Look, Ma! I’m On A Boat!

This morning I went with Audrey to church (Holy Trinity Church, Downtown Chicago), and even before the service began there were the announcements which made me realize we were in the right place, because a couple in Hawaiian shirts had invited the whole congregation to an afternoon picnic on their boat to watch the world cup final! And so I went, and I WAS ON A BOAT. IT WAS AWESOME. BUT THE NETHERLANDS LOST!

Also we met two pastors, Pastor Kim and Pastor Dennis, and Pastor Kim is married to a Malaysian American and Pastor Dennis grew up as one of seven children, some of whom were adopted, and African American – he told us about his two African American sisters – one of whom married a white man and the other who married a fellow African-American, and how his nephew sometimes got confused cos one of their uncles was white and another was black.
Praise the LORD!

Not that I’m Smug or Anything

Slate on The Flooded Earth

detail of bookcover of The Flooded Earth, from Slate

In his new book, “The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps,” Peter D. Ward, a professor of biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, takes a look at what the latest predictions in sea rise will mean for the future of human civilization. In the coming decades, he argues, vast swaths of agricultural land will be ruined by encroaching salt water; the increasingly ice-free lands of Greenland and Antarctica will become contested and ever-more valuable, and our coastal cities’ spiraling preservation costs will bleed our economies dry. The book is a beautifully written, thoroughly research and relentlessly terrifying work, and a must-read for anybody with an interest in the environment or the future of our planet.

Salon spoke to Ward over the phone from Seattle about the world’s most threatened regions, the future of New York, and why the 21st century will belong to Canada.

(quoted from Slate)

BOAT

I think my mission in life is to build a boat.
A boat is intentional, faithful, true.
It floats. It is apart from the land, and a part of it.
It can move from one campus to another
Up and down the Charles River.

It can move across to California!
- If I learn how to drive properly and take it on a trailer.

.

It is a symbol of Truth in a place
Where Truth is not capitalized on anymore
It will be a thing of Beauty
blurring bright with Love.
It is a symbol of Freedom
and of Responsibility.
A symbol of a time when it will come.
Like Grace -

I realize boats have been in my life.
I want to bless people with this boat.
It will be filled from wall to wall with books.
Like the barge of books that came once to my mum
on a sundrenched island which had just learned to read.
It will be the place of love
where my parents honeymooned in
and when they landed, turned into a pool
in, which I then loved to splash in.

It will be a sanctuary;
It will be a place of joy and beauty.
I do not want, Lord Jesus, to always be
a person who only talks about a boat.
I want to be, Lord Jesus, to really be
a person who, if commanded, builds a boat;
even if it proves lonely and difficult.

I will build this boat to plow the seas -
It will seed seeds which float back to me.
I will heal spirits in this boat -
I will reach new peoples in this boat -
I will speak of heaven in this boat -
It will be a slice of heaven, this this boat.

It will sit upon the banks of the Charles River
And it will gather Christian men all thither
to help to build the voice of love together
To feed and to be fed for once forever -

It is a boat. It is a place of hope.
It is a boat, a temporary home -
A boat in which a restless poet floats
And which must one day beach on some sweet shore
where Jesus o my Jesus went before -

It is a boat, it is simply a boat.
An amalgamation of my every hope
of every boat on which I’ve ever sat
and rocked and puked in, saw a lady’s cloak in,
for every boat whose commerce shipped the ship in -

for this is my dear boat
the one I hope
will be a boat.

And it is my wish
that I may sit in it and fish.

.

People will see us building this random boat.
And they will be like, “Why?!”
And we will say, well, it is a boat.
Its purpose in this life is to float.
It is a thing of beauty, brave and wise.
It is like all creation -
a thing of intentionality.
It did not ever need to be – but look!
It is a boat!
And it will come to be
no symbol
not a metaphor,
but real.

It is a boat. It is a boat.
I never thought I’d be on a boat.
on a big blue watery road…

And everyone will think it foolish and unwise
But when it’s done they’ll be in for a surprise!

.

Picture this:
After the long, dark winter
in which we have lost hope
in which nothing has gone right
about the boat.

But then, in Spring, the river begins to crack
and underneath it there will be this water
and underneath it we will see this water
The living living water which will buoy us
and guide us and persuade us and direct us
the living water flowing flowing through us
and we will take on our shoulders this finished boat
and we will set it on the flowing water
the river’s only water that flows through us -
and we will set it on the flowing river
and we will ship and sail away inside her -

and in it, I will one day reach Ithaca -
And there in a great pyre I will burn her -