I'll Add Words Later

I'm putting up some pictures from my trip, and from a couple other events over the summer. Sometime in the next few days I'll tell you why I picked these. They all have memories, are things I love, or define something about doing a 12 hour roadtrip twice in one week with one of your best friends.

A place of terror

Found the following quote, attributed to Mike Yaconelli on a blog I was surfing at work today. I loved this one. Really, there are few Yaconelli quotes I haven't loved, but I thought this one was timely to a number of things I've been thinking about lately.

"I would like to suggest that the Church become a place of terror again; a place where God continually has to tell us, 'Fear not'; a place where our relationship with God is not a simple belief or a doctrine or theology, it is God's burning presence in our lives. I am suggesting that the tame God of relevance be replaced by the God whose very presence shatters our egos into dust, burns our sin into ashes, and strips us naked to reveal the real person within. The Church needs to become a gloriously dangerous place where nothing is safe in God's presence except us. Nothing--including our plans, our agendas, our priorities, our politics, our money, our security, our comfort, our possessions, our needs."

Moon

I'm sitting at the computer in our basement, adding some music to my ipod (Keith Green, Rich Mullins, Robin Mark, Steve Bell), and I happened to glance up and out the window that is at ground level above my head.

The moon is beautiful tonight, haloed by clouds glowin eery shades of gray and blue and orange.

Something beautiful, a little gift of beauty from God to me, sitting in my basement.

Coming Home

I've been at home a couple of days now. We got home mid-evening on Wednesday, and I was back at work bright and early Thursday morning. In fact, as today is a bit of a slower day, and I've mostly caught up on the piles I discovered on my desk upon arrival yesterday, I'm taking a few minutes to write this post from work.

I'll put up a fuller post, expounding upon my vacation sometime this weekend, hopefully with pictures, which I shall have to obtain from my friend's digital camera. For the moment, let me just say that I'm glad to be sleeping in my own bed again, that last night I started attending what I think will be a fantastically challenging Bible study, that I'm still very addicted to Gray's Anatomy, that I'm excited about the school in Seattle that I'm thinking about doing my master's degree at, and that I'm hungry, and my lunch hour is in ten minutes.

It was a good holiday, time desperately needed to refocus and breathe again, but I'm glad to be home.

the sun on my face again

Just thought I'd stop in here for a minute. I'm sitting in my friend's computer room in Langley, catching up on a few emails and reading a few blogs.

I think most of you know that the last half of August and all of September was a really deep and struggling time for me. That there was stuff going on in our family life, and stuff going on in my church life that created a great deal of pain and wrestle. That I was tired and worn and dry. Feeling dead and exhausted from thinking and feeling pain so deeply. I haven't cried so much in years.

But the tears, in the words of a Karla Adolphe song "are dampening my soul". I can breathe here. I needed this week away from Calgary, the space and the distance from the things that troubled me. My soul was softened, raked over and bruised this past month. I feel the sun on my face again.

I just wanted to let you know that I feel new things sprouting, there is a refreshment here, a sense of quiet, a knowledge of the rightness of some of the decisions I made in the last week.

And I'm oh so grateful to Jesus for that.