Yearly Archives: 2016

Friday and Saturday were spent going to, arriving in, returning from Calgary.

On the way I talked with some people about Rural Churches – initiatives, curriculum tracks and just the stuff that you encounter in a rural church.

Arriving in, we said “hi” to a relative and found out they were friends with some of our “on the way” people.

While in, I attended the launch of the Flourishing Congregations Institute at Ambrose University.  Accidentally I sat with a friend at the speakers table.  Good conversation throughout the day.  My wife met with three of our children throughout the day.

Returning from, we went directly to bed – church was the next day and we were on worship team.  For lunch, we ate with friends – whom I performed their wedding almost 40 years ago.  They are off to the south for a month, escaping the snow that is sure to fall in the next month!

And that was our weekend.  Short, sweet and sure to be remembered.

Today feels like yesterday.  And yesterday I felt like Friday was tomorrow.

Some days we just don’t know what day we are in.  Yes, we can tell if the day is cloudy, sunny, windy or rainy (or even if a blizzard is happening).  We can look at the clock and see what time it is.  We can even have a calendar shown to us.

And we still think today is tomorrow. 

I suppose part of that is anticipation.  We want to be there now!  Christmas as a child was just one of those days.

I suppose part of that is inactivity.  When one day blends into the next, we soon lose sight of what comes next.

Or maybe I’m just getting old???

I love to sing.  I love music.  I love the spirit of the music.

Over the years, notation of music has helped us understand an era, and that era’s expressions of emotions, feelings and love. 

I watched my mother sing the songs of her era.  Those that deeply touched her soul were sung with eyes closed.  Her voice reflected the spirit of the song. 

I’m not sure we can always notate what happens in the spirit.  We can find ways to describe the tempo, the mood, the timbre of voice.  Somewhere along the way, we have not yet been able to capture the spirit in print. 

An actor will move into the role of their character, as outlined in the script.  This method allows them to try to touch the spirit.  A truly good actor runs the periphery of the character with ease.  When there is no longer an act, but a sense of the presence of the character, then there is a great actor.

These artistic expressions, in music and acting, cannot be attained by notes or words or even videos.  We know that a culture is truly dead when no one can exact the spirit of that culture from within their own beings.  Yes, they can imitate, they can fashion a look that images the original – but the spirit and the letter are two different things.

Today I read a blog about Donald Trump – that it’s words and not ideas that change us.  We don’t look for reasoned facts and big ideas, we look for factoids, catchphrases, and memes to express our heart and our emotions.  And our hearts rule us. 

Trump used small words to skip the hard work of structure and analysis, and in a few scribbles, spoken with passion and visual flair, he expressed big ideas.  Big ideas that are emblazoned on a generation.  We will spend years trying to analyze the structure of those ideas found in his speeches, while followers and foes will say they knew the idea from the start.

Do Donald Trump’s words and catchphrases really just mean what they “say”?  Or do you have to be in the crowd, in the spirit of the moment, to hear what was said beyond the “literal” meaning? 

Words tend to find the heart much more easily when they are attached to an emotion, a visualization, a medium.  In many ways the medium becomes as much a part of transferring the message to the hearer, perhaps more so than the words.

Maybe this election is just pointing out what Marshal McLuhan had prophesied years ago – “The medium is the message.”