What are We Doing?

These days, my wife, Patricia, does a lot of ministry over the internet to people suffering from Pulmonary Hypertension. She is involved in a closed Facebook group with men and women from around the world who have PH.

PH is an elevated blood pressure between the lungs and the heart. This damages he left ventricle of the heart. If untreated it usually is fatal within 2 or 3 years. If treated, you might get 10 or 20. It affects people of all ages, both sexes, and even little babies. It manifests in difficulty getting enough air to be able to function without great fatigue and dizziness. There are numerous other symptoms involved in PH.

A lot of doctors and even hospitals will not treat PH patients because they know so little about it. The only known cure is a lung transplant. Very often, by the time a PH'r is sick enough to qualify for a lung transplant, they often need a heart transplant too.

Some of the stories of these people, especially the young mothers, are both heart-breaking and, at times, uplifting because of their determination, courage and faith. Patricia offers them a listening ear, a sympathetic heart, and, very often, good, practical advice.

BTW, Pat was diagnosed with PH last fall, and today she is PH free. Read about her miraculous healing at: http://northwoodssaveachild.blogspot.ca/2013/05/god-answers-prayer.html. As I write this, Pat is giving the testimony of her healing to the women's group in the church in which she was healed.


As for me, I have been slogging away at learning to play the guitar. After a year and a half, I am still slogging - at times sounding not too terrible, at other times sounding just dreadful. Nevertheless, I improve slowly and continuously.

I also have to re-write part of the book I finished more than a year and a half ago. I decided it needed a better ending and asked God to give me one. He is doing just that, not only with Patricia's healing, but with the other project that I have been working on.

That project is called, Save A Child (from sexual abuse). After deciding to research the number of children being sexually abused (as I was), the answer was shocking and horrifying. For instance, at least 200 million girls will be sexually molested before they turn 18 years old, most of them repeatedly.

That is one in five girls globally, while some statistics show that in America, it may be one in four. To my mind, this is one of the worst atrocities man has afflicted himself with since the dawn of creation.

Searching the internet to see church involvement in doing something about this horror leads only to the church (Catholic mostly) being a part of the problem rather than a cure.

I'm calling on Christians to pray about this which is the least we can do. Please see: http://northwoodssaveachild.blogspot.ca/2013/06/save-child-from-sexual-abuse.html
for further information.

The blog has been viewed in ten countries nearly 400 times after less than 5 weeks of operation. We need it to go viral for the sake of the children.

God bless

Gary

Uprising in Turkey

As mentioned in a previous post, see: "Turkey, key to a Russian/Islamic invasion of Israel", Turkey is vitally important to the prophesied Russian and Islamic invasion of Israel (Eze 38,39). Russia will have to go through Turkey to get to Israel. Some interpreters of these scriptures suggest that it is Turkey itself, not Russia, that will lead the Islamic invasion of Israel.

For either to happen, Turkey would almost certainly have to become an Islamic country. It is mostly Islamic, but politically secular. As pointed out in the above blog, that appears to be changing and many people don't like it. That's part of the reason there is so much rioting going on there now.

However, President Erdogan has very little patience for these rioters and if he can't restore order soon, he is liable to declare something akin to martial law. He has his own people in place in the military so the threat of a military coup, which has happened several times in the past, is very limited.

With martial law, Erdogan can instil more Islamic values on the people in the name of peace and good government, thus taking them one more step closer to a full-out Islamic state which would, most certainly, be an enemy of Israel.

A Day in the Life...

Actually two days. Make that 4.

Cultus Lake Golf Course - British Columbia

Day one:

Just moved from Alberta to B.C. so I went to an insurance company to get new plates for my truck. The delightful clerk helping me asked if I had gotten my BC driver's licence yet. I replied in the negative. She told me that I would get the same number that I had before leaving BC. I said, "oh, good."

"Do you know your number?" she asked.

"Yes", I replied, and proceeded to giver her the number. She punched it into the computer then looked at me and said, "no."

I tried a slightly different combination of the same numbers and got the same response.

"I thought I knew it," I declared, "but my memory's been really bad since 1999. Nevertheless, I've written my memoirs since then - very colourful book; I'm just not sure if any of it actually happened."

From there I went to pick up Chinese food at a little place close to home. The Chinese lady, the only waitress was taking orders off the phone. Her English was not very good. On her third call, while I was patiently standing at the counter, she had no end of difficulty communicating with the customer. She started rolling her eyes, then flopping on the desk, then putting her hand on her forehead. I'm killing myself laughing watching this.

The customer wanted delivery and she asked for the address. After 3 attempts she got the 5 digit street number but could not get the street name for anything. She asked several timers for him to spell it but he could not figure out what she was saying. Now we are both cracking up, and finally she hands me the phone and says, "you take." So I wrote down the street name and she was finally able to hang up the phone.

It was the most fun I ever had picking up dinner.


Day two:

Spent all afternoon running around accomplishing very little, "you need this to do that," "you need that to do this," "Oh, you don't have one of those - well, you'll have to wait until July." Nevertheless, Pat and I were enjoying the day anyway.

We went to Tim Horton's drive-through and I asked for an orange-carrot muffin.

"I'm sorry, what kind of muffin?"

"Orange-carrot".

Hesitation, "I don't see one. I have a carrot-orange muffin."

Sounding surprised, I said, "OK, that'll do."

Got to the window and the girl says, "we all heard what you said and we're still laughing."



Day three:

Golfing with my son at beautiful Cultus Lake. He has an old Toyota Tercel that he got a good deal on from his brother. It is in its late teens, has more miles than most American made cars ever reach, and has a bit of a lop-sided smile on the front-end. So when Bob pulled up beside a new Maserati in Burnaby the other day, revved his engine and nodded to the driver of the dream car - the poor guy cracked-up. Good to see my son is carrying on the family tradition of absurdity.

Day four:

Walked to Stuporstore today (Real Canadian Superstore) to get some Remember FX. It actually helps with my memory and concentration, not a lot, but some. I searched through the 7 or 8 bottles and could find only one with a future expiry date. I took it and another bottle to the pharmacy counter and asked if they had anymore Remember FX that had not expired. They took the expired bottle and checked the date - Mar 2014.

"It's not expired, it's good until next year," she said.

"You mean it's not 2014 now?" I asked.

"No" she replied, "it's 2013." 

"See why I need it?" I said.

God's Direction

One way God literally directs our steps is through timing and circumstance. Last night I walked my dog (yes, only one dog now, we loaned the other to our grandchildren for a couple weeks and never got her back – we’re in a shared custody deal now) on our usual route past the back of a small building next door and into the park in front of the Abbotsford courthouse.

As we returned, I noticed a card and an I-phone holster lying in the ivy on the ground. I looked around for more stuff as I suspected a robbery of some sort had taken place, but found nothing. Today, I walked through that path again as I took the holster and the CAA card over to the police office which is just a five minute walk from here. I hardly thought it worthwhile, especially since I had handled them both so much that fingerprints were unlikely, (obviously I wasn’t in NCIS mode) but did it anyway.

At the police station there was a line-up, and it did not move one person in 15 minutes. I decided that it really wasn’t worth my whole afternoon and left. On the way back home I took a different path through the small field of ivy and noticed some papers lying on the ivy. I scooped them up and examined them and found the same name on the papers as was on the CAA card.

I decided that there had to be a purse around somewhere and within a few seconds a glint of metal caught my eye and I found a large wallet under the ivy. I opened it just long enough to see that the driver’s license was in there, and it belonged to the same woman as the papers and card. I immediately returned to the police station where the line-up moved very quickly and was able to give them the items and get out of there in a few minutes.

Some people would call that coincidence. I might even call it coincidence if these kinds of things didn’t happen so often as to be statistically absurd.

Almost Christian - the Post-modern Church

What follows is a very disturbing interview with the author of "Almost Christian". Using data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, Kenda Creasy Dean describes what most 'Christian' teens in America believe. Furthermore, she does not blame their apathetic beliefs on poor listening skills or bad communication skills from the pulpit, but she states flat out that they believe what they believe because that is exactly what they are being taught. And if that is what they are being taught, then it must mean that we, the older generation, believe that same thing, in general.

Dean's book should be required reading for everyone in ministry.

Kenda Dean is an ordained United Methodist pastor in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference and Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she works closely with the Institute for Youth Ministry. In this interview, Kenda discusses her book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church.

The term "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" is used quite a bit in your book. What does that mean, and what are the implications of it?

MTD is the term coined by Christian Smith, the lead researcher in the National Study of Youth and Religion, describing what he saw as the "default" religious position of American teenagers. You could summarize it this way: Religion helps you to be nice (it's moralistic) and feel good (it's therapeutic), but otherwise God stays out of the way except in emergencies (it's Deist). That's what most teenagers think. The ways they described God in the study were revealing; God was either the cosmic butler (staying out of the way until called upon to meet my needs) or the divine therapist (God's main goal is to help me feel good about myself).

But the study went further. Since the NSYR also found that teenagers mirror their parents' religiosity to an astonishing degree, Smith and his colleagues believe that MTD is not just the default position of American teenagers; it's the default religion of American adults, too. They conclude that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has "colonized" American churches and is now the "dominant religion" in the United States, having "supplanted Christianity." That's one heck of a claim. In other words, young people don't subscribe to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism because they've misunderstood what we've taught them in church. They subscribe to it because this is what we've taught them in church.

At the very least, MTD is a very self-serving spirituality. It is what Christianity looks like once you jettison Jesus and a conviction that love involves sacrifice and not just warm, fuzzy feelings. It's what you get when churches forget that God has not called us to exist for our own well-being. And it's a short step away from thinking that God's primary goal is to help me feel good "at the expense of everybody else." MTD comes close to a divinely sanctioned sense of entitlement. I think teenagers are absolutely right not to take this form of so-called "Christianity" very seriously. I don't think it represents the gospel well at all.

Your book title Almost Christian comes from a sermon John Wesley preached in the 1700s about people going through the motions of religion without a commitment to Christ. It seems there might have been the same findings had this (NSYR) research been conducted then. How do you think things differ today?

Great question—because of course, every generation of Christians struggles with acculturated Christianity. So on the one hand, the NSYR is this generation's reminder that Christianity is being co-opted by the reigning cultural ethos—and for us, that means absorbing the values of therapeutic individualism, consumer capitalism, and pluralistic relativism, so our primary goals include feeling good about ourselves and being nice to people so we don't step on toes.

Of course, Christians should get along with others—and then some. Jesus never actually mentions being nice, but he says a lot about compassion and justice (which are a lot harder than being nice). And Christ calls us to love people who are different from us, even our enemies—and we do this because we follow Jesus, not in spite of it.

But churches over the centuries adopted some very nasty habits, even to the point of doing violence "in Jesus' name" (which is heresy, flat out). So one thing that is distinct about 21st century Christianity is our need to follow Jesus in a way that does not simultaneously place Christians at the center of the universe. Our solution has been to throw the baby out with the bathwater: be religious, but not "too" religious. Be good, but don't be passionate. Be "almost" Christian, as John Wesley put it, but not "altogether" Christian. Don't love God with your whole heart and soul and mind; it's too dangerous.

This interpretation misunderstands the problem completely. I was visiting a Methodist-affiliated college recently with my daughter, where the admissions counselor spent much of his presentation emphasizing that students should not be put off by the university's Christian affiliation—that in spite of it, "we welcome everyone." I wanted to jump out of my chair! Who is training these admissions counselors on Christian theology? It's because of our Christian identity that we welcome everyone! People who follow Jesus practice radical welcoming, but this is not the way Christianity is generally viewed.

Jesus asks not for our membership in a club or our attendance on Sunday mornings, but for our very lives. Following Christ to the point that it shapes our identity is an "altogether" thing. The more intentionally we pattern our lives after Christ, the more we genuinely extend ourselves for people who are different from us. That is what the New Testament church was all about, which I take to be the prototype for churches even today.

You spend a significant portion of your book encouraging the church to reclaim its central identity as a missional community. Where do you think the church has gone wrong here?

I wish we didn't need the word "missional" to describe the church. It seems redundant to me. Mission is the business the church is in; if the church isn't missional, it isn't the church.

Of course, the fact that we need to make mission into an adjective tells us that we don't view churches this way. As Christendom began to crumble and churches began to feel threatened—you know, fewer people, fewer dollars, less social capital and power in society—churches did what all anxious people do. We circled the wagons and began protecting our own instead of looking for ways to follow Jesus into the world. That's actually a sign of a paradigm shift. When the tectonic plates of our reality start to change, we hold on more tightly to what we have. It's the perfect petri dish for cultivating self-serving spiritualities like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Being Loved by God

On Feb26th, 2012, Pope Benedict tweeted: "If only everyone could experience the joy of being Christian, being loved by God who gave his Son for us!"

Yet even this simple, lovely prayer resulted in no-end of criticism, such as: " God loves everybody!"

Does God love everybody? Can that generality be applied to every single individual? God hated Esau and refused to forgive him though he sought it with tears.

But the big issue here is not whether God loves all of us, but whether we experience that love. If love is only a feeling then we can never know God's love. But with God's love - love is an action verb. He commands us to love our neighbours by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, visiting the shut-ins, and clothing the naked.

When we 'experience' the joy of being loved by God, it is like being looked after by a loving neighbour. He takes care of our needs. He blesses us and you can feel His blessings and, at times, His very presence.

When you 'know' the Son of God for Who He really is, then you can 'experience' the love of God. Until then it is just a concept.

The Apocalypse - Will it Come Soon?

A lot of Christians are talking in apocalyptic terms these days. This is not that unusual at the turn of a century or after a major catastrophe like 911. But the Mayan calendar is behind us and yet the number of Christians thinking apocalyptically has been only increasing. Why?

There are ‘prophets’ in the church, some of whom are predicting events on a biblical scale happening soon. Now, prophecy is a gift of the Holy Spirit and I have no doubt that they exist in today’s church. But just as in biblical times there are an abundance of false prophets these days. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard prophecies of world-wide revival starting in the little church in which I was standing. So far, they haven’t happened yet. So I’m reluctant to believe most prophecies that I hear or come across on the internet.

The situation with Iran and Israel as documented in “2013 The Scariest Year Yet” lends some considerable weight to the fear of ‘The Great Tribulation’ beginning sooner rather than later. The Great Tribulation (see my post be the same name) is described in the Bible as 7 years of hell on earth as the Antichrist rules much of the earth and many, if not most Christians have their faith tried and tested and will probably be martyred. Sound like fun so far?

Many Christians believe that God will ‘beam them up’ like Scotty before things get rough. It is called ‘The Rapture’ and it is based on rather flimsy evidence from the Bible. If it occurs, I believe, it will be very limited, including only those whose faith need not be tested. Most of us Christians will enter the Great Tribulation but will not survive it.

Most recently, two things have occurred to spark interest in the Apocalypse. One – Pope Benedict resigned. The Catholic Church has prophecies by an Irish Archbishop – St Malachy, who lived in the northern part of Ireland in the 12^th century. He wrote prophecies describing every Pope that would ever reign over the church beginning with Celestine II. What is scary is that the last Pope prophesied would become the False Prophet of Revelation, and would pave the way for the Antichrist.

What’s scarier is that the next Pope, the one they will be selecting in the next few weeks, is almost certainly, that last Pope. St Malachy called him Peter Romanus. Some believe that he will assume the name Pius XIII. There are also prophecies coming from other religions that coincide somewhat with St Malachy’s.

The second recent event is the spectacular crashing of a meteorite in Russia followed hours later by an asteroid sliding past the earth 1/10 the distance between here and the moon, and inside the orbit of several of our satellites. Large meteorites are predicted to strike the earth during the Great Tribulation causing great damage to a third of the earth. A scientist on the news just today called these events ‘warnings’ of possible future calamities. That was a scientist, not a theologian.

In Acts 2, the Apostle Peter quotes the Prophet Joel from the Old Testament saying, “I will pour my Spirit out in those days; and they shall prophesy. I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire and vapor of smoke.”

And it gets worse before it gets better, “The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”