The Long-Awaited Blog About My Job

I know you've all been dying to read about what I do at work and how much I love it, but I gotta admit... it's been a hectic first week, even with the long weekend that I had.

If you haven't heard, I now work at the MCC Thrift Shop in Vancouver as an Assistant Manager. It was a long process to get hired, but now that it's complete, I'm pretty stoked about it. This position wasn't one of the many that I applied for at MCC, but they called me up and asked if I would be interested, and a person in my employment situation at that time can't really say no.

So... I get up at 6:45 every morning and have to be at the Skytrain by 7:55. I take the train into Vancouver and get off at Joyce, then take a 20 minute busride. After that, its just a 2-block walk and I'm at work. It takes about an hour overall.

My duties: anything from running the tills to co-ordinating the volunteer schedule to making bank deposits, moving furniture, pricing items, balancing the books (that's balancing, not cooking), and pretty much anything else that needs to be done.

The pay is pretty decent, the people I work with seem awesome so far (both the staff and volunteers), I love the work that MCC does around the world, and I even don't mind getting up early in the morning.

I'll try to get some pictures up in the next few weeks of what work looks like, so stay tuned.

WORLD AIDS DAY - DECEMBER 1, 2007

Alright, I've finally completed the video that has taken many forms and gone through many changes and edits and blah blah blah. A labour of love, though.

I will be using this video in a short presentation my church has allowed me to do on the issue of HIV/AIDS. I hope it will at least raise people's awareness, and even more, I hope it will spur some to action!

You might notice that some of the stats I put in the video don't match up with each other. Basically, from the time I started the video to the time I finished editing and re-working it, UNAIDS had come out with new statistics. Fortunately the numbers are down! Let's hope we can keep that trend going (of better record-keeping, more accurate estimates, and lower infection rates).



Any comments are most welcome!

I actually drank coffee!! I don't know if you know, but I have lived my entire life being some form of mutant. I live in an area of the world absolutely in LOVE with coffee, but I don't (nay, refuse) to drink it. A city that has more Starbucks than Seattle, and I don't drink it... just crazy.

I've been weening myself onto it. It started with Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha a couple times, then onto an Eggnog Latte, and then...

It just came upon me, I needed to do it. I grabbed my dad's cup and hesitantly took a sip. And, surprisingly, it wasn't that bad at all! I could get used to that, methinks. At this point I still prefer the Mocha's and Latte's, but at least I've come to a place where I have the option.

Geoff liking coffee? Who woulda thunk it...

Alright, I made the decision to not move back to Australia a couple weeks ago. It wasn't something I decided over night, and if you had asked me a week before then, my answer would have been a pretty definite YES, I'M MOVING BACK!

The All-Important First Post

I could not conceive a better way to begin a blog to be full of my "emergent" thoughts than to start by quoting John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. And so, I will do so at some length. I hope that you take the time to read the entire passage, even though I do recognize the extent to which I quote as well as the scholarly language Yoder uses may turn many of you off at the outset. I would liked to have quoted more (and I probably will in future posts), but I felt this to be quite sufficient for now. Enjoy!
----------------------------

Before drawing any affirmative conclusions let us first note the absence of the concept of imitation as a general pastoral or moral guideline. There is in the New Testament no Franciscan glorification of barefoot itinerancy. Even when Paul argues the case for celibacy, it does not occur to him to appeal to the example of Jesus. Even when Paul explains his own predilection for self-support there is no appeal to Jesus' years as a village artisan. Even when the apostle argues strongly the case for his teaching authority, there is no appeal to the rabbinic ministry of Jesus. Jesus' trade as a carpenter, his assocation with fishermen, and his choice of illustrations from the life of the sower and the shepherd have throughout Christian history given momentum to the romantic glorification of the handcrafts and the rural life; but there is none of this in the New Testament. It testifies throughout to the life and mission of a church going intentionally into the cities in full knowledge of the conflicts which awaited believers there. That the concept of imitation is not applied by the New Testament at some of those points where Franciscan and romantic devotion has tried most piously to apply it, is all the more powerfully a demonstration of how fundamental the thought of participation in the suffering of Christ is when the New Testament church sees it as guiding and explaining her attitude to the powers of the world. Only at one point, only on one subject - but then consistently, universally - is Jesus our example: in his cross.

This much could have been said without special attention to our learnings from Luke. But all of this language of imitation and participation, all the pious and pastoral meditation on the believer's cross, takes on a new dimension if we take the measure of the social character of Jesus' cross.

The believer's cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer's cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther's or Thomas Muntzer's of Zinzendorf's or Kierkegaard's cross or Anfechtung, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come...

Being human, Jesus must have been subject somehow or other to the testings of pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust; but it does not enter into the concerns of the Gospel writer to give us any information about any struggles he may have had with their attraction. The one temptation the man Jesus faced - and faces again and again - as a constitutive element of his public ministry, was the temptation to exercise social responsibility, in the interest of justified revolution, through the use of available violent methods. Social withdrawal was no temptation to him; that option (which most Christians take part of the time) was excluded at the outset. Any alliance with the Sadducean establishment in the exercise of conservative social responsibility (which most Christians choose the rest of the time) was likewise excluded at the outset. We understand Jesus only if we can empathize with this threefold rejection: the self-evident, axiomatic, sweeping rejection of both quietism and establishment reponsibility, and the difficult, constantly reopened, genuinely attrative option of the crusade.

The statement of the problem with which we began was drawn not from Luke but from the present. Because Jesus is not meant to be taken as normative for political ethics, it is said, we must obviously, consciously, properly get our ethics elsewhere, from a "responsible" calculation of our chances and our duty to make events come out as well as possible. This substitution of nature or history for Jesus as the locus of revelation was justified by the claim that Jesus had nothing to say on this subject. But now we see that he did have something to say; in fact that he said little that was not somehow on this subject. The Gospel record refuses to let the modern social ethicist off the hook. It is quite possible to refuse to accept Jesus as normative; but it is not possible on the basis of the record to declare him irrelevant.

Yoder, John, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 95-97. (Emphasis added)