Recent Columns

‘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 […]

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. […]