the Exodus, the prophets, and the birth of Jesus.  It’s very well done and puts the “Christmas story” into a big-picture context that’s pretty helpful.

My favourite song on the album has to be one sung by Derek Webb.  If you get a chance to hear it, go for it.  Lyrics are below…

Deliver Us

Our enemy, our captor is no Pharaoh on the Nile.
Our toil is neither mud nor brick nor sand.
Our ankles bear no callouses from chains,
Yet Lord, we’re bound.
Imprisoned here, we dwell in our own land.

Deliver us, deliver us.
Oh Yahweh, hear our cry,
And gather us beneath Your wings tonight.

Our sins,they are more numerous than all the lambs we slay.
These shackles, they were made with our own hands.
Our toil is our atonement and our freedom Yours to give.
So Yahweh, break Your silence if You can.

‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem
How often I have longed
To gather you beneath My gentle wings.’

“How’s Your Week Been?”

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I got asked that several times on the weekend; my answer?”It didn’t go how I’d planned it.”

One friend replied, “Oh, more of my weeks are like that than the going-according-to-plan kind.”

I think that sentence was supposed to offer comfort. Didn’t work.

This may sound like minor stuff, but I found it very frustrating. Last week was a week in which I anticipated enjoying more freedom than usual. Some of my weekly duties weren’t in effect last week, enough so that I was eagerly eyeing my schedule: The reading I was going to do, the planning for down the road, the writing, the visiting,… what a week it was going to be!

And then life happened.

And it happened in a way that I hadn’t planned.  How dare it!

Twenty-minute jobs took two hours. One-hour jobs stretched into three. Tasks I had even dreamed up started popping out of the woodwork. Grrrrr!

And I wouldn’t claim to know why, but this ugly little doggie called Get-Nothing-Done-and-Fast felt the need to follow me home from the office.

Now putting up curtain rods (a small job, right?) had to involve an errand for new brackets, a trip across town to borrow a drill that I wasn’t planning on using, a dead battery on the drill five minutes into the job, another trip for another drill, another dead battery (I’m not making this up), a sigh of thanks that I’d borrowed two batteries this time, a broken piece of hardware, some rummaging around in the basement for new  bits of hardware, and curtain rods are finally up.

That was but one example of about five from the weekend.  The weekend… you know: The relaxing, laid-back part of your week, when you’re never tempted to say bad words.

All that said, life’s actually pretty good these days. Really.

Blogging’s just bringing out the best in me lately.

Merry Christmas!

Never Thought of THAT

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I always wanted to be taller.  When I was in Jr. High, I had a mini basketball hoop on my bedroom door.  I slammed the snot out of that thing dreaming that I was 6’9″ (don’t know why I chose that height) and killing every smalltown Saskatchewan high school team that I could find.

Well, what about 7’9″?  What could you do with that kind of size?

More than you might imagine, namely THIS.

A Will and a Way and an Empty Blog

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I’ve wanted to write on here all week.

Seriously.

And on Monday, my day-timer looked free-er than usual–plenty of time to write. Well, this is my first entry of the week, and its point is…

That I have nothing to blog about.

My “open” week has evaporated into a series of office tasks that I hadn’t been counting on, into my first experience of entering the Christmas rat race in three years (I’d nearly forgotten the beauty of Christmas rats), into an extension of my struggle from last week to concentrate for more than two minutes, and into that annoying debate of whether it’s worth my while to wash my filthy car or whether the right-around-zero weather we’re having will just make it grubby again tomorrow.

Hardly inspiring, I know.

But a friend reminded me this week: “Jay, your blog isn’t ‘Inspiring Stuff’; it’s called ‘A Disorderly Pile of Who-Knows-What'”.

Very true, my friend.  Very true.

So in the quest of re-discovering my identity, I’m posting this: A pile of something that amounts to nothing.

Wow.

Sure feels good to have found myself again…