Newspaper columns Archives – Page 33 of 62

What if the joy of singleness is just for you?

Leave a Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / February 27, 2014 / 2014, African university life, divorce, Jesus Christ, relationships, singleness / 4 minutes of reading

(The UCU Standard – Thursday, February 27, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ Last time in this space we were talking about marriage, how good things come to those who wait, and about falling in love with our Creator, really, the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.

I shared that I was 35 before I met my wife and how there was something to this, something mysterious and with joy, the sort that you can’t contrive because it comes from a deeper place inside but also somehow outside of you too.

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The long rollercoaster ride of one Ugandan adoption

2 Comments / New Vision, Newspaper columns / February 15, 2014 / 2014, African adoption, African culture, Froese family, Hannah Froese, maternal mortality, Ugandan adoption / 5 minutes of reading

(The New Vision – Saturday, February 15, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ There’s new joy in our Mukono home these days. Our Ugandan daughter, Hannah, is now legally in our family. She danced when we showed her the formal adoption paper.

This, after waiting more than 500 days. That’s five hundred. Welcome to the world of international adoptions where you need the patience of Job to slog through it all. Adopting a child, especially in Uganda, can be this much of a roller coaster ride.

In our case, we’re Canadians in Uganda since 2005. My wife and I met Hannah in 2009, when she was three, in a Jinja orphanage. When she was barely larger than a cat, she had been found abandoned in an Mbarara hospital. Her family? Unknown.

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You’ve heard of Jamaican bobsledders? These are Ugandan hockey players!

2 Comments / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / February 15, 2014 / 2014, African hockey in the Olympics, hockey in Africa, hockey in Uganda, humour, Winter Olympics 2018 / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 15, 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Okay, maybe it’s too late for Sochi, but I hope you haven’t forgotten about Olympic hockey in Africa. Yes, dear members of the International Olympic Committee, I’m before you to personally share the good news of a Ugandan ice-hockey team.

Of course, in Canada nobody says “ice” before “hockey” because Canadians realize hockey’s natural state is with ice, even the frozen-pond variety.

Uganda, on the other hand, is a place where some poor soul with a hockey stick in-hand might yell out, “We’re Manchester United!” before informing you that he’s a “striker.” But I’m working on this and I’m happy to report remarkable progress.

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This Valentine’s Day, fall in love with the One who knows you

Leave a Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / February 14, 2014 / 2014, African university life, God's love, love, marriage, relationships, sexual culture, sexuality, singleness, spirituality, Valentine's Day / 4 minutes of reading

(The UCU Standard – Monday, February 3, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s soon Valentine’s Day and you’re alone.

The flowers are out there and so is the wine, and much more. One would have to be blind and half-dead not to notice. But you’re alone, a rose in the parched dessert, and you don’t know how much longer you can hang on.

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Distracted by distraction

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / February 1, 2014 / 2014, authentic living, journaling, meditation, social media, solitude, spirituality, T.S. Eliot, the harm of social media / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – February 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ If you’re too busy to read this, just ignore it. I mean, really, I understand. We’re well into 2014 and there’s some serious new clinking and clanking that likely needs your attention.

Yes, in our brave new distracted world, the one that never really turns off anymore, (I was recently in a funeral in Uganda where the cell phones rang and rang and rang), it’s a fresh year to slip further into it, this new place where it’s hard to know what – and who — is real.

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What we can learn from Nelson Mandela about solitude

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / February 1, 2014 / 2014, African culture, African politics, Apartheid, meditation, Nelson Mandela, prison, solitude, South Africa, spirituality, suffering / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 1, 2014)

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

— From the poem Invictus

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Much has been made about the tremendous story from Africa that ended 2013, that of Nelson Mandela and the worldwide send-off he was given, and rightly so.

Mandela will be remembered as the embodiment of William Ernest Henley’s poem, Invictus, that 19th-century verse describing a man who, as Henley put it, fell in the clutch of circumstance, who knew the bludgeonings of chance and bloody head, who found wrath and tears and horror, but through it all was unafraid and, in the end, “captain of his soul.”

Well over a month after Mandela’s death, his name is still easily spoken across Africa.

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We’ll be home for Christmas (for more than mere words)

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / December 21, 2013 / 2013, childhood anxiety, Christmas, fatherhood, parental fears, parenthood, suffering, the incarnation, the Word, today's children, words / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 21, 2013)

ENTEBBE, UGANDA ✦ It’s the end of another year of words.

Words that have routinely informed us and words that have even sometimes, like summer snow, given a fresh look at everyday things. Like what happened recently in Africa during my children’s nightly reading, a story both troubling and reassuring.

“You know,” I said, after, “things will happen in your life. Bad things. And nobody will be able to save you from them. I won’t be able to and neither will your mother. But let me tell you something. God loves to take these sorts of things and turn them into something good.”

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A measure of success

1 Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / December 9, 2013 / 2013, Christianity, definition of success, Korea, Korean church history, Korean culture, Korean mission movement, South Korea, spirituality / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – December 2013)

DAEJON, SOUTH KOREA ✦ It was on the tenth floor café of a mega-church of 10,000 in this South Korean city, beside a floor-to-ceiling window, where a young man greeted me with a “sir,” and oh, by the way, did I have a word for him, any nugget, anything to help his future?

He knew I was involved with a missions’ conference some floors below and his spirit was so genuine – this is the beauty of Korean culture – that I was and wasn’t surprised when he asked particularly what I thought “success” was.

A measure of success Read More »