Perspective

Looking Forward to a Day in Hamilton

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment
JCC totebag

My JCC tote-bag. One souvenir I cold do without.

Okay. I’m back from the latest trip to the clinic in Hamilton and here’s what’s what.

They did in fact find the cancer – it was hiding in my right tonsil. Seems they got the sucker when they took my tonsil out. They were just going in for a look-see because they suspected it might be there, and lo and behold it was. However, since this was just your garden variety tonsillectomy (in case they were wrong I guess) they did not burn out as much of the surrounding area as they would have done if they knew for sure they were removing a cancerous-type tumor.  And since the cyst proved little pieces of this thing are floating around in my lymphatic system, we must not leave anything to chance; so…

On with the radiation therapy! (Oh joy) I head back down Thursday next (Dec. 9th for those of you keeping notes) and engage in a day full of fun and excitement.

1st up – a trip to the surgeon’s at 9:30 am. (or 9:50 am – can’t read my wife’s hand writing and neither can she.  Will have to make a phone call on this one Monday) to make sure the charred flesh in my throat is healing nicely. That’s right, we want to be sure that my throat has fully recovered from the last atrocity inflicted upon it before we subject it to another one.

2nd on the itinerary – The Man in the Plastic Mask – Act 1.  At 11:15 a.m. our healthy, medically certified, and CLEAN-SHAVEN  hero (me) arrives up at the Juravinski Cancer Centre to get a cast made of my face using a special plastic mold. This will be used to keep yours truly from twitching while these high-tech William Tells try to shoot a cancer laden apple off my head with an arrow made of radiation. If I flinch we might wind up with an outcome decidedly different from the opera. Ouch! (Yes, I’m mixing my theatrical allusions here but I really don’t care.)

3rd in line – Lunch.  Apparently it takes an hour and a half for the cast to harden; during which time I am invited to have lunch, take a walk, whatever, so long as I am back for the second act.

4th item – The man in the Plastic Mask – Act 2.  Once the cast has hardened we return to the clinic where a CAT-scan of me in the mask will be taken. This will in turn be used to plot out the course of my radiation therapy sessions and pin-point EXACTLY where those aforementioned radioactive arrows will intersect with my anatomy. Then the mask will be marked with the indelible ink targets, instead of my face.

That done I am set free to roam the earth until the actual radiation treatments begin about 2 weeks later (specifics to follow on Dec. 9th) I am told all will proceed without incident for the first few weeks of treatment, after which the side effects will kick in and I’ll wish my mother had never given my father his first kiss (or some other event that would have precluded my birth so as to avoid all this unpleasantness).

Well, that’s the sum total of the information I have for now. This should be more than enough for the prayerful, the genuinely concerned, and the just plain curious until we write the next chapter. See you Dec 10th.

 

Guelph Waste Management Now Includes Bomb Disposal

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

Has this ever happened to you? You’re surfin’ the net, trying to find the recipe for Glazed Turnips you saw on Canada AM, when you stumble across a recipe for a homemade bomb.

“Wow,” you think to yourself,  “is that ever cool! I wonder if they’re hard to make?”

Checking out the instructions you discover it’s much easier than you had previously imagined. Thinking this would make a great science experiment for the kids you’re homeschooling you downoad the pdf, print out the instructions and before you can say “homeland security” you’ve got a nifty little extreme-urban-renewal device complete with digital timer. Now what?

I mean it’s not like you intended to use it, right? You weren’t going to actually blow up anything were you?  Okay, for a moment you thought about your neighbour with the yappy little dog-wanna-be that barks at every bird, butterfly and snowflake that comes near it’s yard, but in reality you just built it to see if you could. Now you need to get rid of it. So what do you do? Where do you turn?

Well this year in Guelph, Ontario (and most other parts of the province I suspect) you need look no further than your brand new community phonebook from Bell Canada. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a phone book user these days, finding all the information I need on the web. In fact, I can’t even tell you exatly where ours is at home right now. However, when the new phone books arrived at the shop today, I took a few moments to flip through and check that they spelled my name right. (Oh Come on; don’t be like that! You do it too, you know you do.)

Right at the front of the book I noticed a rather large section on waste management, recycling and Guelph’s 3 bags-of-separation curb pick-up program. Now, let me say that I was somewhat impressed as it is the most thorough explaination of what goes where, when  and how that I think I’ve ever seen. There’s not only sections on what can go curbside in which colour of bag and what can’t; there is also a lengthy list of various corporations, businesses and organizations that will help you get rid of all the refuse of our overly consumptive lives that pose a threat to good ol’ Mother Nature and can’t be put curbside, including homemade bombs.

Section L8 Page 17 Guelph Phone Book

Section L8 Page 17

Yes friends, it surprised me too; but there it was, in Section L8 on page 17 of the Green Pages, complete with photo illustration (see pic at right) – a handy tip on what to do with Homeschool Science Experiment #235 –  drop it off at your Local Police Station!

And while you’re at it why don’t you take those unspent shotgun cartridges Uncle Fred left between the cushions of the sofa when he fell asleep after Thanksgiving dinner. Or better yet, if I may offer a suggestion, why not have your lawyer drop it off for you and avoid all those pesky questions I’m sure the officer on the front desk will have as you strive to be a greener citizen.

It certainly is good to know that all our bases are covered when it comes to Guelph’s Waste Management program. Why, even urban terrorists can do their part in creating a greener tomorrow. But then what else would you expect from a government as thorough and efficient as ours?

BTW.. did you also know there’s a line for reporting “bribes” on your income tax return?

Until next time…

Towards Cycling Culture

/ Dennis A. Gray / 1 Comment

As I make my way down the final stretch to the Ride to Conquer Cancer, I find myself pondering the move towards cycle culture in North America and why it isn’t more like Europe?

For the last year or so I’ve been following a blog called Copenhagenize.  Written by an ex-Calgarian now living in Copenhagen, it and it’s sister site Copenhagen Cycle Chic chronicle how Danish cycle-culture is progressing and Copenhagen in particular should be the model the rest of the world uses to shape cycling infrastructure in the big cities. To be fair, there’s a great deal I like about what Mikael has to say, and I certainly would like to see Canada follow more of the Danish example when it comes to cycling infrastructure; separated bike lanes, extensive bicycle parking at malls and public buildings, elimination of helmet laws, etc.  But there is one major difference between Europe and North America that will likely always stand in the way.

Europe moves at a much slower pace.

It’s a mindset thing. Throughout most of Europe things happen when they happen. Deadlines are largely regarded as suggestions, stress relief often involves coffee in a street cafe in the middle of the afternoon, shops will even close in the middle of the day to take in a soccer game or a concert.  The trip to the shop or office is as much an experience as being there.

Not so in North America.  Here it’s all about getting as much done as possible in as short a time as possible.  Fulfillment is found not in relishing every moment of an experience but rather in cramming as many experiences into the moment as possible.  North America has always had a quantity over quality mindset. The daily commute, the trip to the store is a means to an end and nothing more. We get from A to B is as few steps as Google Maps can lay out for us and it better not take one second longer than the estimate.

Even what passes for cycling culture reflects this.   The mainstay of the European bicycle commute is the city-bike.  Ridden by men and women alike it allows one to travel in style; long coats, skirts, pumps and even stilettos are suitable cycling fashion. For families, the bakfeit or cargo bike allows mom or dad to ferry the kids around in safety without ever having to take the eyes of the hope of the future.

In North America however, it’s all Spandex and helmets, 27 speeds and razor thin tires, beat the rush and get to the office in time to grab a shower and wash away the record setting attempt at getting to work.  Kids interrupt air-flow so tuck ’em in back or park ’em in a trailer out of sight so we can focus on the road ahead.  Slow bikes are as much an annoyance as slow drivers and cycle chic is measured in Day-Glo jerseys and the latest high-tech shoe clips.

As long as this is the case I’m afraid that cycling culture in Canada will always be at war with the cars.  Bicycles don’t mesh with North Americas high speed lifestyle. It’s hard to embrace the bicycle when you want to be everywhere 10 minutes before you left and want to take half the house with you in case you need something.

Slow Bike Movement

Slow Bike Movement

If North America is ever going to move towards a vibrant effective bicycle culture the first thing it needs to do is slow down. Not just on the roads but in the way we approach life itself.

“Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.”

See you in Niagara Falls —

How far we have come… or have we?

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

Among the many shades of gray that make up my reality we find my role as technical director for Kortright Presbyterian Church in Guelph. This role requires that I try to keep abreast of what’s what in the world of technology, such as Audio and Video systems, Computer developments, and of course, the Internet.

In regard to the third item on that list one question that pops up from time to time is, “Just how big is the Internet anyway?” I’m sure if you haven’t actually had this discussion with anyone, you have probably wondered about it at least once in your life. So here then, presented for your perusal, are the latest figures from Pingdom, an Internet uptime monitoring firm in Sweden that is very good at keeping track of this sort of thing. The blog article can be found here, but the following are some of the highlights.

Email
1.3 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
210 billion – The number of emails sent per day in 2008.
70% – The percentage of emails that are spam.

Websites
186,727,854 – The number of websites on the Internet in December 2008.
31.5 million – The number of websites added during 2008.

Domain names
77.5 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2008.
11.8 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2008.
7.2 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2008.
174 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains.

Internet users
1,463,632,361 – The number of Internet users worldwide.
248,241,969 – Internet users in North America.

Blogs
133 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by Technorati).
900,000 – The number of new blog posts in a day.

Images
19.2 billion – Photos hosted by Facebook, Flickr, and Photobucket. (my note: This actually represents a small percentage of the images available when you consider these three only account for 3 out of 174 million web domains.)

Videos
12.7 billion – The number of online videos watched by American Internet users in a month.
34% – The increase in viewing of online video in USA compared to 2007.

Malicious software
1 million – The number of computer viruses in April 2008.
468% – The increase in malicious code compared to 2007.

With an estimated world population of 6,706,993,152 (according to the CIA) the above figure means roughly 22% of Humanity is connected to the World Wide Web which is 16% larger than a year ago, 1 in 5 of us don’t write letters much anymore, North America has only 17% of the Internet population, and yours truly constitutes a mere 0.000002% of the Blogosphere. How’s that for a little perspective?

But while these numbers remind me just how small a part of the whole I am, they also remind me of just how quickly our world is shrinking. (I’m going to do a little ‘old guy’ shtick here so be warned and bear with me.)

You see when I was a kid, long distance phone calls from England were still a really big thing. The whole family would gather round and wait almost breathlessly for our turn to say ‘Hi’ to Grandma and Grandpa. I’d get a letter from my penpal in Australia about every other month. When I did get a letter from him the information was already at least two weeks old. The encyclopedia set my parents bought me for high school cost over $1000 dollars and was somewhat out of date by the time I finished.

Now, well you know how it is; through Skype I call a number of people all over the world every day and gripe if the sound quality isn’t up to my 128bit 44.1kHz standard, Facebook’s status line tells me what my friends in Malawi were doing as little as 30 seconds ago, and about $50/year gives me access to the entire reference edition of Encyclopedia Britannica which is constantly updated month to month.

So, what’s my point? Well, the scriptures tell us that God separated the people at the tower of Babel because as one unified force they were getting ideas too big for them to handle. They began to think there was nothing they couldn’t do and were losing perspective as to where they fit into the grand scheme of things. They began to think of themselves as gods. So God confused their language making it harder for them to communicate and therefore harder for them to collaborate on the insanely big stuff, like skyscrapers.

Today technology is reversing what happened at Babel. Every year we grow closer to being a true world-wide community. Every year scientists, engineers and guys tinkering around in the garage (yes that still happens) build on each other’s work to create ever increasingly spectacular feats of technology, some of which has us once again infringing on God’s domain.

In his book ‘Unceasing Worship’ Harold Best points out that we are all worshiping all the time. It is the nature of our being to worship. The key point is who do we worship at this moment, the Creator or the creature. As I watch technology continue to progress I can fully appreciate the temptation to self-worship. We have accomplished a great deal in the lifetime of the human race, and it does indeed seem that there are no limits as to what we might accomplish in the future. But I would ask us all, my self included, to remember that for all our creativity we are only building on what God has done before us.

You see, it’s not about skyscrapers – it’s about how we think of ourselves, and our place in God’s creation. We have learned to do marvelous things with resources such as iron, oil and silicone; but we still have to go looking for them because we have not learned to make them. Only God can do that. We can clone a sheep named Dolly and engineer a tougher tomato by introducing animal genes to its DNA; but we still can’t create life out of lifelessness. Only God can do that. We can communicate ideas, and pack a million calculations into ever more infinitesimal periods of time; but we can’t stop time from rolling on or reverse it’s direction. Only God can do that.

And dispite all the advances in technology we have made, in one thing we have not advanced hardly at all. What has not changed is our propensity to use our creativity to find ever more inventive ways of hurting, oppressing, and killing each other. Despite our best efforts to the contrary greed, pride and ego remain the most prevalent motivations for our advancing technologies. We find we cannot escape the nature of our fallen existence as we continue to exert our superiority over the planet and each other. We cannot wash away the stain of what humanity has done with its creations over the millennia. We do not have within us the capacity to make right the burden of sin that we have created by how we treat each other and our planet.

Only God can do that.

—

On a Leg and a Chair.

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

Well, it’s been two days and I think I’m starting to adapt. Most of yesterday I struggled to get from the chair to the bathroom to the dining room table where my computer is set up on crutches. I hated it!

Oh it was tolerable enough with Roberta around to get things for me, but she will be gone 12 hours a day starting Monday, so I needed to think of something else. So I tried using a roling office chair my friend Rachel gave me, and it seems to be doing the job. I get around for the most part and my bad foot never gets any weight put on it as per doctors orders. It is still a drag though.

Fortunately, a pleasant distraction arrived to help take my mind off things – my good friend David. David lives in Goderich and had a day or so off work and knowing of my situation decided to come down and pay me a visit. He stopped in just before supper last night and we had a great time eating, talking and watching on old sci-fi movie on DVD.

I suppose that’s one advantage of what’s going on right now. If things were the way they normally are I wouldn’t have been home to visit with David; instead I likely would have been out and about doing something somewhere. This situation has certainly caused me to slow down. As I mentioned earlier, I had been looking for a way to do just that, to find more time to write, to read, and to get a few other things done. It makes me wonder if I was so busy, so obsessed with all the tasks I needed to perform that this was the only way God could get my attention. That seems rather extreme, but then Israel wasn’t far different.

Time and again in the Bible we find Israel ignoring God to the point where the only way He can bring them up short enough to listen for a while is to have some other nation drop in and conquer them. Then of course, they spend more time wailing and complaining then listening, but eventually they clue in, get their act together, and pay attention. Then God puts the other nation in its place and Israel is fine for another generation until they decide they know better than God and follow the same destructive pattern of behaviour.

There’s no denying that I do have a hard time slowing down and focusing, even though prayer and meditation are part of my routine. But is it reasonable to imagine that God would allow such an injury to take place just to get my attention, or am I just reading something into the situation trying to find some meaning that will make it less agonizing?

I mean, if this accident is entirely the result of my own stupidity, then I have nobody to blame but myself. But, if it is the maneuverings of divine providence, then it’s not entirely my fault. God did this to get my attention, in fact, in some bizarre way it is an answer to prayer and I am completely off the hook for not looking where I was going and falling down that stupid hole. Wouldn’t that make this a good thing?

Truth is, I’ve had a few people tell me that is exactly what is happening and I should regard this situation as a gift from God, sent by Him in answer to my needs. Frankly, I don’t buy it.

You see, while it’s true that God is all about forgiveness, the scripture makes it clear he’ also about taking responsibility for our own actions. He didn’t let Moses off the hook; his rebellion kept Him from entering the promised land. He didn’t cut David any slack; his disobedience cost him a son and kept him from fulfilling His dream to build the temple. Moses, David and many others all eventually learned from their experiences and were blessed by God in what they did; but forgiveness was never a blank cheque. They all had to live with the consequences of their actions.

That’s why some non-Chrsitians have a hard time with the idea of forgiveness. They see it as some kind of cosmic ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card and to them it’s just wrong that people who do bad things don’t have to pay the price. Unfortunately some Christians look at it that way too and that does a disservice to God and His message.

Forgiveness does not mean you don’t have to face the consequences of your actions, it means you want have to pay the price for what you did beyond those consequences. There is a commoon feeling among people in general that if what you have done is bad enough you should have to pay for it over and over and over again. That there is no amount of suffering that will balance the books for what you have done. They want the sinner to suffer not just once, but always, and for the rest of their lives, because that’s the only way they can see justice being done. Because to them justice means balancing the books, and eye for an eye.

But God’s Justice is a little different. God’s justice recognizes that in the sum of all things it is impossible to balance the books. We will never, no matter how hard we try, manage to achieve justice because even an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth doesn’t make things right. It just makes us feel better because revenge is sweet and since it’s sweet it is the most incidous form of comfort food. Because revenge makes us think we have justice because the books appear to have been balanced, but in reality we’ve just been given a candy that makes us feel better because we got someting out of it.

That’s why God’s justice is different, because it’s about paying the immediete unavoidable consequences of what we do, without making us the victims of revenge. Forgiveness wipes the slate clean, so that instead of falling prey to revenge, we can like Daivd, learn from our mistakes and go on to be a blessing to others.

Because we also need to realize that the victims of revenge are not just those who commit the sin, but those who seek revenge are also it’s victims. Because like comfort food revenge does not deal with the problem, it just make us feel better and distracts us from the problem, so it never gets dealt with properly. You see, forgiveness is the remedy not just for the sinner, but for those who have been sinned against as well. It purges us of the pain we feel that causes us to never be satisfied. That pain is why justice never seems enoough and revenge appears as the only answer. For both sides forgiveness is the only solution.

By now I’m sure some of you are thinking, “Dennis, how did we get from you falling down a hole having more time to write, to pondering the varities of justice and revenge? Man isn’t that a bit of a stretch?”

Well, yes, I suppose it is. But that’s what happens when you give a guy time to think and to ponder. And yet it’s not that big a stretch either because the nature of justice and forgiveness is at the root of how God works. It would not be just for God to inflict pain solely for the purpose of teaching me a few things. Israel’s perils were a direct result of their choosing to violate a covenant that they made with God at Mount Sinaih, the attacks by other nations were never random.

So my current situation is not God’s doing. I don’t believe that for a second. However, just as with Israel, God is not above using my stupidity to His advantage. I didn’t see the hole, now I’m here; and so is God, and while He forgices my stupidity he’s not above taking advantage of the situation. I’m sureHe has a few things he wants to draw to my attention while He has it. The question is will I quit complaining about the inconveniences of my current situation long enough to listen to what He has to say?

I pray that I do. Until next time…

Shalom.