Pre-Blessed Food!

this video so totally matches up with a wicked cool story from today at supper. So my second youngest son stayed home from school today. He was supposed to go with someone for “Take your kid to work day” but he couldn’t go with Char to do catheters and pik lines and no other arrangements could'/were made so…

Char said, “Fine, you are going to stay home and find out what its like to be a house wife.” She lined up a bunch of chores for him to do around the house and i threw in a few as well. Bam he worked pretty much all day. I did take him to Dairy Queen for lunch (like I always did with Char every day when she was house bound as a house wife :))

Guess who made supper? – you guessed it! Now we are a family who still prays before we eat our meal. We tend to not use the memorized prayers but the content and format usually do not vary much. So tonight my youngest prays and as he says “…and bless the hand that have prepared this…” our grade nine ‘house wife’ throws up his hands like a football referee indicating a touchdown. He grins as I look over at him with a pretty blanked out look…

“That was me!” he says, “That was me!” He made the food – he got the credit and his hands got blessed in the process. What happened there in that moment is profound. Think of all the ways that scene comments on gender roles and the relegation of certain tasks into obscurity… Think of what that scene potentially says about for whom prayer is meaningful and how prayer operates either to create a certain kind of distance or to actually acknowledge engagement. Here is what I mean. There is a whole lot of work that has gone into getting the food we ate for supper onto the table. My sons work might actually be the least demanding. The table prayer is intended to reflect gratitude for this labour from which the rest of the family is benefitting. But is it possible that the prayer might actually be making the labour of getting the food onto the table disappear since it ultimately gives God credit for stuff that human beings spent a lot of effort producing. Don’t get me wrong – it not as if I don’t recognize that God ultimately is the source behind the food we get to eat. In a way (and i know this may not be popular to say) praying this prayer of blessing sort of allows to stop accounting for the guilt of not having worked very hard to make this food a reality. This video throws that door wide open. It seems to say look everything is already pre-packaged and pre-prepared but in order to allow yourself that unadulterated access to this food without having to even acknowledge the ‘ultimate’ divine source makes the alienation with the food complete. Now it is possible for food to exist without source – like it just appears on the Grocery Store shelves by magic – like manna appearing on the desert floor. The ludicrous nature of that idea should be apparent. I mean even the militant atheist would have to acknowledge that it takes a far weirder and outlandish faith to believe that stuff just appears on grocery store shelves than it does to believe that God is the source of all food.

In the end the disservice (the thing that does not get blessed) may lie in the fact that we are not really engaged in the production of our food.

So bless the farmer and the butcher and the meat wrapper and stock boy and the cart picker-upper dude in the parking lot. God bless the stove maker and the assembly line designer and the tortilla maker and the fertilizer distributer and the farmer who is wandering towards Christmas this year without so much as sniff of a profit line to show for all the rain and hope he has poured into the fields he tends. And God bless my son.

a special thank-you to the anonymous contributor who brought this video to my attention – storing up riches in…

Premonition

I really don't know what to make of this. Here's the story…

Last week I went up to camp evergreen to talk to kids from the front of the building. Anyways, I was up late Tuesday night with several of the staff discussing issues around the evolution/materialist debate. It was a good conversation with people who, to my surprise, had intelligent thoughtful questions and perspectives on topic. After being chased to bed for being too loud I promptly drained my bladder and crawled into the wonderfully hard double bed the camp provides for its speakers. I wiggled my ear buds down into the aural canal and proceeded to release my body in preparation for sleep. At that moment, a random thought entered my brain. "What if there was a fire?" I thought, "Do I know the escape route from my room on the second floor or this deteriorating lodge?" What was weird was that after reassuring myself that I could quite easily slip out my wind and down the roof to the ground, the thought about fire kept pricking my increasingly deteriorating consciousness. "What if there was a fire at home I thought?" Yikes – that perked me up! After thinking about what might cause a fire in my house and coming up blank I did something completely out of the ordinary. I prayed, "Please God protect my family from fire."

The entire next day brought no reminders of my late night inferno considerations. Even my post supper conversation with my wife did not spark any recollection of the 'fire' prayer from the night before.

It wasn't until the next day, in a conversation with my second oldest son that it came back.

"Dad, we had a fire in our dishwasher."

"What?"

"Yeah, on Tuesday night mom put the dishwasher on before she went to bed around ten. In the morning when I woke up I smelled smoke and told mom about it when we got home."

"That is really weird Jesse cause on Tuesday night (and it would have been close to the end of the dishwashing cycle) I prayed that God would keep you safe from fire."

"Wow Dad God's a pretty good firefighter eh?"

I'm a pretty sceptical person who does not put much stock in what seems like circumstantial occurrences like these. But I can't avoid the way this particular event haunts me. There you go!

Just do it...

some thoughts from Gil's summer ramblings
"For a while I thought that maybe I was missing something. Maybe God did things for and said things to other people in more direct ways. Maybe there was some defect in my practice of the Christian faith that accounted for this gap, some lack of faith or fundamental misunderstanding of how the whole thing was supposed to work. But gradually it became obvious that we were all in the same boat, interpreting (for the most part) ambiguous events and circumstances in light of our faith that God was, in fact, active and present within them."
What is interesting about this is that the degree to which we seem to attribute circumstances to God's action is directly proportional to our need to both absolve our own (human) responsibility for the action and our need to favorably reinforce our belief in God. Pretty self serving - I guess. It may be that the distorted view of God that we and others have may stem from this flaw...

here's nifty piece of sarcastic humour...

on prayer.

ht: my bro

Hmmmm

ht: Dan King

About my weight:

It seems that every weekend I gain back some of the weight I lost the week before. So this week I am setting my target at 7lbs.
Some people have asked what I am doing to lose weight. Here it is:
-significantly increased water consumption (target: 4L/day)
-reducing junk food consumption at every chance (sometimes this is sort of unavoidable because of being a youth dude)
-not eating after 7pm (again youth ministry affects this somewhat)
-spending a minimum of 35 minutes on the torture machine.
And last but not least…
-as I spend time on the tread climber there are many moments that I want to quit. So each time I feel that way - - - - I talk to God with a request…
“allow me one more day with my family…”

A friend of mine recently had a stroke – it knocked out his speech!
I did not anticipate how hard it would be to visit him in the hospital. There were times during that brief conversation that I felt completely frozen and completely out of control with my emotions.
Every Friday afternoon we usually meet at the local elementary school. He gets off work early to pick up his daughter and I wait around after teaching a Bible class to pick up my youngest boy. We always banter back and forth. Most recently he bugs me about how I could get away with almost anything in my youth ministry here. “After all,” he says, “what are they gonna do fire you!”
But these are days when despair follows pain very easily for me.
It is hard to visualize the long difficult road that lies ahead for him as he tries to retrain his mind and body to make words again. And then to live with the haunting fear of another stroke - hope slinks to the furthest corner underneath the bed in his room. He’s resilient – he fights!
Prayer feels so hollow.
Asking God to heal him makes me feel like an old time medicine peddler handing our miracles in little bottles. And saying that makes me feel like a faithless floozy.
What other prayer is there?
Every other prayer seems to ‘give up’.
Give him strength Lord.
Do you hear that tiny corner where hopelessness has gained a grasp?
Perhaps there is no meaning to struggle, but what does God mean to us in the pain?

“I was stabbed by Satan on the day that I was born. I was promised lovin’ but instead I was torn. My heart bled fear, my eyes shed tears.” –K’naan

Listen to the song here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2kwOP9h4-M

advent reading...

"Gracious Lord, give me the patience to wait between the asking and the answer. Fill me with the joy of sweet anticipation! Amen."
-Following the Star (a daily online advent devotional guide)

Dear God
In the confusion of the time that is ahead I want to learn to wait.
Everytime I think about the future (post June) I am filled with questions. And
I'll admit that I am addicted to the answers. I think of the impending chaos
that I will throw my family into in the next few months. That's right I did this
- it was/is my decision. Shoot I know you had a hand in this but in the end,
after all is said and done - I decided this. And I'm scared...
...honestly, love is such a fragile thing that people share. My
instincts are to protect it - to clear the coming chaos for my boys, my wife,
our family, our marriage. I apologize for how I have pushed you aside. I also
want you to know that I find it difficult to know how to trust you. I am greedy
for control.
I want to learn to wait - confidently wait!

Homemade Jam...

When I first came to Coaldale M.B. Church, I was told that one of my assets was a group of older ladies (widows, missionary singles, and regular singles) who were committed to praying for my ministry. Not only has this proven to be true but I have recieved countless wonderful surprizes from this group of ladies. Cinnamon rings, and meat buns and preserves and all kinds of fabulous goodies. Many of these dear ladies have made it their business to watch out for me. Their prayers, I am sure, have sustained me in this ministry. Sometimes the finer nuances of youth ministry escape their paradigms and the story that follows is evidence of that. I mean no disrespect to them or their concern for me.
Anywho here is the first installment of Confessions of a Mennonite Youth Pastor...