All that you are going to knead.

Coming to Canada, part 3.

Ironically enough, I started writing this third and final blog in the series about how we came to Canada in Vancouver Airport when waiting at our gate, about to leave this magnificent land we called home for nearly seven years. The snow-covered mountains, surrounding the airport, flushed pink as the setting sun kissed them farewell in the remains of the day. Airport waiting lounges, like dusk, can feel like liminal places. You are leaving one place but haven't quite entered another. Time feels different. At the close of a chapter, its beginning returns again to loiter at the fringes of your memory for as long as you choose to entertain it. 

There are lessons to learn in every chapter of life. Lessons within lessons come to think of it. The Word of the Lord will come to you, with an invitation or a promise. Often, there will be a time of testing and refining as your life is reframed around this word. Then, with the lesson learnt, the word takes on new dimensions, rooting you further in the goodness of the Lord, and to the reality that "God is who He says He is, and He always does what He said He would do." 

Watching the Vancouver skyline and those peaks change from pink to gold, to blue, to dark, I remembered the day we arrived off the ferry from Vancouver Island embarking on our journey east to Lethbridge. The signposts to a town called "Hope" stood out to me. We certainly felt full of hope driving into mountains ranges I dreamt of seeing as a boy in the gift of a white Toyota, and a GPS to help us find our way. 

The road trip, split over two days, was on a highway that dramatically rose and fell over ridges and through passes with mountains in every direction. We arrived into the Crowsnest Crossing Service Station to refuel (to “get gas!”). Perpendicular icicles had formed along the outside edge of the bottom of my car door, it looked like something from the film Mad Max. Stepping out of the car I took a strange coughing fit after my first couple of breaths of the outside air. Then my nostril hair began to freeze! Taken together you would have thought that these signs would have caused me to wrap up warmer. No, this gallus Scot braved the elements in only shirt sleeves and a tweed waistcoat. I was not so cocky when I got back in the car. I couldn't feel my ears, and my nipples had grown so cold that I thought that they had sheered off in the minus-goodness-knows-what temperatures. The view was completely socked in with freezing fog, all the mountains were hidden under a winter dust sheet. This part of Southern Alberta would play a central role in this chapter of life; the land itself became one of my teachers. I knew none of this standing by that petrol pump in early March 2014, dancing on the spot trying to keep warm and not look too much like a tourist. 

In these mountains, I have shared hiking trails and river banks with creatures that could kill me. I was always conscious of that out here. It produced humility in the way you relate to your surroundings. A wise friend taught me to enter a mountain meadow like a deer. Watch and wait for a moment at the edges. Listen. Then proceed mindfully. Seeing cougar prints in the snow always released a shot of adrenaline. I had three encounters with bears; the scariest of which was on a trail called Dead Man's Pass (how apt). We didn't see the bear but heard it growl, probably warning us that it was around the next bend, a sow with cubs perhaps? It was the right time of year. The growl sounded like someone starting a Harley Davidson motorbike. It reverberated in my chest. Such encounters never put me off. I only ever wanted more time in the hills.

Two days before our flight back to Scotland, I felt like I needed to say goodbye. To the land. I took one last trip heading west from Lethbridge out along Highway 3. My favourite point on the road is when you pass the Piikani Nation of the Blackfoot people. The road drops away down a hill, and the view opens wide. The Old Man River meanders in broad, slow ponderings in the coulee basin further beneath, and the southern range of the Rockies hems the heavens from Chief Mountain sweeping round to Crowsnest Mountain, with the Livingstone Range stretching away to the north. I have always felt so in awe in this landscape. God allured us out into this wilderness, where wildness still exists, to speak so tenderly to us. Here I would see some of my idols, and my egocentric ways; the false gods who demand their sacrifice, and who shape our core sense of identity. Greater still was the relentless tenderness of God who is a lover.

We arrived in Lethbridge to visit treasured friends, Todd and Cheri Atkinson. Initially, we were staying for a week. However, we could not shake this growing sense of peace that we felt when we contemplated staying longer. Was the Lord calling us to live in Lethbridge? It certainly seemed like it. And the Atkinson’s graciously hosted us in their home until we were able to find a condo of our own. 

We were called to Canada not to a job or a title but to learning a lesson, that the Lord God of heaven and earth is our all in all. I was first invited into this lesson during a time of worship at the Stroeve’s home in Lethbridge. As we sang in a living room with strangers who would become the closest of friends, I was taken into an experience where I saw a river of dough flowing towards me. It behaved like lava, slow moving with weight behind it. The dough carried various items caught up within it. In the foreground, I saw a gym membership slowly coming to my feet. I then heard a voice say,

"I am all that you are going to need." 

On hearing this, I watched as a hand came with what I thought was a thimble and lifted some of the dough out of the slow-moving flow. The scene changed and I saw this thimble was actually a large bucket, dwarfed against the quantity of dough. A pair of hands worked on the dough, kneading and shaping it into loaves, ready for the oven. I then heard the voice say,

"I am all that you are going to knead." 

I came out of the experience, appreciating the play on words, with a question,

"Are you telling me, Lord, that it is okay to ask you for a gym membership?"

There was no reply, just a sense of a smile and an air of quiet pleasure. So, I did. I asked for a gym membership. The very next day, someone came to me and said,

"I know this may sound strange, but do you want to join a gym?"

"Yes, I do!"

"That's great because I feel like I am to buy you a year's membership to Lethbridge Fitness!"

On one level, this gift was another sign of the sheer kindness of God, and (shameless plug!) it’s great gym! On another, it was something of a parable that would frame this season of life. I was entering into a time of training. I would see some of the key areas of my life where I craved things apart from God. St Ignatius of Loyola calls these things “inordinate attachments.” Attachments that keep you from being free to know and follow God. To be clear, these things are not just material objects, they can be mindsets that you carry about yourself. Here was my familiar script: I need to be needed. I need to be known. I need to be a success. A man is what he does and what he has. 

I came to realise that the hands in the image were actually my hands. I was being called to draw bucket loads of grace from the Lord. There was plenty on offer, “grace upon grace”. Grace to know his word, and the daily bread of his presence and to abide there. And grace to see his church afresh through renewed eyes, where the bread of his body is broken and we participate in heavenly realities here on the earth. Grace that folds back on grace, that stretches and rises. All this was available but I had to learn to engage. Kneading a loaf requires effort. Grace develops new spiritual muscles. The adjective "ascetic" derives from the ancient Greek term askēsis, which means "training" or "exercise". The original usage did not refer to self denial. Asceticism is better understood in the context of the physical training required for athletic events. The same is so for the spiritual life. God invites us to be strong in his grace. He is all that we are ever going to need.