Employed!

I have a new job! I will officially be the "coordinator of advocacy and movement building" for the YWCA in Hamilton. I am excited to learn more about the issues of women in the community and to help bring more women into the movement for equal rights. I start August 25th and can't wait!

A Toast

A red wine, coke zero, passion tea, vanilla latte, chocolate milk toast

Here is a toast to the friends that always make you feel pretty- no makeup, sweatpants, unshowered, sick or sad...

Here's to the friends that drag you into the truth...

and inspire you to be a better person

Here's to the friends who know your weaknesses and and don't judge...

the friends who ask how your day was and entering into the beautiful and messy soil of life with you.

Here's to the friends that make you the best version of YOU.

Cheers!

A little obsessed with McLaren lately...

I just finished reading "Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope" by Brian McLaren and I have been thinking (and talking- sorry team!) about it nonstop. What is so exciting about this book is that it asks a lot of the same questions about the church, salvation and what it means to be a "Christian". There is one page in the book that I found particularly inspiring- and I am going to copy it all out here- for two reasons...one, everyone should read this book. You can even buy it here-two, if I write it out it's a bit like studying or burning it into my brian.

Here we go....

The  sub-section is titled A Group of People Who Could Change Everything - and THIS my friends, is the very best definition of "church" that I have seen...

" A community of people who begin to wake up to the covert curriculum in which they swim each day and would want to band together to share their insights about it. They would help one another not be sucked in, mot be massaged into passivity, not to be malformed by this powerful educational process occurring in a multimedia classroom without walls or vacations. They would remind one another of the alternative framing story they had come to believe was good, beautiful, and true, and they would seek, together, to live by this alternative framing story, the radical good news.

The would develop practices of spiritual formation so they and their children for generations to come would be able to learn, live, and grow as a part of the solution, not part of the problem; as agents of healing, not as carriers of the disease; as revolutionaries seeking to dismantle and subvert the suicidal system, not as functionaries and drones seeking to serve and preserve it.

The would understand that at every moment, their identity as revolutionaries remains under assault; the gravity of compromise pulls and drags to hunch their backs, slacken their step, and lower their gaze. They would be on guard for ways that they themselves could sabotage themselves-by becoming preoccupied with trivia, or by working from the system's logic and values when trying to fight the system, or by slipping into dual narratives as the Pharisees and religious scholars in Jesus' day did, or by substituting talk for action or activity for fruitfulness.

So through word and deed, song and ritual, holiday and daily practice, they would seek to be the revolution they wished to see in the world, and they would work to spread the vision and extend the invitation to others to join their revolution in every way they could.

A group of people like this, functioning in a difficult environment dominated by a hostile system with a covert curriculum, would make lots of mistakes and need continual renewal. But it would be worth the effort and and sacrifice- as long as it understood its sacred and unique role as the bearers of revolutionary good news, the message of hope: another world is possible, available now for all who believe.

This kind of group would be the current expression of Jesus' original band of disciples. It would be an exciting thing to be a part of: a community that forms disciples who work for the liberation and healing of the world, based on Jesus' good news of the kingdom of God. 

Groups like this wouldn't need building, pipe organs, rock bands, layers of institutional structure, video projectors, parking lots, and so on...although having these things wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, and could possibly be useful. What they would need would be simple: a passion to understand Jesus and his message and a commitment to live out that understanding in a world in which everything must change."- Brian McLaren p. 291, 292.

wordle

click on the picture

Miniature Earth

Puts things into perspective...

from what?

Yesterday I was at a church service and the congregation was singing a song and there was a line that we sang about how Jesus has "saved" us. Singing that struck me because I questioned "saved from what?" What exactly is it that Jesus has/is saving me from? I asked Matt, and he said "death"- which is probably true, but we're not dead yet, so how can we really know.

So, I've been thinking about it and I think that I need to be able to answer that question in order to be truly grateful and to fully understand what I consider to be the reality of Christ has done in this world.

So, that's the question- if you think you've been saved, what exactly have you been saved from?
More on that later.

The World we live in...

"...In this economy we consume time and produce fatigue, consume art and talent and produce entertainment and amusement, consume work and leisure and produce paychecks and heart attacks. And ultimately we consume communities and produce extended families and consume extended families and produce nuclear families, consume nuclear families and produce individuals, consume individuals and produce consumers and finally consume consumers themselves and produce disembodied fragments called "wants" and "needs" and "markets" and "segments" and "anxieties" and "drives" that the economy consumes and excretes and reconsumes in a kind of cannibalistic ferment or rot. In the process, we commonly produce successful megaconsumers of unimaginable wealth who are more or less bankrupt in compassion for their poor neighbors. And in a stroke of suicidal genius,we simultaneously produce poor people whose greatest dream is to be like those megaconsumers who don't care about them at all."- Brian McLaren, Everything Must Change, pg 130-31.

Pretty twisted isn't it?