Recent Columns

It’s Saturday morning in Africa and some of us, jet-lagged, are sleeping in. At least to the extent that’s possible around here. Hannah opens the front door and yells out, “It’s time for breakfast!” She’s yelling to her brother, who is with his best friend, a boy from school who, last night, had his first […]

It’s the other evening and, as we often do, we’re playing soccer on our front lawn – the dog watching, along with the cats, along with African birds in the 40-foot palms. The boy, naturally, likes to show off by putting the ball in the big net in the most creative and dramatic ways he […]

So, after some months in our Canadian home, we’re back in Africa. The commute over the Atlantic was non-eventful with the exception of two notes. One is the passing of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and so-called “poet-laureate of medicine,” a man rich in words and spirit, both. I saw the report on the BBC somewhere […]

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, August 29, 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ If you were a lion you’d have little in common with any little girl, unless it’s the summer of 2015 when you could both die horrible deaths on the other side of the ocean and people on this side would know.

I’m at the Y and it’s the news on TV and the story that will still take some time to play itself out, the one of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, the two slain journalists from Virginia, the story that has shocked, at least to the extent that anyone can be shocked anymore. Not that […]

A cross can be quite something, that is wearing a cross as a symbol of one’s love and devotion to the God-Man who hung on one 2000 years ago, and, in doing so, changed the course of history. And yet. + What I didn’t tell you recently, when I told you how my 10-year-old son […]

(Christian Week - August 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ The ring that my wife put on my finger on the day that we married stayed there for some years until the sorry day it flew off while my arm was in mid-upstroke in an Ontario lake.

I’m at the neighbour’s getting instructions on how to feed their two dogs, how to change the, uh, diaper, of the one, and this sort of thing. “Where are you going?” “Bobcaygeon.” “Ah, that’s where Jean and I met. Sort of. Through a photo, actually.” Yes, a photo. (You’d think we dated in the Arab […]

It was a summer party. “Hey,” I said to the man who had just walked in the doorway. “You almost look like someone I used to know.” He laughed. “And look!” I said. “There he is, on the wall!” He looked up at an old video clip of a wedding, with him in it, and laughed […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, July 25, 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ The last time I peed in a bottle, my doctor looked it over, then looked me over, took my blood pressure and finally said, “Good God, man! How in the world do you manage to do it?” He told me that he thought I’d live to be 100, and then, if I remember correctly, (which I don’t always, anymore), he said something about putting a large poster of me in his clinic (or was it on the front of the building?) to encourage others of my, uh, vintage. I think that’s what he said, anyway.

When you’re 20 the world (thank you Rich Mullins) is your parking lot. When you’re 30 you know better. When you’re 40 you’ve had a crash or two. You live with a regret or three (even if you’ve divorced them). By the time you reach my age – I turned 50 this past week – you’re happy […]

Before the news of the week, the sad news, let me say that my new life motto is “Doing less and liking it more.” This is why the doc says I’ll live to be 100 and why I’m at my second summer camp in two weeks, this time on a lake of undisclosed location with […]

In time to celebrate for Canada Day, the country has a new citizen with a brand new Canadian passport in hand. Her name is Hannah. She has a story. Faithful Reader knows some of, it, how gruelling an experience this has all been for some years as expressed in this New Vision piece. But after, […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, June 27, 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ My youngest daughter, Hannah, is a cool girl who loves water, makes friends easily and puts lots of maple syrup on her pancakes. She laughs more than I do, often from a deep and hearty place. She likes the fact that her name – which in the original Hebrew means “gracious” or “God’s gift to the world” – is spelled the same forwards and back. Canada is cool too. It makes fine maple syrup and, as far as countries go, laughs more than many.

It was a view from a porch or two but there was a third porch I sat on right around the same time, this front porch at home where I grew up, an old manor in Niagara that dates back to the 1870s,  where Opa Froese, that is my father, still lives. It was my […]