Canada Comments

   Entered Canada last Tuesday evening with some Brazilian friends.  Much colder here than in New England. Am staying with a family with two grade school age daughters, both very charming and sweet. They are tri-lingual (Portuguese, English, and French). The younger offered to teach me French but i said fluency in Portuguese first.  Then i will take her up on her offer.
   We went to a retreat in northern Quebec province at higher elevation. Much colder there. One morning minus 19F. It warmed up to 7 above the next morning, a change of 26. Received about a foot and a half of snow during the weekend, and had a stressful ride back through blowing snow. Thankfully no black ice or freezing rain.
   Some brothers talked me into an outdoor jacuzzi. My body was warm enough but my hair started to freeze. We went into a sauna next and finally a pool. These guys know how to party.
   The first meeting i shared briefly on the feeding of the five thousand (with women and children three or four times that number) found in Matthew 14 as well as the other three gospels, one of the few events to be recorded in all four.  We had only thirty people at this retreat and food prep and cleaning took four or five people several hours so the magnitude of the feeding by Jesus, with lots of leftovers, took on additional meaning.
   As i spoke in Portuguese, my message was short and simple. The basic idea was two fold. Jesus told the people to sit down in groups of fifty to a hundred ( a detail found in Mark and Luke) rather than rushing forward, evidence of God,s order. The second was that with at least one thousand to be fed by each of the twelve disciples, and the reality that each one could only carry a limited amount of food at any one time, required them to have faith that Jesus would continue to provide food as they returned to Him, the only source of more food. Try acting this out and you will get the basic idea.