Recent Columns

(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.

The thing about dragons is that you have to believe they exist before you can go and slay them. And even after you believe, you have to somehow care. It’s much easier to let any old dragon open its mouth and breathe its fire and destroy what it may while you leave the poor villagers […]

To be a hero can be a strange thing, something we were reminded of in recent days with the death of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the man – the hero to some – credited more than anyone for liberalizing abortion in Canada. It’s a death that has led to the spilling of much ink in the […]

She was in Seat 24A and she looked like she had lived, but still too young to be a grandmother, yet this was it, she was returning to her home in Calgary from a visit with her daughter and grandson. There was both an empty seat and pleasant conversation between us. It was the book […]

Ambition, like contentment, is one of those strange words to talk about with the children because it means everything and nothing at the same time. In a sense we are all ambitious because we are all looking. Through our actions more than our words, this is the lasting message that we leave our kids: we are looking for […]

As the allegations against Ourtown Mayor Freddy Ford continue to dominate headlines, The Daily Dad caught up with the mayor between meetings for this exclusive interview. Following is the transcript of Daily Dad’s conversation with the embattled mayor. Daily Dad: Mr. Mayor. How are you? Can I get a minute? Mayor: It’s fine. All fine. […]

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 […]