Not Of This World

They say that one person's junk is another's treasure. This was really driven home to me at a Christmas party I was at once. I had got invited on a date, so I didn't really know anyone there, and they didn't really know me, but they were all very friendly. At one point, the conversation turned to weird presents they had received. One person started telling me about how someone had given them a Bible. She turned to my date and I, and asked, somewhat rhetorically, "Isn't that just the weirdest gift? Like, who would want that?" And I thought, how do I respond to that? Because I had  received a Bible as a Christmas gift once. I didn't receive it out of the blue; I had asked for it, even though I already had at least four Bibles to my name. The cover on my big fat study Bible--which I still have and love and consult--was falling off, and I decided I no longer wanted to cart it back and forth to church anymore. I wanted a much more portable Bible. So...

I was 18, sitting in a busful of Canadian Bible college students, crossing the Canada-US border. A US customs officer asks if we had any firearms. We laugh, saying no . What would a bunch of teens studying the Bible be doing with guns? The customs officer, completely serious, replies, but how are you gonna protect yourselves? It was such a foreign concept to me. Protect myself---from what? I had been catcalled, I had been pickpocketed on the bus home from high school, but none of these things warranted pulling a gun on anyone. Not yesterday, though--- Ten people tragically died yesterday in a horrific attack on my city's streets. Ten people dead is, of course, ten too many. But still, I'm glad it wasn't eleven. A mass murderer certainly is more deserving of having a gun pulled on him than a pickpocket or a catcaller, and pulled on him it was . But that's as far as it got. No one has been executed in Canada since 1962, and the death penalty has been officially a...

I was talking to a professor recently, who told me that she had been a devout Catholic as a youth, but when she took a class about existentialism in university, it was over. I thought it was interesting, because I had a crisis of faith in my early university days, but in the end, it made my faith stronger instead of undermining it. It happened in first year. I was taking a course called "Literature and Theory: An Introduction." The reading that did it was about Marxist theory. The author pointed out that religion, Christianity included, was used as a means to control people. And he brought up many concrete examples of how just that had happened. I think he was right, too. Christianity had been used for centuries  as a way to control people. And, all of a sudden, my faith felt empty and broken. Was I just being controlled? But then a crucial thing happened. I didn't run away from these feelings. I did not topple under the pressure. Instead, I worked through them. I...

I'm reading a really good book right now called God's Smuggler  by Brother Andrew. I started it just over twelve hours ago, and I felt certain that I was probably going to finish it before I went to bed tonight. But just now, God stirred in my heart, and I feel like I ought to write down what He is saying before it flits out of my mind. Besides, it's the long weekend, and I will have time to read more tomorrow. When I was a teenager, I read The Voice of the Martyrs  and I kind of got a little bit obsessed about the Underground Church. I admired their faith, their tenacity, and how God transformed that faith in the face of adversity into something so much stronger than could ever be found in a place where Christianity was built into the culture, but stretched thin by it. Of course I knew that visiting an underground church would be dangerous, but also, I wanted to go anyhow. I was drawn to the idea of taking risks in order to help others. In reading books about the Undergr...

I have about a kajillion things to do before I leave on Thursday to present at a conference, and I am feeling utterly overwhelmed. I feel like I am on the verge of panic attack or something, my heart gripped in a vice. I want to get these things done. I need to get these things done. But I am also frozen, so frozen. It seems the harder a task, the bigger it is, the higher the stakes, the stricter the deadline, the more likely I am to end up in a procrastination loop. Like this one, writing my blog, with the threat of this conference hanging over my head. I think that must be what Jesus felt like on the night before He died (except much stronger, of course): "Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, ' Sit here while I go over there and pray.'   He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee  along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled.   Then he said to them, ' My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow  to t...