Recent Columns

There were two roads and they diverged in a yellow wood and who among us would not want to take them both? But life is full of decisions that say, no, you must choose one or the other and your very future will depend on the choice. Not just to choose if we go with […]

Liz has a pile of CDs in her lap and she’s rotating the songs, all our favourites, and we’re driving and Fleetwood Mac’s old classic ‘Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow’ comes on and it’s good, it’s all so very good. It’s the sort of song that can say a lot at a wedding. In fact, not long after […]

(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.

Today’s joke. Who is richer?  A millionaire or a man who has 12 children? The man who has 12 children. Why? Because he doesn’t want any more.

So, since you wanted to know, no, Hannah’s adoption did not go through earlier this week. The judge didn’t show up. But this was vexing enough to prompt a column. Two of them, actually. And anytime I can get a column out of a day’s events, it’s not so bad. Stay tuned to this blog’s other side. […]

The cat is meowing, the sun is shining and the children are across the way, at the park, playing in the sand under the mango tree, excited as ever about the castles and rivers and other things they’ve been working on feverishly for several days now, excited that last night’s light rain hasn’t washed much […]

Today, April 8, 2013, is, we hope, the day we finally get Hannah’s adoption approved. We have been here before, to this court in Jinja, Uganda, but the wheels for this sort of thing, especially in Africa, can grind slow. Today, Hannah has on her best dress and, with us – and her siblings and […]

A child is just a child, you say, and when I was younger my own father would make a point of telling us what his father would tell him, namely that ‘Children are to be seen and not heard.’ Some children are neither seen nor heard, true, especially the many orphans – estimates are as […]

He was a hard-working man, which isn’t the worst, except that he worked so hard and so long and his love for it all was so very satisfying that his wife and children stopped expecting him to join them around the dinner table, never mind the Little League games and the school plays and evening […]

We’ve heard the story so many times – Jesus died, Jesus rose from the dead – that we think we know something about something, and maybe we do know, if nothing else, a profound hope, the hope of eternal life not on some fluffy cloud playing a harp with cherubs floating around, but a hope of […]

(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.

It was in the garden where he talked to his Father. ‘Abba,’ he said, which is to say, ‘Daddy.’ ‘Daddy, I know you can do anything. And I know you can take this away from me. This cup. I know you can take it away. It’s too much. Too bitter. Too awful. Daddy. Please, Daddy, […]

(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.

We were talking about talking animals, the type that talk in Narnia. To think that a horse or a fawn or a messianic lion for that matter would not only have a mind of its own, but actually express it in one way or another is something that speaks to the child in us, or, at […]

(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.’