I'm in love. And he's tall, dark, and handsome.

No, he's not a guy. Or at least, not a human guy.

Yesterday, I went to the Canadian National Exhibition (The Ex, or the CNE, as it's more commonly known) with a new photographer buddy. It was a good time.

But without a doubt the highlight of the Ex, and worth the price of admission alone, plus more, was an aerialist/acrobatic/musical/equestrian exhibition called Hippike, held in Ricoh Coliseum.

Supposedly it's a reenactment of some gypsy legend. Whatever. I was there for the horses. I didn't even watch the acrobatics, unless there was no horse in the arena.

There were some amazingly gorgeous horses. A Friesian. Several Arabs. Lots of Spanish/Portuguese horses. A few of indeterminate breed, including a splashy paint used for trick riding.

However, I fell totally in love with one in particular. A tall, dark bay with one white sock on his left hind foot, Spanish or Portuguese. He was simply stunning: perfect conformation, perfectly arched head and neck carriage, perfect collection, gorgeous, floaty, perfect movement.

I wanted him. I fell in love with him.

I want to know all about him. Name? Age? Where does he live? For goodness' sake, can I buy one of his babies? (Just kidding, those horses go for $20,000 and more).

My photog buddy asked if I'd spend $500 for a weekend riding him. I said sure, if I had it, and if I had a trainer to work with me. I've never really done much dressage, and riding a horse like that would be a bit like putting a teenage learning driver into a Formula 500 race.

But my, he was gorgeous. I'm still hyperventilating.

Does anyone, who might stumble on this post randomly, know anything about that horse?

Last night, I was sitting outside knitting. I was waiting until a specified time when I was supposed to meet someone at their apartment, so, having arrived early I did what I always do when I have a knitting project on the go and a bit of spare time: pulled it out and started working.

Suddenly I heard, "That is the cutest thing I have ever seen!"

I looked up, confused. An extremely good-looking Chinese guy was standing there smiling at me. Tall, well built, very cute.

"What, knitting?" I laughed.

"Knitting in front of an apartment building. What are you doing here?"

We started chatting and exchanging flirtatious banter. I have to admit it was a bit flattering: it's been a long time since a cute guy flirted with me.

"So, tell me something about yourself," he invited.

"Well, I knit."

"I know that! Tell me something I don't know."

I paused for a moment. I had a choice. Do I tell him the most important thing about myself, something guaranteed to stop the flirting and frighten him away, or do I give in to the flattery and say something lighthearted and inconsequential?

"I'm a Christian," I said.

His smile froze. He went silent. He looked at me warily.

"I thought I'd tell you the most scary thing about me," I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

"That is scary," he said. "Are you, like, a hardcore Christian? I've had a lot of conversations with hardcore Christians, because I'm a Buddhist."

"Oh yeah?" I asked him a few questions about his Buddhism, and he asked me about my Christianity. I told him what it meant to me to be a Christian. I left him with a card from my church with my phone number on it.

Somehow, I don't think I'll be hearing from him. But hopefully, the conversation meant something more than a random flirt. Hopefully, God's on his case and tracking him down. I don't know. I prayed for him.

Sometimes being a Christian is harder than others. Like, scaring away the first cute guy in ages to flirt with you by talking with him about Jesus. It hardly qualifies as suffering for the gospel. Nonetheless, I have to admit that there was a little twinge of regret. Ah well. Maybe I can start up a ministry: street evangelism to cute guys. With knitting.

Recently I read a book by Bill Johnson entitled Face to Face With God: The ultimate quest to experience his presence. It's an excellent book, and I recommend it.

One statement impacted me more than any other in the book:

"God's love for people is beyond comprehension and imagination. He is for us, not against us. God is good 100 percent of the time." (p. 3, emphasis added)

"[I]f I had to pick one word to describe the nature of God revealed in Christ, it is that He is good. I never realized how controversial the subject of the nature of God could be until I began teaching week after week that God is good, always." (p. 103)

This simple premise shocked me, not only because it is profound, but because I realized I don't really believe it. Most of the time, even if I'm not outright angry at God and convinced that he is out to get me, the suspicion lurks strongly in my mind that mixed up in God's "good" motives are motives to punish, hurt, or damage me. If I really give myself over to him, I can't trust that the results will be in my favour.

Bill Johnson admits the difficulty of this teaching:

"While most believers hold the belief [that God is good] as a theological value...they struggle in light of the difficulties all around us. Many have abandoned the idea altogether, thinking it doesn't have any practical application. The hardest part is saying that He's always good. Some will say He is mysteriously good, which is about the same as saying He's good, but not as we think of goodness." (p.103)

The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I have become that central to a quest for the presence of God, central to giving up everything to follow Jesus, is a basic and settled conviction in our hearts that God is good. Not just good, but 100% good, 100% of the time.

How can we abandon ourselves to him, how can we completely believe and obey him, unless we believe that?

One of Satan's very first temptations in the garden of Eden, the doubt he sowed into Eve's mind to convince her to disobey God, was the idea that God was not good:

The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "

"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:2-5)

The ugly but plausible lie behind what the serpent was saying was this: God is holding out on you. He knows that this will be good for you, and that's why he's forbidding it. If you take things into your own hands, if you go your own way, forgetting what God says, you will experience what is truly good, what God doesn't want you to have and what you'll miss out on if you obey him.

Eve fell for it. And ever since, generations down the line, every single human being has fallen for it too.

What Jesus Christ came to reveal, and what reconciliation to God is all about, is that God is actually good. That following him reaps ultimate rewards, both in this lifetime and the next.

And yet, we struggle to believe that. Someone far from God doesn't believe it at all: a basic hatred and mistrust of God keeps them shaking their fists from a distance, even if unconsciously. But many Christians probably feel the same way I do: a deep and stubborn suspicion that the love of God is a happy lie, that a benevolent Father can't possibly be true, that ditching the treasures of this life in favour of treasure in heaven won't ultimately pay off.

We follow Jesus because we feel we have no choice. We know he's the truth. But disappointments, unhappy circumstances, far-off things that are starting to look less like promises and more like cruel bait, keep us in a miserable state of depression, discouragement, fear, and fruitlessness. We turn to things we know we shouldn't in an effort to stem the demanding tide of pain.

If God is good, why? Why this circumstance in my life? Why this thing that I want so badly and can't have? Why this stuff that doesn't make any sense?

There's no easy answer to that. I can't promise that a belief in the goodness of God will reap quick and easy solutions to the disappointments and hurts of life. I still struggle with questions about things that are currently ongoing in my life, and I don't have any guarantee that I will have an answer soon, or indeed, any answer in this lifetime.

But key to overcoming the hurt, disappointment, fear, and fruitlessness is a little thing called faith.

We have a choice when confronted with our thoughts, our feelings, our circumstances, and the enemy's lies:

Do we believe God?

God has said, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28, emphasis added)

As believers, that's a shining light of truth, a promise God has given us that encompasses all circumstances in our life, both "good" and "bad".

The belief that God is out to harm us or to hold out on us is a lie.

We know the heart and the character of God as revealed in Jesus. We have the promises of God. What do we turn to when hurt or disappointment threatens to overwhelm us? We will be overwhelmed, unless we believe in the promises of God.

I'm not saying that bad things won't happen to us. Promises that we will suffer are sown through the whole New Testament. Following God definitely does not guarantee that we will get what we want in this life, or that it will be easy. There are no guarantees.

Except for the presence, the power, and the love of God. And somehow, that's enough to make us "more than conquerors", as Paul says (Romans 8:37).

Paul knew what he was talking about. He had suffered and lost more than any of us probably ever will. And yet, he could triumphantly state his all-conquering belief in the goodness and the love of God.

Don't sell yourself short. Disappointments will happen. Hurts will happen. God tells us he uses them to make us mature and complete and shape us into the image of Jesus (James 1:2-4; Hebrews 12:1-13). The question is, will we believe him?

I have gone through many hurts in my life. Sometimes I've felt that God wanted to make me into a test case for suffering! (Which, of course, is not true). Looking back at my major disappointments, I can trace God's hand and see how he has used each one to draw me into new stages in my relationship with him and deal with sin issues. What I thought would destroy me has ended up turning out for my good. Even if, and when, those things were not good in themselves!

With that experience, and with God's promises, I can look at the current hurts and disappointments in my life and say, "God, I don't understand this. I don't like this. This hurts. I don't know why you've allowed it. I wish it could be another way. But I know with total certainty that you will work this out for my good, no matter how it ends up. Therefore, I can walk forward with faith and confidence and continue trusting you and doing what you have called me to do."

Faith in God's goodness does not mean denying, ignoring, or minimizing the pain. It doesn't mean saying that everything that happens to us is good. We live in a sinful, fallen, evil world. Bad stuff can and does happen. People sin, and they sin against us.

But faith in God does mean a settled conviction that, in the life of a believer, God both can and will turn out everything, including the bad, the sinful, the ugly, the painful, for our good, because he's promised. It means a conviction that our perspective is limited and faulty, and God's is eternal and perfect. What from our time-bound, human viewpoint looks only like destruction, from God's heavenly vantage point looks like an opportunity to display his grace and his goodness. It means believing what we cannot yet see, which, after all, is the very definition of faith (Hebrews 11:1).

With faith like that, nothing can shake us.

God help me, and all of us, to believe.

My "vacation" in New England ended up being more than just that. In the timing of God, it ended up being a bit of an ambush.

We are called to live for one thing. As Christians, that one thing is following Jesus and knowing God. It's living to see his kingdom come and his love and power manifest on earth, no matter what the cost to ourselves.

It is easy to become sidetracked from that goal. A lot of us, for a lot of the time, even though we're saved, aren't really living for that goal. We're taken up with the things of this life: jobs, taking care of ourselves, family, hobbies, sports, whatever. We're saved and we're going to heaven, and we go to church on Sundays, but God and his kingdom are not our magnificent obsession. Our attention is captured by a million and one other things and our effectiveness for the kingdom is sabotaged.

It wasn't meant to be this way. Jesus said many hard things about the way we are supposed to live.

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels." (Luke 9:23-26)

It's a hard call. But it's what it means to be a Christian. Jesus never meant for us to live with anything less than total devotion, a passion for him and for the kingdom that consumes everything we are and everything we have to the point that we will give it all up and suffer anything to have him.

But there's another side to this perspective. Jesus also told this parable, one of my favourite passages in the whole Bible:

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all that he had and bought that field." (Matthew 13:44, emphasis added)

Whatever we give up for Jesus is more than made up for by what we gain. He is the treasure. He is the all-surpassing treasure that once we catch a glimpse of, will outshine anything on earth that we once thought valuable.

That's what makes living for Jesus worth it. That's what makes giving up whatever we have to give up, whatever cost we have to pay, whatever we suffer, worth it. Yes, there is a cost. Yes, sometimes it is very pricey. Yet, when we see him in his beauty, we are more than willing to throw it all away so that we can gain him.

What are you living for that makes the beauty of Jesus dim in your life? What do you prize that you are unwilling to give up to receive more of him? Whatever it is, spend time seeking God until he gives you a glimpse of his glory and beauty. Once he does, you won't want to live for anything else. You'll be willing to do whatever it takes to have him. Trust me, you'll be happier for it. You'll discover what you were made for.

So, this week I'm going back to New England for ten days.

It's a bit of a funny feeling. It's been ten months since I moved back to Canada. I don't know how it will feel to go back.

Yesterday I was talking on the phone to the woman whose home I lived in when I first moved to New Hampshire. It seems like only yesterday, though it was over three years ago, that I got her and her family's names by email and tried to imagine what it would be like living in this strange place, on a farm, with these people I'd never met.

Now it's three years later. I'm back where I started, in Canada. In Toronto. And yet I'm not. I'm a completely different person than when I left for New Hampshire. Much of that is due to the things that happened there. It was a difficult time of my life, one that I wouldn't want to repeat. It's had some good results, that I wouldn't want to erase.

So, it will be interesting to go back. I find sometimes you can't understand your time in a place until you do. I'm wondering what I'll find out this time.

One of the interesting things about commuting daily by subway and bus is other people. And even more specifically, what makes it interesting is the people you see every day.

I've been commuting Monday to Friday by TTC for almost 3 months. And without fail, some of the same people are nearly always on my bus.

Some of them stand out more than others. First, there's Bus Guy. I'm sure Bus Guy has a name, but in my mind, he's Bus Guy.

I first noticed Bus Guy (B.G. for short) on my very first commute. He's skinny, with short-cropped hair and a scruffy beard. His eyes are always hidden behind brown aviator sunglasses, and iPod wires snake from his ears to somewhere in his pocket. He has two Chinese characters tattooed on his neck. He often wears a hat. During the winter, he wore a long brown leather trench coat and ripped jeans; now that it's warmer he favours light-coloured checked button-down shirts and ripped jeans. His shoes are black-and-white Pumas.

Then there's Bubble Girl. It's not a flattering name, it's just how I think of her. The reason I call her that is that she wears huge bubbled-out sunglasses and has a very full lower lip that sort of echoes them. She always wears black leggings, black shoes, and a cropped black jacket. She works somewhere in the same complex I do.

Then there are others. Korean High School Guy. Old Bald Indian Guy with Briefcase. Older Guy with I'm Lovin' It jacket. Some of them are there day in and day out. Others appear, disappear, reappear. Some for whatever reason commute regularly for a time and then are gone.

It makes the bus trip more interesting. Because, you know, when you spend an hour commuting every day, you've got to do something to keep yourself occupied.

I have a necklace that reminds me of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I lived for two years and two months. The pendant is a piece of sea glass that I found one day among the rocks on the beach and saved in case one day I could have it made into a necklace. It sat inside the cupholder of my car for months, waiting.

It's pale sea green and roughly one inch long and three-quarters of an inch wide. It's an irregular rectangular shape and has a raised pattern that looks vaguely like the top of an anchor but is probably part of some writing. It's pretty, that's what made me save it.

One day I went downtown to see my friend Ford. When I found him, he was sitting talking to an old Deadhead who called himself Smoke. Smoke had a big bushy grey beard and a Buddha belly that was covered by a tie-dyed Grateful Dead t-shirt. He was sitting cross-legged on the pavement twisting silver wire with a pair of pliers around a pretty stone. Spread in front of him was a black velvet case showcasing his wares: every variety of coloured stone, polished smooth into beauty and wrapped around with silver wire.

I asked Smoke if he could wrap sea glass, and he said that he could. He said that he'd charge me $5. So I walked back to my car again, fetched the piece of glass, and took it to Smoke. He pulled out a length of silver wire, and a few minutes of careful twisting later, handed me my piece of sea glass, ingeniously but minimally wrapped, with a loop at the top for a chain. He then cut a length of black cord, threaded it on, tied a knot, and it was a necklace. Ten dollars, he said.

I hesitated, because he'd told me five. But I handed him ten, even though I was angry about it and complained to Ford later. However, I had to admit the result was pleasing. The thin silver wire cradles the ocean-smoothed glass, twisting to hold itself in place and spiraling up to the loop that holds the cord. When I wear it, it reminds me of the ocean. When I wear it, it reminds me of Portsmouth. When I wear it, it reminds me of countless sunsets viewed over the beautiful Piscataqua River from Peirce Island or Memorial Bridge. When I wear it, it reminds me of a time in my life that was bitter-sweet. When I wear it, it reminds me of a chunk of my past.

And it's beautiful.

I got onto the subway car. I sat down in the only available seat, next to a very sunburnt, red-skinned man in a wife-beater and jeans. I immediately semi-regretted it. He apparently hadn’t showered or applied deodorant recently.

He turned to me. “Pretty cool on the subway,” he said.

I agreed. “Cooler than outside.”

He laughed. “I might just ride the subway all day.”

“That’s one way to stay in the air conditioning.”

“Cheaper than air-conditioning your house.”

I agreed, and there was a pause.

“I’m going to the Writer’s Guild at U of T,” he told me.

“Sounds interesting. What happens there?”

“It’s for writers. People who write poetry and fiction. They get together and critique each others’ work. I pretty much have to go there every Friday. This week, Maggie McDonald is going to be speaking. In honour of her, I bought 5 liters of wine and 10 pounds of smoke—“ I thought he was going to say “smokes”, but he continued “d oysters, and five different kinds of black olives.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Yeah, and I got these!” He reached into his bag and pulled out a bag of tortilla chips. “They’re called ‘Scoopers’. You can see how you could put a smoked mussel into the center, like that…”

“Smoked mussels, I’ve never had those before,” I said.

“Smoked oysters, I mean,” he amended.

“I’ve never tried those either.”

My stop was announced, and I got up. “This is my stop, take care,” I said.

He reached into his bag and pulled out a pink-and-white box, which he thrust at me. “Here, take these,” he said. I looked at them. It was a box of smoked oysters.

“Why?” I protested, but he insisted. “Just take them!”

I got off the train and left the station, unable to stop laughing, with a pink-and-white box of smoked oysters in my hand. The city is such a strange place sometimes.

The smoked oysters were disgusting. But it makes a good story, and it was certainly a kind gesture.

One of the side effects (perks? downsides?) of working at a knitting company is constant exposure to yarns, knitting patterns, and knitting techniques. As a consequence, if you are me, your head is constantly filled and brimming over with new and countless ideas for knitting projects.

Normally, I have a "knitting season" which begins in about October and continues until I get sick of winter or run out of ideas, generally in about February. This year, I've begun knitting in May.

The first thing I started making was this scarf, the pattern for which was created by an incredibly talented knitting designer I work with:

Don't judge it. It's not finished.

Then, I found some yarn on sale and quickly whipped up this scarf:

Next, I ripped apart an old hat that didn't quite work and started knitting this hat:

It also isn't finished.

Who knows where this will end? I envision endless knitting projects stretching into my future. If you're my friend, watch out. You just may be stuck with some knitted object my addiction has compelled me to create.

Last night, Emerald's adopter came to sign the papers and pick her up. After a bit of protest, Emerald was lowered hind-end first into the cat carrier and shut behind the door, looking out apprehensively. She went out the door to her new life and her new home, and that was that.

I wasn't sure how I would feel. It's a bittersweet experience. On one hand, I've fulfilled my purpose: to care for her and prepare her for a permanent home. I know the woman who chose her will love her dearly and care for her well. I'm happy for that.

But the house seems empty now, and a little bit sad. I keep thinking about Emerald and remembering with a little shock that she's not here anymore. I keep expecting to be assaulted by her many meows and her pleading eyes, her padding paws following me everywhere I go and her prickling claws digging into my leg if I delay picking her up. I miss the soft furry warmth of her little body and the rapturous purring as I pick her up and settle her on my lap. I miss being met at the door, and I even rather miss the mess she made kicking litter out of her box every day.

Hopefully the new foster cat will arrive soon to fill that empty space. I wonder if it will get easier or harder with consecutive cats. We'll see. I guess if it gets too hard, I can always adopt my own.