NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

“We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.”  ~S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div. Sometimes the hardest thing we can do seems to be to tell the community, within which we move, what is really going on in our lives. These are many reasons we feel this way. We don’t want it to be ‘all about us’.  Nobody needs to know. They won’t understand. It won’t make any difference in the long run. We can handle it all on our own. It’s none of their business. Etc. Etc. Or perhaps it’s because we are afraid to be vulnerable, to risk losing friendships, acceptance,  and understanding. They mightn’t understand. They mightn’t be able to cope. They might judge us. All of these are real fears. The problem that I see with this path is the necessity to keep straight for months or even years just who knows what story. And then dealing with the expectations that arise out of those stories but are never going to happen in actual fact. We were faced with a similar situation the past 6 months. Yes,

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.” L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables was a favourite book of mine growing up. As an only child, I emphasized with Anne’s delight in finding a ‘kindred spirit’ in Diana Barrie. I have been blest over the years with many good and long-lasting friends, some from as far-back as the first day of Grade One. (There was no kindergarten way back then in rural Ontario) And I thought of those friends as being kindred spirits, and so they were and still are. But in the last decade I have had the awe-inspiring experience of meeting not one, but two people who I knew immediately were kindred spirits. In both cases I felt immediately that we had gossiped over the back fence for all of our lives. They were just that familiar.  I felt like I had known them forever. While I have seen one of these people fairly frequently since meeting them, the other I only saw for t

“There were many Jews staying in Jerusalem just then, devout pilgrims from all over the world. When they heard the sound they came on the run. Then when they heard, one after another, their mother tongue being spoken, they were thunderstruck. They couldn’t for the life of them figure out what was going on, and kept saying, “Aren’t these all Galileans? How come we’re hearing them talk in our various mother tongues?” Acts 2: 5-11 MSG If you were in church last Sunday, you probably heard some version of the words above read as a portion of one of the lessons. Even if you didn’t, you will still be familiar with the story about people speaking in tongues that the church has labeled Pentecost. I have aways understood it as sort of a mini United Nations, where through the wonders of technology, [in this case God or the Holy Spirit], each person hears their own language regardless of the language actually being spoken. But for some reason this past Sunday, the words being read had

I had the occasion recently to look back over some of the posts from the last 5+ years that talked mainly about Stewardship. Several things went through my mind as I read through them but what struck me most was how they had changed over that time. And not only how they had changed, but what had sparked that change! Those changes weren’t sparked by a Stewardship campaign, or by someone sending me information on their charity, or by a desire for a bigger tax rebate at the end of the year. They were sparked first and foremost by my changing perception of who or what God is for me. This was followed by a maturing in my understanding of what the changing perception meant for how I live my life in the here and now.    Looking back over what Stewardship has meant to me, it has grown from pennies in the mitre box during Lent for the poor children in Africa in Sunday School to paying ‘our share’ of the daily upkeep of the church as a young family. This is were it begins to get ‘sticky’