JOY IN THE MIDST OF ROUGH WATERS
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in recent weeks doing funeral pre-planning for my parents. Making decisions about final disposition of the remains of people you have loved all your life is not any fun at all. It can be overwhelmingly sad.
After spending hours with
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Then we have the symbol of being under water. I tell some of the baptismal candidates when meeting with them ahead of time that once they are under the water, the congregation votes how long they should stay under water. The voting process
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My daughter Elia has given me permission to tell this story. Elia faced a huge dilemma in high school when her best friends from junior high days started hanging out with a rough crowd, starting smoking and crossing all sorts of boundaries. In order to keep the friendships she would have to start
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A friend of mine pastors in the Bloor West village in Toronto and runs a "God at the Pub" where he holds open discussions on the Christian faith in a bar setting. He told me the other day that he has all sorts of people there who are not people of faith, but who have told him they want to model
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I spoke with Wes, the new manager of our clothing store, Double Take the other day. He’s been a volunteer at Yonge Street Mission for years, and so he knew that we work with all kinds of people, including people who live on the street. He gave me permission to tell his story.
Wes realized a few
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Someone I know who is really struggling with his faith stately boldly the other day that he had come to understand that the universe is God and it was clear he thought that was a stunning revelation, a great new and important truth.
One of the first things that happens when we go away from the
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Jesus talks about letting his words remain in us. What does that mean? On occasion I’ve had opportunities to go elsewhere, away from the mission, to churches that were bigger and where there seemed to be more to gain.
But whenever those opportunities come up, my dad’s voice has always gone off in
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I was officiating at a wedding in the Niagara region on Friday, and an older man - a friend of the bride’s family - spoke to me about his spiritual journey. At one point he said, “I know the first thing that I’d like to ask God when I see him face to face”. I thought he might say that he wanted to
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I watched a brilliant film with my son Jared a short while ago called, “Downfall”. It is about the last ten
days of Hilter’s Nazi Germany, the last ten days in an underground bunker when the realization of the colossal failure of Nazism and of its war efforts was dawning on Germany’s leaders at the
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There’s a story about a young child who lay in hospital dying of cancer, withering away to
nothing. Her family was devastated. Friends came, from church, from work...and tried to offer
solace. They tried but could only come up with unhelpful little sayings that didn’t begin to touch
the
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