There is a qualitative difference about Jesus that is unmistakable. Nothing in him echoes our frenetic and worried pace. With Jesus nothing hurries, nothing diminishes, nothing wastes, nothing stalls. He is life itself.

John, the beloved disciple, puts it simply: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people” (John 1:4, TNIV). As John comes to write about Jesus, he knows he is touching the infinite. He charmingly says that the world is too small to record what could be said (John 21:25).

So… what to do? John chooses seven representative moments, seven real and tangibly physical signs of how the eternal life comes into our material world. Everything is concretely real and experience-able: wa- ter and wine, hunger and bread, blindness and sight, being dead and being alive. We learn that the life of Jesus is not removed from where we live, but deeply present, if we can see him.

As we now begin our move towards Easter, we follow seven reveal- ing moments in the life of Jesus. In the real physicality of our human experience, John will show us who Jesus is: God’s presence and his very self.

February 12:
February 19:
Special Ash Wednesday Service: Wednesday Feb 22 7pm
February 26:
March 4:
March 11:
March 18:
March 25:

Holy Week
April 1: Palm Sunday
April 6: Good Friday
April 8: Resurrection Sunday

UPCOMING BAPTISMS:
April 1, 2012 at the 9:29 and 11:11am celebrations

All participants must attend the baptism class prior to their baptism. This class will be held on March 27th, 2012 from 7:00-8:00pm.

CONTACT:
403.777.0800 x 5235
baptism@wkc.org

REGISTER ONLINE:
Click here to register

The Deep Dive Journal has information about who we are as a community and resources for those looking to connect at Westside. It also lays out our teaching schedule for the coming year with space to takes notes each weekend.

That journal is now available free for the iPad. You can find it here in iTunes.

Robertson McQuilkin doesn’t fit the stereotype of what we imagine a famous lover might look like. He was a seminary president; a little dowdy perhaps, a bit nerdish, at least by Hollywood standards. He had climbed to the top of his career as an educator when his wife Muriel was diagnosed with Alzeimer’s. After a few difficult years of trying to manage both his work and the care of Muriel he decided he only had one choice.

So Robertson became a homemaker and a caregiver. When he accepted his new life, he thought of it as an end to his ministry. Instead, it was a beginning of sorts. Not only was he now caring full-time for Muriel, but he was discovering that such a choice was both unique and rare. In a culture like ours, a culture that prizes individual freedom and self-realization, Robertson McQuilkin became (unexpectedly) the model lover.

Let me cite a passage from A Promise Kept that seems to sum up Robertson’s story. This moment takes place when Muriel had already begun to decline in her mind, although still able to be quite mobile. Because of the Alzheimer’s, Muriel was often restless, and sometimes panicked. But Robertson was patient with her:

Once our flight was delayed in Atlanta and we had to wait a couple of hours. Now thats a challenge. Every few minutes, the same questions, the same answers about what we’re doing here, when are we going home? And every few minutes we’d take a fast-paced walk down the terminal in earnest search of — what? Muriel had always been a speed walker. I had to jog to keep up with her.

An attractive woman executive type sat across from us, working diligently on her computer. Once, when we returned from an excursion, she said something, without looking up from her papers. Since no one else was nearby I assumed she had spoken to me or at least mumbled in protest of our constant activity.

“Pardon?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “I was just asking myself, ‘Will I ever find a man to love me like that?’”

[Robertson McQuilkin. A Promise Kept. p.18-19]

Its a simple anecdote, to be sure, but the beauty and power of it is clear. And that is why I nominate this rather plain looking academic as one of the great lovers of our time.

In our current reductionism, where love is sex, and sex is mere physicality, we have lost the image of great love. It is therefore necessary for us to find stories like that of Robertson and Muriel McQuilkin, stories that anchor us in a deeper meaning and higher calling. Of course, there was a time when Robertson and Muriel were lovers in the usual way we think of that term. But their love for each other did not deplete in the passing of their youthful beauty and physical strength.

In Ephesians 5, Paul tells husbands to love their wives in the same way that Christ loved the church. If you need to see how such a calling actually works, get the book.

Bob Osborne

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.

This past Sunday we began our series Sex and Money. We began with a talk about the relational dynamics of marriage, the true center of sexual identity and expression. While our present era thinks about sex as mechanics and body parts, the Bible speaks of it as a powerful expression of sacred identity and faithful relationship. The Bible speaks of sex within the context of covenanted relationship. As Chris led us through a meditation on Proverbs 5 we saw how this is so.

The church has, at times, avoided talking about human sexuality as if it were not there, or as if it somehow did not connect with issues of faith. But our sexual identity is at the core of who we are, and who we are matters to God. And to top it all off, we have to say that God dreamt all this up; all one has to do is to read the Song of Songs to see how the erotic is sanctioned by God when it is pure and whole. So we want to be clear that sexuality is good and to be celebrated. The caveat, however, and perhaps the thing that is beginning to sound strange in our present culture, is that sexual expression is meant for marriage. Sexual expression is meant for the context of covenanted love. Only within that context can sexual expression grow and mature and become all that it is meant to be.

Let me recommend a beautiful love story which may help you see this: Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (HarperCollins, 1988). L’Engle, a celebrated author, tells about her marriage to Hugh Franklin. They are two of a kind, lovers of words and poetry and theater. When they find each other, and begin to build a life together, they become lovers in the truest and fullest human sense of that term. And, of course, it all begins with such ecstasy, such passionate intensity. L’Engle recounts how Hugh proposed to her:

He picked up a book of poetry off the shelves and began leafing through it, and then he read me Conrad Aiken’s beautiful words:
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
And then he said, “Madeleine, will you marry me?” [p. 68]

You can hear the violins. The emotions and passions are real. But what L’Engle then does for us, and what many of our current stories fail to do, is to show us the whole picture of her love with Hugh, a love that grows and matures through the course of their entire lives. To borrow from the quote I began with, you see Madeleine and Hugh growing up. Their marriage is the place where their love matures. L’Engle says:

A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out.  The famous lovers usually end up dead.  A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship.  It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. [p. 76]

What L’Engle is showing us is the essence – and may I say brilliance – of marriage as this commitment to covenantal living. Marriage is the place we learn what real love is, the love that begins in the white-hot heat of sexual attraction to be sure, but then commits to endurance, and protection of the beloved, growing into the love that can only be found in and through time. As the story draws to a conclusion, L’Engle describes her husband’s illness, his withering body. But that doesn’t stop their love.

I go to my lonely bed, thinking of Hugh alone in his hospital room, grateful for the nurses who are so good to him. During the night I reach out with my foot through force of habit to touch his sleeping body. And he is not there. Nevertheless, we have been making love during this time in a profound way. He is making love with me in the pressure of his fingers. I am making love when I do simple little bodily services for him. How many times has he taken care of me! And that is intercourse as much as the more usual ways of expressing our sexuality. [p. 184]

L’Engle’s reflections on her own marriage through its seasons and changes gives us a window into what it means to be loved and a lover.  I think these are the kind of stories we need.

See you this Sunday as we continue our series.

Bob Osborne

Wednesday Feb 1

A night of simply worship

An information meeting will be scheduled once the applications have been received.

Every year we construct a prayer walk to help focus our thoughts and prayers. There are five stations in this year’s prayer journey, each designed to help your prayer be focused and effective. We are opening the Westhall from 9 am to 9 pm, Monday through Wednesday, January 9-11, so that you can participate. Special evening teaching sessions are at 7 pm.

We know that Christian life must be lived out in active engagement, but we also know that effective engagement requires deeper piety. It seems this lesson must be learned and re-learned: that movement is empowered by stillness, that impact is made possible by quiet reflection.

Our January prayer days remind us of the power of sacred time and sacred space. We learn that periodic separation from ordinary work and obligation makes realignment possible. So this is what these days are for – to do the simplest, yet hardest thing – to make space and time to listen to what God says, and to answer back from our truest selves. By committing ourselves to the practice of giving up work-time for prayer, and making space for reflection and stillness, we find that we are freed from the petty tyrannies that control us. We move into a more wide-open country, becoming partners with God in the life he has in mind for us.

This year we are calling our time the Epiphany Days of Prayer. Epiphany is that moment in the Christian year, 12 days after Christmas, when we wake up to what God is doing for us, through us, and in us because of Jesus. Epiphany is a kind of capstone to Advent. Now, as we see Christ born into our humanity, we realize that there is more to understand, more to see, more to journey forward into. The birth of Christ is not an end but a beginning, the first part of the story that redefines everything. So we want to have our spiritual senses alive to God. Because of Christ we can see God, see what meaningful actions are possible, see the obstacles and hindrances, see the object of our faith and learn true worship, and see a new way forward.

For these days, and in keeping with the traditional story of Epiphany, we are immersing ourselves in Matthew’s account of the Magi’s visit to the house of the Christ-child (Matthew 2:1-12). Our meditation on this text will help us understand what spiritual awakening can actually look like.

Come any time Monday through Wednesday, 9 am to 9 pm, or attend one of our evening teaching and prayer sessions at 7 pm. I hope to see you there.

Bob Osborne

A quick and honest test: what occupies your mind the most? Before you give the safe or polite answer, think a little harder. It’s rather obvious, don’t you think?

This series will address our human fascination with sex and money. While some topics (like prayer and mission) appear to be more “spiri- tual”, the topics of sex and money can appear to some to be almost crass, mundane, too earthy for discussion in a place of worship. But we think the opposite: we think that these topics are central to who we are and where we live. And we know that God has something to say to us in these matters.

Instead of leaving these aspects of our lives “in the closet”, we want to bring out all we are into the light of God’s transforming and healing grace. We want to think Biblically about sex and money.

Jan 15:
Jan 22:
Jan 29:
Feb 5: