NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

“When life piles up on us it makes me question the notion that God does not give us more than we can manage. Fodder for a discussion.” From my email in-box This appeared in my email at a very apropos time. The 5 days over the Thanksgiving weekend had been horrendous, starting with being rear-ended at a traffic light and ended with my phone dying and needing to be replaced immediately, in order that I could deal with the fallout from the previous 5 days. Add into this mix, a husband recovering from surgery, the expectations surrounding Thanksgiving, doctors and physiotherapy appointments for me, all over a holiday weekend, and it becomes obvious why this email impacted me.  ‘God never gives us more that we can handle”, is an oft-heard quote, that never actually appears in the Bible. It seems to suggest a benevolent God, that watches over us, deciding just how far we can be pushed. It belongs to the belief system that has an all-knowing God out there who answers our prayer...

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough” ~Meister Eckhart, 13th century German theologian. We are celebrating the Canadian Thanksgiving this coming weekend, It will be a weekend filled with fall activities, with closing the cottage for another year, mulching leaves, or perhaps getting the garden ready for another long, cold, Canadian winter. It will be for many of us a weekend that finds the family gathered around a table filled with the bounty of another harvest, At church services decorated with fruits of that harvest, we will sing those old familiar thanksgiving hymns and perhaps listen to a sermon extolling those things for which we should be thankful in this land of plenty.  And then many of us will forget all about Thanksgiving until it rolls around again next year! For Meister Eckhart, though, it is none of those things. It s simply saying ‘thank you’ to our God quietly in prayer. He’s not talking about thanking those ...

As we looked at the torn-up parking lot with the sign saying,”Parking-Lot improvements”, I made the comment “Doesn’t look like an improvement to me!” My son’s comment was... ’You can’t improve anything without digging it up first ‘ And as I reflected on that comment, I found myself thinking “How true…. but that doesn’t mean we don’t try! And soon I found myself thinking of all those things in life that we want to change but are unwilling to pay the price to do so.  We envy the neighbour’s garden, but we are unwilling to invest the time, effort and money into making the same thing happen outside our door. We would like that svelte figure but the hours spent exercising we would need to put in and the denial of those goodies we love to eat is beyond us. In short, it is not very often that we are willing to inconvenience ourselves and others for the future good of everyone. But those half-measures just don’t cut it! And so I take my hat off to the business that is reinvent...