A beautiful tapestry of yellow
I have a problem with dandelions. Late spring is high season for dandelions, when those bright-yellow blooms make their presence in yards and fields abundantly clear. Within a month or two, the flowers will be gone and the dandelion leaves will blend pretty well into the rest of the grass. Fresh from a good mowing, our…
Nurturing spirituality
The church’s primary job is growing relationships with God, says Dave Rogalsky in the feature, “Experiencing the good news,” on page 4. He encourages faith communities to be “actively teaching spiritual practices to strengthen the experience of God in people of all ages, in order to underpin our community, worship, evangelism, missions, and peace and…
Experiencing the good news
“You . . . were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people” (Ephesians 1:13-14, NRSV). I understand spirituality to be our knowledge and experience of God active in our lives. But I hear little in our congregations about how we…
Experiencing God
When my youngest son “graduated” from Grade 5 in June 2000, his class took a special year-end trip to Toronto. I was working as a school bus driver at the time—we lived in Ontario then—and I drove the bus. The highlight of the trip was attending The Lion King live at the Princess of Wales…
The courage to be vulnerable
Most of us don’t like to be in vulnerable spaces. The uncertainties of those spaces leave us with butterflies fluttering around in our stomachs. Conceding power is uncomfortable. Yet, Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) is a place that exemplifies and guides us into those vulnerable spaces. CMU students are not only treated to professors who interact…
Activate your core
It seems the majority of political, social and religious discourse today consists of knee-jerk reactions to the perceived agendas, biases, foolishness and dangerous “isms” of the “other.” This rampant reactivity makes constructive dialogue impossible. To make things worse, we all assume the log is in everybody else’s eye and the tiny speck is in our…
You’re getting worked up over nothing
Jesus and his disciples were invited to Martha’s house for dinner. Martha was toiling away in the kitchen by herself while everyone else, including her sister Mary, was in the living room huddled around a fascinating rabbi named Jesus, a man some were calling the Son of God. Stressed out and frustrated, Martha finally marched…
