Recent Columns

It was a father-son weekend away of climbing and water and sports and night fires and running around a small island on the Nile River in the countryside of Uganda. And one of the boys stood by a swamp and held up some mud like it was a trophy, and then another boy said something […]

So, what do you do when a poor man comes knocking at your front door and the kids are in their pyjamas and it’s really not a good time to do much of anything, but the story behind it all is so dramatic that you can’t ignore any of it for a second? This is […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Friday, September 20, 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It was late and dark and unusual because the visitor lives hours away and I didn’t expect him. But he came anyway and sat at my front door and cried and told me all about it, how thieves had come the night before. He had been at church, he explained, at one of those all-night prayer services common in this part of Africa, when the rats did it, when they broke in and cleaned out his house. Clothing, furniture, cash I had recently given for his kids’ schooling, everything gone by sunrise.

I’ve been looking through the Parenting Manuel they gave when my oldest was born but I don’t see anything on what to do when she gets five, yes FIVE, boys professing their love for her. Liz is 10. ‘Daddy, daddy!’ is how it all started one day after school. ‘You’ll never guess what happened!’ Liz […]

I’m way too sexy for my underwear. Which is why I wear a Speedo into the pool. I expect the same from our new dog. We picked him up yesterday. His name is Zack, which, if you’re a thief, is short for Zack Attack. His birthday, as we’ve discovered, is on My Bride’s and my […]

The year was 1912 and the newspaper ad was from the London Times and it went like this: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return is doubtful.” This, from a more heroic age when men would bet everything they had, even their lives, on […]

My Bride and I are on a plane in a few hours flying back to the kids in Uganda, from Korea, this land of hand-helds and sliding doors, from the west side of Korea while a typhoon comes from the east, something our travel agent and the news have both warned us about. But our Korean […]

My Bride has just finished her address to some hundreds at this conference near Seoul, 10,000 km from home and the kids. It will be my turn later. We’re in the company of a couple of senior Korean doctors. Both are legendary in the Korean medical world. The younger one, a thin-faced 91-year-old, likes to […]

(Christian Week - October 2013) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ The thing about marijuana is that it stinks up the joint and brings images of barefoot hippies and stoner movies and general rebellion, none of which is very attractive to the clean-cut religious crowd. The sorry thief on the cross? A pot smoker no doubt. Probably a dealer. But the times, they are a changin’.

So, we sold the kids to go to Korea. Don’t know what that means for a blog called The Daily Dad, but it can’t be good. My Bride and I are invited to speak at a medical missions conference – she’s a keynote, I’m an addendum – by a Korean doc colleague we worked with […]

My children love to tell it, and told it again not long ago, this joke, laughing and tripping over themselves to the punch-line. It goes like this. There’s a scientist and God. And the scientist challenges God to a contest of who can make the better human being. God tells him that he’s on, at […]

We are children, all of us, not entirely at home in this world because in a deep place, maybe a forgotten place, we realize there is something else, something more. Which is why crimes against children are especially heinous: they’re an attack on the very nature of innocence. They’re also a reminder of how, in the […]

(The UCU Standard – Monday, September 23, 2013) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ The old Yiddish joke goes like this. ‘Do you know what makes God laugh? People making plans.’ This is the mystery of it, of the Gospel itself, really. Even our lives, fragile and short as they are, are not ours to over-script. No, we need to open them to possibilities outside ourselves, and when we do, surely good surprises will come along the way. It’s as true for any person as it is for an institution like UCU. I was reminded of this while around the dinner table – twice – during my family’s recent season back in North America.

It was all set, I was told. Chris had invited me over for the night. Which was fine, because Chris was a cool dude, a buddy with a sort of bowl-cut who lived just down the hill, and, after that, just up the hill. We loved to play hockey together, so much that once I […]

When the Light of the World talked about light, he made the plain observation that it’s not something to hide. No, we strike a match and light a lamp and put it high so that we don’t bump into the furniture. Of course, in Uganda, when the power goes out after dark, this can be […]