Passage: Romans 8:18-28 & Romans 8:37-39    

  Description: The hammering, rumbling and vibrating caused by heavy equipment and roofers at work are for me a symbol of our capacity to adapt to the flood, to repair and restore our neighbourhoods and the wider town. It is difficult to live through both flood and the recovery from the flood, but hope mixed with patience is allowing grace for us as we recover, as we grieve our losses, as we suffer the labour pains of an adaptive process leading to new life, new awareness and new meaning for us...Nothing in all creation, including flooding, can separate us fromt God's love in Christ Jesus. In that truth, we can rest.

Passage: Joel 2:21-28 & Mark 4:1-9    

  Description: My grade 10 science teacher was the one who introduced me to the mystery of soil. Now I’m a farm kid so I already had a pretty good awareness of the soil, but what struck me in class was the image of the world’s arable land covered with about 8” of soil, compared to the kilometres of rock and magma beneath it. It is such a tiny thin film of life-giving, crop producing, forest making, animal-feeding, microbiological mass of mystery that remains powerful and vulnerable all at the same time. The image has stayed with me while I rototill the garden and drive past grain-fields and pastures. When I go back to where I was born, I am aware that it is the soil there that fundamentally brought forth my life, provided for my family, for chickens, and our family’s dairy herd. We are creatures of the soil. Now I actually find comfort in that. If we take the literal Hebrew root of Adam’s name it means earth creature. There is a part of me who claims home as the soil. It’s where I come from and where I will return.

Passage: Job 12:7-10 & Psalms 19:1-14    

  Description: We want God to speak to us. We want divine answers to the suffering, challenges and disasters we face in life. But what if the problem is not that God isn’t speaking to us; what if the problem is that we aren’t listening, that we are so afraid of being able to hear ourselves think, that we fill our lives with noise and busyness to the extent that we also can’t hear God speak? Now granted, listening to God is a special listening: it is listening to silence. It is listening for words that are not words. At the same time, I think the messages are loud and clear. Just ask the animals, ask the plants, ask the bees.

Passage: Exodus 2:1-10 & Revelation 22:1-5    

  Description: This audio recording begins with Bruce Masterman speaking about the Highwood River, sharing his continuing love of the river and the role it continues to play post-flood. This is followed by Rev. David's reflections on Bibical rivers and the theological wisdom that helps us make sense of living with a river which has devastated our community.

Passage: Isaiah 25:6-10 & Psalms 121:1-8    

  Description: Andrea Sawatzky, local Scout leader, who loves hiking in the mountains, shares her joy of being in the mountains. Photos she has taken while in the mountains were shown as she spoke. This is the audio recording of what she said.