Bible Who-Am-I #3

We are two scoundrels, who spent the last night of our lives running across the plain, carrying our death warrant with us. Who are we?

Bible Who-am-I #2

I once laid seige on a city all by myself. Who am I ?

Bible Who-am-I #1

A great deal of trouble I left behind me. Help waited just beyond the mountains, help that would surely have been given to me, had I wanted it. But I had my own ideas. A great deal of trouble came with me. I pursued my own ends, and a great deal of trouble came after me, which troubled Israel for hundreds of years. Who am I?

First hint: I was not alone in this. One of my siblings conspired with me.

Take a breath...

My construction endeavors have come to a close for the summer, my guitar teaching starts up in another week. Time to take my Val away for awhile, maybe we can recharge...

Sunset

It is nearing 10PM, and the evening sun is shining directly down my driveway, too low for my visor to be able to block it. It should set about 20 minutes from now.

So let's talk about the weather...

Last Saturday Grande Prairie recorded it's all-time record high temperature of 35.6 Celsius (96.08 F.). Friday and Sunday also broke their records for those respective days. Hot days for pouring concrete...

I suppose that most places in the world would regard this "high" as absurdly low... But it is pretty high for us. The lowest temperature I ever remember experiencing in Grande Prairie was -56 C (-68.80 F). That is a differential of 91.6 degrees Celsius (164.88 F), which is pretty substantial.

Nehushtan

Is there controversy in your church? In your federation or denomination? Do the arguments sound something like this;

"The Bible says right here that...." "But the confession says...the confessions don't allow..."

...Keep your eyes on the guys with their Bibles open. The church has a future, and the light that will be necessary to guide her steps will be found in the Scriptures.

There was a time in Israel's history when God had sent a plague on Israel for her rebellion. God told Moses to build a bronze snake and set it on a pole, so that anyone who looked on it would live. That thing, that image, was commanded by God for a purpose at a certain point in Israel's history. But the time came when it's usefulness had been outlived, and it became a snare to the people of God. "Nehushtan", they named it, and they treated it as an idol, until it finally had to be taken down and destroyed.

The Lord desires His people to make confessions, to set forth what the Scriptures teach about this and about that. These are good things. But good things can be perverted, and confessions are no exception. I have seen a great many evidences, in my observations of current controversies, that this is exactly what has been happening with the 3FU and the Westminster standards.

When the Scriptures cannot be heard over the shouts of "Great is Westminster of the Puritans!", or "Great is the 3FU!" or "Great is the Church Order!", we have left the realm of faithful obedience and have entered the arena of idolatry. When a good-and-necessary-consequence argument from Scripture is greeted with "Let's consider this and how it relates to us.", there is hope. When it is greeted with "We don't do things that way here" or with some kind of confessions-at-all-costs answers, there is none.

Open your Bibles, people. There is still a great deal of bread in there that you have not yet eaten.

Canada's Birthday

Happy Birthday, Canada! I wonder how many more you will have...

New Website!

Do please go to my new website and check it out! www.solmusic.ca It is much more accessible than before. Many thanks to Tim Gallant at Pactum Web Services. He does good work!

Memorials!

Memorials has arrived, for those of you not aware, or who have not yet procured yourself a copy. It is my fourth kids album, and is full of Bible story songs drawn from those passages which refer to memorials.

I was interested to discover, as I was writing these songs, that almost every time something is mentioned as a memorial, whether the rainbow, or the offering portions, or Passover, or the jealousy test from Num. 5, the memorial was primarily God-ward. "I will see My bow, and I will remember my covenant..." "Burn this as its memorial portion on the altar, a pleasing aroma to the Lord." "It is a grain offering of jealousy, a grain offering of remembrance, bringing iniquity to remembrance."

It is not so that I will remember, but that God will see me make the offering, and will remember me for good. God is the rememberer.

"Do this in remembrance of Me." I was always taught that this meant that I had to think about, to recall, the things that Christ had suffered on my behalf. But as I consider the concept of remembrance in the Scriptures, I am led to believe that this is missing the point. If Paul and Jesus are employing the idea of remembrance in the same way that Scripture almost uniformly does, and there is no reason to assume that they aren't, then they are treating the Lord's Supper as a memorial (as indeed, it can be translated as *Do this unto My memorial*).

When we participate in the Supper; when we eat the bread and drink the cup together in Church by faith, the Lord looks on us and remembers us for our good. And it is the *doing*, not the remembering on my part, which forms the obedience and the faith that God desires.

There is the occasional story in Scripture which doesn't use "remembrance" in this way. When stones, or piles of stones, were set up for later generations to inquire about, they usually are for men to see and recall past events. But not even all of these function in this way. Consider the pile of stones that Israel set up in the middle of the Jordan river. Who but God and the fish were ever going to see that?

Hopefully these songs will help to shed some light on these things, which every kid and former kid needs to think about.

Write me at jamie@solmusic.ca for your copy.

"It was easier back then..."

So I am standing in the lineup at Costco today when an old couple (60ish) I used to know pull in behind me. I start a conversation to renew aquaintance, and of course they ask me about my family.

"I have only eight kids." I say.

"Only eight?!? (chuckle, chuckle). I grew up in a family of eight." says he. "And there were nine in my family!" says she. It was easier back then to raise a big family than it is these days, they agreed.

I'm sure this has been said to me in conversation many times before, but today I stopped and thought about it. Was it really easier back then? I remember growing up in a family of eleven, though there were never more than nine kids home at once. I remember that my dad worked as a logger and that he worked hard. We never went hungry, but the food was pretty plain, and most of it home grown. When I consider how much Dad made as a logger, I am sure that I make a far better living than he did.
We lived way out in the sticks; I now live in town about 5 minutes away from every convenience. He was surrounded by mud; I am surrounded by pavement.

So as far as money and it's accessories go, it is MUCH easier now to raise a large family. One thing I do have to face that dad did not is a culture which loves things more than kids. But it doesn't seem to be too stressful... We faced this anti-child mentality around us up until the 6th one, at which point we became an object of fascination to our neighbors and family. We were at once pitied and looked up to, sometimes by the same people...

Now, when people find out that I have eight kids, I am greeted with open-mouthed astonishment, followed by the exclamation "I don't know how you stand it! I have TWO kids, and they are driving me insane!" I have heard this so many times that I have become convinced that having two children is the hardest job in the world. But I also hear many comments along these lines; "I wish we had more...", and "Good for you!", and especially "My husband doesn't want any more kids..."

So I guess I failed to agree with the old couple. I wondered why they would say such a thing... maybe it is just a politeness to commiserate with your conversation partner about something, to let them know that you feel their pain. But, hey, I love having eight kids, and have no desire whatsoever to return any of them to the manufacturer.

The Taxman

I was late to see the taxman, through nobody's fault but my own. I was given the news that I too must become a tax collector, because if I don't, the number crunchers will one day find me and take a WHOLE BUNCH of money from me at once.
What becomes of a country that makes all it's citizens into tax collectors? I know that in Bible times such men were hated, and I suppose it is still true. Feed the nations coffers by making it's citizenry hate one another... this doesn't sound to me like a recipe for peace and prosperity.

Jewel Wins! (Or loses...)

On Sunday eve, Jewel, my 9 year old daughter, managed to crack/break both the bones in her left forearm. In all our 65 years worth of children in our house, she is the first to break any bones.

Val took her to emergency at the hospital at 5:30 PM, where they waited. And waited. Emergency was full of emergencies. So full, in fact, that when our second emergency of the night (Joseph got a deep cut in his eyebrow at about 7 PM) came into emergency, Val and Jewel and Zion were still waiting. She had been taken for xrays and her injuries were determined, now she was waiting for them to be dealt with. So we checked in 2 year old Joseph. About 9:30 Val came home with Joseph (Zion stayed with Jewel), who had three stitches in his eyebrow, and told me they were still waiting... At 12:40 AM, I got tired of waiting at home, so I went down to emergency and found that Jewel had just been casted at about midnight, and was waiting for it to dry enough that she could come home. I took Zion home at about 1:20 AM, and Val got home with Jewel at 1:40 AM.

It is a good thing that emergency is only 4 minutes from my house...

Had I been thinking at the start of this process, I could have had Val take Jewel to Beaverlodge, 30 minutes to the west of G.P.. It is a longer drive, but almost invariably a shorter wait time. Oh well...

Homeschool Conventions

I attended the OCHEC (Ontario Christian Home Educators Conference) conference in Hamilton when I was there last week, and it seemed to be well received. I played songs and chatted with passers-by, and sold a pile of CDs.

The response to this suggested to me that I should be doing more of it. So; tell me about the homeschool conferences, and particularly Christian ones, that happen in your state of province. Do lots of folks come out to them? When do they happen? I may try doing "the circuit" next year, if there is one...

If any of you have some good ideas on how to get my music out there, let me know. I know that I have gifts in the making of music; I do not have them in the administration of this enterprise.

Ontario reprise

It was a delight to sing in Ontario again. What a hoot, to sing loud with a whole crowd of kids.

"Ascending" seemed to be the preferred album, I sold everything that I took along of that CD.

I thank God for people with administrative gifts. What an enormous blessing they are for wingnut artists like me!

Concerts in Ontario

I am packing up to get on a plane to Hamilton on the 27th. On the 28th and 29th I will be sitting at a booth at the OCHEC (Ontario Christian Home Educators Convention), playing my guitar and chatting with people. It's good work, if you can get it... :-)

On May 1 I have a school assembly to take part in, then a concert in Jordan Station in the eve. On May 3rd, there will be a concert in Burlington at the Canadian Reformed Church. I love doing concerts, especially when I can have a whole wack of kids involved as backup singers. It is a hoot!

Then home again on May 4, back to the best backup singers in the world.

Christ Covenant Church Grande Prairie

Our first service was Easter Sunday, and it was a delightful service. All of our council was involved in some way. The liturgical responses were done with vigour and enthusiasm, the songs were appropriate, the sermon was very good, the Supper was served. And what a delight for the half of our congregation who have never before been invited to the Lord's table! May all their days be filled with the assurance that Christ's sacrifice was for them, too. Thanks be to God!

Oddities

What an odd bunch I live with! My wife is odd, almost all my children are odd... The only ones in my house who are not odd are me and Joseph, although in another year Joseph and I will be odd too. Perhaps the others will have ceased being odd by then...

Not only that, but my kids are old, too. They are older than me, and they are older than Val, but they are not older than both of us.

Psalm puzzles

I aspire to writing good songs for all the psalms. In order to succeed, I am going to need to become a better musician than I am, on several levels.
1) I have generally been able to write word-for-word songs on the shorter psalms, and some of them are actually singable by a congregation, But what do I do with the longer ones? How do you write a song from a long psalm which a: avoids missing parts of the psalm, b: avoids twisting the psalm to fit one's rhyme scheme, c: avoids being tedious. I have been singing from metrical psalm books for some years now (The Psalter Hymnal, the Book Of Praise, the Book Of Psalms For Singing), and all of them fail on all three accounts listed above, more often than not.

2) I have a word-for-word (ESV) song written on the first 17 verses of Psalm 69, which seems to me to capture the sense and feel of the psalm. One day I hope to record it.

But it raises a question in my mind about the singing of psalms. Even though I feel I have musically captured the psalm fairly well, there is no congregation on earth that could sing it. How do you do angst and despair in congregational song without either obliterating the text on the one hand, or failing to match music to the words on the other? And how do you sing the whole psalm without it becoming tedious?

I believe the psalms need to be sung, with feeling, by the church. But I need to do a better job of figuring out how. I am not convinced that chanting is the final answer, though it may be part of it.

Looking Forward

Last night I and the other consistory members at Covenant Reformed Church handed in our resignations and our requests for release. These were accepted, and we were released with God's blessings spoken, to go and begin a new work in Grande Prairie. We will be called Christ Covenant Church, and we are organizing under the auspices of Christ Covenant Church in Langley, B.C. . The CREC has been our long-expected home, federationally speaking, and now here we are, on the doorstep. Praise God!