We had just moved to our present farm and were getting started with chickens and gardening. There was even a beaver pond on our property! Our neighbour, who rented the hay field, was mowing next to the beaver pond when a duck flew off her nest and right into the mower. John climbed down, looked…
Dave Larsen’s debut novel, Green Street in Black and White, compactly narrates the backstory of the upheaval of Englewood, a middle-class Chicago neighbourhood, as integration began. The book poses as fiction, though it tells painful truths. The names have been changed – I suspect to protect kind, scared, belatedly guilt-beset white Christian sisters and brothers….
The deafening sounds and scary sights of the war in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, are taking a toll on parents and children – especially as the conflict grinds on toward its fifth year. “When you go into the city, you can hear the sound of sirens. You can see that people are a little bit tense or…
It is a good habit, even a spiritual discipline of sorts, to make careful provisions for the end of one’s life. Especially people with dependents should have a will and other documents in place in case they pass away unexpectedly. For me, the cold winter months seem like a good time to do some updating…
This past Spring, I read Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation by Episcopal priest Adam Bucko. I considered my life and saw that my heart had been repeatedly broken. I revised the question to: What is my greatest heartbreak? It didn’t take long for the answer to emerge – my failings…
This story is about a five-year-old boy named Tommy. It was time for Tommy to go to kindergarten, but Tommy wasn’t sure whether he was going to like kindergarten. He had been told that it would be lots of fun, and that he would learn interesting things and play with new friends. But he would…
Last January, the house I grew up in was empty. My mother had moved in with one of my sisters. Over the spring and summer, we emptied shelves and found new homes for family things, trying to hold on to memories while preparing the house for sale. My parents owned that house for over forty…
I glanced at my clock and saw that it was ten minutes after two in the afternoon. I grabbed my coat and stepped outside to wait for the school bus. Within a few minutes, the bus pulled up, and the driver stepped out to prepare the wheelchair lift. As she worked, the school nurse stepped…
Christmas may not look the same for me now that I’m blind, but it means even more than it used to. My memories of the season are blurred around the edges – the powder-white world is a little more grey, the sparkle of stars a little less bright – and while the lights of the…
Ron Greidanus was born with the twin gifts of being prodigiously talented and being gay. But being born in the late 1960s, the fifth child of six to a hard-working, modestly-educated farm family in the Dutch immigrant community in Huron County, Ontario, it would take a long time before he could accept both of those…
I had dinner with some new friends last month; all of us are caregivers of children with disabilities and developmental challenges. At one point, we discussed the question, “If you could change anything about your child, would you?” It sparked some deep reflections about making changes for our children versus making changes about them. Several…
Anniversaries have a way of shifting our perspective. They invite us to slow down and remember the road behind us, noticing what has changed and what has stayed the same. With Christian Courier marking its 80th year, I’ve been reflecting on nostalgia and memory: how the past shapes who we are today, and how God’s…
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