Gone facebooking...

Okay, if my blog thing isn't happening so regularily, blame Facebook. I know was dissing it a month ago, but it's making more sense. And I've connected with a ton of people I haven't talked to or heard from for years. YEARS, I say. The end result is that I'm starting to feel very old, and don't have much time left to blog...

10 Ways to Get Out of the Gay Life, If You Want Out

Here's a great story Dallas put me on to:

Prominent Afro-American gay publisher turns to Jesus

Charlene Cothran, a prominent black lesbian in the forefront of the fight for equal rights for gays and lesbians, and publisher of a successful magazine geared to black homosexuals was not looking to change anything in her life. Her entire life and all her earthly successes were firmly entrenched in the homosexual community. But, due to the inspiration of a pastor who counselled Cothran to use her gifts for Christ, Cothran has left her homosexual life and is making it her mission to offer help to other homosexuals who want to do the same.

In a front page article in her own VENUS magazine entitled 'Redeemed! 10 Ways to Get Out of the Gay Life, If You Want Out', Cothran unabashedly explained the reasons behind her conversion and the peace that her decision has brought to her. VENUS magazine has a circulation total of over 38,000 predominantly black homosexuals across the United States.

Cothran says that her conversion story has been received, predictably, with mixed emotions in the homosexual community. "I completely understand many of the responses, as angry as they were. A year ago, I would have responded the exact same way."

Thought for the Day

"All the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still."

Blaise Pascal, French philosopher (1623-1662).

I'm not a political junkie, but...

I'm not a political junkie, but I must admit one of my political heros is Tony Blair. Even though I probably lean more toward the political right, Blair has always hit me as an honest, principled, down to earth kind of person. I have aways appreciated his communication style and his governments accomplishments have been amazing. One thing that has been kept buried are his deep conservative religious beliefs. The Globe and Mail had a fascinating article on him that is worth reading.

It was fun to see him portrayed by Michael Shean in The Queen. If you haven't seen it, you can catch his resignation speach here. He is a master communicator worth watching and learning from. (I guess that's the preacher in me surfacing...)

Ouch! I got gas...

I bought a Corolla because I wanted some economical transportation. But then fuel hit 122.9 / liter.

$1.22.9!!! Per liter.

I went to fill the tank and it cost me $50.01.

$50.01!!!

And I didn't even try to squeeze it full. I couldn't. I was nauseous.

Facebook fanatics please fill me in

I finally got my face on Facebook. But after a couple of weeks of being on Facebook I have to admit I just don't get it. I do value my friends who have hooked up with me in cyber-space...deeply! But people spend hours doing this? And I thought blogging (and the endless reading of blogs) could get ridiculous.

Maybe I'm just old or really out of touch with reality. Oh, I know it is about community and social networking and that it's growing by 100,000 members a week with 2,000,000 members world-wide (500,000 of them in Toronto alone, making it the center of the Facebook Universe...).

But thanks to Yoni Goldstein, I finally understand what Facebook is all about:

"The following is a list of the things you can do on Facebook: You can (a) post pictures of yourself, (b) find long lost friends whom you never really cared about anyways (that's why they became long lost in the first place), (c) post messages to your Facebook friends on their Facebook sites (important communiques like "Happy Birthday" or "that party last night rocked!"). You can also (d) cyber-bully the trusty nerds at school or (e) slander all the people you dislike."

That's just about what I had gathered through my brief Facebook career. Now just in case Yoni is misinformed, please let me in on the big secret, because on my own I don't think I'm going to figure it out. Maybe I'm just not post-modern enough. Or maybe I have a life. :)

PS: Yoni also says that Ontario has banned government employees from accessing the Facebook website from government computers (along with YouTube, gambling, and porn). Something about productivity issues...hmmm...I better get back to work...

New wine, or just old wine with a new name?

Just got back from District Conference, and along with all the great leadership moments with John (the corn feeds the cows and the cows feed the corn), it's always a good scene for connecting with good friends having some great conversations about life and ministry (thanks Stewart!).

And it stirred up some of my thinking about the contemporary church and culture.

I recently stumbled on something Alan Roxburgh wrote that articulates some of my nagging concerns with my own understanding of the issues, as well as the perspective a lot of pastors in our PAOC fellowship seem to express when I talk to them. He stated that while there is a lot of interest in church transformation, which is an indication of crisis and opportunity for churches, too often we as leaders still opt for techniques and programs that are simply baptized with missional language. We don’t understand the depth of culture change that is required with church systems.

Does the church need change? Not just change our language or swap the existing program or try the latest technique, but change the very culture of the church, the paradigm we have of ourselves and our mission?

Yup.

How?

You can catch the full thought by Alan Roxburgh here.

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

This is too weird not to post. Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Glad I'm not moving to Paris...

Having an interest in things urban and having lived in downtown Vancouver, I have to admit I find the following statistics fascinating, especially from a western Canadian perspective. You can read the whole story here.

TOP 10 MOST EXPENSIVE DOWNTOWN MARKETS
- Paris $1051/sq.ft.
- Moscow $688/sq.ft
- Seoul $630/sq.ft
- Vancouver $577/sq.ft
- London, U.K. $532/sq.ft
- Calgary $500/sq.ft
- Athens $375/sq.ft
- New York City $375/sq.ft
- Tokyo, $325/sq.ft
- Edmonton $322/sq.ft

St. John's and Quebec City had the lowest and second-lowest per-square-foot downtown prices of all 31 cities surveyed, at $55 and $93 respectively. The two lowest per-square-foot prices for international cities were Istanbul, Turkey and Sydney, Australia, at $94 and $105 respectively.

AIDS, Famine, and Me

Showed Bono's interview with Bill Hybels at Tehillah last Monday. Powerful stuff. He is a very articulate guy. His passion is the fight against global poverty, the AIDS pandemic, and the 3rd world debt crisis. No small potatoes. You can catch Bono's address to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last year here. I knew he was buddies with Paul Martin and had been at a bunch of Liberal Party of Canada stuff, but the Prayer Breakfast thing was really my first exposure to Bono the activist, or more accurately, Bono the Preacher. He blew me away. His interview with Hybles is just as riveting, and has some great concert footage. If you get a chance to watch it, it's worth the time. (And people used to argue about whether Bono or U2 could really be thought of as 'saved'. God deliver us...)

Bottom line: Doing nothing is unacceptable. Every day 8000 people die from AIDS. Everyday 11,000 more get infected. By 2015, over 115 million will have died, and there will be 35 million orphans. Doing nothing is unacceptable. Check out Matthew 25:31-46.

So today the girls are doing the World Vision 30 Hour Famine. They are doing something. And between them they've raised over $750. I'm proud. But that can't be where it ends.

Thrilling News from Paul and Wanda

Here is some wild news from our friends Paul and Wanda! God is good, and thier lives have changed! Check it out here.

Fire Pit Officially Inaugurated

We had our first fire in our fire pit the other night. It was fantastic. Clear and warm, with stars shining and frog croaking from the wetlands below. It was like camping - only better: we were only steps away from a bathroom and our own beds! It may not seem like it, but after years of city living, this is a big deal.
We are looking forward to many more evenings like this. Call it our contribution to global warming.

Crazy like a...moose?

Having grown up in "moose country", I just had to post this...

Moose Logging Story.

We had been trying to keep this under wraps as we knew this would happen once folks found out that with some effort you can train moose to harness. Once this picture got out, it's been E-mailed around like crazy but no one has bothered to fill in the rest of the story so before any rampant rumors get going, I better write down what I know. I folks want to extrapolate on that, then Lord only knows where this picture and story will end up.

The man in the picture is Jacques Leroux who lives up near Escourt Station and has always had work horses, first for actual work and then for show at Maine's' many summer fairs.

I think he had two matched pairs, one Clydesdales and the other Belgiums. He would turn them out to pasture each morning and then work them in the afternoon dragging the sled around the fields.

Three springs ago, he noticed a female moose coming to the pasture and helping herself of the hay and what grain the work horses didn't pick up off the ground. Jacques said he could get within 10 feet of the moose before it would turn and move off.

Two springs ago, the moose foaled(?) at the edge of the work horse pasture and upon getting to it's feet had not only the mother in attendance but the four horses. The young moose grew up around the horses and each afternoon when Mr. Leroux took the teams for their daily exercise the yearling moose would trail along the entire route next to the near horse.

At some point, the yearling got so accustomed to Mr. Leroux that, after he had brushed each horse after a workout, he started brushing down the moose. The moose tolerated this quite well so Mr. Leroux started draping harness parts over the yearling to see how he would tolerate these objects. The yearling was soon harness broken and now came the question of what could you do with a harness broke moose.

As you may or may not know, a great deal of Maine is being bought up by folks "from away" and some of them understand principles of forest management. Well, the folks buying small parcels of land up in the area of the Allagash have it in their mind that they don't want big skidders and processors and forwarders on their small wood lots. Enter Mr. Leroux with his teams of horses.

Every morning when Mr. Leroux loaded the teams into the horse trailer to go off to the days job, the yearling moose got quite riled up and one day loaded himself right into the trailer with the horses. At the job site, Jacques unloaded the horses and as the moose stayed right with them, he would take the Clydesdales and his brother Gaston would take the Belgians and off into the woods they would go with the moose trailing behind. They would put the harness on the moose in case they encountered someone who they could kid with the explanation that the moose was a spare in case something happened to one of the horses. The work required them to skid cut, limbed and topped stems to the landing where the stems could be loaded onto a truck for the pulp mill.

All morning long the two brothers brought out twitch after twitch of stems with the moose following the Belgian team for the most part. At lunch break Jacques had the bright idea of putting trace chains and a whiffle tree on the moose's harness and all afternoon the moose went back and forth following the Belgians in and out of the woods dragging his whiffletree along the ground. As there were no stumps in the skid trail, the whiffle tree never hung up on anything and that first day in harness went great. So next day, they hitched on first a small stem and the moose brought it out just fine following the Belgians.

Mr. Leroux told me they were up to four small stems now and the moose was doing just great. He cautioned however that there were a few problems with using a bull moose. Come June, when the new antlers start, the new bone is "in velvet" and must itch like crazy as the moose stops every once in a while and rubs his rack against just about anything to appease the itch. Once, before the brothers learned to tie him of by himself while they had lunch, moose was rubbing his antlers against the hame on the Clydesdale called Jack and got it wedged there for a bit. Jacques said he wished he had a camera as it looked like moose was trying to push Jack over.

The other problem is the rutting season. The brothers learned quickly to leave moose in the barn as he was constantly on red alert in the woods during this time. The brothers are also considering trying this with two females to make a matched pair which would become an instant hit at the Maine Fairs. The trouble with the bulls is their racks. They would be constantly rubbing and hitting each other and yes they would have to be gelded as I just couldn't imagine getting the two bulls anywhere near each other, let alone in harness.

So now that this picture is going all over the place, the surprise has been let out of the proverbial bag. The Lerouxs want to continue the work of trying to get a pair of females in harness but they may have to end up breeding moose to do this and that's where they will run into trouble with the State of Maine IF & W. I'm sure they don't like the idea of the brothers "keeping" wild animals.

Thought you should know the rest of the story. If any of you doubt this please contact Tom Whitworth in Ashland , Maine. I think he said was a second cousin to the Lerouxs and has seen this anomaly many times.

Upgrade to Church 3.0?

Which version of church are you running?

Church 1.0 - Traditional: Sunday is Sacred
Church 2.0 - Contemporary: Sunday is Central
Church 3.0 - Emerging: Sunday is Secondary

- thought from Kenton C. Anderson, homeletics guru at ACTS, Langley, BC

Maryn's Christmas Letter

December 06

Hey everyone,

We can all agree that 2006 has been a busy year. For me, moving to Nanaimo and summer vacation has most definitely been the highlights of this year. Before I talk about that though, let’s start from the beginning.

On January 21st, Daleena celebrated her 14th birthday. Although she can’t drive until she is 16, she is already talking about getting a car. She is in grade 9 French Immersion and doing well. She is enjoying doing candy striping at the Nanaimo Hospital every Wednesday. The nurses give her jobs to do like helping a patient with their meal, or getting someone a glass of water. Daleena loves to shop, bake, and babysit.

In May Mom turned the big 4-0. We had a blast throwing her a big party to celebrate, and her three sisters from Alberta came and surprised her with a visit. She is currently taking courses at Malaspina University College to become a Community Health Nurse. Also, a couple days each week she works at a clinic downtown. She is really enjoying her new job.

Now this is the part when summer vacation starts and when we move. I got to go to a summer camp with some of my friends and Daleena volunteered at a kid’s camp dishwashing and being a co-counselor. We packed like crazy when we got back from camp and then we loaded all the boxes into the elevator, down the hallway and into the moving truck. It just barely fit! On July 28th we moved into our big new house. I unpacked most of my boxes that day, but the few that I didn’t unpack are still sitting in my closet.

The next day was my 13th birthday. My best friends surprised me and came out for the weekend. I think my Dad is still trying to get used to the fact that he has 2 teenagers in his house! I am in grade 8 French Immersion, and although this year I was not able to join the school team due to 6:30am practices, I love playing volleyball. I also like to swim and I hope to take some life guard courses in 2007. I would like to complete them over the next few years.

In September it was Dad’s turn to celebrate. Daleena made a delicious cake and we invited some of our new neighbors over. He is the Associate Pastor at Evangelistic Tabernacle Family Church and is just finishing up the big production of the year, the Singing Christmas Tree. He is the conductor of the choir and the producer of the Tree. I think he will be happy when Christmas is over, because he has been listening to Christmas music since June! You can check out his blog at http://siggyurbanite.blogspot.com/ if you’re bored.

Now it is December and Christmas is almost here! We are very excited to be celebrating Christmas with Grandpa and Grandma Siggelkow and Uncle Dallas and his family. We wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Love,

The Siggelkow’s

I Survived the Tree of '06

Well, I started listening to Christmas music in June, and last night we wrapped up this year's production with the world's largest tinsel fight. It's hard to beleive that after so many months of planning and hours and hours of works it is really over. But the reviews have been very positive, and I'm happy to say that I'm very pleased how it all came together.
A couple of thoughts. First, I had a lot of fun. Yes, it was a ridiculous amount of work, and at times I felt like I needed to reintroduce myself to my family, but over all, it was a hoot, especially the performance. There is nothing quite like a live production and a live audience to keep things interesting. I have to admit that for the most part it was a very enjoyable experience.
The other thing I have to mention is that I had a fantastic team to work with. It is incredible how many talented and commited people it takes to pull this thing off. I was blown away by the dedication and passion people have for this thing, which when you think about it, is really wierd. A singing Christmas tree? Who's idea was this anyway? But it is a tradition that is alive and well in Nanaimo, and already people are talking about 'next year'. That's a little hard for me to get my head around, especially after being at the church 'til 1:23 AM doing 'take down'. Ah, the Ways of the Tree...

Tree Time

Tree takes shape

Well, the tree is going up. Puts a whole new spin on setting up the Christmas tree. As you may have noticed, its an artificial one. Maybe next year we can go with a real tree. They do grow them big enough out here.Notice our new stage extension...

Back stage isn't so pretty...

Winter Wonderland

We are currently enjoying our three days of winter. It is a fridged -3 degrees!!! Schools are close, Tehillah is cancelled, everyone is hunkered down for the extreme weather. Don't you wish you were here?