In one month my blog will celebrate its 10th anniversary (2004-2014) and I feel like I should bake it a cake or something.

Statistics: Ten years equals 1,628 posts (an average of more than three per week); 50,000 plus views and 629 comments.

I started the blog after many failed attempts to keep a journal. It occurred to me that as an unashamed technophile I always have something with me that I could record my thoughts digitally and with the emergence of blogs perhaps the internet was the place for me. Paper was unreliable and prone to destruction and loss (like my memory). The creation of the blog speaks to my own desire to see my words go on I suppose.

So here were are now nearly 10 years later and it feels as if a lifetime has come and gone. There is only one other 10 year period in my life that I think may qualify as having more change and destruction than this past 10 years and those are the years between six and sixteen, the decade of fire.

When I started this blog I was finishing my Master of Divinity in Pastoral Studies at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. I had an 18 month old daughter, a four year old son and a a seven year old son…all have whom continue to humble me with the beautiful wholeness of their incredible selves.

My blog should be seen as an echo of my own perceived reality; it is the recorded ripples of the events in and around me over the past decade. Their are moments of banality and the mundane that exist as mortar between the more worthy bricks of whatever I am building. It has seen me graduate and start vocational ministry. It has seen me move west and come to live in and love a new community and the people in it. There have been many deaths. It has witnessed the death of vocational ministry. It has witnessed the isolated death of my lost father. It has seen the slow, destructive march of my marriage to a death as real and painful as any death.

Then again the beauty of the witness is that it is there not simply in the dark but in the light as well and so many births have been seen as well.

My blog has seen the re-birth of my ministry into something far more personal and in the world than I could ever have hoped for; It has witnessed my slow recognition that while there is death the world will continue and that I must choose to continue with it and stay in the grave…I choose the latter. I have even been able to receive a love and beauty that felt well beyond my deserving…something great enough to teach me that there is more to me than pain.

I titled the blog Iceberg Tips because what you see in it are the great and jagged white teeth of a mind and a man that runs far deeper and far colder. For all the feigned gregarious extroversion the average person meets when they meet me in public this blog is as close as most people will ever get to knowing me for who I really am. If you only know me through the words of others than what you know is but a shadow of a shadow of who I really am…you have not even tread the umbra.

My only hope looking ahead is that the next 10 years are less destructive than the last…I would like the next decade to be one of life and resurrection. Let the light of the years to come cast shadows on the cave walls of this blog that the occupants might come to know something of the world outside.

Slàinte!

There has always been a desire to define love. If history and art have taught us anything it is that love is an enigmatic mystery that puzzles us.

One thing is clear…we do not understand love and what we do not understand we seek to control it, or failing this, destroy it.

Our efforts to control love are many and myriad and often can be seen in our attempts to systematize it in various ways.

Now my worldview teaches me that love emanates from God. Not only does love find its source in God (that which is completely outside of us) I believe that God IS love.

God resists systems and structures since they are human tools that seek to contain God by understanding God.

In the same way love resists systems, structures, traditions and any effort to fully understand it.

We find this resistance frustrating because as little bent gods we seek to systematize and control everything.

Our frustration is often directed toward those who might not understand love within the same boxes we have created and constrained it within.

We shout loudly that what you call love is not really love and so on and so forth in an attempt to bring others to our viewpoint and ultimately under our control. When this does not happen we seek to destroy the other perspective with whatever tools we have at our disposal.

It is this resorting to violence (not simply physical violence but the seeking to destroy another’s ideas) that is our own undoing as it signifies that we too, have failed to comprehend love and are no different than what we fear.

Ultimately love, like God, does not fall within our grasp. It must be revealed to us and we must accept it and respond to it. We must humbly admit that love, like truth, is an ideal that we strive toward and not a philosophy that we can define and control.

If we come to this place we will find ourselves incapable of telling another (or even ourselves) that they do not love…and this is not a bad thing.

No amount of emotional stockpiling, no great gathering of vengeance and pain, no crushing salty tear hate will stop your world from ending…it will end all the same.

Better to let it end that you might hope in resurrection and peace. The sun sets bringing night that it might rise again in the morning and welcome day.

there is no happy
beatbeatbeat
of fists upon faces
so we suffer ourselves to
beatbeatbeat
our pens upon pages,
crazed fingers on keys
that words would pour;
pulse like gushing blood
to sate a different kind of lust…
it is the violence of poets that burns,
burns as light in a shit-black world
til’ empty as hollow gas cans
they are thrown wasted aside
to the rust and runaway dreams