It is quite weird to be sitting, at around 7:30 in the morning, on a kitchen table, and be informed by your stats page (in NZ time) that it is in fact 0130 back home. This means that I will lose at least one if not two days of posting — I am flying home tomorrow and will lose Monday at the international date line…
I have to be careful here. Because my generic dislike of the consensus in Canada — that we are liberal, reasonable and above all nice — hides a seedy underbelly. I spend a fair amount of time in the glorious dominion, and the hypocrisy rankles. The current scandal in Toronto? Mayor Ford knew hoodlums and smoked weed? Piffle. The equivalent mayor in NZ — Len Brown — influenced council to get his lover onto the council’s “ethnic committee”. The prissiness gets me as much as the ideology of entitlement.
The correction is that we are told the faithful will come from all nations.
9After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. 10They cried out in a loud voice, saying,
“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
11And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12singing,
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”13Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” 14I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
15 For this reason they are before the throne of God,
(And no, there are no photos today. The only photos I took yesterday were of daughter, and the grandkids, and they are civilians).
31He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
33He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
34Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. 35This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:
“I will open my mouth to speak in parables;
I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.”There are some very good things about every country, and then there are our visceral reactions to them. perhaps I am at a point where — as someone who visits about every year or so, and has a family there — I get to know more about the nation. Perhaps it is because the country appears to be functionally post-Christian — perhaps even more than NZ. I’m not sure.
But in these times there are parables that comfort, and predict a future.
Everyone thinks about the mustard seed but I’m more interested today in yeast. The mustard seed was about the visible church. Yeast is about the church being in every society, and in each society it does it’s work — Christians should be of every station and every ethnic group. There should be no qualification.
And if a society uses some form of ghetto — ideological, regulatory, or via commission — to remove the church from the nation, then those people will be honoured by Christ, as Revelations testified. But the nation from which they sprung?
That will, eventually, cease.
So the problem is not as much Canada but the idea that the state suffices: that society is enough. It is not. Put your fate not in the hands or your rulers.
The consolation of government health care in Canada is a one-size-fits-all mediocrity. Obamacare, by contrast, offers no-size-fits-you:
George Schwab, 62, of North Carolina, said he was “perfectly happy” with his plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which also insured his wife for a $228 monthly premium. But this past September, he was surprised to receive a letter saying his policy was no longer available. The “comparable” plan the insurance company offered him carried a $1,208 monthly premium and a $5,500 deductible.
And the best option he’s found on the exchange so far offered a 415 percent jump in premium, to $948 a month.
“The deductible is less,” he said, “But the plan doesn’t meet my needs. It’s unaffordable.”
The president of the United States knew three years ago that this would happen to Mr. and Mrs. Schwab. But he went ahead and did it to them anyway, and added insult to injury by lying about it all the way. The genius Ivy League technocrats that a formerly self-governing citizenry apparently prefer to be ruled by have bet they can get away with wrecking the lives of millions of Americans whose only mistake was to make prudent and sensible arrangements for their own health-care needs. At some point,
Now, that is a scandal. And it should remind us to put not our trust in princes or technocrats, but instead in the Lord who we worship.
