Cool!

U of T Chancellor David Peterson is retiring.  Here's what they did for him (what a nice send off!):

http://www.thestar.com/videozone/1215393--retiring-u-of-t-chancellor-gets-convocation-send-off

Barrie residents, we've got a good mayor.  Christians, we need to feel blessed.  Here's why.

A few night ago, Mayor Jeff Lehman held an evening called Focus on Faith, to discuss matters related to faith in the community.  Faith leaders across the city were invited and about 30-people showed up, many of them pastors.  I was honoured to be one of the invited.

Mayor Lehman started off by speaking for about 20 minutes, then sat down on the hot seat and invited questions.  There are a number of amazing things about what happened that night.  I'll list a few.

1) Most obvious is the fact that the mayor initiated this night.  In a day and age when faith is being pushed out of every aspect of our lives, where science is 'truth' and people of faith are actually disillusioned (according to the world), the fact that we have a mayor that requested to meet with the faith community is something that must be recognized.

2) Equally impressive in my books is the fact that the Mayor went ahead with the meeting, despite coming up against some opposition.  Some thought the meeting wasn't a good idea.  Pushing the separation of church and state (which I am undecided on to be honest, but that's a discussion for another time), they lobbied the mayor not to have the meeting.  He had it anyway.

3) Not many people would put themselves on the hot seat and welcome questions - and possibly criticism.  The evening was tame and all were well behaved of course, and it was mostly informational - asking what the city was doing about affordable housing, or parking, or churches in industrial lands, etc...  There were not many difficult questions, but the mayor did not shy away from any of them, and was willing to answer anything anyone threw his way.

4) Mayor Lehman started the hot seat session by asking, "What are your churches saying to you?  What is your congregation saying?  What do they want from the city?"  The mayor WANTS to hear from us!

I bring it back to this key point - in this day and age when faith is considered non-essential and even silly, a mayor that wants to hear from (and work with) the faith community is worth more than its weight in gold.

I only had one issue with the whole evening, and it was a big one - that it took us over an hour to ask the question, "Mayor, how can we, the churches, serve the city?"

Oh how we take it for granted...

The world's population is 7 billion people.  It's astonishing to think that 1/7 of those, 1 billion people, don't have access to clean water.

I was at the Water Ambassador's Training Camp at Springvale Baptist Church in Stouffville on Saturday. Let me start by saying I am a very environmentally friendly person, and I try not to waste anything (ask my wife!).  But I was still blown away by some of the things I learned.

Over 30,000 people die every day from water-borne illnesses, which essentially means because they don't have access to clean water.  To put that in perspective, the population of Owen Sound is 21,000.  A group of people the size of Owen Sound - and then some - dies everyday.  Every four days, nearly the population of Barrie is wiped out.  Every three months the population of Toronto dies.  That brings it into perspective, but it's still quite unimaginable.

And even more unimaginable still - how simple the cure is.  Most of us know about drilling wells.  That's a huge source of help to thousands.  But more than just that, there's water purification systems.  A lot of villages have access to water such as a river, but it's not clean.  The solution is simple - a couple of large jugs, a battery, and table salt connected by a few tubes, and you have clean water.  Make it a solar power battery and the contraption can last forever.

In a day and age when all we have to do is turn on the tap and the water will run all day and all night if we let it, we must remember how blessed we are.  While you and I are at work, studying, playing, etc, 1 billion people across the globe don't get to do that because their days consist of hiking miles upon miles to get water - and quite often, dirty water.

Learn more.  It's a crucial cause.  Water Ambassadors Canada does about 20 missions trips a year to dig wells or install water purification systems.  Or they can train you to do your own mission trip with your church.  waterambassadorscanada.org.

Nature! In the form of Venus' transit this week

So being a nature guy, I had to post on the incredible phenomenon that happened this week - the transit of Venus across the sun.  Which basically means that Venus travelled between earth and the sun.

It happens twice every 110 years or so, and those two times are eight years apart.  So the last time was in 2004, then this past Tuesday, and now not again until 2117.

If you didn't know it was happening you would not have noticed a difference...actually, even if you did know it was happening you wouldn't have noticed anything.  You couldn't look up at the sun and see it, not even with sunglasses, because the sun is way too powerful and Venus is tiny compared to the sun.

But if you were able to go to an astronomy lab, or had a welder's mask or a properly filtered telescope, here's what you saw - a small, dark spot, travelling across the top portion of the sun.

NASA has created a video of it, showing it through several different types of filtration.  There are two things I think are really cool about this video:

1) The immense size of the sun!  The sun is 150 million kilometres away from the earth.  The distance between Venus and Earth rotates significantly because of Venus' orbit path, but in the case of this transit Venus is obviously between the earth and the sun, meaning it's a whole lot closer to us than the sun is.  And yet, Venus appears as a small circle against the backdrop of a huge, shining star.  It's amazing!

2) All the different views of the sun provided through NASA's filtration give an amazing picture of the sun.  All we normally see on a day to day basis is an orange ball, and we even that we can't really see all that well because it's so bright.  But the images in the video below show incredible detail to the sun that we would never be able to see otherwise.

Enjoy God's creation!