“How long have you been married?” a friend asked, just after a recent anniversary. “Forty-seven years,” I responded, tossing out the number uppermost in my cognitive surface. All that year, I answered that question the same way. When our next anniversary showed up on the calendar, I took time to …
An embarrassing truth confronts us all. We first-world emperors have no clothes after all. Reassurances of our own lordship, the thoughts that have clothed most of us for most of our lives (we are what we make of ourselves, unconquerable, masters of our own destiny, no God necessary) have toppled …
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. …
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 necessity forced me from the world of freelance writing and speaking into using those skills to earn a regular paycheque, I never imagined the blessing of a desk of my own in a quiet office. Three desks, actually, in three different offices so far. As a former interior decorator, …
An hour before church is set to begin, I find the pastor’s wife weeping in the church nursery. She’s huddled in the chair in the corner by the playpen, pressed deep into it, like a wild thing cornered. Over the last dozen years, she has sequestered herself often here during …
“A crazy dream, that’s all.” The Preacher sat on the edge of the bed, still shuddering. Nightmares often chase him down, robbing precious sleep. “What was it?” I wanted to know. “Lizards. Crawling everywhere.” A plague of lizards, it seems, overwhelming him with their noxious presence. It seemed so …
Today’s itinerary stretches between our son’s place in B.C.’s Kootenay region and my father’s residential care facility in Abbotsford. We set out on Highway #95, the two-lane road connecting Invermere and Golden, B.C. – one of my favourite sections of that route. Under blue sky and dumpling clouds, we motor through vast …
Maybe you were in one of the northbound cars I met on Highway Nine between eight and eight-thirty that Monday morning. You couldn’t have known, and neither could I, that with every rotation, all five bolts on my front tire, driver’s side, got looser. That at any moment every single …
The Preacher and I spoke at one of our former churches a while back. The platform seemed lower and wider, but the church had changed little in two decades. It took a long time to get to my seat—too many friends lined the aisles. And I would have missed Lisa …
