Amazing Video

This is an amazing video from the folks at Preaching Today! A Blessed Christmas to one and all.

Norwegian Lefse

Last night my wife and I made our annual Norwegian lefse (pictured above). It is a flat bread made mainly of potatoes and flour. We like to eat it at Christmas time, and for me it brings back very pleasant memories of my childhood years when we used to celebrate Christmas with my Norwegian grandparents and eat all of the traditional dishes. There are several different types of lefse, here is our recipe.

5 cups of mashed and riced potatoes (cool them)

1/3 cup of cooking oil

1 tbsp of salt

2 1/4 cups of flour (we use 1 cup of whole wheat flour and 1 1/4 cup of white flour)

Lefse is eaten in several different ways. We like to eat ours with: cinnamon and sugar (can use either white or brown), various flavours of jams or jellies, and I personally like it with peanut butter too!

God bless you this God jul as you celebrate the birth of Jesus and feast on lefse or whatever happens to  be your traditional Christmas fare!

Latest Scribble-Digital Art

 I've been having fun working with Microsoft Paint, here's a couple examples.

The Other Iranian Revolution

In 'godless' eastern Germany, Iranian refugees surprise pastors with their interest in Christianity.

God must have been laughing up his sleeve," muses Jobst Schöne. The retired bishop of the Independent Lutheran Church in Germany is applying a German paraphrase of Psalm 2:4 to the baptism of seven former Muslims from Iran. Early Easter morning, the seven were baptized in the Berlin parish where Schöne serves as associate pastor. The baptisms were an emblem of something bigger—a nationwide surge of such conversions in several denominations and a spate of reports of Muslims seeing Jesus in their dreams. But Martin Luther's Bible translation, now nearly 500 years old, also played an important role in their story.

The group baptism happened at an unsettling time for European Christians. During Lent, radical Muslims handed out large numbers of Qur'ans on street corners and announced plans to distribute 25 million German-language copies of their holy book in order to win Germans to their faith. But on the night before Easter, some 150 worshipers filed silently into St. Mary's Church in the Zehlendorf district of Berlin to witness conversions in the opposite direction.

Until midnight, the sanctuary was dark. Then Gottfried Martens, senior pastor, chanted from the altar: "Glory to God in the highest." All at once the lights went on, the organ roared, and the faithful broke jubilantly into song: "We praise you, we bless you, we worship you." Like Christians everywhere, they celebrated the Resurrection of their Lord.

For the six young men and one woman in the front pew, the moment had additional significance: They were placing their lives in danger in exchange for salvation. Under Islamic law, apostasy is a capital crime, a fact brought home to the German public by press reports about Iranian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, an ex-Muslim, who was sentenced to death in Tehran. Some of the converts at St. Mary's were themselves persecuted before fleeing to Germany, now home to the largest Iranian community in Western Europe, numbering 150,000.

"These refugees are taking unimaginable risks to live their Christian faith," says Martens, who ministers to one of Germany's most dynamic parishes, which has grown from 200 to over 900 members in 20 years. He views the conversion of a growing number of Iranians in Germany as evidence of God's sense of irony. "Imagine! Of all places, God chooses eastern Germany, one of the world's most godless regions, as the stage for a spiritual awakening among Persians," Martens exclaims. According to a recent University of Chicago study, only 13 percent of all residents of the formerly Communist part of Germany attest belief in God. Read the whole article here.

What is the point of the Church?

I like the following quote by Anglican bishop, Nick Baines, when he was asked about the point of the Church. “The job of the church is to create the space in which people can find that they have been found by God.” 

 

Happy Father's Day/Eric Clapton's "My Father's Eyes"

Happy Father's Day to all you dads. I like this Eric Clapton song "My Father's Eyes." It's a soul-filled, heart-warming piece. Here's the lyrics and video.



My Father's Eyes

Sailing down behind the sun,
Waiting for my prince to come.
Praying for the healing rain
To restore my soul again.

Just a toerag on the run.
How did I get here?
What have I done?
When will all my hopes arise?
How will I know him?
When I look in my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
When I look in my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

Then the light begins to shine
And I hear those ancient lullabies.
And as I watch this seedling grow,
Feel my heart start to overflow.

Where do I find the words to say?
How do I teach him?
What do we play?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That's when I need them,
That's when I need my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
That's when I need my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

Then the jagged edge appears
Through the distant clouds of tears.
I'm like a bridge that was washed away;
My foundations were made of clay.

As my soul slides down to die.
How could I lose him?
What did I try?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That he was here with me;
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

My father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

Bruce Cockburn-Pacing the Cage tonight on Vision TV

“If I try to understand what it means to be a Christian, I look at the two instructions that were given in the Bible that are paramount, and those are to love God with all your heart and mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself. That’s it.” -Bruce Cockburn

Tonight I watched a Vision TV documentary on Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn, called Pacing the Cage, which is the title of one of his songs on his The Charity of Night album. I was rather disappointed with the documentary for at least a couple of reasons. i) The documentary was annoyingly interrupted by way too many commercials and that broke the flow of thought and conversation. ii) There were too many fragmented sound bites, without a lengthy, in depth conversation, which I would have appreciated, and I’m sure Bruce is capable of. On the upside, I was amazed at the high quality of Bruce’s live concerts—he still has the gift and after more than 40 years, he's sharing it with the world! Thank God for that! For those who missed it, you can check this link out over at Vision TV.