CHRISTINE’S 2015 BIRTHDAY PARTY

July 23, yesterday, was Christine’s birthday. She is looking and feeling great for her age, which will go unidentified here. She is fantastic to be hanging around with me, an older guy by eleven months and I am 72 and will be 73 in September. We are fortunate for so many reasons, for our health today, for children and grandchildren only minutes away, for a comfy downsized home, for friends.

Last night, Eugene and Elaine Bodner joined our family, Cari and Tim and their three, Kailyn, Ryan and Jayden and Jeff and Gina and their two Kale and Kadence. We gathered at Jeff’s and Gina’s home for an evening of appies and desserts and conversation and some nice wines. It was another pleasantly warm day with a lovely sunset. Children love each other and love playing with one another. This is how Christine likes to celebrate, casually, simply, and with people close.

Today, we get ready to make a trip together with Karen and Rob Stewart, leaving tomorrow morning for the Tsawassen ferry to Nanaimo, from where we will travel north on Vancouver Island to Port McNeil, meet Ben and Anna Crumbeck and have lunch, and then go by ferry to Malcolm Island. We will drive to the village of Sointula, where Ben and Anna live and pastor the Sointula Community Church. We will stay overnight, and I will preach on Sunday morning and then the church is having a community BBQ. We will leave the island at 3pm and we have a reservation on the 9PM ferry from Nanaimo back to the mainland, so we’ll be home between 11:00pm-12:00am Sunday night.

Monday, we may be at Cultus Lake with the Locken clan for the day.

A RANDOM SPOUT

A random spout

That's all, not rancorous but attentive to life

As now I live it vigorously, and why not

When already past four score and ten

I contract arduous house-painting opps

Working like a young man, to a loop

Of my choice, Divo, Rod Stewart, Bublé and Phantom

For two coats on a neighbour's walls

Adding money to my Art Fund - my fine art resource

If there's time for canvas between writing and speaking

Long after my challenging professional years

Vested with office and colleagues a seeming lifetime ago,

When in our private home we took privacy for granted,

Then downsized for profit to live in common property

Shared by hundreds whom we hardly know,

Many of whom smoke weed, my unsolicited default fragrance

On a summer evening, at parties held within earshot 

Between midnight and the 5 o'clock train,

Just in time for me to wake for coffee and the gym,

And renters moving in and out and good riddance

Since they care less than owners for our pooled space,

In time as well to see the Donald,

Announced Republican candidate for U.S. Pres

Who surprised Nasa scientists with New Horizons spacecraft photos of Pluto.

Life is anything but uninteresting, when my ears need aids,

And my car needs a soft top, and my wife needs cataract surgery,

And my nearest neighbour needs a detox centre

And my grandkids long board to our house

Where cantaloupe and conversation and water satisfy them.

In our uncommon prolonged summer heat

My raised bed garden yields zucchinis

Tomatoes flourish high on towering plants
And fragrant roses flower for all to enjoy.  

THE SHACK, A FILM, MADE NEXT DOOR.

They are making the movie right here in lower mainland B.C., and I have been just metres away from some of the filming this week. This may be a good film, if it keeps to the script. John Fusco, best known for writing 1988's Young Guns, wrote its screenplay adaptation from the book by the same name by first-time author Paul Young which sold 22 million copies worldwide. Of course many in the evangelical world took issue with the 2007 best-selling book, The Shack, in the first place, castigating it and its Canadian author Paul Young for parodying God and the Trinity, perhaps even depreciating these entities.

SAM WORTHINGTON

I treated the read years ago as the novel that it was. You would throw out much of C.S. Lewis' fiction if you took the same reactionary stance against his material.  Young was not teaching theology, but telling a story, the account of a man's pain at the loss of a daughter as a result of a kidnapping and murder by a serial killer. Sam Worthington plays the lead role of Mackenzie "Mack" Allen Phillips who is plunged into a deep emotional abyss that embraces fury at God. Four years after the horror, he receives a letter from God called Papa. 

And of course this representation in the book set people off, because portrayed Papa as a woman, a black female who will be portrayed by Octavia Spencer, who has already won an Oscar for her role in the "The Help." Radha Mitchell is in the role of Phillips' wife and Amelie Eve is their missing daughter. I saw her in the canoe scene as it was being shot last night. The Shack and Papa's cabin tucked into the woods are all on site and the filming went on for the four days that we were close by holidaying in a cottage. Very fun.

Paul Young himself says that he is excited about the movie because he has been given the rare opportunity to invest his creative input into the filmmaking process. We will see how much his voice is heard.  Young calls the book a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain.” 

Will non-believers be confused, led astray from God’s true persona? Might viewers who never think about God, feel compelled to seek to know him outside the context of the novel? I will look forward to the movie. I won't fashion my theology, or my concept of God based upon its expressions for deity. I may however, learn to meditate more keenly on some aspects of the character of God as expressed by the three persons whom readers may discern as the Trinitarian God image. I may  be encouraged about the compassion of God for his human creatures when they suffer. 

SPEAKING IN RICHMOND

2013 Summer Retreat of Richmond Chinese EFC (English Ministries)

Christine and I began yesterday with the first of three Sundays with our good friends at Richmond Chinese Evangelical Free Church (English Ministries). I have the opportunity to teach them during their Sunday worship hour. Currently they are studying through the book of the Acts of the Apostles, so I am providing a 3-part series on the Holy Spirit and the Church.

This opportunity comes as a result of some church multiplication. Both the pastor of EM Allen Chang and his wife Hanna and the internship pastor Daniel Wong and his wife Joyce are expecting new ‘first’ babies. Daniel and Joyce are waiting until August, but even as I write this Monday morning, Allen and Hanna may be rejoicing in their new arrival. I have not heard yet.

Yesterday following the worship service, the EM church held a BBQ outside in the great summer weather we are having. Chinese Ministries were engaged in their own worship hour concurrent with that. I am very grateful for the friendship of these people, and that of the lead pastor Anthony Yeung and Board Chair Don Lau.

The group photo is that of the second weekend retreat to which we were invited as teachers during these past several years. We love this eager, enthusiastic, teachable group of God’s servants.

I AM ON GOOGLE MAPS

I appeared on Google Maps painting our Sunset Grove Estates outdoor signs - Woo Woo … internationally known now

https://goo.gl/maps/Fa4Up

or, https://www.google.com/maps/@49.121542,-122.683314,3a,60y,239.35h,81.62t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sIpQNDzWE2ok3CCp15tD0wQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!5m1!1e1

EDWARD RICHARD UNRUH DIED MAY 1, 2008

May 1st is the anniversary of my Dad's death. I cannot own him by myself. We are three sons of Edward Richard Unruh. Our father passed away on May 1, 2008.

Murray, Neale and I will remember him with pleasure today. Such a good man, a gentle man he was. Faithful, constant, loving in a reserved manner appropriate to his generation I suppose. Through the years, even as he aged, he seemed enduring, unchanging, always there when I visited, or Neale visited or when Murray regularly took him for a coffee at Horton's. Murray and Diane know our lasting gratitude for their years of loving care. Even during the last years when Mom's dementia required her care in a nursing facility, Dad remained in his apartment, looking after most of his own needs. And then he was gone, quietly, peacefully.

Like millions of other men, Dad distinguished himself, as son, a husband, and a father. I would like you to know him. He was born the last of four children to Cornelius K. Unruh and his wife Katherine. His childhood home was the prairie town of Hepburn, Saskatchewan, where he acquired a grade eleven education. Then he began to work at numerous jobs. Edward, fell in love with Tina Martha (Doerksen) Willems, four years younger than himself. Willems was her step family surname. Doerksen was on her birth certificate from Montana where her birth father Isaac Doerksen died when she was two years of age. Their love took them happily through 66 years until Mom passed away. In his twenties he owned and operated a 'filling' station as it was called (gas station). Together, Mom And Dad set up a coffee shop on the main street. Then WWII happened and Dad enlisted in the Canadian Air Force, which was an exceptional act in a town of Mennonite pacifists. He was an airplane mechanic. When the war was over, they looked at the future for their family, measured employment options, and the many factory jobs in Ontario seemed attractive. Dad, Mom and me at age four, moved to St. Catharines. Dad worked for Thompson Products, Ontario Paper Mill and finally Anthes Imperial, where he remained for over forty years. Anthes built furnaces and dad worked in the heat of the foundry, in the cab of an aerial crane, and then for decades on the assembly line. He often came home exhausted. He would clean up and settle down with his newspaper, sometimes draped over his face as he napped on the sofa. His work ethic was a commendable model for his three boys. Well into our own manhood, one day we asked him why he stayed at such difficult work for so long. A six-word reply revealed the man. “I did it for my boys.”

He purchased a family home before he turned forty years of age. He took his family to a rented cottage for summer vacations. He took us for Sunday afternoon car rides. He sang with us. He yodeled. He was proud of us. He loved our Mother. When we married, his love for our brides gave them a strong sense of comfort in an extended family. He trusted in God, and he supported all three of us as we took on Christian service vocations.

Dad never took a leadership position at church. If he was asked to be on committees or boards he declined. He knew his strengths and limitations. He enjoyed serving but the service had to be in the areas of comfort and competence. Smart man. Private man. Honorable man.

In November 2007, our Mom passed away. The night before the memorial service as our family stood together at her coffin, Dad said, "Goodnight sweetheart, I'll see you soon." His loss was profound, we are sure of that. Yet Dad was stoic. Mom had been ill for several years and it was time for her to go. Perhaps a man knows when it is his time as well. One evening six months later, he enjoyed a dinner at Murray and Diane's home. Beth and Eric were there, as were their daughters Selah and Karis. After the meal Murray drove him home. Before bed, a nurse arrived to dispense medication but found Dad lying on the floor. With no evident bruises, it was supposed that he felt unwell and was heading for the couch, but lay down on the rug and died there.

WE WANT TO TALK ABOUT US

In this digital culture, much of our online networking is aimed at self-representation and self-exposure, and the use of the first personal pronouns services this preoccupation. In face-on conversation, one might certainly conclude that a person who speaks predominantly about himself or herself is in a personal silo of self-importance. Online social networks coerce subscribers/friends/partners to talk about themselves. The user-friendly web with all of its channels, endorses even inhibited people to exhibit, and private people to self-expose and deceptive people to appear authentic. Privacy and online social networks are mutually exclusive unless one is purely a voyeur and listener. If relationships are a key result area of your life, then you will determine to keep the cell phone in your purse or pocket when you are having conversation and a coffee with a friend; you will discipline yourself to refrain from too much self congratulatory Facebook entries; you will purposely and sincerely ask others how they are and what is happening in their lives before you volunteer your current stories.

SNEAKY GRANDPA

At Jayden’s art lesson today, he spotted a bag of chips under the art table. He asked “Grandpa, why are the chips there?” I said, “I’m hiding them.” With a smirk on his face he asked, "From whom?” ” I told him, “I’m hiding them from Grandma.” Now a big smile appeared on his face. “Why are you hiding them from her.” I said, “She doesn’t want me to have them.” He continued, “why doesn’t she want you to have them?” “She wants me to lose weight.” Now he wanted to laugh but he kept it in, and tucked it away as a future anecdote about G&G when he used to come over for art lessons.

THE HIGH NOTES

If I could only sing the high notes

I would soar.

I would float a song to melt a mood

Discordant with hard times;

I would lift a tune beyond the moon

Where lovers lift their eyes;

I would glide a melody so long

That broken hearts would mend;

I would hum a bar so musically

You'd wish it would not end.

© Ron Unruh, March 2015

A WORTHY HERO

I am having one of my ‘senior’ hours just now, having awoken at 3 am, and checked some art websites, some email like this, and now will settle into the middle of my current novel, reading Lee Child’s ’61 Hours.’ His protagonist in this multi-novel series is Jack Reacher. And over the past year I have read many of his works. Reacher is an interesting character, fascinating because he is unlike me in every conceivable way, standing 6’5”, an ex military man, with combat skills and awareness of other people’s weakness that makes him fearless; a vagabond of sorts who is constantly travelling across the USA, always on the move, without any possessions whatsoever, carries no backpack or anything else, purchases new inexpensive clothing every few days and discards the old stuff, and wherever he goes, he stumbles into some fascinating scenario where he has a string of heroic moments at the end of which, I as a reader feel relief from the resolution, strength from living Reacher’s story, eagerness to learn more about him as he moves on.

I can’t explain my fascination with this diversion from personal reality, in which my inadequacies are all too apparent. But I am aware that Reacher is not my personal hero. Jesus is my hero.

He is so much more than that to me of course, but Jesus is a bonafide hero. We seldom think of him in such terms, but if we do revisit his earth-time story, his character stands out compellingly against the culture and values of his time and certainly of our time.