Whatever He Says

Lord, your love is evident everywhere I look, When you were making this fair earth, What tender care you took! You could have made the birds talk, As plain as plain could be, But joyous cheerful melodies, Ring from tree to tree. The sky so blue above us, Your love did hang in place, Without earth's special atmosphere, We'd stare right into space. In every sight, in every sound-- Your love is there--outpoured. Oh, how I want to thank you, My great Creator, Lord. Belinda, 1980

Our son Pete usually calls to chat during his long commute to and from work in the city and it was during one of these conversations recently that I mentioned having the gift of mercy. He loves to tease me about what he describes as my "random mercy," and says that I'm always able to "ferret out" the good in people. A particularly flattering choice of metaphor, I thought .   He launched into his "axe murderer" routine, saying he imagines me saying, "Well, on the good side, he always cleans up after himself. And he keeps his tools nice and sharp." He muttered something about not many people wanting me on a parole board--getting carried away now--he was o n a roll--I was laughing so hard I could hardly catch my breath--the fuel to his fire. Pete may have been exaggerating for dramatic and comedic effect, but  when I told my granddaughter Tori about his teasing, she said, "Omie, remember that terrible dream I had a few ...

It was midsummer when I drove for miles down roads that wound up hills and down, to buy some apples for my small pie business. As I was leaving, the woman behind the counter of the rural country market told me that they were the end of the line   and there would be no more until the new crop came in. The three large boxes I managed to get represented quite a few pies, but one by one they all found a home before the new crop was available from my supplier. When my freezer was finally empty, I went to my local No Frills, which is a little more expensive, but I looked for the apples in bags labelled, "Naturally Imperfect." These apples lack conformity in size or shape--they aren't quite "perfect," but are perfectly delicious in the pies. Recently as I was thinking about a fault that was obvious in an acquaintance, I thought of the "naturally imperfect" label, and how appropriately it could be applied to humans. In that moment, instead of persist...

It's been almost a week since we returned from Mishkeegogamang, a First Nation 2000 kilometers north of our home, and I feel as though I have a suitcase full of stories to unpack.  We went as a team of 23 diverse people, brought together by a common desire to bring encouragement, hope, practical help and spiritual support to the people of Mish. Ten of our team were teenagers, and this story is from Tippy, who was one of  them. It happened on our first full day there and is shared as she told it to me: Susan said that we needed to set up a buoy line, and I said, "Okay, I can do that," not thinking that the water was going to be as cold as it was. So me, Dylan, Tori, Jared and Max all went down to the water to set it up. We got everything ready and had anchored the two 50 foot sides and were taking out the 100 foot rope for the back of the buoy line. We anchored part of the 100 foot rope to one of the sides and were taking it across to the other side, when the...

It was 2004 and I had gone back to England for two weeks to help my brother Robert move Mum from the two story home she was living in, to a perfect little ground floor flat in the same village. Robert and I had a lifetime of gathered belongings to sort through and condense into a much smaller space, while Mum, blissfully unconcerned with all of this, patiently waited for the move. I persuaded Robert that it might be a good idea, even though Mum's final quota of belongings was small, to get help in the form of a moving company. We settled on movers called Mike and Al .  Their advertisement in the phone book sounded so promising. "No job too large or too small," it boasted. From the moment I made contact with "Mike" though, something in his voice gave a different impression to the enthusiastic advertisement. In fact, I wasn't sure that he really wanted to do this job, although he didn't come right out and say so. When I pressed him for a quote, s...

Sometimes one word can make a profound difference, as I found through reading the book: “Understanding the difficult words of Jesus—New Insights from a Hebraic perspective.”  The authors, David Bivin and Roy Blizzard, Jr., believe that the first three gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke; also known as the Synoptic gospels ; were not originally written in Greek as was believed for centuries, but in Hebrew, which was then translated into Greek and then from Greek into English.  A triad of languages involved in translation, create issues obvious to anyone who has tried using Google Translate, which seems to focus on words alone as opposed to the idiom it is translating. For example, I translated “raining cats and dogs” into Dutch, and got the result: "hondenweer," which literally means “dog weather” or “dogs again.”  Bivin and Blizzard’s  theory that the first three gospels were originally written in Hebrew is based on relatively recent evidence revealed b...

I had the privilege of delivering the message at Green Valley Alliance Church today and because it was live-streamed I can post it here.