kar0ling

Touched by Midas, autumn arms shower gold and the stench of death. *I'm not saying this poem is any good, but these images struck my fancy as I rode in the glorious days before winter's cruel skin grew over every surface.

Since I've already got an entire transition month of biking notated here, it seems a good place to journal my season switches. November 11, I was still on my Skyline despite trace amounts of snow and significant chill. The next day, a snow covering and slippery streets advised me to get out the mountain bike. By Friday, I realized it was dry enough to take out the old Skyline again for a much faster ride (since my seat post refuses to stay at the height it is set. Despite no sign of it even in the wee hours of Sunday morning, by daylight, there was a heavy blanket of snow that convinced me winter is decidedly here to stay. Welcome back, slowness and fear.

If we are to love our neighbours, before doing anything else we must see our neighbours. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in. --Frederick Buechner To really see people, as Buechner urges above, is not so simple as telling them the right story. My boss and I sometimes talk about how in our zeal to "reach the lost," evangelicals sometimes fail to actually like people. Of course, we would all decry treating people as projects, but it's really quite easy to do. We so easily focus on "the need," be it spiritual or material, that we reduce people to what they are not.  I'm not convinced that the starting place of the good news should be convincing people of their sin and need for salvation. I think we tend to have an niggling conviction, however hard we try to quash it, that there is something ...

You wouldn't expect it of an eco-crusading, habitually opining, gimmick-embracing (Commuter Challenge, anyone?!) person such as myself, but I don't like the October Dress Project . It's an initiative, usually celebrated with daily pictures on social media, to wear the same one dress every day for the month of October. What's not to like about an event described as "anti-consumerism, pro-simplicity, anti-conformity, pro-imagination"? Why do I object to promoting the humility (in Western culture) of wearing the same article of clothing day after day? Its execution entirely misses the point. If only the single dress wardrobe actually meant simplicity, I would champion the project, but  iterations of the dress project I've seen have instead been a celebration of excess. They become a celebration of how many different ways you can dress up that garment so no one will even notice you've been wearing the same one dress for 31 days. One dress, yes,...

CAVEAT: I fired this off quickly at the end of a long day. So I'm probably going to come back over the next few days to sharpen and refine it -- or at very least, correct a few inevitable typos. But I wanted to put the pressure on myself to get it out there and not leave it endlessly in draft status.  My weekend has been dominated by human rights. Mostly, I was hanging out at The Forks, enjoying free concerts held in honour of the opening. And I watched the tail end of the ceremony streaming online, and kept tabs on the Twitter discussions, and read articles about it in the local paper. Even the Sunday sermon was -- coincidentally, I believe, since it simply came in rotation of our series on 1 Corinthians -- on Paul's teaching on the rights of a Christian (1 Cor 9). And to round it out a bit, I attended a Palestinian cultural celebration dance event. The paper reported our premier describing the protestors at the grand opening ceremony -- who succeeded in being disruptive w...

Or, what these four walls say about my city The Free Press is doing a Saturday feature series on the architectural history of Winnipeg which I find speaks uncannily to its current social state. After regaling the reader with the ambitious, lofty, exciting plans for this upstart city -- bursting with promise in the days before the Panama Canal killed freight rail traffic and social unrest spawned a defeatist mindset that still hampers efforts at progress today -- the authors come clean about "the real Winnipeg" the "City Beautiful" plans were trying to banish. There were pawnshops filled with weaponry, and bars and brothels galore. And slums to call home for the hopeful immigrants lured with false promises at the end of the journey.  "In a book entitled A Social History of Urban Growth, [Alan F.J.] Artibise concluded Winnipeg's shortage of housing, inadequate water and sewage disposal services [in the ever-poor, overcrowded North End] -- combined ...

The tower of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights was lit as I came over the Norwood Bridge today. That got me thinking of how impressed I was by the architecture when I had the privilege of touring the place in the final months they offered interior tours. At the time, I was awfully tempted to purchase a membership just to hang out in the building. And it wasn't only the architecture that was compelling; the vision that our tour guide expressed of a living museum with lectures and theatre pieces and discussion groups or Q&A sessions with experts broke through my wall of skepticism that the Holocaust would dominate in this rights museum which violated Aboriginal sensibilities by building at the Forks. I pondered this inclination now as I consider the growing furor about the museum's emphasis (mostly its exclusions) from various groups wishing to boycott the place. However, besides the fact that the museum isn't open yet so we don't actually know what is in it (or...

My brother-in-law knows how to manipulate me to make a decision. My sister and I are agonizingly slow at making up our minds, he has cleverly learned to introduce ideas to us with plenty of lead time so that we not only come around, but do so with the conviction of having thought of it ourselves. Thus it is the more significant that for the second time in nearly 10 years, I made a snap decision without my brother-in-law's help (with relatively little uncertainty, though much trepidation) to do something uncharacteristic – that is, drop everything and go overseas. When I saw an appeal for participants to join MB Mission’s ACTION France team , something in me rose up and said, “let’s do it!” Those foreign forays represent two of a small handful of instances when I felt an immediate and clear sense of the Spirit’s prompting. So I’m going to France. For 5 weeks (July 5–August 9). On a French-language summer discipleship program in conjunction with Alsatian Mennonite churches. A...

There was an irritating wobble in my pedal. Then a wobble and a catch. Then a wobble and a catch and a clunk from the crank arm hitting my kick stand. Then the crank arm fell off with a clatter. ...good thing I was on a deserted street less than a block from home. This little anecdote actually dates from early winter, before the snow fell, in the first days of riding my winter bike for the season -- I just didn't want to lose it in the backposts of my Facebook.

Continuing to be the poster-child for singles in Mennonite churches, I was invited to share my testimony at a local congregation as the pastor preached through 1 Corinthians 7. Below is my script, mainly recut from earlier versions. British author Rudyard Kipling tells a story about how several of the wild animals become tame. The dog and the horse are lured out of their wild-ness by promises of food and companionship but the cat stays aloof, declaring, “I am the cat that walks by herself and all places are alike to me.” I’ve always identified with that cat. I’m independent – I can recaulk my bathtub by myself, navigate a strange city alone, and make my own schedule. I’m single – I’m don’t have a husband or boyfriend or children to come with me or ask me to go there. “I am the cat that walks by herself and all places are alike to me.” As the demographic of single adults becomes an increasing part of Canadian population, I suspect there are many others who feel the same. The lin...

Well, that was a day! If it had been any other morning, an unexpected omission with my transportation wouldn't have been of so very much account, but this morning, I was supposed to be at a meeting in NK at 9 a.m. So I was displeased (and flabbergasted) to discover my stem missing when I went to unlock my bike this morning. It's a tad difficult to ride like this. I rushed upstairs to my winter bike, hoping, after a conversation with a bike-riding (and bike-fixing) coworker, that a simple application of grease would partially address the problem that caused me to park the steed. After some lubrication, the chain was sagging like a plumber's pants and I realized the pushing and pulling in my drive chain was caused by the slack catching up with a start. In the drizzly back alley, I finally realized my rear derailleur was at fault for shifting forward, got my fingers good and greasy fiddling with the chain, and, after a few false starts up and down the street second-gues...

That I was blogging through April last year is quite helpful to gauge expectations and precedent for bikeable weather this year. Thus, this seems a good place to note for future reference that I took out my 3-season bike on Thursday, April 17. I'd dropped it off at Natural Cycle for a tune-up at the end of March, so it was ready Apr. 1 already, but, the roads still having some slippery spots and a whole lot of gravel, I decided to stay on the winter bike a while longer to spare my lovely from the worst wet and grit. Then it was hard to gauge when would be an appropriate time to make the switch. In the end, my bike made the decision for me. A month before, I'd had a bizarre incident with my drive train where my chain was tugging and pulling and catching and simply feeling wretched. With no measures to fix it, the problem disappeared. A few days before the fateful Wednesday, I'd been feeling some wonkiness in the drive train but it felt like my right pedal -- which ha...

Once again, some advocacy group has declared April "Bike Every Day" month, a group that obviously doesn't live in Manitoba where fair weather bike riders only begin to think of hauling the two-wheeled conveyance out of the shop part-way through the month. So numbers for Bike Winnipeg's annual spring bike count were pretty low this sunny but brisk morning. I learned something, though, and not about the demographics of Winnipeg's active transportation participants. I found myself tensing up when an approaching person's appearance suggested a life on the street. Thoughts like, "I wonder what it's like to get mugged" reared their ugly head, and, selfishly, "how will I extricate myself from some awkward conversation with someone who may not be fully in possession of all mental faculties?" On average, these persons of whom I tended to be apprehensive were the friendliest passersby of the morning. Given my previous post on how I see ...

Horse and buggy Mennonites don't love horses, says Mennonite historian Royden Loewen; it's suffering. I suspect it's not that they don't like their horses, nor that they don't find some parts of the horse-dependent existence enjoyable, even preferable to mainstream society's ways, but it's not some horse crazy notion that leads them to that choice. They're under no illusion that their simple life is necessarily easier. It would be more comfortable to have cars. It would be more comfortable to have electricity. But at what cost? It's not financial cost at issue, but the cost to souls. It's hard to be mindful when life is easy. It's easy to become independent and preoccupied with leisure. It's hard to keep God in his place and us in ours. Suffering -- no, not a mortal suffering, not the pain of broken relationships, nor a masochistic infliction, but a choice to do things the hard way for the greater good -- that's the saving gra...