NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

  I find myself on a Saturday morning counting out my pills for the next week prior to restocking the weekly supply. Do I count the pills out one by one? No! Do I put them immediately from the pill vial into their section of the box? No! I arrange them in two groups: one of 3 pills and one of four... just as I was taught over 70 years ago in Grade One by Mrs Dawson. How many other things, I wonder, do I do a certain way because that’s the way I was taught as a child? 1 Corinthians 13:11 ran through my mind. “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.“  So for the next few days my mind was busy considering just how many of those ‘ childish things’ still were part of my life. We might have grown up in a house where alcohol was used to excess, where violence was a way of life, or where those who looked or sounded different were denigrated. That is no reason for us to repeat those things as adults....

Will we have a one dose or a two dose summer? No one knows and what’s more there is nothing that we can do about it. It depends on two things completely out of our control: how much vaccine will be available and how many people will take advantage of that vaccine.  Last fall we organized getting a new deck built this spring. The builder has the required lumber and is ready to go but we are waiting on the local township to get our building permit to us. Nothing we can do to hurry that process along. All the ‘i’s have been dotted and the “t’s crossed. The Bible came into being over a period of hundreds of years. It involved many people copying and editing texts, deciding what should stay in and what could be discarded.  So considering just why a certain story was included is sometimes an interesting way to approach scripture.  Some of the post-Easter stories can be helpful to us as we struggle to relate to this current pandemic. One of my favourite of these stories is ‘...

Mother’s Day came and went last weekend lost within this pandemic.   Like all families ours tended to celebrate Mother’s Day in a similar way each year with a family day culminating in a dinner that was often ordered in Chinese food. It was a low-key but pleasant day. I can’t really remember Mother’s Day 2020 during the first lockdown of the pandemic. I think we were all still in shock trying to just cope with everyday life.  This year though part of normalcy returned.  Flowers and a card found their way to our apartment along with a short and well distanced visit where we talked about what the younger generation was up to. Then at dinner time a bag containing our share of the Chinese food was delivered down here for us to enjoy. And so we shared the meal together while apart. The bonus from our point of view was that we got to keep our leftovers for the next day! We are finding new ways to do old things. It made me think of the Israelites spending the 40 years in th...

  Bloomberg CityLab reports on the world's cities, communities, and neighborhoods: How they work, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need.  Here is what they had to say this past week. ‘The widened boulevards and reimagined streets of Paris following a deadly cholera outbreak in the 19th century offer a unique lesson in how cities can thrive after a public health crisis.’ Bloomberg CityLab The same day I read this there was an item on the CTV evening news from Barrie in which it talked about Dunlop Street in Barrie being shut to cars on selected Saturdays  during the warmer weather.  Apparently the shop keepers are calling for this shutdown  to be more regular as the increased pedestrian traffic is good for the businesses. It was instigated in part as a reaction to a decrease in in-person shopping due to the current pandemic as well as street closures due to construction. Change follows disruption in the New Testament stories of the cruxifixc...