Day by Day

I could almost have titled this one "Letting the Pieces Fall", but that may have come off a little melodramatic. It honestly feels that way though. It feels like there is precious little I can do to stop it without removing my foot from the path, and the only peace I have is when I surrender to it. As I write this it comes to me that this is the only way that I can travel and still follow my Lord. It is, in fact, the road that my feet having been walking for many years now, but some seasons seem to test the footwear more than others.
My diary shows that this time has been, and continues to be, the most challenging one since a certain sojourn in a certain prairie city. Now as then, there is no place in my life that offers any ease. Work is challenging on so many levels, family life is no cake walk as we transition to an entirely new life, marriage is good, but we have to consciously work at it. There are no real male friendships for me to draw from, and time for personal space would have an IPO higher than bottled youth. To be pressed on every front like this leaves me only one place to go for peace and solace, and that is the way and the heart of my Father. To say I do this perfectly would be a joke at best. To say I do it well would even feel like a stretch. To say that I do it at all is just pointless masochism, because if I didn't I would have already bailed. Truth is, the only thing that keeps me moving forward is the hope of my Father. As I wrote to a friend the other day, hope is a deadly weapon against our foe, but expectations are poison to the spirit. So I find myself somewhere in the middle of doing, and just surviving.
God is good, though, and gives encouragement and strength in its time. Never when I think I need it most, but when He knows I do. The heat of the day never disappears, but the cool winds do come, as do the pools of refreshing. I am thankful for this because if it were not so I would not be able to stand. It is hard to imagine how ugly that would look. I didn't like the view that giving up afforded from that prairie city and I certainly don't like it from here. The one thing I do know is that if I had packed it in in the prairies we would never have set foot in Hong Kong. The other thing I know is that persevering then brought me to a new depth of relationship with the Father, so this gives me even more hope here and now.
I certainly do not feel like any kind of spiritual superman. My Father once told me that my worries about that were groundless, because it is all found in Christ anyways. It is good that I too am found to be in Christ. This will be my rest.

Checkmate

I have recently started to play chess again after a couple of decades or so. It is a truly fascinating game which I have no illusions of mastering, but would love to at least enjoy on a recreational level. My kids have also shown an interest as I have recently purchased a nice set from the stalls at Stanley Market here in Hong Kong. It has the pieces carved from ox bone in the fashion of emperors and warriors, which adds a certain enjoyment to the whole process of playing.
I think the thing that fascinates me most about chess is the whole aspect of forcing the other player into moves until you finally pin then down in checkmate. That sensation of helplessness is unlike any other. This is what lead me to the though I would like to share today. It all revolves around the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and the "Checkmate!" that has resounded throughout the cosmos ever since. It has the same effect on all of us as we survey the board and try our best to see if there are any other options, or perhaps our opponent missed something that will allow us to escape the inevitable outcome. For example, there is the whole argument about evolution....Checkmate! What does it matter if there is or is not a shred of truth to evolution? Christ rose from the dead. Perhaps there is are many ways to heaven.....oops...Checkmate! Christ rose from the dead, not Buddha, not Vishnu, not Mohammad, not Freud, nor any other pretender, only Christ. What about all the evil in the world today?.....there it is again...Checkmate! Christ rose from the dead. The choice is upon us all as to what we will do with this. It really doesn't matter what comes up the resurrection of Christ trumps it all, quite resoundingly. Please don't come out with some lame new Dan Brown styled pseudo science trying to refute what has been a point of fact for 2000 years either. Those so-called hypothesis's are laughable at best.
The nice thing about this checkmate is that there are battles that rage against all believers in the court of their own minds, and this gavels all of them down as empty, unsubstantiated objections against the truth of Christ. It is somewhat debilitating when you are on the receiving end of checkmate, but oh how wonderful when you hear the Lord sound this out like a trumpet before all your enemies!!
CHECKMATE!!!!

Drawn From Water

I saw this on a friend's blog and was moved to post this here and help spread the word. It is true that once you have seen you cannot turn aside without action. This is why we are where we are in the world, and it is why you are where you are in the world. There is so much need, but why else are we in this fleeting little life of ours than to trade it for all the riches of the heaven we can live right now. It is impossible to imagine the poverty of this life when seen through heaven's eyes, and equally impossible to imagine the richness of this life when lived through heaven's heart.

Drawn from Water from Drawn From Water on Vimeo.

How Do You Rest??

This has been an ongoing thing for me, the lesson of rest, especially guilt-free rest. It probably has a cultural root in me, but some roots grow weeds and I don't want weeds. These weeds come from a heritage of hard core work ethic that grew up in fertile soil of personal insecurities. Really rich stuff, and like any other rich, dark soil it had plenty of shit in it too. The work ethic was fine, because the word says that if a man doesn't pull his share of the load then he shouldn't eat either. The school I am volunteering at right now teaches the students the value of work in the setting of a healthy community, so the whole work thing is not the issue. The issue is being ok with being at rest.
God actually had to command us to be at rest, because He knew that many of us would have a tendency to ignore the off switch. God then cursed people by saying that, because of their rebellion, they would never enter His rest. It is apparent to me that God takes this whole thing quite seriously. It is apparent to me that I struggle with the concept quite a bit. Even in this season my family and I are in right now, there is still work to be done each day, and tasks that we need to complete, but the overall emphasis is rest. I am discovering in this season how deep the roots of these weeds go and that they choke out so much of the joy of my relationship with my Father. They then spread from there to my wife and kids, as I externalize this struggle with them. It becomes increasingly evident that this is an area where I need to do some weeding, and that my Father's command is no light thing.
Until I actually begin work at the school this will be a struggle with the physical reality of rest, and after I begin work it will become a spiritual necessity. I am so glad that in all of this my Father is always good!

Some LOL While You......You Know

I love all the cultural oddities that you come across when you leave your own cultural for a decidedly different one, it makes everyday life a lot less ordinary. You never know when you are going to run into a little tidbit that will make you smile, so it is like a bizarre kind of Easter egg hunt you don't even know your on. I guess it could be easy to use these times to criticize or point out all the differences, but I prefer to just sit back and enjoy it all. Actually this time I was standing and enjoying it, because I was in the public washrooms at the bottom of our hill. Back home these are usually fairly fetid little rooms with questionable sanitation sequestered in some corner of the park where the smell won't scare people off. Here on Cheung Chau, though, it is actually a relatively pleasant affair in a clean facility (which a lot of people back home may find hard to believe, of course after using a public toity in downtown Shanghai I would be thinking the same thing) The picture below may give some indication of why the place is looked after so well. (Just click the pic to enlarge it)

God Of The Lesser Things

As I lay here on the floor of my empty house I am taking a moment to reflect on our family's passage to the next part of our lives. I am taking a moment to take it all in so that it doesn't rush by in a flash of packing and paperwork, swirling down to an indiscernible tangle of lifeless memories. I need to take it in, because this whole journey is about knowing my Father, and in fact if I don't know Him the journey is a pointless adventure, because I have nothing to give when we get where we are going.
My Father speaks. Unlike the lifeless concoctions of the human psyche, He lives, and He speaks. The words He speaks are truth, life, and love. I am so glad that He speaks to me! He infuses my whole being with life and hope in a single word. Not really that surprising when mere sentences ushered galaxies into existence, flinging them to unseen reaches of the universe. Surprising, though, when I consider that His voice does not destroy my frail form, but rather strengthens and comforts me. Absolutely magical when I consider the comparably infinitesimal things that He will speak to me about. Never has He explained the existence of the substance of His creations, nor has He given forth on the distinctions between time and eternity. What He has talked to me about are the smallest things in my life, the things so small most people around me wouldn't even notice, and He does it like a hopeless romantic. Have you ever considered that the voice that whispers in your ears, that drops like rain in the desert, that sends showers of life through parts of you that only exist for that interaction, that voice will thunder the end of this heaven and earth? When I ponder this I marvel not so much that He commands all the heavens, but that He has the time to tell me where I've misplaced something, or even a secret little tip on how to parent my child through a sea of transition. Little things, really. Yet, in all these slight details He speaks. Not for show, simply for love.

ABSOLUTELY Loving It!

I had to write something tonight, even though it will in no way capture the feelings that cocooned my psyche this evening in a tenderly woven, sensationally evocative, baby blanket. It may have happened because of a simple act of surrender, or perhaps it was a unyielding embrace from a Father who understood the depths of my need this night. I surrendered to my family and went to a beach for a cool off swim, and was lifted up from this earth in a sublime warmth of spirit for which words fail me. As I slowly swam on my back away from a far distant shore lit by the last fragrant fires of this day's death every movement, sound and color was like a harmony of living caresses. I've tried before to manufacture such a moment, but those were pale corpses gnawing on my desires compared with this rapture. The slightest movement of my hands beneath the surface bent those reflections into crystal beauty, resurrected in true form to lightly flow away from my open hands. Even the sound of the buoy chain beneath the water blending with my own rhythmic breaths became the refrain of a much larger melody my body felt dripping from the fingers of my spirit. I was captured by the perfection of the water's reflection of my movements within its womb, the waves of force it expressed as it allowed me to propel myself through its form.
These words grasp so weakly, but the source of this great peace knows His breath upon my weary, dry soul.























Thank you.........Dad

Not Again!!!

This is a little too strange, and already tragic. There are memories of 2003 and the fires that destroyed over 200 homes in the Lakeshore area of Kelowna.

(Pics from 2003)
This time it is going on in the Glenrosa area south of Westbank, on the other side of the lake from Kelowna. We are listening to the local AM station online and there is so much going on already. Today was a very sunny, hot day and there were high winds in the evening which have whipped the fires very dramatically. There are currently two fires burning, one in the Glenrosa area and one west of the Fintry area north of Kelowna on the west side of the lake. There are over 10,000 residents evacuated from the Glenrosa area already this evening.
We are also weirded out by this on another level because it was after the fires in 2003 that we left for China the first time, now we are preparing to leave again, and it is happening all over again. A friend of ours actually had a dream last year that there was a huge fire right where this one is happening.
Like our 8 year old son said, with no trace of accusation,"What is God up to dad?"

LOL

I had to laugh when I came across this. It was roundabout as most surfing is, and this ride started with a search for a story about the Neverland Ranch replica being built in Shanghai for the Expo there in 2010. When I went to the Shanghai Daily online paper I stumbled upon this section in the sidebar where they highlight a certain block of the city and give links to businesses. When I hovered over the links I noticed this one for the Big Bamboo on 南阳路 (Nanyang Road). This was the bar where the other Canadian guys I worked with would hang out. I went there with them once and ended up talking to an American gal who was oozing American attitude, although it was obviously to make up for being so out of her element.
Just a bit of a laugh for me this morning.

How Great Thou Art

This has been a very interesting season for us, with lots of work and lots of waiting. It has been a season of many hopes being fulfilled and many hopes walking the wires of public opinion. If you look over at my wife's blog you'll see some of the fallout of this season that we have both had to deal with. On this post I will try to synthesize the other half of what we have been going through, the half that involves the family that lives outside our personal four walls.
The gathering of saints (I humbly refrain from calling this a church) that we have been traveling with for the the last decade and a half has found itself in yet another crisis and there is no end of meetings and media being spun from it all. We have been a part of some of these, both small and large. We have mostly been listening for the words that we long to hear, we yearn for the waking of the dream we have dreamed. We yearn now, with hearts that are turning to the east (actually that would be a European perspective as it is actually 6500 miles to the west). We yearn, knowing we are leaving. We yearn with the hope of Christ.
I know this all sounds a little too ethereal, but truly, as we look inside, there is a deep love for the people that the Father has joined us too. There is not just a history, there is a shared DNA and a common lineage. This is where the hopes find their roots. Not to say that I am more mature than any of the people, because I actually feel that the opposite is closer to the truth, but there is a sense in which we look with hope as we do towards our kids. We hope and dream for them, and we pray to the Father to see them through. We see so much potential, and in the Father we hope. Personally I see these people as so much more than myself and actually see a lack within myself when I watch them. I know it would be so much easier to just pass judgment on them and go my way, but I could no more do this to them than to my own family.
This is a time where the Father is calling them to so much more than they have ever imagined for themselves, and yet there is so much fear to overcome. I do believe that there will be an overcoming, but not because of the people, rather because of the greatness of our God who loves us enough to continue this work He has begun. This is where the substance of my prayers lies, in the purpose of God, and His eternal desire revealed to us in an ever increasing measure. When I step out on this ground there are seas that part, dead that rise, angelic armies unveiled, and simple gatherings of saints that overcome.
The only sadness is not actually being there for the working out of these purposes.