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This morning, Kristi and I welcomed David Peter Gallant into the world at 7:13 a.m. He’s a healthy 9lb 4oz and 20 1/2″ long. Mama and baby are well and resting after a night-long labour.

David Peter is named in honour of my brother Peter David, whom the Lord took to be with Himself at birth. Kristi always wanted a David, and every generation on my mother’s side except my own has had a David for probably hundreds of years, so everything came together for this one.

This was the first birth I have witnessed. It was an amazing experience, and I am overwhelmed with delight, praise, wonder, and joy.

It hasn’t happened yet, but Mom and I will be moving within the next 1-2 weeks. Our new mailing address will be:

R.R. 1
Grande Prairie, AB
T8V 2Z8

My cell number (780-876-1102) remains the same. My business landline number (830-1125) will be cancelled as of the end of the month; Mom’s phone line has not been operational for some time, and I have no immediate plans to get a new “land line.” Mom does not hear well enough to talk on the phone, anyway, and when Kristi gets here, I anticipate she will primarily be using a cell phone. Given the cost of hooking up a conventional phone line to a new acreage, I just don’t see it happening for the foreseeable future.

Stina’s son Tym Van Braeden has informed me that her memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. this Saturday at the Gospel Light church in Debolt.

May the Lord continue to bring comfort and hope to His people.

A longtime friend, Stina Van Braeden, has passed away. I have long been very close friends with two of her sons, Roger and Tym, and in my early adulthood I rented a room in her home.

Tym informs me that there will likely be a memorial service Saturday in Debolt. I will try to post here when I get further word.

Please pray for the family, giving thanks for God’s faithfulness to one of His own children.

Our official wedding web page is now online:

http://www.timandkristigallant.com/

Both Kristi and I have given accounts of how this whole thing came about.

Do remember to pray for us!

I can’t receive email at the moment (unfortunately, this also means that my web clients can’t do so either). The mailserver where I host everything has crashed. If you need to contact me personally, try leaving me a message on Facebook. I’ll try to check it when I get home from work, although obviously I hope the hard drive will be replaced long before then.

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.