BLOG ENTRY # 2

Something very unexpected happened today. About two minutes after I got to the office for staff meeting my mom called my cell phone. She told me that my dad had a heart attack. At frist the news soaks into my brain with not much reaction. Then I realize that my dad had a heart attack. I told Mom I would call her back and let her know when I was leaving to come and see him.

The past ten days have been very taxing. We have been in Salmon Arm/Sicamous for a month and living in other people’s homes. These folk are gracious, to be sure, but still it is very tiring when as a family we have been not in our own space for over a month. We got possession of our new home on August 1 and immediately ripped up the smoky orange shag carpet and began painting the smoke stained walls and ceilings with Exterminator paint. It is very effective. As well as moving some stuff and doing these renos in the new home I began to speak at Sunnybrae Bible Camp last night. I wanted to tell the kids about my best friend Jesus. I like talking to kids. They listen. I was all set to go and speak again tonight…and then I got that phone call from Mom.

At 11 am I got in the car and made it as quickly as I could to the ferry. It took me five hours and then I found out I had a two hour wait because the ferries are so busy in the summer.

So, God, what are you trying to teach me?

I am supposed to be at Camp tonight speaking, moving stuff into our new home, finishing flooring, meeting people in Sicamous so I can invite them to our new church….and my dad isn’t supposed to be in ICU post-heart attack…so what are you trying to teach me?

I am on the ferry and I thought I would film a little teaching video for the campers I am supposed to be teaching and email it to the camp. Good idea. I finished the filming and went to a computer workstation to edit the video. Only I didn’t have the USB cable to transfer the video to the computer to edit it. So I decided I would watch part of a movie and re-charge my cell phone at the same time. Only there was no power at the workstation. So I went back to my car on the upper deck of the ferry facing the beautiful hills and mountains that are Vancouver island and the setting sun.

I get a thought. Aren’t there some old comics in the trunk of my beater? So I open my trunk. The only comic is a dilapidated old Spider-Man comic I have read a hundred times and am not interested in.

That’s when I saw them. An old pair of Binoculars that my mom gave me. I am on a ferry. So I pulled them out of the worn, black case and I walked to the side of the ferry and peered through them.

There was an old fishing boat, much like one out of the movie the Perfect Storm, serenyl drifting on the calm blue ocean…

I look through these lenses and see the gray moon hanging in the early evening sky…and I realize that it is just hanging there…and so is the earth.

I walk to the other side of the big boat and once again I look through seldom used lenses and I see a sea gull…all by himself..resting on the waves. He is not cold or in a hurry. He is just sitting there watching the ferry go by. If he feels like it he will take off from the briny blue and catch a ride on the big metal fish thing that is floating by if he wants to go to the mainland and see his buds.

And then I see them. Two dark gray finned backs surfacing and then boing backs under the mild waves. Two porpoises. I have never, in my life, for all my ferry rides seen dolphins. It took my breath away. Their glistening, ebony backs went up and down and I had to adjust the trajectory of my gaze swiftly to keep up with them—they were so fast. I was blown away.

God, the very God who has allowed my Dad to have a heart attack, who has taken me away from my very important work of planting a church, speaking at camp and doing renos on our new place—made it so I would walk in the cool of His garden which surrounds this big pond. It has reminded me of what my friend Leanne quoted to me as we left Prince George. Just walk in the cool of the evening in the garden with your God as you do and plant this church. Just walk with Jesus the way Adam did before sin distracted him from the beauty of what was all around him.

The circumstances aren’t great…but the God who surrounds me is great and has calmed my soul and reminded me that He is God and that He is good and that He is our friend.