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Okay, fellow Christ Covenant folk – as usual, I was in a fog when I did the bulletin. The Bible study this week (tomorrow evening) is not at my place; it’s at the Soles residence.

Be there, or be sawn asunder.

Okay, it’s official. Over the past couple of weeks I have been putting together a new business site that better represents the spectrum of my creative work.

I have been operating for a little over five years under the moniker of Pactum Web Services, a title borrowed from my publishing company that I formed in order to release Feed My Lambs. But that stopped making sense over the course of time; for one thing, I’m one person, and I would rather do creative work under my own name. At least as important, I do a lot more than web development now – I have designed logos; drafted print work such as letterhead, business cards, and even lawn signs; and I’ve jumped into custom imagery such as 3D characterization.

This little venture, begun as a small side income in January 2005, has grown a bit every year. As my mother has deteriorated and construction work has become unpredictable, I have more and more sought to make this primary for my income. It would be so beneficial for Mom if I can work from home full-time. Please pray that in 2010 this can happen.

So anyway: Pactum Web Services is no more. Tim Gallant Creative is at timgallantcreative.com. Take a look, join the mailing list, become a Facebook fan….

It’s interesting that a lot of evangelical churches do stress participation in worship. But usually they don’t mean participation which everyone can engage in (and certainly not all at once, i.e. together). They mean “doing something at the front” – e.g. a skit, playing an instrument etc. It’s not said directly, but to be part of the congregation is not considered participatory.

What therefore happens is that the congregation becomes an audience, and inclusion in “the action” requires getting up on stage (and yes, that is actually what the platform is frequently referred to as, which I think is telling). But all this means is that (1) people are performing, many of whom aren’t really qualified to lead worship in a meaningful way; and (2) those not semi-skilled enough to do that are essentially non-participants; they are “outside the action.”

But worship is something that the whole congregation actively does, and giving bit parts “at the front” is a poor substitute for understanding that “the action” doesn’t happen on stage. The action occurs within the dialogue between God and all His people. When the proclamation of forgiveness, the sermon, and the benediction are given, that is God’s time to speak, and we all engage in hearing Him; when we pray, sing, and confess our faith, it is our time to speak, and He hears us. And when we commune, we eat together with one another and with God. In short, biblically speaking, we are all involved in the action, and for the whole properly-ordered service.

Just an observation triggered by a blog comment by my friend Rogers, as well as by a discussion we had last night in Bible study.

I have a great deal more I wish to write about my father’s life, but my last two days have obviously been quite eventful for me. I do plan on adding more of his story later, but as today is the twentieth anniversary of Dad’s death, I think it is fitting to say something about that, very briefly.

A few months after I left home in 1986, my parents purchased a home in Alix, a small town near Stettler, Alberta. (Abandoned prairie towns often had houses for sale for next to nothing; my parents paid $6,000 for this house; a house we had bought in Manitoba a few years earlier had been purchased for $3,500 at $100 a month with no interest.)

Shortly thereafter, Dad began experiencing strange symptoms, including sudden loss of strength in his right hand, to the degree that he began dropping things such as cups. He also had some stuff going on in his upper shoulder / collarbone area that I at first wondered was connected to a car accident we had been in a couple of years earlier. Soon he was losing his balance and falling to the floor.

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My friend Jamie was dropping off Mom at her adult day program yesterday, but ultimately ended up taking her to the emergency room. There, the diagnosis was a mini-stroke (TIA).

Mom’s personal physician saw her this morning. Unlike the emergency room surgeon who obviously saw Mom in the thick of things, he doesn’t think she had a mini-stroke, after all, and apparently attributes her symptoms to her arthritis. Given what I see, I find it hard to attribute the whole thing to a dramatic turn in her arthritis; and given her history (Mom has had a number of mini-strokes over the years), I have to admit I’m partial to the emergency doctor’s opinion.

At any rate, Mom does feel better, but seems to have lost a fair amount of strength in her left side. She’ll be in the hospital a bit longer…her doctor requested a second CT scan for 10 days from now, and I’m told most people stay in the hospital in that circumstance. Which seems excessive to me; I can’t imagine that would happen if it weren’t a country with socialized medicine….

Your prayers are appreciated.

It is a common conception that marriage gives roots to a man. And I suppose that is true in certain senses (at least, if the man is worth his salt).

But if we’re talking about the taming of wandering feet, it certainly wasn’t true of my father. I recall that at some point our family did a calculation of how many moves we had made. I think it was something like 26 by the time I was twelve.

My father was no longer a hobo, but the travelling never stopped until he contracted ALS. When I was a kid, my Dad at one point figured he made about 100,000 miles a year. None by air.

I guess the moving can’t be blamed entirely on the preaching tours. It started before Dad really turned to preaching much, given the fact the preaching really heated up around 1969 (although I think he first started the year I was born)… and my sister was born in Victoria in 1964, and I was born in New Westminster in 1965, and only lived there for the first three months of my life. And in 1969 we were back in Port Alberni….

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Shortly after his conversion, Dad ended up on the West Coast, in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. I don’t think he had lived there before, but it became a recurring destination during my young years.

Dad settled into a church in Port Alberni; I think it was an ACOP (Apostolic Church of Pentecost) affiliate. It was there he met my mother, who was 4 ½ years his senior (although he always looked older than she did). Not sure how quickly he took a fancy to her, but I do know that when he first asked her out, her response was “Certainly not!”

Dad could be single-minded, and my mother could be naive. She boarded with an older couple from church, and somehow it came about that Dad would go over there and have Bible studies with her on a regular basis. Despite the fact that he had asked her out earlier, it somehow didn’t seem to occur to her that he may have any ulterior motives. (Has anyone else had such unusual parents?)

Needless to say, the relationship did not remain Platonic. (In fact, Dad never quoted any Socrates at all.) He finally got her to go out with him.

Even at that, though, it still remains a curiosity that he got a second date, as his first attempt was to take her to the local dump to rummage around. (Yes, you read that right.) She demanded to leave, asking, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”

If you think that’s humourous, it should be kept in mind that in married life, dump rummaging was sometimes an almost regular activity, nearly as appealing as going garage saling. (As an aside, I didn’t usually enjoy it all that much myself – and I’ve never been a garage sale hound to the degree my parents were – but on one occasion I did find an antique miniature vase that managed to net me $17, which wasn’t bad for a young kid without an allowance. Well, in the mid-1970s, anyway.)

Yes, my Dad was a regular Mel Gibson who knew just what women want.

But, for all that, she married him, even though she had long maintained she didn’t need a husband. She lived relatively modestly and took care of herself on her teacher’s salary. How a stable farmgirl from Saskatchewan who had nearly reached midlife came to say “Yes” to someone with the rootlessness, artlessness, and, well… tactlessness of my Dad is one of life’s great puzzles.

But once upon a time, it really happened.