Convenient Truth

Denial - or changing perspective?

2011-11-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

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"Aren't you afraid you'll just get written off as one of those people who says 'just leave it to God'?"

The question came from talk-show host Frank Pastore back in 2008, as he gave me 10 minutes of air time to talk about A Very Convenient Truth, Version One. Frank's show is on KKLA Los Angeles, a Christian station, and he'd brought me on after I'd sent a note pointing out that diverting using grain to produce motor fuel rather than food was against God's plan -- Gen. 1:29 "it shall be food for you". (In other words: not for powering motor vehicles.)

The interview itself was a disaster, since Frank threw some curves at me (he is, after all, a retired baseball pitcher) that I wasn't able to handle and I think I came off looking likea kook (don't say it), but that question about "leave it to God" gave me something to think about and it's lurked in the back of my mind as I meditated more about God, the environment, and the obsession over global warming/climate change. It reminded me that a lot of people might think that -- and those just happen to be the very people who need to be reached with this message.

I believe I've managed to address that in writing Version Two.

For the record, I did have an answer to that question: "this is too important not to leave to God".

The fact is, once we consider the responsibility God placed on us right from the start to be His "branch managers" for the earth, considering the promises in His Word is a must. His Word calls us to draw close to Him and worship Him -- not some flighty, mythological witch called "Mother Nature" -- and that when we do, He will heal the land and give us the Grace to make proper use of the wonderful Creation He has given us. The current "green" obsession takes our focus off Him, as if He were irrelevant; yet without a focus on God, to whom are we accountable for our actions?

A Very Convenient Truth points out something else: for decades, we have been trying to solve man-made problems with man-made solutions. (Regardless of whether climate change is man-made or no, or any alteration of man's behaviour will ultimately derail the changes in our environment, there are changes underway and Scripture tells us what we are supposed to do when we see them.) We have to come to terms with the fact that in spite of those efforts, the situation has grown worse (at least, according to the numerous studies and reports by scientific panels). Now is the time to remember that, "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." (Psalm 127:1); if actions have not borne fruit, maybe we have to consider that God is not blessing those actions.

In other words, if we really want to see something positive out of this whole experience with climate change/global warming, it's time to get to know what the Maker has to say about what He has made.

If you love this planet ...

2011-10-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

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... an excerpt from A Very Convenient Truth ...

(You hear that expression from time to time, "if you love this planet"; but really, how can we love a planet? It's a rock, and saying "I love a rock," -- no matter how beautiful it may be -- can get into a weird area really fast. But in this portion, we see how love does figure in the picture.)

What's the difference between “using and enjoying” and destroying? Both involve consuming something, but to destroy something is to consume it so it can never be restored. We are only to use and enjoy the rest of Creation to the extent that we can replenish it. Does not pollution result from our using creation beyond our ability to replenish?

That’s where love comes in.

If you love me, keep my commandments.

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever;

-- John 14:15-16

People are Destroyers by nature: we burn, we kill, we pluck things in their prime; that's why we have to be commanded to replenish what we use of the earth. God does not command us to do things that come to us naturally, and that includes the First Great Assignment. It’s part of the base animal “fight or flight” response in which we say, “I need to protect myself (or feed my family or get shelter), and no matter how many fish and birds are killed, I’m going to get it.” The underlying theme of God’s commandments is, “trust Me and no one else to meet your needs.” Failing to do that is the root of all sin.

Having dominion over the earth is not in our nature, which is why it’s so hard to comprehend. We can be overwhelmed by the power of natural disasters and the size and ferocity of the beasts of the earth are overwhelming to us. God sees it otherwise. So it’s not a question of whether we love the earth: if we love Jesus, we will take care of the earth; as that relationship builds, it’s inevitable that our behavior will change. Consider Zacchaeus, the little tax collector described in Luke 19, who climbed a tree so he could get a better look at Jesus. Jesus invited Himself over for dinner, and by the time they reached Zacchaeus’ place, Luke tells us the tax collector, speaking of his renewed life in the present tense, had already repented.[i]

Notice, too, that Jesus spotted Zacchaeus because Zacchaeus had made the effort to see Jesus directly. When we do the same, God honors that commitment by bringing the transformation we need.

As with Zacchaeus, Jesus does not stand over us, pointing out our every sin. He did not do that with the woman taken in adultery; He did not go into deep thought about what sin Lazarus might have committed, that he would have fallen ill and died; He flat-out rejected the idea that either the man who had been blind since birth or his parents had committed some terrible sin; for Jesus, it's all about glorifying God, not revisiting sin.

And so it is in our relationship with Him and our impact on His creation. When we receive Jesus joyfully, as Zacchaeus did, we know what we've done wrong, and we're already moving in the right direction.

In other words, our current environmental crisis has less to do with SUVs or GHGs or CACs than it has to do with GOD.

In our repentance, we must move from being destroyers to being replenishers, but we can’t do that without changing our entire mindset. “Be not conformed to the world,” the Apostle Paul writes, “but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind ….” (Romans 12:2[ii]) Being conformed to the world means adopting solutions and attitudes that seem right to us or follow another person’s particular point of view or a consensus of like-minded individuals. Only when we allow ourselves to be led by God do we truly change our thinking. We pray, “how can we do this without destroying what You have created?” and then wait on the answer. He will show us: it may seem like a less dynamic or immediate response to the situation, but when we consult with God, the answer is both the right answer and the timely one.

[i] Zacchaeus is one of my favorite characters in the Bible. We meet him as Jesus is passing through Jericho en route to Jerusalem. Z. is a crooked tax collector who is so short, he has to climb a tree in order to get a look at Jesus. And Jesus … looked up and saw him and said unto him, “Zacchaeus, make haste and come down; for today I must abide at thy house. And he … received Him joyfully … and said “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” I think it’s significant that Zacchaeus is speaking in the present tense, despite his well-earned reputation for ripping people off. In the time between Jesus’ spotting him up the tree and arriving at his house for dinner, Zacchaeus has already repented and changed his whole way of thinking and living.

[ii] Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:2)

GOOD NEWS! We're guilty of Original Environmental Sin!

2011-10-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

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... excerpt from A Very Convenient Truth

If we have to shoulder responsibility for the environmental trauma we see today through our disobedience to God, does that mean we have yet another reason to beat ourselves up?

No. This is not a guilt trip. This is, in fact, good news in the same way that an EKG result is good news for someone with chest pains: we have identified sin.

Hooray! We’ve sinned! How is that “good news”, you ask?

Because in Christ, we hold a significant trump card called Calvary.

If our failure to nurture and protect Creation is a sin of disobedience, does it not stand to reason that this is just as redeemable in Christ as sexual sin, lying, cheating, murdering or any of the other acts of disobedience for which we have to repent?

Repentance means we humble ourselves and allow God back into the picture, giving Him room to increase as we decrease. The Grace God extends to us means that we can repent for dropping the ball on The First Great Assignment and then pick up that ball and run with it as we were supposed to. For His part, God promises to blot out altogether the things we’ve done to damage the environment (Col. 2:13-14) .

But if we simply throw up our hands and say, “What is truth?”, and walk away as if that's something we can never know, then Satan has just been allowed to come in and hold confusion over the situation, essentially leaving Jesus out there to be crucified again. For Evangelicals, it’s also a missed opportunity to bring more souls into the Kingdom of God by showing how the Word of God is true in all aspects of day-to-day life.

Jesus told us there’d be days like these …

Another reason why Satan is taking such an interest in climate change is because he knows what time it is. Again, we go back to Matthew 24:5-7, where Jesus foretells the signs of His return. Famines and pestilences can both be seen as climate change symptoms. Jesus spoke in language people could understand, and while “global warming”, “melting polar ice cap” or “ozone depletion” would have gone over their heads, they would definitely have known about “famine and pestilence”.

We also have plenty of false christs today – self-help gurus who claim to show people how to feel good about themselves without repenting; others who presume to “simplify” things by reducing Christ to Just Another World View and looking for ways other belief systems “agree” (“many paths to the top of the mountain,” as some say), when God has already simplified things by reducing the number of paths to one; men called “holiness” with beatific smiles, pronouncing that we are each our own universe.

We have the wars and rumors of war -- terrorism. Incurable diseases are cropping up, the moral rule book has been thrown out the window, “tolerance” has replaced “love” and “rights” have replaced “what’s right”; governments try to legislate things that can remedied if we were all walking in agape love for one another – truly, “the love of many (is waxing) cold” (Matt. 24:12).

With those signs becoming more numerous and intense, Satan knows that the best way to keep people from turning their eyes towards God is to have them chasing straw men – like arguing over climate change. Like a magician using a “mis-direct” so we don’t see him slip the coin up his sleeve, Satan is using the debate as a sleight of hand.

The premise of A Very Convenient Truth is that Biblically, we're not to obsess on climate change/global warming, nor to deny it, but to see it as an incentive to get our own walk right with God. That may mean that our personal approach runs counter to conventional wisdom or the prescriptions demanded by certain advocates or interest groups; it also means we don't judge others for choices that may seem "environmentally-unfriendly": but if our actions are God-friendly, He promises to "heal the land".

Hallowe'en and the double standard

2011-10-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

I remember when Hallowe'en was fun.
At my father's memorial in July, the guests included a woman I'd literally grown up with from babyhood -- we were born a few months apart, our families lived a few doors away from each other, our mothers were both friends through theatre and our dads were both TV producers. Naturally, we played together a lot. At the memorial, one of the recurring things mentioned was the photo of the two of us on Hallowe'en, 1958: Drew dressed as a bunny; Debra as a clown.
Over the years, my Hallowe'en costumes were along those lines: a hockey player, a clown, Tiny Tim (the singer - complete with ukulele), a Roman soldier (using a costume left over from a play mom directed that was set in ancient Rome), a duck-billed platypus (don't ask) ... my kids' costumes followed along those lines: Aidan as Robin Hood or Elvis Presley, Hannah as an angel, a princess, Snow White ... you get the picture.
In other words, the true meaning of Hallowe'en was more than somewhat obscured by the "fun" aspect: kids dressing up, going door-to-door, getting candies, then going to a neighbour's place for fireworks and hot chocolate.

But over the past decade or so, the tone of Hallowe'en has changed. Now, it's all about death and evil spirits and fright and foreboding -- probably the "true meaning of Hallowe'en", and in a reversal of Charlie Brown at Christmastime, who got depressed because he couldn't find what the True Meaning of Christmas was about, seeing the "true meaning of Hallowe'en" is depressing the heck out of me.

And signs are all about, saying, "Happy Hallowe'en".

REALLY? "Happy" Hallowe'en?
OK. Now I'm offended. Why? Because the same people who fatuously wish us that -- including retailers, broadcasters and public officials -- cannot spit out the words "Merry Christmas" for fear it will offend someone who might not subscribe to the point of view that the birth of the Saviour of Mankind is a happy occasion. Why is it politically correct to wish someone a happy time of celebrating evil and the dark side but not to ...... okay, I think the point is made.

As this is the kickoff to the shopping season for the Holiday That Dares Not Speak Its Name, I thought I'd bring back a portion of a posting I did in 2009, about the confusion that comes when you have a holiday season that appears to be all icing and no cake. Imagine, if you will, a non-Christian immigrant, trying to decipher what the fuss is about.
"Excuse me? What is this holiday that people are talking about?"

"Oh! It's the most wonderful time of the year! It's a time when people get together and give each other presents and have a huge dinner and give a little something to the poor and families re-connect -- or try to -- and all the lights and colors and prezzies make you feel warm inside."

"Why? I mean, what's there to celebrate?"

"Well, because it's the holidays!"

"What holiday? I mean, doesn't 'holiday' mean 'holy day'? What's holy about it?"

"Well ... if you must know ... it's called Christmas ... and, uh, there's a particular religion that celebrates it."

"So why don't you call it that?"

"Because we're afraid 'Christmas' might offend some people."

"How can you offend someone with something that you're celebrating? What does this religion believe that's so offensive?"

"Well ... they believe that the way to peace is to get right with God."

"And that's offensive?"

"Well ... they figure that there's only one way to do that, and that's through the Son of God."

"And the Son of God is really bad, is He? What did He teach?"

"Well ... He said that we have to love God above everything else -- even above ourselves."

"I'm waiting to be offended ..."

"And we have to love everybody else more than ourselves."

"Still waiting ..."

"Yeah, but the Son of God also said that we have to deal with the things we did wrong in our lives."

"Oh! Wow ... I've done a lot of things wrong. So I guess He went around and killed all the bad people, did He?"

"Heck, no! This religion says He never did anything wrong and then let Himself die to be the punishment for our wrongs. Even the bad people could turn to Him, and it would be like they'd never done those bad things."

"Why keep this a secret? Why not tell everyone you can?"

"Because people might get offended."

"Who?"

"Well ... you know ... people from other countries ... other religions."

"Look: in my religion, we say 'peace to you and your household'. Would you be offended if I said that to you?"

"Well ... no."

"Then why would I be offended if you said to me, 'Merry Christmas'?"

"Not following."

[pause]

"Is there some high priest I can talk to, to find out more?"

"Not necessarily. There's a book called the Bible and that tells you the whole story so you can find out for yourself. Some people say it's like God speaking directly to you."

"Has this been on Oprah?"

"Don't be silly. That might hurt her ratings."

"Why?"

"Because people might be offended."
At which point, our immigrant friend either runs off, strumming his lower lip and making a noise like Lou Costello, trying to figure out who's on first, or races out to the nearest bookstore to try to find the book this local person was talking about.
"Where are you going? Don't you want to hear about Boxing Week?"
My office is adjacent to one of the biggest shopping malls in Western Canada. Soon, it will be filled with people of all different ethnicities, wading through the mall with children in tow. Happy-sounding music tells us Santa will be comin' down the chimney down and then tells the story of a reindeer nobody liked until he turned out to be useful for something. Children are often bawling their eyes out because they can't have something -- even though they know they're supposed to be excited about the Day Of The Great Gift-Getting while the parents have this bewildered look at what appears to be a tradition in this new country they've come to live in, but which doesn't appear to have a name or a purpose.

from A Very Convenient Truth: The Climate of Climate Change Discussion

2011-10-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

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Satan stirs the pot

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines and pestilences and earthquakes in divers places.

-- Matthew 24:6-7

The debate over climate change is brutal. What’s odd is that there’s any debate at all: the “brutal” part is the vicious ad hominem nature of the discussion. Whether it’s the vicious attacks faced by scientists who question the findings associated with conventional wisdom on climate change, a prominent activist’s demand that politicians who don’t take the action he prescribed be thrown in jail, or Richard Curtis’ infamous “blow up the children” video, the debate over climate change is especially vitriolic.

There’s no question that something is going on. While “natural disasters” have always been around, there is an unusual intensity in their force and frequency. There have been unusually severe storms and some of the worst in recent years have had little or no warning. Seasons seem to be out of place: summers in some areas have been hotter and drier than normal, while other areas – like Vancouver, BC, where I live – have experienced harsher-than-usual winters (except during the Winter Olympics – go figure). Forest fires have become increasingly destructive, pushed along by unusually strong winds, coming from an unexpected direction. A variety of scientific predictions has missed the mark – from salmon runs to “surprise” heat waves.

But is this a man-made situation with man-made solutions? And why is “climate change” dominating the headlines? Have you ever stopped to wonder why, with so many undeniable environmental issues to deal with like air and water pollution, loss of farmland, soil degradation and nuclear waste, the one with the shakiest foundations and greatest potential for controversy gets the majority of the attention?

This is one of many signs that Satan is driving this issue. Remember, all worldly battles may appear to be flesh-and-blood struggles, but are in fact, as the Apostle Paul tells us, wars in the spirit realm with the sole purpose of distracting our attention away from God. It’s important to recognize this in the environmental issue, particularly with what passes for debate over climate change/global warming: Satan has absolutely no interest in preserving God’s creation; he will do whatever it takes to keep us at one another’s throats and take our attention away from God. Suddenly, the answer to the question above becomes strikingly clear.

Truth does not need to threaten or suppress its opponents. Nor is truth a matter of consensus, a word used often when explaining how “the science is settled.” “Consensus” does not necessarily mean “truth”. If 20,000 experts agree on something that is wrong, does it become right? As Graham Cooke has said, “one person, plus God, is always the majority”. One person, plus Truth, trumps 20,000 scientists.

One person, plus Truth, trumps an army of conservative talk-show hosts, too. And so long as he can keep us at one another’s throats, Satan has us right where he wants us.

Truth is not about politics. It is the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t extinguish it. Consider James’ words:

If ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth.

This wisdom descendeth not from above, but [is] earthly, sensual, devilish.

For where envying and strife [is], there is confusion and every evil work.

But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle [and] easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.

-- James 3:14 - 17

When a “debate” degenerates into a matter of “who wins” rather than “what’s right”, as this has, Truth is often sacrificed. As humans, we must be seen to be vindicated – to be seen as “right” or “right all along”. To do that, we feel that we have to attack our attackers if we can’t convince them with the facts. But when Jesus told us not to worry about what to say if forced to defend our faith, He was not just comforting us that we would not be alone, but calling us to overcome that fleshly desire. We are to let the Spirit do the talking, and if anyone doesn’t receive the message, we shake their dust off our feet and move on, trusting that we have planted seeds that will eventually take root and grow.

A Very Convenient Truth - I may have to clarify ...

2011-10-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

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I realized on re-reading it that Friday's excerpt from A Very Convenient Truth leaves the impression that I'm advocating that the Biblical response to global warming/climate change is to do nothing. Not so, but it takes the rest of the book to put it all into context.

So while I make no qualification to the statement that the changes we're seeing in the climate and other environmental issues like seismic and volcanic activity are all part of God's plan and that trying to "fight" them puts us in opposition to Him, that doesn't mean we do nothing. It just means we focus our attention in another direction and Scripture tells us what that direction is.

To begin with, we have to stop denying the human contribution to global warming/climate change and acknowledge that we, as a species, have violated the First Great Assignment (Genesis 1:28) by not replenishing the earth at the same time that we were being fruitful, multiplying and subduing it.

Next, we need to repent for that and let those sins be covered by the blood of Jesus -- the "trump card" we hold when we receive Christ.

Then, we go and sin no more.

But this all has to come under the umbrella of bringing our walk into line with God in all things: loving Him above all others, loving our neighbours as ourselves, and re-committing to Jesus' Great Commission, which is to be His witnesses all over the world. Indeed (and I go into this in more depth in the book), the Great Commission is the New Covenant version of the First Great Assignment, because it means propagating a spiritual Garden of Eden -- which is what we were supposed to do in the first place.

We are warned, repeatedly, not to observe signs. We are to take note of the signs and understand that when the signs appear, we turn to God, but we are not to observe, or study or obsess on, those signs. God's promise is that as we obsess on Him, He will take care of everything else.

The natural response is to see the "bad" implications of those signs and try to do something about them. God calls us to look beyond that natural response to something higher and place our trust in Him to do what He's supposed to do.

So "do something" about climate change/global warming? Yes ... but ...

from A Very Convenient Truth: is this a fight we should get into?

2011-10-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

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After fear, the two biggest signs Satan is pulling the strings and God has been left out are failure and confusion.

We have pointed out already that millions of earnest, well-meaning people have worked hard for decades to find solutions. They've organized recycling programs, promoted consumer boycotts, voted governments in and out and taken other actions to solve the growing problem.

Consider the human sacrifice: thousands of people have had their lives turned upside-down for the sake of the environment. They’ve lost their jobs, their homes, their families; industries have shut down or re-tooled and whole communities have been thrown into disarray.

For all this, the problem keeps getting worse. Could it be that, for all these good intentions, God is not blessing these actions? Could it be that the whole way of thinking is wrong? One has to wonder whether this “fight” is even winnable. It’s not even clear what “victory” looks like.

Is the “fight” against global warming/climate change a battle that can ever be won, or is it really, like Sisyphus endlessly pushing that rock up the hill only to have it roll back just when he gets to the top, a version of hell on earth?

As I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back, this may not even be a fight we want to get into, if we remember that Jesus told us there’d be days like these. In laying His cards on the table, God has told us, straight-up, what His plan is. If the “symptoms” of global warming/climate change are really the signs that Jesus foretold of His return, why on earth are we trying to stop them from happening?

That’s mighty dangerous ground; and when it comes to “victory”, Jesus already gave us that in a much greater battle. Like Cain after the Fall, we run the risk of spending our time wrestling against God and His plan, when we should be, like Abel, simply enjoying what He has given us and worshiping Him for it.

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.

-- Psalm 127:1

Failure is a sign that God is not blessing the actions.

And then there is confusion.

For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.

-- I Cor. 14:33

As we’ve seen, there is nothing peaceable about the dialogue. With what passes for “debate” becoming divisive and increasingly acrimonious, many people, including myself, have been left crying, “What is truth?”

And that’s actually good news, because when that happens, we're actually on the verge of an answer.

The Most Environmentally-Friendly Verse in the Bible

2011-10-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

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... excerpt from A Very Convenient Truth.

The Word of God is shot through with references to and images of the love God has for His Creation, the love Creation has for Him and the responsibility He has placed on us to take care of it. What’s more, He’s given us guidelines to follow; the root of the current problem is that we have strayed away from those guidelines.

First, though, a Scripture Reality Check:

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth.

-- Genesis 1:1

“In the beginning ….” – the first thing we have to acknowledge is that God made this whole show, wrote the whole script and is moving everything along according to a Plan He’d already worked out before He ever said, “let there be light!” He takes credit for all things that have been made (John 1:3), and as Job pointed out, that includes the “bad” as well as the “good”; notice how He says, in 2 Chronicles 7:13-14, that He will “shut up heaven” and bring other such natural disasters.

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people;

If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Genesis 1:1 is the most environmentally-friendly piece of Scripture in the whole Bible. How? Because it establishes that there is a well-defined Authority to whom we’re accountable. God created everything and for that reason alone, we need to subject ourselves to Him. As we’ll see shortly, there are lots of other reasons to subject ourselves to Him when it comes to the environment.

Why do I believe Genesis 1:1? Because it's written in His Word --the same Word that tells me I’m saved, redeemed by the Blood of Jesus Christ and given a new chance at life.

---

All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.

-- John 1:3

---

And because God created all, we are answerable to Him, which is what makes Genesis 1:1 the environmentally-friendly verse. We have a very high Authority to answer to – certainly higher than any scientists, politicians, activists and celebrities who have spoken out on the issue. These are, after all, fallible human beings, just like anybody else.

Now consider this: “… and God saw that it was good.”

Throughout Genesis 1, that is the coda to every stage of Creation: the indelible stamp that God saw that what He had done was good. Now since, as Jesus says, there is “none good but God” (Matt. 19:17[i]), anything God has made is an extension of Him. That tells you just how high the stakes are in this game: our lives are surrounded by extensions of God and we (as we’ll see shortly) have been given the responsibility to care for and nurture those extensions.

---

Mind you, this is not to say that we regard Creation as being God Himself. Paganism and animism and similar philosophies take that fatal step, but in so doing, they deny the vital principle of accountability to an Authority. I believe that’s one of the reasons why alternate theories like evolution and natural selection become so popular – even in the absence of real scientific proof – humans, fallen creatures that we are, really don’t want to be accountable to anything but to our own conscience.

Strangely, many people who believe in Creation miss the point about accountability, themselves. The environment is repeatedly sacrificed either for the perceived need to feed one’s family or out of greed, plain and simple. Have you ever tried to convince someone – especially someone who thinks they’re “right with God” – that they’re committing sin? Yet we’ll see soon that destroying Creation without taking steps to replenish it is the “original environmental sin”.

And if people try to “clean up the mess” or prevent it from happening in the first place without acknowledging their accountability to God as Creator and in control of all things, they find the efforts are futile. In fact, if the object of the efforts is to “stop global warming,” they’re already doomed to failure.

Occupy Vancouver: a cry for hope

2011-10-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

October 15 is looming as the date for the Vancouver version of "Occupy Wall Street", the sit-in-on-steroids intended to ... well, it's hard to say what the protesters want: they're dissatisfied with the current world system, which they say is the fault of evil corporate greed; according to the Province newspaper, the Occupy Vancouver protesters plan to occupy first and decide what they want later.

My initial thoughts are rather negative, but on further consideration, I'm hearing a cry for hope, because that kind of nameless, directionless frustration only comes when you know something is wrong but you can't quite put your finger on it. The fall-back position for anyone in a situation like that is to find a convenient enemy and declare war. But people are missing the true source of Hope.

First, though, some of the negative thoughts -- which I think are still real concerns:

how many thousands of people and their families depend on corporations for their incomes? Many of these people belong to unions, which makes me wonder why some trade unions seem interested in getting involved?
what if some of these greedy corporations were to fight back by showing real greed and cutting off their philanthropic activities? Do you know how many millions of dollars the Jim Pattison Group donates to various endeavours (trust me: it's way beyond the ones that have Jim's name plastered on them)? Then there's the Weston family, owners of Weston Bakeries, Loblaw's, Superstore, and a whole whack of other grocery interests, whose Foundation actually increased its giving in 2009 when others were pulling in their horns because of the recession. (I know: The W. Garfield Weston Foundation gave Gospel Mission $15,000 out of the blue that year out of that special fund.) (Remember, too, that Weston's also markets No-Name food products, which help keep groceries affordable for many low-income families.)
there's a certain irony in the fact that the meeting was held in the Woodward's complex, which bears the name of one of the great corporate families in BC history. Also, many of the homeless, under-housed, reduced-circumstances people supposedly "represented" by the Occupy Vancouver movement hang out at and otherwise receive services from the Carnegie Centre, which is housed in the original Vancouver Library, given to the city over a century ago by that greedy coal baron, Andrew Carnegie.

In other words, one shouldn't be so quick to condemn corporations. A lot of people -- far more than the 1% the organizers claim to be battling -- depend on corporations in more ways than one would care to admit. Promoting the Us-versus-Them mindset and turning this into a quasi-war seems misguided, and statements like, "if you have to ask (what it's about), you're making too much money" (actual sound bite on CBC radio) only polarizes people. Makes you wonder if they want to accomplish anything, or just throw a tantrum.

Actually, my first thought was that the idea of a protest like this happening in Vancouver is cause for concern. No matter how "peaceful" everyone says it will be, the spirit of rebellion that sits over Vancouver makes that highly improbable. The Winter Olympics riot in February 2010 was a perfect example: there were protesters with seemingly legitimate causes to promote; but there were also the "Black Bloc", who were out more to make a lot of noise. It reached its nadir with the Stanley Cup Riot this past June, where it was apparent that people simply wanted to destroy things and taunt police at the same time. Add to that the fact that Vancouverites can't even obey traffic signals and you get a sense of the level of respect for the law in this region.

There's another thing to consider. Even if the protesters somehow got what they wanted -- whatever that is -- that's no guarantee of peace in Vancouver. A prime case in point is the situation with bicycles. For years, some cycling advocates have organized the "Critical Mass Ride", where hundreds of cyclists ride through city streets on a Friday rush hour, tying up traffic (causing an increase in exhaust emissions due to idling engines) and generally being a nuisance. The incessant drum-beating and chanting of slogans doesn't help the cause, either.

The current Mayor of Vancouver and his council launched a $25-million program to install bike lanes through city streets and improve cycling routes. TransLink, the transportation authority, has invested millions of dollars a year in cycling infrastructure, as have other municipalities in the region. And cyclists still ride on sidewalks, go the wrong way on one-way streets. And there are still Critical Mass rides.

It's like the country song ("Daddy Never Was a Cadillac Guy") says, "The more I give [my kids], the more they want".

But having gotten all that off my chest, what the Lord started showing me is that this is a group of people -- and a rather large one, at that -- who are trying to fight a fleshly battle, trying to counter greed by stirring up envy in people and masking it as a sense of justice. That's using one sin against another: calling on Satan to cast out Satan.

In fact, we're seeing people who are bereft of hope. As I said at the beginning, they know something is wrong and can't put their finger on it, and in that frustration and desperation with ignorance of the Lord and His Word, they lash out.

How can we make them see that the solution in all these things is Christ? Get them to look at the Gospel not as "just another belief system" or the manifesto of self-righteousness -- an effect of Religious thinking over generations -- but as the Word of God and a guide to life itself? Indeed, how do we get people to read the Word, when The World keeps telling them they don't need to?

You want social justice? Jesus is social justice. You want caring for the poor? Jesus is about caring for the poor. You want healing for people? Jesus is about healing for people -- especially getting beyond cures or reducing harm and getting right to the root of whatever problem people face. You want environmental restoration? The word of God is all about environmental restoration and stewardship.

You want peace and an orderly society? Jesus is about peace and an orderly society.

You want truth? Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

It requires a paradigm shift in thinking. It requires stripping away any preconceived notions of what "victory" looks like and accepting the Victory that God has already given us. It requires breaking away from the human/fleshly desire for revenge against people we think have wronged us. It requires shedding the self-righteous belief that you're better than those in big corporations and humbling yourself to the thought that we are all children of God, marginalized protester and have-it-all corporate mogul alike, and repenting for judging others. Then it requires seeking God and His righteousness and trusting that, as you brings yourself into line with His Word, He will watch over you and others who see the changes in you will be drawn to the same Light.

Now available on Amazon Kindle: A Very Convenient Truth

2011-09-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

Now available on AMAZON KINDLE US$3.99

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people;

-- 2 Chronicles 7:13-14 (KJV)

Former Vice-President Al Gore recently held a 24-hour TV event about the current state of global warming/climate change, and his former boss, Bill Clinton, told a gathering in New York City in September that “green” industries need billions of dollars of investment in order to succeed and, presumably, save the planet.

News about global warming/climate change is invariably bad, whether it’s coming from the scientists warning us that things keep getting worse and governments aren’t doing or spending enough to fight it, or from those who deny there’s a problem, who say the economy will tank if the measures the environmentalists demand are adopted. A Very Convenient Truth – now available on Amazon Kindle -- sets out to break us out of the cycle of Doomspeak, personal attacks and confusion.

A Very Convenient Truth takes the position that Christians – in fact, anyone who believes in the One True God of Israel – hold a significant trump card, which makes all that Doomspeak and the worry and fear that goes with it an absolute non-starter. The Word of God, after all, is nothing but good news: you just have to look for it. The book neither denies the issue nor takes the position of the True Believer, but as you consider God’s promise about “the land”, you realize that God has already given us the answers. Anyone can pursue them, they don’t cost a cent and they don’t involve serving the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25).

Part of this “very convenient truth” is that there is an original environmental sin that a lot of us have a hard time recognizing, largely for the same reason that people have a hard time recognizing any sin as their own; also because the world has made the effects of that sin appear to be insurmountable. But for someone who’s in Christ, there is also another Truth: just as with any other sin, Jesus’ sacrifice at Calvary allows us to repent, have that sin wiped off the books, and get on the right track.
===

-- from A Very Convenient Truth

===
A Very Convenient Truth also reminds us that things that are attributed to “global warming” have actually been foretold for thousands of years and that trying to fight against these signs puts us in opposition to God’s Will – very dangerous territory, indeed.

===

“So ...” you ask, “are we supposed to pray our way through climate change?”

Yep.

It may not seem like Dynamic Action or accords in Kyoto, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro or any of the myriad political agreements to Do Something About It, but those things are only soul-satisfying “feel good” exercises that give the impression of action while scoring political points.

Scripture tells us that Dynamic Action is highly over-rated. Consider Peter, the poster boy for Dynamic But Ineffectual Action. When he vowed to come against any attempt to kill Jesus, Jesus responded, “get thee behind me, Satan”: Peter, however well-intentioned, was trying to stand in the way of God’s plan. When Peter did take action and pulled his sword on the soldiers at Gethsemane, he missed and only got the ear.

-- from A Very Convenient Truth

For Christians, the book contains a challenge; God’s promises are always yea and Amen: do you believe that when it comes to the environment, too? For environmentalists, the challenge is, are you broad-minded enough to consider a different approach?

A Very Convenient Truth is a re-working of a book I self-published in 2008. This version is considerably different from the original with a completely different tone, attitude and revelations from Scripture. It's available for US$3.99 on Amazon Kindle -- go to www.amazon.com, click on Kindle, then "Kindle Books" and type "A Very Convenient Truth" into the "search" field.

Where to Go in Vancouver

2011-09-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

Vandals have broken into Scotland Yard and smashed all the toilets. Police say they have nothing to go on.
-- The Two Ronnies

One of the "causes du jour" in my day job as media relations guy for the BC Electric Railway Company is the desire for public restrooms at transit stations. I won't go into the entire debate here, but it leads to a broader issue: public restrooms in general. The City of Vancouver has again approached us at Gospel Mission about keeping The Lord's Rain open in the evenings, seven nights a week, to give people a place to go. We sent them a budget; we're waiting for their response. (A similar overture in 2009 came up short for lack of funding.)

I don't mind saying: if a politician were to add "public restrooms" to his or her platform, I think they'd be surprised at how that might turn the election. They'd get my vote, anyway. The heck with the current mayor's obsession on making Vancouver "the greenest city" or "wiping out homelessness by 2015" (as if!): providing a clean, safe place where someone can go to the bathroom is symbolic of actually caring about someone's comfort and well-being.

"Going green" more often than not implies giving up something: the car, creature comforts, warmth in the winter -- even a job in resource-based industries. I think people are getting tired of being told to give something up. Besides: I promise you that the majority of people on the Downtown East Side don't give a hang about being eco-friendly when they're living in substandard conditions, surrounded by drugs, crime and poverty. But turn the "greenest city" efforts towards providing said clean, safe place to go to the bathroom, and people will actually see that someone truly cares.

(How about a 21st-Century take on 1st Corinthians 13, from - ahem - my book A Very Convenient Truth, soon to be e-published?)

Though I speak with words of tolerance and use inoffensive terms for racial and gender descriptions, and have not love, I am like a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I understand all the implications of my carbon footprint and recycle diligently and use public transit and eschew my private auto for the sake of creating a greener city; and have not love, I am nothing.

And though I devote my spare time to fighting for social and ecological justice and quit my job even when I can’t afford to because I believe my employer does not use proper environmental practices, and have not love, it profits me nothing.

At any rate, we get so hung up on being "friendly". "Bike-friendly," "car-friendly," "business-friendly," or "family friendly", but the simple pledge to provide something as basic as a place to relieve oneself can put the city on track to something I haven't heard much lately:

People friendly.

If the storm knocks you off-course ...

2011-08-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

... check when happens when you get there and see if you were really "off-course" ...

From Westpointe Christian Church in Vancouver, Aug. 14, 2011 ... (don't sweat the photos: I had to cover the audio with something to make this work ... the Word's the thing, anyway) ...

Rev. Camping's Lesson - be ready and know the Word

2011-05-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

It's easy to sneer at Harold Camping for his all-out Doomsday prediction, which had the end of the world pegged at May 21, 2011, 1800hrs local time -- especially since as I write this, it it now May 22, 2011, 0700hrs Pacific Time, and the predicted opening of the earth hasn't happened. But there are a couple of key lessons here.

First, discounting the possibility that this was just a hokey publicity stunt to bring more people and dollars to his ministry (and we know that evangelists have NEVER done that before!), let's assume that the basic motivation was the same thing that motivates any Christian: a desire to see as many people Saved as possible on the principle that friends don't let friends go to hell.

Second, let's assume that Harold Camping was given a strong leading from God to warn people in general that the signs that Jesus foretold as preceding His return are building up (and they are). It's entirely possible that's what happened, but can happen to any of us, pride got mixed in with the anointing so that he believed he'd been shown something no one else could see. He who has never been misguided can cast the first sneer.
Scripture tells us to "touch not [God's] anointed, and to My prophets do no harm." (1 Chr. 16:22). (That's the reminder (1 Sam. 26:11) that stopped David in his tracks when he had Saul dead to rights during the civil war.) In other words, we don't judge or ridicule someone who may have heard an instruction from God but was mistaken in the way he carried it out.

Third, Jesus says, "... of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but My Father only." (Matt. 24:36). While there are plenty of invitations throughout the Bible to delve deeper on particular topics and search out mysteries of God and His plans, there is no place that suggests we'll be able to "do the math" for ourselves and devine that "day and hour"; and Jesus specifically tells us not to bother.

There's a good reason for that. If you know where the finish line is, you know where you can let up and coast the rest of the way. Jesus doesn't call us to "coast". We are called to run the entire race (1 Cor. 9:24), which means we don't know where the finish line is. We have to be prepared constantly for Jesus' return, drawing ever closer to Him and letting God order our steps.

In Matthew 24, Jesus warns about false Christs (not that I'm suggesting Camping is one) and those who say, "He is in the desert" or "He is in the secret chamber." Jesus tells us not to get suckered in, because that's not where He will turn up. Rather, His return will be like the daybreak from east to west: gradual, unstoppable, constantly lightening our sky at the turning of the day (Matt. 24:27).

And this leads to what may be the biggest lesson of all from Harold Camping's prophecy: know your Scripture. It's not like that's a big freaking secret: God has given us His Word, complete and unabridged with nothing further to add, so that we can know exactly what He plans and know exactly what His voice sounds like when we hear something in the Spirit. People who know their Scripture know that any pinpointing of Doomsday is all wet, simply because of what Jesus tells us in Matthew 24.

People who don't know Scripture (a) sneer at evangelists who warn of judgment day, (b) fall for the prophecy and are then disillusioned when it doesn't come to pass or (c) wind up gathered around a pot of Kool-Aid in Guyana. They also don't know that the signs that Jesus did foretell are happening, and that means we have to Get Ready: draw closer to God so He will draw closer to you. Let Him work on you to bring you more into the image He has of you. Get to know His Word and what it really says, so you're not caught out -- or left behind.

Storms and intercession

2011-04-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

As we consider the tornadoes which have killed nearly 200 people in the Deep South -- following last week's severe storms which killed nearly 100 more -- there's a sense not just of grief but frustration for those of us hundreds and thousands of miles away, wanting to do something.

Let's not forget that we who are in Christ have the authority and the responsibility to intercede before God for people we've never met, in places we've never been to. We talked about that at Gospel Mission, of all places, after the Japan earthquake and tsunami, and this might whet our purpose again.

And Part 2:

What color is your underwear?

2011-04-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

Columnist Allen Garr has an interesting piece in the current Vancouver Courier on the history of action to keep Vancouver's Strathcona neighbourhood from getting torn apart by road construction. Nearly 60 years ago, the fight began to prevent houses from being bulldozed to make way for a freeway into downtown -- shades of the Jane Jacobs/Bob Moses battles in New York City in the 60s. The story reads a little like the premise of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, only without the laughs: a new hyper-space freeway is to be built across the galaxy,m and "regrettably, your planet has been identified for demolition."

Seriously, I don't think people in Vancouver know how much they owe to the people who stood up more than half a century ago and said, "no mas!" and kept the freeway from going through. I don't want to imagine what the city where I was born and raised would have looked like if that had happened.

Now, the issue is whether the Georgia/Dunsmuir viaducts, which -- according to Allen's article -- were the precursors to the broader freeway plan, should be knocked down, as part of some "green" initiative for Vancouver. The idea seems noble enough on the surface: make driving downtown less attractive, "force" people onto transit or into other alternative modes, and continue the push to make Vancouver The Greenest City.

Except I have serious reservations about the move to tear down the viaducts now. For one thing, there would be a tremendous ripple effect throughout the region's transportation system -- and whether some Vancouverites like it or not, Vancouver is part of a region -- No man is an island unto himself, and all that. Transportation issues need to be worked through. People might say, "well, we closed the viaducts during the Olympics and everything worked fine". We also had the equivalent of 180 40' buses available on top of the "normal" fleet, ran West Coast Express more often under a special arrangement, put a vacation blackout on the Games Time period and benefitted from a lot of bus drivers who put off their retirements until after the Games. Knocking down the viaducts and choking off downtown traffic without sufficient alternatives in place would be disastrous and until funding issues are resolved with the transit system, those alternatives aren't there.

But more than that, I have deep suspicions of the motives of the proponents. When I hear talk of knocking down the viaducts it's almost drowned out by the sound of developers, rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of all that buildable land underneath. Like "Eco-Density", I can't help wondering how much of the motivation is green and how much is greed? At the time of the freeway debate in the 60s, people pointed to developers as the villains in the piece: but how are the developers who today talk about "increasing density" as if it will preserve the planet from destruction motivated any differently than their predecessors? The clothes may be different but the underwear is the same.

Why I dislike CBC News

2011-03-11T06:58:00.000-08:00

I have to preface this by saying the CBC has been a major part of my life since before I was born. My dad, as I've said before, was a TV producer. My mom wrote and acted in countless radio dramas and did the odd TV gig. I cut my teeth as an actor on CBC Radio and did two Beachcombers episodes; the first time I got paid to write was for CBC TV (Rene Simard Show in the 70s). When I was out of work, the Mothercorp came to my rescue with three solid weeks of work until my previous station let me back in.

But over the past few years, there's been a shift in the perspective of much of the programming, particularly news and public affairs. Maybe I've shifted, and just hadn't seen how slanted the point of view is. Let's just say that, if "Canada Lives Here [at CBC]", as the "positioner" states, where the heck do I live?

In the course of less than two hours last night, I found a stream of reasons why I feel this way. CBC's local afternoon show, then The World At Six, followed by As It Happens, ran a series of stories on politically-charged events, and every one of them lacked an important ingredient.

The other side.

The items were:

protests over Wisconsin's new labor laws: an interview with an organizer from the BC Government and Service Employees Union who had gone to Madison, WI, to join the protests; she used language like "attack on organized labor", "destroying the middle class" and other such rhetoric.
more on the protests on The World At Six
The World At Six had a spot-news item on the opening of hearings into an alleged conspiracy by Muslims in the US to promote terror: the "radicalization" of American Islamists
on As It Happens, an interview with the communications person for a "moderate" Muslim organization, decrying the right-wing reactionary approach to the above hearings, playing (for a second time) an emotional statement by a Congressman about a Muslim firefighter killed in 9/11 and who had been, apparently, accused of being "in league" with the terrorists; the public affairs person described how Muslims had been working with the FBI to expose the efforts to radicalize young Americans
On The World At Six, an interview with international AIDS envoy Stephen Lewis about the bill to allow Canadian generic drug companies to export drugs overseas -- particularly drugs to combat the effects of AIDS.
Also on The World At Six, an interview with the person who developed an educational curriculum for Omar Khadr, the Muslim-Canadian imprisoned at Guantanamo for killing US soldiers.

Now, if you have left-wing tendencies, you probably wouldn't have noticed the slant. Rhetoric like the CBC reporter who referred to the chairman of the committee investigating the Muslim issue as "leaving out facts" let you know not just where he -- the reporter -- was coming from but also implied that if you were in any way sympathetic to the right-wing point of view, then you, too, were bigoted, ignorant, knuckle-dragging scum.

See, here's what I wanted to hear -- and would actually expect to hear it on the taxpayer-funded public broadcast outlet that's supposed to represent all Canadians:

some of the reasons why the Wisconsin government brought in this labor legislation in the first place. Do we simply assume that the Governor and all Republicans in the state have conspired to come up with a carefully-crafted, union-busting piece of legislation, stripping away people's rights? Or is there a specific problem they're trying to address and this is the only way they can do it? Have they tried other means and felt stonewalled by organized labor? Maybe it's the former ... maybe it's the latter ... maybe it's something else ... but I want to be able to make up my own mind.
similarly, I wanted to hear more about why this Congressional committee was trying to dig up dirt on Muslims in the US. How many Americans have been radicalized? How? What are the suspicions? The CBC was quick to invoke the term "McCarthyism", which was certainly a dark point in history, but people tend to forget -- or ignore -- the fact that there were Communists active in US Government positions and in areas of influence, like the movie industry. Whether this constituted a real danger was something that should have been looked into, but from as objective a point of view as possible - not in the atmosphere of fear that McCarthy and his ilk created. Same thing here: there's an opportunity to dig into an issue, but without airing out the suspicions and the evidence for holding those suspicions, how can we make up our own minds?
the interview with Stephen Lewis made it clear that exporting drugs that combat the effects of AIDS was a good thing -- and couched in the terms that it would help children infected with the virus, of course it is. But Mr Lewis and his organization have been on record as scoffing at idea of promoting abstinence -- indeed, practically any time someone has the temerity to raise the issue of abstience at an international AIDS conference (the ones that invariably call for another billion dollars to be spent on the futile search for a cure or a vaccine), they're shouted down and accused of being manipulated by those wicked American Evangelicals. Since there is no cure and no vaccine and people continue to contract AIDS despite the active promotion of condom use, it's evident that these drugs will do little more than delay the inevitable. For the children, I'm all for it: it's not their fault. But how many million more will become sick and die while this high-priced charade continues? Needless to say, that was not part of the discussion.
I had stopped listening by the time the Omar Khadr piece came on.

I want to hear all sides and make up my own mind -- not have it made up for me by observers and commentators, and especially not delivered in a way that I find sneers at anyone who doesn't hold that point of view. Is that too much to ask of the taxpayer-funded broadcaster? The network's "positioner" states, "Canada Lives Here", but that vision of Canada is very narrow and is founded in the sense that we're sure glad we're Not American -- the classic Canadian inferiority complex.

In World War II, Lorne Greene was anchoring the nightly news on CBC Radio. The Allies had been taking a beating in Europe, but word came of a significant victory. Greene -- who had been known as "The Voice of Doom" -- prefaced the story with the ad-lib, "Tonight, we are pleased to bring you some good news from the front."

Calls and letters came in, excoriating Greene for showing any kind of bias -- even where our own forces were concerned. How things have changed.

Where is your faith?

2011-03-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find atheists in insurance companies, if only because storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. are referred to as "acts of God". Some might bristle at the idea of blaming God for the things that go wrong, but in His Word, He's usually the first to take credit.

But the Lord sent a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. (Jonah 1:4 KJV)

This week, we were on the lookout for one monster of a storm in Metro Vancouver. One meteorologist could see it coming on Sunday -- just as we were recovering from a snowfall that caused the usual traffic snarls and grumbling among Wuss Coasters -- and described it as a "wicked-looking system" coming in from the North Pacific. As of Tuesday night, it was predicted to hit Vancouver just before noon Wednesday, with winds peaking around 100 km/h (65 mph), gusting to 140 (90). Certainly, the memories of the great wind that blew down 1,000 trees in Stanley Park in late 2007 were still fresh, so people got a little bit freaked out. So what do we do?

I have prayed against "acts of God" in the past, with interesting results. In spring 2007, the projections indicated that the Fraser River was about to head for a flood even worse than in 1948, which is still legendary. A group of friends prayed together and rebuked it: the river reached just high enough to test our own faith, and then gradually receded. The inspiration comes, in large part, from the account of Jesus, being wakened out of sleep in a boat on the Sea of Galilee, because the boat He was in was being swamped by water. He went up on deck, rebuked the storm and then, when things had calmed down, said to the disciples, "Where is your faith?"

The following winter came that horrific windstorm, which changed Stanley Park's landscape overnight. Flush with my "batting average" in standing against the elements, I had been praying against that, too, and the next morning, was bewildered as to why my prayer didn't "work".

I prayed about it, and the Lord's answer was surprising: who said it didn't? No one got killed, and the storm hit late at night with very few people out on the roads. (There were fears it would hit just as at least 100,000 people would have been heading home from a Seahawks game in Seattle. But it held off.)

The storm had to hit, He said, because it was His Will. But people were praying and so the damage was limited.

As I've contemplated that since then, He's shown me that it's actually futile (not to mention dangerous) to try to stand against His Will -- especially when there's a part of one that wants to say (O, prideful person!) "look what I can do! I can rebuke storms!". That said, we can, like Abraham pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, advocate for the people that are threatened. After all, it's all about His glory and how much we're willing to seek Him no matter what.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, it wasn't to show that He could do it: it was to show God's glory. God knows the time and date when He will call us home, and to try to stand against that puts us in an extremely dangerous position.

For the disciples in the boat, "Where is your faith?" was the reminder that, so long as they had Jesus in the boat with them, they were going to be OK. That's the same as with Paul, when his ship ran into the storms off Melita: an angel reminded him that he was supposed to get to Rome, so he and all those with him were going to be safe -- so long as they didn't fear.

But what happened in all those circumstances -- Jonah on the freighter; Mary and Martha when their brother died; the disciples in the boat; Paul en route to Rome -- was that they all turned to the Lord rather than collapse in fear or cry out that the devil had them under attack.

The other thing to realize is that others, regardless of their faith level or whether or not they Know God, are affected by our faith level. When we seek Him, they benefit too and see His glory. Note that Matthew records that there were other ships caught in the storm that night on Galilee and they, too, were saved when the winds calmed down.

Wednesday morning, I went out onto the patio as the rain was getting heavier, and He started showing me what to pray. If this resonates with you, please join me.

Lord, You created all including good times and bad times. You cause it to rain on the just and the unjust. You are the One sending this storm and I praise You for it and give You the glory because You know the beginning from the end and all things are, ultimately, right.

In Jesus’ Name, I pray protection against fear and physical harm against all people: those who know You and those who don’t; those who have rejected You, ignored You, had a skewed vision of You and even those who have no vision of You at all. I was one of those people and You protected me from worse. Protect them now as You did then.

Show us Your glory in this and show us – together and individually – what we need to do, think, say, pray about, to bring our lives into line with You.

In Jesus’ Name ... Amen.

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand;

but it shall not come nigh thee.

Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

-- Psalm 93:7-8

The Middle East - what does God really want?

2011-02-16T06:43:00.000-08:00

Man, that looks like a pretentious headline, doesn't it? Couldn't think of anything better ... and maybe that's exactly the headline we need here. See, as people's revolutions catch on across the Muslim world -- first Tunisia, then Egypt and now Iran is getting nervous -- it's easy to think that maybe Islam is on the verge of blowing itself up. (My daughter had just left Egypt, where she'd been staying with a Christian family for 2-1/2 months; I'd say she got out just in time.) I'm seeing some Religious Rightists who can hardly contain their glee.
But not so fast. While it's easy to return evil for evil in this case, the prophet Isaiah received a word about this that we should consider.

In that day shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the Land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord.
And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt, for they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and He shall send them a Saviour, and a Great One, and He shall deliver them.
***
In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.
In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land:
Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.
-- Isaiah 19:19-20; 23-25

"In that day" generally refers to the Jesus Era -- when God has come to deliver His people. This prophecy tells me a number of things, beginning with the fact that the One True God will be known in Egypt -- through Christians, albeit generally persecuted, unable to hold public worship meetings and having to keep their heads down. But the Saviour is promised to the Egyptians, just as much as to the Israelites and the Assyrians.

Then there's the prophecy of the "highway" between Egypt and Assyria. Assyria is modern-day Iraq, and that appears to refer to a connection, of sorts, between those two countries.

And right bang in the middle of it is Israel.

But does that mean Israel will be caught in a deadly squeeze between two sworn enemies? No: because God also declares Israel shall be "a third" with the other two countries, a blessing in the midst of the land, and that Egypt and Assyria will also be blessed.

How can that happen? Well, back in the 50s, a US diplomat said he hoped the Arabs and Israelis could settle their differences "like good Christians". That remark has been often interpreted as an example of Good Ol' American Ignorance, but he may have inadvertently hit on something.

It comes back to those three little words: "In that day ..." When Jesus is allowed to reign over that part of the world, He becomes the Great Equalizer. God declares to Isaiah that these are all His people, whether they're of the "chosen nation" or not, for as Peter writes, "[followers of Christ] are a chosen generation ... a peculiar people ... which in time past were not a people but are now the people of God ...." (1 Peter 2:9-10 KJV).

It makes sense, too. Have you ever stopped to wonder why that relatively tiny strip of the Earth -- that "highway" linking Egypt and Assyria would be barely 1,000 miles long: maybe the distance between Vancouver and Regina -- has been such a flashpoint ever since the Canaanites told Abraham and his household to leave? Why is there such persecution of Christians in the Arab world? Not because Arabs are evil -- God Himself says they're His people and the work of His hands and promised to take care of the descendants of Ishmael; but because the enemy is trying to do everything possible to prevent Christ from getting a toehold in the area and thereby foil God's plan.

The enemy loves futile battles, doesn't he?

But Christians, far from rejoicing over this internecine struggle and generally maintaining a sneering or hostile tone towards Islam, need to be praying: praying for Jesus to be revealed to Muslims and Jews alike; praying for those who are called to evangelize in that area to hear the call and be protected (because it won't be an easy job); praying for Truth to prevail.

Praying, in other words, for God's will to be done. He's already stated that will: we have to get onside.

The Other Side of the Boat

2011-02-14T08:00:00.000-08:00

Twice in the Gospels, Jesus gives an instruction to His disciples to do something that they initially wonder about. In Luke 5, after going out in Simon Peter's boat to address the crowd that has followed Him to Lake Gennesaret, He tells Peter to "launch out into the deep and let your nets down for a draft" (Luke 5:4 KJV).

Peter reminds Him that they'd been out fishing all night and had caught nothing. "Nevertheless," he says, "at Thy word I will let down the net."

And what happens? They catch so much fish the net breaks and they have to call over another boat to help haul in the catch and the boats are in danger of sinking.

In John 21, Jesus calls to Peter and John and the others, "have you caught anything?" They say no, so He tells them to drop their nets over the other side. According to John, they didn't know it was Jesus, but they do it anyway. And again, they bring in an enormous haul.

Both times, Peter is overwhelmed at the presence of The Lord: in John 21, as soon as John recognizes Him, Peter -- who was, apparently, naked (one of those fishermen's superstitions, I gather), throws on his robe and leaps into the water. In Luke 5, he flings himself at Jesus' feet and says, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!"

We'll sit on that one for a bit, but right now, let's look at the idea of casting your net on the other side of the boat. Peter and company were plying their trade as commercial fishermen; but this time, they were having little success. Along comes Jesus, an outsider to their trade, with some simple advice: do what you're doing, only do it differently. And the result is overwhelmingly successful.

Do what you're doing, only do it differently. Don't we run into situations like that from time to time? We have God-given skills and knowhow, but get into a rut where we seem to be going nowhere using our own measure of success. It certainly happened to me. I'd spent over a quarter-century writing, broadcasting and occasionally dabbling in acting, and had been successful enough to make me think I had something to contribute. Then one day, about a year after the call to Ministry had become too strong to ignore -- and about six months after I'd prayed to God to take over my life and move me to the place He wanted me to be -- I heard Him say, "I want you to take those gifts I have given you for writing and communicating and give them back to Me."

And as I did that, little by little, I found my groove -- and my Ministry. And little by little, God started weaning me away from the worldly measure of success to the point where working at a major-market broadcast outlet is no longer my life's ambition.

I'm using the same gifts He gave me, but for Him now. He has blessed me in myriad ways, both in the success of the Ministry and in my personal life. I dropped my net over the other side of the boat -- and I also rowed out into deeper water: beyond my comfort zone.

(Believe me: going into Skid Road and telling people they don't need to live the way they're living, or going up to a drug dealer and asking him if this is what his life will look like in 10 years -- assuming another drug dealer hasn't blown him away -- is Beyond My Comfort Zone.)

When you combine your God-given gifts with the leading of the Holy Spirit, the results can be overwhelming -- as Peter found out.

But there's a reason why we need to listen, not be overwhelmed, and follow that leading -- and it's not just because we want a new way to be personally successful.

It's because others around us benefit, as well. Peter's net (in Luke 5) broke and he had to call over another boat to help (James and John, in fact). The blessing that came on Peter for being successful literally and figuratively spilled over and started benefitting others. In other words, others around us benefit from our own obedience. God doesn't bless us in order to benefit us solely: we are expected to make sure others get spilled-on.

I know of others who have allowed God to "tweak" their gifts: businesspeople, for example, who bring their leadership and management skills into Ministry; the pastor at the church where I fellowship -- Westpointe Christian Centre -- is also the Worship leader, and he told me he played in a reggae band in his pre-saved days. (He shaves his head now, but I keep trying to imagine him in dreadlocks ... nope, not happening ...) Now he uses those same gifts for the Lord, and we have some of the most awesome Worship times I've ever experienced.

So what about you? Have you dropped your net over the other side of the boat? Have you been led in a different direction with your gifts, once you gave them to the Lord? Have you thought you needed to re-invent your life, only to find that all God needed was to "tweak" your gifts?

Another clip from dad

2011-02-10T12:11:00.000-08:00

Last month, I posted a clip from my dad's TV series, Klahanie - The Great Outdoors. When I was growing up, dad was a monster with a 16mm film camera. Most people -- if they shot home movies at all -- used an 8mm piece, but dad bought a professional-model 16mm piece of equipment, which he used, among other things, to shoot stock footage for Klahanie. The camera would often travel in the trunk of our car, and if dad saw something, he'd pull over, whip the camera out, and fire off several feet of film. On top of it all, he recorded a lot of my growing-up with this camera, and in the 90s, he edited his favorite bits together and had them transferred onto VHS tape.

Much of it is probably like watching paint dry, but the clips do stir up memories. Interestingly, some of the incidents I remember from watching on the screen, but many of them I remember from my own perspective at the time.

Tucked away on this "keepsake" tape, which I rediscovered while digitizing it to make DVDs for dad, is this clip of rather historical interest. In 1965, Stirling Moss (now Sir Stirling, OBE) visited Vancouver. Not sure why, but it was a big media event, and the major photo-op was held at Westwood Raceway in Coquitlam. The track is long-gone, replaced by housing developments and a golf course, inter alia. So Stirling, who had retired in 1962, was to put on a racing display in a Lotus (I think it was). And who better to race against him than BC's Minister of Highways, Phil Gaglardi?

Why would I say, "who better"? Because Gaglardi got the nickname "Flyin' Phil" for good reason: a notoriously leaden foot on the accelerator. He had received at least one speeding ticket at the time, and I remember a newspaper headline, "Gaglardi 'Like A Bloody Maniac,' Cop Says".

Dad was at the media event. I'm pretty sure he shot at least some of this footage (although I do see him in one of the shots, so this may be a mix or someone else was using his camera), and that would explain how he came to have it. Anyway ... enjoy!

One more thing ... the graphic says "1966". I'm pretty sure it was '65. My bad.

A little retrospective on dad

2011-01-17T16:54:00.000-08:00

One of dad's complaints from his extended hospital stay has been a lack of entertainment. He really can't abide TV, and would much rather watch videos of shows he likes. But he still hasn't taken that bold leap into the 21st Century and acquired a DVD player, so all of his videos are on VHS tape. (Could have been worse: could have been Betamax!)

For his birthday, then, we bought him a personal DVD player with built-in screen and have loaned him a stack of DVDs to get him started -- things he'd like: Victor Borge, Shakespeare, John Pinette -- and I realized I could take the video transfer system I recently bought to transfer videotape from our Hi8 camera to the computer and burn DVDs of his favorite tapes.

And in the process, I came across a film clip that encapsulates, in about 3-1/2 minutes, the essence of dad's work as a TV producer.

As well as some of the mundane assignments, like producing sports, news and public affairs programs, dad produced a string of "outdoors" shows. There was "Game Country", with Paul St Pierre -- the basic huntin'-shootin'-n-fishin' show -- "The Outdoors", with Bob Fortune, known through the 50s and 60s in Vancouver as "The Weatherman" for his nightly appearances on CBC News with his blackboard map and oversized chalk; and "The Open Road", which featured the travels of Ches Lyons, a BC Parks official who shot a lot of 16mm footage of his adventures in BC's backcountry. There was also "The Web of Life", with Dr Ian McTaggart-Cowan, talking about science and nature.

Dad's idea of an outdoors show had nothing to do with huntin'-shootin'-n-fishin'. I don't think he's ever defined it, but I'd define it as the interaction of man and his environment: living with, rather than overpowering it. As an evangelist, I'd take it a step further, towards understanding God's creation and the amazing responsibility and trust He's placed in us to take care of it.

In the early 60s, dad launched a new show that intended to do that, and more or less married the concepts of the last three. KLAHANIE is a Chinook word (Chinook is an extinct dialect of English, French and local native Indian words, which was the trading language of the west coast about 100-150 years ago), meaning "The Great Outdoors". Much of the material was shot by amateur cinematographers, and masterfully edited together by CBUT's finest -- including Fran Rayner, Bill Burns and Don Cummings -- and knit together with studio interviews with the guest and the host -- at first Fortune, later Don White, and occasionally Lyons as well as a number of staff announcers.

KLAHANIE pre-dates and in fact pre-saged "The Nature of Things", "Man Alive", and anything by David Attenborough, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, National Geographic or anything on the Discovery Channel. It broke new ground for viewers, and the fact that it ran for 13 seasons indicates the viewers were more than willing to go there.

If anyone wanted to know the essence of KLAHANIE ... I'd say this film clip sums it up. Dad has always been intrigued by movement and setting it to music (he had an unrealized dream of dressing Gordie Howe in something that showed his physique and filming Gordie skating, capturing the muscle definition and movement), and he got this idea to get footage of a horse and rider and set it to the KLAHANIE theme music, Virgil Thomson's "The Plow That Broke The Plains". So he tasked film photographer John Seale to go out to Maple Ridge to shoot the film. The result was a team effort -- as credited in Don White's voiceover at the beginning -- of concept, film and editing.

I get a wistful feeling from watching this. Not only does it show a simpler time and a link to my childhood (I used to cheer whenever I saw "Produced by Andy Snider" on the closing credits), but it occurs to me that this lovely bucolic location is probably buried under condo developments now.

One other personal note: when the CBC Pioneers Association held a party in 2004 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of CBUT going on the air, they showed a selection of clips from the station's history. This was used as the finale. I remember how dad just beamed at the thought, and how the people at the party enjoyed talking and interacting with him as CBC producers, staff and talent. All my life, I'd seen dad in the shadow of my mother, and he was proud of being known as "Mr Dorothy Davies". Finally, he was getting a measure of recognition for his own work.

I realize I'm probably shattering the Copyright Act by posting this clip, so let's enjoy while we can.

Argument? I'll sit this one out.

2010-12-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

"Do you know," the reporter asked me, "of any church groups that might take out advertising to counter this?"

That rather tiresome group, the "freethought" lobby -- a/k/a atheists -- has resurfaced, purchasing ad space on public transit, where they intend to run a series of ads either questioning or outright denying the existence of God. I've blogged about the discussion that happened almost two years ago when they tried this, and now they're trying to raise the hackles of pretty much every group that they feel doesn't use hard science to back up its claims.

I understand these adverts will use the late Carl Sagan's declaration that "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence".

I don't know if any church group will try to respond with an ad campaign of its own. My advice is that there shouldn't be one. Why pay good money to advertise something that's so doggone obvious? Most churches I know of that have that kind of bread are spending it on helping the poor, healing the sick, comforting the brokenhearted -- you know, activities that prove there is a God.

Oh, yeah ... and praying for those who don't believe. But that doesn't cost money.

I will -- as our forefathers have -- defend to the death their right to say what they feel and to advertise it; I also know that I was very much in that camp at one point: maybe not outright denying there was a God, but refusing to accept that He played any kind of role in day-to-day life or that I had any responsibility to Him. I figured science -- and my own intellect -- knew best.

And I learned the hard, painful way how wrong I was about my intellect ... and the humbling, gratifying way how wrong I was about His being "distant". And in my own free thought, of my own free will, I came to Him.

The "freethinkers" are just as lost as I was. But remember: Jesus wants us either ice-cold or red-hot -- anything else, and He'll spew us out of His mouth on Judgment Day.

So I won't argue with these people and I would encourage any other Believer to sit this one out. Remember: arguments rapidly deteriorate into exercises in "who's right" rather than "what's right", and as Bishop Noel Jones says, you could win an argument but lose a soul. Instead, we need to reach out to these folks and simply -- as James Aldrich says -- love them until they ask why.

I do pray that the "freethinkers" open their minds to the idea of God, and that if they want a "discussion", they lead the hand by providing "extraordinary evidence" that He doesn't exist -- because I guarantee, that's the most extraordinary claim of all.

Jesus said, “I thirst”.

2010-11-09T07:15:00.000-08:00

Mark, Luke and John all record that Jesus, as He hung on the cross, was given vinegar to drink. But in John 19:28, we learn what Jesus said prior to being given the vinegar.

He said, “I thirst”.

Wait a minute: when He met the woman at the well, as He was travelling through Samaria, He told her that He was the source of Living Water, and that anyone who drank that water would never be thirsty again. And now, here He was, the very source, saying “I thirst”.

That shows how He had taken on all the sins of the world – those committed at the time, as well as every sin committed since Adam stood by while his wife bit into the fruit, and every sin that would be committed until Jesus returns – and was wrung dry. It was almost at that point that He said, “it is finished”.

“Almost”?

Because there was one more thing to be done. The world had to offer Him something to top Him up again and quench the thirst. And what was it? Vinegar. It can look like water (if it's white wine vinegar), but don't take a long, deep drink of it. It's wine, that's become old, sour and useless for quenching thirst. Wine – the representation of His blood – that cannot be drunk.
Isn’t that what religion does to Jesus? Whether it’s the ABC (Anything But Christ) philosophies or the imposition of rituals or taking Scripture out of context to create something that “sounds” holy and righteous but misses what Christ is about, the world, having wrung Jesus dry with its sin, guilt and shame, tries to replace His living water with a cheap, rotten substitute.

And it was only then that Jesus’ work was done. He had poured out His living water on the earth, and it was now proven that nothing the world had to offer could replace it.

He is ...

2010-10-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

The World's Most Inclusive Man

"Never be thirsty, My friends." (John 4:14)

"You'd be welcome to join us," the Hallowe'en street party organizer told Pastor Barry recently. "We're very inclusive, you know."

"Inclusive" is one of the great politically correct watchwords of the 21st Century. Organizations, governments, businesses, individuals go to great effort to show how much they are open to people of all races, cultures, ages and lifestyles. Now, here’s a word from the Man who set the standard for inclusiveness:

... him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him, and he with me.

Do you know where those statements come from? They’re from the Bible, and they’re the words of Jesus Christ (the first is in the Gospel According to John (ch. 6, verse 37) and the second is in the Book of Revelation (ch. 3, v. 20)).

Here’s another: They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. That’s from Matthew, ch. 9, v. 12 (Mark and Luke also record it).

Are we not all “sick” in some way? Wouldn’t we all like to be well?

Here’s what the Apostle Paul had to say about “inclusiveness”: There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. (Letter to the Romans, ch. 10. v. 12-13)

“Lord over all” ... “rich unto all” ... “whosoever” ... can’t get much more inclusive than that! (When Paul refers to “the Greek”, he’s talking about people outside of “God’s chosen people” – the Jews. In other words, as far as God’s concerned, we’re all the same.)

The Prophet Isaiah wrote, more than 700 years before Jesus came: Thus saith the Lord ... mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people ... yet will I gather others to Him, beside those that are (already) gathered unto Him. (ch. 56, v 4-8 – edited.)

Inclusive? God wrote the book!

Businesses, organizations, etc., tend to have a vested interest in being “inclusive” – good PR, grant eligibility, among other things. But God’s interest is simple: He made us, He loves us and He wants nothing but the best for us. His Word promises that as we draw close to Him, we can expect healing, prosperity and most of all ... HOPE.

Without HOPE, why bother trying to stand against the drugs and the booze and the mistakes of the past that bring us to a destitute state? Without HOPE, why bother trying to live? And yet our greatest hope comes when we finally admit that we have no hope – we can change nothing in our own strength. But once we surrender and say, “Lord, I can’t do this – it’s up to You!”, something miraculous starts to happen. God sends a message that He’s got it covered and you can stop worrying.

The Bible tells us of a woman named Hannah, who was unable to have children. It hurt her more than anyone could imagine: she couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, cried often. One day she went up to the temple to pray and basically pour out her heart to God, begging Him to give her a child. Once she prayed – with some affirmation from the priest Eli – she went back home with a smile on her face and started eating again. Within a year, she had a baby – one of the greatest Prophets of them all, Samuel.

That is hope. Hannah was no more pregnant when she left the temple than when she went in, but she had handed off the situation to God and left Him to sort it out; as far as she was concerned, it was a done deal. That same kind of hope is available to us, just by handing off our problems, our situations and even our past slip-ups to God.

What does God expect from us? This is My commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you. (John’s Gospel, ch. 15, v. 12) That’s it: love God above everything, and love others ahead of yourself – the way Jesus loves us.

It’s a pity that many people think that you have to be “perfect” or “ready” to be with Jesus. Look what Jesus said about the “sick”: He doesn’t expect us to be “well” when we come to Him. Making us “well” is His job. (In fact, God requires us not to worry about ourselves and how “bad” or “good” we are, and instead look outward – towards Him and towards the people around us.)

Want to know more? Pick up a Bible and read for yourself. God gave us His Word on paper so we can all know what He wants from us and what we can expect from Him – and it’s a two-way conversation. You don’t have to go to a guru, bend yourself into uncomfortable shapes, whack yourself with a flatiron or pay one red cent. If you find something strange or contradictory, you’re not alone, but don’t worry: it’s just God’s way of keeping the conversation going.

The Holy Ghost ... shall teach you all things. (John 14:26)

We give out Bibles at Gospel Mission (when we have them) because we know that once people taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34), they don’t want anything else. We’ve been serving up God’s Word, straight no chaser, since 1929. And we see results: people find hope, get happier, move forward with their lives. People who felt they were rejected learn that they’re good enough for Jesus.

Now that’s “inclusive”!

Is it really 40 years?

2010-10-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm having enough trouble coming to terms with the fact that my son, Aidan, turns 24 on Saturday ... and now comes the 40th anniversary of an event I remember vividly because I was there ... and old enough to be conscious of every moment.

I refer to the Vancouver Canucks' regular season NHL debut -- Oct. 9, 1970.

It was a different time then. It was actually possible to phone a sports team and ask them to set aside a couple of tickets at the "Will Call" booth and pay for them when you got there. Mastercharge and Chargex were getting a foothold, and there was no such thing as Internet bookings. As soon as the opening date was announced, I remember writing to the Vancouver Canucks' office and stating that my dad and I would like two tickets, topmost row of Pacific Coliseum, right over centre ice, and enclosing the money order. The tickets came a couple of days later.

I'd been to games at Pacific Coliseum before. My peewee hockey coach, Ted Wetmore, sprang for tickets for us all to go to the first game in the brand-new arena in 1967 (an "interlocking" game between the Providence Reds of the American League and the Canucks of the Western League -- the Big Chickens* beat the Canucks, 3-2).

There was no question Ted had money: he owned a Volkswagen dealership in West Vancouver and kitted his teams out in blue and white sweaters with a big Volkswagen logo on the front and socks to match (this, at a time when it was considered a luxury for a team to have all the same sweaters). He was also quite the hockey player. He must have been in his early 60s when he coached us, and he would always close out our practices with a little self-indulgence: taking the puck and skating in on a breakaway against me -- the goalie. I remember his bald head and cardigan, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, old-fashioned straight stick (he hated the newly-popular curved sticks "you can't shoot a backhand with those stupid things!"), and wire-rimmed glasses. The only thing that didn't quite register in time was the puck -- until it bounced out of the net behind me. Ted (he insisted we first-name him) has probably long since shuffled off this mortal coil, but Wetmore Motors is still there at 22nd and Marine.

Anyway, enough of digressions. Dad and I did go to that first-ever Canucks game in the NHL. On that Coliseum opening night in '67, dad came along but discreetly sat in one of the last rows in the corner. I went and sat with him in the third period, and we realized we really liked the wide view you got from there. That's why I insisted, in my letter to the Canucks office, that we get seats in the last row over centre ice.

It's interesting what comes back to you when you think of something from that long ago:
-- standing ovation for Dale Tallon, who was touted as another Bobby Orr, although Hal Laycoe didn't seem to know where to play him: defence? Forward? Centre? Right wing? They were so certain Dale would be the Next Big Thing, they gave him #9, which was long regarded as the "star" number (Gordie Howe, Rocket Richard and Bobby Hull all wore #9; so did Wayne Gretzky in his earliest days, the story goes, as a paean to Gordie, but when he arrived at Sault Ste Marie, someone else had #9, so he switched to his famous #99). Eventually, though, Tallon was switched to #19.
-- chorus of boos for Tom Campbell, then the mayor of Vancouver. I know my parents weren't crazy about him, but really, booing the visiting politician was The Thing To Do in those days (still is, I guess). It wasn't until the home opener in 1972, when Dave Barrett, fresh off his big victory in the provincial election, was introduced for the ceremonial faceoff, that I actually heard a sitting politician actually get cheered.
-- disappointment that my radio hero, Jim Robson, was not calling the play-by-play for Hockey Night In Canada that night. Danny Gallivan came in from Montreal to do it.
-- minor disappointment that the Canucks were wearing white. Up till that time, the NHL home team wore the "coloured" uniform, while the WHL home teams wore the white uniform; I was looking forward to seeing the cool blue-and-green uni's. No joy. It would be 1975 -- when I was living in Montreal -- that I would see those in a game up-close.
-- the late George Gardner's heroics in goal. He was a great, solid backstop -- exactly what the Canucks needed in those shaky first minutes -- and a bit of a fan favourite, being one of the holdovers from the WHL team.
-- the stark reality that the Los Angeles Kings really were the better team that night. They'd beaten the Canucks twice in exhibition play.
-- the exhilaration of Barry Wilkins' goal -- as I recall, it was a low slapshot from about halfway between the point and the slot, followed by that satisfying CLANK! as it hit the back iron of the net behind Rogie Vachon and then, half a second later, the ear-splitting, stomach-loosening eruption of the crowd.
-- the final score: 3-1 LA. It was disappointing, but to an endless optimist like myself, the feeling was, "what did we expect? The team is new."

In 1979, I was walking past the Quick Stop Skate Shop on Hastings Street in Burnaby. There's still a sporting goods store on the site, but it has a different name. Hanging on a hanger was a Los Angeles Kings jersey -- purple with the gold crown on the front -- the original design; #18 on the back.

"Is that for sale?" I asked.
"Yep."
"Where'd you get it?"
"The boss knows the Canucks' trainer, so he got this."
"How much?"
"40 bucks."
"Wait there."

I went to the credit union, pulled out $40 (I was working on a TV series at the time, so I could afford that princely sum -- about like paying $100 today), and came back. Clearly, it was a game-worn jersey, but remember - the "sports collectible" market didn't take off until almost 10 years later.

Back at the TV studio, I wore the sweater proudly, and one of the production members, who was from LA, noted it and said, "#18 - that's Bob Berry".

I thought that was cool, because I knew Bob Berry graduated from Sir George Williams University, and so did I -- albeit many years after he did and it was called Concordia by then (1977). It took a few years for the realization to sink in.

Game-worn jersey from the 70s in Vancouver.
Bob Berry scored the first goal in the Canucks' first regular-season NHL game.
Could it be ... ???

And here we are ... 40 years later. There'll likely be a reunion of -- or at least thoughts for -- some of the principals from that night -- like Jim Robson, Orland Kurtenbach, Dale Tallon (who became a very successful general manager in Chicago). I wonder how many of us ticket-holders are still around -- there would have been 15,571 (since every Canucks' game was recorded as a sellout that year, the paid attendance figure is burned into my memory, along with the late Tom Peacock intoning "and we thank you," when he'd announce it in the third period of each game)?

Many of us would have been kids then, going with our parents. What memories do they have, I wonder? What's burned into their minds?

And one more thing: it's 40 years on -- and the Leafs still haven't won the Cup.

====
*The name "Reds" had nothing to do with a Communist plot brewing in New England: it was, rather, a reference to the Rhode Island Red, a chicken indigenous to the area. I have no idea how the club fared during the McCarthy era, when Cincinnati's ball club officially changed its name to the "Redlegs".

The Last Lesson of the Children's Zoo?

2010-09-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

My dad has always been a photographer. He snapped off photos of practically everything as I was growing up, and -- being a TV producer -- he also acquired a 16mm movie camera and shot miles and miles of footage of things in our lives (as well as stock footage for his show, Klahanie).

One of the earliest pictures he has of me is as a 2-year-old, standing nose to nose with a fawn in Stanley Park. A little baby with a little baby. (I remember a couple of years later, my mother took me to a concert, when Leonard Bernstein brought the New York Philharmonic to Vancouver (did he really play at the Forum?) -- and they played Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun. I thought it was a nice piece about a baby deer.)

But back to Stanley Park. It was my first encounter with a wild animal. Later, when the "Children's Zoo" opened, we got to get up-close-and-personal with a lot of animals you wouldn't ordinarily see; and while staged shows in the Aquarium and caged -- or otherwise boundaried -- animals in the rest of the zoo were interesting, there's no substitute for that kind of contact with another species.

Amid all the hubris of the "saving" of the Bloedel Conservatory in Vancouver, there was the nemesis that the Stanley Park Children's Farmyard -- formerly called the Children's Zoo -- would be closed. Its last day will be January 2, 2011 -- the day after the annual Bright Nights Christmas festival closes. The reason? It lost a quarter-million dollars last year. Bloedel was also a money-loser, but that was blamed on construction of the Canada Line, which limited road access to Queen Elizabeth Park and the Conservatory for a couple of years. (How a viable business can go into the tank because of only two years of limited access is a question for smarter economic minds than mine, but to this unlearned and uneducated one, maybe there were problems before then? Here's one: I was born and raised in Vancouver, and have not set foot in the Bloedel Conservatory in well over 30 years. Hmm.)

But maybe it's easier to "sell" a Conservatory -- with a built-in spectacular view of Vancouver and the North Shore from the top of Little Mountain and a gourmet restaurant -- as a tourist attraction than it is to promote "another petting zoo". After all, bringing in the tourist dollars is a bigger deal than something that would entertain and educate young local children and deepen their appreciation of animals and, by extension, farming and the source of their food. (I had no problem with the knowledge that the little lamb I played with on one Sunday could well be the star of someone else's souvlaki the next Sunday -- after all, it wasn't the Stanley Park Children's Abbatoir ...)

(A loss in the neighbourhood of $250,000? The City of Vancouver is spending 100-times that much, setting up separated bike lanes.)

You want to know how to bore a young kid to tears? Take them to a flower and plant exhibit. That's probably why I haven't been to the Conservatory since the mid-70s: too many memories of wanting to be someplace else. But I could have spent hours at the zoo -- the "regular" zoo or the children's zoo -- no problem. But that little bit of joy for a kid -- some gentle education -- sadly takes a back seat to economics.

Kids are being required to grow up too fast these days. (There are "advocates" who want them to explore their sexuality while they're still children, which reminds me of Goldie Hawn's one-liner on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in the 1960s about petitioning Congress to lower the age of puberty); maybe this is just another sign of the times. You want to go to the Children's Farmyard kid? Sorry: it's closed, 'cause it wasn't making money. Why is it important to make money? Well, lemme tellya .....

The last lesson of the Children's Zoo? Sad, dontcha think?

The Florida pastor's legacy

2010-09-13T03:01:00.000-07:00

"Aren't you glad that idiot in Florida cancelled his plan to burn the Koran?"

The lady at the bus stop didn't even know me, much less Terry Jones, yet this seemed a fitting conversation opener for a Sunday morning. Personally, I've been training my tongue not to call people names -- especially not a fellowservant -- no matter how much I disagree with them, so it was hard to set myself in agreement with her calling the pastor an idiot. Yet -- hey, let's be honest -- it was hard to disagree.

But while it's easy to dismiss Terry Jones' 9/11 stunt as simply someone getting his Warholian 15 minutes so he can now be differentiated from the guy in Monty Python's Flying Circus, it's also possible to look past it and see where God is involved. Has he not -- wittingly or unwittingly -- been used by God? The response from other Christian leaders has been pretty consistent: this is not the God we serve, and this is not the way to go about witnessing Christ. Even our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, uncharacteristically spoke of his own faith, saying "my Jesus is a God of tolerance". In the process, I believe this is helping the Body of Christ get re-focused on what we're called to be, and that calling is not to go around hating people of other faiths -- no matter how holy or righteous the reason.

I dealt with this in a previous posting back when Pastor Jones' plan was first announced, and pointed out that declaring what we hate -- no matter how much we think God hates it -- is not what we are called to do. We could also consider this:

"Though I fervently declare my loathing for the things God hates and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
"And though I know every word of God's Old Testament Law; and march in protests and rail against abortion, Muslims, homos and even my country's President if his agenda doesn't suit me; and have not Love, I am nothing.
"And though I dare police to cart me off to jail* because I ought to obey the laws of God rather than the laws of man, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing."

It comes down to this: the moment we put on Christ -- to use another of Paul's expressions -- we're supposed to behave differently, think differently, live differently than we did BC. No matter how much darkness rises up in the world, our Light is supposed to overpower it -- and if we can't do it with our Light, then there's something wrong with the connection.

Paul writes, "in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men" (I Cor. 14:20). We are supposed to be totally unschooled and inexperienced in malicious behaviour: but when it comes to understanding of the Word of God and our commandments from Jesus (WDJTUTD?), we have to be mature, adept, perfect.

Jesus told us that in the last days, we'd be called on to defend our faith, and that's something we do every time we witness Christ to others (Matt. 10:19). If the Holy Spirit is to give us the words we need when we need them and the Holy Spirit is the spirit of Love, could He possibly instruct us to burn another faith's holy book or otherwise act hatefully towards them?

If we use the Terry Jones experience as a stone on which to whet our almost-blunted purpose, then we see God at work, after all. God has used people in much more loathsome ways to get His Will accomplished: Calvary comes to mind.

---
*Some years ago, a friend of mine and his wife were planning to take part in an anti-abortion rally, where the protesters planned to challenge a court order preventing them from getting within a certain distance of an abortion clinic. On the day of the rally, my friend and his wife were praying, and the Lord told them, "don't go". So they didn't. Turned out, some people were arrested and charged with criminal contempt of court. Not long after that, my friend and his wife were called overseas as missionaries -- and they couldn't have obtained their passports if they'd been arrested at that rally and come out of it with a criminal record. Their ministry work has touched countless lives over the past 20 years, but who knows if they would have done anything if they'd been disobedient that day?

Hawking and one of the First Temptations

2010-09-05T16:57:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hawking is back in the news, this time with a book that, according to press reports, provides scientific evidence that God did not create the Universe. It's likely to spark outrage among Christians -- or anyone else who believes in God (Muslims, Jews ...) -- and will cause many people to want to rise up and argue vociferously against the professor's points.

My advice: don't take the bait.

Don't succumb to what was, essentially, The First Temptation of Christ: to dispute the point that began, "if thou be the Son of God ....". For Jesus, even responding to the Devil's statement would be to admit that there was the slightest possibility that He wasn't the Son of God. Instead, Jesus simply said, "it is written ...." No debate. No discussion. Stand on the Word of God and do not waver.

For us, that's important, because that is the very weapon we have at our disposal as believers, and that's all we need.

So no matter how tempting it is to stew on the concept and think of a well-constructed, rational argument, all that does is play into the devil's hands and take the fight onto his turf. Rational thinking cannot withstand faith, and as the Apostle Paul says, anyone who believes in God has to begin by accepting that He exists, and since no one has seen God, that's a matter of faith.

A little while ago, I blogged about another statement of Hawking's, that mankind had to make plans to colonize other parts of the galaxy(ies), or else we'd become extinct. That might have been taken as a wake-up call to the situation on Earth, but his theory that the Universe could have come to be without God runs deeper than simply promoting science over religion.

If God did not create the Universe, then to whom are we accountable. The idea of our accountability is based in that fundamental statement in Genesis 1:1 - "In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth". If for some reason we reject that, then what good is a God at all? Why should we be accountable to Him? Why should we follow commandments? Why should we love Jesus and love our neighbour as ourselves and lay down our lives for others, whatever the cost or level of inconvenience?

Take God out of the picture, and we're left alone with our own intellect to get us through life. What many think of as freedom of thought is really aimless direction. What is the foundation of any kind of morality? Laws by governments that can be changed the instant a party ticks off enough of the electorate? Being "nice" or "tolerant" towards someone? If my intellect is as good as it gets, I'm in big trouble. I need God, through His Holy Spirit, to show me what to do and how to do it, and if this God didn't even create the Heavens and the Earth, then He's really not much better than I am so why should I owe Him any obedience at all?

Worse -- take God out of the picture and you take Love out of the picture. God is Love, and Love cannot be explained by any kind of reason. Take Love out of the picture and the concept of laying down one's life for someone else can only happen if it's convenient for someone: if it makes them look good or saves someone's life because the person laying down his or her life would miss them. For that very reason, Man could never have conceived of unconditional Love.

But as Christians, we know that, and because we know it -- it's not a theory for scientists to debate, publish and peer-review -- there's absolutely no point in debating Hawking's theory or giving it the time of day; even if we think that we've come up with the perfect slam-dunk to shut it down.

Consider Eve. In her zeal to defend her right standing with God, she embellished on God's instructions regarding the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil -- saying God had said not even to touch it -- and, by essentially lying about God's word, giving the devil an opening.

Consider Hezekiah's troops (II Kings 18), faced with the Assyrian envoy not just trash-talking their military abilities but trash-talking the God of Israel Himself. Every soldier kept his mouth shut, having been being ordered not to respond to the envoy's increasingly blasphemous rantings. That's how we have to be.

Besides, to respond would be to judge Prof. Hawking, himself. It's possible to be "sincerely wrong" about something, and we are only called on to pray for those who are misguided. I believe God is using Hawking as a means of dragging the atheists to the brink of the abyss and then, in a glorious revelation of His own, showing Himself to Hawking in a way so brilliant, so glorious and so incontrovertible, that Hawking will have no choice but to repent and retract his statements ... and in the process, bring other atheists into the Kingdom with him.

That is, in effect, what happened to the Apostle Paul. He was by no means the last person to be knocked off his horse and become one of the Lord's greatest supporters, and I believe Stephen Hawking is a prime candidate for a shaft of light, himself.

What prayer for an old man?

2010-08-31T19:50:00.000-07:00

My dad had a heart attack last week.

If you're going to have a heart attack, it's best to have it in Oak Bay, where you're just a 3-iron shot away from Royal Jubilee Hospital -- one of the best ticker wards in the country. In fact, it was because of mom's heart attack in 1988 -- which happened while they were house-sitting for a friend in Esquimalt -- that they made the decision to sell their condo in West Vancouver and buy a place in Oak Bay. But that's another story.

Dad had a "significant" heart attack, and it reached the point last Wednesday where the medical team -- three earnest young doctors and a cardiologist -- discussed the situation with dad, Amelia, me and dad's neighbour Gail, and told us flat-out that there was a very real possibility that dad could take a bad turn. Noting the "do not resuscitate" instruction on his Living Will, they wanted to confirm that that was, indeed, dad's wish. It was.

Today, I've been informed that dad would likely be released from hospital in about a week and allowed to go home. On Monday, the nurse told us that his signs were definitely improving: his heart rate was stabilizing (although he'd had an irregular rhythm during the night, so they added a blood thinner to his medication); his blood pressure, while still on the low side, was climbing again; his kidneys, which had been failing, were making a comeback. There was definite cause for optimism on our part, and the fact that he was being moved out of Coronary Care into a "general" ward suggests the doctors think so, too.

Through it all, people have been praying. My circle of friends is very steeped in faith -- the faith for healing and also the faith that leads one to seek God in all circumstances, regardless of whether they "look good" at the time or not. My son Aidan, for example, is very much a word-faith type: speak the positive and expect the positive -- your words frame your world. On Wednesday, after the medical team had given us The Talk, Aidan declared confidently, "it's not his time yet".

Back in Vancouver from spending time with dad in Victoria, I spent time with the Lord. I felt I had to pray something, but what? Really: what do you pray when an 87-year-old man has a heart attack? If you believe we're generally allotted 70 years, anything beyond that is gravy and grace, so what if this is his time? Do I pray for healing and complete recovery and basically set myself against God's will? I'm praying for my will, but that's not what we're supposed to be praying for.

Aha! I thought: dad's worst fear is that he won't be able to go home again (while in hospital, he's talked of little besides going home and being in his garden and tending to his bees) and that he'll have to go into a "home" -- or should I say, retirement centre for seniors with healthy, active lifestyles?

Right: I'll pray for that. After all, dad's been so fiercely independent all his life, that going into a "home" would kill him -- pun intended. And that's where the Lord stepped in. "How do you know that's not My will?" And then He left me to think it over.

Why would it be God's will for dad to go into a retirement home? Perhaps to give him the chance to allow others to care for him. Perhaps to let him know that fierce independence is highly over-rated -- and leads to broken hips and nervous neighbours (and family members). Perhaps to let him know that it's Quite All Right to rely on others.

Or maybe God has something else up His sleeve. I got to thinking about Hezekiah, whose near-death experience is written up no fewer than three times in the Bible: 2 Kings 20, 2 Chronicles 32 and Isaiah 38-39 (which tells me there's a pretty significant "take-away" here). Having heard a prophecy that he was about to die, Hezekiah prayed that he would go on living; God heard his prayer and gave him another 15 years.

But Scripture also tells us that Hezekiah did not "render according to the benefits he received" and that God's anger came on him. Moreover, in his pride, Hezekiah showed off his worldly goods and treasures to total strangers from Babylon, and Isaiah prophesied that all of those goods would be carried off to -- where else? -- Babylon.

So somewhere along the line, Hezekiah blew it. He had been walking according to God's ways, and spoke of that in his prayer to live longer. But once granted that prayer, his "heart was lifted up" (2 Chr. 32:25), which is an expression meaning he was overtaken by pride, and he did not do ..... something in keeping with the Grace God had shown him.

What Hezekiah was supposed to do isn't clear, but we can see that God was keeping Hezekiah around for a reason, and that reason was not because He liked Hezekiah's face.

God has His reasons for keeping us all around and for the Grace He grants us in other ways. Do we render according to that benefit, or do we, like Hezekiah, become prideful and take our eyes off Him?

This evening, as I was walking in the West End, I saw a young woman nearly buy the farm before my eyes. She was engrossed in a conversation on her cell phone, and stepped off the curb right into the path of a car. Perhaps the car was further away than it appeared from my angle, but it certainly looked close. The car stopped and she continued crossing, hardly missing a beat in her phone call.

Does she have any inkling, I wonder, of the grace she had just been given? Or would she simply think -- if she thought about it at all -- that she was "lucky", and keep on with whatever she had been doing? God grants us grace of additional years more often than we might think. Do we take advantage of that grace to serve Him better?

So what prayer for an 87-year-old man? That he would receive the grace of additional years of life and then, having received that, seek the Lord for the reasons why he should get that grace and pursue them.

WDJTUTD?

2010-08-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?" Peter answered, "Yes."

Jesus said to him, "then hunt down the lousy rats who did this to Me and make them pay for it!"
Then Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?" Peter said again, "Yes, Lord, I do."
"Then track down everyone who doesn't believe in Me now and shake a finger in their nose and say, 'Sinner! You are going to hell!'"
And a third time, Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?"
Peter was getting grieved to hear this question again, and said, "Lord, You know all things: You know I love You."
"Then seek out all things that you think offend God and march and protest and declare how much you HATE them in My Name!"

Of course, we know that's not what happened on the banks of Galilee after Jesus had returned from the grave. Jesus' instructions to Peter were, "feed My sheep". So why do some professing Christians act as though the scenario above were Jesus' instructions to us?

The latest perversion of the calling of Christ is found in an entry at a ministry called Dove World Outreach -- offering up 10 reasons to burn a Koran. A lovely response to that was posted by Christine Smith in the Bible Cafe for Women, pointing out that this notion does not further the Kingdom -- at least as far as bringing non-believers to Christ is concerned.

The sad thing is, so many Christians think the way to promote the faith is to declare fervently what they hate. I have a friend who's a very fervent believer and desperately wants to serve the Lord, but never misses a chance to forward emails with links to "Christian" websites that promote hatred -- hatred against abortion, gay marriage, Muslims, even President Obama (and are we not called to pray for our leaders, not disrespect them?).

We get so hung up in wanting to be like Jesus and kick over the tables in the temple that we forget a key question:

What did Jesus tell us to do?

He left us with one commandment: that we love one another.

He told us that people should see the glory of God through our works -- not through the things we don't like.

He told us to forgive our enemies, not try to bomb the living daylights out of them: otherwise, what makes us different from the Unsaved?

He told us not to call people names -- something I've previously written about.

He told us to offer the other cheek if someone hits us on the first one. He told us to give our coat to anyone who steals our sweater. He told us -- through the Proverbs -- to give our enemy food and water and so pour "coals of fire" upon their head: not to burn them with a guilt trip, but to release the Holy Spirit over the situation.

Look at it this way: people who offend God are condemned to Hell. We who have seen the Light are called to prevent that from happening. But can we do that if we talk and act just as hatefully as the people who oppose us? Our words, our actions, our very thinking, has to be so loving and bright and glorious that the darkness others walk in doesn't have a chance. Or put another way, we can't promote the Kingdom of Heaven if we keep making Hell look like a viable alternative?

Hawking's hyperbole and the third option

2010-08-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

Much has been made over the past couple of weeks of the statement by the astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, that mankind must find new planets and environments in space and colonize them. If not, he says, our species will face extinction on this planet.

I don't know how the statement came up now: Hawking's been saying it for at least the past four years. He says that, with our intelligence, we have the ability to affect the environment for good or ill, but with the rate of population growth and resource depletion, plus human tendencies towards greed and aggressive behaviour, we have little choice but to work towards a propulsion system that approaches the speed of light and prepare to move out.

At first, I thought it was hyperbole: something to shake people up and spur them to action on issues affecting the Earth. But then, reading Prof. Hawking's interview, it appears he's serious and believes it is possible to build a propulsion system that can approach light speed and carry a whole lot of people to new frontiers.

How about that? A man-made Rapture -- an interesting variation on the false Christs Jesus warned us about. Mind you, all I saw in the interview was Prof. Hawking saying that mankind is capable of coming up with the technology to do it: I didn't see anything about how much money would this cost and who would pay for it -- heck: ever try to get a rapid-transit system built?

Nor did I see how six billion (the last I checked) people would be moved out. Maybe he's punting that question over to the ethicists for one of those delightful angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussions -- who would be allowed to colonize? who would be left behind on the scorching, uninhabitable planet?

(My answer: those with faith enough to see that this is not, nor cannot be, sanctioned by God.)

One observer on Twitter summed up what many environmentalists may be thinking: "or," he said, "clean up the mess we have".

Good retort -- which is why I thought maybe Prof. Hawking was trying to use a shock tactic. But there's a third option: get right with God.

Let's take a look at the current scorecard:

lethal heat wave in Russia
devastating flooding in Pakistan
largest landslide in BC history
earthquakes in Chile, Haiti, China, California
underwater oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico
a new "superbug" hitting Europe

and there's a lot more I can't think of, offhand.

Environmentalists look at these and claim that it's proof of global warming. But the last three in that list have little to do with global warming (although I read a couple of months ago that some scientists were looking to see if there was a link between earthquakes and climate change: the idea that, if glacial ice melts, then the glaciers become "lighter" and exert less pressure on the earth, thereby making it "easier" for earthquake action to take place; even one of the researchers says it's a MAJOR stretch to make that reasoning).

Remember: I'm not a climate change denier -- although I prefer to call the situation "global weirding". My issue is that we're using ineffectual tools to fight this battle -- we're looking in the wrong places for solutions, and for whatever reason, a lot of us don't want to acknowledge that the right place to look even exists.

See, God does not want His creation to be destroyed, and in fact, His word promises that it won't be. He loves the Earth and the Earth loves Him back (Psalms 96 and 98 make that clear). He's also stated that He plans to come and live here, and we have a job to do, taking care of the Earth and everything that's in it.

What's more, He promises that, if only we turn to Him and repent and go back to seeking Him, He will heal the land (2 Chr. 7:13-14). And if we've sinned and offended Him by the way we've treated the Earth -- using its resources beyond our ability to replenish them (Gen. 1:26, 28) -- Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross allows us to repent of those sins and move forward with a clean slate.

We need to stop obsessing on the environment. Yes, we've had a lot to do with the environmental trauma that appears to have escalated over the past few decades. But now we have to recognize that there's very little we, as a species, can do in our own power to fix it. We've already found that out: after 60 years of concerted, well-meaning, earnest action (I'm going back to the Cold War days, when efforts started to escalate to save mankind from himself), by all reports, things are getting worse.

We need a new paradigm and we need to admit that we can do nothing by ourselves -- not even Jesus could, don't forget (John 5:30). Praise God, that "new" paradigm is actually the oldest one around: His Word and His promises. And the bottom line is, we have to admit our powerlessness, place it all before God, and re-focus on what Jesus instructed us to do: "occupy till I return".

That means, love one another; love God above all; do good works so others can see God's glory; trust in the Lord and don't lean on your own understanding; do not judge. And when it comes to the environment, assert the authority God gave us back in Eden: be fruitful, multiply, replenish the Earth and subdue it. And that does not mean worship it.

And here's a challenge: if God leads you to do something and it appears to run against conventional environmentalist thinking ... go with God's leading and trust that He'll mitigate any environmental impact. He will not tell you to do something that damages His Work.

And remember those human tendencies towards greed and aggressive behaviour that make Prof. Hawking believe we can't survive on Earth? Yeah, like I want to be cooped up in a spacecraft for several years with greedy, aggressive people! But as we turn towards God and walk closer with Him, we bring those tendencies captive in Christ. I know: a lot of my own "human tendencies" came into captivity once I met Jesus.

Considering that Jesus warned us there'd be days like these -- filled with the signs He said would foretell His return -- there's a certain urgency to our re-focusing on Him and re-committing to The Great Commission.

And whether He comes back in 2030 -- 2000 years since He was crucified -- or before I finish writing this, we can't afford to roll over and play dead and wait for the Rapture (the real one, I mean): we have to get busy -- but get busy doing what God told us to do -- not what the world keeps telling us to do.

If it ain't got the blessin', don't bother messin'!

2010-08-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

CBC Radio is reporting this morning that Fraser Downs -- known for decades as Cloverdale Racetrack -- is in danger of losing its live horse racing events. (Pause while I suppress the urge to make a remark about dead horse racing ....... OK, that's passed ...)

It's been the home of the "wholesome trottin' race" for many, many years, and now it's owned by Great Canadian Casinos. A couple of years ago, Great Canadian installed slot machines at the track -- not satisfied with already having an enterprise where, as Bob Hope famously said, the windows clean the people -- and I seem to recall racing enthusiasts were solidly onside, saying the added attraction would "save" the industry.

I've written before both here and at "Rev. Downtown" about how I feel about gambling in general and the addiction to gaming revenue. I believe that, because it's an offence to God -- essentially, putting more trust in the random generation of numbers than in His provision; it also involves somebody losing, and I don't believe God would ordain something where someone loses -- money generated through that enterprise is not blessed. As I've pointed out elsewhere, charities and health-care systems receive a lot of money from gaming, and yet they're still crying poverty. With all the billions of dollars sucked into gaming coffers, wouldn't some of that poverty have been alleviated by now?

So it really shouldn't be a surprise that the horse racing industry is now worried that live racing at Fraser Downs is in danger, even with the installation of slot machines.

Interestingly, I recall the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurred when tobacco companies were forbidden to sponsor sports events. The sports organizers were afraid that their events were going to die, and indeed, some of them did. Yet, a great many found new, less lethal, sponsors and are still going. The question is, do proponents of live horse racing have sufficient faith -- both in their sport and in God's willingness to bless it -- to wean themselves off gaming revenue?

One problem: the gaming company owns the track. This should be a cautionary note for anyone who enjoys thoroughbred racing at Hastings Park.

The other problem: any addiction is a genie that's incredibly hard to cram back into the bottle.

Sarah and the morphologisms

2010-08-13T07:32:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin may have gone viral with her apparent malapropism on Twitter -- "refudiate" -- but she's also created what I (ahem) have dubbed a "morphologism".

That's based on a contest run by the Washington Post a few years ago, in which readers were invited to create new words from existing words using just one letter. You could add, delete or change a letter to make this new word. My favorites were:

karmageddon -- that's like, a really bad scene? where all the bad stuff that everyone's ever done comes back on them? and people get killed? and everything's destroyed? and it's, like, a real bummer? and
reintarnation -- the belief that when you die, you come back in the next life as a hillbilly

Another example is one the British humourist Denis Norden coined: tauntering. He described that as a "labour-saving word to describe one man tottering (carrying a load of stuff) while another was sauntering (and carrying nothing)". Of course, the fact that he had to expend so much labour on explaining what the word meant rather defeated the labour-saving intent, but there you go ...

Anyway, the Post didn't really have a name for this type of new word, so I came up with one: morphologism -- from a couple of Greek words meaning changing a word.

Alas, I don't think the Post ever re-ran the contest, which is personally disappointing because not only had I coined a term for these words, I'd started thinking of some of my own, to wit:

pestulence -- the state in which your home is overrun by teenage girls
decafitation -- in which, until you've had that first cup of coffee, you just can't get your head into things

And now comes the ex-gov., with refudiate. It may come across initially as a malapropism -- named after Mrs Malaprop, in Richard Sheridan's 1775 restoration comedy, The Rivals, who mangled the language with such remarks as "promise to forget this fellow - to illiterate him, I say, from your memory" and "Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!". (Other examples include the weasel character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, who said that all his information had been "duly corrugated" and the sportscaster who commented on a contract dispute with a player that was settled when the club president stepped in: "xxxxx has a way of getting involved and exacerbating the situation".)

But refudiate actually makes some sense, AND it's a one-letter change in an existing word. The definition is a bit of a challenge, but that's not what's important right now. I'd like to have some fun with this and see what others come up with. Submit your suggestions as comments, and please make sure I know how to reach you. Might even find a prize to send to the best one -- although that's a little like tying a pork chop around my neck so my dog will play with me.

And I don't even have a dog.

The joy of conversation

2010-08-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

One of the things I absolutely love about the Internet is the blogging and commenting and interchange of a variety of ideas from a variety of areas. This really hit home in the past week, when Ron Edmondson, pastor at Grace Community Church in Clarksville, Tennessee, ran a blog item about principles. In summary, he asked whether sometimes we tend to cling to a principle at the expense of following the Word of God. As he often does, he posed the question for response from his readers.

This touched on something that had bugged me: the question of what to do when a couple who's been living together decides they want to get married and want to be married in a church. Some pastors balk at this, or suggest strongly (if not make it a prerequisite) that they live apart for a while leading up to the wedding.

For various reasons, I've had a hard time with that, fearing that it might drive away a couple who are just overcoming the belief that Christianity is some kind of exclusive club. And frankly, I've not been able to find a Scriptural basis for this reluctance.

So I mentioned this to Ron in a comment on his blog, and he asked if I'd do a guest post -- which I've done.

Talk about poking an issue with a sharp stick! Read the comments and see for yourselves: there's a variety of positions, some Scriptural, some legalistic, all very well thought out. I don't agree with them all -- and nor should I, in a free exchange of ideas. It appears very much that this is an issue that God has left us to sort out in cooperation with the Holy Spirit: there's no definite "thou shalt not ..." commandment relating to this, but we definitely have to keep seeking Him and cannot rely on "going with our gut" or whatever "feels right".

So through this wondeful dialogue, I'm starting to develop a kind of clarity and -- as so often happens when you're seeking an answer from God -- it's nowhere near what I'd expected.

Rolling the dice with people's lives

2010-07-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hume hits it spot-on when he writes about the BC government's expansion -- explosion, really -- of online gambling. Like dealing drugs to addicts, he says. Indeed, it confirmed my own feelings about those poker websites advertised on TV that promise it's not a gambling site and it doesn't cost anything to play: it comes across like the pusher who tells a newbie, "the first one was free".

Of course, fuelling the gambling addiction has grown from the government's own addiction to revenue, and while Stephen doesn't come right out and say it, I will -- as I have before: gambling is sinful. It's a smorgasbord of things God warns us not to get into, like sloth (trying to get something for nothing), envy and greed. Gambling means we put more faith in the turn of a card, the roll of the dice or a random generation of numbers (assuming you're dealing with a square house that doesn't fiddle that number generation) than in the Creator of the Universe, Who has promised to provide for us.

And look at the fruits: why are the organizations that supposedly benefit from gambling revenue still crying poverty? Why do sports teams, arts organizations and health-care endeavours suddenly face being wiped out when their lottery-money grants are cut? Where is the blessing? Could it be that, when you throw in your lot with the world's way of doing things, God holds back? (Remember Jesus' words: "your Heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask Him." The unstated condition is that we have to ask. And if we're too busy chasing lottery revenue to ask Him to supply what we need, we won't get it.)

At least the government adverts for gambling have stopped using the lie that gaming revenue helps these organizations. (They've substituted it with something worse, I'm afraid: that insipid tag-line, "know your limit - play within it", which is like telling an alcoholic that "just a little taste won't hurt".) The percentage of revenue that's actually doled out is minuscule: as I've said before, if you really want to help such groups, take the money you'd spend on lottery tickets or at the casino and hike it straight over to them. Cut out the middleman. And watch the blessings come back on you, full measure, shaken together, pressed down and running over.

I'm surprised they haven't adopted that as a tag-line. If they ever did, I'd avoid government offices, the BCLC headquarters and the ad agency, because the forecast there would be for lightning with a strong probability of fire and brimstone.

The cussin' mayor

2010-07-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Reams have been written about Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson's recent unguarded moment in front of a live microphone and reams more will likely come. For those who haven't heard, the mayor was caught on tape using profanities in describing some of the speakers at a public meeting on some city hall plans. We tend to be so cutesy about rude language: I've had just about enough of the expression "dropped the F-bomb" in the past couple of days.

Hizzoner is by no means alone in the league of leaders caught saying or doing rude things. There was Richard Nixon, caught on tape using male anatomical references to describe Pierre Trudeau; Trudeau, for that matter, raising his middle finger to protesters outside his train in Salmon Arm, BC; Ronald Reagan doing a mike check and saying “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

There are others (although I greatly doubt whether Queen Elizabeth would really say "buggah!" when her Land Rover broke down, as portrayed by Helen Mirren in "Queen").

But politics aside, what bothers me is the rush to justification for using profanity. One columnist in the Vancouver Sun came out with a "history" of the F-Bomb. Another cited a study that found profanity is a reaction to pain. It's as if people who are offended need to lighten up -- "everybody" does it now (in a follow-up story, Mayor Gregor talked frankly about his language on the rugby field in younger days) and we should be more tolerant. Translation: don't get outraged; just acquiesce and abase ourselves to accommodate the lowest common denominator -- even if we voted for him. (I didn't.)

Apparently, someone got paid for that study, which really could have been published in the journal Duh. I could have saved them a lot of money with my own experience -- or at least, cashed the check, myself. As a 22-year-old acting student in London, we were given an exercise to imagine that a heavy metal gate had slammed shut on our hand and then act out our reaction.

Being of a "progressive" mind at the time, my "acting" involved grimacing in pain and "dropping the f-bomb", and then adding la bombe "c*", in French, just to show off my bilingual gifts.

Later that afternoon, I went back to my squalid little garret in a B&B a few blocks away, and as I closed the door I was distracted by something: a gust of wind blew the door shut on my hand, thereby proving that my "performance" in class was amazingly true-to-life. But I digress ...

To me, profanity is a cop-out: it's the mark of a badly written play, an unfunny comedian or a punk who tries to project a tough-kid image. When I came to Christ, one of the changes that happened to me was that I became greatly offended at hearing the f-word and other profanity. I used to have a rather foul mouth, myself; profanity still slips out on occasion, I'm ashamed to say -- even ashamed if it happens when I'm alone and supposedly no one can hear me.

Swearing is a reaction to pain? That's the same as a wounded animal -- but aren't we actually higher beings than animals? The Bible also warns us against acting like the heathens: we are to follow the way God wants us to follow -- not the base reactions of animals.

But it seems that the world's agenda has always been to try to get us to accept that we're really no better than the animals -- and considering we're supposed to be caring for and protecting them and all of God's Creation, that's kind of a silly concept. We can't allow ourselves to be dragged down by excusing "animalistic" behaviour -- whether it's in our actions or our words.

The Commandments God gave us -- for our own protection, don't forget -- involve dealing with situations in ways that don't involve reacting like animals but responding like children of God: with circumspection, wisdom and, at the heart of it all, with prayer. As with everything else, though, following those commandments is a "learned behaviour" -- which is why we have to be commanded to do it, come to think of it. We can also do what David did, and call on God to set a watch over our mouths. I might point out that David was under a whole lot more pain and pressure than Mayor Gregor. We can do it: it just takes a sense of responsibility and a refusal to let ourselves and others excuse base behaviour.

Jesus, James and Paul all warn us to watch our tongues and not to give offence: Jesus says that if we so much as call someone a fool, we're in danger of hellfire. How much more do we risk by calling someone a " ******* hack"?

*That would be the French word for the wine cup Jesus passed around at The Last Supper -- it's apparently one of the vilest things you can say to a Quebecois, as I found out when I jokingly (I thought) said it to Rene Simard when I was his dialogue coach on his English-language TV show. He looked like I'd hit him with a halibut. When I realized the impact of what I'd done, the show was long out of production and contrition was a bit late.

Doomspeak revisited

2010-07-08T06:55:00.000-07:00

A blog post by Mike Klassen in CityCaucus.com looks at the latest exercise in Doomspeak -- a talk given by SFU Prof. Mark Jaccard, in which he says humans are kidding themselves when it comes to actions being taken to reduce or eliminate climate change. Prof. Jaccard says, in effect, that talk of "carbon neutrality" and reducing dependancy on fossil fuels takes our focus away from what he says is the real task at hand: eliminating the use of fossil fuels altogether.

Urban studies specialist Gordon Price reported on Prof. Jaccard's talk in its entirety.

I'm sorry to say that I think the headline on the CityCaucus item is misleading. It says that humans lack the capacity to prevent climate change, which is not what Prof. Jaccard said, at all, according to the body of the story. I actually agree with the premise in the headline: to use the Apostle Paul's description, we're beating against the air, accomplishing nothing, with this "fight" against climate change -- and, as I've said before, we're dangerously close to trying to fight against God's plan.

All that being said, it's interesting reading Mike's and Gordon's posts and some of the comments, because they all remind me of one of those goalmouth scrambles in a hockey game where the puck misses on one side of the net ... then the other ... then over the top ... goes everywhere, in fact, but into the net. Those commenting seem to be all around different points and arguments, except for the one that should be staring us in the face.

While Prof. Jaccard says the grand delusion is that the actions we're taking now can actually solve things, he doesn't say whether it's any less delusional to think that eliminating all human-produced greenhouse gases would stop or even make a dent in climate change. I posed that question to the eminent scientist Bill Rees in the spring of 2009 and did not get a real response then, either. (Not that I pushed for a response: it was at a dinner for some international-development environmentalist types where I was a guest (my wife is a former member) so I didn't want to spoil the party by pushing too hard with the notion that maybe the emperor had no clothes. Besides, someone else -- one of those cloyingly apologetic visitors from the US who seemed to be ashamed of being white, male and American (no, it wasn't Mike Moore) -- had made a remark that the "Bible-thumpers" had been holding up progress on climate change, so I had a feeling I wasn't in sympathetic company.)

Prof. Jaccard says our desire for "good news" is blinding us to what he says is the problem. And maybe that's part of it: we're so focused on the problem, whether the perceived solution involves eliminating climate change (as if) or reducing our contribution to it, that we miss the real Good News.

I've written about that good news elsewhere, but it bears repeating: our treatment of God's Creation has been Original Ecological Sin. God instructed us in Genesis 1 to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it". We've had no problem with the "fruitful and multiply and subdue" part, but we've failed miserably at replenishing. But the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross was not just to draw us closer to God, but to give us a chance to step away from our past sins (repent) and start with a clean slate. In environmentalist terms, that means to repent and move forward as proper stewards of Creation.

But stewardship of Creation is only a part of our walk with God, and we have to remember that. We cannot obsess on that one area at the expense of the rest of that Walk, which also involves loving one another, reaching out and helping those who need it, spreading the Gospel: things that, at times, may seem at cross-purposes with the environmental movement in the way they need to be accomplished.

Of course, Satan -- the god of this world -- wants to keep us from seeing that Big Picture, which is why he's snookered people into this raging debate and discussion and doomspeak over the most contentious element of environmental concern: climate change and the role of humans. Air quality? Water quality? Land use? Pretty much a slam-dunk when it comes to human involvement in those. But climate change? Still a lot of theories and a lot of questions and a lot of doubt, and that's just the way Satan likes it. After all, he's not interested in whether Creation survives: he just wants to keep us depressed and at one another's throats so that we don't turn our hearts and minds towards God.

If we ever did, we'd see that God promises that, if we turn away from our wicked ways, repent, and turn back to Him, He'll heal the land. Open-and-shut, if you ask me.

Environmentalism is about sustainability. Jesus is about abundant life.

Environmentalism is, at its heart, very inward-looking: how can I reduce my "carbon footprint". Jesus is about looking toward others and seeking God above all else. When He promises that "all these things will be added unto [us]" when we do that, He's talking about the things we need to survive -- including a healthy planet.

There's one more thing we need to understand. Nowhere in the Word of God does it say that earth is going to be around forever. One of the failings of the hard-core environmentalists is that they act and speak as if it's supposed to, and God clearly tells us that, sooner or later, there are goingto be big changes. He's told us what His plan is; we have to stop trying to fight it and find out instead what our role in it is.

That's Good News. One wonders why certain eminent scientists don't want us to look for it.

Whiz Kids - on stage and on the field

2010-07-07T07:21:00.001-07:00

Last week, we went to see the Arts Club's latest offering on Granville Island, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. It was a lovely romp: a burlesque on the whiz kids one meets in life, with the current popularity of spelling bees as the backdrop. And yet, through the sometimes over-the-top caricatures, there was a very poignant message about the way children can get screwed-up by self-indulgent parents: parents pre-occupied with "finding themselves" or validating their own lifestyle choices through the kids. (Interestingly, the tired old theme of the parent imposing their own failed ambitions on the child was not one of the "targets" of the story.)

(As well as being a lot of fun, it was wonderful to see Sarah-Jeanne Hosie on stage again. I knew her as a teenager in Victoria and her mother rescued a play I was directing by taking on the choreography. Now, Sarah-Jeanne is the Next Big Thing in Vancouver musical theatre as an actress, dancer and choreographer.)

But the play also got me to thinking about kids and competition and fun. The idea of a spelling bee is very much like the idea of Reach For The Top, the TV quiz show in which I played for two years in the 70s. I loved playing and I loved winning, which our teams did consistently -- except for the two times we were faced with the psychological game from our opponents. Somehow, that seed of doubt about our own game put us off just enough that we second-guessed ourselves -- and in a game that requires split-second decision-making, like whether one has the answer and whether to push the buzzer button, that's anethema -- and we lost those games.

It also connected in my mind with Jim (not his real name), who played little league with my son and who, I recently learned, is now in the majors. There was no question Jim was good: he'd remind anyone about that -- including other kids on the team -- any chance he got. He'd been well-schooled and taught by willing parents and coaches, but they left out that important x-factor: attitude and a measure of humility.

My son, who was still of the mindset that, at age 9, youth baseball was supposed to be a time to learn the game and have fun, was a frequent target for verbal abuse because his skill level was considerably lower than this Jim's. In a playoff game, Jim actually asked the coach, loudly, if he could pinch-hit for my son if his turn to bat came, even though he -- Jim -- had already batted. That game was the last straw, and I spoke to the coach about Jim's attitude and the effect it was having on my son. "Yes, kids are entitled to have fun when they play," he agreed. But I saw no change in his approach.

(My daughter, on the other hand, who's about five years younger than my son, was considerably more vocal, and would unleash a torrent of abuse on Jim from time to time. She was NOT putting up with anyone going after her brother.)

That experience more or less ruined baseball for my son. He hung in there for a couple more years, but I wasn't able to teach him the basics (I'm an horrendous teacher) and coaches didn't seem willing or able to work with individuals, and he left the game just before the bantam level.

For me, I find I have difficulty looking at other hot young prospects in the majors. The commentators rave about their skills and talent and I wonder how many other children had their experiences ruined because the resident little league phenom couldn't keep things in perspective.

In another posting about a year ago, I wrote about Al Jordan, who had just passed away. His son Randy was another kid phenom, but as much like "Jim" as I'm like Hercules. We played hockey together briefly in peewees -- until it was determined it wasn't fair to the other kids to play against someone that gifted and he was moved up to an older age group. Randy was brilliant, but he never talked about it. His play spoke for itself, and he also understood that, if you're that talented, you help others bring up their game.

"Let's skate and pass," he said to me at one practice. We just skated up and down the ice, passing the puck back and forth. He showed me how to "lead your man" -- passing the puck just ahead of your teammate so he could skate into it, maybe making him speed up a bit so he can be near top speed when it hits the stick. Randy's attitude wasn't "lead your man ... ya dummy!", but "lead your man ... teammate". And somehow, the fact that I was being taught by someone who otherwise was my peer made the lesson stick through all these years.

(Randy also imparted another insight that's stuck with me to this day. He knew I had a yearning to work in radio, and one day, when we were playing Junior-B baseball (or, more accurately, we were on the same team: Randy was a starter; I occasionally got into the late innings if the game was already pretty much decided), he passed on a helpful hint he'd learned from his dad. "Smile when you're announcing," he said. "It opens up your facial cavity and turns that into a resonating chamber." Even now, when that mic goes on, my cheeks rise just a little.)

It would be nice to think that the "Jim"s of this world are the exception and the "Randy"s are the rule. Maybe the young major leaguers I look at so cynically are actually the kind who would take a less-skilled teammate aside and give them a helpful hint or just a word of encouragement -- even hearing Randy shout from the dugout, "Come on, big 1-3! Base-hit, buddy!", was enough at times; maybe they were less-skilled, themselves, and benefitted from hearing from one of those phenoms. When we are gifted, God calls us to be giving. And that's an attitude that only comes from one place: parenting

I think Brian Lord's remembrance of Al Jordan in that blog entry gives an insight into Randy's upbringing. Indeed, there's a lot to be said about parenting and perspective: remind kids, for one thing, that we do not function independently of one another. Things we say and do, our behaviour and our attitude, affect others. Don't listen to the cop-out that we have to be responsible for the way we respond to something: we are called to speak and act in love, putting others well ahead of ourselves, asking God to keep a watch over our lips. That's one of the lessons the kids learned in Spelling Bee, and it's something in which we could all use a refresher course.

For when the One Great Scorer comes

To write against your name,

He marks - not that you won or lost -

But how you played the game.

-- Grantland Rice

Not above, beyond or outside the law ...

2010-06-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

... no matter what an eco-saint you might be ...

Bike Month in Vancouver (June) has been marked with interesting and encouraging features in the local media about cycling and how to make the experience more enjoyable for everyone. But an item in the Georgia Straight this week encapsulates just why I cringe at "bike activist" efforts like Critical Mass.

The article profiles the outrage of a cyclist who, horror of horrors, received a ticket from a police officer for violating the rules of the road. She's indignant that she got the ticket during Bike Month, when we're supposed to be promoting cycling.

Can somebody explain the connection?

Oh - I know: it's the same thinking that, with public transit in Vancouver carrying over 300,000,000 rides a year and packed SkyTrains during rush hour, suggests we should make transit free to encourage people to take transit.

Actually, Bike Month is exactly the time to start handing out tickets and letting cyclists -- veterans and newbies alike -- that they're subject to the rules of the road and those rules are taken seriously.

But what's incredibly telling is the advice this woman received from a bicycle activist: publicize the date that she goes to court to challenge the ticket, so she can get lots of supporters out. A packed courtroom, reasons the activist, can have a great effect.

"Great effect" for what? Intimidating the judge? Hey: it worked for inSite; nothing like a mob of paid-off druggies* staring at the judge with a lawyer pleading that these people's lives are at stake if they don't have a safe place to do illegal drugs to make the judge decide it's a health issue and not a criminal matter.

(*One of the fellows who comes into Gospel Mission told me last year, "I missed out on $35 by not going to the court that day" -- the going rate, apparently, for a supporter. He then proceeded to tell me about getting a free trip to Victoria and a box lunch so he could help demonstrate on the lawn of the Legislature in support of InSite. A couple of weeks ago, he showed up with a large swelling on his arm. He'd been shot -- with a needle: a "friend" tried to inject him with crystal meth and missed the vein, so the drug -- and infection -- ravaged his arm. I suppose some would say that was a great argument for a safe injection site, but really it's an argument for GETTING HIM OFF THE DRUGS NOW, because the safe injection site was there and he STILL ran into trouble.)

But I digress: the cycling activist apparently wants to intimidate a judge into deciding that people on bikes are exempt from the law.

And this is why I want to take a bag full of marbles to the next Critical Mass ride.

I'm a cyclist. I ride to work often; my wife and I ride a lot. It's a wonderful way to get out, spend time alone but together, if you catch my drift. As part of the transportation strategy, cycling has an important place and I think the city of Vancouver is doing some great things in retrofitting a city that was built on motorized traffic to be friendlier towards "active" transportation.

But spare me the load of self-righteous cow cookies that cyclists somehow deserve beatification because they're doing something wonderful for Mother Nature. As they might say in another part of the continent, that dog don't hunt! Give me cyclists -- and motorists and pedestrians -- who see themselves as responsible members of society and who obey the laws and respect one another: then we'll start taking real steps towards a livable city.

Sooner or later, we'll realize ...

2010-06-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

... how powerless we are even to deal with things of our own making. A Twitter entry from one of the Vancouver fishwraps considered the lightning strike that hit one of the ships trying to siphon off oil from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and asked, "Is this God's doing?"

The paper was probably being facetious (although lightning is included in an insurance contract as an "act of God"), but I'd say there's more than an atom of truth to that, in light of my earlier blog entry on the disaster. The fact is, our science and technology got us into this mess: how can we expect science and technology to get us out of it?

I'm reminded of the account of the prophet Elisha at the waters above Jericho in II Kings 2. The waters are polluted, the land is barren, women are miscarrying, and nothing the people of the city have been able to do has cured it. So they turn to the Man of God. Instructed by the Holy Spirit, Elisha calls for salt in a new, unused jar, throws it into the water and declares the Word of God that the waters are healed. And they were.

As it was at Jericho, we don't need more science and more technology. We need to return to the basics (salt) and God, through His Word. People would be surprised at how quickly He'll respond.

God is trying to get our attention! Enough with the oil, already, He says! Extract ONLY what you can get without destroying My Creation and use it wisely! Stop fussing about being "self-sufficient" and remember that I promised to make a great nation of Ishmael. They're My children too, so learn to live in peace!

===
This has also been a knock to those who called President Obama the "Messiah". If anyone thinks that pointing fingers and talking angry is leadership, they're in a sad state. I don't think people want to hear how he's going to hold BP's feet to the fire and make them pay; nor do I think people want to hear him say "I told you so" about "fossil fuel addiction"; nor are they particularly interested in his new Clean Energy Policy when their livelihoods are going down the tubes. You can't stem an oil blowout by pointing a finger.

The President's response to this may have another motive: steer people away from his own comments about offshore drilling prior to the blowout. Bill Maher, not noted as a Republican, pointed out Obama had said, "It turns out the oil rigs today generally don't cause oil spills. They are technologically very advanced."

Sorry, America -- and the Nobel Prize Committee and the Canadians who gushed, a year and a half ago, that "we" had finally elected a "different" president -- he's just another politician.

==========
Another Very Convenient Truth:

Looking through Scripture the other day -- reading up on something completely different -- I came across Amos 3:15 "And I will smite the winter house with the summer house and all the houses of ivory shall perish ... saith the Lord." Isn't that a prophecy of seasons being turned upside down: the very thing that appears to be happening with "climate change"? Why are we even bothering to fight it? Clean up our own environmental act and take proper care of Creation because God commanded us to do it way back in Genesis: but don't let's kid ourselves that we can actually win the battle against climate change. Turn back to Him and stop worrying.

A Very Convenient Truth - boy, do we need to hear this now!

2010-06-11T06:44:00.001-07:00

This is an unusual approach -- for me, anyway -- but it's one way to get this in front of as many eyeballs at once. What follows is the outline for a revised edition of my book, A Very Convenient Truth -- How to see that you’re not troubled with environmental fears.

This is a Biblical look at the environmental issue and provides, I believe, hope and a new focus. I've had no success so far in attracting a publisher, but it's a message that needs to get out -- especially with current events like the BP oil disaster. My blog entry on that builds on the premise of the book.

So I am posting the entire outline here on the blog, in hopes that there is a publisher out there willing to take on this project. It doesn't have to be a "Christian" publisher, per se: Jesus' message was for all, and so is this message.

If you're a publisher interested in finding out more and receiving some sample chapters, please contact me and we'll discuss this further.

A Very Convenient Truth
How to see that you’re not troubled with environmental fears

The Market
· Christians who are concerned about the environmental trauma today, but who are also concerned that things seem to be getting worse, despite mankind’s concerted efforts.
· Environmentalists willing to look at another way of approaching the issue.

The Premise
Current events (as of June 2010) like the BP oil disaster, the volcanic eruption off Iceland, devastating earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China and a Big Scare on the California-Mexico border should be getting the attention of people that something big is going on. Add to that the outbreaks of war around the world, the continuing threat of terrorism and the accelerating slide into a “me-first” self-absorption in Western society, and you can start to see some of the signs the Jesus foretold of His imminent return.

Just one problem: environmental issues – particularly global warming/climate change – have grabbed center stage, to the point that society is obsessed with that issue, and any warnings are not being heard.

The title of the book notwithstanding, A Very Convenient Truth is not an attack on Al Gore or an attempt to get into the scientific debate over global warming/climate change, whether it exists and whether humans are responsible either for its cause or cure. Neither is it yet another voyage into eschatology. Rather, A Very Convenient Truth looks at the global warming/climate change issue and encourages people to step back, take a breath and consider how God looks at it.

One of the premises of the book is that, despite lots of action on a number of fronts, things appear to be getting worse, not better. It’s worth asking whether God has, in fact, been blessing the efforts so far to mitigate the problem.

The book argues that God has not been blessing these efforts, largely because He’s been “frozen out” of the discussion. And yet, as the Creator, shouldn’t He be the first one to be consulted?

The Thesis and Argument
The current environmental dialogue is driven by fear, obsession and a nagging sense that humans are responsible for its cause and cure, and that while well-meaning action has been going on for decades, humans should be doing more.

A Very Convenient Truth points out that this general guilt trip is a poor motivator to begin with. It’s either someone else’s responsibility, or one’s own needs at that particular time far outweigh any environmental concerns. There is also the sense – not without good cause – that the problem is far too big for people to address.

A Very Convenient Truth begins with the position that environmental trauma is very real, but that people need to change their thinking to look at environmental responsibility in terms of their overall relationship with God. That’s an important concept, because it shifts the paradigm from the current view as a battle against the effects of climate change (which could easily degenerate into a battle against God’s plan) to one where we are allied with God.

From the standpoint of environmental protection and stewardship, putting that into the context of one’s personal relationship with God raises the stakes considerably, because now there is a very real Authority to answer to – considerably higher than one’s own conscience or a guilt trip put forth by activists and the media.

But there’s more. If you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you should know that you hold a trump card, because if there’s a problem with your overall relationship with God, it usually means there’s a sin involved. Praise God, there is – and that’s good news.

The sin lies in what A Very Convenient Truth calls “The First Great Assignment”: Genesis 1:26 – 2:15. God put man in the Garden of Eden with instructions to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it” and to propagate Eden around the earth. Our failure to do that is the sin at the root of the current environmental trauma.

And that’s good news, because in Christ, we can repent and receive redemption at the Cross. Just as with any other sin, we can come to Jesus, “go and sin no more” and re-commit to the First Great Assignment. But it’s not as simple as adopting environmentalist actions and philosophies and adding “in Jesus’ Name” to the end. That’s because many of those actions and philosophies run at cross-purposes to the Will of God.

A Very Convenient Truth looks first at the ways you can tell God has been left out of the discussion – the ways that the enemy has taken over all sides of the dialogue, in fact. Then we start to unpack what God does say about taking care of His Creation, the burdens we’re supposed to carry and those we’re not, and how Creation feels about God.

In all, the book argues that the solution to “saving the planet” lies in integrating environmental responsibility with all the other aspects of our walk with Christ. As we focus on serving God – He promises to deal with the worldly matters, including environmental issues. That promise is summed up in 2 Chronicles 7:14: “if My people, which are called by My Name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sins, and will heal their land.” (emphasis mine).

Besides, the book also points out, Jesus warned us there’d be days like these: days that He said would precede His return. Events that have been linked to global warming/climate change are arguably the very signs Jesus foretold 2,000 years ago: there is really nothing humans can do to stop these events from happening. But we’re not to roll over with our paws in the air and hope that the Rapture comes first. There are things we are instructed to do, which includes following God’s instructions for His creation.

Chapters

Preface: Welcome to the NDZ (No Doomspeak Zone)
The environmental dialogue is filled with “doomspeak”: a sense of dread and hopelessness on all sides. Dread and hopelessness are not “of God”, and this book promises to inject much-needed hope into the discussion.

Introduction: A section detailing some of my own credentials – both as a broadcaster and as an evangelist – discussing how the issue has been close to my heart since I was quite little. It finishes by noting that God’s perspective on the environment – through His Word – provides a failure-proof guarantee.

1. The Manufacturer’s Guarantee
This chapter begins with what is essentially the “foundation Scripture” for the whole book: 2 Chronicles 7:13-14. God essentially takes responsibility for sending “natural disasters” like drought, disease and pestilence, but says the solution is for His people to turn back to Him. It also states my own belief that climate change is happening and that humans are responsible for it, but not in the way conventional wisdom says.

2. The Climate of the Climate Change Debate (Satan stirs the pot)
This looks at the signs that God has been essentially left out of the discussion of climate change/global warming. Fear, confusion and failure are three of the top signs that Satan has been getting his fingers on the whole issue; greed, self-righteousness, the religious spirit and the bitter, personal attacks on all sides are other signs. When we find ourselves crying out, “What is truth?”, it’s likely that, as it was with Pilate when he asked that question, we’re actually staring the Truth in the face.

3. The First Great Assignment
The Truth, of course, is Jesus, so the answer is to look to the Word of God to make things clear. If anything in our lives is out of joint, chances are there’s a sin involved – a falling-away from God. And we don’t have to look far to find the sin we have committed that has led to the current state of environmental trauma. In Genesis 1:26, 28 and 2:15, we see what I call “The First Great Assignment”, which essentially is to care for the earth and propagate the Garden of Eden around the world. Looking out the window today, you can see how well we’ve done that job.

4. A Matter of Love
In this chapter, we look at the environmentalist mantra, “if you love this planet” and show how silly the notion is when compared to the interactive love we experience with God. We love God because He first loved us, but we’re not the only ones: Scripture also tells us how non-human Creation loves Him. That’s important as we consider the “dominion” God gave us humans over the earth: we need to strike the balance between enjoying Creation as God intended us to, and taking care of it, because Creation is in a two-way love relationship with God, too.

That’s why we need to walk in lock-step with God about this issue, or else we’ll either stomp all over everything – or wind up worshipping the creature over the Creator. At times, acting on God’s Will may seem out of line with environmentalist thinking, but we need to believe that obeying God’s Will cannot be damaging to His Creation. We are also able to rise above any judgment or condemnation – either by us or against us – that come from going against “green principles”.

5. Personal responsibility – can we really “Think Globally”?
This chapter looks at the concept of “God’s Plan” and the role humans play in it. The environmental movement makes a big deal out of the big picture, but the Word of God tells us that we can’t see the big picture and we’re not expected to. He gives us individual assignments – the ones we can handle – and we need to trust that He will bring all the pieces together to form the global picture.

As humans, we tend to do what we think is right, rather than what God tells us to do – and, like the servant who buried his master’s money rather than invest it, run into a lot of trouble. Instead of Think Globally – act locally, we need to Think Godly – Act Obediently.

6. Sustainability or Livability?
“Sustainability” is a watchword of the environmental movement – and public policy-makers everywhere. But many places – Vancouver, for one – pride themselves on their “livability”. What’s the difference? Which is more important? Does one necessarily follow the other? Is it more blessed to live or to sustain?

7. The Godly Environmentalist – the land Sabbath, tithing and the “One Tonne Solution”
As with anything else in the Word of God, environmental matters are not dealt with simply in theoretical terms. There are practical applications, particularly in the Old Testament laws. The Land Sabbath spelled out in Leviticus is one such application. How does tithing fit into the picture? What else can we glean from Scripture to direct us towards Godly environmental solutions? How does political involvement mesh with the Christian walk?

8. The Fourth “R”
In addition to the environmentalist “3 R’s” – reduce, re-use and recycle – there’s a fourth in the Christian perspective: righteousness. Over and over again, God’s Word connects unrighteousness with environmental degradation. A lot of environmentalist thinking is inward-looking: cautioning people to watch their own “carbon footprint” and beware of the impact of their own actions. But that goes against the calling of Christians to put the needs of others ahead of their own. The chapter states baldly that our earth has become corrupted as its people have become corrupted. When people try to look at the walk with Christ as something separate from caring for God’s Creation, they’re really falling for another Satanic “mis-direct”.

9. Greater works than these …
Without faith, the writer of Hebrews says, you cannot please God, and John notes at the beginning of his Gospel that as many people as believe on the name of Jesus are endowed with the power to be God’s Son(s). Faith is a tremendous weapon that we have and we have a responsibility to use it. We can rebuke natural events and focus on glorifying God in all things. The chapter also encourages Christians to “count the cost” and include environmental impact in the “costing-out” of anything they do. This includes the step of faith of abandoning some things that appear to be good if we can’t replenish the earth at the same time. We need to have the faith that if we turn away from potential gain by abandoning the action – clearcut logging, mining in a sensitive area, drilling for oil in a wildlife refuge – God will provide what we thought we could obtain and then some.

10. So long ago, the Garden …
Is Satan over-playing the “fear” card? Some people appear to be taking a stand against the fear being promoted on all sides. We also take another look at The First Great Assignment, and ask what the “Eden” is that we’re supposed to propagate? Is it the “physical” Eden of Adam and Eve, or is it a state of being? And we come back to the Foundation Scripture we started with: Solomon’s prayer and God’s response in 2 Chronicles 7.

11. And finally … (the call to arms)
This chapter begins with a Word from the Lord I received while the first edition was in its final stages. He says that the land is “fighting back” against us because it has been polluted by blood shed in sacrifices of ourselves and our children to Mammon and by our own disobedience. But as we propagate Eden around the world – spreading the Gospel, as explained in Chapter 9 – we spread the blood of Jesus over the land and cleanse it that way. We close by urging Christians to use environmental matters, as spelled out in the book, as another means of reaching the unsaved with the Gospel. But since the Word of God also ties our own walk with Him to the state of the land, we need to make sure that walk is an example people want to follow. In other words, it’s up to us – individually and collectively, as the Body of Christ – to take that first step.

Appendices:

i. Scripture references – with some explanatory notes, for readers who don’t have Bibles
ii. How I Got My Car – a description of a “faith project”.
iii. Wrong Way Goes The Right Way –the tale of Roy Riegels, the star college football player who recovered a fumble in a Rose Bowl Game and, by running for the wrong goal line, cost his team the game – but gave the world a story of salvation, grace and a second chance.

The Challenge
A Very Convenient Truth contains some challenges for readers, Christian and non-Christian:
1. To Christians, do you believe the Bible or don’t you? This is an issue that can cause us to look away from God as we try to “do better for the sake of Mother Earth”, but the Word warns us against worshipping the Creation rather than the Creator, and His Word also gives us specific promises that as we re-commit to Him – through The First Great Assignment – He will restore our land.
2. To environmentalists who have been trying in vain to repair damage done by centuries of human action and inaction, the challenge is whether they really want to see a solution. Many environmentalists (as the book notes) are not Bible believers, so the question is whether they’re open-minded enough to consider that there is an alternative to bashing their head against the wall.
3. For everyone, the challenge is to keep looking for signs of hope and clarity in an area dominated by fear, confusion and frustration. Those elements are not “of God”, and it’s important for us to focus our attention on what is.

Marketing and Promotion

All-told, I’ve been doing something in front of a microphone or a camera for over 40 years as an actor, a broadcaster and as a corporate communicator. When A Very Convenient Truth first appeared in a self-published edition, I made appearances on three Christian talk radio stations: Seattle, Los Angeles and Minneapolis-St Paul.

I have also spoken at two churches on the subject (Westpointe Christian Center in Vancouver and Victoria Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Victoria, BC), and have been refining that talk for future use. I would make myself available for a “circuit” of talk shows and speaking engagements to support the sale of the book.

There are also opportunities using the social media. I produced a series of short talks and posted them on YouTube and on Tangle, supporting them with notifications on Twitter. Some revelations were written in my blog, “Convenient Truth” (http://veryconvenienttruth.blogspot.com/), also promoted on Twitter.

Excerpts of the book could also be published in a Christian magazine.
I also see possibilities for developing a workbook so church “small groups” can discuss ways of becoming a “Godly environmentalist”, following Scripture to see what God will bless, what burdens we have to carry and what burdens we are not to worry about.

The Author
I have covered environmental issues from the standpoint of the “sympathetic journalist”, giving air time on radio and TV to environmentalists at a time when they were still considered to be fringe-element tree-huggers. It was the logical progression of a lifetime of listening to, embracing and sometimes even espousing against-the-grain thinking, which often put me at odds with others. This latest book continues that trend, only now, as a committed Christian, called as an Evangelist, this against-the-grain thinking is an attempt to shake out of the groupthink that encompasses so much of the environmental dialogue.

I was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and graduated with a BA in English from Concordia University in Montréal. After trying my hand at freelance writing and acting, I landed in broadcasting, working in a number of markets in Western Canada, including Vancouver, Regina Saskatchewan and Victoria BC. I did just about everything: news, sports, talk and played the morning-show sidekick on Victoria’s top radio station; I also produced and presented a series of environmental features for local TV in Victoria.

I received the 2001 Environmental Journalism Award from The Skies Above Foundation (Canada), recognizing my persistence in bringing environmental issues and their advocates into the media mainstream in British Columbia.

By then, I had come to Christ (in 1999) and was called into Ministry in 2002 with what turned out to be two main purposes: to minister to the urban poor on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (at Gospel Mission, where he is assistant pastor) and to bring this new message on the environment based on the Word of God, rather than the worldly prescriptions of the mainstream environmental movement.

My day job is as a communications specialist with TransLink – the regional public transportation authority – which has given me further insight into the “corporate” side of the environmental movement and the way public policy is being driven by environmental fears.

Contact me

And God said, "Had enough yet?"

2010-06-01T06:35:00.001-07:00

A couple of days ago, with the BP undersea oil blowout raging, I was watching an episode of "Dharma and Greg", in which Dharma's parents went to Washington to protest outside a senate committee hearing where Greg's father was testifying.

(If you're unfamiliar with the show's premise, Dharma's parents are superannuated, unrepentent hippies who still engage in activism of all sorts -- except the effective kind; Greg's folks are from the monied elite. It's the classic "social clash" love story.)

The senate committee hearing involved offshore oil drilling. I wonder if the syndication company made a snap scheduling decision based on events of the day?

It was good to find something funny in all of this, because looking at the BP situation now, all I can feel is sadness. What's the use of saying, "I told you so" or wondering aloud, as comedian Bill Maher did, whether President Obama was going to "catch s**t" for saying offshore drilling was safe just a couple of weeks before the disaster? After all, if people weren't demanding oil, BP wouldn't be drilling for it, right?

Now, with solution after solution coming up snake-eyes (latest headline: new answer could take weeks), we're faced with the classic scenario of mankind's best technological efforts being unable to keep up with mankind's worst technological disaster.

Einstein said (and I've probably quoted this one elsewhere in this blog or at the Rev. Downtown site, but it bears repeating) that you don't solve problems using the same approach that created the problem in the first place. And here we are, showing in spades how our intellect has become far too sophisticated for the world we live in.

This isn't about oil. This isn't about environmental disaster. To be blunt, we are seeing what happens when we fall away from God. We need oil and its various uses. Even the guy who stood beside Beach Drive in Vancouver last year during one of the Critical Mass bike rides, shouting "no more oil! No more f**king cars!" over and over again, needs oil. (If I thought he had the power of reason, I would have stopped and pointed out all the oil-dependent things he had in his possession.)

Oil is a staple throughout the Bible: the source and maintainer of light and heat, the metaphor for the Holy Spirit itself. But when "need" takes a back seat to "desire", that's when things start going wrong. See, you could argue, "God put the oil in the ground for us to use," and you'd be right. But does that give us license to drill wherever we think there might be oil?

I don't think so, and the First Great Assignment God gave us should be the clue. He told us, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it." (Gen. 1:26 KJV - my italics). Without going into a great long dissection of that passage, I read that to say that we are the managers of His creation; we are entitled to enjoy that creation, so long as we are able to replenish it.

And there's the rub: if we cannot enjoy something without destroying or threatening other parts of Creation, we need to leave it alone.

How does that apply to oil? We need it -- no question. We know that it is possible to drill for oil out of the ground on dry land without doing irreparable harm. That's largely because, if there is a problem, we're in our own element as human beings and can deal with it: we can mitigate, contain, clean up and remediate when there is a problem. But add the complication of being outside our element -- at sea or underwater -- and you can't guarantee the same level of safety.

Here's where we need to bring the Word of God into the conversation. Psalm 127:1 says, "except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Conversely, if the labor is in vain -- or, in this case, causes unspeakable harm to God's Creation -- it's a pretty safe bet the Lord isn't building that house. We need to ensure the Lord is blessing our activities -- and that doesn't mean making a decision and then asking the Lord to bless it: it means going before Him, seeking His will and committing to follow it.

Another Word is Jesus' reminder about "counting the cost" (Luke 14:28-29). Environmental considerations -- including immediate impact on wildlife and our ability to handle a potential disaster -- have to be part of that cost consideration. If one can't guarantee that, best to leave it alone.

Where does that leave us with offshore oil exploration? I'd say it means leave it alone. It means moderating our demand to suit the oil that's readily obtainable, as opposed to the oil that's in too risky a location. It means reining in our greed.

It also means praying for BP, for their executives, their workers and people who depend on that company -- shareholders and those with pensions tied up in BP shares.

It means going before the Lord and asking Him to forgive us for our own greed and wastefulness, which has landed us in this mess. We are clearly in a situation that is beyond the reach of human intellect to resolve: but as we know -- or should know -- with God, all things are possible. It's the clearest evidence yet of our need to turn to Him: humble ourselves, pray and seek His face (2 Chr. 7:14).

Volcanoes, earthquakes, pandemics (or fears thereof) ... now an undersea oil blowout: I get the feeling that God is standing there, waiting for us to finally get the message, wondering if we've had enough yet.

(Please note: I see that the Google Ads thing has a message from someone in the oil & gas industry -- whatever the message is, I don't endorse or condemn it.)

Just sayin' ...

2010-05-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

One of the local daily fishwraps Tweeted a comment yesterday, calling on the province of Ontario to legalize mixed martial arts competitions.

Not long after, the same fishwrap Tweeted that an 18-year-old girl had been arrested in the stabbing death of a 17-year-old girl at a house party in Vancouver.

DOES ANYBODY ELSE SEE THE INCONSISTENCY HERE?

Is it possible that, if the popular media didn't encourage and promote the sanctioning of senselessly violent exhibitions, 18-year-old girls (children, for the luvva Mike!) wouldn't get the idea to stab 17-year-old girls -- or even to take a knife to a party?

Just askin'.

"And the love of many shall wax cold." (Matt. 24:12 -- one of the signs of Jesus' imminent return: don't let's get caught among those whose love has grown cold; and trust me -- the desire to do violence to someone else, or to sit and watch while it happens, even in the name of "sport" is not a manifestation of love.)

The souffle falls ...

2010-05-04T09:26:00.001-07:00

Wow ... I get to be a witness to history today (the low end of the spectrum, I suppose ...) ... they're about to deflate the air-supported Teflon-fabric dome of BC Place Stadium and I've been invited to the ceremony to watch it happen.

I was there when it got pumped up ... 1983, and I was a reporter for CFUN -- back when radio stations tended to be "full-service", no matter what their format or audience. I drove onto what would be the field area in the CFUN Cruiser and parked, with mike trained on the speakers, as a group of politicians and other dignitaries gave speeches about creating jobs and making Vancouver a world-class city (this just in: we were a world-class city long before the stadium was built) and looking forward to Expo 86 ... Stephen Rogers was there -- he was the minister responsible at the time, as I recall ... I think Grace McCarthy and Mike Harcourt (he was the mayor) were on-hand, as well ... and we all got blue hard hats with a sticker saying, "I raised the roof at BC Place!"

Of course, part of the raison d'etre for BC Place was to give our sports teams -- the original incarnation of the Vancouver Whitecaps and the British Columbia Lions -- a place to play where conditions would be less of a factor. Lousy drainage around Empire Stadium and exposure to the elements had become detriments to good sports spectacles (or so they said), so they idea of being in a climate-controlled environment to watch football or soccer ... or the major league baseball team we thought we should have at the time ... or anything else was attractive to a lot of us.

The ceremony itself was uneventful. After the speeches, someone -- I think it was Rogers -- flipped a switch and the fans roared into life. Gradually, the fabric started to flutter, then grow taut and larger and larger (get your mind out of the gutter!), and then suddenly ...

GOOSH!

The fabric was supposed to keep water out, but nothing was said about its ability to hold water in. Water had built up in the folds of the fabric and then suddenly, as it unfurled, it dumped water right onto several rows of dignitaries, making them the first and only people to get rained-on at an event at BC Place.

We tried to come up with nicknames for the stadium -- you know, like The Garage for GM Place or The Barn on Blanshard for Victoria Memorial Arena or The Joe for the Joe Louis Arena in \Detroit -- I referred to it as a concrete souffle ... someone suggested -- given the images of inflated fabric -- the Con-Dome ... but I liked Buzz Leboe's the best: The Mushroom in Bondage.

Oddly enough, though, no nicknames really stuck: it was always "BC Place" -- even though it had to be the most uninspired name for a venue ever.

anyway ... being gifted with a flypaper mind, where everything sticks ... I thought I'd offer up a few of my own trivia questions ... reply via comments, and lets see how you do (I'll post the answers tomorrow).

Which sports team was the first to play in BC Place?

A BC Lions exhibition game featured the reunion of what rock band?

Name the members:

What was the name of the new, original song they performed?

What teams played in the first baseball game at BC Place?

Who hit the first home run at BC Place? Who was the pitcher?

True or false: David Bowie, Sting and The Tubes played the first big spectacle at BC Place

What AL batting champ missed the first part of the 1993 season due to an injury suffered at BC Place

For many years, CKNW was the flagship station of the BC Lions, but not when the Lions moved ùnder the dome. What station carried the games that year

One of the features of the new stadium was the jumbo video screen in the end zone. Prior to each Whitecaps game, a video highlight package of the previous game was shown. Name the announcer who wrote and read the voiceover.

Have fun! Time now for a deflating experience!

Earth Day: whom are we fighting?

2010-04-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

Earth Day XLI (40th anniversary = 41st Earth Day) has been greeted in the media with an interesting historical piece and a collection of observations from various experts to the effect that "things are getting worse", there's "still a lot of work to be done" and that we're "losing the battle".

Rather than revisit issues like global warming/climate change and its effects and discuss what we're fighting, maybe we ought to take a look at whom we're fighting; because I assure you, the enemy in the fight against global warming/climate change and its effects is not greedy businesspeople, recalcitrant governments, or even the guy with the SUV next door. You'd be surprised -- and a little terrified -- to realize Whom we're picking a fight with.

Consider this:

But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken (Jonah 1:4)

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;(24) These see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep. (25) For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. (26) They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. (27) They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end. (28) Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distresses. (29) He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. (30) Then are they glad because they be quiet; so He bringeth them unto their desired haven. (Psalm 107:23-30)

Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire. (Isaiah 29:6)

If I shut up the heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or it I send pestilence among my people .... (2 Chronicles 7:13)

And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. (26) And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's bands were loosed. (Acts 16:25-26)

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. (8) For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in diverse places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows. (Mark 13:7-8).

It's pretty clear from this that what we often think of as "natural phenomena" -- like storms, earthquakes and volcanos -- are actually sent by God. Sometimes, they're judgment and/or punishment; sometimes, they're a test; sometimes, they're a reminder that He's there and He's in charge.

The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell within. (Psalm 24:1)

And as Jesus says, they're also the signs that we should be aware of, preceding His return.

Lately, some scientists have been trying to draw a link between geotechnic activity -- earthquakes and volcanic eruptions -- and global warming/climate change, although even the leading expert in the field admits it's a long stretch.

At any rate, here we are, those who believe the Bible as well as those who don't, getting dragged into this seemingly never-ending battle to turn back these natural phenomena, as if we have some kind of power or control over them. That would add to the list of things that the environmental community would want us to believe are within human power to cause and control.

Approaching the issue from the standpoint that it is within our power to control is a fool's game -- not just because it's futile, but because it's dangerous.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6:12)

That's the "never-ending battle" we fight -- or are supposed to fight. But according to the people warning about global warming/climate change, we're in a never-ending battle against natural phenomena that are apparently sent by God in the first place.

Essentially, we're being dragged into a battle against God. And that's what's dangerous.

Now, lest people think this is an argument for inaction, not in the slightest: we have to be aware of the right action -- as in, the action that God will bless. Jesus never said that when we saw the signs, we were to roll over with our paws in the air and wait for Him to rapture us out of here; He gave us specific instructions -- the Great Commission -- and He warned that there would be a lot of things done to try to turn our attention away from that. Indeed, the Great Commission was given to us not just as marching orders, but so that we'd have a point of focus when the end-times signs manifest.

Yes, we humans are partly responsible for global warming/climate change, and primarily responsible for loss of farmland, air and water pollution, erosion and ozone layer depletion -- no question. But the natural phenomena attributed to global warming/climate change are in the hands of the Lord. We need to stop fighting Him and re-focus on the job at hand.

We are called to be proper stewards of His Creation, but that stewardship only comes from our relationship with God -- it is neither the end nor the means: it is a side-effect of the total relationship. And we need to be aware of God's instructions as to how we are to take care of Creation -- He has that all planned out, too.

Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, hoping to get a different result. After 40 years of Earth Days and at least half a century of concerted, earnest but fruitless effort to stop environmental degradation in various forms, we need a new approach -- something to break us out of this unholy cage match of The Chicken Littles vs. The Deniers. By "fighting" the symptoms of global warming/climate change, we are really fighting against God Himself, trying to subvert His plan. Nothing will stop that plan: and in a case like this, you don't want to be on the wrong side of the ball.

Now, how about some really good news? Take another look at the passage from Psalm 107, there. The mariners cry to the Lord in their trouble and then are quiet, because He hears them and calms the storm and brings them back home. Compare than with Mark 4, where the disciples go out on the Sea of Galilee and the storm comes up. They cry out to God -- Jesus -- "Master! Don't you care that we're perishing?" and He delivers them. He delivers us from the storms -- the actual, as well as the figurative.

Another assault on social grace

2010-04-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

If you have a hard time understanding what the Apostle Paul means when he tried to describe the difference between being "under Grace" and being "under the law", take a look at the latest move to restrict where smokers can light up. The Vancouver Park Board has brought in a bylaw that would ban smoking in most outdoor areas, such as parks, beaches, sports fields, playgrounds, etc.

I'm no fan of smoking, as I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, when I decried the fact that, with so many people having to go outside a restaurant to smoke because Health Authorities had decided that it wasn't good enough to have separate smoking-permitted sections, one couldn't wait for one's reservation in the 'fresh' air. But I'm a bigger fan of letting people decide for themselves what is The Right Thing To Do -- and asserting their own rights, whether it's to breathe clean air or to pollute their lungs, or to allow someone else to do either.

Apparently, the Park Board plans to begin by "educating" rather than "enforcing". Does that mean, telling people smoking is harmful? I think that message has gotten a pretty good workout over the past 60 years, don't you? Or are they "educating" that it's nasty to toss cigarette butts on the beach? What's wrong with having a mom say to her child, "Eeeewww! That slob just threw his cigarette butt right where you're playing!"

Which, I wonder, has the greater potential for correcting bad behaviour? A bylaw that may or may not get enforced (or worse, educated)? Or a mother's disapproving sneer ringing in your ears? I don't know about you, but mom's disapproval carries a lot more weight -- and is less likely to create that "John Dillinger" kind of outlaw mystique of someone who blatantly stubs out his cigarette butt in direct defiance of the law.

A ban on smoking may come across as Progressive and Socially Responsible, but legislation strips us of the option to show grace towards someone -- as God shows grace towards us. We are created to be like Him, and the grace involved in saying, "Do you mind if I smoke?", while being fully willing to accept the answer, "as a matter of fact, I do" ... or for the other person to say, "by all means", even though they might detest the smell ... is something we shouldn't allow a tiny group of bylaw-makers to take away from us.

(I'm also increasingly aware of what musician and columnist Joe Jackson calls the "nanny state" -- where someone in "authority" decides what's best for us, on the premise that we common rabble are too stupid to figure it out for ourselves. (I don't necessary endorse all of Joe's article there, a liberty I'm sure he'd be the first to endorse.) I'm a little surprised (not) that I haven't seen any comment from the civil liberties bunch. Maybe they were too busy looking for people getting hassled at the 4/20 smoke-in.)

The irony of this story appearing on the same day as the aforementioned smoke-in has not been lost on me. I wonder if anyone there was busted for smoking "within six metres of an entryway, openable window or air intake of a building and the perimeter of a customer service area", per the City of Vancouver bylaw? But I digress ...

During the Olympics, I was walking along Robson Street a few steps behind two women. One was smoking and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke which, as the Lord would have it (He has SUCH a sense of humour!), blew right into my face. I coughed inadvertently, and she noticed it. I could tell she was partly embarrassed and may have also been thinking that I was being a smart-aleck. So I caught up to her. "You didn't know I was there," I assured her. She still apologized.

Grace. Grace, that I let her know it was accidental. Grace, that she apologized even though we both tacitly agreed there was nothing wilful or malicious about it. Under "the law", there could have been a "scene" with railing on her for doing something illegal and her railing back in defense.

Legislating people's behaviour brings that added nastiness that (a) someone's breaking the law and is, therefore, an arrogant the-law-applies-to-everyone-but-me wannabe rebel and (b) someone complaining about it has the weight of the law behind them and might just call the cops.

When we're under the law -- whether it's a park board bylaw or Moses' Laws -- we focus on not doing something wrong so that we don't get punished. When we're under grace -- be it God's grace or simple politeness and consideration for others -- we focus on doing what's right so we can find even greater grace.

What a world this would be if we focused more on "right" and less on "rights"!

Narrow-minded? Or confident?

2010-04-21T07:49:00.001-07:00

The headline in Doug Todd's recent article in the Vancouver Sun about the owner of Banyen Books is a bit misleading, referring as it does to Christians' needing to be more "open-minded" about their faith. The piece makes for some interesting reading, and while there are some things I simply don't agree with, it should make for some provocative discussion among churches.

One area, for example, is Kolin Lymworth's suggestion is that more churches get involved in social matters -- like food banks and outreach. At first, I bristled, because my own work on the Downtown East Side is Christ-centered and Westpointe Christian Centre, where I fellowship, is one of the most outreach-focused churches you could find. Yet that's been one of the great frustrations of the work so far: encouraging other "suburban" churches to even consider the DTES as a mission field. (Case in point: trying to get articles on the matter -- or even news releases about Gospel Mission -- published in BC Christian News - I don't even get acknowledgement of receipt.)

He also calls on Christians to explore the "mysticism" of the faith more. It's hard to say what he means by that: there are intense spiritual experiences such as healings, prophecies and spiritual warfare - the very things that drew me to Christ in the first place - and that amazing experience called "basking in God's glory", but experiences like those are not meant for our own personal use, but to translate into power that can be used to bless others.

Lymworth's experience -- as is the case with so many of this generation (myself included) -- is very self-centered. We ask, "what can the church do for me?", when the whole idea of Christian fellowship is based on "what can I do for the church?", recognizing that the "church" is neither a building nor an institution, but a collection of people who need one another as much as they need God and Jesus. Jesus never said, "if you go into a sweatlodge, there am I in the midst of it": He said, "where two or more are gathered in My Name ...."

We try to find God through ourselves, when really, it's the other way around. We focus on The Experience as if "resting in Him" were the end in itself, rather than simply a means to re-charge and continue serving.

Buried in the article is the classic red herring: Christians have to be open-minded. Certainly, it helps to re-think doctrine in the light of Scripture and separate what is the Word of God and what is the embellishment of man, but is it not more narrow-minded to reject the notion that there is an single, absolute Truth -- Jesus -- the Way, the Truth and the Life? After all, if one accepts that 1 + 1 = 2, is it narrow-minded to reject that 1 + 1 might, at some point equal 3?

The article notes that Kolin Lymworth walked away from the church due to lack of interest at age 10. Since then, he's tried a variety of different "paths" (including LSD) in his search for whatever it is he's seeking. My prayer is that he takes another look at where he started from -- only this time, with the open mind he wishes on Christians.

Earthquakes and the foolish virgins

2010-04-05T08:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's earthquakes in southern California/northern Mexico got me thinking about something: with the hysteria over global warming/climate change, how do earthquakes fit into the picture? They fit into Jesus' description of the signs of His imminent return (read Matthew 24), but while floods, fire, famine and even pestilence fit the global warming/climate change paradigm, where do earthquakes and volcanos?

A check online finds there are at least a couple of scientists who are promoting a theory that some geologic activity is connected to melting glaciers and rising sea levels. This appears to go back to 2006, and resurfaced last September at a conference called "Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards" in London. (You can also find a bit of a review of the evidence in a blog posted just after the Haiti 'quake in January.)

But while the suggestion gives one cause for pause, something that leaps out at me is that even the scientists researching it -- like Patrick Wu at the University of Calgary -- admit that it's "highly speculative". One commentator notes that "no one is seriously suggesting" that any particular earthquake was caused by a melting glacier releasing pressure on tectonic plates (one of the points of the theory). And nowhere (yet) have I seen a suggestion that any human solution like eliminating human production of greenhouse gases would make those geological events any less likely.

You want to see a real connection between global warming/climate change and signs that Jesus foretold, consider that He predicted that "the love of many [would] wax cold". Do you think there isn't a link between our obsession with the environment and homelessness? Vancouver prides itself on being the "greenest" city in North America, yet it's home to "the worst postal code in Canada" for the amount of drug addiction, poverty, homelessness and crime concentrated in about 10 city blocks called the Downtown East Side. It's gotten worse over the past several years -- interestingly, as our obsession with the environment has grown. Is that coincidence? I don't think so. After all, how can you reach out and love someone in sad state if you're too busy gazing at your own navel, trying to "reduce your carbon footprint"?

As we serve the Lord in the way He told us, it follows as the night the day that we will take care of His Creation in the way that He told us, by asserting dominion over it, being fruitful and replenishing the earth and subduing it. But nowhere does He say we're to obsess over that one aspect. We focus on Him: He takes care of the rest.

That will disgust some environmentalists, because it sounds like we're not taking action; but frankly, it's a question of the right action. Remember Peter: all gung-ho to defend Jesus in the ways he thought he was supposed to, but when Jesus really needed a witness, Peter denied him.

To me, it looks like another in a series of sleights-of-hand, designed to keep us from looking at the real connection, which is that these are all signs of Jesus' return. While He said there really wasn't anything we could do about the day or hour that actually happens, He did give us instructions on what we have to do in the mean time: care for one another, heal the sick, share the Gospel; be prepared and help others to get prepared, so that when Jesus does return, we're not caught with no oil in our lamps.

Christian if necessary, but not ... ???

2010-03-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

REPORTER (to Hall of Fame goalie Gump Worsley, when Gump was playing for the New York Rangers): Gump, which team gives you the most trouble?
WORSLEY: The Rangers.

That may not be as relevant in this context as it could be, I suppose, but that exchange flashed through my mind looking at an email thread involving a good friend of mine and a couple of friends of his.

I'm not sure how it developed, but by the time I got dropped into the mix, they were talking about this third person's use of the word "fool" in describing President Obama. "Prince of Fools", I think was the way he put it.

Then my friend suggested it was inappropriate to call someone a fool just because their ideology was foolish ... and that's about where I stepped in.

The edited version goes like this:

... it doesn't matter whether the person you are calling a fool is the President of the United States of America or the people who put him there -- you, a child of God, are still calling another child of God a "fool", and Jesus -- the One we follow, remember? -- tells us that's the same as murder. >

OR (here's an idea) ... if you want to attack those you disagree with by > name-calling and other ad hominems, don't profess to be Christian. That would make the evangelists' job a lot easier, because then they wouldn't have to go to pains to make the distinction between Christians and "religious people".

Then we can win more souls for the Kingdom, and more people would, as they draw closer to God, see the error of their ways: the folly of drug abuse, the evil of abortion and all the other things that we've been battling.

Paul, approaching Mars' Hill, was confronted with the evil that beset Athens and its people. He could have railed against it, ranted and pointed fingers of accusation at the people who promoted the various religions ... instead, he looked for ways to promote Jesus.

Nowhere in Scripture have I seen that he launched a personal attack on anyone at Mars' Hill -- he made the case for the Truth rather than against the lies.

And so it should be: if you disagree with someone or something, yes -- make your case; yes -- stand for your principles ... but to descend to the level of discourse that I've seen and heard non-stop since Obama first emerged as a possible candidate is to walk right away from the way we've been taught to live -- and only drives away people we should be trying to reach.

And pray for those in authority: Paul's exhortation does not come with conditions as to party affiliation or ideology. If the one in authority is misguided, it'll only be our prayers that will bring revelation from God as to what the proper way to go should be.

And as we pray, God might -- just might -- show us that we're the ones who are misguided. But at the end of the day, His will be done.

===
Well, that appeared to touch a nerve the size of Minnesota, because I got this response back a few hours later ...
===

Your point might have relevance if we were living in a monastery… but we are not. I am a faithful Christian who lives in this world and I feel comfortable that the quote that started this was not “out of bounds” or inappropriate in normal dialogue or conversation. If you wish to find a more appropriate word than “fools” to apply in this context, by all means go ahead… but spare me your suggestion that using the word “fool” to describe people who embraced a charlatan is the same as murder. What would we say about the Germans who acquiesced to Hitler’s rise to power. Were they naïve, foolish, or just cowards? I would say to you Drew or any Christian that we can learn more about avoiding failure in politics by reading Machiavelli than by reading the Bible. Similarly, we can also learn more about economics by reading Adam Smith than by reading the Bible. Scripture reveals the path to have the most personal relationship with the Lord.

===
Indeed? Hmm ... this is where the interview with Gump Worsley comes to mind: sometimes, the ones who give Christians the hardest time are other Christians.
===

I'm afraid I don't agree. The problem with our world stems from the fact that we do read more Macchiavelli and more Adam Smith than the Bible. Also more Che Guevara, Appolonius of Tyrana, the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey ... and look where it's got us.

Do we put our complete faith in God, or is there a point at which we say, "sorry Big Sir - You're not capable of handling this"?

That doesn't mean inaction is an option: it means the only action that gets us anywhere is the action taken after we pray for direction and square up our actions with Scripture.

I don't live in a monastery, and I've been doing nothing but trust in the Lord for the past 8 years after 46 years of trying to do it my way. This included an incredibly dark period where I lost my job 3 times in just over 2 years (in broadcasting, that's actually not "bad luck" -- that's "job security") ... and He has prospered me far more in worldly terms, spiritual terms, relationships, my Ministry ... than I ever could have imagined.

The wisdom of man has let us down at every turn.

The wisdom of God never fails.
===

Every so often, I get brought up short by the revelation that there are Christians who'll only trust God "so far" and then grab the wheel and insist on driving the bus. Former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan once described himself as a "practical Christian". What the heck is that? Christian if necessary, but not necessarily Christian? The trouble with that is, at the end of the day, we consider our wisdom to be far superior to God's, and I'll never buy that one. Our point of view is only relative: what seems to be "good" is only "good" according to what we can see at a particular point in time. When things are "not good" according to what we can see, we have a choice: we can assume that things are going "badly" and therefore have to be fixed in order to make them go "good" in our eyes; or we can assume that God is up to something.

I prefer the latter. Why? Because when I impose my own definition of "going good" on a situation -- or my own image of "success" in an endeavour, I'm setting myself up for major disappointment. But when I walk in God's ways no matter whether they're going well or not for me, I learn to see His hand and the end result is far greater and more satisfying than anything I could have defined with my own puny intellect.

As for my correspondent's comments about taking Macchiavelli over the Bible for political savvy and Adam Smith over the Bible when it comes to economics ... I don't think there's any substitute for "bring your tithes to the storehouse and prove Me withal, that I do not open the windows of heaven ...." (Malachi 3) ... or "... supplications, prayers, intercessions and giving of thanks be made ... for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" (I Tim 2:1-2).

A little bit of God

2010-03-19T06:28:00.001-07:00

John Fischer's "In The Tank" article today (March 19, 2010) put me in mind of something my late mother (who passed away eight years ago this month) once said when I was a teenager.

Mom was not Religious: I believe that till the end, she knew that Jesus was the Way, the Truth and the Life, but she was so wounded by people with overt expressions of Religion that she despised anything that smacked of "churchianity". She also had a ring-side seat to the personal struggles of a lot of people who would have been judged for their behaviour and lifestyles, and she would have wanted nothing to do with those who would judge them. (I think that if she'd met someone like John Fischer, she would have heard a far different Gospel than what she'd grown up with.)

Anyway, mom said this one day, "I don't want a god who's so puny that he can fit inside my tiny mind".

At the time, I thought that was an endorsement for rejecting God altogether, but as the years went by and I found my own way to Christ, I started getting an idea of what she meant. And in a way, it melds with what John's getting at.

We tend to forget that God made us in His image -- not the other way around. And just as with David's tent, He's the one to provide us with the house: we need to stop thinking we can provide Him with creature comforts.

The other part is, if we try to cram God into our minds, our brains will explode. Even when God talked to Moses -- "as a man speaketh with his friend" -- He wouldn't let him see His face ("there shall no man see Me and live" -- Exodus 33:20). But He would let Moses see a bit of Him.

A bit of God's glory: that's about all a mortal man can handle. How can we begin to fathom how enormous God is?

But here's where mom didn't quite complete the circuit. Our minds are capable of fathoming that "bit" of God. The size of that bit depends on where we are in our walk with Him. I know the bit I had 20 years ago is far different from what it became 10 years later, and the bit I have now is light years beyond what it was then ... and nowhere near what it will be next year -- or next week, for that matter.

That being said, we have to bear in mind that there is a WHOLE LOT more to God than the little bit we can comprehend. As near as I can figure -- since God is not a man, that He would ever lie -- the "whole lot more" does not contradict anything we truly know about Him, but would build on what we do know, multiplying it infinitely.

Does our walk with God depend on how flawless or sin-free we are? Does it depend on the accumulation of holy "brownie points"? Or does it entail trying to increase the size of that bit? I believe it's that last one, praise God! Remember that Jesus did not tell us to "attain the Kingdom of God and His righteousness" but to seek it. We can't "attain" it, because that would involve looking at God face-to-face, and in these mortal bodies, we know that can't be done. But as God allowed Moses a glimpse of His glory, He allows the same to us when we ask Him ... and as we are ready for more, He gives us more.

That's why -- to return to John Fischer's point -- it's a mug's game to try to build a house for God. (We can build a house of God for people but that's not the same thing.) The best "structure" for anything to house God in our life is our life itself -- and so long as we keep that expandable and capable of moving anywhere God leads us (like a tent, right?), He will keep filling us with His presence.

Reality Check: post-party depression

2010-03-08T06:58:00.000-08:00

Some of what follows is related to the company I work for, TransLink, but they're my personal thoughts, not offered in my official capacity as Public Information Officer.

In many respects, it already seems like a lot more than a week has gone by since the end of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The last of the house guests left a week ago yesterday, Sydney, Jarome and Dany are again sworn enemies and Roberto is yelling at his teammates to protect Henrik and Daniel, not take a two-hander to clear them out of the slot.

And the post-Olympic navel gazing is already underway. Professional pundits and the "man in the street" alike (if you've seen the movie, "Remains Of The Day", which I did yesterday, you'll have a completely different view of the "man in the street" concept) are talking about what a grand party it's been and the "lessons learned". How, people ask rhetorically, can we keep this momentum going and push towards the next generation of "Vancouverism"?

Folks, your reality check just bounced.

There are two common threads that I see in the discussion of the post-Olympic legacy. One is in the way of maintaining the wonderful atmosphere that took over the city -- using pedestrian malls, public "celebration" spaces and dismantling a key road network linking downtown with the east end.

We have to remember that there were disruptions to businesses and day-to-day life during that 17-day period. Many schools and public institutions shut down. Ordinary life had to work around the Games and the parties, and now that it's over, there's a bit of a sigh of relief that we could get back to a semblance of normalcy. The focus of the grand visions for our city is too much, I feel, on how to provide party space and play areas for people and not enough on how to marry this new way of thinking with day-to-day life.

It's interesting that much of the assessment of the "success" of the Games has to do with the "feel-good" sensation and the notion that the "legacy" is somehow tied to that. That's like using a drug high as a substitute for genuine happiness. Having more and better public spaces is a good way to temper the other aspects of urban life, but any development has to go slow and consider all the realities. Vancouver is still a very young city and its development tends to be driven by the hubris and a desire to prove it's just as big as the old-established places, rather than evolve over time of the celebration spirit.

OBSERVATION: the smartest thing anyone could have done was close the liquor stores early. Someone wrote a letter to a paper saying that would just promote the "Nofuncouver" image; but we've earned it because in the past, from showing absolutely no wisdom when it comes to partying and drinking. Remember that concerts by Elvis Presley (1957) and The Beatles (1964) had to be shut down early because the crowd was on the verge of rioting; then there were the Grey Cup Riots (pick a year) and the Gastown Riot (which, inexplicably, has been raised to worship status by a giant mural inside the atrium of the Woodward's project); not to mention the Stanley Cup Playoff riot of 1994 and the smash-up when Guns 'n' Roses cancelled its show. Remove alcohol from the equation, and it's amazing what you come up with.

The other unfortunate thread is in the assessment of how public transportation performed during the games. The years of preparation paid off with brilliant execution, and literally from Langley to Lions Bay, ordinary folk and experts are asking how that "momentum" will be maintained. Some demand more buses, more often; others look at the Olympic Line streetcar and say we need to use that mode throughout the transit system.

No one is talking about how to pay for it. I mean, really: the Olympic Line was operated free of charge - who wouldn't love to ride it? Transit operators had a vacation-time blackout during the Olympics, so they'd be available to drive the additional buses that were provided to handle the extra passenger loads. I've actually read a couple of letters to the editor, saying that they don't want to hear "TransLink doesn't have the money" as the reason. This, even though last fall, when the Mayors' Council approved a budget that only allowed for service to be maintained, it was made clear that the funding wasn't there to do anything more. It was in the media: surely, those who write letters to papers actually read those papers?

(In a posting on my other blog, "Rev. Downtown", I chide the anti-Olympics protesters for expecting someone else to pay for the things they demand in society. It's really the same thing with this situation.)

But that points to the biggest reality check of all: the fact that any quality-of-life improvements related to the Olympics -- the temporarily improved transit service, the party atmosphere, the "people places" created around the city -- came at a cost. There were, as many have noted, serious disruptions in day-to-day life, which forced people to change their thinking and their behaviour. They were able to do that for that 17-day period: has that been enough time to make them re-think how they live, work and play?

Paradise Found

2010-03-04T05:58:00.000-08:00

"I have found Paradise!"

God works in amazing ways, bringing people and situations together. With the Olympics over, spring busting out in Vancouver and my life becoming all too sedentary again (transl.: the fine work the Lord had done in shaving 20 pounds off my frame was starting to reverse), I couldn't wait to get on my bike and ride to work again. The ban on bikes on SkyTrain was ending, so yesterday was The Day. (My ride to work is much too far to tackle by bike, so I ride to Waterfront Station, take SkyTrain to Patterson or Royal Oak and then ride the rest of the way to Metrotown, since bikes aren't allowed at Metrotown Station.)

Except I -- who had written the dang press release -- forgot that, when the rule said "no bikes on SkyTrain until March 3", that meant March 3 was the last day one could not have a bike on SkyTrain, not the first day that one could.

The nice SkyTrain Attendants decided to "use their discretion" (which TransLink policy allows) and let me ride, but lest I cause any grief on the return journey, I decided to hitch my bike to the front of the #19 bus and go home that way.

And here, as you'll see, is where God took over, because what followed could only be Him at work with what some might call a "chance encounter".

A group of people also got on the bus at Metrotown and sat next to me. They were black, and their accents told me they were from the US. One of them struck up a conversation with me, and it turned out he was from Mobile, Alabama, and had come up to drive the media buses for the Olympics. He would be working through the Paralympic Games, as well, making the runs to and from Whistler.

"It's so beautiful here, and the people are so nice and polite," Ed said (that was his name - Ed), "I called my wife a few days ago and said, 'Honey, I found Paradise!' Know what amazes me? So many cultures here -- and it don't matter! White, black, brown ... It don't matter! ... Man: you guys are 'bout a thousand years ahead of us!"

Ed looked about the same age as me, and I did a quick flashback to the headlines from my childhood -- the mid-1960s would have been a whole lot different for a black kid in Mobile, Alabama than they were for a white kid in Vancouver.

For all the negative carping about the Olympics, the inescapable fact is that this has been a defining moment for our country. I don't mean, as spelled out in any rhetoric from officials, but as shown in a kind of spontaneous, organic manifestation as the Games progressed. Sure, winning all those medals helped, but I get the feeling that even if Canadian athletes hadn't been as successful as they were, people visiting for the Games would have come away with a totally different view of Canada than they'd had before -- and seen Canadians as rabidly patriotic, multi-cultural (there's a guy who works in one of the Metrotown office buildings, a Sikh with huge beard and turban and who occasionally shows up in a vintage Oilers "Mark Messier" jersey: only in Canada, I say to myself) and, yes, unfailingly polite, courteous and welcoming.

It was a "defining moment" that none of us really expected, and I don't think it over-states the case to suggest that it's rather like the battle of Vimy Ridge, almost 100 years ago. We came together as a nation then, and in a totally different way, came together as a nation now.

(Warning: with exposure comes risk, and our swaggering patriotism -- while justified and DEFINITELY nothing to apologize for -- caught some commentators by surprise. Gil LeBreton in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram made no friends north of the 49th with his column, which likened the sea of red to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. But whether he meant to or not, we have to realize that he gave us a taste of our own medicine. For decades, we have smugly defined ourselves as being Not American and have taken pride in putting down our neighbors for what we consider to be over-the-top jingoism. The 2010 Olympics proved we can be just as nationally prideful as any star-spangled Yank, Empire-yearning Brit or Kangaroo-toting Aussie, and while I'd be one of the first to say, "It's about bloody time!", we have to remember that we, too, can be called down for it by the very ones we criticize. Make sure the flag you wrap yourself in is made of sturdy fabric.)

But I digress. How would people like my newfound friend Ed have learned about Canada -- and learned about what's possible in a multicultural community -- if not for the Olympics? He'll go home to Mobile and will tell others about his experience in Paradise, and while that may not translate into a Crimson Tide of Alabamans surging into BC to buy up property, they'll have a new goal to shoot for in their own society.

A cynic, Oscar Wilde famously said, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We've had myriad assessments of the price of the Olympics, but such things as Ed's experience remind us that the value of the event can't be measured in gold -- medals or otherwise.

Question for sports fans: What Would Jesus Cheer?

2010-02-18T05:25:00.000-08:00

One of my numerous jobs is as PA announcer for UBC Thunderbirds basketball games (and occasionally hockey and baseball, too). I love the energy at the games, the opportunity to do what's essentially an acting role, and being a recovering broadcaster (25 years in radio and TV), I never met a microphone I didn't like.

If they're within driving distance, fans of the opposing teams often come to the games, and they tend to sit right behind me (which is also close to their players' bench). they add to the atmosphere, but sometimes they can be pretty rude. Thunderbirds fans are no saints, either, but this piece is directed at fans from a Christian university, because, alas, I have to say they're the worst in the league. There is a pre-game announcement I have to make, warning people that profanity and derogatory remarks can be grounds for getting run out of the building. If the fans from this school added foul language to their arsenal, they'd be banned for the season.

And that wouldn't serve the Kingdom, would it? "The Worst Fans In The League" might be a badge of honor for people in, say, Philadelphia, New York or Boston, but when you’re sporting the colors of not just a school but a Christian school, that "badge" reflects your faith walk, too.

The fact is, fans from a Christian school are under scrutiny wherever they go and if they come across more of the world than of Witness, it does the Kingdom a disservice. Do I need to add that it makes a mockery of any post-game prayer circle? We need to remember that we are ambassadors for Christ (2 Cor. 5:20). Think of this: the 12-year-old son of another pastor was at a UBC-TWU tilt with a birthday party, and they picked up the mood from the Spartans’ fans.

Can you imagine the exchange at home?

PARENT: Who told you that was a good cheer?
CHILD: The fans from (insert name of school) were saying it.
PARENT: But they're supposed to be Christians! So that's what they're really like ...

Oh, sure, there’s fleshly delight in a well-constructed insult, but doesn’t God expect us to be a LITTLE bit higher than the flesh?

We need to ask, What would Jesus cheer?

Matthew 5:22 makes it clear that He would never trash-talk the opposition: “whosoever shall say to his brother, ‘Raca’ [loose transl.: “Waste of skin”], shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, ‘Thou fool’, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Anyone want to guess what “you suck!” would merit?

Verbally attacking the opposition is pride. You can be proud of your team, but Solomon warns us (Prov. 3:34) “Surely He scorneth the scorners, but giveth grace unto the lowly”. Romans 12:21 gives another insight: “Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.” Jerry Savelle puts it succinctly: “If you can’t speak the Word of God, shut up!”

The Old Testament is riddled with references to victory that God gives to those who turn to Him. Go through the Psalms (Ps. 27 is a great example) to see what is written about God giving His followers absolute victory. Even in the apparent trash-talking between David and Goliath in I Samuel 17, David declares that he’ll take down the big guy because God is on his side.

A Christian sports fan should urge his team to excel for God’s glory, and remember that to cheer for the other side to fail is to rejoice in iniquity (I Cor. 13:6); pray for both sides AND THE REFEREES; and also for a chance to witness to fans on the other side.

Any trip to another school is an opportunity to represent Christ, and that includes the way you comport yourselves in the stands. No amount of preaching, praying or handing out of tracts will have any impact if you’re a bunch of jerks once the game starts. As St Francis of Assisi once said, “take each and every opportunity to preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words.”

There's your trouble ...

2009-12-16T07:28:00.001-08:00

(with thanks to the Dixie Chicks for the title!)

As yet another "save the planet" exercise wraps up with more finger-pointing and rancor and personal attacks (some of the many signs that God has been left out of the discussion on the state of the environment!), the Lord has gob-smacked me with another piece of Scripture, which shows how we continue to miss the boat. That applies to Christians, too, who are also becoming divided over the whole Global Warming/Climate Change issue.

It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in His own power. (Acts 1:7 KJV)

I call this a Scriptural "gob-smacking" because, as is often the case, it's the verse right before the one I use frequently to remind Christians of their responsibility to minister to the "yucky" in society (e.g. the Downtown East Side). And it just happens to encapsulate the problem we're facing right now with the environment.

We're observing times and seasons when we should be fulfilling The Great Commission - spreading the Gospel, healing the sick, binding the brokenhearted, etc. etc. We're watching symptoms like changes in the polar ice caps and widespread changes in weather patterns, rather than being Jesus' witnesses at home and abroad.

There are a couple of key issues here. One is that observing the times is strictly forbidden (Leviticus 19:26 and Deuteronomy 18:10). The meaning of "observing the times" ranges from the obvious -- astrology, tarot and reading tea leaves -- to the "scientific" -- focusing on events in nature and then obsessing on man's influence on them. The instruction in Deuteronomy is that "there shall not be found among you an observer of times": in other words, we shouldn't even be listening to such people, because that takes away our focus from God and what He called us to do.

Part of the trouble is that we are also called to be stewards of God's Creation, so it's easy for us to be motivated by fear and guilt to do things, thinking we're obeying the First Great Assignment (Gen. 1:26-28), and get sucked into the hysteria when the world keeps pointing at the signs and saying disaster is imminent and we have to avert it. Nowhere have I seen that we're even capable of averting disaster, at least, not in our own intellect. After all, human intellect -- science and technology -- got us into this mess: why would we expect to it get us out? One of the big problems is that environmentalist solutions are often at cross-purposes with God's will. Think about it. That's why Jesus gave us instructions about what we're supposed to do, and let God worry about the signs.

And since the signs are in God's control, He wouldn't worry about them, would He?

It's very much like the way the Israelites acted when Moses went up into the mountain to meet with God. No sooner had he gone -- and with their throats probably hoarse from shouting, "all that the Lord says we will do, we will do" -- than they made their golden calf and started worshipping it. They got impatient waiting for Moses to come back, and tried to take matters into their own hands. That's what we're doing here. Spiritually, are we getting tired of waiting for Jesus to come back and fix things, and creating our own golden calf to worship, hoping that will save our skins?

Jesus' parable of the ten virgins and the image of the thief in the night should tell us that, while only the Father knows the exact time of Jesus' return, the very time that we should be on our guard, doing the jobs He's assigned us is when we think He's not coming back and try to take matters into our own hands.

Another stern warning is in Deuteronomy 18:14, when God warns that the inhabitants of the promised land listened to those who observe times, and got driven out. Think about it.

From the enemy's perspective, the obsession on the environment is one way to make us disobedient to God; it may even be a futile attempt at forestalling Jesus' return by eliminating the signs. That's like taking cold medication and thinking you're cured of the flu.

Remember: the fear, the confusion, the personal attacks, the self-righteousness and the ultimate failure of our efforts at "fighting" climate change are all indications that God has shut out of the discussion. If He isn't involved, then that leaves only one alternative, and, sad to say, he doesn't give a flying fish about preserving God's Creation. He just wants to keep us at one another's throats and focusing on anything but God.

=========

To close, another "stupid question" ("The only 'stupid' question is the one that doesn't get asked," as my old colleague Joe Easingwood would say) about the climate change debate: the local weather office recently predicted 20 cm (8") of snow over the weekend. We got a dusting, and then the temperature shot up and it turned to rain. Last summer, the weather office missed a major heat wave, and almost a year ago, was blind-sided by a major snowstorm.

My stupid question: if meteorologists, with all their scientific data and equipment and charts, can miss a forecast for something happening two or three days down the road, how are we supposed to believe climate projections over the next 10-20 years?

That's not a smartass rhetorical question: it's something that really needs to be answered.

Some stupid questions about H1N1

2009-12-01T12:40:00.000-08:00

"The only stupid question is the one that doesn't get asked."
-- Joe Easingwood, talk show host, C-FAX Radio Victoria

When Kenneth and Gloria Copeland came to Vancouver in the spring of 2002, their theme was NO FEAR HERE. The 9/11 attack was still fresh in the world's memory and the whole premise was to encourage people to walk in faith, in love towards one another, and not to allow terrorists -- the ultimate fear-mongers -- to rule their lives. It's a lesson and an attitude that I've tried to live by -- and encourage others to live by -- to this day.

Fear is a terrible motivator. You get pushed to make decisions and take actions that turn out to be more hasty than considered, simply because you're scared, and one of the many reasons for being scared is that you don't have enough information about something. Knowledge overcomes fear, and when that knowledge is God's promises, that's faith.

This is why I'm concerned about the level of fear surrounding the H1N1 flu. There are a lot of pronouncements by health officials -- dutifully and sensationally echoed by the media -- but some basic information is lacking.

On the "Easingwood Principle" mentioned above, therefore, may I offer some STUPID QUESTIONS ABOUT H1N1:

How serious is H1N1 flu compared to other "seasonal" flus?
What makes H1N1 different that there is so much hype this season?
How does the projected death toll compare to the overall projection of deaths from influenza?
Did the people who died receive H1N1 shots?

That last one may seem like a really stupid question, but no one's asking it, and it would go a long way towards convincing people whether or not to get vaccinated.

As for the question before it, it's dashed hard to get "normative" data on H1N1. (The Corporate Wellness manager where I work tried without success to get it from health authorities.) A 2004 Health Canada report -- the most recent I could find online -- projected that 2500 people a year in Canada would die from flu and flu-related causes. Now note that, since April, 42 people have died in BC from H1N1 and BC's Medical Health Officer this week predicted another 30 or so would die before this is over.

If you figure BC has approximately 12% of Canada's population, "72 or so" would extrapolate to less than 600 for the entire country.

So if you go back to that initial figure of 2500 projected to die from any kind of flu "and related causes", that leaves maybe 1900 such deaths in Canada expected this year.

The "information" that is being provided is simply information on where to get vaccinated and a lot of highly-placed doctors telling us we should. But we're not getting anything to put this into perspective.

I don't know how many of you remember this, but when H1N1 started appearing last spring, the World Health Organization, while talking about a possible "pandemic", was careful to say that the word did not relate to the severity of the disease, but rather its readiness to spread from person to person and the number of countries where it was spreading.What do we get? Stories about the "deadliest week" (8 deaths). An item in Business in Vancouver recently, trumpeting the business opportunities from developing vaccines and other preventive measures against H1N1. Opinion pieces like one that says there's too much fear and ignorance in the discussion, without actually answering the questions, itself: it just ridicules the people (like me) who want some simple information. A full-page ad from the country's chief medical officer urging us to get vaccinated.

(Not that there isn't some pretty ridiculous talk out there on the anti-vaccination side: one friend of mine piped up that he'd heard the vaccine was made out of pigs. Swine flu, right? He was serious! I'd hate to see how they make vaccine against Hong Kong Flu. But I digress ...)

Darn right there's too much fear and ignorance. I'm not a doctor (although I did play one on the stage), but when I see the level of fear and lack of simple information -- or people asking the "stupid questions", I start to smell something.

And speaking of confusion ...

2009-11-27T06:26:00.000-08:00

If you Google "climate change emails" today -- and probably for the foreseeable future -- you'll find reams of items about the emails purportedly heisted from the University of East Anglia. That's more or less the centre for climate change research/activism, and the emails discuss things like suppressing contradictory views, discrediting scientists who hold those views and even altering data to support the notion of human-induced climate change.

Let me refer back to a previous posting a week ago, dealing with a possible schism in the Body of Christ over climate change and what to do about it. I don't take sides in this: the fact that there's a discussion at all, with the deep personal attacks, suppression of facts (truthful or otherwise) and the mammoth guilt trips and fear attached to it all, makes me look beyond the surface issue and find who's really pulling the strings here.

See, if you have taken a side, you need to realize that neither is Simon Pure here. Many of the nay-sayers about human-induced global warming have been linked to businesses and lobby groups. There have been suspicions about the motives and connections of the environmentalist causes. Now comes this -- a very environmentally unfriendly smoking gun, and I notice none of the principals involved has leapt up to accuse anybody of altering the actual emails.

For the ordinary person, just trying to get on with life and do what's right, discovering that the very data used to dictate our whole way of thinking may have been altered only ramps up the confusion level.

For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints. (1 Cor. 14:33)

Take a look at some of the comments posted on various websites and blogs about this latest story, and see how much peace there is.

Confusion comes from not knowing whom to believe: it comes from wondering, "what is truth?"

But remember who said "what is truth?" and what he was doing at the time.

It was Pontius Pilate, and he was looking the Truth right in the face.

Praise God, He has given us His Word, so we can find the Truth! The enemy has very cunningly tried to get us to ignore the Word of God when it comes to environmental matters -- as if it's a completely separate area where the Word does not apply.

But instead, we need to look to the Word for answers in this issue, as in everything else.

"If My people, which are called by My Name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from Heaven and will forgive their sins, and will heal their land."
-- 2 Chr. 7:14

Remember that Satan doesn't give a flying fish about climate change or taking care of God's Creation: he just wants to keep us at one another's throats so that we don't seek God's face in all things.

Blatant plug alert: if you want to purchase a copy of my book, A Very Convenient Truth - real hope in the face of environmental fears, you can find it at Pilgrim Book & Bible and El-Shaddai's Books in Vancouver, House of James in Abbotsford or Christian Book & Music Centre in Victoria. Or just contact me.

And who is the author of confusion?

2009-11-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

Stuart Shepard continues to take advertisers, marketers and retailers to task in his latest Stoplight video, for wishing us Happy Unspecified Holidays at this time of year. It's considerably edgier than the one I mentioned in my posting a couple of days ago, and looks at how confused marketers must be, trying to pitch a holiday without actually discussing it.

Living in a city as wonderfully diverse and multi-cultural as Vancouver is, I can imagine another area of confusion: for the non-Christian immigrant, trying to decipher what the fuss is about.

Supposing, for example, you were to move to a country where many -- if not the majority -- of the people practise Foonism. Once a year, there's a big ol' festival called "Foonaria" and Foonites go to great lengths to celebrate it. Wouldn't you be curious to know about Foonism and why they're doing this?

But in my home and native land, we have a major holiday celebration, which occupies about 2-1/2 months -- from the runup to Hallowe'en to THE GIGANTIC BOXING WEEK EXTRAVAGANZA -- but if you look at the signage, there's no real indication as to what the holiday is and why it's being celebrated.

Imagine the immigrant, trying to get some answers.

"Excuse me? What is this holiday that people are talking about?"
"Oh! It's the most wonderful time of the year! It's a time when people get together and give each other presents and have a huge dinner and give a little something to the poor and families re-connect -- or try to -- and all the lights and colors and prezzies make you feel warm inside."
"Why? I mean, what's there to celebrate?"
"Well, because it's the holidays!"
"What holiday? I mean, doesn't 'holiday' mean 'holy day'? What's holy about it?"
"Well ... if you must know ... it's called Christmas ... and, uh, there's a particular religion that celebrates it."
"So why don't you call it that?"
"Because we're afraid 'Christmas' might offend some people."
"How can you offend someone with something that you're celebrating? What does this religion believe that's so offensive?"
"Well ... they believe that the way to peace is to get right with God."
"And that's offensive?"
"Well ... they figure that there's only one way to do that, and that's through the Son of God."
"And the Son of God is really bad, is He? What did He teach?"
"Well ... He said that we have to love God above everything else -- even ourselves."
"I'm waiting to be offended ..."
"And we have to love everybody else more than ourselves."
"Still waiting ..."
"Yeah, but the Son of God also said that we have to deal with the things we did wrong in our lives."
"Oh! Wow ... I've done a lot of things wrong. So I guess He went around and killed all the bad people, did He?"
"Heck, no! This religion says He never did anything wrong and then let Himself die to be the punishment for our wrongs. Even the bad people could turn to Him, and it would be like they'd never done those bad things."
"Why keep this a secret? Why not tell everyone you can?"
"Because people might get offended."
"Who?"
"Well ... you know ... people from other countries ... other religions."
"Look: in my religion, we say 'peace to you and your household'. Would you be offended if I said that to you?"
"Well ... no."
"Then why would I be offended if you said to me, 'Merry Christmas'?"
"Not following."

[pause]

"Is there some high priest I can talk to, to find out more?"
"Not necessarily. There's a book called the Bible and that tells you the whole story so you can find out for yourself. Some people say it's like God speaking directly to you."
"Has this been on Oprah?"
"Don't be silly. That might hurt her ratings."
"Why?"
"Because people might be offended."

At which point, our immigrant friend either runs off, strumming his lower lip and making a noise like Lou Costello, trying to figure out who's on first, or races out to the nearest bookstore to try to find the book this local person was talking about.

"Where are you going? Don't you want to hear about Boxing Week?"

My office is adjacent to one of the biggest enclosed shopping malls in Western Canada. I see people of all different ethnicities, wading through the mall with children in tow. Happy-sounding music tells us Santa will be comin' down the chimney down and then tells the story of a reindeer nobody liked until he turned out to be useful for something. Children are often bawling their eyes out because they can't have something -- even though they know they're supposed to be excited about the Day Of The Great Gift-Getting while the parents have this bewildered look at what appears to be a tradition in this new country they've come to live in, but which doesn't appear to have a name or a purpose.

Confusion? Well, we know who the author of that is.

As sure as there's an "X" in Christmas ...

2009-11-24T04:53:00.000-08:00

Stuart Shepard has posted another brilliant "Stoplight" feature in what's become something of a Christmas tradition: a humorous but firm reminder that "The Holiday Season" actually has a name (Christmas) and a meaning (the celebration of the birth of the Son of God and Saviour of all mankind).

I've already started watching out for the "Holiday" catalogues, so I can join in Stuart's activism, but it also got me thinking: in Vancouver, I'd say it's about a 50/50 split between those who celebrate the Unspecified Holiday Season and those who aren't afraid to use the X-word ... about the media and "official civic types" make a big deal about a lot of other, specified, celebrations.

(My daughter's student choir in Victoria -- made up of students from across her public school district -- puts on an actual Christmas concert each year: a couple of years ago, I went to one, which was also attended by the local Member of the Legislature (like a State Senator). She could not spit out the words, "Merry Christmas", if her life depended on it. Her boyfriend and I knew each other from somewhere (something in the media, I think), so we chatted a bit afterwards, and when I wished them a Merry Christmas, it almost felt like I was taunting her. As, indeed, I was. But I digress ...)

There's Vaisakhi for the Sikhs, Ramadan for the Muslims, Pride Week for alternative lifestylers ... a variety of Native Indian rituals ... and recently, kids in public schools got a day off to go to a conference where the Dalai Lama was speaking. You'll see media reports about the color and costumes, the ceremony and activities, without actually digging into the deeper meaning of the celebrations.

Personally, I'd like to know more about and discuss the deeper meaning of those celebrations, but the public treatment I see, while giving the appearance of "embracing other cultures", does have a certain patronizing quality, as if one is simply paying lip service to Quaint Cultural Traditions.

Maybe it's not such a bad thing that the celebration of the birth of the Saviour of all mankind has not been reduced to a Quaint Cultural Tradition -- say, a Page 3 photo spread of "Catholics Attend Midnight Mass At Holy Rosary Cathedral while Worship Team Rocks Up 'Joy To The World' at Sword of Zion Pentecostal Church"? "Stock brokers and lawyers in their traditional business attire gather for a noontime prayer meeting"? "Homeless people and drug addicts wear their traditional costumes -- donated, used clothes and new-to-them underwear for a Christmas dinner at Gospel Mission on Vancouver's Downtown East Side"?

Consider this: there's no real "traditional Christian costume", because when you "put on Jesus", as the Apostle Paul puts it, we wear Him on the inside.

Jesus told us there'd be days like this: days when we'd feel persecuted for our faith or feel like we're all alone. As Graham Cooke said in a message recently, one person, plus God, is always in the majority.

Something we have to remember is that the promotion of other cultures and religions has grown out of a worldly concept of "inclusivity", while Jesus is inclusivity: He came for everyone, and His last instructions to us were to be His witnesses all over the world. That doesn't take a PR department or having "the ear" of elected representatives: we are Jesus' PR department. By our lives, by our love, by our fruits -- by healing the sick, binding the brokenhearted and giving comfort to the poor -- we Christians should give others cause to celebrate Jesus, no matter what the catalogues say.

Who's listening to whom?

2009-11-20T04:34:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting piece in the Christian Post about a group of evangelical leaders and climate-change experts, banding together to convince Christians to join the fight against climate change. While it appears on the surface to be a breakthrough for climate-change activists in coming together with Christians, there's an underlying theme that the body of Christ is divided over the issue.

With that, we should see, once again, that God is nowhere to be found in this discussion -- aside from lip service from the activists' opponents, who say, "well, of course we have to take care of God's creation, but ..."

One of the points in my book, A Very Convenient Truth -- real hope in the face of environmental fears, is that the division and sharp, personal tone of the discussion over climate change is one of the indicators that God has been left out of the discussion. If "the science is settled", why are people who apparently have some expertise on the subject questioning it? If "the science is settled", why are these people subjected to personal attacks?

The apparent division within the church -- divided, I notice, between those who have President Obama's ear and those who don't -- can only spawn confusion, and God is not the author of confusion.

But He is the author of His Word, and in this article -- aside from the general platitude about caring for Creation -- I don't see Word One from Scripture.

Let me offer something.

"If My people, which are called by My Name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I look down from Heaven, and will hear their prayers, and will heal their land."
-- 2 Chron. 7:14

Were that the only passage in Scripture that tells us where God stands in this, that should be all we need. But (as you'd read in A Very Convenient Truth) His Word is peppered with these references. The state of the environment is dependent on the state of our relationship with Him. It's not a matter of GHG or CAC -- it's a matter of GOD.

Is there climate change? YES -- but ...
Are humans responsible? YES -- but ...
Can humans fix it? YES -- but ...

The "but ..." is this: climate change (the way I see it) is a combination of God playing out His plan and people falling away from Him, leaving His Creation unprotected. The ball started rolling in the first place when we failed to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it". The only way we can fix it is by turning back to Him, and praise God, He sent His Son that we can repent for that sin and be redeemed and get on with having life more abundantly.

Don't worry about the environment. Worry is a sin, because it assumes God is not going to fulfill His promise.

God promises to heal the land if we turn back to Him. We may not be able to see what "healing" looks like, but God does. And have you ever noticed that the activists haven't really presented a clear picture of what a "healed" planet looks like? There's a lot of talk about fighting climate change, but how do we know when we've won?

What we need to remember is that environmentalist solutions can be at cross-purposes to the Will of God -- and when that happens, whose word should take precedence?

To a Christian, that one should be a no-brainer.

After all, what we've done thus far, using our own intellect, hasn't worked -- and you'd think that, after about 60 years of concerted effort to turn things around by "leaning on our own understanding", we'd be out of the woods. Instead, we keep hearing things are getting worse.

So it's a challenge to the activists: do you want a healed planet, or don't you?

And it's a challenge to the churches. Deborah Fikes of the World Evangelical Alliance says churches "lack the spiritual will" to take action. Here's my question to the Deborah, the WEA and Christians in general: do you believe the Bible, or don't you?

Now, the devil would make us believe that there's such an urgency to the climate change issue, that it's too important for us to leave to prayer.

I believe it's too important for us not to give to God.