I was thinking recently and decided I wanted to add a section to my website to blog about issues of church and faith. It's interesting to consider what role the Internet might have in the lives of today's and tomorrow's young people -- could it be a catalyst for encouraging kids to explore and share their faith?
Idea: What if a church body blogged?March 3, 2008
As I set out to write some blog posts about issues of church and faith, I wonder what the response would be if you asked a church body to individually write down things they're thinking about over a period of a month, and then get together and spend an hour taking turns reading out entries from those journals. Thoughts, questions, ideas, encouragement, struggles. You could do the same thing with a youth group, perhaps.
Idiot's guide to prayerMarch 3, 2008
As I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday I noticed the
Idiot's guide to prayer sitting there at the checkout. How odd, I thought, for a book on prayer to be staring at you in the supermarket, and not even in the book section. (Yes, Zehr's has a book section oddly enough) Prayer has always been a topic that fascinates me... it's this thing that we all agree we should be doing more, but often we find it difficult to make a priority in our lives.
A mental paintingOctober 30, 2007
I had one of those deep thoughts today that come now and again, the kind that sends a bit of a tingle down your spine... what brought it on was contemplating a relative of a church friend who is near to dying, and as is not uncommon, the circumstances are quite sad. But as I sat there, a mental picture started forming that rendered itself like a painting -- two paintings side by side, actually.
Painting #1, on the left: You have this dark blue backdrop, very rich, and in the foreground there is a woman dressed in flowing white robes. Gravity has been somehow set on its side so that she is falling towards the right side of the painting. Rather than there being "ground" along the right edge, there is this bright white surface, a membrane, that shifts and flows a little bit like water and a little bit like fog. It is slightly transclucent, but not enough to see below the surface, and this woman is practically splashing into it. She is on the verge of being totally submersed, sucked under. She is near death, at the very tipping point between life and the mysterious unknown, and her face reads of great sadness and fear. She struggles not to be taken.
Painting #2, on the right: In this painting, the white shifty surface is on the left, but from this vantage point it is much more translucent. You can clearly see the woman on the other side, and parts of her have already come through. What couldn't be seen from the other side was that here are green, rolling fields, a bright blue sky, and crowded around the girl are her grandmother and grandfather, her aunt, and many other family, some from decades past, all crowding around to welcome her. They would be crying tears of joy if there were tears here, but there are not. Instead, they are radiating, only wishing that the woman could be reassured what awaited her.
