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Saturday, 14 February 2009

  • My Dead Mother's Tooth brush

    “Don’t you think it’s strange, using your dead mother’s tooth brush?”.

    My fiance was questioning me, perhaps even accusing.  My mother had only passed earlier that very day, but, I didn’t think it was weird and I had what I feel are some very good reasons to be scrubbing my dentures with the pink, extra-soft bristles of my passed matriarch.

    Reason number one: she’s dead and can’t stop me.

    Second: She was always on my case, pestering and nagging me about personal hygiene practices, tooth-brushing being very high on her list.  Yet, at the same time I must concede that she was staunchly opposed to sharing tooth brushes while she lived, claiming that the bristles left microscopic lacerations over one’s gums, tainting the instrument with the user’s blood, a fluid she felt shouldn’t be shared or passed.  I never shared this hang-up with her, however, and coming back to my first point, there was no danger of her using it after me anyways.  I’m positive that her desire for her boy to have clean teeth would have overcome the stigma of brush passing.

    Third: A very practical observation; I needed a tooth brush.  My fiance and I were at my Dad’s place, and had been staying there much loner than intended.  I came for an overnighter, but as dear mother’s condition worsened… which it did rather suddenly, I prolonged my stay.  I’m not proud of it, but no, no I don’t bring a tooth brush for an overnight visit, don’t judge me.  All this to say, I hadn’t brushed my teeth in three days and it now felt like they were wearing little yellow wool sweaters.  Decisive action needed to be taken.

    I didn’t think I had the audacity, but now, after a few drinks I’m feeling brazen enough to say how it is I really feel about the thing, the statement, the snide comment made about the use of my mother’s tooth brush.  Point four!  She was my damn mother and I’m the oldest.  When someone dies the loot gets divided amongst the family.  I had a blood claim to that brush.

    So back and forth, up and down I vigorously worked the pink plastic tooth cleaner, the minty paste foaming pleasantly in my mouth, washing away the stress and taste of the hospital of the last week.  I don’t want to be pretentious, or to sound contrived.  The fact is, I don’t even appreciate sentimental expression, but standing over that porcelain bathroom sink, periodically spitting light green froth down the drain I had a surreal, profound moment.

    The bristles were soft, too soft.  I could see my mother in the mirror looking back at me, the feeble little brush in her feeble little mouth.  Leaning on the counter with her free hand to keep her balance, weak shoulders sagging with each weary, ragged breath.  The brush in her mouth, her eyes half closed, her delicate hands, delicate, blue-veined hands arduously manicuring one of the tiny, final intact pieces of her decrepit self.

    I saw tufts of her curly brown hair sprouting from my own scalp.  The same abrasive, dogged spirit doing what we wanted how we wanted, whether it was considered strange, unclean or not.  I thought of everything she left me, made me.

    And then I remembered that morning and I saw her grey skin.

    Her last breath.

    Her lifeless eyes.

    Fresh white hospital sheets tousled around her freshly dead, cold body.




Thursday, 15 May 2008

  • I remember when I first felt led into missions.  I remember being a boy and visiting the New Tribes Mission field training grounds in Ontario with my father and feeling a kind of affinity for the lifestyle or the image of the lifestyle that you can have when you’re a child thinking of being a grown-up.  I remember being in Bible college or at conferences and feeling ready, strong but aimless.  Hitch-hiking I would evangelize every car and then I found my way to the rigs which I felt was my mission field but in actuality became a mistress and my Delilah.  Yet still on Sundays or in prayer I would beg God for a yoke.  I remember my heart pounding in church and my blood boiling, the muscles along the back of my shoulders and neck swelling as they implored God for labour and abuse that would glorify him.  Begging forgiveness for my wreckless living in one sentence and begging for my harness or my pit in the next.  I felt like I had no place in a church and that there was nothing anywhere for me, that there was nothing worth caring for and the sole answer was to plunge into some sort of celibate, arduous penance and my faith would be perfected and I would be clean and God would be happy.

     

    Two weeks ago I was praying with a group of eight Africans in the little village of Nadiabanli.  There’s a National Bible School there and pastors from various parts of Burkina move their entire families there, farm the land and make a life until their training is over and then return.  I was there with our drill and equipment because life is hard for them while they study and without a well they may have to move the school or shut it down.  So we were praying, and the pastor layed his hands on the drill and prayed for God to open the Rock and called for water in the name of Christ his saviour and an heir to the riches of God as His son.  And I worked and the 50 degree weather put the sting of sweat in my eyes, turned my urine dark yellow and made it stink as it stained the cracked earth.  And I prayed and watched the others pray and drilled the deepest driest hole I could.

     

    Before that was the Fulani Village.  Mocked for by their Muslim neighbours for their conversion and living with a desperate need of water we arrived with the equipment as their brothers and friends with a gift and hopefully answer to their prayers.  They grilled us chickens and served us the best of what little they had and everyone prayed but we left and they had nothing more but two holes puncturing heaps of dry rock dust.

     

    And this is when I tell myself that I am right about God’s character.  That he is impossible to truly know the way we think of, personally.  That there is a God and a saviour that loves us but perhaps there is no real dialogue or intervention in our lives.  And how could there be?  How could we fool ourselves into thinking we have the capacity to interact with the eternal, the universal.  Our capacity is the problem and the source of the despair I have found myself embracing the past years.  Like knowing God only served me to understand my condition and like wallowing in despair, clinging to hopelessness like a whore would save me.  Somewhere my idea of salvation ended at understanding the brokenness of man and became the main tenant of my faith that directs my life.

     

    But it hasn’t always been this way.  I used to live in a backpack and move with my thumb and every car had an earful of joy and the ability to escape from bondage with Christ.  Children in Bible camp had a glimpse of a life lived in liberation and in my early days on the rigs there was a man with a harness for all his appetites.

     

    But despite the love I have held for this despair this brokenness we are born with and brought her in my bed and loved her deeply and passionately she is being painfully rent from my hands.  The pain of my absent fiancée, the frustration of work in a country without infrastructure and the despair of millions at my doorstep push me to one place.  It seems as though it does not matter how many times I analyze my experiences, push myself in my Gnosticism or try to believe that we are cut from true communion with God when I go to bed I am begging him for it and find a kind of comfort there.  And so this sliver of light that I have been unable to expel from my heart for a very long time is finally being let to pierce some of my dark places and dispel the long, sharp-edged dusky shadows I’ve been so diligently cultivating.

     

    So with yet a mild bitterness I thank God for this new (again) hope.  My pain and my work of sacrifice here has done nothing for me but a Bible verse I have not truly seen in some time will bring tears and a line from a hymn joy.  I still don’t know if God’s character is something to be grasped but I do believe in glimpses and slivers and I love and grip my sliver of a glimpse of God tightly and hope to live again with honour and more fully know this freedom I love to turn from.

     

    I suppose this is the type of experience typical to North American Christians in this part of the world but since I’m back into blogging, here’s a bit about mine.

Saturday, 06 January 2007

  • Me and T-Hark went to Simcoe this past week and it was sweet, Luke Miller is the man and here's why; I met Luke Miller when visiting my brother at Prairie Bible College, we have a lot of the same friends from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and he's dating a girl from the town I grew up in in Ontario.  Plus, he's one of the funnest guys to roll with hands down.

    Here's a video, our friend Nicole learned us some aerobics.



    I made a little more progress in the whole support raising thing this weekend, I guess now that Christmas is over and it's the new year and everything so it's pretty well go time I think, hopefully things go well and I can get drilling again.

    Oh, Tyler has a new nickname, ask him when he gets back to school.

Saturday, 30 September 2006

  • I broke my nose today, I was chopping some boards because I was using them to  put under my  tranny until I got it high enough to line up and put it back into place.  Anyways I chopped a board and it came back and hit me in  the face, seven stitches and they  straightened  my schnauz back to  almost  normal,  my camera was out of battery when it actually happened so I only have an after picture.

     


    I'm still going to brag:  the doctors were impressed I didn't lose conciousness, the stitches over my eye is just an old scar that burst open when I got beaked.

Wednesday, 20 September 2006

  • Currently Listening
    The Bends
    By Radiohead
    see related
    oh man, so my last shift for SDS went down like this

    last shift ended up being a gong show, we went up to the rig late because of a breakdown, my driller was drunk, stoned, wound right up and driving I honestly thought he was going to roll the truck off the mountain.  we only went up for an hour or so and afterwards I went with the boys up to the bar, and another one of our rigs was down so there was a big gang of us there.  Champion and Precision drilling also had crews at the same place, plus some coal miners.  A champion guy tried picking a fight with my buddy, Schlomo but his crew made him leave...so he left and ended up driving a car into a house, no kidding.  Then it was pretty much all arm wrestling and good times until some coal miners got rowdy and some girl fought some other girl and then some dude got knocked out by this coalminer in town I know so me and Schlomo pulled him off and calmed him down and everything went back to normal.  then I put some mellow music on the jukebox, watched the boys hover around a couple local girls with poor judgement and decided it was a good thing that I'm quitting.

    shout out to Champion and Precision drilling, things could've been a lot worse, good guys

    shout out to my coalmining buddy with the big right hook, he's actually the friendliest guy in town but I guess has a temper

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reidharkness

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    • Name: reid
    • Location: Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
    • Birthday: 3/30/1984
    • Gender: Male
    • Member Since: 2/2/2006

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