Have you ever been in a hospital? Well, you might say, “I think I was born in a hospital, but I don’t remember that.” Or maybe you remember being in a hospital because you spent some time there when you were sick or had to get some treatment for a broken bone or something similar….
Jeffrey Mackie-Deernsted, Archdeacon of the Klondike, in the Yukon, says he hears the same song at almost every event he attends. Sung by the Hän singers, an intergenerational group from the Tr’ondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation, it is “a prayer song, hoping that the salmon will come back.” “In the six years that I’ve been here,…
Last night’s good intentions are laid out on my floor. My running leggings. Merino wool pullover. A decent pair of socks. It’s 5:33 am, my alarm has gone off, and I’m counting raindrops. Maybe this is a sleep-in morning. I roll over and promise that I’ll find time to run later. When I do wake…
To my dear grandchildren, If God blesses you with a normal life span, you will live to see the year 2100. At that time, I will have passed and been buried next to your Oma (who is already in glory), awaiting the day of resurrection. This letter is my encouragement to you, to be read…
Prayer rooms in universities made headlines recently when Quebec introduced a bill to ban their existence. Banning prayer rooms in public universities and banning communal prayers in public spaces are two measures in Quebec’s Bill 9 on Laïcité (Secularism), introduced in November. The bill also extends an earlier ban on religious symbols into daycare settings,…
Engaging in the arts can be a deeply spiritual act – an expression of worship, reflection and even healing. Through creating, we can enter a space where faith and imagination meet, where the Spirit speaks not only through words but also through images. This fall, I joined a Christian art therapy group hosted virtually by Genesis…
Do they remember, that girl /
treading water in her cabin /
or the mother who held on /
for a long, last hour, praying /
until the tree itself gave way?
There’s been a lot of drama in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) these past few years. I could use a break; maybe you too? The CRC has suffered self-inflicted wounds. We’re losing churches and pastors. We’re short on trust, and all we have left is procedure. We haven’t found ways to give and receive forgiveness,…
I go down to the river to pray. /
Its water tumbles to the Mississippi, /
a major artery, open to the open sea . . .
A few weeks ago, I stopped by a local Canadian Tire store to pick up a pack of paper garden bags in preparation for starting our spring garden cleanup. I took my pack of bags to the nearest cashier, a young man of Indian descent who, according to his nametag, was Rupinder. I noticed Rupinder…
Lazy! That was a charge. We had a La-Z-boy chair at home, but being lazy was forbidden. We were a busy family. I had a paper route at age 12, sold Fuller Brush at 15 and worked full-time every summer thereafter. I was a product of the Protestant work ethic, Dutch immigrant culture and Depression…
When a Christian Reformed Church (CRC) pastor prayed a prayer lifting up Indigenous ways of being, Shannon Perez recalls feeling for the first time as if “I could belong here as my full self.” At the time, Perez was a young volunteer member of the CRC’s Canadian Aboriginal Ministry Committee (now known as the Canadian…
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