(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.
This Valentine’s Day, fall in love with the One who knows you Read More »
(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.
Distracted by distraction Read More »
(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.
What we can learn from Nelson Mandela about solitude Read More »
(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.”
We’ll be home for Christmas (for more than mere words) Read More »
(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 »
(The Hamilton Spectator – November 23, 2013)
KAMPALA, UGANDA – When Rob Ford first appeared onscreen in Africa I was sitting in front of some public televisions, a place where I often work, reading about Ghandi.
It was strange because Gandhi, the great Indian leader, led a fifth of the world’s people to democracy in his bare-feet, boney and malnourished and wrapped in just a sort of bed-sheet, while the burly mayor of Toronto has become a small man even while, in heavy shoes, he’s fallen with such a thud that it somehow has to be heard around the world.
The last time I recall Ontario news making it this far was six years ago when the Shedden massacre involving the infamous Banditos gang got a couple of paragraphs in a Ugandan daily.
And now onsreen in Uganda, it’s Rob Ford Read More »
(The UCU Standard – Friday, November 1, 2013)
MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ Suicide is a shabby and shameful business, something that nice people don’t get mixed up in, yet here they are, two suicides in our university family, two young people who in separate incidents have left us with nothing but a disturbing ‘good-bye.’
What suicide can teach us about fear and living freely Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday, October 24, 2013)
PANMUNJEOM, SOUTH KOREA ✦ We’re at the border of North and South Korea, at the planet’s hottest line in the sand, and the guard – a youth in military garb and dark sunglasses – tells my wife to change her footwear. She has open sandals and the North Koreans, even from a distance, might see her feet.
Which shows that while war may be hell, it’s strange too, certainly this pseudo-war at Panmunjeom, the UN’s demilitarized zone, the so-called DMZ separating these two Koreas, countries that stopped formal shooting 60 years ago but still without any treaty.
War may be hell, but it’s strange too Read More »
