Dreams Unlocked

The year that was: Moved from downtown Vancouver to the suburb of Port Moody. Transitioned from church planter to lead pastor. Became a Mennonite!!! Moved from a tiny condo. on the 26th floor to a HUGE home with 3 floors. Became more reliant on my car, as there is nowhere to walk to from my house. Watched both Sophie and Adam change in interesting ways. Dealt with some difficult hiccups in church life. Met with the mayor of Coquitlam. Read a lot of books. Saw a lot of movies. Joined a running club. Made new friends.

Sophia reads Grandpa's book: The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson Grandpa reads Sophia's book: Madeline Gets Sick. Check out these signs - they look like the manager needs to hit certain numbers or he will be made to disappear forever. Ok - this snow is getting a bit much. It was fun for a couple of days, now it's getting to be a bit of a drag. We had a big dinner planned for tonight with my mom cooking up a HUGE amount of amazing Indian food. And.... nobody could make it due to the snow fall. It was pretty disappointing. We had a perfect Christmas day however. Adam still believes in Santa, and was overjoyed to see so many presents under the tree! Both kids got quite a few gifts, which led me to consider maybe a 3 gift max. at Christmas, just to curb the spirit of consumerism and materialism that can infect them early on. Also, hopefully next year, as a family we could do some kind of act of service around the holidays, so that we lift the attention off of ourselves. We got th...

Our house. The Inlet I did something today that I've never done before. I canceled a church service on account of the weather. Our Christmas Service was supposed to be on at 6 PM. It has been snowing non-stop since last night. I have never seen this much snow in Vancouver before. The roads are unreal. At 2:00 we decided to pull the plug. I called everyone and let them know - I felt bad for 3 guys in particular who had put a lot of work into leading worship tonight. But, they all understood this was something beyond our control. Turns out we weren't alone, as the majority of Christmas Eve services were canceled. So we stayed in tonight. At 6:00 the power went out! At least we were INSIDE the house this time. We waited a bit - I ate cereal for supper. Power came back on at 8:00. This weather is really crazy - canceled flights and smashed up cars. My parents are here and Adam and Sophia are thoroughly enjoying their grandparents attention. Looking forward to Christmas morning tomo...

Well, yesterday was pretty interesting. After church, we went sledding with another family in the church. Sylvia made this amazing peppermint hot chocolate. She brought it in a thermos. As we were drinking, I felt like I was in a Norman Rockwell picture. Adam enjoyed the sledding, but I think he liked wrestling with his friend Spencer more. Spencer is 2 years older than him, and a bundle of energy - he's also Adam's hero. Adam is always imitating him. After the sledding we went back to our friend's place - another family was going to join us for dinner and guitar hero. Just before this other family showed up, the power went out in our area, due to the incredible deluge of snow that we were experiencing. We decided to pack it in and head home, as we were all pretty tired from the Arctic air. As we were driving home, I realized that our garage door opener operated on electricity... and our house now had no electricity. We sat in our driveway staring at the useless door. What...

Harvey Milk - Crusader for Gay Rights Another Monday, another day off. As usual, I spent part of it alone in a movie theater. This week's offering was the bio-pic "Milk" starring Sean Penn. This movie chronicles the life of gay activist/politician Harvey Milk. Milk moved to the Castro district of San Francisco in the early 70's as the neighborhood was shifting from a blue collar Irish Catholic neighborhood into an area populated by gays and counter cultural refugees. Milk opens up a camera shop. He starts to see some injustices taking place against the gay community. He quickly mobilizes a rag-tag army of volunteers. He runs for a civic post and loses several times. He finally wins and is elected city supervisor and is a member of San Francisco city council - becoming the first openly gay man to hold an elected public office. The movie moves towards a show-down over "Proposition 6" which would allow school boards to fire openly gay teachers, and even teacher...

I posted a video on Facebook of me relating the stories of meeting Bono twice. It elicited 7 comments which is quite a lot for me. Anyways, I guess meeting Bono not once but TWICE kinda puts me in a special class of humanity... (take that with a big grain of salt - total sarcasm here). Today we had the children's Christmas presentation. There really is nothing that can quite renew you like watching little kids perform. Adam had the prime role of Joseph.... and he played the role more like a concentration camp inmate instead of someone about to usher in the savior of the world. He looked completely miserable and bored throughout the performance!!! You gotta see the video to truly appreciate his somber demeanor. I don't think they had much to practice - there were quite a few lengthy awkward pauses as the kids waited for cued up music to start. The church was quite full - which always makes a pastor feel better about his existance. I am no exception. One thing I have been reflect...

Small, and never goes bad. Settle in for one of the oddest tales you will probably hear for a long time. One of our closest friends at our church owns a company that provides security for a number of medium to large businesses. One of their clients is the largest mall in West Vancouver. Today, he was at the mall, meeting with the electrical contractor that needs to do some work for him. This is a fairly substantial contract, so everyone is probably fairly sober and serious as they conduct the meeting. They break for lunch and head for the food court. My friend asks the contractor if he wants a sub. He says, he brought some food, but he wouldn't mind a bag of chips. So, my friend goes to get his lunch. There are about 5 people at the table - the contractor and the actual electricians. My friend glances down and notices the contractor has opened a tin can of something. And then he sees it. The words "Fancy Feast" are on the can. My friend slowly sits down, his heart beating...

I have been reading a lot lately - almost a book a day. I started a new book today. The title and author are the title of this post. Gregory was Pope in the 6th C. He wrote a lot, and this book was written at a time when he was resisting the call to the ministry. He wrote it to show how tough it is to be a pastor. The book is excellent. The pastor who takes on the guidance of souls must be one: who dies to the flesh puts aside worldly prosperity fears no adversity does not covet the goods of others inclined to the merciful has compassion on the weakness of others grieves over sin

Not a lawyer. Today after church, one of our newest attendees told me one of the nicest things anyone's ever told me. He said, I'm glad you didn't become a lawyer. He was referencing the fact that the only other career I ever considered was as a lawyer in the area of criminal or civil law. He said that if I had become a lawyer, then this church wouldn't have a pastor! I was so touched by his kind words. Went to a new church plant tonight, led by my friends Andrew and Rebecca Stanley. It was the first service of Urban Journey (sounds familiar right?), a new church in the Dunbar area of Vancouver. There was a real freshness to the service, and a sense of excitement at the birth of something new. As they were cleaning up after, it brought back all those memories of Urban Sanctuary and first@night. All those nights when Felicia and I would do everything - setting up, setting down, etc. I really pray and hope for the organic and natural growth of this budding church. Going b...

Met with the mayor this morning. There were about 25 pastors from across the tri-cities crammed into this small conference room. The mayor moved the meeting from the city council room (which is pretty big and impersonal). The mayor is a decent fellow named Richard Stewart. He has a fairly good record of public service thus far, mainly local and provincial postings. He has the sort of confident demeanor and telegenic good looks which people seek out in their elected officials, in this cosmetic age. The meeting began with the mayor welcoming us and quite candidly telling us that he had no agenda, but simply wanted to hear any concerns that we had. The main idea that I got was that he was simply trying to open up clear lines of communication between faith communities and the city. I have noticed that Christians have a tendency to demonize large entities such as the media, society and the government as being blatantly anti-christian. Most of these biases are uninformed perceptions. Once pe...

I had this fantasy of going into the woods and cutting down a Christmas tree, a'la Clark Griswold of Christmas Vacation. In British Columbia, you can actually do it. You print up this license off a government web-site, and it permits you to cut down one tree, in these special government forests. I though it would be cool, until I realized I would actually have to cut the tree down, drag it through the snow and strap it onto my car. Oh, yeah - the forest is in Squamish about an hour and a half from our house. The idea devolved into going to a Christmas tree farm, where you still get to cut down a tree - but they give you the tools, and its all supervised in case you actually can't cut it. After realizing, we'd still have to drive a long way, our idea further devolved into simply buying a tree from the Port Moody Garden Center, which we did this afternoon. We perused the various trees which ranged from short squat trees which looked more like Christmas bushes to large regal t...