I have been learning that in life, there are many uncertain roads to walk. Uncertainty seems to be more prevalent now, as many of us face global pandemic uncertainties alongside all the other existing ones…
Intrigued by the description of Rohadi Nagassar’s book When We Belong: Reclaiming Christianity on the Margins, I read the book eager to learn more about enfolding those on the margins into the church…
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“Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one – that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was.”
That’s from Cloud Cuckoo Land, American author Anthony Doerr’s new book.
“Then a moment arrives and everything changes” (64).
In Cloud Cuckoo Land, the world ends roughly five times…
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I’m yanking persistent weeds through the black shroud covering last summer’s flower beds. It’s Good Friday. Steve, who has only 15 days left to live, is sitting in the sun keeping me company – that simple act of marriage – while I weed and muse…
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The time: Ash Wednesday, February 1996. The place: worship in the chapel at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Sitting there, eyes closed, the words of the service washing over me but not really sinking in until suddenly the singing of the psalm refrain began to filter through. The voices lifted in prayer were singing “Mon Dieu, donnez moi un coeur nouveau….”
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I struggled with the meaning of Lent this year. With the wars and so many conflicts in our own town, country, and the world, I wondered what my Lenten practices should be? Would fasting from food help in a world full of suffering and uncertainties? What should be my prayer focus? What should I do as almsgiving for Lent this year?
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We first wrote “twelve hours of daylight” in 2016 as part of an anthology (FEAST) of spoken word poems that are still unpublished. Like most of our work, we take our deep love of the scriptures and weave them together to speak to current realities. In this particular poem, there are a few references to cities, including Vancouver and Montreal, where we were living at the time of writing…
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It’s been two years since the world began shutting down where I live in Saskatoon. My Facebook and google photo memories have been popping up these past few weeks with the events that I still remember as the last time I did this or that.
I see the memory of my gratitude for my birthday gathering and I can’t help but think “ahh, the last party we threw.” …
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When Amy asked me to write a reflection about Lent, I wasn't sure if I would do it. To be honest I wasn't sure if I was qualified to do this as my first “real” introduction to Lent was from people around the New Leaf table and my mother-in-law. Because in my tradition, we don't really observe Lent. Growing up in Texas, I thought it was only for Catholic people to do…
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Most years I have come to long for Lent, and this year perhaps more than most. I’m not sure how I was first initiated into practicing this season but it likely began with noticing the change in liturgical colours decorating my rural Protestant church. Purple must have captured my imagination…
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As the scene opens, in Luke 2, there are no indications that tonight would be unlike any other night. The ones keeping watch are not an elite military unit or a secretive spy agency. Just an ordinary group of shepherds pulling another night shift.
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I cannot remember a time in my life where I have heard the word peace more often than I have in the last few years. It seems everyone everywhere is longing and calling for peace.
Maybe you've heard it in the cries of Canadian protestors who took to the streets over police brutality, racism, and the uncovering of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children. "No justice, no peace"…
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As I write this Advent devotional, my heart is heavy. Heavy with the weight and tension of 2021. Heavy with pandemic tensions, the tensions of racial unrest, family tensions, health concerns. This year, my roads have been barricaded, my finances eroded, my relationships damaged, and my children hurt…
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Christmas 1914—it was only five months into the First World War. Cultural memory remembers this war as senseless and wasteful, ending an era of stability for the West. I was taught in school that this was the war that disabused the West of their own civility in war—with the introduction of chemical warfare, machine guns, and far more powerful artillery than the world had seen up to this point…
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I am not sure when I first became aware of the way my subconscious converses with my conscious self through song. But in the same way you begin to see the same car you just purchased, around every corner, I notice it happening all the time now…
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We live in a world that can easily consume us with its catastrophes, commercials and cacophonies. These come at us from our larger world, or our smaller worlds; there is noise from every side vying for our attention, trying to prop up some image of what an ideal world or life should be…
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“Mary was a total bada**!” she blurted out, and then almost immediately covered her mouth. This spontaneous (and hilarious) outburst happened one Sunday morning while our community was walking through Mary’s Song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-53)…
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Growing up, Christmas was a relatively quiet experience. My mom often worked through the holidays, and living on a hobby farm meant we weren’t going far if we were to go anyway. The one day I’d look forward to was the one day my aunt, uncle and cousin would come to visit…
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The past few months have been a particular season of stillness and readiness in Advent for my wife Bonnie and I. This has been one of the hardest years I can remember, encompassing family losses, pandemic social collapse and isolation, health failures, and surgery…
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