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Showing posts from November, 2014

Beautiful decay

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.

Winter update

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.

On seeing

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 ...