Through a rich narrative of story-telling God Quest–God Discovered in Everyday Places leads to hidden truths, God’s presence revealed in daily living. Struggles with unemployment, mental breakdown, illness, accident, family dysfunction, life partnership, and even dreaming weave new meaning. These stories bridge the divide in our understanding of the world and God’s place in our lives with grace and spiritual evolution discovered in unexpected places.
After twenty-seven years as a corporate business professional (BComm, CCP), the author turns a unique writing style towards spiritual matters. Unsatisfied with the status of her own faith journey, she begins a quest to more intimately connect with God.
Years of volunteer work plus supporting her local faith community in various capacities–liturgical, spiritual renewal, outreach, fundraising, church school, administration, treasury, editing–results in associations that lead the author to discover many poignant and remarkable faith stories.
The author’s journey develops into the narrative non-fiction book: God Quest–God Discovered in Everyday Places.
Prologue—In the Beginning
“Write. Do it now. Don’t wait.”
My church friend is right. How much time do I have to do the thing tugging at my heart? I love writing, but I am no savant. I am a business professional. Unemployed and mid-aged, but a business professional nonetheless. Surely my business communications and advancing age count for something.
And how does a calling feel? I can’t shake the quiet, persistent pull at heart and mind. It won’t go away. Even with a career (until I got canned) and the busyness of raising children and caring for a home, nothing mutes the siren call. The silent whisperer does not relent.
It pairs with a growing hunger. The spiritual ambling of earlier years is not suiting my middle age. It isn’t good enough. The clock is ticking. The alarm sounding. My relationship with God feels separate from my daily living.
As a cradle Anglican—not strictly, I was baptized Catholic but raised as an Anglican–ideas intrigue me. For years, I’ve been journaling: church sermons, book passages, reflections, stories of grace. I’ve gathered a lot of words. But why, and for what?
Yet, the spiritual churning and book writing bug are circling each other. It is a showdown. A stand-off. Either God is vibrant, real and in everything or not. My need to know is impatient. I don’t want to believe God stands only at the periphery of my life.
My heart aches to understand my Creator better.
Something has to change.
What if I were to pull on the threads of my journalling? I have stories, and there are more out there. People talk to me. I find hope in their stories. Are the answers in everyday places?
“Write. Do it now. Don’t wait.”
As I write this prologue, God Quest is an idea. Maybe a beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word...” (Jn 1:1 NIV)
Carolin M. Paradis
December 31, 2012
Chapter 1: The Call–Carolin’s Story
The Word
“In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
All things were made by him, and nothing was made without him.
In him there was life, and that life was the light of all people.
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overpowered it.”
(Jn 1:1-5 NCV)
The beginning verses from John’s gospel are a favorite bible passage. They have a poetic flow; a seamless rhythm. The separate words when joined suggest an undivided unity. I have the same sense studying the tapestries adorning my church.
Drawing my gaze are the vibrant fabric blocks of an altar frontal. My eyes trace the quilt’s intricate stitching of patterns and shapes with myriad choices of design and colour.
At the heart of the quilt is the pre-eminent symbol of Christian faith–a crucifix. But unlike any I have seen. Harsh planes associated with a wooden cross–a cruel pier of ancient execution–defer to gentler, rounded edges. Multi-hued fabric panels fill the beams. At centre are three super-imposed intertwining circles. I am reminded of a Venn diagram. The seamstress’ representation captures one of the deep mysteries of Christian faith: the inseparable nature of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, often referred to as The Trinity. Finally, rays of sun erupt from the centre cross splaying golden beams; streams of light spread to a black star-studded border as if straining to reach the outer limits of the universe.
How the seamstress laboured. Her work at first a puzzle held as a thought, before fitting the disparate pieces into a riveting mosaic.
Kicking Tires
The quilt intrigues me, but I am captivated by its creator. A retired homemaker living a quiet country life; nothing mysterious about that. Pat seems ordinary, leading quilting classes for the youth at our church. But I study her too, less obviously than the quilts–even shyly–sometimes close up and sometimes at a distance. I think I am kicking the tires of the work she is doing. It’s what you do when you buy a new car. You take it on a test drive. Picking at a starting thread, I look for a lead to a creative unfolding. Secretly asking can I do what she does, but with words?
The name for what Pat does in our church is called a ministry. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says: a ministry is a person or thing, through which something is accomplished. What Pat’s ministry accomplishes are quilts, clerical robes, and altar frontals. Her quilted art speaks of the multi-layered nature of God, each colour block denoting diversity and uniqueness. Youth, and adults too, flock to her ministry and it has grown and flourished.
The kids she mentors stitch together quilts they send to impoverished children in Africa. There were sixteen in the last batch. How many, I wondered, felt the love stitched into the blankets when they wrapped themselves against frigid nights?
I catch Pat in the church hall after service and tell her, “You know it’s seeing what you are doing with the kids and the quilts that have got me hooked on a book idea.” I don’t think she knows how seriously I have been watching her.
She smiles in response. Bright and animated Pat talks about their current project. She finishes with, “Well, it’s turned into more than I ever thought. Who would have imagined? God is full of surprises.”
There is a special light that radiates when Pat talks. It catches my breath and I marvel. Pat’s ministry is accomplishing Merriam-Webster dictionary’s “something.” And I want something of that radiance seeping from her pores.
I watch Pat’s ministry grow. To me she listens carefully to an intangible, internal call and now takes part in the unfolding of something significant. The unfolding of God’s kingdom on earth? I am encouraged to give voice to my internal impulses, quiet and so long held back. For many years I have guarded my spirituality as a private, closeted secret.
Raised in a household with British influences speaking about God was what we did through prayer at church and not typically something discussed around the dinner table. As an adult, my family and a few friends knew of my faith-life, but I rarely shared the contents of my heart. Nobody at work knew about my spiritual inclinations or that I was a church-goer. I was careful. Fearful of the label religious nut-bar or worse. Irrespective of my relative silence, I couldn’t have sensibly shared the ideas accumulating in my head.
I suppose the disparate thoughts were like Pat’s pieces of beginning fabric before she assembles and stitches them together. My prayer journal held the pieces. If I responded to an internal call to write a book, I had the starting threads. But where Pat gathers heartfelt expressions of God in the world through cloth, my template would be words.
Ghandi once said, “Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words.” And the Word is a living instrument calling forth the symphony of life that often sleeps within our souls.
Chapter 2: God’s Design–John’s Story
God’s Template
I am an impatient person. Having worked for years in business management for a large corporation when I put energy into projects, I trusted to see results. Mostly this worked. With an excellent career and opportunities to learn and grow, I enjoyed the work. Until the company downsized.
As I pour buckets of time and energy into finding another job, with no results, this is a kick-in-the pants to a decades-old mindset. I labour, but to no avail.
This same frustration surfaces when I pray. To what end the time and effort in cultivating an interior world? On good days, I am confident my job loss is part of God’s bigger plan for my life. On so-so days, I’m fairly certain he is in control and knows where things are going. On bad days, I despair. For years, my template was: when you put in effort, you get results.
With a growing realization and some dismay, I sense God’s template is different. The design being broad in scope, weighted in depth, and with details not clear unless viewed from a greater height than an individual’s limited perspective. Impatient for results, I long for the privilege of a top-down view.
Recently, I received a peek from the pinnacle, but not of my own life; that part is still unravelling. It was in John’s experience where I glimpsed God’s synchronistic nature and how she does things.
The Design
“I just didn’t know what to do. But I knew I had to do something.” These were John’s words as we sat across the table sipping coffees in Tim Horton’s on a bright December afternoon in 2012.
It was easy to talk to John. Checking my watch, to my surprise, two hours had passed without running out of things to say. With such an open and generous manner, I suspected he had many friends. His smile was a beacon of light directing travellers to the shore of a safe harbour. I could see why the young African girl he was speaking of had responded to his warmth.
***
John and Pat (a retired couple) had been on various mission trips before, some organized by the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, others through World Vision Canada. Their travels to different countries included work to support impoverished communities. On their trip to Kenya in June 2011, the Anglican Diocese of Toronto had organized medical teams to join in an overseas mission.
Pat’s job was to work in the nurseries caring for young children and they assigned John to a mobile medical unit charged with bringing medicine to various distressed districts. It was on one of these four to five-day roving visits that John met Emmah in the Kibera slum.
The Kibera slum is in a suburb of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. It is a sprawling place that grew after World War I because of the British colonial government’s decision to allow Nubian soldiers who had served during the war to settle in the outskirts of Nairobi. A bleak omission by the British colonial powers was failing to give the soldiers title to the land. As a result, there is no land ownership, no services, no sewage, and not even roads. It is a violent, dirty and desperate place.
It was into this squalid neighbourhood the mission team entered to bring medical supplies. The make-shift clinic attracted hundreds of visitors: ninety percent were women and children with the majority between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Many were pregnant and had Aids. Often the pregnant girls seeking treatment arrived already supporting babies in their arms. The lack of male presence was notable.
John doesn’t recall the exact circumstances when he met Emmah, but it was at the clinic. She was one teen not yet pregnant.
“We were handing out medicine. There were so many young teenage girls and a lot of them with children. I don’t remember how I met her; she just seemed to be there when we were giving stuff out. There was something about her that was different, a bright spark in her eyes. Her English wasn’t good, but we started to interact and tried talking to each other. There was a translator, and that helped.”
John took a sip of his coffee, his eyes turned inward and reflective, “There was just something about her that struck me.”
Then he looked up beaming proudly, “You know she wrote me a thank-you note. I keep it in my wallet.”
I smiled in return. Time had not faded the ability of the young girl’s gesture to touch John’s heart.
“I know how tough it is to bring up kids,” he continued. “My kids are grown up now but for a long time I was a single Dad. It wasn’t easy bringing up my two daughters and Canada is such a great country to live in.”
I realized the source of John’s protective nature, which was further solidified by his concluding comment, “It bothers me to think of all the things that could happen to Emmah growing up in such a terrible place.”
The Depth
John thought his involvement was over at the end of the service mission trip. He and Pat continued their travels and visited India and Amsterdam. But the girl in the slum never left his mind or his heart; thoughts of her persisted. He worried about her prospects for the future ending in pregnancy and Aids. As a man of faith, he prayed for her well-being and protection from the ever-present threat of violence and rape. God had placed a quiet urging in his heart that did not go away. He wanted to find a way to help this young teenager. Maybe securing her education would provide just enough leverage to break out of the Kibera slum.
For over a year John prayed. He implored God for discernment and direction. “Lord, what am I to do? You have my heart wrapped around this little girl but I don’t know what to do or how to help. I don’t even know her last name or her circumstances. I just can’t see how to help.”
All John knew was her first name and the name of a school she had mentioned in one of their limited conversations. Initially he attempted to connect by e-mail to the various parties that had made up the service teams: the social workers, the Anglican Diocese in Nairobi, the clinic pharmacist, the school. Each time he was unsuccessful and received no response.
One challenge not widely recognized where Aids is epidemic is the resulting social instability and stress on local infrastructure. Where acute infections are prevalent, people become sick and cannot work or must leave jobs to take care of ailing family. Humanitarian agencies working with local staff often lose key people. The staffing shortages and loss of continuity create sizeable gaps in an agency’s ability to communicate both locally and abroad. John’s attempts were likely similarly hindered.
The many frustrations and roadblocks encountered never diminished the call to do something. Unknown to John were the seeds of answered prayer planted years earlier. The most astounding facet of Emmah’s story was the foundation laid even before her birth.
***
