Thursday Update

We've been having issues with our internet connection since we arrived so please excuse our infrequent emails/posts. In fact, I don't think Rhonda has actually been able to get online for more than a minute at a time. (So Yvonne and Michelle, she has not forgotten you - she will hopefully be able to blog tomorrow morning.)

We have our first guests arriving from Manitoba tomorrow so we are looking forward to sharing our experience with them and seeing some familiar faces. For the rest of you who have said you are planning on coming - please let us know when you might arrive because we can have guests come to our classes at no charge if we give advance notice. (If you do come you will definitely want to come to a class!)

A correction to yesterday's post. There are actually 100 people in our Commission group (and about 40% are from Korea).

We have been spending a fair bit of our time in conversation with a couple from New Zealand. Phil is Dutch, his wife Lek is from Taiwan and they have a 9 yr old son Benjamin. They have spent a lot of time in at Toronto Airport Vineyard (or whatever it's called now) and are part of a Vineyard church in New Zealand. It's interesting talking with them because our experiences and life circumstances are so very similar to theirs. It's also nice for our kids to play together because the 4 of them are the only english speaking kids in our program. Without Emma, Benjamin would have no one his age to talk to. We are both here for 3 months and I would imagine we will be seeing a lot of each other (or at least each others kids).

I'd love to blog more about my internal workings today but it seems way too vast to put into a few words.

One nugget that doesn't require too much explanation is this - we were invited today to lay down our "edited" versions of who we believe God to be for a complete image of God that is fashioned by the entire revelation of Him found in scripture.

So often we set aside things about God that we either don't like or can not explain because it makes our image of God more acceptable or understandable. The problem with this edited approach is that we end up making God in our own image/idea. God has a very simple word for this practice - "idolatry". So the God of mercy AND justice have to exist together in our hearts/minds. The Lion and the Lamb have to both exist in equal measure in our understanding at all times. God does not take off mercy to exercise judgement - His judgments are delivered OUT of His mercy. He never changes! So He is both the giver of mercy and the righteous judge at the same time, all the time. There is no space for setting aside attributes of His character simply because we can't explain how they work together (in our own minds), because the truth is that they work perfectly in His.

The result is that we are being asked to look deeper into the workings of His character then we have done in the past. No pat answers. No towing the conference line (whatever that line may be). Simply trusting that when He presents Himself as "the avenger of blood" (Numbers 35) that it works in perfect partnership with "I delight in mercy"(Micah 7:18).

At any rate. My battery is about to konk out and I need to check my emails.

Jon