Nick & Susan Pharoah (A Rocha Canada’s Pembina Valley Centre hosts) and Tiina Hildebrand on the Thousand Hills ranch she runs with her husband Dean.
Doesn’t this little dude (Aidan’s got sharp eyes) look thoroughly unimpressed? Can anyone tell me what kind of frog it is?
Aidan, Noah and I under Susan’s helpful guidance helped pick trail apples one afternoon. We’ve been munching on these small and refreshingly tart morsels ever since. It was a great teachable moment in the sense that the boys griped and bellyached about having to do “work” for a good hour beforehand; and ended up thoroughly enjoying themselves while getting a needed job done.
Shauna working with Susan and the kids in A Rocha’s garden, while I was very busy doing labor intensive activities like taking photographs and exploring the local pond invertebrates.
On Sept 9th we traveled from Grasslands National Park in south Sask to the Pembina Valley in South Central Manitoba. This is where A Rocha Canada has a 100 acre site nestled in a beautiful location right beside Pembina Valley Provincial Park. We were warmly welcomed by Nick and Susan Pharoah, the Centre’s hosts and spent two excellent days.
The southern highways of SK and MB are intoxicatingly beautiful (a personally unfamiliar descriptor, but apt nonetheless).
One of the best parts of preaching was being confronted with the humbling reality of how terrible my understanding of heaven has been! Heaven is not somewhere we go, it’s where the Creator of heaven and earth resides in full. When we die, or sleep as the Apostle Paul so wonderfully writes; we do not go ‘to heaven’, we are with the Lord. It is not a place to escape to, it is a reality that is breaking in upon us now. Jesus taught us to pray, ‘Father, your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’. In Revelation ‘heaven’ as it were or the New Jerusalem comes down out of the heavens and makes a home on earth, renewing and blessing the earth in it’s holiness. Heaven is breaking in around us all the time if we would have eyes to see and ears to hear. ‘Behold’ , Jesus says early in Mark’s gospel, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Each time we care for the uncared for, speak the truth in love and lay down our life in service to others in Jesus’ name, heaven and earth touch and our Creator is gloried.
Now, I don’t know if the forebearers of the 157 people who presently live in Val Marie (home of Brian Trottier, you Islanders fans) outside Grasslands National Park in southern SK knew all that when they created their welcome sign, but maybe, just maybe they did.
I hope so.
While visiting the Harden family I asked Thane (15) what he was reading at the moment. Turns out he’s reading some of the Patrick O’Brian novels, which for the uninitiated are largely set on English tallships in the time of the English-French and Spanish wars of the 19th century. If I’m wrong of the century history lovers, I pray your forgiveness. The time is not the point of this entry, the subject of what constitutes a ‘real’ man is. (or really, a real person… I was going down a gender track to start this one, but it didn’t go that way)
For in the novel in question, the protagonist is a ‘gentleman’ and the captain of his own warship. As a gentleman he was expected to be ‘well read’ in a multitude of ways. He plays violin, and can ascertain the correct distance to fire a sixteen pounder at at pirateer. He quotes the bible and the classics of English literature, and can keep order with an iron fist. He… well, you get the point.
This led to a discussion about why it is that today it seems that the arts are seen as somehow outside the jurisdiction of guy guys (which we all know is a gross stereotype, but most stereotypes have within them a solid body of truth and this one is no exception). How is it that we arrived at such a wizened cultural understanding of what it means to be a man, and to be an artist?
Thane’s father, Andre, chimed in with the observation that a few generations ago many prairie families were integrated in the same fashion as O’Brian’s sea captain. Hard working farmers and ranchers by day, by night they read Shakespeare, memorized scripture, learned piano and made their own clothes. Again, some stereotyping here, but still much truth. ‘And today’, I asked?
‘Today’, Andre replied, ‘on the whole in the evenings you simply see the flicker of blue through the windows of most farmhouses’.
Is TV, the communicator of much art (and much of our sense of what it means to be human: male or female) actually the slow death of the arts? It’s hard work wood, play music, form pottery, compose a poem, or any other creative task when one is watching Battlestar Galactica (picking on myself here, just to be fair), and there is only so much time in the day.
Turn off the TV and do something. Turn off the computer (after reading this blog of course) and write your loved one a letter, or better yet a poem… it doesn’t have to rhyme.
Be creative.
We all had a talk, and thought that if we can put astronaughts on the moon, land robotic vehicles on Mars and build tailing ponds for the Albertan oilsands that can be seen from space and suck rivers dry; then surely we can design highway systems that curtail the deaths of porcupines, and countless other creatures.
