The View From Here

Pop-Up Wedding

I have a recurring dream where I show up for a wedding, only to discover that I was supposed to be officiating the ceremony. The problem is, I haven’t prepared, not a word of it, and the rest of the dream is me scrambling unsuccessfully to scrape something together at the last minute… - - - - - One of the many things I’ve learned in my work with First Nations communities in western Canada is that even though the content of our personal development experience is the same every month, each new group of participants comes together to create a unique experience for everyone involved. Last week was no exception—especially Thursday night. 5:00pm Our afternoon session had just wrapped up when I overheard someone say that a couple of the participants wanted to get married. Well that’s a first. John and Alexia had been engaged for some time, and earlier in the day, Alexia mentioned to a friend that she wanted to have her wedding right there at Ness Lake. “But ...

There are two ways I could tell this story. The first would be to wait a little while longer until I have some more clarity around how this narrative will actually unfold. This is my preferred way of sharing anything personal: wait until things have worked themselves out, and only then drill down into my experiences for whatever I think might be helpful (or at least mildly entertaining) to others. Lessons learned, victories won, tales to be told. I’m not alone in this. Most of us prefer to tell our stories from the end backwards. In the middle, things are too messy and too uncertain and, well, too raw. I had a conversation once with a friend who was in the midst of an unspeakably challenging season, and we wondered together what it would be like for him to tell his story right there in the middle of it—right there where he wasn’t even sure he would make it out alive. And so the second way I could tell this story of mine is to do just that, to tell it from the middle, which is wher...

Fear and Trembling

I first registered an account with Blogger back in 2011 when someone suggested I start a blog after visiting our church one Sunday morning. The fact that nine years have passed by with nothing to show for it speaks pretty clearly as to how comfortable I am with the idea as a whole. So why now? In 2018, the church where I serve as pastor went through an incredibly trying season. When a leader and beloved member of our congregation told me he was gay and that he was preparing to ‘come out’ publicly, I desperately wanted to know how other pastors had responded to a challenge like this without destroying their church in the process. I grasped for anything that could help me get through what I knew would be a daunting leadership experience with significant implications for our church’s future. While I was able to find a number of books written from different sides of this hot-button issue, the primary commentaries seemed to come from those who were not actually leading local congregat...

A Good Honest Shuffle

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