To go back a couple of steps, let’s talk about Thursday night, March 26.

At this stage, we had just finished a visit to Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, and having talked to my sister and my mother in Edmonton by phone, discovered that our planned overnight at Dawn’s place was not going to happen.  It wasn’t a big deal – only 90 minutes south we knew we had a bed at Cheryl’s parent’s place in Red Deer.  We jumped on the highway south through Devon and that led us straight to… Leduc, and a White Spot for supper.  Kind of funny, when you realize that White Spot is a unique restaurant chain that is a household name in BC, but almost unknown in the rest of Canada.  The fact that we drove right to one of the very few that are not in BC… well it was comfortable.  I made one concession – I didn’t have their “Legendary Burger”.   When in Alberta, you have an Alberta steak.

We meant to stop for dinner, to digest in private the cities we had seen and ask God where our hearts were.  We only brought in two packets – Spruce Grove and Medicine Hat.  Looking back, these were the two we preferred from the start, but having reviewed all the options, we were more certain than ever it was between these two cities.

After sitting down, we both found our hands gravitating to the Medicine Hat material.  We tried to be fair and set up pros and cons for the two cities, but it was clear to us that barring an act of God, Medicine Hat was where we were being led.  There are many reasons, from the superficial to the miraculous.  I’ll start there.

When I began to set up this blog, I started surfing around other blogs to see if I could find others on similar journeys.  One of the first ones I found was Jason and Leigh Wilks’ blog, planters in Medicine Hat.  At that time, Cheryl hadjust begun to get interested in Medicine Hat, so on discovering that they were planting there, I immediately began to distance myself from the idea, as I did not see that it would be wise to jump into a town already being evangelized by gifted people with a heart for the Gospel.  However, it never left our radar and when it came time to plan this trip, we still wanted to stop there, so I thought who better to give an honest assessment of the Hat than two planters on the ground?  I contacted them and they graciously agreed to put two strangers up and give of their time – little did I realize how much of a sacrifice they would make for us!

When we reached Medicine Hat, we discovered (they didn’t really tell us) that they were in fact in the middle of a move!  They had their whole lives in boxes and were ready to move into a new house the following week.   Nevertheless, they ordered Chinese for us, from a lovely restaurant and we shared a meal together with Randi Short, their worship leader who moved all the way from Newfoundland to help them with their church launch, back in January.  In between getting to know them and their two sons, we felt completely at ease and connected with them very much on a heart level.

They told us of a city that is successful but changing.  Once one of the biggest cities for retirement, the demographics have been shifting as those retirees began to end their earthly journeys.  It had seen growth as the oil patch, desperate for workers, began to arrange to commute men and women from Medicine Hat by airplane all the way to Fort MacMurray.

Yet, there was still more.  The farming base and longstanding natural gas harvesting (one of the biggest gas fields in the world and the first in Canada was discovered under our feet) had been diversified as just outside of Medicine Hat, the largest centre for greenhouses had grown east of the Fraser Valley, where we are right now!  So cheap vegetables are another feature of the area.  In addition, there is a Goodyear plant in town, obviously the foundational brickworks are still in operation, and even in the surrounding towns there is work whose hub is Medicine Hat.  You can walk into any corner store in Canada and find “Spitz“, salted sunflower seeds – they are produced in Bow Island, just 20 minutes away.  Just north of town is Canadian Forces Base Suffield, one of the largest bases in Canada.  Medicine Hat serves as an important hub, with an extended influence.

The people there are passionate people.  They love their WHL team, the Medicine Hat Tigers (Vancouverites may be aware that this was Trevor Linden’s junior club!) – there is a waiting list of 8 years for seasons’ tickets.  They have a brand new arts centre, the “Esplanade” downtown.  They have a newly constructed recreational facility, complete with a lighthouse and waterslides, wavepool, and the requisite hockey rink all in one building!

Yet, the city is struggling spiritually.  They have one of the lowest ratio of evangelical churches to population in Alberta.  Many mainline denominations are withering away, and seem to have lost heart.  The new developments leave no room for new churches in them, leaving huge swathes of homes unreached.  Three Catholic parishes are merging into one from lack of leadership.  We have heard accounts of large churches with promise embroiled in church splits.  It will be a challenge to locate a place for Sunday meetings – Jason told us that the school board, if we seek space there, requires you to pay the janitorial staff for half a day just to unlock the doors for you.

Emotionally, their people there hurting.   Lifestyles of men leaving town for days at a time does nothing positive for their families.  Family violence is rife, as well as crack addiction as the random drug testing from the oil patch would pick up cannabis which remains in the bloodstream for 30 days, while crack comes and goes in a couple of days allowing them to “clean up” before heading back to work.   Driving through neighbourhood after neighbourhood, we could see the hearts of these people in their driveways, with huge material toys concealing the pain behind closed doors.

No city is without its challenges, but we are excited to be going.  We believe that we can begin to change the community, one heart at a time.  With God at our side, we can make a difference, and see people begin to turn away from the fruitless things of this world, and rely on Jesus and find new meaning in Him.  As I posted earlier, we are excited about the idea of attempting to build a new culture from scratch in a neighbourhood that is under construction – welcoming people and making the love of Christ known from a street’s very foundation and inviting people who move in, into that.  If the love and kindness we show to others becomes the “normal” then people will find it easier to adapt to it, rather than us having to go into a neighbourhood and transform a calcified and resistant fortress mentality so common to suburban life.

We invite you to join us.  Support us in prayer – subscribe to our monthly newsletter, on the right.  We also will need financial partners going forward, so please consider if God is calling you to contribute that way.  We also desire to go as  a team, so we are prayerful already that God would stir up people from anywhere – everywhere to journey with us to Medicine Hat to see God’s Kingdom grown in a fresh way.  We plan to move in May-June 2010.  Thanks again for all your love and support so far!

We tried to reschedule our stay at my sister’s place in Edmonton a day early since things were progressing so quickly, but then I learned why she had not been responding – she has had the flu for a week. When I finally learned what was going on, she was staying at my Mom’s place because she couldn’t even watch her 2 year old daughter she was so sick. She is in good hands over there though. My Mom is a pretty good nurse when it comes to colds and flu.

So, the backup plan was instead of staying overnight in the Edmonton area, we hightailed it back to Red Deer – which was only an hour and a half south anyway. That’s another neat thing about Alberta – everything is pretty close.

On the way south after seeing Spruce Grove and Stony Plain, we stopped for dinner at White Spot! Heh. They’ve even expanded out here. We prayed and looked at the material we had for the top two, and God brought us to a consensus. The deciding factors were definitely not on our list before we left so this trip was absolutely worth it.

So that was the good news. The bad news…

Cheryl was grateful that we would have another extra day to rest up as she was getting uncomfortable in the long rides. Being at her parents’ place that helped too. So we visited her grandmother yesterday afternoon and had a great dinner of Roast Buffalo(!) and went to bed, planning to leave today.

You might ask, “What is Shane doing up at 4am posting a blog entry?”  The answer would be Cheryl and her youngest brother Sasha waking up at 4am (Mountain) and throwing up into buckets.  Now they are both occupying different couches with buckets beside their heads and not feeling at all well.

So now the challenge, in addition to about 30 total centimeters of snow that has fallen on us since we got out here (don’t know if more fell last night or not – I haven’t checked), we have the challenge of waiting for this sickness to pass.  Which puts us…

Right back on schedule.  If we leave tomorrow morning, that is what we planned all along.

In our heart we may have planned this trip, but the Lord has definitely determined our steps! (Proverbs 16:9)

Last Saturday we got a call that my grandfather had two strokes in quick succession and was now in intensive care at the University of Alberta Hospital.  We quickly made the decision to travel to Edmonton in our minivan, risking wintery conditions in the mountains and spending money we don’t really have to be with my family and my grandfather in a time of crisis.

He’s an 84 year old World War II veteran, and proudly independent.  I knew he would take this hard.  But I also had some concern because while I know he grew up Catholic, and I know his second wife was a devout 7th Day Adventist, I don’t know if he ever truly made faith in Christ his own.  I also knew that I wanted to see him again, if these were his final hours.  I haven’t seen him since he moved to Alberta 2 years ago after Grace died.

God truly opened a number of doors for us to enable this trip, from providing financially for the expenses, to providing help to cover for us in our many responsibilites, to providing friends to take care of our two cats.  He cleared our path in front of us – we didn’t meet with any storms on the Coquihalla, and made it all the way to Revelstoke the first day, and even found a pet-friendly room for us all to bunk down in.

By Monday we were in the Hospital, and he was all hooked up to tubes and things.  He was unable to speak, the stroke having damaged the speech areas of his brain.

We spent a couple of days with Cheryl’s family in Red Deer, and then brought the boys the rest of the way to Fort Saskatchewan, to see my parents and brother and sister.  Friday I went back to the Hospital and saw Grandpa again.  He had improved again, but was groggy initially, and in considerable pain in his abdomen.  I prayed with my mother and him, and then we left him to sleep for a bit.  When we returned an hour or so later, he was much more alert than he had been and the pain was gone.  He wanted to go for a ride in the wheelchair, and we were excited to see him demonstrate his strength and mobility.  His coordination seemed very good in both hands, despite his still not being able to talk.

God definitely wanted to use us on this trip.  In Red Deer, we had a long talk with Cheryl’s grandmother and mother about churches and about why we do the things we do.  We had a great talk about honesty and transparency and community.  I think thay are typical in that most Canadians view church as something to do on Sunday, a quaint custom from a more superstitious time.  If they still even believe in God as a concept, they have never truly understood the kind of life that Jesus calls his followers to – a whole life of love and fellowship and support.

Then with my family, my grandfather, though he was limited in what he could understand, I believe he did get what I wanted to say to him, to just invite him to talk with Jesus as he recovered.  To remind him he doesn’t need to speak to speak with God and begin or renew that relationship once more.  At my parents’ house, we had several opportunities to talk with Steve, my sister’s husband, who claims a staunch atheism.  His inquisitiveness was enjoyable and revealed a desire to understand more about the faith we have.  I was very excited at the non-confrontational conversation and to learn that he had recently tried reading the Bible (to little success – he made the same mistake I did, starting in Genesis!)  I wish we lived closer so we could spend more time helping him to understand the message of the Bible and of the Word.  But it is a beginning.

Of course, I would be lax to not praise God once more for his watch over our travels home which we pushed through in one day – 14 hours of driving.  Strangely the cold weather followed us all the way to the coast – blowing snow and sub-freezing temperatures looked bizarre and prairie-like was we pulled in our driveway here on the coast.  It’s supposed to stay this cold for at least a week too!

I was talking with Cheryl after church, and she says to me, kind of out of the blue, that she had a bit of a vision, but more of a realization.  She said she saw Adam and his family coming with us to Alberta.  Totally out of the blue.

I figured I had better note this down for posterity.  I like to give glory to God when he moves in ways beyond our understanding.  And it certainly will be beyond my understanding if (when) it comes to pass!

So, here’s your notice, Adam.  You’re moving again in a couple of years.  Yeah, sorry Phil.  What can I say?  It’s God, not us!