The Table

In Ephesians 5, people that want to make the most of life and live it wisely are instructed to “speak to one another psalms, hymns and spiritual songs”. These songs, the writer goes on to explain, come from the heart. It’s like some songs are written in a different language…one that sometimes seems to bypass […]

At breakfast yesterday morning Tayah suddenly said, “Did you know that a pigs heart is almost like a human heart?”. Now there’s a picture to carry into the day… As it turned out, there was a context for that info. The day before, Tayah, Tirian and Corinne had been helping out at a transitional school […]

I know I chose to live here (came but for friendship, stayed for love…), but it has been a longish stretch of deep-freeze cold. Conversations about the weather these days seem to be almost uniformly negative, and with the exception of my mechanic I haven’t met very many folks that are loving this. And, as […]

Hello Tablers. Earlier this week I had another one of those conversations that reminded me of just how hard it can be to see past our pre-conceived or learned notions of who God is and where signs pointing to such a Being might be found. In my experience, it is hard work to learn a different […]

Just “down the road” from where I grew up in Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan is the little town of Nipawin. You can take the boy out of the town without taking the town out of the boy, so when I heard overheard a news item yesterday with the word “Nipawin” in it, I turned up the […]

I don’t remember the sequence of events, but I do remember the circumstances. Almost exactly one year ago, just after we had our house fire, I was lying in a bed that wasn’t our own, in a house that wasn’t our own, in what felt like a life that wasn’t my own, and I was […]

This is the time of year when perfect strangers share a rather substantial “wish” with one another without thinking twice about it. We toss off “Happy New Year!” as though it meant roughly the same as “Hi”. If we stopped to think about it, we might recognize it as something more akin to a prayer, […]

Hello Tablers! Welcome to Christmastide.I don’t know if you have ever been either in or near a car crash, but having had both experiences one of the things that I have noted is that strange moment of silence that follows the racket of the collision itself. I sometimes feel like this week (the week after […]

Hello Tablers! We’re deep into Advent, within a whiff of Christmas, awash in the swirl of “seasonal events”, and I suppose that gathering with our community at The Table to mark this unique time of year could be just another thing on the calender. For those able to come this Sunday evening (gather at 5, […]

In country terms, we live “just down the road” from the site of the Winnipeg Folk Festival. So it’s easy to wander over there and enjoy some of the great acts that come through every summer. Every once in while one of them becomes a new favorite That happened this past summer with Canadian folk-rock […]