Goats on the loose

In all fairness, I should admit that most of the goats are tied up, but given how many goats there are in the village, the handful that end up on the loose make an impression. Invariably these fugitive goats drag their tie rope behind them. One day I took a close look at a tied goat and realized why the former exist: he was tied to a tuft of grass.

The goat.

The grass.

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Electioneering again

Climate anxiety has entered the lexicon. For the last few years, it’s been talked about more and more in news articles, science discussions and even in spiritual care contexts. I shrugged it off as overly sensitive people, but the shoe has dropped for me now too. Extreme weather or one sort another everywhere all at once for the past few years has brought home what I always acknowledged intellectually but didn’t really synthesized emotionally: climate change is actually coming and it will be bad. I feel so angry and impotent in the face of these massive systems working against my small efforts to reduce waste and burn less carbon. So I went to the climate forum for this provincial election. It felt really important just to be in the room to declare “this subject matters!” The room had a remarkable number of grey hairs in it. This brought up terribly mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, good of them to continue to care about these issues, even as they can anticipate it won’t ...

Stand up for Canadian Health Care (such as it is)

Canadian health care is far from perfect — it has never achieved all Tommy Douglas dreamed for it: from tip to toe (teeth are still missing, as are a lot of drugs) — but unleashing unfettered two-tier is the opposite of fixing it. So I joined with the Canadian Medical Association in pleading for the Canadian government to grow a spine and stop unhinged Smith's attempt to violate our own rules within her province. As someone on Bluesky observed, if Stephen Harper tried to do this, we'd be at the gate with pitchforks. Where is the outrage. Daddy Warbucks Carney’s latest just-barely satisfactory performance in trade negotiations should not blind us to his failure to prevent this from happening. The letter to the health minister, CC my MP and the shadow ministers: The Canadian Medical Association says the Canadian government must stand up for Albertans and all Canadians to ensure Alberta's new legislation doesn’t create a new normal of health care haves and have-no...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...

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