spirituality Archives – Page 3 of 6

Known by our love ( … or the things we’re against?)

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / May 23, 2014 / 2014, brevity of life, Christianity, death, Jim Morrison's grave, Père Lachaise Cemetery, religiosity, spirituality / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – Friday, May 23, 2014)

PARIS ✦ Dead rock stars aren’t the only idols to worship out there. Houses and cars, retirement portfolios, relationships and sex—or, well, religion—can be equally distracting in a fallen world looking for things as nebulous as truth and meaning.

But come to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and see for yourself the cult of rock-star celebrity. In this gothic and tumbledown resting place of some of the world’s best-known artists—Chopin, Bizet, Proust, Oscar Wilde to name a few—Jim Morrison’s grave is by far the most visited.

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This Valentine’s Day, fall in love with the One who knows you

Leave a Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / February 14, 2014 / 2014, African university life, God's love, love, marriage, relationships, sexual culture, sexuality, singleness, spirituality, Valentine's Day / 4 minutes of reading

(The UCU Standard – Monday, February 3, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s soon Valentine’s Day and you’re alone.

The flowers are out there and so is the wine, and much more. One would have to be blind and half-dead not to notice. But you’re alone, a rose in the parched dessert, and you don’t know how much longer you can hang on.

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Distracted by distraction

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / February 1, 2014 / 2014, authentic living, journaling, meditation, social media, solitude, spirituality, T.S. Eliot, the harm of social media / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – February 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ If you’re too busy to read this, just ignore it. I mean, really, I understand. We’re well into 2014 and there’s some serious new clinking and clanking that likely needs your attention.

Yes, in our brave new distracted world, the one that never really turns off anymore, (I was recently in a funeral in Uganda where the cell phones rang and rang and rang), it’s a fresh year to slip further into it, this new place where it’s hard to know what – and who — is real.

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What we can learn from Nelson Mandela about solitude

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / February 1, 2014 / 2014, African culture, African politics, Apartheid, meditation, Nelson Mandela, prison, solitude, South Africa, spirituality, suffering / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 1, 2014)

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

— From the poem Invictus

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Much has been made about the tremendous story from Africa that ended 2013, that of Nelson Mandela and the worldwide send-off he was given, and rightly so.

Mandela will be remembered as the embodiment of William Ernest Henley’s poem, Invictus, that 19th-century verse describing a man who, as Henley put it, fell in the clutch of circumstance, who knew the bludgeonings of chance and bloody head, who found wrath and tears and horror, but through it all was unafraid and, in the end, “captain of his soul.”

Well over a month after Mandela’s death, his name is still easily spoken across Africa.

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A measure of success

1 Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / December 9, 2013 / 2013, Christianity, definition of success, Korea, Korean church history, Korean culture, Korean mission movement, South Korea, spirituality / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – December 2013)

DAEJON, SOUTH KOREA ✦ It was on the tenth floor café of a mega-church of 10,000 in this South Korean city, beside a floor-to-ceiling window, where a young man greeted me with a “sir,” and oh, by the way, did I have a word for him, any nugget, anything to help his future?

He knew I was involved with a missions’ conference some floors below and his spirit was so genuine – this is the beauty of Korean culture – that I was and wasn’t surprised when he asked particularly what I thought “success” was.

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What suicide can teach us about fear and living freely

Leave a Comment / Newspaper columns, The Standard / November 1, 2013 / 2013, African university life, Christianity, family, family life, Jesus Christ, relationships, spirituality, suffering, suicide, theology / 4 minutes of reading

(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.’

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On prayer, danger and flying into it all

4 Comments / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / August 17, 2013 / 2013, Christianity, danger, Froese biography, malaria, prayer, spirituality, suffering, travel / 4 minutes of reading

(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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Of grace, forgiveness and tears

4 Comments / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / March 30, 2013 / 2013, African culture, African university life, Christianity, Easter, global violence, Jesus Christ, Jesus' humanity, spirituality, suffering, violence in Africa / 4 minutes of reading

(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.

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