Pastors Week concludes...

It has been an amazing, inspiring, challenging, and insightful week! The sessions with Diana Butler Bass, as well as the worship gatherings and workshops, have provided me with food for the mind, body, and soul. I would highly recommend AMBS's Pastors Week and/or books and conferences by Diana Butler Bass to anyone who is concerned or involved in the leadership and mission of the church. I sat beside a pastor this afternoon who has been coming to Pastors Week every year since he started pastoring and he called this his oasis. I feel as though I need some time to process all that I have received over the past week and fortunately I have a few days before the regular class session resumes next week to do some reflecting. I do want to leave you with one thought from this afternoon's session, though, as food for thought: "Nostalgia is the enemy of hope."

Pastors Week...

This week is Pastors Week at AMBS. It's a four day event, bringing in pastors from all over Canada and the US. The theme this year is Imagining a New Old Church with Diana Butler Bass as the keynote speaker, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us. She studied 50 churches that were described as having vitality and found that one of the common denominators was intentional Christian practices. She is also debunking the myth that mainline churches are in decline. It has been an exciting week thus far and I'm looking forward to the remainder of it.

http://www.dianabutlerbass.com/

As part of Pastors Week, participants are also given the opportunity to attend workshops on any number of topics. Yesterday I attended a workshop called "Where have all our Sabbaths gone?", led by our professor of spiritual formation. It was a great time of discussing the importance of Sabbath and brainstorming ways of incorporating daily, weekly, yearly, and lifetime Sabbaths into our busy lives. One point that I found interesting was thinking about putting margins on each day, creating white space on the pages of our lives for prayer, reflection, and worship. One idea for a weekly Sabbath was to create a "Sabbath Break" in the place of adult Sunday school. Even our Sunday morning at church has become so incredibly hectic that no one seems to get a break. Creating a quite space where people can escape to journal or practice centering prayer is a great way to offer people the space that they just can't seem to find in their daily lives. Another interesting idea is to think of retirement as a lifetime Sabbath. Often retirement is this empty space that we fill with any number of things that we dream about doing once we have time, but what difference would it make in our lives if we think about retirement as Sabbath and prepare for it in this way?

...in the book of Exodus we read, "In six days God made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested, and was refreshed." Here the word "refreshed" literally means "and God exhaled." The creation of the world was like the life-quickening inhale. The Sabbath is the exhale. Thus...all creation moves with the rhythm of the inhale and the exhale. Without the Sabbath exhale, the life-giving inhale is impossible. ~Wayne Muller in Sabbath.

Published author, so to speak...

Today I received my copy of The Messenger, the journal of the Evangelical Mennonite Conference, and to my surprise they had published another one of my articles. Here's the link if you're interested.

Covenant Community:
http://www.emconf.ca/Messenger/vol47/Messenger-47-01.pdf

Here's an article from last summer.
Sabbath and Hospitality:
http://www.emconf.ca/Messenger/vol46/Messenger-46-12.pdf

Winter...Time for Contemplation

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. -Thomas Merton

I have recently come to realize something about myself: For me, wintertime is a time for contemplation.

When I arrived back in Elkhart following my Christmas holidays I felt unsettled. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first. Maybe it's just that I'm not ready for my holidays to be over or maybe I'm not really into any steady routine yet, I thought. The weather was very spring-like here compared to Manitoba and Saskatchwan, with temperatures ranging from -10C to +5C and no snow on the ground. Apparently that's quite typical here, and along with the mild temperatures come cloudy days. I was told when I first moved here that the sun goes away for winter - being so close to Lake Michigan, Elkhart is usually has cloud cover during the winter months with only a few days of sunshine.

The next week, though, the snow began to fall and the temperatures plummeted into the -20s. When it snows here it is very beautiful with huge snowflakes that fall straight down. With the colder temperatures also came the sunshine. As the ground went from a dull grey/brown to a sparkling white I noticed myself settle into my usual winter pattern, one that until now I didn't realize that I had. I felt this need to create my cocoon, to turn inward and reflect. I do this each winter, I discovered. Just as the seasons have their rhythms, so too does my spiritual life and wintertime, especially, is my time for contemplation.

Next week I am going to go on an overnight, self-guided spiritual retreat at The Hermitage, a retreat center in Michigan about 40 minutes north of here. I hope that it will be both a time of centering and contemplation.

Sue Monk Kidd, a new favorite author...

So when I'm not napping, I've been reading a few books. Not only have I been reading books for class, I've also read a few books for pleasure.

One of my friends recently gave me a copy of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. For me, this was one of those books that once you pick it up you can't set it down. Last Sunday I spent the entire day in bed reading this book.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina - a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come (from the back cover).

A quote I like from the book:

"Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about."
I loved the idea of bees having a secret life, just like the one I was living.
"What other secrets have they got?" I wanted to know.

I loved the depth with which Sue Monk Kidd writes, so I decided to pick up another one of her books from the AMBS library, one that was also recommended to me by a friend.

The last few days I've been reading When the Heart Waits. While The Secret Life of Bees is a novel, this one is a moving account of Monk Kidd's own story through some of the darkest days of her life and how waiting can be a fertile emptiness, the space that we most need for inner awakening to take place. This work is really spiritual direction in book form.

Though I'm not finished the book yet, here are a couple of quotes:

"If I can't trust God now, when I need him the most, how can I ever trust him again?" she cried. It wasn't a matter of whether God could be trusted, of course, but of whether or not she could wait. She didn't understand that there was a journey to be made here. A waiting, a gestating, a slow and uncertain birthing. That is where God was to be found. Not in the erasing of the experience, but in the embracing of it.

"Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are, " (Brother Anthony) explained. "People recoil from it because they don't want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves."

Next of my list of books to read is The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.

Caught napping...

Ahhh, a crisp, snowy Sunday afternoon, curled up in the sun, snuggled into an oversized beanbag chair, reading a good book. Life is good. Then my eyelids begin to get heavy and next thing I know my roommate is standing over me with a camera - she caught me in the act. I love Sunday afternoon naps in the sun.

Sparkling...

"When it snows, you have two choices: shovel or make snow angels."

I do both.

"The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only." Joseph Wood Krutch

"The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow.
Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show."
"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." John Ruskin
"Roomservice. Roomservice, don't send up any more ice." W. C. Fields

“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”- The Motto Of The U.S. Postal Service

"Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, 'I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.'" Maya Angelou

Snow Day...

The other day I was looking for a cheap pair of winter boots and couldn't find any. Today I'm really wishing that I had some! We've been in a "winter storm" since Friday and it's only supposed to get worse tomorrow. I laughed as they told us to pick up any groceries we might need before the weekend because a storm was coming. I went out on the weekend, no problem. A little snow never stopped a prairie girl. But what I'm amazed at is how much snow can fall in a short period of time, and it's very wet snow. This morning I was supposed to go to an appointment and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it out of the parking lot; plus my car hasn't been dug out for a couple of days. Fortunately, the office called and cancelled the appointment.

It's actually really beautiful outside. The snow covered ground is much prettier than what we had last week when there wasn't any snow on the ground and it looked like late fall/early spring - very unusual in my experience of January but completely normal here, or so I'm told.

I took one picture out of my bedroom window and maybe later today I'll venture out and get a few more shots. I'm not sure if you can see it in the picture but there are huge snowflakes falling and they're swirling around. It's almost like the snow is falling down and then blowing back up at the same time.

January...

Well, it's back to Elkhart and back into the swing of things, kind of. I had initially registered for a January interterm course, which is a 3 week intensive, but after talking with my faculty advisor and planning my spring course of study we decided that it would be best for me to spend January working ahead on some of my spring semester assignments. I'm registered for 14.5 credit hours next semester, as compared to the 9.5 that I had last semester. Spring semester starts the first week of February and I'll be taking the following courses: Intro to Bible Study Tools, Human Sexuality and Christian Ethics, Pastoral Counselling and Theology, Mission and Peace, Formation Seminar, and an independent study called Soul and Voice where I'm going to learn how to sing! So in addition to working ahead on assignments, I'm also catching up on some work in the admissions office, and even having time to relax in between. The other day I pulled out my scrapbooking stuff and actually got into my scrapbooking for the first time since coming to school here. I received a season of Corner Gas on DVD for Christmas so I've been enjoying those as well. So that's what my January is looking like thus far. Happy 2009!

A Seminary Student Goes Home for Christmas - Part 2

A few random scenes from home, the Great White North:

Downtown Hudson Bay. Compare to downtown Chicago where I had been just a couple days prior (sorry, no picture of Chicago available but I'm sure you can imagine).

Mom, dad and I took the scenic route back to Manitoba, on my way to catch the plane in Winnipeg. This is just south of Hudson Bay. Sun dogs.
Southern Manitoba.
The snow blew the entire way from Hudson Bay to Winnipeg and we didn't even count how many vehicles we saw in the ditch!

A Seminary Student Goes Home for Christmas - Part 1

Well, I made it home for Christmas. It was an incredibly relaxing time with good eats, cool treats, and lots of laughs. I'm sure someone put in an order for -20 to -30C temperatures over my two week holiday just so I wouldn't forget what I'm missing while living in the States.

As we waited for my sister and brother-in-law to arrive on Christmas day, my mom, dad, brother, and I decided to go sledding at Hardy's Hill for old time's sake. Here are some snapshots of our adventure. The full-length DVD, produced by my brother-in-law, is available for viewing from any of the family members. It's a must see if you want a good laugh (that is, if you appreciate the small-town/hick-ville kind of humour)!

This is what happens when one goes home for Christmas and doesn't come prepared with winter clothes for sledding...the family is more than happy to help you out.

Team ___________________

(this one's just too good; you have to help me come up with a name for it)

For some reason there was a broken Jeep toy and GT at the hill. Had the Jeep had more than one wheel we probably would have taken it for a ride down the hill.

Mom demonstrating her acrobatic sledding skills.

Andrew, man vs. nature (or a gravel pit).

My lame attempt at going over a jump.

Dad, showing us how it's really done.

I've had enough. I'm going home.