“It began on a long wooden pew.

I grew up on The Banner, Calvinettes (now GEMS), rolls of King peppermints, and the steadfast traditions of my Christian Reformed church in suburban British Columbia.

I used to believe that at some point all Christian Reformed kids had to spread their wings, fly the CRC coop, and explore the wider world of Christianity. We’d travel like vagabonds to charismatic revivals and Pentecostal worship services—finally, finally, experiencing the omnipotent God we’d learned so much about.

The moment my last high school bell rang, I hopped a plane to New Zealand. Eventually I settled in a prominent Baptist congregation in the heart of Queenstown, where my brother and I lived.

My memories of the church are sparse. I remember my brother, in a testosterone-induced flurry, scaling the church’s roof with his bare hands. I remember the calico church cat who’d comb through the pews looking for bored churchgoers’ attention. But the memory that stands out clearest is the particularly bright Sunday morning the minister read aloud the following passage:

Now listen, you say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. . . . Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:13-15).

Those words helped me, at the age of 18, first understand God’s bigger story. I could make my own plans, but ultimately God was guiding my path…”

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An excerpt of my piece in the October issue of The Banner. Read the full article here.

My hand, Bowen Island

“Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

- Thomas Merton, Trappist monk

K-os says it best: http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/videos.html?id=1130063130 (I encourage you to watch the entire interview.) 

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For the past number of weeks I have been questioning my own honesty. Asking the question, what is my first responsibility: to be real or to be understood? 

I am a believer that “the Truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32) While this verse from the Bible is speaking of Jesus, I also believe it is speaking of every truth — every bit of honesty.

The truth shall set us free. 

Honesty / truthfulness are our first responsibility: to ourselves, to each other and to God. Nothing else will do. 

To k-os, an artist I have long loved and admired, honesty is the best poetry. I couldn’t agree with him more.

I reread the article “Five reasons to stay in church” by Aiden Enns, Publisher of Geez Magazine, this morning, as well as this comment from ‘angela’:

“This is a re-occuring event in my life: I am sitting in church, in my pew in the balcony, and someone is talking down below at the pulpit, and I start to twitch. I shift. I look out the window, out the door. I drink my coffee and stare at my hands, and I tell myself: Self, don’t leave. You will miss out.

And it’s true. Some days, I swear I need to mount those stairs to the pew in the balcony with a sack of nails and a hammer and pound my shoes to the floor because (lord almighty) I can hardly breathe from what’s being said, and then other days I sit, I drink my coffee, and god siddles up alongside me and smashes my heart to smithereens with all that beauty he’s got pouring out of that stained glass window, that preacher’s mouth, that 200 year old song we just sang, that grandpa that camps out at church to keep the furnace going in the winter, those flaws, flaws, flaws. 

I love my church. It disapoints me, hurts my heart, leads me astray. And it elevates me, heals me, and shines God’s face on me.

It ain’t heaven yet, baby. That’s not the point.”

I couldn’t agree more.

For the past few months I have been thinking a great deal about church. In our absence from Vancouver Michael and I have been intentional about discussing and praying together about where God is calling us in this next season of life (living in Burnaby, being new parents.) A couple of weeks ago, while Michael met with Oxford colleges, I sat down and tried to put my very complicated emotions about God and Church into words. No simple task, for me at least.

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I’m sitting on a Tuesday morning sipping a hazelnut latte on Ship Street in Oxford. I’m staring out the window at a narrow lane. Three bicycles lean chained in front of a stone church nestled in this busy bit of Englandshire. A sign outside says: Enter. Rest. Pray.

Amen. This is what church should be: An open door. 

I feel so broken by my experience of church. It has changed how I see God. It has stripped the mystery from His face like the curling of paint: unwelcome moisture lacing papers, slowly. 

I carry regret and hurt like a stone. 

I have quieted my voice. I fear my words sifting through air, like a vapour: gone. Can words change anything? (Actions speak louder than words…) 

So many friends have been hurting, and disillusioned. Now: J, M & A. Then: K, J, P, R, dozens of others. Still, I’ve stayed steadfast.  

God gave us the entirety of the Bible with all of its mysteries. There is no room for mystery, innuendo, or questioning in our community. I feel we are pale and one-dimensional because of it. 

Is this the Gospel? The Gospel that has spilled from century to century, confounding the wise of every known culture? Is this the Gospel that whispers beyond the heavens? Beyond creation?

To my mind, reducing God to a five-part sermon is a serious sin, the greatest act of treason to the cross, to Jesus, to His sacrifice. 

How dare we take the depth and complexity of His everlasting love for us and reduce it to a simile? 

I sit in a city where brilliant men like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein spent their lives in wonder, discussion and service to our Lord. These men dedicated pages, chapters and books to their questions, their struggles with this Jesus, and yet remained chaste to Him.

Should this not be our model? Should we too not reach out to touch the Teacher’s cloak? This encounter is a beginning. Our lives here, and beyond the grave, are for the knowing. And the knowing and being known lead to praise. 

There is much that I long to know in this life but it all pales in comparison to a moment, an hour, shared in the presence of God. 

His wisdom sustains and guides.

As I walked through Oxford’s streets this morning, brought to smiles by penny whistles, busking, and the birds, welcoming spring, I heard the whisper of these words:

“In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.”

A truth I have neglected too long. 

In every step of worship God fulfills our heart’s desires. We need not fret over the trajectory. In mystery and devotion we worship, and God fulfills.

I long to be a part of a community who is free to be lost in the mystery of God, the beauty of His creation, the marvel of His plan, the pain of His sacrifice and the depth of Christ’s commitment to his father’s will. 

This Jesus is not an abstraction. If we let Him, He can become our life’s obsession. A man who in every moment set His desires aside for the best of others. This, He, is enough to sustain a lifetime of study, questions, mystery and emulation.

I am grateful to people whose life work, they feel, is to simplify the complexities of the Gospel so that those — children, teenagers, and adults who have never encountered the Bible — have a starting point. 

But the Gospel (that is, the good news) extends far beyond the introduction. What rests beyond our first meeting?

Enter. Rest. Pray.  Let us begin. 

Seawall, December 20, 2008 (my last walk before heading east)

The last three years have been spiritually abysmal. You may not have seen it, or maybe it was plain as day, either way I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. 

The devastated dreams of a career within the CBC coupled by my mom’s year-long graze with death by cancer spun this once confident faithful into a pit of despair. It came slowly. Unknowingly. I’ve been crawling through a long season of why-asking while my Lord’s voice, once my closest confidante, has lay dormant.

Nearly a year ago I began seeing a counselor — a lifeline in what had come to be an emotionally and spiritually void existence. I got married amidst that void and by God’s grace Michael’s and my love has grown, slowly, in spite of it.

It has, and continues to be a slow journey - a pilgrimage to wholeness. The wholeness of being. Of being daughter fully known and loved by parents fractured by painful childhoods and eventual divorce. It has been a journey restoring trust in a God I had seen as the divider and stealer of relationship, friendship and love — my ever-present scapegoat. It has been a journey to let go, to unhinge the steel doors around my heart, to name the wounds, to name the wounders and choose forgiveness, healing, hope.

Hope is my word for this year. Hope. She is a new friend. She is filled with longing and beauty. She is searcher, wonderer, and wanderer. She seeks good, and expects it. I love my new friend. I’d love for you to meet. Perhaps you know her, if so you should introduce her to a friend. 

This journey has been filled with hundreds of little breakthroughs, dozens of wrenching sobs and a handful of glimmering pictures of what is to be, what our Father intends for you, for me…

My prayer for you is that 2009 is a beginning.

I’m in Toronto at the 2nd annual Canadian Youth Workers Conference. This year’s theme is Seriously Ridiculous.

My friend Darian asked me to read a poem for the opening session of the conference. I thought I’d be off stage reading along to a video montage but instead I was the opening act. In 10 hours I memorized the following poem, written by the amazing Amena Brown.

It goes like this:

God’s call is absurd
In his world, virgins birth saviors
studderers become speech sayers
Back side of the mountain shepherds become kings
Old men past their prime birth generations

He calls a people who have never had it all together
To come together and reach a generation
Hooked on text message and playstation
With hearts longing for an invitation
To point their eyes to the God of all nations
This kind of call involves trust
This kind of call is seriously ridiculous

This job is many times crazy
Sometimes thankless
But greatly amazing
How God never ceases to shape imperfection
And mold it to his perfect purpose
How he can use your broken life to show a generation their lives have purpose

You who used to have a life
Who sacrificed paycheck for football game Friday nights
Who has suffered through middle school band concerts  
And seemingly neverending lock-ins
Who traded vacation for summer camp
Who now must answer to church janitor for many a mess that needs to be cleaned
Who would never admit OMG BTW IDK how 2 txt
Who learned to facebook, twitter, chat, poke, link, post, and tag
And well…LOL

In your world
There is laughter, breakups, break outs
Tears, tattoos, and piercings
Braces and embraces
In your world, pizza is it’s own food group
McDonald’s is a five-star restaurant
The term ‘what not to wear’ doesn’t exist
No matter how crazy it gets
Your love for them is Seriously Ridiculous

And you’re not alone
Take a look next to you
You are surrounded by the faithful few
Who have triumphed and been bruised
Who know that it hurts just the same even if it’s only one you lose
Who bend weak knees and pray heartfelt prayers
Calling out the names of sons and daughters to a loving Father
For parents’ marriages to mend before divorce
That teenage wombs will not give birth too soon
For the healing of wounds
For families without daddy
For encouragement, for purity, for faith, for hope, for grace
For words to say, For his direction, For his way    

We signed up to be Jesus reflections
But didn’t know this was in the job description
There comes a time for counting the cost
Giving up your life for the sake of the cross
This is your real world
And you may think you know but you have no idea
How God’s plans extend from before the beginning to way past eternity

The one who put the G in OMG
The biggest G in history
Who enclosed his holiness in the frailty of human skin  
To bring conviction to a world full of walking contradictions
To redeem time
To bring an end to the neverending consequences of sin passed through the bloodline

We ask for a glimpse of what he sees
Into the lens of eternity
That’s how he keeps us on our knees
Seeking direction
Praying protection
That he would show himself to a generation that needs him desperately
As he reminds us that we need him desperately
May the words we say match the lives we lead
He teaches us to follow so he can lead

The maker of all creation walks with you
Every student’s life belongs to him
And your life too
He is calling you to something he knows you can’t do without him
Watch him love his kids through you
Play your part and watch him do what only he can do

He gives us grace we don’t deserve
Plus forgiveness we couldn’t afford
Matched by an eternal word that will outlast and outlive
Any sacrifice we can hope to give
Shows us how to put our trust in a God who is more than enough for us

His love is seriously ridiculous

 

At the age most children are out chasing butterflies and the ice cream man, Dave Hammer lay alone, receiving his sixteenth skin graft.

It happened when he was five. A tent engulfed in flames. His sister, dead. A brother and friends singed by flames, and Dave, nearly lost to the licking fires of a prank gone terribly amiss.

Decades later he began piecing together the tale: interviewing family, neighbours and friends, combing his own memory for the stories that would best tell his story. Though he has stumps for hands Dave completed his manuscript, penning a story of redemption, healing and ultimately, a life fully lived. His story is one of resolve, faith, utter despair, and uncompromising honesty about his journey through life with extreme deformity. To meet Dave is to meet a man who has overcome endless hurdles and is teeming with a joy that alone comes from his heavenly Father.

“At first I simply felt writing was something God wanted me to do,” explained the author in a phone interview. “Now that I’ve written the book I see that is was really important for me to realize just how much I miss my sister. It has helped me deal with the loss. But ultimately I wrote it because I feel I have an important message to share: that you don’t have to let all these things in life get you down. I want this book to inspire people that they can go the extra mile; that what the enemy intended for evil, God intended for good.”

In his memoir, From out of the Flames (ImaginePublishing) released November 24, we journey with a young boy wrestling with death, overcoming infections and mastering button holes, and eventually into the inner-workings of a man, superficially disfigured, yet solicitous, living with measured humour and seasoned grace. It is a story of hope that surprises and inspires, and a testimony to the strength God offers in our supreme weakness.

“It has all been about faith, in my life,” explains Dave. “I could write a whole book on that. I think I’ve always had a simple faith in God. Since senior high, people have always asked: ‘What are you going to do with your life.’ My reply has always been: ‘Whatever God wants me to do.’ I have always known that would be the most awesome path.”

(written for Faith Today Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008)

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For more information, or to order Dave’s book visit ImaginePublishing.