Recent Columns

(The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, July 26, 2013) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ Love has always been one of those loaded words, one that means everything and nothing at the same time because we can love the latest Bond movie or country music or summer rain, but this has nothing to do with summer love at, say, a July wedding, or the love that shows on the faces of a couple who have sailed through thick and thin. This is what it was the other day, an anniversary of 55 years. The man smiled and looked me in the eye and told me that he knew from the first time he saw her. “She stepped off the train and I heard a voice: ‘This is the woman you’ll marry.’”

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, and a time to keep silence and a time to speak, and a time for many things under the sun. This is how the poet in Ecclesiastes put it. He was talking about time in the sense of what happens in it, that is the type […]

My daughter Liz is a rather astute little 10-year-old and I can’t help but show off her writing every once in a while. Here’s some verse she just wrote about change called Ancient People of the World. Ancient People of the World My friends, my friends, we gather. So much to talk about, history. We […]

It’s the other day, Friday, and I’m saying goodbye to my children’s cousin, the little girl of My Bride’s sister, a bright little six-year-old with wavy brown hair and the best manners. ‘Why thank you for asking,’ she would say all week whenever I asked how her day was, her day at the camp that […]

‘This is how you do it, she said, and she put some water in the sink and got some soap and took it all in her hands and showed me how to wash my shirt in the sink. The shirt was short-sleeved and striped blue and white, horizontally, and the sink was in the attic […]

We’re talking about telling the truth, Jon and me, and the truth is something that to a seven-year-old boy can be this or that. Apparently at camp, a day camp just a few minutes from  our Canadian home, he told everyone yesterday that he had been up at 5 a.m. here at the house playing […]

You never know what to say when you’re up there. Your name is called. There’s a presenter, a certain presenter picked just for you, waiting to hand you the honour, the certificate in this case, the paper of recognition that has your name on it. You walk up and you receive it and then, besides a simple […]

He was a black man and he could recite entire chapters of the Scripture, and this is what he did while teaching in this Muskoka chapel in his booming and prophetic voice. Some of us could barely rub two notes together, but by the end of the week he also had us all sounding like […]

She’s a scholar of the Old Testament and her reading glasses sit on her nose, and then she takes them off, and then they’re on again, and she’s talking about hope and my son Jonathan is here in the group of adults because he has asked if can stay. The rest of the seven-year-olds, known […]

Liz is now tall enough to legally sit in the front seat when Daddy drives. Oh no. Today, it’s the front seat; tomorrow it’s a new car. What you might find more interesting is that young professionals in, of all places, Africa have some entitlement issues of their own. Here’s a recent commentary on it. PDF Version (Christian Week – […]

(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.

Ten  years ago, in June 2003, my daughter Elizabeth Katherine was born. My life as a father began. And life changed, forever. I immediately wrote about it all, what I thought fatherhood might be about, especially as a travelling family with a foot in two worlds. The Hamilton Spectator published those thoughts at that time. Below is a […]

(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.”

It’s hard to know exactly how many orphans Uganda may have. Some estimates are as high as two million. What we do know is that there is one less. Her name is Hannah. She has been in our home for almost four years now. The interesting thing about Hannah is that long before we met […]

(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.