Salvogesis

I think this is a very significant passage. A prophet, a person of God, is used mightily by God to do amazing things (like we have been here). He was even used to shrivel up the king’s hand and then restore it! God told this prophet that then he was supposed to go straight home without stopping. The king, the government, they wanted the prophet to stay and have dinner with them. The prophet said ‘no’. He was faithful to God in the face of the Government.  Part way home, an older prophet tells the younger prophet that God has told him that he is supposed to stop and have dinner with him. The younger prophet, who had just successfully stood up to the government and refused to be delayed in returning home, now defers to the senior prophet and does the opposite of what God wants him to do. He follows a man of God instead of following God – because of this, the younger prophet suffers the consequences. In this case, he is killed by a lion.  This is important: The message of this st...

 Joseph was trafficked. As a boy, a teenager, he was sold into slavery by his own brothers. From there he spent many years in slavery, taken to a foreign country where he served at the will of his owners and following that he spent many more years in prison – his family did not know where he was, they did not know that he was even alive.     Children are still trafficked today. When we were in Toronto our corps was involved in an outreach to prostituted women and girls. Many trafficked people in Canada are prostituted. In Vancouver people in our corps had an outreach to prostituted boys and men, as well as women and girls. When we were in Saskatchewan, I went with another Corps Officer to speak to our MP about specific people we knew, who were trafficked as slave household labour here in Canada -which for them was a foreign country – very much like Joseph in Egypt. This week is Orange Shirt Day: Also enslaved in Canada are children taken from First Nations and traffi...

A few interesting things happened in the previous week or two – well, lots of things actually – but one or two things I’d particularly like to share today.   You know of course that The Salvation Army has a drug and alcohol policy: we don’t drink or do drugs at work (or soldiers anywhere, anytime). I recently needed to print out our drug and alcohol policy and go over it with some of our volunteers, staff, or community partners. Apparently one or two folks may not have remembered (even though they all read it when they were hired or started volunteering) that they can’t use drugs at work with our clients. You'd think that would be self-evident, a ‘no-brainer’ as they say. We don’t want to harm people and we do want  to help people, but good, well-meaning folks actually needed to be reminded that they shouldn’t use drugs with our clients. There are many reasons for this and God gave us an object lesson, an example of being sober so we can help others out; as well as a lesson ab...

Let me tell you three stories. These are all true stories; they all happened this week and they do have some other things in common too. They all have a rope in the story. They all have peril. 2 of them have water. 2 of them have happen endings.   One evening this week Susan suggested that I should take Heather kayaking for a couple of hours before dinner. She said be home at 7pm. Dinner's at 7pm. Be home at 7pm.   I threw the kayaks in the back of the vehicle. Heather and I quickly drove out to Sproat Lake. We didn’t have that much time. We got out there. Heather was already a little tired, I think. I asked her where we wanted to go on the lake; she said, she wanted to go to Manitoba Island. (There is this small private island that you can reach from the boat launch and whoever owns the island has a Manitoba flag that they fly from it, thus Heather and I call it Manitoba Island.)   It was pretty choppy out there. The waves were pretty high and the wind was blowing quite ...

•          Colossians 3:11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. •          1 Corinthians 12:13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. •          Galatians 3:26ff So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.   It is election season again. Is it me or are these things coming around way too frequently these years? It seems like only yesterd...

The earth is on fire. Rena and Tim’s son’s family and some friends of Mary Anne and others are in and around Vernon. There is a massive fire burning between Vernon and Kamloops (more than 557 km2 have been on fire there at one time this week alone). Susan, Sarah-Grace, Heather and I were just up there during our furlough. We saw helicopters carrying buckets almost every day, dropping chemicals on the ground (while the water bombers sit quietly by the Lake here). Roads were blocked due to the fire.   There were places we couldn’t go. We checked the news every day to see if we would need to be evacuated (like we needed to flee while on our previous holiday; when the plague of coronavirus hit the world, we scrambled to try to get safely home). This recent trip we stayed in Salmon Arm for a week.   There was smoke everywhere. We went kayaking, as well as tourist-ing: sometimes you couldn’t even see across the lake it was so smoky and the sun was a strange orange-y-red ball of fire...