NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

  “The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.“ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice   This phrase, ‘sins of the fathers’, comes originally from references primarily in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers and relates to generational sins passing from one generation to the next. Despite what the church said, I must say it always seemed to be unfair to me that the children would suffer because of the father’s sins.  Recently however I heard a new term (for me at least), transgenerational. While this talks about passing from generation to another, it isn’t about about the children inheriting the sins of the fathers but rather about the children inheriting the emotional scars of their parents. And now I wonder if that is perhaps what is being alluded to in the Old Testament, that it was not the sins of the fathers but rather the scars those sins left behind.   It certainly sheds a whole new light on the problems that beset various facets of ...

We all know someone who tells the same story over and over.  Do they not remember telling us before we sometimes wonder…. Research conducted at Queen’s University and funded by the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors has discovered a pattern in the stories told over and over by aging parents. There are really just Ten Stories (more or less) The role of the storyteller is important  Many of the stories come from the 2nd & 3rd decade of life which is when values are learned  The facts of these stories aren’t important. What is important is the meaning within them. The next time you find yourself listening to (or telling) a story for the second, third , or fourth time,  try listening to it in a different way to see if you can hear what is really being said! These same four points hold true for any stories that were part of an oral tradition such as stories of Indigenous people, folklore, and yes, stories in the Bible. All of these, based on what w...

  An iconic saying for our generation, “That’s one small step for man. One giant step for mankind” is attributed to Neil Armstrong as he stepped onto the surface of the moon. However, what  Neil Armstrong insists he actually said and the tapes from NASA confirm is “That’s one small step for a man.  One giant step for mankind.” Interesting how millions of people hearing the broadcast live on July 20, 1969 heard one thing while Armstrong actually said something else, isn’t it!   I thought of this saying earlier in the week when a group of high school friends were planning to meet over lunch this month. Patio dining was now allowed! We had all had our first shots, and some our second! We felt the need to celebrate! Only 4 were allowed at a table? Well we could just use more than one table and move them closer together! This didn’t sound like Armstrong’s small step to me….  Armstong’s quote is the way forward from this pandemic. If everyone was to take one sma...

  “In times of stress, the best thing we can do for our children  (and each other) is to listen with our ears and hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.” -Fred Rogers, You Are Special (1995) Controversy has been swirling around the heads of our children.  Many families have one or two children and in the large urban areas live in apartments or condos.  Children are feeling isolated as they try to cope with online learning and a lack of social stimulation resulting in depression and anxiety. The question on the minds of both children and parents has been ‘Will schools reopen in June or remain closed with online learning until September?’ They finally got the answer on Wednesday of this week  when Premier Ford made the announcement that schools would indeed be closed to in-person learning until September. He spoke of the possibility of play dates and summer camps and ended by saying that NOBODY wanted to see the chi...

  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...