prayer

Courage and sacrifice will never be forgotten

It was the nightly news and she wore a large summer hat and a smile on her face while she sat in a golf cart and talked to the cameras, but there was pain too, we all know that, because her husband was murdered last summer. And while the wheels of justice turn slowly to […]

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God’s not dead. He’s living inside my son.

She’s an astronaut, a space walker, a scientist of scientists, way up there in the cosmos, first floating free for some time, just on a tether, then, after some drama, getting into a tiny space capsule, into her driver’s seat of sorts. She is bright and pretty and has a one in ten million view of creation,

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Eat. Pray. Drive.

Once there was a dad who, every morning on the way to school, would pray for safety on the road. He was in a foreign country and the driving was the most dangerous part. Sometimes he’d even pray at other times of the day, ‘God, just keep me alive in this place for the sake

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The hills are alive with the sound of mystery

So over the weekend Hannah and I did a little dance because Hannah wanted to dance in her new birthday bathrobe, this during an intermission of The Sound of Music, the first time all five of us sat down to watch it together. Maybe Hannah danced too because we’re still basking in the glow, that

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Hannah sees the judge, Nelson Mandela smiles at us

It’s Entebbe, Uganda’s port of entry and departure, and we’re almost on a plane over the ocean and back to our home, the one where you can’t wear a t-shirt outside during this time of year. And on the table in front of me is an African news magazine with a picture of Nelson Mandela,

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Lose your life, find your bliss

It’s the other day and we’re on the streets of Uganda, on the morning school run again, this time behind a tanker truck plodding in front of us. “Danger,” it says in red letters that are big enough. Then, some distance below, near the license plate, “God bless my work.” Such open prayers and other

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On prayer, danger and flying into it all

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, August 17, 2013)

HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It’s a strange world, especially here on what is, for all I know, my deathbed. It’s malaria and I’m dreaming. Or maybe in the fight of it I’m actually hallucinating.

I see a friend, a writing mentor, a bear of a man, the sort you can disappear into when he hugs you. He’s an American who’s never been to Africa, no not once. But he’s somehow made it over the ocean and through the walls to kneel at my Ugandan bedside.

­“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I’m praying for you.”

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Praying for Tim Bosma. Growing young.

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

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