Elizabeth, meet Elizabeth
“Hey! So how is fatherhood going?” “It’s picking up,” he told me. “Hah! Well said!” Which goes to show that fatherhood is neither for the faint of heart nor those who want to get much sleep. In this...
View ArticleOpen hands. Open hearts. It’s Christmas.
Today’s post is a wish for a blessed Christmas for you and yours, a wish for peace and joy and all the things that (thank you, Paul) are to be seen at least through a hazy mirror even here … Continue...
View ArticleRemember the signs
It is difficult to leave, to walk out the door onto the road and all that uncertainty, to leave the familiar and walk into the unknown, but it’s what any of us are called to, even as Jill and Eustace …...
View ArticleOne life to live
There are New Year resolutions and most are a waste of breath because if you or me or anyone is going to make a change, if you’re that committed to it down to the atoms in the cells that make …...
View ArticleThe hands of the old and the young
The last note in this space was that life is a gift and life is a mystery, both clichés and both true. The other truth, as true as the sun rising every morning, is that we’re not made to live forever....
View ArticleWant an educational trip? Go to Washington!
It’s Monday morning coffee at the kids’ school, a privileged school if for no other reason than it sits in the middle of Africa’s sunshine and offers parents morning coffee. I wonder aloud about...
View ArticleDon’t read. Don’t feel. Don’t think. (And DON’T tell the kids.)
You never know what might happen when you pick up a book, even a book that has sat on your bookshelf for years like an old bottle of wine aged good and long for just the right moment. Such a … Continue...
View ArticleWinning and losing and other sacred moments
It’s morning, just past sunrise, and the youngest, Child #3, gives me a big hug at the door. “Wish me luck, Daddy!” she says. Today is Track and Field Day at her school. She will run and jump and all …...
View ArticleFroese, the prodigal
The thing about working with words is that they can get tired and worn and they can lose their meaning. The wordsmiths who handle (and mishandle) them can easily forget this. Yours Truly is no less...
View ArticleBantleman’s nightmare, the Brownshirts, and Jesus for president
I woke up this morning and, as I often do, told my wife what I dreamed. Just a dream. Then I read the morning news. That was the nightmare. Trump continues to … you know. Then another story, another...
View ArticleFriends and family
It was this morning and we had just left the kids at school. And we (my cousin and her husband, along with my wife’s cousin — the three of them visiting from Canada) were at the club, in the...
View ArticleI’m under 11. I can play. No, really.
When it’s all over (this two-lives-for-the-price-of-one business, this travel and observing and returning home, then leaving again and looking more and writing at least some of it down), it’s the...
View ArticleSo grab death and scream “Mine!” And what does it turn into?
It’s bedtime. Liz needs to get to the kitchen to make her snack for the next day. “Dad!” she says. “I’m afraid to go out there. Something’s there. I can feel it in my bones!” “That’s arthritis.” + But,...
View ArticleThey’re everywhere
It’s not yet breakfast and I catch Child #1. I bend over to her ear-level. “I have a secret,” I say. “What is it?” she says. I whisper in her ear. “They’re everywhere.” She smiles. Shortly later, I do...
View ArticleWe have a limited democracy around here
It’s dinner. The vote goes in the kids’ favour for what DVD we will watch this evening. (Dad’s latest find, a biography on Rich Mullins, will wait another night for, uh, Laura Ingills and company.)...
View ArticleJust call me The Daily Granddad
We’re taking the long way home. Through the UK. More to follow. Before this, through Athens. More to follow from here also. And before this, transiting through Brussels airport. Yes, that Brussels...
View ArticleOkay, so my son has the dark side in him
Okay, (still catching up here from last time), speaking of watching movies in Uganda, which we were recently with this latest Joseph Fiennes movie, I can report two other things. One relates to the...
View ArticleQueen Elizabeth’s 90th, C.S. Lewis, and other news from The Kingdom
So, we, the five of us, have been out of Africa for a bit, and taking the long way home to Hamilton, and are now in the United Kingdom, specifically in Stratford Upon Avon. Diana, (yes, like the mother...
View ArticleThe joy (and fear) of flying
It was the other day, since my family’s recent return to Canada, and I was on the massage table (I’ve had a bad back for 30 years), and we were talking about her husband. He has MS and it isn’t …...
View ArticleCrossing through Brussels. Staring down the principal.
So, it’s Day 5 of our official return to our own home, Day 4 of the kids’ return to school, that is their Canadian school, this, their annual routine here in Hamilton for the next couple of months. Of...
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