Committing to the South End
I wrote this article for the Sarnia Journal his past week. Keeping my thoughts to under 500 words and on topic has served to be good exercise in being concise and clear. Our values speak…
Maybe Violence Is Necessary Sometimes
For quite a while I’ve had the moral principle of non-violence being necessary for the way of the Christian. Taking cues from John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas I had come to the belief that…
Thinking vs Feeling In Regards To Empathy
I am predominately a thinking person. My wife endearingly calls me a robot because when situations arise that would for some evoke deep feelings, I tend to respond with logic rather than comfort. In a…
Imagine being uprooted from your home
My first piece written for the Sarnia Journal. If you feel like your rights are being trampled on for a situation like a barricade coming down – can you stop for one second and try…
Whoever Is Against You Is Not For You
A friend recently counselled me in regards to my post on Bethel and their fight against homosexuality that “the disciples wanted to call down fire on some folks and Jesus counselled a different approach.” This…
Action Precedes Belief Only Once You’ve Been Enlightened
We start life where the way we live informs the way we think. We are raised as children and then eventually grow into adults and we only know life how we experience it. The majority…
Thinking Further And Acting Better Than Bill Maher On Muslims, Terrorism and The Charlie Hebdo attacks
Bill Maher has been growing in popularity as of late. People are really jumping on his no-shit direct opposition to religion. In particular, he was recently on the Jimmy Kimmel show where he stated that…
The Goodness and Badness of Guilt and Grace
This morning we chatted a bit about guilt, shame, repentance, confession and this quote: The one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it, because when people feel guilty about…
New Years Sermon: On Meaninglessness and Setting Goals
Let me start with a story. This is taken from Caesura Letters. Philosophies for Sale is a clever dialogue written by Lucian of Samosata, a second century satirist. It is a story about an auction…
If White People Are Upset About A Barrier, Imagine What Aboriginals Must Feel Like Over Their Land
In most conflicts between white folk and aboriginal folk we are usually presented with quite the bit of rhetoric that someone isn’t following the rules. In the recent situation at Ipperwash where Kettle and Stony…
Trends in Conversations around the Protests
In trying to follow the unfolding of the Michael Brown shooting and protests and the Burnaby mountain protests I am noticing several different trends in the conversation. 1. Individual Justice vs Corporate Justice – Many…
A Sermon on Thankfulness
This week has been an interesting and eventful week for me. The story about our ducks being taken is going into the newspaper. I wrote few blog posts that got some attention and conversation going….
Tim Gibb and Bethel’s Fight Against The “Homosexual Agenda”
I spent an hour of my evening tonight listening to Pastor Tim Gibb (the senior pastor of a decade or so at the Sarnia Pentecostal Church that I grew up up) ripping into the “gay…
Parables of Judgment – It’s Really Not Looking Good For Us
The last three weeks of the church calendar have been awfully depressing. Especially if we read them right. Parable of the Virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) Must read David Henson’s take | My sermon here Parable of…
Why We Shouldn’t Stand For Our National Anthem
I don’t think I really thought about this until the last few years. But lately, I just haven’t been able to stand when the national anthem is on. It just feels so, I don’t know,…
The Story About Our Ducks And How Sarnia Took Them
Early in May our house decided to get some ducks. Why? Well I think everyone had their own reasons. Rachel wanted someone to cuddle with. Dallas wanted to raise his own meat. Nick wanted companionship….
Ireland in HDR
Sometimes I take the same picture 5 times all with different exposures and then throw them together. I think it looks pretty cool. Click on the image to see it bigger. It will look sweet…
Ireland Trip
2014 has been quite the year of travelling. What a beautiful world. Costa Rica, Azores and now Ireland. We found cheap tickets again. Well Rachel did. So we took a few weeks and drove around…
Pregnancy Centres, Dammit Janet and How I Ended Up In The Middle
So this is interesting. The Pregnancy Centre in Sarnia applied for a grant from Ontario Trillium Foundation to open a second centre in Petrolia (a nearby town). The pregnancy centre here is well supported by…
A Sermon on The Ten Virgins: Formation Cannot Be Shared
This was passed to me after my sermon, but I had to post it. This is a brilliant reading of this passage and I think makes sense of a lot of the struggle we were…