Headshot

Fingers tense in sudden excitement
Palms sweaty, a shallow breath
Held in eager anticipation
BOOM Headshot!
A wicked, glorious glee
And a foe defeated, a player pwned
Bloodlust captured, transformed,
Ameliorated
The gritty pixel, a battlefield of bytes
There are new heroes, new laurels
of respect, cred, and cool
And they are but a construct
An achievement is a tick on a screen

A bloody warrior, avatar of grim justice
ripped now from myth and legend, made
Alive to hew at the ephemeral
seething flanks of an imagined enemy
A boyhood imagination's playground
Transmogrified into half-reality
Power lies in the controller, the flick of a
thumbstick, and a thought commands armies
fleets, a KO, a Superbowl victory
The nectar of triumph, a sweet drought
to a thirsty imagination trapped
in a dull and pallid existence
Where there is no war to win
No fight against desperate odds
or a clarion call to courage

Worth

Who am I?

A question that tugs at the bottom of every soul.

What is worth, what is of worth?

We are made in the image of the Creator, blood, dust and bone. We are reflections of a singular and unfathomable will. We are the children of the Word that fell from His lips onto the world.

There is something inherently of value in us, of us, that we radiate. It is in what we are, it is in the unlimited potential of the DNA in our cells, we are the many, we are the variegated, and we are the host of possibilities. There is something of His eternity in the incredible manifold paths that the complexities of biology offer us.

And that is merely in our form, our shape, our dust. And He showed fit to give us something more. He gave us His breath, the animus, the soul, the ability to choose. He gave us choice. He gave us the capability of understanding.

A question then follows, regarding understanding. We ask, especially to the literal translation: If Eve knew, truly knew the fullest consequences of her actions, would she have bit into that apple? Would she have enslaved us, a world, to thousands upon thousands of years of pain and suffering? Would the mother of us all condemn us in a moment, for the sake of knowledge? And yet, to push the literal translation, even her limited understanding of a choice between God and self would mean that she knew of good and evil.

Regardless, there is something rotten at the core of us all. There is a malignity to us, and it colors every decision that we make. We are bent, and everything we do is thrown askew. Yet, I ask, are we broken, in the fullest sense of the word? Are we incapable of understanding altogether, that we are totally and absolutely lost? Would being this broken not even allow us to be capable of self-reflection? Would we not even know how broken we are, unable to answer the question to why we mess everything up?

Do we mess everything up?

A man called Tolkien said once, “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.”

But. But: Are we not the reflection of a God that is perfect? Are we not the refractors of a pure Light? Is there not something in us that calls to Him? Is there not something in all of us that recognizes we are the vessels of His Light, His greatness? Is there not some worth in that?

We see through a mirror darkly.

So: the problem. We can’t, being the instruments of our own destruction, engineer a way out that destruction. If we see sin as death, in and out of this mortal coil, a death in the little sense during our life, and a death after we pass, then we’re f*cked. It takes something to straighten us. It takes something to repair this “broken” soul.

It takes something like Jesus. For God so loved the world. Notice the language. Notice what it says. He LOVED the world. He saw worth in it. He saw something worthy of redemption. He saw something that needed to come back to Him.

It is true that we cannot manufacture this worthiness by anything we do, for in the end it falls short of its mark, it bends in its skewed flight, it misses the target. It is not complete, it is not perfect. But that we do, that we know, that we try, that very fact is from what we inherently are, the image of God. We seek after His face even though we cannot give the very search its words. We look for transcendence; we look for that purpose, engage in that passion that will deliver us to something better. Worth comes then, when we are our truest selves, an independent agent of the Will of God, spun into the world. We see this, in the image of who Jesus is, and what he’d done. The greatest thing a man can do is lay his life down for his friends, a free act of volition, not some prescribed fate. Our worth is immeasurable, for God took an immeasurably worthy Son and had him die for us. Our price has been the death of the Son of God.

Let us hold to the value of this worth, with humility and gratitude. For we are bought, purchased with a coin of infinite value.

Autumn, Interior and Exterior

This sums up how I feel nowadays, in a much more sublime fashion than I can craft at the moment. Go Go PB Shelley

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

V


Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. II

These are our youth. They should not be treated the way they are. They deserve our assistance. They deserve our time. They deserve our love. They deserve not to be abandoned or rejected, for who they are or what has happened to them. They deserve to be seen as people, and people of worth.

You want to fight crime and poverty in our city? It's easy. Frighteningly so. You look after the kids that are in greatest danger of becoming the next generation of criminals. You don't subject them to a system that dehumanizes them, and shuffles them, like a worn pack of poker cards, drawn at random.

These are the kids that will sell your son pot. These are the kids that get into the adult entertainment industry because it's easy money, and nobody's told them the consequences of those actions. These are the kids that will steal bikes to sell for drugs. These are the kids that are enticed into gangs because that is the closest thing to family they've ever had.

You want to stop vandalism? You want to stop theft and drug crimes? You want to stop drive by shootings? You want to stop seeing that guy under the bridge, or the guy that asks for your change outside the liquor store? Stop them from becoming that man or woman. It's easy. Frighteningly so.

These kids are not animals. These kids are not monsters. They are like us, but a with a crappy hand of cards. They've had less to start with. They've had more to fight through than most of us can ever imagine. They are resilient beyond what you give them credit for. They have inner resources that beggar me.

Our church shares this burden of our society. Jesus calls us to look after the least of these. Jesus calls after us to look after the children of our neighborhood, of our city, of our province. It is not always some starving child across an ocean that he's calling us to look after. It is not always some face on the tv that stares blankly into the camera. It is the child that is in the rough part of town. The kind that you drive past on the way home and are thankful you don't live there. It is the child of the mom that's in the woman's shelter, who isn't going to school, who doesn't know what home is. This is not to say that the people across the ocean don't deserve our help. They do. But they aren't hungry as a result of our choices. The kid down the block is. He's hungry because dad can't make it past minimum wage, and has a drinking problem that soaks up all the money that should go to food. He can't make minimum wage because we have a government that doesn't support our poor. We have that government because we voted it in, or failed to vote to begin with. THAT is a result of our choice. We ARE our brother's keeper, and we've steadfastly ignored him.

We been comfortable in our cars and SUVs, walking the +15s, and it's time for us to consider the teen that's sleeping under the bridge, a block or two away. It's time for us to consider that the teen that is the same age of your own teen, and you were once the same age as well.

They should be in homes that care and love for them. They should be in foster homes where there isn't abuse, or a lack of compassion and love. They should be in foster homes that aren't overburdened. If they can't get in, they should be in grouphomes that have the staff, the time, and the space for them. They should be in a home where there is consistent people around, with fewer kids per staff, with a house mom and a house dad.

You hear about Focus on the Family, why don't we focus on our family growing larger, opening our hearts to include those that have been excluded. Why don't we consider, as a part of our society that seems to support family values, the notion that family should count for all people, not just the ones in polo t-shirts that sip lattes on the way to another church service in the car that cost more than these kids can even imagine. Why don't we think about loving the people who are unloved, the ones that are hard to love and easy to ignore, forget, and dismiss. We are called to love the least of these. We are called to love the unlovable. We are called to touch the untouchables. They do not exist a continent away, they exist a block or two away. They do not demand your attention the way your radio does, they do not demand your attention like prime time tv does, because they have not been given the voice, and its time we listen to it. Listen! Compassion is what Jesus was about! Compassion is letting go of our privilege and opening our eyes and hearts to those around us. Get involved in street ministry, give money to the poor. Don't ignore the dude that asks for a little bit of change. Feed him lunch instead. Find out who fosters in your church and support them with everything you got. Foster kids yourselves, consider adoption. There are so many kids that want homes, and we have families, with family values in abundance. You want to make a change in society, change this world around you? You want to stop this slide into apparent degradation? Make room in your heart for those that society has spit on, stepped on, and walked on by. Are we willing to be the Samaritan, heretical and rough around the edges? Or are we going to simply push the status quo and just walk on by, deaf to the cry of a society in pain?

Listen!

A Youth Worker's Manifesto pt. I

There is a problem in this city. It is not with the roads. It is not with the buses. It is not with unemployment. It is with how we treat our youth and the people that take care of them. The youth of which I speak are the kids that are in your schools, in your rec centres, in your starbucks and in your youth groups. They are the youth that are in the system, but whether we see them or not, they are in our lives. They have been ripped from their homes by forces that they don't fully comprehend. They have been shaped by choices that are not their own. They have been made into people they are not entirely by their own will.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that society ate, chewed and spat out, left to their own devices. They are the youth that get into gangs. They are the youth that have access to drugs. They are the youth that sleep on our streets. They are the youth that have gone missing. They are our invisibles, well on the way to becoming invisible.

These are our youth.

They are the youth whose mothers passed on their crack addiction when they were born. They are the youth that were abused when they were babies. They are the youth that were left for days without food due to neglect. They are the youth whose faces are bruised by yet another of mom's boyfriends. They are the youth who were born with FAS. They are the youth that were ignored. They are the youth that were beaten without cause. They are the youth that were beaten for any cause.

These are our youth.

They are the youth that are strung out in an alley. They are the youth that break into houses to find something they can pawn so they can score another hit. They are the youth whose boyfriend left them with nothing more than a pregnancy. They are the youth that listened to the wrong man online and disappeared. They are the youth that cut. They are the youth that want to end their lives. They are the youth that can't control their anger, for a reason that they can't explain, because Daddy kept on hitting him when he was little and wouldn't stop crying.

These are our youth.

And we own them more than what we can ever give them.

We house them in grouphomes and foster homes and lock down recovery clinics. We commit them as patients of a hospital of societal illness, slaves to an impersonal system of beds and numbers. We house them with grouphomes that are understaffed and underpaid, with drywall full of holes, cracking lino, and burned out staff. We house them with foster parents and brothers and sisters, who opened their hearts to take yet another risk, another burden on the shoulders of the burdened. We give them case workers who are overworked. We house them in places that are ripe for tempers to fray, with easy access to others for drugs and gang inductions. We house them in the ghettos of our city. We house them without regard. We tell them that this is only temporary. We tell them this until they turn 18.

These are our youth.

We give them staff that are underpaid and told to care for them, and if they can, love them. We give them staff that are paid a pittance and train them in how to stop a kid from trying to kill themselves, how to restrain a kid that’s lost control of their temper. We give them staff that pull 48 hour shifts because there wasn’t anybody else to call. We give them staff that are paid less then someone working at the local Timmy’s. We give the staff six kids with different schedules, doctors, counselors, parole officers, support workers, social workers, teaching assistants, psychiatrists, addiction counselors, and ask them to juggle it all. We give them staff that are the anvil to the hammer that the world has beat into these kids. We give them staff that deal with the behaviors and the memories of the abuse suffered at a previous home. We give them staff that are asked to risk life and limb to some of the kids that are severely unbalanced. We give them staff that are expected to bind the horrific emotional wounds that abandonment causes. We give them staff that can’t work regular hours because it’s shift work, and doesn’t pay enough to hold down as a job. We give them a staff that cares, and then burn them out. We give them a staff that sees these kids for who they really are, youth who actually matter, and then fail to pay a competitive wage.

These are our youth. And these are our youth workers.

And we’ve forgotten about them.