At some point, I was going to write about biking in Toronto. How I'd gotten over my initial terror and was enjoying it despite the perils. How despite slight mishaps like getting knocked onto the sidewalk by an opening car door and getting hit (lightly) by a taxi, it was a good way to travel.

But then I broke my elbow riding my bike. So I'm typing this one-handed.

I was leaving work and going to meet my friend. The route involved turning left from Queen Street. I sped up to avoid being hit by a car turning left onto Queen from the street I was turning into (bad move, I know). Suddenly, my wheel fell into the groove of a curve in the streetcar track, my bike stopped short, and I catapalted over the handlebars, breaking my fall with my arms. I remember a vague feeling of dread as the pavement rushed closer, then lying by my fallen bike with intense pain in my elbows as a crowd of voices asked, "Are you ok?"

When I could answer I said I was ok, I thought, but please don't pull on my arms. A passing firetruck paused, and a cop who'd seen the whole thing offered to call an ambulance, but I didn't want the bother of waiting hours in the emergency room so I refused. Somebody handed me the remains of my bell, which had been knocked off and shattered, and I walked off to meet my friend.

The bike seemed ok: besides the broken bell, the handlebars had been knocked wonky and the chain was off, but otherwise it appeared undamaged. As I walked, I was conscious of my left arm hurting more than the right. When I arrived at my friend's house, she gave me a bag of frozen corn to rest my elbows on as we chatted. However, it soon became apparent that more than casual damage was done: I couldn't move my left arm without intense, stabbing pain.

My friend insisted on accompanying me to the emergency room. She helped me put on my jacket and boots and we walked to the nearest hospital. After checking in we amused ourselves during the long wait by speculating on other patients' maladies and cracking silly jokes. We arrived just before ten in the evening: it was the small hours of the morning before we were finally called in. A doctor briefly examined the arm and sent me for an x-ray, which involved contorting the arm into various agonizing positions. At 3 o'clock I sent my friend home. At 4 the doctor came back with his verdict.

"I don't see a fracture, but I'll have the x-ray techs take another look at it in the morning. Here's a prescription for the pain." On the pink hopital slip he'd written "No fracture."

So that was it. My arm wasn't broken. I wearily collected my things, retrieved my bike from outside, and trudged home, arriving at nearly 5am.

The next day the hospital called. Because of soft tissue swelling, they couldn't see a fracture, but the swelling was consistent with a radial head fracture of the elbow, apparently a common type of injury incurred when falling on the arm. I was to put it in a sling and come back on Monday (that was a Friday).

In a way, I was relieved. I was certain it was broken, so this verdict made a lot more sense.

I made it through the weekend with my arm in a sling, including working at the store on Saturday, albeit more slowly than normal. On Monday I went to the fracture clinic and had the arm examined by a specialist, who diagnosed a radial head fracture and a torn ligament. The arm has to be in a cast for three weeks, with a brace and physiotherapy after that. The cast was put on, and that was that.

I have to say, I will never take having two arms for granted again. Everything is slower, more difficult, painful, or impossible with one. I'm managing most things, but it's tiring and takes so much longer. I have a new respect for people who live with this all the time.

Also, I have a new respect for streetcar tracks.

It's been an eventful weekend. I decided this summer I was going to go trail riding at The Ranch, and finally I booked a two-hour advanced ride for this past Friday evening. It was a perfect day, and the ride was idyllic, a challenging but beautiful meander through fields, woods, steep river banks, and the riverbed. To make it more exciting, my horse, Cisco, a flea-bitten grey, suddenly decided to throw a little bucking fit for no apparent reason. I've sat a lot of bucking in my day, but my seat isn't what it used to be, and this was completely unexpected. I went flying and hit my bum, then my (thankfully, helmeted) head. After lying still to assess the damage I realized that a) I was in one piece and b) I'd kept hold of the reins, something I was inordinately proud of. The guide offered to switch horses with me, which turned out to my advantage. His horse, a big Appaloosa, had much smoother gaits than Cisco and was calmer, so the ride ended peacefully with a magnificent moon rising over the cool summer twilight. Apart from a fair amount of soreness (much of which is simply due to not having ridden regularly in ten years), some scrapes and bruises, I'm fine.

However, my brain was perhaps rattled more than I realized, because after being kindly given a ride to the bus stop I simply got on the first bus that appeared. The driver turned out to be a horse person, so we chatted happily for several moments before I suddenly saw a sign for Hamilton. I live in Toronto. I pointed this out to the bus driver, who said "Oh! I wondered why you were going to Hamilton when you told me you lived in Toronto." There was nothing for it at that point but to keep going, so she took me into Hamilton and told the next driver for Toronto to allow me on without paying extra fare. She was really a very nice person.

While waiting for the bus in Hamilton, a young Philipina girl with a suitcase came and sat next to me. We started talking, and before long she was pouring out her story. She'd left a nannying job in Hong Kong because she heard Canada would allow her to sponsor her family, but she'd ended up imprisoned by an abusive employer who threatened her and took her money and her belongings. One night she managed to sneak to her employers' computer while they were downstairs and send a quick email to a friend. The friend contacted the police, and eventually she was rescued and taken to a shelter. Now she was headed to Toronto to find another job. She was a Christian, and her faith and hope in God remained strong despite what she'd been through. She encouraged and challenged me, and I was able to help her find her way from the bus to the train and then to the subway in Toronto. Perhaps she was the entire reason I'd taken the wrong bus...God has reasons for such twists and turns in our lives.

Most of the rest of the weekend was taken up with entertaining three visiting French girls. One is staying for a semester at the University of Toronto, the other two are friends who'd come along to see her settled in. They were beautiful people, and it was a lovely reminder of how deep and immediate our fellowship in Christ is even with Christians we've never met from the other side of the world. I've experienced it many times with Christians from many different parts of the globe, and it's always wonderful.

But it's very late, and I'm up too late as usual. Tomorrow's another day, and another recreation day as our church is going to the beach. One of these days I'll actually get some work done...

So I didn't get the second job I interviewed for either. A friend of mine speculated that they may have already had a candidate in mind and simply had to interview others for the sake of protocol, which makes a lot of sense of several things:

-the interview was about 15 minutes long
-the interviewer didn't seem to have read my resume very carefully
-the reason given why I did not get the job was that I lacked enough "web-based knowledge". Headdesk. The only piece of "web-based knowledge" I'm really missing is programming, and this was a content management position.

But it's perfectly ok. I am resting in trust of the one who holds the universe, and I know I don't need that job. He'll provide for me anyway, as he's faithfully done up till now. I'm learning a lot about things like surrender and trust, some of which I may blog about in the near future.

Well, ok. By "popular demand" I really mean about three people. But I'd been intending to blog anyway. I just hadn't got around to it, ok?

This is going to be one of those boring "here's what's happening in my life" posts. It will be brief.

This has been the Summer of Housesitting. I travelled to the States for a week and a half in the beginning of July to take care of my parents' house, the dog, and the cat while Mom and Dad went on a well-deserved 30th wedding anniversary jaunt. I wasn't back long before friends of mine in Toronto asked me to housesit for them while they went to England. It was spectacularly refreshing to have a house to myself for nearly three weeks, not to mention a cat and an iguana. It was spectacularly stressful to be in charge of hosting the after-church gatherings and weekly homegroups, but it all happened without loss of life, limb, or sanity (just).

And, I'm job-hunting. After a bit of a hiatus while I focused on freelancing I'm launching myself into the employment market again. An interview a few weeks ago was a spectacular failure; another one yesterday went rather well, and I'm glad it happened that way round because the second one seems like a much better fit. I'll hear back from them next week, so here's hoping, but if not, I'll trust it's for the best and keep looking.

I was supposed to go to England in August...but I am not going to England in August.

That's about all...as far as externals go. As far as internals go, there's always a lot going on, but this post isn't about that. I'll try to write something more interesting soon.

A few days ago I set aside a day to cry out to God about an impossible situation. I am reading through the book of Mark, and that day I came upon four stories of Jesus that struck me deeply. They're found in Mark 4:35-5:43.

In each of these four stories, Jesus faces the absolutely impossible and demonstrates his authority over it.

In the first story, Jesus rebukes a storm and commands it to stop. He and his disciples are in a small boat crossing a lake and are in danger of being swamped by the waves and drowned. Instantly, at Jesus' command, the wind and the water are still. Jesus demonstrates his authority over the forces of nature.

In the second story, Jesus faces an incredibly demonized man, so oppressed "even his demons had demons", as a friend of mine puts it! As outcasts go, he was past it: he lived among graves, crying out and cutting himself ("self-harming", we'd call it). He had such supernatural strength from the demons that he couldn't even be bound by chains, because he'd rip them apart and run away again. No one could help him; he was a hopeless case. The best he could hope for nowadays would be to be sedated and locked in a secure psychiatric ward.

Yet with a word Jesus sends the demons to flight. The man is found by the curious townspeople wearing clothes and in his right mind. They're so terrified by this that they beg Jesus to leave (biggest mistake ever?) The man asks Jesus to allow him to follow him, but Jesus tells him to go home and tell his family what the Lord had done for him. What an incredible testimony! Can you imagine the scene when their son, brother, father arrives home, completely sane and full of joy, telling about this man Jesus who delivered him? So Jesus demonstrates his authority over demons.

The next two stories are intertwined. A synagogue ruler named Jairus begs Jesus to come and heal his daughter who is dying. As Jesus is on his way, crowds throng around him. A very ill woman is among them. She has suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years and spent all she had on doctors, but the condition only gets worse.

Too shy to confront Jesus directly, she believes that if only she can touch the edge of his cloak, she will be healed. She presses through the crowd until she's within reach, grabs the hem of his garment, and instantly realizes that her condition is gone.

Jesus turns, perceiving that healing power has flowed out from him, and demands to know who has touched him. When the woman finds the courage to come forward, he comforts her: "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering." (Mark 5:34)

So Jesus demonstrates his authority over sickness and disease.

As Jesus is speaking to the woman, he's met by messengers from Jairus' house announcing that Jairus' daughter has died, and not to bother Jesus any more. Jesus ignores them and continues on his way. When he arrives he dismisses the mourners, takes the girl by the hand, and commands her to arise. Immediately she gets up and walks around, to the astonishment of the observers.

So Jesus demonstrates his authority over death.

These stories are tremendously encouraging to me in the situations I am praying for. Humanly speaking, they are just as impossible as the situations Jesus faced 2,000 years ago. Yet I know because of his authority over each of these impossibilities: nature, demons, sickness, and death, that he has authority over the situations I and those around me face today, and that I can believe him for that. The key to accessing his authority is faith.

For most of my life, I believed and was taught that these stories about Jesus were simply that: stories. They were things that happened 2,000 years ago, and the only practical relevance they had in our lives today was convincing us to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. We certainly couldn't expect him to do the same things today, or use them as examples for our lives.

I've since learned differently. But it's been a slow journey of shedding cynicism, fear, prejudice, doubt, and a host of other anti-faith sentiments, to the point where I can begin to look at Jesus with fresh eyes as the One who is "the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). His authority has not changed. His power has not changed. His heart has not changed. He still has compassion for those caught in Satan's kingdom: those oppressed by sickness, sin, disease, demons, and death.

John tells us: "The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work." (1 John 3:8). Jesus came to both announce and demonstrate the arrival of God's kingdom. He demonstrated it by forgiving sin, healing diseases, casting out demons, and raising the dead. All that opposes God in these areas is from the evil one.

The problem is not Jesus, but us. His kingdom remains the same; his authority is undiminished. The problem is with our faith. We do not believe Jesus to conquer the impossible in our lives and the lives of those around us, and we do not trust that the One who stilled the storms, cast out demons, healed the sick and raised the dead will do the same today.

We need our blindness to be removed, and spiritual eyes to see Jesus for who he really is: not what we have been taught that he is, or what we have experienced in our lives, or what the lies of the enemy tell us, but the Jesus of the Gospels, the Jesus who is the same yesterday today and forever. We need bold faith that falls at his feet like Jairus, knowing that we cannot do the impossible, but that he can. In short, we need faith.

When the messengers came to tell Jairus that his daughter was dead, Jesus said, "Don't be afraid; just believe." (Mark 5:36) When Jesus was on his way to raise another dead person, Lazarus, he said to Lazarus' sister, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" (John 11:40).

I was so struck by these four stories of Jesus conquering the impossible. In stark contrast, the very next story is about Jesus visiting his hometown. The people who heard him teaching were offended by him. They knew him. They knew his family. They knew where he was from. And it states "He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith." (Mark 6:1-6)

I'm convinced that what I personally need is to fill my mind with the truth of who Jesus is and what he came to do. I need to believe that and act on it, rather than on the voices that loudly tell me otherwise. I need to step out in faith and ask him to do the impossible, that which humanly speaking cannot be. I need to cry out to him to give me the faith that I lack. The good news is that Jesus is gracious, and he will give even faith to those who admit their need of it.

The more I do that, the more I've seen him answer prayer in definite ways. It's encouraged my faith and made me confident to ask for more. I'm excited to see what he's going to do.

When I first decided to try making shaving cream, I used this recipe, mainly because it was simple and used ingredients I already had. It's basically just shea butter and oil, with options for different essential oil fragrance blends.

However, the stuff turned out more like shaving grease than shaving cream. It was thick and goopy, wouldn't rinse off me or the razor, and left a coat of oil everywhere.

So I decided to try adding some liquid castile soap and see what happened. Here's the final recipe:

2 TBSP shea butter
3 TBSP almond oil (you can use other cosmetic oil of your choice)
2 TBSP liquid castile soap (I used Dr. Bronner's)
Essential oils for fragrance (I didn't have and didn't want to buy any for this, so mine is unscented, but you can use any of your choice. The original recipe has lots of good suggestions).

Melt the shea butter in a glass bowl placed into a pan filled shallowly with water. Remove from heat. Add almond oil, liquid castile soap, and essential oils. Stir and let cool.

It turns into a kind of liquidy cream with tiny white suspensions which I think must be the shea butter. They kind of melt after spreading it on your skin.

Because it's fairly fluid you'll want to put it into a tube or a bottle with a narrow opening. It works very well and leaves your skin feeling really moisturized. It doesn't foam like commercial shaving cream but it does the job.

The most recent homemade personal care product I decided to try is toothpaste. I started with the recipe here and modified it somewhat.

2 TBSP coconut oil
2 TBSP vegetable glycerin
1/4 cup baking soda
30-40 drops peppermint essential oil
5-10 drops tea tree oil

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and blend thoroughly with a fork. You may have to warm the coconut oil a bit to soften it, or even melt it, as it can be quite hard at room temperature.

It makes a sort of gritty paste that isn't quite the consistency of commercial toothpaste but is pleasant to use. One difference, the baking soda is somewhat abrasive, so I've noticed it being a bit harder on my gums than normal toothpaste.

There's probably a good way to squeeze this into a used toothpaste tube (a large syringe maybe?), but I just keep it in a jar next to the sink and dip my toothbrush into it.

This stuff can end up separating a bit, especially when the weather is very hot. You may have to stir it from time to time.

This is maybe the natural recipe I'm most pleased with. It works fantastically and has completely eliminated my need for conditioner, which is a plus because although I love the Aubrey Organics conditioner I was using, it's very expensive.

I started doing some research online about natural shampoos and kept running across the same ingredients: baking soda, apple cider vinegar, and tea tree oil. Baking soda is a cleanser, ACV is an anti-dandruff and conditioning rinse, tea tree oil is anti-fungal and a dandruff remedy.

It seemed like most people who were using natural methods were making a baking soda paste to clean their hair and then occasionally using an apple cider vinegar rinse.

So I tried that for a while. I made a paste with 1 TBSP baking soda, 5-10 drops tea tree oil (any more gave me a headache), and enough water to make it workable. I spread it over my scalp and left it for a while before rinsing. I'd then rinse with apple cider vinegar.

The only problem was, it stripped my hair incredibly dry. Even using conditioner didn't completely restore it.

Finally one day I tried mixing the apple cider vinegar and baking soda BEFORE putting it on my hair. It foamed fiercely, as such a mixture is prone to do. I used it, rinsed it out, and immediately noticed: no dryness. In fact, I didn't even need conditioner. It made my hair sparkly-clean and didn't dry it out whatsoever, unlike shampoos. It still seems a little bit too good to be true, especially since the main ingredients are so inexpensive.

Mix together:

1 TBSP baking soda
1 TBSP apple cider vinegar
5 drops tea tree oil

Pour over your hair, work it in, leave for a few minutes, then rinse thoroughly to remove any residue. It leaves your hair shiny and soft without the need for conditioner. I do still use a commercially-available natural shampoo every once in a while, since this recipe does tend to build up in your hair after several washes and leave it a little "sticky".

This is the point at which many people say "yuck". I understand the reaction, but honestly, this stuff works just as well as I remember any commercial deodorant working. It's not an anti-perspirant, and you do still have to maintain good hygiene, but you do that anyway, right? I run and ride my bike regularly, and I have not noticed any "smelliness" or issues with this stuff as long as I wash and re-apply daily.

I experimented with many natural deodorant products and methods before finding this recipe online and modifying it. It works the best of anything I've tried so far, definitely better than commercially-available natural deodorants I've tried. I'm sure there are some good ones out there, but this works for me so I'm sticking with it.

1/4 cup cornstarch (moisture absorber)
1/4 cup baking soda (natural deodorant)
30 or so drops tea tree oil
2 TBSP shea butter
3 TBSP almond oil
10 or so drops lavendar or other essential oil (optional)

Mix cornstarch, baking soda, and tea tree oil. Melt shea butter in a heatproof glass bowl set inside a pan filled shallowly with water over medium heat. Stir in almond oil. Remove from heat and stir in cornstarch/baking soda/tee tree oil mixture.

I originally just used 2 TBSP shea butter to substitute for the coconut oil in the original recipe. However, shea butter is much harder than coconut oil and I ended up with this rock-solid stuff that was almost impossible to use. I re-melted it down and added the almond oil to make it more of a cream. It works brilliantly and has a nice consistency.

Note: Baking soda can be a skin irritant. If your skin is sensitive or you notice irritation after using this, you can try halving the amount of baking soda (says the original recipe). You also might not want to apply it directly after shaving your underarms.

You really only need a very small amount of this. It absorbs well and doesn't leave a white residue unless you use too much.

I found this recipe here. The only changes I made were to use shea butter instead of lanolin. I also basically ended up omitting the rosewater as the cream just cooled into a pocket around it and it spilled out the first time I used it. I don't think you really need it.

Night cream

The cocoa in this moisturiser will not stain the face. Instead the alkaloids it contains - mainly theobromine and caffeine - act as stimulants and rejuvenate the skin.

2 tbsp almond oil
2 tbsp shea butter
1 tsp cocoa powder

Put the almond oil, shea butter and cocoa in a heatproof glass bowl. Place the bowl over a pan of water and heat gently over a low heat till the mixture melts into a smooth cream. Use only a wooden spoon to stir as a metal one will react with the ingredients. Take off the heat. Allow the cream to cool and store in a glass bottle in the refrigerator (it started growing mold when I kept it at room temperature).

This is a wonderful, rich cream which I use only at night as it's rather greasy. You do have to be careful not to get it into your eyes as it stings rather fiercely.