I was sitting in my office doing whatever scientists do, when the door pushed open and a colleague from downstairs came in saying, "You're a real live Christian. Tell me what I should be doing…"

I don't remember what his problem was, but more than 40 years later I still remember his coming in.

That sort of thing was totally unexpected and totally off the wall. We were roughly the same age with the same background in science, working in the same community for the same employer on roughly the same topics. How was I supposed to solve his problems if he couldn't?

So I was a real live Christian and he wasn't? Maybe, maybe not…

God works in mysterious ways, but you'd think there had to be a better way on that occasion. There was no searching or testing, no therapy couch, no touchy/feely stuff, no voices, no nothing. Just a startled, real live Christian listening, I suppose, to what needed to be heard.

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that we also serve, who just sit and listen. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Matthew 27:59 – So Joseph took [the body of Jesus], wrapped it in a new linen sheet and placed it in his own tomb, which he had just recently dug out of solid rock. Then he rolled a large stone across the entrance to the tomb and went away.

We were in Jerusalem a couple of years ago and on Good Friday we visited the Garden of the Tomb just outside the Damascus gate of the walled city. There was an empty tomb located on one side of a beautiful little (walled) garden. It probably wasn't Joseph of Arimathea's tomb but it was illustrative of it. It was just a block or so from Golgotha.

Two things about the scene caught my attention: firstly, there were only four people in the garden that day, Good Friday, and three of them were of my party; and secondly, I finally understood what the ladies (the two Mary's) were speaking of when they asked, "Who is going to help us roll the stone away from the tomb?" I had always pictured the stone at the entrance to the tomb after the crucifixion as being a big round granite boulder like the glaciers left scattered all over western Canada. It would have been an enormously heavy rock that would have taken many people to move it. On the other hand, the stone that the ladies were actually concerned about turned out to be a carved limestone or dolomite disk about 20 cm thick, standing about a metre and a half high, travelling (rolling) in a shaped stone gutter along the base of the tomb at the sidewalk level. To open the tomb, a strong person could easily roll the stone to the left, and to close it, roll it to the right.

The first observation was profound: Where was everybody on these most terrible days in the church calendar? Any other religion would have had people lined up for kilometres and kilometres to just get a glimpse of a most sacred shrine. (By the way, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a few blocks away was almost equally bereft of visitors.) One could easily, then, accept the conclusion that Christians aren't into shrines – that Christianity for them/us is the living Christ, not the dead one. And the living Christ is everywhere, not locked up in a tomb somewhere, and is with everyone wherever they might be.

The other observation is much less profound. What we are told is often imperfectly placed in our imagination – like the rock at the tomb. What seemed in our imagination to be a terribly difficult task, such as rolling a huge bulky stone out of the way, can in reality be very much more easily dealt with when we know the true dimensions of the challenge.

Prayer: Gracious God, help us to rely on the risen Lord and face our challenges with strength and understanding. Amen.

One day we were standing on the hill (mount) of the sermon-on-the-mount account. Below us was Peter's boat out fishing on the Sea of Galilee. To our left, to the east, was the region known as the Golan Heights. A bit further to the left were the hills including Nimrod's castle (of Crusades fame) beyond which lay the lowlands of Syria – past the UN station when Syria, Israel and Jordan came together – right where Abraham and his families crossed over the highlands on their way from Ur to the western lands several thousand years before. It was a bit hazy that day and Peter's boat seemed mystical. It lay offshore, just beyond Capernaum below where we stood – at the north end of the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum was just a tiny village.Behind us lay rocky, hilly land hardly useful for agriculture, but an Arab boy was herding his sheep along the roadside as they nipped the grass around the volcanic rocks on the hillside.

In the distance, on the west side of the Sea of Galilee, we could just barely make out the prosperous small city of Tiberius, the Banff of Israel and home port of Peter's boat. In the lowlands all around the Sea of Galilee the vegetation was lush and productive, thanks to irrigation from the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan river. The very steep hillsides were neglected but the high table land in places was covered with green fields of cereal crops, as in the irrigated lands of Saskatchewan.

Part of the tableland in the Golan Heights was abandoned – totally desolate. The paved road through the desolation was terribly rough with potholes every 50 or 100 metres. My driver wanted me to stop and photograph some of the buildings but I refused because I suddenly realized that we were in the middle of the site of the 1967 war when this land was being seized from the Jordanians.

War is not to be celebrated. There were destroyed farmhouses and a destroyed mosque in a tiny abandoned village. There were wrecked buildings that had been used to shelter troops. The holes in the road were from either mines or artillery shells. There were yellow signs every 100 metres on the fences on either side of the road warning of mine fields. The land was desolate. War is not to be celebrated, yet my driver pointed out to his kids, "Oh, look at that real tank over there! Wow!" War is not to be celebrated. He might just as well have said in East Jerusalem, "Look at that woman over there with her legs blown off! Wow!"

Jesus the Christ had little to say about war although he lived in the Holy Land when the Roman armies were in control. He treated Roman soldiers… well, as people, not instruments of violence. The violent people were the temple people.

Prayer: Gracious God, help us to view things in their proper context – to deplore that which needs to be deplored and to celebrate that which needs celebration. Amen.

I have a T-shirt that declares that I was stoned – at a variety of places to be checked off, for example, Jerusalem, Jericho, Hebron, Nazareth and so on. I checked off Jericho and Jerusalem for events of a couple years ago.

We were reminded of the biblical fellow who journeyed down from Jerusalem to Jericho – down that main road from the city in the hills to that other city close to the Jordan river where there must have been a river crossing to take the Jerusalem-Jericho traders into the country to the east. At the time that the biblical fellow was travelling, the road would not have been the high-speed four-lane road that it is now. On the other hand, it would have been more like the district roads in the Bedouin hills of Samaria a few hundred metres off on either side of the modern four-lane road. The Bedouin tents would not have had television aerials sticking up, nor rubber-tired water tanks parked in their front yards. But the general desert desolation would have been the same, with every blade of grass trimmed neatly to the ground by sheep grazing in the parched hills and valleys.

It is hard, sometimes, to make connections in this crazy world of ours, but it is not hard to imagine car-jackings taking place on that four-lane road today, as the modern analogue of the assault that the biblical fellow sustained. A person coming upon the scene of a car-jacking assault would, of course, use his/her cell phone to summon help for the victim.

My "stoned" shirt came from a tiny little shop in the old city of East Jerusalem, in the Arab/Palestinian sector. And nearby there was a sidewalk vendor from whom I got a carved camel carrying water jars. This camel came from Hebron, 30 or 40 kilometres away. The vendor was sad because the carving was done by his father in Hebron, and it was very difficult for Palestinians to get in and out of Hebron. It was even worse for the people in Hebron because tourists were not visiting there, for the same reason. Times were tough. That's why he was working the sidewalks in East Jerusalem.

So what's the point of it all? Violence and compassion, I suppose. There is surely no need for more violence, and the world could use a great deal more compassion these days, when all social decisions seem to be driven by a modern bottom-line mentality. The fellow on the Jerusalem road was not into bottom-line thinking at the time of Christ's parable, nor was his rescuer.

Accountants have never been very effective in building compassion into their analyses of the functioning of socioeconomic systems. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a way of doing so. I expect there are academic committees somewhere that definitely rule out compassion as anything worthy of attention. How does one enter a debit/credit item for a compassionate event? Or for the compassionate component of a standard transaction? What shekel/dollar value does it have? Yet, in the end, the element of compassion in a transaction may be far more important than the free-market evaluation of the event itself.

Prayer: Gracious God, help us see our way clearly through the confusion of the day to recognize what is good and worthy. Amen.

Before I retired from gainful employment, I used to walk to the university nearly every day, summer and winter. In the winter I found myself intrigued by the rabbit tracks that crossed my path in the snow, particularly in the park lying between the university and my home. The tracks were fairly random in their distribution, coming and going in all directions. That was fine, but closer examination showed that the randomness was modified by the fact that most of the rabbits – about 70{8395b6ce96fcf25a14d80edc3b65c36a8995b6c1ba5f8c16ac11d8adaa79f35b} of them – were left-footed. This could be deduced from the impressions of two front feet followed by two hind feet in the fresh snow – two in front, two behind, wherein the pairs of feet never hit the ground together – always the left or right was there first for a given rabbit. And most rabbits, I found, had their left feet striking the ground first. Hence, they were referred to, by me, as being left-footed, in the same way that the rest of us are largely right-handed (and right-footed, unless the military got to us first!).

God's world is pretty random, with the business of free will being widely respected everywhere. Yet within all that free will we have patterns of behaviour the roots of which are uniquely obscure. We travel our random paths in our secular and spiritual lives, but within that travel we exhibit patterns that are less than random. We do our random walking, but there is something very powerful affecting the pattern of that random walking in our spiritual journeys. Some of it is culturally imprinted but a significant portion of it may be based on something far more deeply rooted. Rabbits do not go to rabbit lessons in leaping, but we do. Rabbits follow some pre-built pattern of non-random behaviour. Beyond our public participation in spiritual walking – that has been largely culturally imprinted – there is still some kind of special imprint guiding us in our very private being.

Reginald Bibby insists that we – all of us in the church and the great unwashed as well – are spiritual creatures, and he might well be correct. It may be that we are seeking and responding in some way to deep-rooted instincts that we cannot articulate in our own random walks, much less respond directly to. It would be easy to say that Christ, above all, was in touch with those spiritual instincts and used them effectively in his earthly ministry in connecting with his people, two thousand years ago… and ever since.

Prayer: Gracious God, help us to search out our deepest roots of spiritual understanding so that we may fulfil your purpose more effectively in this random world. Amen.

People are always trying to improve my mind by giving me good stuff to read. The latest was a compendium of essays written over the years by C.S. Lewis. I have never read a great deal of Lewis, and never became a great fan of his, but still this person felt I should try again.

When one gets old, a lot of reading stuff becomes transparent. One fails to see it for what it was trying to deliver and instead sees through it to what is beyond in the background. These Lewis essays were written over a long period of time many decades ago, and while they are timeless in their own way, they are also of another age because of language and circumstance. After reading a couple of the essays one puts the book down and says, "That was an interesting read, but I cannot for the life of me, recall what he said…"

In this day of terrible information overload, one tends to become very defensive. One adopts an attitude of why are you trying to tell me this? Or why should I be interested in what you are trying to tell me? Or why did you interrupt my dinner to ask me about carpet cleaning?

This is partly the result of simple overload – we can't handle everything that comes in. Worse still, much of the information we get is terribly tainted – principally by solicitation and commercial advertising, but particularly by TV advertising. The standard defence is to switch off the mind, switch off the TV, or apply a suitable discount, for example, I will discount this "message" to the extent of 90{8395b6ce96fcf25a14d80edc3b65c36a8995b6c1ba5f8c16ac11d8adaa79f35b} – 90{8395b6ce96fcf25a14d80edc3b65c36a8995b6c1ba5f8c16ac11d8adaa79f35b} misinformation, 10{8395b6ce96fcf25a14d80edc3b65c36a8995b6c1ba5f8c16ac11d8adaa79f35b} truth. That other message is from the PCC. The PCC is something I can trust. Therefore I will discount it only to the extent of 10{8395b6ce96fcf25a14d80edc3b65c36a8995b6c1ba5f8c16ac11d8adaa79f35b}, and so on. So when we put those defences in position day after day, month after month, we tend to apply them to all information coming by, whether from C.S. Lewis or Conrad Black, and things get very transparent.

The people of Israel were having similar problems. The messages from their God were getting mixed up with messages from other gods. The hucksters were out there – the commercial types, the military types, the charlatans and the temple types.

Jesus had a good message but it was mixed up with all the others. Sometimes it prevailed; sometimes it didn't. People were confused. On Palm Sunday things were great; within a week Jesus was in deep trouble. People were confused. This time it was because they were being very actively manipulated by the temple people.

We are always being manipulated and we must try to discern who is doing the manipulating and apply the appropriate discount factors.

Perhaps the best defence is to be still, open the mind for the Holy Spirit and listen for the word of God.

Prayer: Gracious God: In the stillness of your presence, help us to organize truth and reality so that we may be of some continuing worth in your sight. Amen.

Most cities are built on rivers and Edmonton was no exception. Trouble was that the river was hundreds of metres below the plain on which Edmonton was built and railways coming from the south side had to negotiate the river valley, typically by crawling slowly down one side and then struggling up the other after crossing a normal short bridge over the river. The early part of this century saw railway engineers still in ascendancy, so in a moment of inspiration someone drew a line on an "elevation" chart showing Edmonton split by the broad, deep valley – a line joining the plain on the south with the plain on the north. He then sketched a train on that line going from south to north without crawling down into the valley and back out. And so the high level bridge was created.

High level bridges are spectacular for trains, and it was logical to make the bridge wide enough for street railway tracks on either side of the single railway track on top of the bridge as well. Thus electric street cars could take advantage of the high level short cut, too. A minor problem, though: street cars had their entrance and egress steps on the right side of the car so that passengers could come and go conveniently from the street car to the sidewalk. There were no stops for passengers on top of the high (windy) bridge, but safety-minded engineers, even in those days, felt they should provide for egress from the streetcars on the bridge should an emergency arise. It didn't take long for them to figure out that the normal exit from the car (there was no other!) on the bridge would leave the hapless passengers stepping down off the street car steps – down into the abyss below since the steps were on the outside edge of the bridge. That would surely be upsetting to most passengers, so back to the drawing board: the obvious solution was to switch the streetcar to the other side of the train bridge. Southbound cars would then have their exit steps away from the bottomless pit at the edge of the bridge, and passengers could now exit toward the centre line of the bridge directly onto the relative safety of the railway track. All that was needed, then, was to design a way to get southbound street car traffic relocated over to the left side of the bridge, and northbound streetcars over to their left side. This called for some fancy trackage at either end of the bridge. But this was possible and it was done. However, it caused for some noticeable lurching and swaying of the street cars as they went through the switch-over manoeuvre as they approached the bridge.

During one of the lurching and swaying motions one Sunday evening more than fifty years ago, a number of university students were returning from church services – so many of us, indeed, that we were standing in a tight group at the rear of the car where the swaying action was most pronounced as we approached the bridge entry. Suddenly, one of the students – Charles, a fellow in physics and several years my senior – turned to me and asked in a clear voice, "Are you saved?"

I was not well acquainted with the "saved" terminology, but I guessed he was dealing with the theological question rather than with the safety of the high-level street car as it lurched onto the bridge. Still, the question was ambiguous given the circumstances.

Two generations later, I still wonder whatever happened to Charles. When he asked if I was saved, was he implying that I was not saved? There is some ambiguity there. The market for physicists at that time was not strong although they were getting the atom bomb business up and running in those years. More ambiguity: could he have gotten into that business if he were saved? Fortunately my Christian faith doesn't depend on my having an answer to every ambiguous question.

Prayer: Gracious God, help us to understand things we cannot understand, to grasp the ungraspable and to honour God all the while. Amen.