Thanks everyone!

My time as President is now ended. Thanks to everyone in the Conference for making it a very special time for me. I have appreciated the opportunity to meet many of you - sometimes to renew friendships and connections and also to connect with some of you for the first time.

My term ended on Sunday, May 29 as the closing act of the Celebration of Ministry Service. The service was pretty much all I had hoped for and even more (certainly in terms of length!) and I am deeply grateful for the team that put it together in such a wonderfully integrated way - especially since we never met face to face, only had one voice to voice conference call and then finished the collaborative process by conferring by email either with the whole group or between members of the team.

The venue was outstanding. The Heritage Amphitheatre in William Hawrelak Park in Edmonton is a great place. It proved to be a wonderful place for a worship service - combining the opportunity to worship without walls in the midst of God's creation and also to feel protected from any of the elements that might have made the space uncomfortable. As it turned out there was no reason for discomfort. The temperature was fine, the breezes were just that - only breezes and about the only detracting aspect of the day was that the sun shone so brightly that it made the screens a little hard to see for the worship service that was being projected. It was difficult to see but not impossible and that certainly relieved one of my anxious moments in the run up to the worship service.

I learned a lot about preparing worship for projection, and these learnings will be helpful to me as I move into what has become pretty much a standard form of media for worship in this generation.

I also had affirmation for the idea that if you find capable people and then trust that they will do their part, wonderful things will result.

I now look forward to a time of discernment as I reflect on all the things I learned and gained from my time as President and as I consider what new things I am being called to. One of those things I have already accepted - my offer to continue writing for "In Contact" on a somewhat regular basis was approved by the editorial board. I will be focusing on the "view from the north" likely keeping the title "Northern Light".

I will also post here from time to time - sometimes augmenting what I say in my columns in the Observer insert, sometimes repeating those columns for a wider audience and sometimes just taking time to reflect on our relationship with God and God's creation with "northern eyes".

Finally it would not be proper for me to reflect on my time as President without offering a few other expressions of gratitude. When I was first nominated for President I made sure that the people back home were informed. This included people from the Yellowknife United Church congregation, and most importantly my partner Sharon. They all said they were willing to be a part of all this. The people of Yellowknife United Church are a very special group of people. They have been unfailingly supportive of my time as President, counting the time primarily as their own time of blessing rather than as a time when they would lose a part of me.

And as for Sharon - there were many times when because of the travel that I was required to do, that we were apart, but she has been a wonderful support for me during my term. She has built me up when the schedule or the requirements of the position have seemed too large or complicated and she has been a wise and capable source of insight into some of the things I wrote or tasks I have been asked to do. There is nothing truer to be said that even though because of where we live she was not able to accompany me on many of the visits and trips, this time of my term as President was a partnership. Sharon was always there in some fashion - having contributed to making the trips work, having offered early morning drives to the airport, and being the supportive and reliable presence back home. It will be good to be together more again, now that this term has ended.

I also have to offer thanks to Heather and Jeff, Steve and Coral and of course Tekerra. One of the cherished bonuses of many trips to and through Edmonton was that I was able to watch Tekerra grow. I was able in part to do this because I often stayed with Steve and Coral and Tekerra during these trips. Accommodation on many occasions and wheels almost as many times were provided to me by them, and thus helped to save the conference some dollars in what was anticipated (although I think it never quite worked out that way) would be a somewhat larger travel budget given that the President was living north of sixty degrees.

Heather and her little dog Oliver (hey, I'm a Wizard of Oz fan!) moved to Yellowknife in the early months of my term, and their sharing of our place was an unexpected delight, and a way to ease the loneliness for Sharon in the times when I was away. It is somewhat ironic that Heather will be moving away again just a month after the term ended. Oliver is going to stick around for a little bit, so the loneliness won't be quite as sharp, but we'll miss Heather.

Thanks everyone.  Mahsi Cho!

Thoughts and Prayers for the people of Slave Lake

A letter to the people of Alberta and Northwest Conference

Many of us in the Conference awoke on Monday morning to news of the destruction that has occurred in Slave Lake as a result of raging wildfires pushed in to the town by winds of up to one hundred km per hour. As the day progressed we heard estimates that a large percentage of the town was destroyed, including many key buildings and churches, but more importantly, the homes of hundreds of Slave Lake residents.

With the town having been evacuated it is likely that many Slave Lake residents do not yet know what happened to their homes.

I know that you along with me are praying for the residents of Slave Lake as they face the devastation and grief of so much loss. All reports so far have indicated that despite the tremendous speed at which this catastrophe has happened, and the large number of homes, businesses and other buildings that have been destroyed, there has been no loss of life. We can hope and pray that this small blessing in the midst of such ruin will continue to hold true.

The work of re-building will take not only hard work, but also the strong commitment of many people, and a strength of will that will be hard to find in the midst of such loss.

We all know that the church is more than a building, but for those people who have lost their place of worship, it will be an especially traumatic time. However, the church is more than a building and I know that the church is also more than the people in a particular community. And so I invite us as the church to be with the people of Slave Lake, offering the hope and presence of God in all the different ways that are possible.

Please hold the people of Slave Lake in your thoughts and in your prayers, and be encouraged in whatever way you can to offer whatever other assistance you can.

We also hold in gratitude everyone who has responded to this crisis, and made things just a little bit easier in the midst of shock, loss, fear and disbelief.

We will continue to monitor the situation in Slave Lake, with particular concern for the community of faith, and we will provide updates as soon as we can, along with any information we can provide about ways that you can help in the days to come.

And to the people of Slave Lake, may you know the power, strength and love of God in this time, and may God's presence be made known to you by the people of God who are standing, praying and working with you in this very difficult time.

Ash Wednesday #2!

Because the Lenten Discipline is free-form this year (as I mentioned in my previous entry) I can even put two entries up on the same day!

I reflected on what a pleasant chore it was for me to choose music for Lent today. As I searched for suitable hymns and choral responses I came across #109 in Voices United "Now Quit Your Care". I liked it. At first I thought the words were written by Percy Dreamer (what a great name for a hymn writer that would be!) but when I looked again I noticed I had mis-placed the "r" and it is Percy Dearmer. Being unfamiliar with the tune I went to that fount of all audio (and video) knowledge - YouTube and found this link to the King's College Choir, Cambridge singing a Christmas Carol in French to the tune in question: Quittez Pasteurs. Here is another nice one with better video.

This only confirmed for me how much I love Choral Music especially as sung by British choirs. This is music that inspires me - and more about that in a later post!

And yes, #109 VU is in the order of worship for Sunday.

Welcome Back!

The title of this post might be a cheery message to anyone who in vain checks this blog on a regular basis. It could mean to them that their search has finally yielded some results. If the title fits your situation you are welcome to use it!

My intention however was really to welcome myself back. Yes, indeed, it has been a while since I blogged here, and certainly the most prolific time of blogging is now more than a calendar year back.

I am referring to my Lenten discipline of 2010, namely the discipline of writing a blog entry every day (save Sundays) in the season of Lent. I recall near the end of last year's effort that I promised to come back in a while and offer some reflections on the whole experience. Such are the busyness and distractions of life that it took until the beginning of the following Lent to even offer a whiff of such reflection.

Not apologies, just observations...

A while ago I decided that my Lenten discipline this year would be to read my Lenten blog from last year - one entry each day, in the same order that I wrote them last year. At first it sounds much easier, and in reality it probably is, but I suspect that it will also allow me to do the kind of reflective analysis that I had hoped to do earlier. You see I can think back on last year's practice and recall some general themes - a certain ebb and flow that occurred as I walked the Lenten journey. That's part of what I am looking for. I also have a sense that I got off to a really good start last year - with lots of insights and ideas. It will be interesting to me to see if that recollection is mirrored in what I actually wrote. I will also be curious to see if the more difficult times (somewhere in the middle) are reflected by the quality and length of post I did last year.

The view from my office window,
Ash Wednesday 2011

I also promised to add a photo each day in Lent. I'm not sure how well that worked out. I had actually forgotten that part of the plan from last year. As it turns out I have my camera with me today and it is very easy to take a photo similar to the one I used last year. It's interesting to see the difference from one year to the next. It's a bit later in the year this time, but also much colder  - twenty degrees celsius colder! The skyline has changed a bit too! I've been watching the new DIAND (Department of Indian and Northern Affairs) building going up. It's the big yellow thing in the middle of the photo. The yellow is the insulation which they've been adding all around the building for the past two or three weeks (which means of course that the skyline is actually changing every day, if not every hour!)

It is not my plan to do a blog entry every day in Lent this year. Some days I will likely be prodded into responding to last year's entry either by reacting to what I wrote last year, or perhaps heading off on a tangent. I recall having some interesting thoughts and ideas around the whole idea of spiritual practice and spiritual discipline and I am giving myself permission to be more free-form this year - writing some days, photographing other days, being a creative writer on still other days and some days only reading what I wrote last year and perhaps reading some other daily Lenten study resource.

I also know that I will be involved in at least two other spiritual discipline situations in the coming weeks. On Sunday some folks from Yellowknife United Church are going to create a temporary labyrinth on the floor of our worship space and people will be invited to walk the labyrinth. I'm looking forward to it. Following that, members of the congregation have been invited to participate in the document that was put out by Alberta and Northwest Conference related to the "Listening Year" which everyone in the conference has been invited to engage. It contains some spiritual practices which seemed a very fitting connection between the desire of the conference to hear from us while at the same time allowing us the opportunity to engage in spiritual practice. I hope that my insights from last year's blogging discipline might be a helpful addition to the process.

So, here we go, another Lent has begun. I've fulfilled my first commitment by checking out what I wrote on Ash Wednesday last year and here is an entry for day one this year.

By the way, I spent some time today selecting music for the first Sunday worship service of Lent and that too was a helpful thing for me today. I enjoyed reading through some hymn texts and indices in my goal of picking music that would serve us not only for this coming Sunday but in some cases throughout the season.

Lent can be such a rich season. I heard someone say that a few weeks ago and wondered what they meant, and doubted that it would ever apply to me, but I can truly say that after this little bit of hymn choosing, reflecting on Lent, reading what I wrote last year and now writing these few words, I find I am actually looking forward to what the season might have in store for me and us (with that "us" being vaguely (and comfortably) defined!).

Blessings...

Peter

Dark and Cold: Warmth and Light, A Christmas Message

It is two days before Christmas and the days are getting longer. That's a bit of a big deal for us who live north of 60 degrees latitude. We watched with interest and excitement a few days ago as the earth's shadow passed across the moon on the evening of the solstice, turning the moon a rusty red. It was a crisp clear night and we and our vehicles were parked all along the ice road which runs across Yellowknife Bay from Yellowknife to the community of Dettah.

The next morning I had the honour and privilege of travelling north of the Arctic Circle to the community of Fort McPherson to take part in a commemoration of the 100^th Anniversary of the “Lost Patrol” - a tragic story in the annals of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police – which later became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – when four members of the RNWMP set out on a regular winter patrol to Dawson City. Unfortunately through a combination of never having done the patrol in that direction, terrible weather with the temperature plunging to the minus 60's Fahrenheit and of course the limited light at this time of year, they never made it. All of them perished in the frozen land, but only after a terrible forty seven days of trying to find the route and running out of provisions.

Cold and dark are a fact of life for us who live in the north. Many of the Christmas carols we sing at this time of year make mention of the cold – perhaps more fitting to our Canadian climate than to that of the first-century Middle East, and the dark, as the shepherds beheld the choir of angels.

But the birth of a child in a stable, in a place that was not home for Mary or Joseph, reminds us that so often the gospel is an upside down story – a story of the surprise of God's presence in unexpected ways, a story of the last being first, a story of the last and the least being first at the feast. And so, I look to the cold and the dark for the lessons they can teach me about God's presence, and I think of the resourcefulness and courage of people who face hardship and trouble with faith in the power and presence of God to sustain them.

We talk of light – and light is wonderful, and revelatory, and for people who live north of the Arctic Circle – like the people of Fort McPherson and other communities, there is a big celebration when the sun returns on or about January 6 (how wonderful is that little connection between Epiphany and the return of the sun!), but I invite you to think of how many good ideas, how many inventions, how many lives were transformed in the dark of night – in dreams that became fulfilled, in bedtime meditations, in the ideas that popped into active minds, and in that birth which we celebrate at Christmas – in the darkness of a Bethlehem night.

May your Christmas celebrations – in worship, in the gathering of family in whatever forms they take, in communities across our wonderful and diverse church in this conference, be ones which bring out the value and support of tradition, but may they also be ones which are open to insight and wisdom in the unexpected, in the upside down way that God has always spoken.

You are a blessing: Be a blessing...

T-Rex Jesus

So, it is happening again. Senior High Rally started around 7pm last night (Friday) and it is still before noon on Saturday and of course the creativity is flowing. This morning the home groups were invited to re-imagine a biblical story and we were inspired to see, hear and incorporate the good news in wonderfully imaginative, humourous and insightful ways.

Zachaeus the Raptor and T-Rex Jesus. Noah and his wife booking a vacation on a "Zoo Cruise" gone wrong, but ultimately right. The story of Jonah told in a game of tag. A commercial for that new healing product "Jesus Touch" gel including the requisite list of side effects (except in this case they were all to be desired rather than feared!).

I heard it said last week that if you want something transformative to happen to your congregation just offer to host one of the two rally events that are held in our conference every year - Senior Rally in October and Junior Rally in March.

Nothing that has happened so far at Sherwood Park United Church has caused me to change my mind on that one!

Reporting in as one of the Chaplains at Senior High Rally 2010 in Sherwood Park United Church.

Back at last...

Here's a curious little piece of information. I wrote a blog entry every day for forty days in Lent and before that off and on - pretty much every time I wrote an article for "In Contact". Throughout the Lenten writings and in most of the previous entries I invited people to interact with me. Not once did anyone comment online with regard to anything I wrote. It was easy not to get an inflated idea of how many people were reading... I knew a few who were reading the writings in Lent, but I did not expect that there were too many others.

In an interesting irony, the title of the last Lenten writing was this: Is this how it ends? Of course I was referring to the end of the Lenten season and the disciples commenting on the death of Jesus, but for those people who kept checking the blog after Lent, it probably had a different ring. It could well be the question I was posing to myself after completing the Lenten discipline that both challenged and inspired me.

But over the past three weeks or so, I have had several people make reference to the blog and while they have expressed an understanding that I've been very busy, they have also mentioned that I haven't added anything lately. You may know who you are - and now you know that those little comments dropped into the middle of other conversations have sparked a rekindling of my blogging enterprise!

So this entry is an answer to all of that. No, that was not how it all ended - at least in blog terms, and no it was not how it all ended for Jesus either.

Lessons for me?

• Resurrection themes can pop up in the most unlikely of situations.

• Keep on writing because you never know who is reading.

Lessons for you?

• Keep on letting me know you are reading - whether it be by commenting in the blog itself or by letting me know the next time you see me. I am always happy to write in response to questions or requests. In fact I commented to someone recently that I get inspired by deadlines, but I also get inspired by questions.

Posted in Banff, Alberta on October 15 while attending the Banff Men's Conference - more on that later!