suffering Archives – Page 5 of 10

Love is our highest calling

Leave a Comment / Christian Week, Newspaper columns / March 12, 2014 / 2014, African culture, African politics, Christianity, East-West relations, gay rights, homosexuality, human rights, relationships, suffering, Uganda's anti-gay law, Ugandan politics / 3 minutes of reading

(Christian Week – March 12, 2014)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ By now you’ve heard plenty about Uganda’s new toughened laws on homosexuality, the news that spread to the West with the fanfare of a dark sporting event.

Even short of jail—terms range from seven years to life—it’s a new day of survival in a horrible state-sanctioned chill.

Several weeks in, like so many things in developing nations, it’s hard to know all that’s happening. Was that murder really a robbery gone bad? And that street beating? Why did she really lose her job? Many things simply don’t make the news here in Uganda.

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After Women’s Day, men … wake up!

2 Comments / New Vision, Newspaper columns / March 8, 2014 / 2014, African culture, human rights, International Women's Day, poverty, relationships, suffering, Women's rights / 5 minutes of reading

(The New Vision – Saturday, March 8, 2014)

MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s International Women’s Day and we’re all happy to celebrate women in Uganda and around the world, but the truth of the matter is that it’s the men who need to come to terms with who they are and why they’re around, or it’s all for nothing.

This is the strangeness of this big yearly celebration. Women’s Day largely revolves around the hard times women face because their men are so hopeless. Plenty of husbands and fathers don’t pull their weight and don’t understand or care how desperately their families need them.

Now I am not about to beat-up myself or my brothers everywhere because I have nothing better to do. The Daughters of Eve are just as fallen as the Sons of Adam. But have an honest look into the homes of Uganda. I’m imagining you see what I see. It’s a bloody mess.

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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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We’ll be home for Christmas (for more than mere words)

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / December 21, 2013 / 2013, childhood anxiety, Christmas, fatherhood, parental fears, parenthood, suffering, the incarnation, the Word, today's children, words / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 21, 2013)

ENTEBBE, UGANDA ✦ It’s the end of another year of words.

Words that have routinely informed us and words that have even sometimes, like summer snow, given a fresh look at everyday things. Like what happened recently in Africa during my children’s nightly reading, a story both troubling and reassuring.

“You know,” I said, after, “things will happen in your life. Bad things. And nobody will be able to save you from them. I won’t be able to and neither will your mother. But let me tell you something. God loves to take these sorts of things and turn them into something good.”

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Timothy Mugisha died in his mother’s arms

2 Comments / Daily Dad / December 4, 2013 / 2013, cancer, death, eternity, friendship, funerals, God's love, God's nature, life after death, our Ugandan home, soulfulness, suffering, Timothy Mugisha / 4 minutes of reading

We arrived at the chapel to find Timothy’s casket sitting heavy at the entrance. This, yesterday morning when we had walked down the familiar green hill to the chapel, the university chapel of dark wood and century-old brick, a place the children have known as Sunday school for some years, a place now to say

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On children and faith and smashing pots

1 Comment / Daily Dad / November 8, 2013 / 2013, Jeremiah, making art, pottery, praying for your children, suffering / 2 minutes of reading

It’s early and the African sun is stretching and the monkeys are making a racket in the banana trees and Liz is feeding the cat and Thomas Merton and Old Man Jeremiah, today’s reading, dance in my head. Merton says that faith is all about discomfort and struggle and don’t let anyone sell you a

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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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When the poor come knocking

Leave a Comment / Hamilton Spectator, Newspaper columns / October 21, 2013 / 2013, African culture, deception, ethics, Mzungus, poverty, rich and poor, suffering / 4 minutes of reading

(The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, September 20, 2013)

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It was late and dark and unusual because the visitor lives hours away and I didn’t expect him. But he came anyway and sat at my front door and cried and told me all about it, how thieves had come the night before.

He had been at church, he explained, at one of those all-night prayer services common in this part of Africa, when the rats did it, when they broke in and cleaned out his house. Clothing, furniture, cash I had recently given for his kids’ schooling, everything gone by sunrise.

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