The great part of every life is made up of duty. While we certainly experience many delights and enjoy many distractions, there is more of duty to life than anything else. The God who creates and calls us also assigns to us many obligations, many responsibilities, many tasks and assignments. The great majority of what…
The road is narrow. The path is long. The way is rough. Yet God has called each one of us to run the race of the Christian life. Our every step in this great race is taken in the presence of deadly enemies, our every stride opposed by the world, the flesh, and the devil.…
Nick’s gravestone has finally been installed, and I have come to see it for the very first time. I have been looking forward to this day and dreading this day in equal measure. For months I have had to visit an unmarked grave, a patch of bare earth with no way to identify the name…
Those who explore the vast boreal forests of Canada are rarely far from a bunchberry dogwood, a plant so common that some have suggested it ought to be Canada’s national plant. The cornus canadensis is a little shrub that often carpets the floors of the great fir and spruce forests. A perennial, its shoots rise…
There are not many in this world who are at risk of drowning in an ocean of encouragement, of being swept away by a tsunami of cheer, of being pulled under by great waves of comfort. There are not many who receive so much encouragement that they never have reason to feel doubts, never have…
My favorite cities to explore are the ones that have come together organically rather than according to a plan. Where some city centers were built on a grid with each building aligned closely with the road beside it and each street meeting the others at a perfect 90-degree angle, I prefer the cities that arose…
Legend tells of a humble old man who wished to do good to others, but not to receive their praise. So he wrote letters of blessing, epistles of encouragement, placed them in bottles, and set them afloat on the seas where, through the power of wind and wave, they went through the world, cheering many…
It is a hard truth, but also an intuitive truth: God disciplines the ones he loves and chastises his children. After all, what father does not at times have to correct his son, for what son does not at times need correction? In this way discipline is proof of a father’s concern for his child,…
Happy birthday, my boy! You’re 21 today! Or you would be. Do you celebrate birthdays in heaven? Do you even mark days, months, and years? I confess, I have only just begun to realize how little I know about the place you have gone to be. I’ve got many questions, but few answers. Then again,…
An elderly man, bedridden through a long and terminal illness, wished to see the Rocky Mountains before he died. Unable to travel, yet being a man of some means, he hired a number of skilled artists and dispatched them to the West. To each he gave orders to bring him a painting that would display…
Though few tools are simpler than a plumb line, few are more effective at their task. A plumb line is simply a pointed weight—a plumb bob, or plummet, if you prefer—that has been suspended from a cord. The bob dangles from the cord and, through the consistent downward pull of gravity, establishes a vertical reference.…
In the warmth of a Canadian summer, in the reaches of a distant forest, a maple seed falls from the sky. This seed, called a samara, is a masterpiece of design that looks and behaves much like the blades of a tiny helicopter. As it falls through the air it spins, and this spinning action…
My thoughts these days turn often to heaven. In those moments when I hover between asleep and awake, in those moments when I bow my head to pray, in those moments when I lift my voice to sing, my mind turns often to that place and to its people. My father made the journey there…
My family moved a number of times when I was a child. The first home I remember was near the center of Toronto, a little house that has long since been torn down and replaced by a modern monster. From there we moved to one of the city’s up-and-coming eastern suburbs where we had an…
I always felt safer in the dark when carrying a MagLite. There was something about its size, about its heft, about its sheer brightness that made me feel better, that made me feel safer, when I would walk through the lonely woods at night. The MagLite was the flashlight of brave police officers, of well-trained…
Have you ever bitten into a green tomato? Have you ever sunk your teeth into a fall apple during the heat of summer or into a summer strawberry during the cool of spring? Have you ever listened to a choir’s first rehearsal, read a book’s first draft, gazed at an artist’s initial sketches? Have you…
Suppose a young, ambitious, seminary-trained, godly pastor was given the choice between a large church and a small church as his first charge. Which should he prefer? Which should he prioritize? Theodore Cuyler took on this question in his book How To Be a Pastor which was written in the early twentieth century. His answer…
The past couple of decades have seen an unprecedented rise in the use of pornography and an associated decline in the social stigma that accompanies it. Pornography has been downgraded from scandalous to humorous, from aberrant to mundane. Rare today is the young man (or young woman) who has not at least dabbled in it.…
How many tears do we shed over the course of a lifetime? From the days of infancy when we cry out from hunger and discomfort, to the days of old age when we weep from the agony of physical pain and the sorrow of compounding loss, we are creatures who cry, creatures who express inward…
The Bible is a book of many metaphors. Almost all of its most precious truths are taught through vivid word pictures. Even a brief look through its pages will turn up hundreds of them—God as shepherd, his people as sheep; Jesus as head, the church as his body; the Bible as nourishment, its words as…