“What gives us permission to disregard Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17:20-23, and to split and start yet another denomination?” Recently, I have been asked this question and variants of it. Christian Reformed (CRC) churches and folks are wrestling with questions of disaffiliation and forming a new denomination or network of churches. Given the…
Author and scholar Daniel Taylor has a succinct definition of the genre of memoir: “Memoir is remembered pain.” Ineke Neutel’s One Thousand Fears certainly fits that category as she probes her wounded childhood in the frontline city of Nijmegen during WWII. Neutel’s father was Reformed pastor Wiebe van Dijk, a man responsible for his wife,…
Post-war immigrant Paul Boers built a hugely successful greenhouse construction company in the Niagara region, throughout Canada and overseas. As his son Arthur testifies to in this unsettling memoir, though, there is far more to this man’s story than business success; their father-son relationship suffered through years of painful failure. With every book Arthur Boers…
Robert Bruinsma remembers the day his friend, Sam, told him he was going to die. It was a few days before Christmas 2017, and Bruinsma was visiting Sam (not his real name) in the hospital. Sam told Bruinsma that his request for medical assistance in dying (MAID) had been approved and would be carried out…
As I wrote last month, a kintsugi workshop helped me realise that God can bring beauty out of brokenness (“What If It Could Be Beautiful?” Aug. 7). All brokenness – whether physical, emotional, relational or situational – results from sin, but not all is a direct result of our own sin. Some forms of brokenness…
When 19 children and two teachers are murdered we cry, where’s Jesus? When a white supremacist kills 10 African Americans in a supermarket, where’s Jesus? When nations wage war bringing death, destruction, famine, homelessness and economic chaos, where’s Jesus? When loved ones suffer from cancer or mental illness, where’s Jesus? One might treat this question…
Like small, dark clouds dotting the horizon, I should have recognised those random twinges as indicators of a bigger issue to come. While riding my motorcycle last year I noticed odd little surges of pains now and then in my hips. Our last few rides in the autumn began to feel quite awkward, as if…
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