NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

Sunday afternoon we were at a piano concert in our local theatre. The performers were 6 members of one family with the youngest being about 10 years of age. As I listened to the music I was amazed at the skill and dexterity that even that youngest member displayed. However, that wasn’t all. I was taken back almost 70 years to when my burning desire was to learn to play a piano, to be able to make the instrument sing. I took every chance that came my way to experience having that instrument played for me. Then for my eighth birthday, I was allowed to pick out piano, a Heintzman piano, second-hand, but I didn’t care! My dreams of sitting down at that instrument and playing anything I wanted were about to be realized! While I became a player who was capable of getting excellent scores on the Royal Conservatory of Music exams and one who my teacher wanted to go on to further study, I didn’t feel the magic of the keyboard. I was too focused on getting the notes ‘right' wi...

‘ My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love.’ 1 John 4:7 MSG Jesus said, “Give Caesar what is his, and give God what is his.” [ Mark 12:17 MSG] This verse is often seen to mean that church and state shouldn’t mix. Or in other words that politics has no place in the churches of a nation. This idea was challenged by the Rev. Michael Curry in his sermon at the recent Royal Wedding. While the conversation the last couple of days has focused on that wedding: on what the wedding dress was like, on how cute the children were, even picking apart the bride’s makeup which allowed her freckles to show [Horrors!] the main conversations have revolved around that sermon. The Rev. Curry began with this quote from the late Dr. Martin Luther K...

‘We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own "to-do"list.' Michelle Obama Have you ever had that ‘put-down feeling, that feeling that you really don’t count? I am writing this on Mother’s Day and I suspect that most mothers out there know exactly what I’m talking about. After all that’s what being a parent is all about, putting the needs and wants of others ahead of our own. And of course there’s nothing wrong with that.  When it becomes a challenge is when we continue to put the needs of other ahead of our own, to the extent that we find ourselves embarrassed, or even ashamed, not to. The biblical juncture that ‘the first shall be last and the last first’ [Matthew 20.16] can too easily be understood as meaning that it is somehow wrong to not denigrate one’s own needs. It becomes difficult to actually admit what one wants/needs for fulfillment. I remember being offered a position of responsibility, in a area where I had some exper...

Can you imagine how boring life would be if everything was black and white.... so started the TV commercial. ‘Do I agree with that?’, I wondered as I watched the screen morph from a field of black & white into one of vivid colour.  My mother was an artist. My daughter is an artist. I know that black and white are opposites. White is the sum of all possible colours. Black is the absence  or absorption of visible light, and therefore without hue.  Black and white have often been used to describe opposites; particularly light and darkness and good and evil. The white knight  usually represents virtue, the black knight something mysterious and sinister. In American westerns , t he hero often wears a white hat, the villain a black hat. Studies have shown that something printed in black letters on white has more authority with readers than any other colour of printing. Doesn’t sound boring to me! The gospel writer Matthew has Jesus say the fol...

I am grieving a loss! Not the loss of a loved one, or a beloved pet, but the loss of the contents saved on my computer: over 6000 photos, 7 years of sermons, 20 years work in my genealogy tree, and all my documents. And I can assure you, it is real loss and is accompanied by real grief.  I was assured at the Apple Store after they had wiped and reinstalled the operating system on my computer that I could go ahead and load the saved backup from my Time Machine, ‘And no, Ma’am you can’t mess it up!!!’ They definitely underestimated me, because while the shells of the programmes reloaded, the contents did not.  Not only did they not reload, the Time Machine is now blank prior to April 18, 2018! And so the process begins of gathering from hither and yon whatever I can find and of acknowledging my real grief for those things that are gone forever. But I am beginning to realize that my computer disaster is a gigantic metaphor for my spiritual journey, a journey I am alrea...