Whatever He Says

I traveled a gray concrete arm clad in green sleeves, from the hamlet of Bond Head, down to the city of Toronto on Thursday afternoon. Along the way I parked my car and met Susan, who drove us the rest of the way down to Church Street, where we were meeting friends at the  Cafe California . Driving as a passenger, I tried to absorb as much as I could of the increasingly concentrated life  of the city. We flowed like corpuscles down an artery; blood pooling into nerve endings. Sensory stimulation overwhelmed with every glance and inhalation of air. A tall black woman in casual clothing walked the hot pavement with the grace of a gazelle--a Masai princess in t-shirt and denim; around her every tribe and colour in the world seemed represented on the crowded streets. In the depths of a parking garage we tried to talk sense to a stoically impervious ticket machine. I resisted the urge to kick it as our generous margin of time was squandered on its adherence to strict...

Our friend Dave wrote a lovely post today about our mutual friend and sometimes writer here: Susan. I know you will enjoy it as much as I did. Rolling Around In My Head: What I Learned From Susan : Though people often refuse to believe me, and I've never understood why, I am a very nervous and uncomfortable public speaker. I know I do i...

Note by Belinda. Dave Hingsburger: My friend; writing encourager and member of this blog readership family, also had a post published on Canada.com. You can read it here: Grandma’s Trust

Note from Belinda My dear friend  Dave  sent me an email today as he prepared to leave for a while. It was so beautifully written (which is what comes of having writers for friends) and it made me feel that I might  be proud to have inscribed on my headstone one day, simply, "She baked a good pie." And you can be sure that Ruby, too, shall have pie! :) By Dave Hingsburger   The weekend before we begin a long lecture trip is one that has become full of traditions. Being away for a long time means incredible organizing. Everything has to be made ready, lists made, items ticked off, everything double checked. At our age this means everything from ensuring that we have enough of our medications to last and that we've packed a book or two for those long airplane trips. By the time we get to the weekend before, we are pretty much organized, then it's the job of getting ourselves emotionally ready for life out of a suitcase, life on the road. No matter how...

With the kind permission of my friend Dave, I am publishing a post written by him about the recent "rapture that wasn't,"  that is being simultaneously published over at his own blog:  Rolling Around in My Head I know that it may be controversial here, but if it is a point of view not thought about before or even necessarily agreed with, that surely is one of the reasons why we write; not to convince, but to cause to consider.   Blessings! Belinda  By Dave Hingsburger I'm going to say this all wrong but I'm going to say it anyway. Here goes ... Everywhere I've gone over the last couple of days people have been talking, lightheartedly, about 'the rapture that wasn't' ... the big 'uh oh'. Someone tried to talk me into a kind of sympathy for those who gave up their life savings, their life pursuits, in the false belief that the world was going to end. Part of me, of course, felt a kind of sadness and sympathy for their ultimate dis...

I found this post in my blog's archives; written three years ago by one of my favourite writers and a dear friend; Dave Hingsburger. As an Easter gift, I am sharing it again. Happy Easter everyone! A guest post by  Dave Hingsburger I've never understood the relationship between clothing and faith. Long before I became aware that we lived in a multi-cultural world, I questioned the very idea that God cares about what we wear to church. The high holidays of Easter and Christmas had my family getting dressed up and trotting off to church. There in the pews I saw everyone else from my small town dressed differently than they did normally. Tough, hard, miners hands stuck out of uncomfortable suits. Strong backed, strong armed mothers looked somehow wrong in pinks and pastels. I remember, wearing shirts that hurt to wear, wondering if God were looking down on us approvingly for dressing up for him. It seemed like we were playing 'pretend' and trying to trick God into thin...

Today in England it is Mothering Sunday. My friend  Dave Hingsburger  sent me this in response to Friday's post,  Found Treasure  about Mum's Potato Leek Soup recipe. With his kind permission, it seems like the perfect post for today, when I am thanking God for my treasured Mum. with whom I will  be talking this morning. By Dave I sat peeling potatoes and glancing down at the recipe. It was deceptively simple and, concerningly lacking in herbs and spices. But I was determined to make it as written. I'd found the recipe on your blog and loved the way it was written. It wasn't one of those impersonal recipes, it was from Mother to Daughter and if you listened carefully you could hear the voice behind the words. I remember when we were in England last and drove through Alvechurch on a whim. We loved seeing the town you'd written about and it was easy to imagine you there. Though we've never met your mother, we'd seen her picture and when we saw t...

Note of explanation by Belinda; post by permission of my friend, Dave Hingsburger, whose blog, Rolling Around in My Head , is one of my daily reads. God had me and five of my friends on the British Isles yesterday: Jamie in Ireland with his daughter Candace; Ron and Susan were on Skye and are now in northern England; I was in Alvechurch, close to Birmingham, in the West Midlands--and Dave and Joe flew into Birmingham where Dave will be starting a three week speaking tour, arriving so tantalizingly close to my departure that there was no way to meet. It was so hard to know that they were so close, yet unreachable, that I sent Dave an email with the subject line: Missing You, Literally! When I arrived home in Bond Head last night, there was an email from Dave and it was so beautifully written, and such a fitting farewell to Alvechurch for me this time, that I asked if I could publish it and he said, Yes! Here it is: Belinda You know, years ago when I...

Susan and I spent yesterday with ten members of her team, at a day of training. On a break I checked emails on my Blackberry. There was one from my friend, Dave, sharing his thoughts about a bus ride to work. I couldn't help myself; I boldly blurted out in a return email,"I love this. Can I post it on my blog?" "Um...yes," he wrote back, asking only that I let him know when I would use it. Susan usually posts on Fridays, so I thought that I would save it for Monday. At the end of our long day, Susan was at our house for cell group. We had dinner, and then, just as we finished clearing away the dishes, she turned to me and said, "I'm so exhausted, I'm going home. I don't think I could focus on the study tonight." She had been up since 4.00 a.m. with back pain. "How would you like not to write a blog post tonight?" I asked. And she said something she never says:"I would love that." "God has it covered...

This is the story of the "coming to faith" of a dear friend, Dave Hingsburger of Chewing the Fat . Thank you so much Dave, and welcome to Whatever He Says as a guest blogger. ********************************************************************************** I am a Christmas Christian. By this I do not mean that I come back to faith, yearly, like a salmon spawning. No, though my faith is strengthened by the rituals and the ceremony of the holidays, I am a year round believer. But I came to faith at Christmas. In fact I remember the exact moment that I met Jesus. A fat and ungainly child, a child of no promise in a home infused with violence, I did not love life, I feared it. Constant, unrelenting fear. Christmas was a time to be endured, gotten through, escaped. A holiday that, to me, resembled a drunken man laughing too loud in a bar, I despised the season. All I knew was that at some moment the stress of the season would break and then part of me would break or bruise...