Photo:Mt. Fisher from Bethesda Pool
“God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent.
Has He said, and will He not do?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?
Behold, I have received a command to bless;
He has blessed, and I cannot reverse it.”
(Numbers 23:19, 20)
Ben Heppner
El Cid by Massenet
An English translation, from the Tenorissimo! site:
Ah! It’s all over.
My sweet dream of glory,
my dreams of happiness
have gone forever!
You have taken my love from me,
you take victory from me,
Lord, I bow to your will!
Oh Lord, oh Judge, oh Father,
always indistinct, yet always present,
I have adored You in happy times,
and blessed You in the dark days.
I go wherever your law calls me,
free of all human regrets.
Oh Lord, oh Judge, oh Father,
Your image alone is in my soul
which I submit into Your hands.
Oh heavens blue and shining,
spirits on high, descend upon me,
it is the soldier who despairs,
but the believer maintains his faith.
You can come, you can appear,
dawn of the eternal day.
Oh Lord, oh Judge, oh Father!
The servant of a just master
answers Your call without fear,
Oh Lord, oh Judge, oh Father!
Ah! tout est bien fini.
Mon beau rêve de gloire,
mes rêves de bonheur
s’envolent à jamais!
Tu m’as pris mon amour,
tu me prends la victoire,
Seigneur, je me soumets!
O souverain, ô juge, ô père,
toujours voilé, présent toujours,
je t’adorais au temps prospère,
et te bénis aux sombres jour.
Je vais où ta loi me réclame,
libre de tous regrets humains.
O souverain, ô juge, ô père,
ta seule image est dans mon âme
que je remets entre tes mains.
O firmament azur, lumière,
esprits d’en haut, penchés sur moi,
c’est le soldat que désespère,
mais le chrétien garde sa foi.
Tu peux venir, tu peux paraître,
aurore du jour éternel.
O souverain, ô juge, ô père!
Le serviteur d’un juste maître
répond sans crainte à ton appel,
ô souverain, ô juge, ô père!
Painting: Consuming Fire, acrylic on canvas 
“When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not harm thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.
The soul that on Jesus doth lean for repose,
I will not, I will not, desert to his foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.”
(from “How Firm a Foundation” by John Keene)
Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:28,29)
Kootenay River
You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water.
(Psalm 65:9)
Kootenay Lake
Bluer than Blue
The artist leading the workshop in the desert city looked at my paintings and asked, perhaps facetiously, “You use a lot of blue. Are you depressed?”
I looked around at the other participants’ work mostly done in earth tones –beiges, browns, greys –with occasional splashes of red and yellow. Desert colours.
“No,” I said, “Not anymore. I just come from a place that is mostly blue.”
When I arrived home in the Rocky Mountains of Canada a few months later, deep lavender blue skies, shifting azure-blue lakes, paler and paler layers of blue mountains and sparkling blue snow shadows seemed even bluer than the paintings.
Bluer than blue.
I come from a place that is mostly blue.
To some blue communicates serenity. To some blue communicates depression. I come from a place that was mostly depression.
A while ago I was told in a dream, “Look to the area of your greatest failure, for therein lies your greatest success.”
There was that night.
That night I bowed on a stage before a large audience jumping up to shout “Brava” and throw flowers. Most of them didn’t know that underneath a gorgeous costume I was balancing on one leg the whole time. I had broken the other one only a few days before.
Then there was that night.
That night, I cowered in a locked ward where a silhouetted person behind a flashlight peered in my room every fifteen minutes to make sure I was still alive.
That night on the stage, the night of “my greatest success,” was actually my greatest failure. That was the night when I identified myself as a strong-willed, disciplined overcomer. That’s when I was foolish enough to think that if I just worked hard enough I could earn love, respect, and adulation.
The night on the ward, the night of “my greatest failure,” was actually the night of my greatest success. That was the night when I admitted it took more courage to live than to die. I was fresh out of courage. That was the night when my tank hit empty, when I had no will power, no self-discipline, no hope. That was the night when grace pulled me deep down into those depths of blue and began to show me that freedom means nothing left to lose. Freedom means letting go of self-sufficiency, self-righteousness, and self-promotion. That was the night when Jesus Christ took me by the hand and lifted me up toward the light. Drowning in emptiness and being lifted up to a new life of hope was a kind of baptism.
It took a while to get on my feet. I had a lot of forgiving to do. Forgiving myself was the hardest test of wrestling pride, reputation, and the albatross of potential to the ground. I still have to remember to punch it in the beak regularly.
Blue means freedom, revelation, and serenity now. I understand better what Paul meant when he wrote:
Yet every advantage that I had gained I considered lost for Christ’s sake. Yes, and I look upon everything as loss compared with the overwhelming gain of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For his sake I did in actual fact suffer the loss of everything, but I considered it useless rubbish compared with being able to win Christ. For now my place is in him, and I am not dependent upon any of the self-achieved righteousness of the Law. God has given me that genuine righteousness which comes from faith in Christ. How changed are my ambitions! Now I long to know Christ and the power shown by his resurrection: now I long to share his sufferings, even to die as he died, so that I may perhaps attain as he did, the resurrection from the dead.
Yet, my brothers, I do not consider myself to have “arrived”, spiritually, nor do I consider myself already perfect. But I keep going on, grasping ever more firmly that purpose for which Christ grasped me. My brothers, I do not consider myself to have fully grasped it even now. But I do concentrate on this: I leave the past behind and with hands outstretched to whatever lies ahead I go straight for the goal—my reward the honour of being called by God in Christ.
(Philippians 3)
Only Someone who knows the plans He has for us has the courage it takes to show us how to die so that we might live.
A Light in the Dark
You light a lamp for me.
The Lord, my God, lights up my darkness.
(Psalms 18:28)
Photo: Tam O’ Shanter Creek
So much of art, music, and poetry
is learning to leave spaces,
observe rests,
and reserve words.
So much of maturity
is learning to leave spaces,
observe rests,
and reserve words.
So much of faith is learning
abundance is
not needing to eat the whole feast
today.
In the Kingdom of God
there is time
to savour his goodness.
His loving kindness endures forever.
Photo: moulded
Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould.
(Romans 12:2 -J.B. Phillips version)
I’m weird.
I’m weird and finally okay with it.
Some people are just meant to be on the edge of the crowd, not really out there, but not really fitting in either.
If something is trending you’ll find me wending down some other path. I figure the trendies have got that one covered.
When the tourists are snapping photos of each other in front of iced mountain peaks, I’m focusing on lichen blanketed rocks in the ditch. I weep for the clown, rejoice for the beggar, fast at the feast, and arise to do battle at night. When the clan gathers for a celebration in the heat of a summer’s eve, I slip out in the moonlight to breathe the cool falling cedar and pine air as it settles along the creek bed.
My poor, dear mother never knew what to do with me. I was hopelessly out of step.
I tried. I really did. I wore the uncomfortable fashionable clothes and the crippling high heels. I endured the horrid chemical smells of perms and hair dyes and nail polish. I spent far too much of my income and far too many years of my life obsessively following diet and exercise programs that, in the long run, always left me in worse shape than when I started. I listened to hours of pop music trying to understand the allure of a limited assortment of repetitive chords, rhythms and lyrics. I read the best-sellers and watched the Oscared pondering the pay-off of fear and pessimism. I paid attention to political pundits who knew what was wrong with everyone else’s ideas and I faithfully endured more sermons and devotional talks than I dare to recall. I tried to participate in the church ladies’ games (which usually involved rolls of toilet paper and or unscrambling baby and cooking related words.) The only spiritual maturity I gained from those exercises was learning how to doze with my eyes open and with an is-every-body-happy-smile on my face.
Then I realized one day I was spending a lot of effort trying to win the approval of people who didn’t really have mine -not that they were doing anything wrong, it’s just that I had no passion for the things that seemed to move them.
There is only one person whose approval I really need, and that is God’s. He likes weird. He can work with weird. When I look at the weird folk he loved in the Bible I realize I am in good company. Jesus didn’t exactly fit in either.
The crowd can move on without me. I’ll catch up later. Right now I am just enjoying watching the osprey flying a pas de deux, the daisies growing in cracks of asphalt, and working on becoming who God intended me to be in the first place.
Photo: Tam O’ Shanter Creek
Since then it is by faith that we are justified, let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have confidently entered into this new relationship of grace, and here we take our stand,
in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance;
this in turn will develop a mature character, and a character of this sort produces a steady hope,
a hope that will never disappoint us.
Already we have some experience of
the love of God flooding through our hearts
by the Holy Spirit given to us.
(Romans 5:1-5)
Charis: Subject to Change 