There was a creepy guy at the beach.

He was the only one wearing long pants and long sleeves on a sweltering August day at Alouette Lake.  

I didn’t know he was creepy at first, he just looked… overdressed.   I saw him take a few pictures of Beatrice, who was making a pile of rocks.  It didn’t bother me at first; she’s cute, she’s stacking stones, it’s not like we were changing her or anything.  As he walked away, Joanne and I saw another woman walk hurriedly toward him and proceed to animatedly chew him out, demanding to be shown the pictures on his phone.

I thought, well maybe he took a picture of her kid and she didn’t want that.  Once they’d finished and parted, Joanne decided to go ask her what that was all about.  She came back and told me that the woman had demanded to see the pictures on his phone, and they had all been pictures of the crotches of girls.  Just girls.  Just their crotches.

I took off to try to find him.  I made one loop through the crowd and then Joanne joined me and we made another loop together, to no avail.  He’d probably left quickly after being confronted.

We were more than a little nauseated the rest of the day.

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My next day at work, the phone rings and it’s a guy looking for help.  (Not the same guy.)  He’d been arrested for possession of child porn and I guess was out on bail until his court date.  I agreed to meet with him.  After I hung up, I thought, what am I doing?  I do NOT want to meet with this guy.

I meet with a lot of guys.  I hear a lot of horrible stories, lives coming apart, men desperate for change.  But after the event at the lake, I did not want to hear this guy’s story.  I wanted him to go away.

I met with him.  And he was creepy.  I had prayed for compassion beforehand, but wondered if I was going to have to say, "Can you excuse me for a moment, I have to go throw up now."

He was divorced, and hadn’t been to church in six years, but he had started going again.

I ask him what his relationship with God is like.  He'd mostly just blamed God for everything that had gone wrong in his life.  "Then why did you start going back to church?"  He said that he had a little spark of hope.  I asked him if he ever read the Bible, and he said he didn't have one.

A voice in my head said, “Give him your Bible.”

I say, “Just a moment, let me go check on something.”  I go out and check our office shelves.  Dang it, don’t we have any spare Bibles lying around? 

Joanne had purchased a nice Bible for me as a gift years ago.  It was a parallel version with NIV on one side and The Message on the other.  It had been lost in the fire we had at the office, and it had taken me a while to find another one like it.  So this was my second one and it had this cool cover with a place to put notes and pens.  I had a great fondness for it.

I’m still scanning the shelves.  There’s a hymnal, no, that won’t do.  Where’s a freakin' Gideon when you need one?

“Give him YOUR Bible.”

I come back to my office and I’m surveying the shelves there.  I ask him, “Have you ever read the Bible before?”

He says, “Kind of.  Years ago.  It doesn’t really make sense to me, and goes in one ear and out the other.”

Shoot!  The voice will not leave me alone, and as I reach for my Bible, I wonder how tacky it would be for me to remove the cover first.

I hesitate, sigh, and hand him my Bible and say, “Well I’m going to give you mine.”  He says, "No.  I can’t do that!"  I say to do it anyway, and then I open it up and explain how the parallel thing works.  We read a Psalm in the NIV, and then read it again in The Message.  I tell him I want him to read a Psalm every day like that.  I print out a list of meetings in town for sexaholics anonymous, and I tell him I want him to go to 30 meetings in the next 30 days. (I should have said 90.) I fold up the list of meetings and put it in the special note pocket in the cover.

Then I pray for him.  As I sit there, praying for this guy in the rumpled white T-shirt, I get a strong impression that he is “the least of these.”  He is the out of work, creepy, isolated guy addicted to extreme pornography, child pornography.  He is unclean.

As he leaves, lyrics to an old Petra song go through my head.

The least of these knows sorrow.
The least of these knows grief.
The least of these has suffered pain, and Jesus is His name. 

I feel like I hear Jesus say, “I am that creepy guy.  The guy on the beach.  The guy in your office in the rumpled white T-shirt.  I died for them, and their pain is mine.”

God please continue to break my heart.

Kite Flying can be like life

A dear friend sent kites to our kids.  The kites are great because they are "pocket kites" and have no sticks.  They are rectangular pockets that fill with wind and have a really long tail.  

We had one partially successful and frustrating day of flying when we were visiting a friend in Hope, but the winds stopped, so hoped to have a really good day of kite flying when we got home to Steveston.

Atticus really trying

Phin taking his kite for a drag

When we were home, and I had my day with the kids and Joanne was at the office, I noticed it was really windy.  So after we finished our home-schooling we went to the park that is right on a point jutting into the Georgia Straight and is known as a windy spot favoured by kite-flyers.

I had underestimated how windy it was, and that it may be foolish to try this on my own.

I was able to get one kite unwound and launched.  Up it went, and I had one thrilled child and two that were now eager and impatient.  I started to work on the second kite.

While I am doing that, my four year old, excited and impatient, pulls his out of it's pouch and proceeds to shake it, vigorously.   "No Phin, please wait, no... no!"  Too late.  Kite #3 is now a tangled mess.  

So I get the second kite launched and then I start trying to untangle Phin's, and while I am doing that, the other two kites cross lines in the air, dance around each other and come crashing to the ground.  And there I am, with a howling wind, and three kites in a tangled heap on the ground.   Atticus pleads with me, "Papa can you fix them?"  "Maybe, but it's going to take some time."

Beatrice grabs one of the spools and starts running in circles around us with great glee.   I try to get up and stop her, but then the three kites I'm kneeling on start blowing away, so I have to rush back to hold them down.  It's my turn to plead, "Please stop sweetheart, you're making it worse."  She giggles and continues to make a cocoon around us.  I need to do something before we resemble Frodo prepped to be carried off to Shelob's lair.

"Atticus, help me.  Stop her please."  Atticus, in a swift judgement call, decides to stop her with a flying tackle.  "Atticus!  You didn't have to do that!"   He retorts, "You said to stop her!"  That's true, I did.  Now Beatrice is sobbing, I'm trying to console her, and both boys are standing beside me, begging for their kites, like they would petition for the life of an ill pet.  "Please Papa?  Pleeeeeassse?  I am saying pleeease!"

With one sobbing little girl on my shoulder, and two little boys pulling on each pant leg, and a heap of tangled kites at my feet, I want to laugh and cry and let loose with a primal scream that will rip the sky.  But instead I whimper a prayer, "...help?"  (I wish I'd done the primal scream as well.)

I take a deep breath and break the news to them.  "We are not going to be able to fly kites any more today.  We are going to have to go home, and I will work on them there."

Beatrice continues to sob.  Phin's heart is broken and he begins to wail.  Atticus shifts to anger.  "You can fix them!  You can!  You just don't want to!"

More than anything at that moment, I wanted to see those three kites in the air and three happy little faces.

Some of us, impatient with how our life is unfolding, have shaken it out, only to have a jumble of string and cloth that never gets off the ground.

Others have soared for a bit, only to cross other people's lines, and the entanglement has brought us crashing to the ground.

Sometimes we get mad at God when we look at our tangled up life that's not soaring like we'd hoped and we yell, "You can fix it.  You just don't want to!"  And I think God says to us, "I can fix it, but it's going to take some time."  And He might need to bring us in out of the wind for a while.

More Fire Thoughts

Thoughts on Fire-Mediated Serotiny
                              or

Jack Pine

Jack Pine has Been Through the Fire but the Kids are All Right

Most pine cones open up and release their seeds on a yearly basis.  Some do not.  Some cones, like those of the Jack Pine, often don't release their seeds until they've been through a fire.  This is called fire-mediated serotiny (seed release.)

Life can be tough for a seedling.  Finding enough soil to take root in among all that ground cover can be difficult.  And sometimes a dense forest means much competition for sunlight on the forest floor.

But sometimes something miraculous happens in the taller trees that are not consumed by a fire.  The heat from the fire will actually cause the cones to open.  The serotiny of some trees is so well choreographed that they will open in the heat of the fire, but not actually drop the seeds until after a rain.  This way the seeds are not burned, but land on rich, moist earth.

This is my prayer for Living Waters.  That since our fire, more growth will happen; that the seeds will we scatter will fall on fertile, receptive soil.  And I pray for substantial growth.  We don't want to be planting clover or Dandelions, but trees, big trees; something strong that is going to stand for decades.

Interestingly enough, and perhaps not coincidentally, one of the trees with serotinous cones is the world's largest; the Giant Sequoia.  The cones of the Sequoia can stay closed for twenty years, sometimes waiting for a fire.  The fire that consumed our office happened as we were celebrating our 20th anniversary.

Join me in praying that this will be the year of new growth.

Giant Sequoia, this one is known as The General Grant tree in Kings Canyon National Park

Significance

I wanted to write a bit about some of the larger significance surrounding this fire and our move to the new offices.  This is a season of big changes for Living Waters Canada, even before we lost everything in the fire.  See, we had just parted ways with our parent organization Desert Stream Ministries.  Andy Comiskey, the founder of Desert Stream, (and the author of the original Living Waters manual that our manual is based on,) came and met with Toni and some board members.  He released us and gave us his blessing to function on our own and to network more closely with Living Waters Global.  This was a huge shift.

Another interesting note is that Living Waters Global has an international conference every three years in a different country.  And that conference is happening this year, and for the first time, it will be in Canada.  We are hosting the conference right here in Vancouver in June.

All these "firsts" and "new beginnings" had just occurred when our office burned down.  We received many encouraging letters talking about trading ashes for beauty, and being refined by fire.  And we believe this to be so.  We believe God allowed some things to be burned so that we may start afresh, and we pray that the things that were true, will remain.  Please pray this for us as well.

Farewell to the old...

I was the last person to leave our old offices on the last day that they let us go in and rummage for items that might be rescued.  Before I left I shot a quick video, just to say goodbye.

Temporary digs

Since the fire, we have been "camping" at a local church that has been very generous with their space, and we are very grateful for Tenth Church allowing us to use their nursery and prayer room as our temporary offices.  (The little animal decals on the wall are helping us all get in touch with our inner child.)

Toni, our boss, sharing the nursery with the rest of us.

Some team time around a table in the prayer room.

Ashes... ashes...

I thought I would post some more pictures of the aftermath from our fire.

This is my friend Matt who runs our River program for youth.  Much of that mountain of debris is what used to be my office.

We were literally shoveling through stuff to find anything we could salvage.

Smiling on the outside but crying on the inside.