Category: Devotional

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

When my husband John was still here, we used to go on short-term mission trips. These trips were four to six weeks long. We were very aware that we could not accomplish a lot in that short time period, but our prayer was that the group … Read more

Jewels can sometimes be found among the junk. My wife calls it "junking", and she does it quite often. When possible, I usually tag along. We don't actually visit junkyards or stores, but we call what we do junking because we do it among … Read more

Periodically, when my grandmother was baking a cake or a pie, I got to help her with the enjoyable but tedious task of cracking nuts. Each nut required a different amount of hammer force to crack or break the shell without ruining its … Read more

Do you like surprises? I posed this question recently in a not-very-significant survey (I asked only three people). I received two responses in the positive and one in the negative. Even the two positive responses were later qualified … Read more

A painting that an artist gave me recently had been no more than a colourful garden scene, until it suddenly exploded with new relevance. That "Aha!" experience was too exciting to keep to myself. So here it goes: It began with an … Read more

My granddaughters and I, plus two of the dogs, had to spend the day in Whitehorse, Yukon. One of the dogs, Simon, was having surgery, which meant that we had to be on the road by 6 a.m. in order to arrive at the vet's by 8 a.m. The other … Read more

There was a time, before I trusted in Jesus' knowing better than myself, when everything worldly seemed up for grabs. It was a time of exploring our coming-of-age freedoms. For me, this included a girlfriend. Latterly, I realized that … Read more

During the COVID-19 shutdown, for more than a year and a half now, Greta and I have watched a great number of services on YouTube from a church in the Netherlands, which we attended a number of times when we went there on a family visit. … Read more

I remember a dream that I had when my oldest son was nine. He and I and two angels dressed in white were standing in heaven beside a giant Bible, taller than we were. The pages of the Bible had fallen open to these words: In the dream, I … Read more