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Watch this if you need help understanding the new Tim Hortons cup sizes…

It was just a simple little question, really: What book has most influenced your life and thinking? 28 comments later, here is the result:

Desiring God, Revised Edition John Piper

Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis

Here We Stand!: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals for a Modern Reformation James Montgomery Boice and Benjamin E. Sasse

The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells

The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien

INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION… John Calvin

Lectures to My Students Charles Haddon Spurgeon

‎The Hero With a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky

The Pursuit of God A. W. Tozer

Chronicles of Narnia Box Set C S Lewis

Dynamics Of Spiritual Life Richard F. Lovelace

The Problem Of Pain C S Lewis

Pagan Christianity? Frank Viola, George Barna

The Naked Gospel Andrew Farley

One Thousand Gifts Ann Voskamp

The Gifts of Imperfection Brene Brown Ph.D.

Abba’s Child Brennan Manning

Let the Nations Be Glad! John Piper

Radical Reformission Mark Driscoll

Don’t Waste Your Sorrows Paul E. Billheimer

The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Irresistible Revolution Shane Claiborne

Radical David Platt

A Tale of Three Kings Gene Edwards

The Screwtape Letters C S Lewis

Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond

The Holiness of God R. C. Sproul

Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche

Reason within the Bounds of Religion… Nicholas Wolterstoff

The Crucified God Jurgen Moltmann

The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart

Another B.S. Night In Suck City Nick Flynn

My sister lost a dear friend on the weekend. Eva Peters, her husband Bill, and their daughter Lilly were almost finished the long drive from Ontario to Alberta, where they were moving to work and live on a horse farm/resort.  This was a dream they’d had for some time but the opportunity had come as a surprise. So on fairly short notice,  they packed their stuff and left for a new life in another province.

The picture you see was taken last Friday night. That’s Eva on the left, my sister Tammy on the right. Bill and Eva and Lilly said their goodbyes and left on the long journey. On Sunday night, on a snowy road – just 20 or so kilometers from their new home – Eva lost control of the vehicle she was driving and went off the road and was killed.

She was just 31-years-old…

Many in our church community are grieving. Eva was dear to us, Bill was one of our elders. The funeral is Saturday – the day before Christmas, so as you can imagine there are a lot of mixed emotions here.

Here is a song I came across yesterday that’s fits the occasion, sung by one of my favorite singers and writers, Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls.

There’s Still My Joy

I took my tree down to the shore
The garland, and the silver star
To find my peace, and grieve no more
To heal this place inside my heart

On every branch I laid some bread
And hungry birds filled up the sky
They rang like bells around my head
They sang my spirit back to life

One tiny child can change the world
One shining light can show the way
Through all my tears, for what I’ve lost
There’s still my joy
There’s still my joy
For Christmas day

The snow comes down on empty sand
There’s tinsel moonlight on the waves
My soul was lost, but here I am
So this must be amazing grace

One tiny child can change the world
One shining light can show the way
Beyond these tears for what I’ve lost
There’s still my joy
There’s still my joy
For Christmas day
There’s still my joy for Christmas day

John Piper’s newest book, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian, is now available. Earlier this year his publisher traveled with him to his hometown of Greenville, SC to revisit the world in which he grew up. This 18-minute documentary takes us through his experience of racism in the 1960′s American South.

This is a really touching documentary and even if you don’t agree with his Christian perspective on the world, it is still worth watching:

Bloodlines Documentary with John Piper from Crossway on Vimeo.

Order the book online, or call 888.346.4700 between 9:00 and 5:00 (CDT), Monday to Friday.

Get a free download of the Introduction [PDF].

Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight…
August 29 is the release date! The album will be available online and on CD for you to buy. I’m really proud of the work Deni Gauthier and I have done on this album and I know you’re going to like it too.

Download a pre-mastered track from the album here

This is a picture I took during a visit to Chicago earlier this year. This is a dubious distinction but this is the very corner on which the finale of the latest Transformers movie takes place. I KNOW – you are impressed.

Live performances…
If you’re interested in booking a show, contact me here. Full band show to solo acoustic set – the rates are reasonable and the show will be good!   We’ll play in back yards, parking lots, living rooms, churches and anywhere else there’s a few people willing to listen. Here’s a little bit of what you can expect in concert… watch Michael Krahn & Band – “The Love Song (live)”

The Weight of Glory…
It’s been a decade already since I released “The Weight of Glory” and I still think it sounds pretty good. You can listen to samples buy it on iTunes by clicking here.

Today’s bit of wisdom from Seth Godin:

If you engage with the heckler, if you qualify yourself, justify yourself or worst of all, rationalize yourself, the heckler will pounce, turning a small wedge into a giant hole. Like a standup comedian, it’s almost impossible to outwit or shut down a dedicated heckler.

But there is a strategy that works. Acknowledge and move on.

When the heckler announces that you’re incompetent, unqualified or hardly ready to step forward, think, “oh.” And then proceed.

You give it no purchase. No opportunity to escalate. Each jibe is met with “noted.”

Over time, the heckler gets quieter, because it just isn’t worth the effort.

Read more here.

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My new album “Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight” is almost done… info here: http://bit.ly/pimCw8 Get the previous album “The Weight of Glory” here: http://bit.ly/pFEhs1

From Billboard.com editor Jem Aswad,

Today, the media is exploding with stories about her sales “spike,” “surge,” “skyrocket,” “soar.” This week’s SoundScan totals of 55,000 albums — up by 3,400% from the previous week — and 111,000 digital tracks (up 2,120%) are based on the first 36 hours after news of her death broke. They may be bigger next week, by which point the story will have cooled off — watch for it to last for the rest of this week and flare up again with next week’s SoundScan results.

What gets lost in all this is perspective: For all the talk about her legacy, she leaves behind a sadly thin catalog of two strong albums, two digital-only B-sides collections and a smattering of stray tracks. She was a marvelous singer and a precocious interpreter who left behind precious little evidence of her talent, since her spiral began almost as soon as she became famous; not much she recorded after the age of 23 has been released.

Read the rest here.

“When God’s people worship God, they always do two things: (1) they pray and (2) they reflect on the Scriptures. Prayer is our talking to God; the Scriptures are God talking to us, and the two always go together.”

- James Montgomery Boice (Acts – Expositional Commentary)

I haven’t posted much lately. Why?

The post that went viral a couple of months ago really took me off guard and came at the worst possible time. It happened just prior to me leaving for Seattle followed shortly thereafter by Chicago… followed shortly thereafter by Toronto – twice. Normally each of those trips would require some prep beforehand and an extensive debrief after. As it was though, they mostly got neither. That post multiplied my blog traffic by 40 and along with it came a slew of attention via comments and Facebook and Twitter follow requests. I was making lots of new connections but I had no time to follow up on them.

Buried under the weight of my own self-expectations, I simply stopped moving for a while. And then the other half of my brain kicked in. This might be my built-in coping mechanism – when the left brain is immobilized by over-consumption and can’t express itself in linear language, the right brain kicks in and speaks for the left. Dear right brain, my plans and structures got destroyed! Please help me cope.

So it’s been less linear things lately – mostly songs and more songs for the last while. All of the processing I’ve needed to do has come out in more poetic form. I’ve been relying less on analysis, logic and calculation and more on intuition, creativity and art.

So I could post a lot of lyrics here but I’m not sure how useful they’d be without their clothing (i.e. the melodies I’ve wrapped around them). But I did start working on a book to go along with the new album I’m recording though. It will look something like chapters that align with the song titles and lots of elaboration on the themes of the album.

There are 2-3 more new songs brewing that fit with the theme so I’d like to put those on the album as well and add those chapters to the book.

Today I find myself with some unexpected free time. I think I’m going to finish those new songs and work on the book.

I posted my first column for SEVEN (the Promise Keepers magazine) over at my other blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Having a conversation is relatively easy. You find another person, you find a topic you’re both familiar with and then (hopefully) you begin to discover that you agree on a lot of things. Simple, right?

But it doesn’t always happen this easily; sometimes a bit more effort is required. When this is the case asking someone out for coffee to have a conversation can be pretty frightening. So frightening in fact that we often delay the effort or try to avoid the situation altogether.

Read the rest here.

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The “other blog” features only my longer pieces of writing, some of which have been published in print and others that are waiting to be published. The post frequency is about once a week. So, if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for…

Go and take a look here.
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Enjoy!