"I've got too many bad memories of the holidays, especially Christmas," a friend told me some years ago. "Everybody seems to be having a wonderful time, while I can barely hold it together. What can I do?" She was asking because she … Read more
Author Archive
How To Get To Know Who We Are
I helped my husband write his resumé when he applied for a job — and he got it, over 100 other applicants! I thought that I could do the same for others, so I advertised. My first client said that she was a teacher and needed a resumé … Read more
Truck Tire On The Beach
When I was about a year old and my sister was two, my parents deposited both of us in an old truck tire on a beach of the Bering Sea. Then, they went away to search for the glass balls that came off Japanese fish nets and floated up to the … Read more
Not A Weedwhacker!
I had students coming to my home to help ready my garden for planting, but I had no tools. At the time, I was working as a greeter at our downtown credit union, right inside the front door. A friend said that he'd bring me something to … Read more
She's Not Worried
In response to a developer's proposal to build a sixteen-story condominium on all three sides of my nearly 200-year-old house, I'd made a seven-foot yard sign. His professionally printed sign was three times the size of mine with many … Read more
No Penguins
"Look at that!" A petite engineering student was pointing to Penguin Press's thick History of Canada on my bookshelf. "I didn't even know we had penguins in Canada!" she said. "And they have so much to say about them!" I couldn't … Read more
Cabin In The Woods
Sixty-seven years ago, I spent my last summer at Bible camp, always with the same counsellor, Christine, who wore jeans and old plaid shirts at a time when no other woman in my life did that. I trusted her enough to speak up during evening … Read more
Mountain In The Front Yard
The rugged Selkirk Mountain Range, spanning Canada and the USA, is home to grizzly bears, cougars, and wolves. When my father was still able to go down into the mines, we lived at the foot of one of the mountains, in tenement housing … Read more
One Cold Easter
One Easter Sunday in Alaska when I was very small, we opened our front door and a wall of snow higher than the house looked back at us. There was no use digging through it. All the way out to the street would be just as deep. We'd have to … Read more
Wrong House
Back in the early 1960s, I often took on odd jobs in Portland, Oregon, USA, where I was a student. One day, my assignment was at an address in an affluent suburb. The door would be unlocked — those were innocent days. I was to tidy the … Read more
Doubts And Dungeons
While my husband went to university, I ran a hostel for teenage runaways in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Kids from every small town came to the city for what they thought would surely be fun times and adventure, only to wind up beaten, lost, … Read more
Wiser Behind The Wheel
During my first year at university, I moved back in with my parents. But school was in another town, requiring me to drive there if I enrolled. Cars didn't rust out where we lived, and my father kept an old car going for each of the six of … Read more
Baby Snatcher
A large man was kicking in my front door, interrupting the nap that I'd been taking with my children, ages three and four. "I want my kids!" he was screaming. There was no time to run and hide, so I bundled my sleepy two under the … Read more
Who Knows Where We Should Be?
One of the most helpless things that we ever do in life is to have the entire care of a newborn baby. The fact is that that is what the Christmas story is all about — not just any baby, but the Son of God. I was just home from the … Read more
Glorious Hard Times
Pregnant with our last child, I begged my husband to stop sending the Unwed Mother Worker from her job with Children's Aid to visit me whenever she was near the tiny village where we lived temporarily. My husband was her boss, so she had … Read more
What Do I Do Now?
Once I had come to believe, to step out in faith, and to embrace the truth of God's offer of salvation, I wondered, What do I do now? Some have summed up the Christian life after first believing as Trust God. Clean house. Help others. … Read more
Living Through Times Like Ours
When I was seven, my father worked in the Mammoth and Morning coal mine in Washington State, USA, till his frozen lungs wouldn't let him go underground anymore. We knew what "poor" was, but "jobless" was a whole other experience for our … Read more
You And What Army?
When I look back over God's hand in my life, a time when I was in charge of a hostel for runaways in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, comes up. The police brought me two teenage girls, who knotted bed sheets while I was doing something … Read more
There's A Vulture On Your Windowsill
Many years ago, I received a phone call from some local disk jockeys at the radio station downtown asking me to gather up what we called a gaggle of politically active older women, to come down when their phone-in program was on air, to … Read more
Best Lists Ever
We often travelled by skin boat (called a umiak) when visiting our family's tin mine in the White Mountains in Alaska, USA. The boats were made of walrus hide stretched over a framework. In my first year of life, wrapped completely in … Read more
An Odd Place For Trauma
"Cuckoo", "nuts", "gone bananas", "gaga" … So many derogatory words describe the battle with mental illness — all of them unkind. But it is a different story on the receiving end. My poor afflicted aunt was left in charge of us one … Read more
I Don't Need To Know What Will Happen Tomorrow
When I was young, I was lonely, despite being one of four children close in age. My sisters read romance comic books and snuck makeup. Unsupervised, I invented games in that small mountain mining town in northern Washington state, USA. … Read more
On Being The Perfect Mother
When I was young, I had determined to be the perfect mother, but that was before encountering the unfamiliar subway system in Toronto, Canada, with my two children, aged three and four. It was Monday. The day before, I'd heard a study of … Read more
Oh, Her Again
I wrote awhile back about calling 911 for a woman lying in the grass beside a parking lot, with all that she owned in the world scattered around her. When the firemen arrived and saw the woman on … Read more
One Of Today's Greatest Temptations
"Is this guy any good?" I heard a customer ask my husband, as I came downstairs into our tiny bookshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was holding a copy of The Great Code: The Bible As Literature. The back cover of the book was a … Read more
The Spiritual Sledgehammer
After living in 34 different rental accommodations, my husband and I finally managed to buy a house. Since 1840, it had been zoned commercial, with the business on the ground floor, and living space on the top floor. The upstairs had … Read more
What The Books Did
Over twenty years ago, my husband's studies in contemporary philosophy had pushed him into ceasing to believe, and the abuse of our sons by their choirmaster had convinced me that the church, which we thought we knew, didn't exist, and … Read more
A Day At The Post Office
Ah, the post office, a place where we all have to go at Christmas, even if it is with a smashed-and-broken soul, as I had then. The loudspeaker was blaring a loop of hollow-eared music from which every smidgen of spirituality had been … Read more
Impossible, God's Favourite Word
Someone said, It isn't the load that wears us down. It's the way that we carry it. They might've added, It's the fact that we carry it, at all. I was in the job market for many, many years, under-qualified, as I worked to support … Read more
A Streetcar Named Life
My barely school-aged children decided to become independent in a big city when we had to ride a streetcar home. Instead of standing beside me, they spread out, taking whatever seats were available. So, they weren't paying attention at … Read more
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