My daughter and I once turned on the TV in time to catch the last few minutes of a movie; just enough to grasp the plotline. It featured a pair of lovers – he was sixty, she sixteen. After “The End” slipped slowly off the screen, we sat silent, pondering. …
I loved summer camp as a kid. Horseback riding. Cavorting in the lake. Fashioning tacky crafts from macaroni and matchsticks, paper plates and plaster of Paris. Gathering round campfires singing Clementine, Kumbaya and my favourite, Dat’s vut I learned at da school, yuh, yuh! That one began (hand on head) …
I once interviewed a Canadian who had twice summited Mount Everest. “I wasn’t trying to get to the top,” Dave Rodney said, remembering the most perilous portions of the climb—crossing ladders placed as bridges over almost bottomless crevasses. “…Just to the next rung on the ladder.” Everest climbers surround us. …
My favourite childhood Christmas gift showed up beside our scrawny tree on Christmas morning, unwrapped. To Beverly and Kathy. Love, Mommy and Daddy. My father spent part of his adult life as a construction worker. He built churches – a prelude to the later decades when he and Mom propped …
Scene 1. OutsideWal-Mart. December, years ago. A loaded buggy rolls down a slight incline towards me. We collide. “Whoa!” I grab its side to stay upright. A cherubic face peers from among piles of bags and boxes. Wide eyes meet mine. They belong to an infant. “I just got run …
I’d rather go to a saint’s funeral than a sinner’s party. Marking a life well lived calls me higher. Reminds me to live in such a way that my grandchildren will remember my love and follow my faith. Such was my mother Agnes’s farewell. Mom was the sweet and sticky stuff …
“It’s time to get your faith dancing,” croons gospel singer Sandi Patty. I’m sure she means those good days, when you live up to what you say you believe, and know you’d die for the same. When you sit slow at Jesus’ feet, and stand fast for what you know …
When I learned about a former parishioner’s death from a mutual friend, the Preacher and I didn’t question whether to attend her funeral. Of course we’d go. Dorothy’s family (name changed) regularly attended our last church. A few years earlier, the Preacher had officiated at her husband’s funeral. Both were …
Like the sweeping arc of a lighthouse beam, illuminating, for one glorious moment, some unutterably lovely scene, a beautiful season of life will soon end for our family. Our six grandbeans can no more race the three hundred steps between their parsonage and our home, the shortest legs pumping …
When the ushers in the church I attended last week counted the money in the offering plate, they found something they didn’t expect. I don’t know what, but I know they didn’t expect it. I also think they likely had a good laugh at me behind my back. I understand. …
