Wind Blows Deeply

She began by asking, “You’ve heard of Collective Soul, right?”

Oh, of course. It’s almost like I grew up on them.

She continues, “Well, last week, Erin and I went to see them. We had the worst seats in the place. Second row from the back in the nosebleed section. But, since we couldn’t see them, we decided to go talk to them afterwards.”

How in the world did you get backstage passes?

“No, no. Not backstage passes. We waited around their bus until they came out.”

Oh, like groupies.

“Sort of. Anyways we ended up talking to them for a while. Then one of the guys gets a call on his cell from one of the other guys who has already left for the bar. So the first guy asks us if we’d like to go to the Toad … if we’d heard of it.”

The Toad, really? Weren’t we just there for Jack’s birthday?

“Yup. Anyways we ended up driving them …”

Whoa, hold up. You drove Collective Soul to the bar?

“Well, they were just going to take a cab. And we had driven downtown, so we offered them a ride.”

OK, let me get this straight. You stay after the show, hang out by the tour bus, talk to Collective Soul, they ask you to go out the Toad, you agree and offer them a ride, which they accept?

“Exactly.”

So you just hung out at the bar?

“Pretty much. Erin made out with one of them in the back for a while. But we stayed until close. Their tour manager had been calling for a couple of hours because they were supposed to be on the road for their next show. We just waited outside with them until their taxi came and said our good byes.”

That’s it?

“Yup. We hung out with the band for the evening,” she said.

It seems that whenever change, massive amounts of change, is about to happen I develop a proportional amount of doubt.
For instance, my upcoming move and job change.

I wonder if I’ll even like my job. And if I’m not satisfied in my new job, is it mostly my attitude or is it that my profession isn’t my passion?
I fret about finding a new place to live and trying to sublet my current place.
I question why I’m leaving a church that I absolutely love.
I wonder about my friendships that I’ve cultivated over the past two years, and some that I’ve begun only in the past few months.

I’ve done this whole thing before, and the first six months were some of the roughest times I’ve ever gone through. So while I’m stressed at my current job, I wonder about the stress of starting all over again. It’s almost like I keep trying to talk myself into it … or like I’m talking myself out of the whole thing. I keep telling myself that it’s not in my hands.
That’s all. I doubt. I doubt a lot about a lot of things. I’m usually willing to tell just about anyone anything. But there are certain things, like my doubts for example, that I keep a little more covered.

I’m frustrated by the number of people I come in contact with who have no idea who the Group of Seven is. I try to explain their influence in developing the Canadian identity. The Tom Thomson Gallery writes:

As an “outpost” of culture, Canadians followed the rules of the European art world. Canadian art authorities did not believe that our rough landscape was fit subject matter for art. “It’s bad enough to live in this country,” an old lady once told A.Y. Jackson, “without having pictures of it in your home.” This, and the attitude that pine trees were unpaintable, slowly began to change.

The Group of Seven’s original members were J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Franklin Carmichael, F.H. Varley and Frank Johnston. I have no doubt that you may recognize their work once you see it.

Dwight wrote:

What if faith could never be stable in the way God intends it to be if it didn’t have forward momentum and if that momentum weren’t in the field of the gravity of God himself? And if you don’t like that metaphor, think of a bird in flight or a bicycle or a ship on the sea. In each case, there’s movement in relation to some larger forces and realities. Stability comes through an interplay of those factors. Stability is not always as simple as a static building sitting on a solid foundation. John Wesley understood this very well: he talked about the church deriving its stability from a dynamic interplay of four forces-what were they? Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.

The Anabaptist Network is a new site I found with most of its content from folks in the UK. The following is an excerpt from a recent post:

Anabaptists: An Introduction

The Anabaptist movement had its genesis as the radical wing of the Protestant Reformation. It began in Zurich in 1525 when a small group of men and women gathered to baptise one another. This group and those that followed them became known as Anabaptists because they believed that Christians must choose baptism as consenting adults rather than as infants.
The concept of believer’s baptism was rejected by more moderate reformers who still believed in the Christendom model in which baptism of infants served as entry into both the church and the state. The Anabaptists were hunted down and persectued by both the Catholic and Protestant authorites for their baptism of adults as well as their rejection of the sword, swearing oaths and their focus on evangelism.