Newspaper columns

In pursuit of happiness

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / / / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – June 2013)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ The Lord is my Shepherd, the Psalmist wrote, and I lack no good thing. The waters are still and I’m not afraid. How can I be? My cup overflows with goodness and mercy. Even when nothing goes my way and hell itself threatens, I’m at peace with myself and the world. I am, for lack of better words, happy.

Of course, we’re not happy. Not really. This is the very nature of it, this life, this nagging feeling that there has to be more. We’re created in the depth of our cells to feel this uneasy yearning, because this world, after all, is not the end, not our real home as much as a fleeting shadowland.

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Faraway home is where the heart is

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / / , , , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 15, 2013)

It’s 10 years later, dear Elizabeth, and it’s true: Home is where your heart is. You’ve said it now in plain words. Your heart, with your imagination, is in our African home.

This is what I know you mean when you say with sorry sadness, “Daddy, the roads are too smooth here. Everything’s too perfect. I’d rather be in a place where the roads are bumpy but more interesting.”

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A place called ‘Baby Cottage’

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / / , , , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Friday May 31, 2013)

JINJA, UGANDA ✦ It’s Monday and we’re on the road early, dressed up, driving the 90 minutes down a dangerous road, the road that we won’t drive at night anymore because we fear it may kill us.

We arrive at the court in Jinja, a relaxed beach-town on Lake Victoria, to finally be told ‘Yes. Yes, everything is in order and the court is satisfied, and Hannah will never have any family outside of yours, the family she clearly belongs in.’

Hannah is the Ugandan girl who’s been in our home for almost four years now. We just need the final stamp of court approval to make her adoption official.

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Mourning in Uganda with a change of clothes

Leave a Comment / New Vision, Newspaper columns / / , , , , , , , , , , , / 3 minutes of reading

(The New Vision Online – Monday, April 15, 2013)

JINJA, UGANDA ✦ It’s Monday morning and I sit in a Jinja café wearing a bright tie, blue shirt, navy blazer and brown pants, but I’m wishing I could start the day over and wear black from my neck to my feet, everything as black as the black in Uganda’s flag.

This, as I read the latest news report of Black Monday, the growing citizens campaign pointing out what we already know, that Ugandans need to mourn, to grieve, to be saddened for their deepening losses, losses from thefts of public funds that are key to the wellbeing of this nation.

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Of grace, forgiveness and tears

4 Comments / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / / , , , , , , , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, March 30, 2013)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ I’m the odd man out in a loose circle in the campus home of the university president talking about God’s grace, an unsurprising discussion because, besides being a university and my own family’s home, this is a nearly century-old theological training centre.

The horrible news of late is the roadside murder of a young law student, John Otim, beaten dead with an iron bar for money that he didn’t even have.

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Light and shadows in a Good Friday world

2 Comments / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / / , , , , , , , , , , , / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – April 2013)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Jesus wept. Not long before he set his face like flint toward Jerusalem and the cross, he wept. Why?

Surely he knew how it would all end, how he’d resurrect Lazarus, who lay nearby so cold and dead; how this miracle would foreshadow his own final triumph over the grave. Was he playing his audience? It’s a scene with at least some strangeness. Here’s another.

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The Light of the World in the darkness of hell

1 Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / / , , , , , , , , , / 3 minutes of reading

(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.’

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Will Barack Obama come to Africa?

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / / , , , , , , , , , , , / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 16, 2013)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It was YouTube and it was Barack Obama talking to the neighbours in Kenya. You may have heard that they’re about to vote.

The last time the Kenyans did this, six years ago, 1,000 lay dead on the bloody streets. Another 600,000 were displaced, including here to Uganda where UN shelters near the airport are still up.

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