TREVOR'S WRITING

What keeps meat from rotting? One way to do that is to salt it, this method was widely used in Bible times. In Matthew 5:13 Jesus says to a bunch of his followers "you are the salt of the earth." In other words, the world is the meat and you are the salt, you help to keep the meat from getting rotten. Here is where I think that we have missed out on something. We (the church) keep removing ourselves from the world more and more, we look down on all the horrible things that are going on in the world and shake our head and say "tsk, tsk." There are horrible things going on in our world (sexual promiscuity, hatred, racism, oppression, drugs, alcoholism, etc.) so we withdraw ourselves from it in order to protect ourselves from these horrors. We create our "Christian bubble" and pray that no one will burst it. We make sure our kids hang out with the right crowd so that they will not be corrupted, we don't hang out in certain places so that we won't be

I am opposed to pink, well not really opposed, but opposed to what it stands for, when it stands for something I am against. If that makes any sense at all. When it comes to my daughter Hannah, I have always resisted when she wants to wear pink, have pink dolls, have pink shoes (or pink camouflage shoes for that matter). Now she has asked us if she can paint her room pink (the second she in this sentence refers to Nicky and I, since our 5 year old will not paint her own room). The funny thing is I have embraced pink in my life, I have a shirt that some people call pink (actually, it is more of a salmon colour), back in the 80's I remember having a flourescent pink t-shirt, flourescent pink shades and many other pink accessories. I also own a beautiful flourescent pink toque that I love to wear on youth nights (or when I was driving the tractor at camp) I guess my issue is not with the colour pink, it is with the stereotype. I don't want my little girl being taken with pink beca

This morning I happened to check out a blog by Mark Westman . I don't know him, but he made a comment on my blog so I thought I would check him out. It so happened that on the morning I was preparing to go speak to the "captured" audience at Union Gospel Mission I read his blog about UGM and the question of when and if to preach to hungry people (should we force them to sit in a sermon before they get their food?) I really appreciated the discussion there, so go check it out here . I put in my two cents for what they are worth (probably not 2 cents).

What a great question. One that has caused me to really think and reflect on what I wrote myself. It was left as a comment under my last post. Do you hang out with the poor. I had a few thoughts on how to respond to the comment, the first was defensiveness..."of course I hang out with the poor!" after which I would go on to exaggerate the amount of time I spend with the poor. The second thought in response to this might have been, "maybe you misread what I wrote, I said ' let's go find Jesus in the poor...' I didn't say 'I have been, why aren't you?'" Therefore excusing me from having to feel guilty, since I was challenging all of us to do this - including myself. However, I realized the question could be an honest question of how I spend my time, not an accusatory question that insinuates that I don't spend my time with the poor. The fact that I became defensive bothers me, because I have a heart for people who are poor, and I t

Today is Blog Action Day 2008 , a day when Bloggers come together to blog about the same topic. This year the topic is one that is really close to my heart, poverty . There are so many poverty statistics...like the fact that 1.2 billion people live on $1 a day or less, or the the fact that another 1.6 billion live on $2 a day or less - 2.8 billion people. People who struggle every day in order to get food to put in their bellies and the bellies of their children. Meanwhile, the United States spends 30 - 50 billion dollars every year on diets and expenses related to reducing calorie intake! What is wrong with us?! We need to do something, something that makes inroads on this situation...but you are only one person, so don't bother unless you can make a major impact...NO, you are one person that can make a small impact, but many small impacts creates a very large impact (ask anyone who has been buried by an avalanche of millions of small snowflakes). My challenge to you on Blog Actio

My life is full of programs that I have thought up, ministries that I lead. I believe in them, I think they do good things, exciting things, probably even God-ordained things. I also try to do great things with my family, fun things, family-building things, even things that intend to lead them to see a picture of what Jesus looks like. Is it possible that even these things are vanity? Is it possible that the things I hold most dear are like a vapour? I listened to two sermons on the way home from Boissevain yesterday. Both of them were from the Youth Specialties convention - NYWC last year. I have had them on my iPod for almost a year now without listening to them. Interestingly enough, after all this time they both really hit me at an appropriate time. I have been really struggling with the idea of just focusing on seemingly small things and both these sermons (one by Francis Chan and one by Phil Vischer) talked about how the only thing that really matters is that we are comple

It's three o'clock in the morning, when I am roused from my bed. There is a loud bang that came from the deck. At first I think nothing of it, but a few minutes later there is some more shuffling and a bit more sound. Nicky and I are both sitting up in bed. "There is definitely someone there," I say. I climb out of bed, my heart racing, is someone really trying to break into our house while we are here? I look behind the bedroom door for any sort of weapon to take with me (the right to bear arms has not been an excuse for us to buy a gun), thankfully I find a crow bar there. It feels like it could do some damage. I slowly walk through the living room to the kitchen and towards the back door where the sound had come from. I can't see a thing outside since it is pitch dark...I clutch the crow bar and flick on the outside light and swing open the door simultaneously prepared to attack. There, standing about 2 feet away from me is the bandit...a raccoon...dig

Almost 24 years ago I started waking up in the morning and telling my Mom I had headaches. I missed a lot of school that year (Grade 5) because of the headaches. I missed so much school that my report card for the middle term of grade 5 does not have any grades listed on it. I had headaches all through school and eventually, when I was 16 I dropped out of school. For a few years I tried working and various ways of going to school. I did not graduate from High School. When I was 19 I went to Winkler Bible Institute - I spoke to the Admissions guy 5 days before school started, I told him, "I don't have a high school diploma, I don't have any money, can I come to your school?" He said, "sure, we will work things out." During that year I still had headaches...I also met Nicky there, and we married 2 1/2 years later. She always cared for me and supported me when I had headaches. My headaches caused me to miss a lot of classes and get incompletes in a number of