Recent Columns

He was a name – an astronaut – a man of numbers more than anything, but he still knew the value of words and he was talking about the wonder of it, our universe, and his unique opportunity to see just a glimmer of its sparkling palette, and wasn’t it something for him to be […]

It was just my daughter Liz and me in the living room, a quiet moment in the evening when I said to her, ‘I went to Tim Bosma’s funeral.’ Of course, one never knows if there is a right way to talk about this sort of thing with children, about death, about murder, about the […]

The children had dental appointments and I was running late and so found myself in the back without a program in hand, a thousand people in front of me, a thousand faces, a thousand hearts, some in black clothing, some not, all coming together for one purpose, to say goodbye to Tim Bosma. We listened […]

We were in a park yesterday and the children were playing with their new kites and the sunshine, and with them were several adults including a 75-year-old man with thin wisps of gray hair and a new girlfriend. I said hello and shook hands and we talked briefly about memories from 30-some years earlier, a time […]

We’ve barely been back to our Hamilton home three weeks and My Bride, the lovely one who has made it her life work to give a voice to the voiceless, has already made her presence felt. Last weekend she led the Steps to Deliver Change Walk at the Dundas Driving Park, where about 200 local […]

‘Don’t let your hearts be troubled,’ is what he said. ‘Trust in God. Trust also in me. My Father’s house has plenty of room.’ This is what Jesus told his friends. That he was going to get things ready. That he’d come back to get his friends when things were all set. He’d have to […]

It was Mother’s Day, Day 7 of it all, Day 7 since Timothy Bosma left his Hamilton home for a quick test drive of his truck with a couple of strangers and then vanished. And it was my girls who prayed for him. ‘Dear Jesus,’ Liz said. We were on the 401, in the van, in the busyness of the […]

The truth of the matter is that we choose very little in life. We are born in a certain place to certain parents. We are sent to a certain school. And if we were just one neighbourhood over, if we were just one year older, if that something else had been said to start that […]

We were eating. It was the first meeting with my side of the family since all of us, the Froese 5, returned to Canada. And my nine-year-old, Liz, was explaining everything that I had taught her. Ever. ‘Daddy says not to wear high heels. It’s bad for your back,’ she explained. ‘This is the only thing Daddy has […]

Back from Uganda, now in Canada for our first full week, the question from someone happy to see us is given to Jon. ‘So, what do you like the most about Canada?’ Jon: ‘The clean toilets.’ You think my son is a funny boy. He is. But clean toilets, something we, naturally, don’t like to […]

One day, maybe, science will measure just what exactly happens to the deepest part of our beings when we go home — what happens not just to our emotions, but what happens physiologically in our organs, in our cells, in our very molecular makeup when we go to the place where we belong. I don’t mean […]

We’re in the moment saying hello to an old, balding gentleman. It’s Jon and myself. The old man is a sociologist and professor and writer who had just made us laugh and think and wonder, along with Mom and Liz and several hundred others in the crowd. He had just talked about giving. How do we give? […]

Time is a funny thing. We tend to believe that we have more than we do but wish we had more even when we misuse what we’ve been given. Then there’s that strange sensation of going back in time, at least when flying through time zones from one side of the ocean to the other. […]

We’re en route from Africa to Canada and finishing a few days in Amsterdam, where Justin Bieber recently made his now well-publicized comment in a guestbook at the Anne Frank House that he would hope Anne would have been a so-called belieber. This is what Liz, all of nine, thinks about the controversy. ‘He’s trying […]

We were all on the big bed – this is how we often watch videos on the computer – and it was a 27-minute feature on Anne Frank, the German-Jewish girl in Holland who wanted more than anything to be a writer and, strangely, became just that after her diary was published sometime after she succumbed […]