Life

Jesus Good

afaiz

With friends like Bruxy Cavey who needs enemies? Cavey is a pastor with The Meeting House, a non-denominational church in the Toronto area. He's also the author of The End of Religion: Encountering the Subversive Spirituality of Jesus. In the preface he writes, “Religion uses rules to force our steps, guilt to keep us in line, and rituals to remind us of our failure to live up to those rules. In doing this, religion adds more weight to those who are already burdened with life's hardships. But Jesus offers us the rest we're searching for.”

Of Bumper Cars and Harpoons

Phil Callaway

My grandfather Callaway was a combination of the graceful and the geezer. He loved a good laugh, but he also loved to talk about his ailments once the entire family had gathered around the dinner table and the food had been doled out. “So I remember when the doctors had to root through me and take out my spleen. Stayed awake for the whole thing. Watched 'em dig it outa there all wrinkled and green. I asked 'em to pickle it for me. Put it in a jar. I kept it for years on the counter. Looked like a big hairy cucumber. Hey, where's everybody going? Mind if I eat your carrots?”

The Christmas T-Shirt

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Just before Christmas, as executor of my late father's will, I started the process of making application for compensation benefits for armed services veterans who were used as human guinea pigs in a top-secret chemical warfare testing program. The program went on in this country from 1941until the 1970s at two locations. As a soldier, Dad was used as a human guinea pig several times at Suffield, Alta., during the Second World War. Acknowledgement of the top-secret program was forced on our government after a class action lawsuit by victims seeking redress for illness related to the testing. Dad died in 2000 after a tragic battle with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It was the last of many diseases that plagued him, particularly in the last 15 years of his life. (Were they a result of the chemical testing? We will never know. In the legal world you have to surrender a lot in order to win.)

The Journey of Hope

Irma Bull

Little things confound the wise and contain God's greatest gifts. Signs of God's love surround us, yet often go unnoticed. The gift of a starry night, the smile of a stranger or the fragrance of a flower could touch your soul at just the right moment. Life is a difficult journey but people make it harder when they close their eyes to the messages God sends every day. Yet every year in Bruce Mines, a small northern Ontario village, people trudge through the snow to experience the Christmas story. People come by busloads. When I first heard about this Holy Walk, my imagination ran with it.

Families Like Ours

Phil Callaway

Each year I receive lengthy Christmas letters from former friends of mine and it is a little annoying to hear just how very well their lives are proceeding. Here's one example:

Merry Christmas dear friend,

Catamount Choices

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November is deer hunting season. When you live a rural lifestyle, in my neck of the woods at least, you grow most of your vegetables in a garden, gather a lot of your fruit in the bush, collect a good portion of your fish from a stream or lake and hunt for most of your meat and fowl in the woods. Anything less and you are missing out on what a rural lifestyle in the Cariboo-Chilcotin has to offer; you might just as well be living in the city. Each hunting and gathering endeavour has a month assigned to it. November is deer hunting.

Blessed by Prayers

Allen Aicken

St. Columba-By-The-Lake, Montreal, has meant a lot to me. It was the community into which my first-born daughter came to life, and where she was given the new life of baptism. I suppose it was also our “house of prayer,” although Presbyterian churches are rarely distinguished as prayer centres. Of course St. Columbans do pray and, like Leap year, prayer occasionally is a topic.

Brand Me!

afaiz

Can you buy a better car than a Honda Civic? Or for that matter a Toyota Corolla? I don't know if you can. For approximately $15k you get a really decent car—four wheels plus a steering wheel, comfortable seating, a decent trunk, pretty good fuel efficiency and intermittent windshield wipers. For roughly the same amount of money you can get a Pontiac G5 or Vibe or a Kia Rio5. There are equally fine cars in that price range offered by Chrysler, Mazda and Ford. The Ford Focus is a perfectly acceptable choice.

From Hollywood To Iowa

Phil Callaway

Back when our kids wanted to travel in the same car as their parents, we journeyed three days to get to a camp in Iowa where I was to speak. I've discovered that the best way for a speaker to gain credibility at family camp is to leave his children at home, but ours have always come along. And I think it's been comforting to other parents to watch our children misbehave.

Confessions of a People Pleaser

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This morning I awoke to the sound of a jackhammer. I thought at first I was snoozing inside a construction zone but after a few shakes of my head I realized it was our old friend Flicker. Flicker is a rather large common flicker (Colaptes auratus) who drops by from time to time to rattle our cage, literally. This morning he was doing a particularly good job of it. I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stalked out of the bedroom to peer through the kitchen window and watch him. He was standing on the board on which our bird feeder is mounted and bashing his beak against the board for all he was worth (flickers are in the woodpecker family). The board is attached to our metal deck railing and so he was setting up a vibration through it and the deck and the whole wall of the house. The wall of the house acted like a huge amplifier. The racket was so loud that the windows were rattling. But it wasn't the noise that got to me.

Peace, Love & Understanding

afaiz

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. – Matthew 25: 35, 36

Staying Young

Phil Callaway

My mother is in a nursing home and the doctor just gave her six months to live. But when he found out she couldn't pay her bill, he gave her another year. Last night after spending some time with her, the thought hit me, “If I stay in peak physical condition, I will be a drain on the medical system.” And so I have uncovered three ways to ensure that this does not happen.
1. Change your diet and exercise habits. I exercised for the last time today. Retired my sneakers. My light weights. My pass to the exercise room. The resolve began when an acquaintance of mine dropped dead of a heart attack. When I thought of the last time I saw him alive, how he was waddling over to the Twinkies aisle in the supermarket, it hit me like a runaway grocery cart: die eating.