kar0ling

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Two sets of bunkbeds crowd each of the three bedrooms in an East Toronto highrise apartment, dubbed “the DC” (discipleship centre) by the five guys who currently live there. Their living room is furnished Middle Eastern-style with beautiful Oriental rugs, cushions scavenged from the trash lockup outside, and a coffee table rejected from Grandma’s house. These young people have Moved In. And there’s room for more. What are they up to? (read the full article here )

Let's be realistic about apologetics in the post-modern world. Perhaps back when everyone was modernist in thinking, it was sufficient to simply out-argue the other side (though I doubt that). But certainly now, when "what you believe is good for you, and what I believe is fine for me" is the dominant take on life, it is imperative that we teach apologetics as a way to have conversations, a way to begin dialogue -- friendships, even -- not as a way to beat others over the head with facts until they cry uncle. It is imperative that those who learn apologetics exercise their discipline with grace, love, and a willingness to listen to, and even learn from, the others' perspective. I don't think anyone is going to change his or her mind because a dialogue partner crushed his or her perspective with superior logic. But that doesn't mean apologetics is going out of style, only that the style has changed.

We’ve all heard of “elevator speech” as a term for a sales pitch you can give in a short time. Many MoveIn-ers* mention the elevator as an opportunity to get to know people. In a building that has some 20 floors and but a few slow – and, at times, idiosyncratic – elevators, it’s not a cliché that things can happen on an elevator. Waiting in a lobby that kept filling and emptying of people, after passing up 3 opportunities to ride due to perceived overcrowding, I was rewarded with a near-empty elevator – until a crowd piled in with kids and strollers. Talking gregariously amongst themselves in a Slavic language, they were headed for the upper floors. The rest of us, however, did not live so lofty. Floor 6: “Excuse me!” The lady from the far corner needs to get out. The crowd at the front shifts affably, partly disembarks, the woman steps out, and the rest pile back in, laughing and conversing all the while. Floor 8: Huh? No one moves until a small “excuse me” comes from bel...

I keep hearing about leadership -- in the church, in the workplace, on the shelves in bookstores. And frankly, it depresses me when Christians are a few steps behind the latest trend in wider society. Amid all the resources on leader development amassed in the past decade, what are we still missing? In our journey to become “little Christs,” have we taken our eyes off the perfect example? Did Jesus urge his followers to become better leaders, or better servants? Jesus was undoubtedly grooming his disciples to be leaders – they were the ones who started the church after his death and resurrection. The churches these former Jesus-interns began grew over 2,000 years to comprise the largest religious following in the world. But Jesus’ message to that motley crew was not to build on your strengths, or to read the next management bestseller – advice we hear not only in business circles, but also in the church. Such advice has value, but isn’t what makes Jesus’ example different. The heart of...

I've discovered an ingenious and completely "legal" way for inhibited Mennonites to use their bodies in worship: song interpretation through American Sign Language.

Sharing God's love with all creation. It's the motto of Christian conservation organization A Rocha. At first, it seems like jarringly liberal rhetoric. Is saving the whales really as important as stopping child prostitution? But taking a step back, I realize that there's nothing so very out of line about it. Why shouldn't God love all creation? He made it -- lovingly, intricately, with great beauty. He says that if we won't praise him as is his due, the rocks will cry out to do it for him. God loves all his creation, for all of it was made to worship him. And when relationship was broken -- by humans -- it was broken not only for us, but for creation as well. So our mission of reconciliation includes not only our fellow humans, but the physical world in which we live.

A wise coworker recently shared this insight she has gained over the years: contrary to our wishes, God doesn't have a sense of obligation to report back to us. When we do anything good -- are involved in a ministry, perform a random act of kindness, play the Good Samaritan, or just follow through in obedience on an impulse we feel is from the Lord -- we secretly want some kind of confirmation that we've done the right thing. We want to see the fruit of our work. We're results-oriented, conditioned to value efficiency as a high goal, thus, we gotta know what happened . God doesn't often oblige. He's not concerned with being accountable to his shareholders. I'm increasingly seeing that being a follower of Jesus means learning to embrace mystery; to accept the beauty, intricacy, and wisdom of the magical unknowns, not in a complacent lazy acceptance, but in a life-giving surrender to a power that is above our own, and a wisdom that far transcends the working of ou...

I've been wondering lately if choice isn't becoming our ruin. As Westerners, we're under this delusion that we get to choose. We have freedom of choice, we assert. We get to vote. We can choose brand names, products, stores, cable packages, payment plans. Oh, the choices! And more. We get to choose who we marry. (And having chosen, unchoose when things don't work out as planned.) We get to choose when we have children, and whether, and maybe even who they are -- or, perhaps more accurately, who they are not. And now we want to choose when we die. But do we really get to choose? Are we really in control of all this? I'm not arguing for some overly-deterministic, fatalistic perspective on life, only for a dose of reality. There's a saying that you can't choose your family but you can choose your friends. But can you honestly say you've chosen each of your friends? You fall in with a group of people, or are thrown together with a group of people, and rela...

Is all this celebrating really necessary? Certainly, there can be value in acknowledging when we've done something well. But every occasion seems to be a celebration lately and it's starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Thus, Dick Benner's comments in the Canadian Mennonite on the proceedings at Mennonite World Conference jumped out at me. Katherine Johnson, assistant general secretary for the Lutheran World Federation, represented 68 million Lutherans worldwide. She claimed that while Lutherans were “proud of their theological distinctives,” they would not be “celebrating” their 500th birthday in 2017 due to the divisiveness of the Reformation. Their goal is to help shape the church for the 21st century, she said. A thought for Mennonite Brethren who are gearing up to celebrate 150 years in January. Our theological distinctives include some morsels of truth we may have understood better than others, but they are still far from beginning to comprehend Truth. There is...

"The point of art is not beauty but awareness." I recently heard Milton Glaser say that on CBC radio and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. It's one of those statements that you understand instantly, as though you've always known it, but find exhilarating in its freshness and appositivity (?). I think I've always had an instinctive, though not explicit, understanding of this awareness principle as applied to story -- both books and movies -- but in visual art I've always been looking for beauty. This accounts for the ambivalence I felt toward art therapy. I know beauty is powerful, but is a bit of pretty really enough to heal? Awareness, however; I see the point in that. And suddenly, with that simple statement, not only do I understand why art is for everyone, why public art leads to public good, but I also see the point of more abstract art. Piet Mondriaan's cubism, I maybe don't quite appreciate yet, but this statement has broug...

My first experience was so painful, that I’m very grateful I had so few proposals of marriage while in Cameroon (probably because I took pains to avoid being in a situation where it could happen again). Nevertheless, I was frustrated, agitated, bewildered, by what on earth possessed these men to propose to a woman they’d just met. Of course, as a white woman, I represent all the fantasies of appealing, prosperous, decadent North America. I represent these things, and I pose a path to attaining them. But... A random woman you've just met? What on earth are you thinking?! I posed this question to the ever-ready-with-a-both-wise-and-cheeky-answer Dan, who replied, “What’s a guy got to lose? The worst you can do is say no. “...but if he never asks, he has no chance of ever receiving a yes.” Thank you, Cameroonian men, for giving me a model for taking risks. When I’m about to let fear of failure or of rejection stop me from trying, I think of those marriage proposals. What’s ...

I met an American nurse who started some AIDS education classes for pastors' wives at a remote Cameroonian seminary. She quickly realized sex education was necessary first for the women to even have a clue what she was talking about. With the help of a fluent Pidgin speaker, she was trying to talk about sexual intercourse and not at all sure her students were understanding. "Do you have a way of saying it other than 'come together'?" she asked. Her translator, a young, unmarried woman, blushed and didn't know how to answer. There was a pause while women in the class conferred, then finally an older woman stood up. "Yes, Ma," she said, in the formal, respectful way. "We just say 'fuck'."

(I can't believe a year has passed since I've returned to Canada. I've now been back for longer than I was out there. But Cameroon has left an indelible mark on my memory, and I still have some stories to share, though I suppose they've gotten rusty, lost some details, and accrued others, in the interim. Not going to stop just yet, though.) Cameroon roadside fast food beats North American drive-thru flat. Suya, affectionately known as "typhoid-on-a-stick, is sliced meat (usually beef or chicken, but it's perhaps best not to ask) doused in spicy sauce, roasted on a spit over a roadside flame. Mmmm. Depending on the location and the vendor, consuming suya may produce anything from a warm glow to fire in the mouth. The typhoid moniker refers to the fact that these tasty treats may have been roasted hours earlier, then loosely wrapped in a dirty piece of stiff paper, and waved under the noses of every passerby in the dusty street, and made available for inspection ...

A personal hypothesis: When a person returns from a short-term cross-cultural exposure (days, weeks, up to three months), they tend to glow with the bright-eyed observation that "people are the same everywhere you go! Isn't it lovely." When a person returns from a longer-stint cultural immersion (year or two), they tend to harbour some frustrations, and think, "good gracious, those people are so different in their thinking! How aggravating." And when you spend a lifetime together, learning and growing, the response is probably more measured. It's not "those" people anymore. We're all the same, yes,.... but, boy, are we ever different. And there's a richness to that.

One of my first nights in the village, trying to fall asleep long after dark, I heard a loud call echoing across the rainforest, a sort of cross between a croak and a trill. A bird seemed like a logical producer of this sound; a large carnivorous bird. I was sure there was a vulture of some sort perched outside my window at the back of the house, screaming into the night. One of the fortunate things about my irrational fears of all things avian is that I'm fairly adept at self-delusion, so, heart in my throat, I convinced myself it was only a...well,....an oversized grasshopper, or crazed frog, or something -- anything -- other than a bird. You can well imagine my relief one morning when Becky asked if I'd heard the hyraxes. "Is that the creature that makes that trilling call?" I asked warily, unsure if I wanted to know. "What is it?" "It's the most interesting creature," she said. "It looks like kind of like a rabbit, but it lives up in a...

It was nearly the end of my time in the village when the subject of Mike's solar panels came up and I asked Dan how they worked. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and impishly replied, "You're wondering about Mike's white man magic?" There's a worldview difference in play here. I didn't know what caused Mike's solar panels to reorient to the direction of the sun every morning but I knew there was a very plausible explanation. Perhaps there was a winch on a timer, perhaps it was activated by solar power. Maybe even Simon, the yard worker did it midmorning without my ever noticing him. It never occurred to me there was anything mysterious about the panels' movement, despite the fact it was beyond my comprehension. In a Western mindset, we assume there is a logical explanation for everything. We don't consign things we don't understand to the realm of mystery, magic, and spirit -- we expect that science will sooner or later be able to ...

When I was a child, the new 3 Rs were introduced to us in school: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Since then we haven't stopped hearing about recycling. The other two, however -- arguably the more effective of the strategies -- have been much more muted. Recycling has caught on while the others haven't because the only change to lifestyle or mindset necessary is spending an extra few seconds thinking about which garbage can to put waste into. We can keep getting new things, keep using stuff, but with less guilt now, because we can recycle them! Reducing has gained a bit of attention through new technologies which make it fun by necessitating the purchase of new things. Far more fun that simply acquiring less, we reduce by buying new high-efficiency lightbulbs, toilets, windows, washing machines, cars, the list goes on. I'm not arguing that these things have no value, because they certainly are a step in the right direction. But they fail to achieve the shift in thinking and acting ...

I was watching The Last King of Scotland the other day and so many things were familiar from my experience in Cameroon . Even though the movie is set in East Africa , the place has far more similarities to West Africa than to North America .   But there was one moment that did not ring true, and it took me a while to realize what was wrong. When Idi Amin addresses the crowd after his seizing power, he speaks eloquently and passionately into a crystal clear sound system.   Wait—crystal clear sound system?   Did any outdoor sound system back in the 70s sound that good, much less ones used in rural East Africa ? In Cameroon in the late 2000s, I was not in the presence of any sound systems that did not squawk, squeal, stammer, and static the entire time they were being used.   So close, but not quite.

Not quite slinky, but I love to say that line. The light has returned, aided in part by Daylight Savings Time, and I bask in the thought of increasingly long evenings. Though the wind is still frigid, there's a wonderful earthiness in the air, a damp but fresh and living scent on the breeze that teases with a promise of spring, even while the gale bites your cheeks and threatens to draw the very air from your lungs. The streets and sidewalks are one massive murky puddle, but AHHHHH! it's not -30 anymore; we've shed toques and mittens and heavy coats, so what's some wet feet compared with a fatal fall on an icy sidewalk. In many respects, a Manitoba spring is a miserable time of year, but after the harsh winter, we've learned to dredge every speck of appreciation from the warmer temperatures, and know well enough to savour every moment of outdoor time before mosquito season starts.

Cribbed from someone else's wisdom in a forum discussion: "we obey because we are saved, not saved because we obey." I like that. A very good reminder for those of us who have a tendency to slide toward legalism. Further to that, I suppose, is, we obey because we love and are loved, not out of fear or guilt. Makes me thing of this: "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord." John 10:8

Suddenly, everyone is concerned about being "green". Every major government project is touted for its "green" merits and people are developing "green" habits like bringing a shopping bag to the grocery store. This is all well and good, but as long as we're just being "green" because it's the fad of the day, we're still missing the point. Sustainability is what we need to achieve, or at least strive toward. Reducing our vast consumption patterns is not about being trendy, it's about developing habits that enable resources to last longer, and be shared in a more equitable fashion. "Going green" isn't just a good idea for the environment's sake, it's a good idea for everyone's sake. It's a good idea for our health, enabling us to live fuller, healthier lives, not just because of the better food we're eating and the fewer chemicals we're ingesting, but also through the way "green" habits...

To hear that someone has "found Christianity" really doesn't get me excited. Who knows what that means? What I would love to hear, however, is that you met Jesus and he changed your life.

I'm not afraid of bringing rain. Even if I did believe in the superstition, what do I care about a bit of precipitation? No, that old reticence from Cameroon has stayed with me. When I saw a spider in Cameroon, I weighed the relative harm the arachnid caused me versus the relative harm it could cause to other insects (like mosquitoes) which could cause relative harm to me. The scales definitely tipped toward letting the spiders live. Now, it just seems rude to dispatch them without another moment's thought.

Two rather abstruse names are used for two different kinds of heavy-duty reusable bags in Cameroon. I was able to get the history behind “fertilizer,” a general word for an all-purpose shopping bag, but despite Johannes’ explanation, I never quite got a handle on why the extra-large plaid suitcase-style bags were called “Ghana-must-go.” Fertilizer. Fertilizer came/comes in a sort of gunny sack, which of course, would be reused as a carrying bag, small mat, or however it could be pressed into service. Over time, the content word was lost, leaving the adjective, and the word came to be used for bags in general. A common phenomenon in word formation. Ghana-must-go. I’m sure there’s a nugget of etymological fact in this explanation, but I’m not quite sure where it is. Johannes, Scotts’ cook, says the bags have this name because during some football (soccer) tournament they were used by the team from Ghana. Everybody wanted Cameroon to win, so they said “Ghana must go,” and ever since tho...

"Of the 2,400 language groups with portions of the Bible, roughly 1,115 have the New Testament. Only 426 have a full Bible including the Old Testament."— Christianity Today quoted these figures from Wycliffe in September 2006.   One of the neat things about the Oroko translation project is that from the beginning, the translators planned to give the Oroko the whole message of the Bible, not merely the New Testament with portions from the Old. The team is presently working simultaneously on the gospel of Luke and the book of Genesis. The book of Ruth has already been published, and the book of Jonah is in the final stages of approval for publication.

"Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered," Leviticus 24:19-20 (NRSV). I always understood that in the context of "if someone takes your eye, you're entitled to take one of his; what's fair is fair," and thought it vaguely unfair. I didn't quite understand what about the law in Exodus was particularly just or righteous. If you've lost an eye, causing someone else to lose theirs hardly seems the way to make reparation. It may satisfy the bloodlust for a while, but even that, I suspect would end up leaving you cold. How is this an improvement was beyond me. But if the previous way of doing things -- which is likely -- was to take two eyes for one, a life for two eyes, a family for one soul, and so on, in an ever-escalating chain of violent retribution, suddenly an eye for an eye seems sufficiently fair after all. Having functio...