The Bible in a Year: Week 12 (Thoughts on Synod)

So, as you have probably figured out, I'm reading through the entire Bible this year!

If you are at all interested in doing the same, I'd like to recommend the ESV study plans, as I am currently using their "Every Day in the Word" plan for my daily readings. I'm a couple of days behind (March 23rd right now) but it's going fairly well!

I am very excited to announce that yesterday, at our Annual Vestry Meeting, I was elected to be the Youth Delegate for Emmaus Anglican Church at this year's Synod! I feel honored and privileged to be chosen for this job, and look forward to taking lots of photos this November when the event is taking place.

I've always been kind of hesitant to get involved in any kind of church politics. Perhaps this aversion was partly due to my aversion to politics in general, but it seems more likely that I just didn't think of the church as a place that should be governed by any kind of meetings or structure. Of course I now realize that's crazy, but hey, we're all young and ignorant at some point or another. When I was asked to let my nomination stand for this year's election, I was initially hesitant, but mostly because I wanted to give the opportunity to somebody else. They turned down their nomination though, so I let mine stand, and I'm pretty glad I did! I think it's going to be a rewarding experience, and it should open my eyes to things I have been otherwise unaware of about the workings of our diocese. Plus, it's a trip to Ottawa for a weekend, with my pastor and two or three other people, so it should just also be a lot of fun!

Well, I'm pretty exhausted from a super long weekend and too much walking, so I'm going to call it quits and watch some mind-numbing television for a few hours, eat some bad food, and pass out.

Cheers,

Hardcore Brokenness: Foreword

So last Wednesday I announced that every Wednesday for the next little while I will be doing a post about the ways that God is at work in all of our hearts to deal with our brokenness and build our character, so that we can be better disciples and better witnesses to His glory and to the Gospel of His son, Jesus Christ. This week, I’m going to go a little deeper into exactly what this series is going to look like, and outline some of my goals and plans for the time to come. Starting next week, you can expect to have a sort of devotional-style post put up every Wednesday before 11PM ET (Montreal time). I wish I could be more specific about what time it will go up, but that will massively depend on how busy I am on a given Wednesday and on how many posts I back up in the queue for the weeks ahead. If you plan to read them every week as part of your devotionals, which I hope you will, then you should probably aim to read them on Thursdays, or late Wednesday night. Before I begin, I’d like to also state that I plan on doing another weekly update, probably on Sunday or Monday, about my New Year’s Resolution, reading through the Bible in a year with the ESV’s “Every Day in the Word” reading plan. This will look a little different from the Wednesday devotionals in that it will be more of a reflection on what in particular stood out for me that particular week, and will likely be less thematic.

So, let’s get down to business! A quick disclaimer: This post will likely be full of Christianese. Most of my posts will be less so than this ;)

As stated above, this post is mostly going to outline the goals and plan for my series titled “Hardcore Brokenness” which will start for real next Wednesday, the 18th of January.

As Christians, we are called to make better disciples of ourselves through the studying of God’s word and through our interaction, be it service or otherwise, with the rest of His Body. We also know, however, that God wants us to change our hearts for Him. He wants us to constantly be renewed by the power of His Spirit, and to ask for His help in doing so. We acknowledge that we are imperfect beings, and that God does not expect us to change ourselves for Him, but THROUGH Him, specifically, through His son, Jesus Christ. If we forget, for even a moment, that Christ’s sacrifice is what gives us life and worth, and try to change ourselves apart from that, it will mean nothing. Therefore through this series I plan to constantly keep you turning your eyes back to the Lord in all things. In all matters of the heart, I pray that He would be our main focus and our guide to dealing with the brokenness within us.
My goal here will be to address the issues of character that are clear in my own life, and, through Scripture, to encourage readers (and myself, in the process) to bring such things to God and lay them down at His feet in full submission to Him. My hope is that lives will be touched through this, that hearts will be broken and that God will use this as a way to start dealing with the things that His people are too proud or broken to have started working through before.
Over the next couple of months (I say couple of months rather presumptuously; I have no idea how long this series will go on for) I will be posting one devotional-style post per week, and would love to have feedback and encouragement through prayers and comments. I will also have a few guest writers at some point, which promises to be an interesting addition to this series.

I think that’s about all I have to say as an introduction to the series. I am excited to think that the Lord will use this to change people, even if those people are just me and the four or five people who actually read this blog regularly. I wish I could post this right now, instead of having to wait until I find free Wifi somewhere, but alas, I am currently typing this in a word document because the Café I’m in has the gall to charge money for their Wifi. At least the muffin was tasty.

Yours in Christ,

Tom

Exciting Update!

Hey!

So this was kind of a cool night- I hit 1000 views! And I couldn't have gotten here without you (seriously, because I told blogger not to track my own pageviews, so like, all those hits were you guys!)

I'm excited to announce that a new section will be added to my blog in the weeks to come! There'll be a new page popping up soon that will be an archive of posts about superheroes! Specifically, detailing the pros and cons of various superpowers and hero-related phenomena!

And to make things even more exciting, there will be a second writer coming on board! He'll be writing mostly, if not exclusively, about the superhero stuff, but is also a really talented creative writer, so we'll see if some of that comes out a bit too :) His name is Oliver. That's all the information you're getting about him for now, but hopefully you'll be seeing more of him in the next couple of weeks!

That's all folks.

Dawson College Peace Garden

This week I had the honor of participating in the opening ceremony of the Dawson College Peace Garden. My voice teacher, Jacinta Luis, wrote and composed a song in honor of the ceremony and had our class perform it at the end of the event.

And I ended up on the front page of the Montreal Gazette! Not as the headline, that was an article about getting druggies out of the gay village, but in a short teaser for the article located a few pages into the first section. But still, a photo on the front page? That's pretty rad! I got excited when my buddy Simon texted me telling me his mom saw me in the newspaper, haha.

Anyways I've linked to the article up on the Gazette's website, take a look at the great shots in the album!

More posts coming later this week, possibly about some really intense stuff! :)