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Kristi and I have tentatively set our wedding for April 10, 2011. There remains a possibility that it could be earlier, but it doesn’t look likely at this point. Please pray for us in our time apart; we are planning visits in one direction or the other every couple of months until the wedding. (Kristi was just up my way; I visit the family down there at the end of October and just after Christmas, Lord willing.)

Please also pray for Kristi’s health, as she is quite sick right now.

It’s a bit over two months since I announced my engagement to Kristi (Hays) Carman, and we’re frequently asked about a wedding date.

That date has not yet been set, due to complications I would rather not post on a public site. Nonetheless, we are fully committed to the marriage, and continue to prepare, and pray that obstacles would be removed.

I want to add that through the complications, our relationship has only grown stronger, and the opportunity for Kristi to visit me in Grande Prairie last month caused our already-stable love to bloom into something even more wonderful. We look forward eagerly to our future together, and acknowledge that only God in His infinite wisdom and power could have brought us together.

On Monday, April 26, 2010, Kristi (Hays) Carman and I expressed to each other that together we were home, and it became very clear that our lives belong together, including her seven dear children whom I love with all my heart.

We do not have a date set yet, as we have only begun to deal with logistical matters, some of which are pretty complex. You can certainly pray that we may find a way to make all of this happen before the year is out. I’m not a big believer in lengthy engagements, and even less so given the distance involved and the factor of children. (If you’re interested in learning how you can pray more specifically, feel free to contact me.)

I cannot express how grateful I am to God for bringing such a wonderful woman into my life. I am humbled by my own weaknesses, and elated by His grace. He truly gives us much better than we deserve.

One of the things my Dad did not do early on in his preaching ministry was take up collections. Occasionally someone gave him money out of the blue, but for the most part, he simply ministered gratis. From the beginning, he formed a habit of saving up a few hundred dollars, going out preaching until the money ran out, and then going back to work.

While at a few points in his life, Dad had his own handyman business, his one recurring employer was Argyle Machine Shop in Port Alberni, BC. (I think that is where he was working when he met my mother.)

There were a lot of interesting things about his history with Argyle, but one basic one was that he never joined the union in what was ostensibly a closed shop. How he accomplished that, I’m not sure, but he was opposed to it philosophically. The union shop steward perhaps countenanced it because Dad would do tasks that his union members probably would not. (more…)

At long last, my extensive essay on Paul and the law, These Are Two Covenants: Reconsidering Paul on the Mosaic Law, is available!

I was sort of commissioned to write this piece back in 2004, but the book in which it was to appear fell on hard times and was not published. I later had a contract with another publisher to have it released on its own, but it fell victim to cutbacks. Knowing that I do not have present resources to publish in paperback as I did with Feed My Lambs, I decided on my first ebook-only (PDF) release.

You can get more information and learn how to purchase by going to my Pactum Reformanda Publishing web site.

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….

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.

The highway was his home, and it was mid-winter, but his Damascus Road experience – or rather, South Carolina highway experience – served my Dad with clarity: he was in the USA illegally, and needed to get back to Canada.

Not easy to face, since he did not own so much as a winter coat. But determined to do what was right, he started his northward journey. By thumb, naturally. (It was a lot easier to hitch rides in the 1950s than it is today, of course.) And witnessing to everyone who would pick him up.

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I am closing in on an anniversary. It arrives this coming Saturday.

On that day twenty years ago, I lost my father to a 2 ½ year battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was 59 years old.

Born in Nova Scotia on January 4, 1931, my father had the calamity of being named by an illiterate mother, and so ended up with unfortunate initials: his full name was Paul Innis Gallant.

An illegitimate child raised in a cold environment, Dad was raised by a grandfather who was (to use the technical term) a tough old S.O.B. On his first day of school, my Dad got beat up and came home crying; his guardian’s response was that he better not do that again unless he wanted to face a worse whupping at home. Not surprisingly, the little guy (who topped out at 5′ 5 ½”) got toughened up pretty quickly.

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Regretfully, I have just learned that Canon Press will not be publishing These Are Two Covenants. We signed the contract about 13 months ago, and contract signing to release date is usually about a year, so I thought I’d contact them and see what the story was. My understanding is that Canon is cutting back for financial reasons.

Unfortunately, I have no idea regarding an alternative publisher at this time. Disappointing, but five years after first writing and two failed contracts later, I’m still without a publisher, and don’t have the resources on hand myself to print it through my own company.

I just learned this morning that one of my closest friends from my young adulthood has been absent from the body and present with the Lord for many years. I had tried tracking him down many times over the years. Last I saw him, he was preparing to move to South Africa (he had been born in Malawi, I believe, and was of half African and half Caucasian descent). Apparently he died in a car accident not too long after his arrival there.

Al John Losacco was probably mid-40s when I met him. Not even sure how we found each other when I started going to Falconridge Full Gospel in Calgary back in 1986. Perhaps someone introduced us. At any rate, we connected from the beginning, perhaps in part because we were both something of “outsiders” in different ways.

I was a newcomer to an established church (as well to Calgary). My dad was an independent itinerant Pentecostal preacher with a strong anti-institutional bias, so while growing up I was largely in house church and revivalist settings. Yet somehow when I moved to Calgary, I decided I should be in a local church. To be a light to all the poor hypocrites, I’m sure. God works in mysterious ways, because that was a significant turning point in my life.

Al John was simply different. He was the guy traversing the neighbourhood, going door to door with the gospel. Not just randomly (though that was likely the case when he began); he seemed particularly adept at establishing relationships among people of other religions. He would then go into their homes repeatedly with the gospel. I went around with him on one occasion and remember talking with some Hindus he had developed friendship with.

Al John was a gentle, thoughtful man who loved people and wanted nothing more than to serve the Lord faithfully. He sought his counsel from Scripture and didn’t keep it to himself.

Well done, good and faithful servant. We miss you here.

I’ve been sick for a week running, so not accomplishing much at the moment.

I am managing to get a little bit of reading in, though, so that’s nice. Here are the books I’m focusing on at present:

1. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. I’m about 2/3 of the way through this one. Novak is a bit of a softcore capitalist, in the sense that he doesn’t seem to bat an eye regarding trade unions and quite a bit of other stuff. At any rate, some of his most valuable contributions have to do with his discussions regarding the nature of “self-interest.” Socialists translate “self-interest” in capitalism as “greed,” but Novak notes that for most people (at least in a society with social and moral bearings), “self-interest” is generally far more communitarian: concern for welfare of one’s family, for starters, and on into broader concerns for other various community circles such as church. Worthwhile.
2. Greg Bahnsen, Homosexuality: A Biblical View. I’m about halfway through this one. Like (1), this is a book I’ve owned for quite a while, but have never read before. I haven’t shared Bahnsen’s theonomic presuppositions for pretty much a decade, and some factors in his presentation are slightly off-putting, but there’s no question that he was able to reason clearly, and his handling of the biblical texts is solid. As expected from someone trained in apologetics, the argumentation is top notch. Someday I plan on working through Robert Gagnon’s definitive/comprehensive stuff, but this is a good brief intro to the subject.
3. Thomas Woods, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. This just arrived a couple days ago. Just started it last night and got about 1/3 of the way through – very engaging, well-written, and not difficult to read. Woods is a Catholic historian with a strong economics bent (or is it the other way around?); I’ve got a few other books on the way also written by him. This one is a fascinating plow-through of a number of events in American history that are widely misunderstood due to basic ignorance or misleadingly selective reportage of the past. A good debunker for those who don’t understand the nature of the American constitutional system, for those who think of Lincoln as a heroic president, and a whole lot more.

In the past week or so, I’ve also finally got to a couple of “classic” movies I’ve often seen raved about: Amadeus and The Phantom of the Opera.

I found the storytelling viewpoint of Amadeus to be intriguing, told as it is by one of Mozart’s rivals, but honestly the movie on the whole didn’t really feel all that “filling” for me. I really didn’t learn much about Mozart… I guess that wasn’t the point.

The Phantom… well, it is what it is. I enjoyed it well enough; the singing was superb, and the heroine isn’t hard to look at. It’s an odd story that can best be appreciated for things other than plot. I suppose that’s the nature of a musical.

All in all, I thought both movies were worth watching and I’ll likely view them again at some point, but neither come anywhere close to my favourites lists.

… I thought I’d throw a quickie render up as my new header here at timgallant.org. Of course, that forced a change in colour scheme, too, but the layout remains unchanged.

I may have to rethink that mauve-ish colour featured in the middle column, which is a holdover.

Someday, I’ll probably try to do a more believable 3D self-portrait, but this looks okay from a distance, I suppose.

My new adventure in business is up and running.

I’m quite excited about this concept. Now for the work of getting the word out.

When I first got my domain, timgallant.com wasn’t available, so I picked up timgallant.org. A few years ago, the .com domain came open, so I snapped it up, but it really hasn’t had much there. I knew for some time that I wanted to use it for my creative side, and was streaming early demos from Metanarrative there for quite a while.

Well, as of now, it’s a real site, although I still have a few things I want to do – a nice gear pics page and a contact form. Take a look and see what you think!

As noted in an earlier post, this will be the site which I will keep up info for over the coming weeks regarding my efforts in the Hockey Night in Canada anthem challenge.

As most Canadians know by now, CBC decided not to renew their rights to the traditional HNIC theme song. Instead, they are holding a contest to find a new Saturday night anthem.

And… I’ve entered! You can find my first entry, “Hit the Ice,” at the CBC site here.

I’m hoping to find time to get another entry or two in, but the deadline is August 31, so we’ll see.

I’ll try to keep this site updated, but further challenge info is at the sister site, timgallant.com, where I’m eventually planning on keying my music stuff.

If you’re a fellow Canadian, please listen and consider voting for me when the time comes!!