Father Poster

Heart to Heart: Like You've Never Danced It Before

Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord's Prayer is taking on a whole new life as the basis for a dance production called Father, which will tour parts of southern Ontario this summer. It is being produced by Soli Deo Gloria Ballet, a new company starting up in the Niagara Region.

... which is a formal way of saying "I'm really excited" :). The break between semesters with WriteAtHome has meant, not a break from work (that never happens), but a chance to focus on my newest venture: a ballet company. No, I don't personally dance. So far, I do a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. I also get a lot of creative input.

For Father, we've taken select, poetic readings out of Heart to Heart that really get to the center of our day-to-day relationship with God. We've put them together with contemporary music like "Small Enough," a duet between Nichole Nordeman and Fernando Ortega, and Rebecca St. James's "Come Quickly Lord." All of this is brought to life by gorgeous choreography and talented dancers.

Our goal for Father mirrors our goal for Soli Deo Gloria as a whole. We want to take the timeless truths of the gospel and present them in a way that makes people sit up and pay attention and go, "Wow, I've never thought about it that way before." We want to use all this art and beauty to show people how beautiful God is.

If you're in southern Ontario, we hope to see you this summer!

Check out our related Web sites:

www.littledozen.com/h2h.html - The Heart to Heart page, including chapter excerpts.

www.lordsprayerdance.com - The Web site for Father.

www.solideoballet.com - The Web site for Soli Deo Gloria Ballet. (Christian dancers, we need you! Check out our Auditions page.)

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I've got a heap of writing-related news coming, too, so stay tuned!

Heart to Heart news and a published article

My book Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord's Prayer is currently a featured resource on Ungrind.org!

Ungrind also recently published an article of mine, entitled While You Wait, Rebekah. Follow the link to read it. It uses the life of the matriarch Rebekah as an example of "making the most of the meantime"--the waiting periods in our lives.

My thanks to Ashleigh Slater, editor of Ungrind, for creating a great webzine and allowing me to contribute to it :).

changes

I had several epiphanies last night. One of them was that the sales/introduction page for Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord's Prayer on my Web site was a boner. I've rewritten it entirely. Stop by and let me know what you think :).

Thy Kingdom Come - Excerpt from "Heart to Heart"

Any view of Christianity as fire insurance or a feel-good morality tale is missing the reality of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is that place wherein God has His unhindered rule, and that place is in our hearts. "The kingdom of God is within you," Jesus told a listening crowd. And to live in accordance with His kingdom necessitates a total change of life. "Repent," Jesus told the people of Galilee, "and believe the gospel." Belief in the good news of the king's arrival in our world goes hand in hand with repentance: with a complete about-face in our way of being, an absolute surrender to God's rule and reign.

The fact is, the kingdom of God runs totally counter to anything we have learned growing up in the world. Jesus, the Servant-King, is the heart and center of His realm, and His character defines its laws and principles. There is no room in the kingdom for our self-serving games, our divisions and petty offenses. The King is love, and oneness, and grace. In the world, we preserved ourselves by fear and cunning; Jesus calls us to trust and childlikeness. In the world, we value possessions and position; in the kingdom, we value people and poverty of spirit.

In a sense, we who have repented and believed the gospel are outposts of heaven. We are a new and living world within an old and dying one. It is ours to walk in the light, to live as children of the day, to worship the True King and oppose the rebellious stewards who have tried to claim this realm for their own. To the darkness, we are the worst sort of traitors, because we dare to live eternal lives while the world tumbles ever nearer its ultimate destruction. The Bible speaks truly when it says that we are at enmity with the world. But at the same time, we are the world's hope: because we have not just been left here to wile away the hours until Christ returns. Rather, we have been left here as colonists with a mission: to preach, as Jesus and His disciples did, that the kingdom of God has come, and that if we will surrender ourselves to the King, God has promised to "deliver us from the power of darkness, and translate us into the kingdom of his dear Son."

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I just finished putting a complete collection of chapter excerpts from Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord's Prayer up on Little Dozen. Come check it out!