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“It’s inspir- ing to see the


spirit of Christmas and the gener- osity of Canadians,” says Graham Moore, territorial secretary for public relations and development for Te Salvation Army. “Proceeds will help restore hope and dig- nity to women and children in crisis, feed and provide shelter for the homeless and help make Christmas a possibility for those in need.” Proceeds from the Santa Shuffle


help vulnerable children and fam- ilies living in poverty. Te Army oſten tends to the basic necessities of life, providing shelter for home- less people and rehabilitation for those who have lost control of their lives to an addiction. Karen Allington, a member of


a Salvation Army congregation in Oshawa, Ontario, is training for her second Santa Shuffle. “I just took up running last


spring and thought it was a good goal to set for myself,” says


Allington of her first five-kilometre run in 2010. “Tere’s a history of heart disease on both sides of my family and I thought it was about time to get in shape and set a good example for my kids.” Allington was part of a team of


eight from Te Salvation Army’s Oshawa Temple that raised between $1,200 to $1,500 last year. Tis year’s team is larger—there are 12 running—and Allington hopes to improve on her time of 33 minutes and 32 seconds. “I’d like to be under 30 minutes,”


she says. “Here’s hoping.” Taking place in 38 communi-


ties across the country, the fund- raising component of the Santa Shuffle is coordinated by the Running Room, which coordi- nates the event. Teams register with local Running Room stores— in Allington’s case, the one in neighbouring Whitby—which provides sends out an e-mail to the participants’ contacts. Te pre-written e-mail provides


If u cn rd this U cn gt a gd jb w hi pa!


Rob Alloway ChristianWeek Columnist


(DIS)QUIET TIMES “


‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’” (Exodus 3:4-6). It started out as a New York


T


subway poster in the 1970s and was later reworked into a poem by the Pulitzer poet James Merrill in 1983. Something was going wrong with the way we communi- cated with each other, and what- ever that “something” was, it was picking up speed. More and more people could all too easily under- stand the poster and it made some of them lol. Originally intended as a paro-


dy against linguistic reductionism, it remains an iconic comment on the pitfalls of what we now call Information Teory—that com- plex science that shapes our lives every time we pick up a phone, go online or send an e-mail. In a game-changing paper pub-


lished in 1949 by Claude Shannon, Te Mathematical Teory of Communication,


Shannon


hen God called to him (Moses) from within the bush and said,


invented a new term to describe the smallest packet of information possible. He called it a binary digit and people immediately shortened it to the word ‘bit.’ Tese bits, he said, were subject to distortion called ‘noise,’ were cumbersome to transmit and you needed a lot of them to compose a message. But only if you wanted to send


the entire message. Fortunately, language—any


mode of communication in fact— contains this blessed thing called


‘redundancy.’ Te English alpha- bet alone contains about 50 per cent redundancy. At the level of an average paragraph, redundan- cy climbs to about 75 per cent. Eliminate redundancy, and com- munication became clean, fast and easily accessible. Te trend to eliminate redundancy is growing. Not by accident are newscasts now referred to as ‘sound bites’ or that the verb ‘to tweet’ has been recog- nized by the Oxford Dictionary. Avoiding redundancy is both


sensible and seductive. Sensible because in the time-impoverished landscape that defines our lives, focusing only on essential informa- tion is a necessary coping skill to handle the sheer volume of infor- mation that confronts us daily.


Seductive, because it begins to jus- tify reducing content, particularly biblical content, to only what you absolutely have to know. It’s a John 3:16 kind of approach to faith—pick a few verses, probably from the New Testament and pretty much forget about the rest. Surveys sug- gest that a lot of people already have. Fewer than half of Americans can name the four Gospels let alone all 66 books of the Bible. Redundancy is, well, redundant. Yet Scripture is littered with


redundancy: the parallel histories of Kings and Chronicles, of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and yes, even four Gospels to name just a few portions that hugely overlap. It begs the legitimate question: Why? Why might God in His wisdom have gone to such length to provide us such an elaborate catalog of detailed narra- tives if the essence of His message could be communicated with more economy? And, having picked out the ‘good parts’ of God’s message, is anything actually at risk when we skip over the rest? What’s at risk is credibility.


While we acquire information, it’s actually people that we tend to trust. Source informs credibility. It’s how much we know about a person’s own life story that


determines whether we will rely on what they tell us. Te worth of communication invariably remains embedded in this messy thing we call ‘narrative’—the gritty details of people, living or long since passed. Words becoming flesh— the precursor to them becoming life and spirit (John 6:63). And stories are, by design,


hugely redundant. It is the insur- ance against ambiguity and mis- information, a bulwark against the


‘noise’ of distorted transmission. To presume that our knowledge of God’s character can be separated from the stories that reveal Him is to risk worshiping the wrong god. How else can we know how He will treat us except by seeing how He has already treated others? Perhaps that is why when Moses is faced with a decision that will change his life forever, God points him to people, and not propositions. And Moses knew their stories. Te voice from the bush was


asking a big thing of Moses. When it comes to our equivalent turning points in life, do u no th stries?


Rob Alloway has written three award winning collections of Old Testament stories: Balaam’s Revenge (1999), Babylon Post (2005) and The Left Hand of God (2008).


• November 01, 2011 • 19


the whys and where- fores of sponsoring a team or team mem- ber. Online pledges go through, securely, to Te Salvation Army. An international


Christian organiza- tion, Te Salvation Army began its work in Canada in 1882 and has grown to become the largest non-govern- mental direct provider of social services in the country. Today in Canada the


Salvation Army has 877 active clergy, close to 62,000 congregants who attend 311 church- es and more than 330 social-service institu- tions of various kinds. As well as the many thousands of volunteers, Te Salvation Army employs more than 10,000 people; 55 pastors and lay staff serve overseas in countries


More than 10,000 runners will lace up their shoes to help the poor in this year’s Santa Shuffle


The Salvation Army


from Papua New Guinea to South Africa. For more information or to


register for the 2011 Santa Shuffle, visit www.santashuffle.com.


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