War and Worship

This is my year of museums—of so many museums. If all goes according to plan, between January and December I will visit museums on every continent and in at least 15 different countries. In many of those places I will visit more than one. I’ve already been to so many that they are beginning to blur together in my memory and I’m having to dig out photos to distinguish them. But this remains clear: in almost every museum in almost …

What Haunts Me About the Humboldt Bus Disaster

On April 6, 2018, the Humboldt Broncos of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League boarded a bus for the two-hour drive to their playoff game in Nipawin. They had no idea that their obscure little hockey team from small-town Saskatchewan would soon be known around the world. At about 5 o’clock that evening their bus collided with a semi truck, causing utter devastation to the vehicle and the 29 passengers within it. Fourteen died immediately and two more in the days …

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Message To My Older Self

If I could roll back time a little, what would my older self say to my younger self? That’s the premise of this short video. I also try to predict what I’ll want to say a few years hence… Transcription What was one thing when you were younger that you thought was going to be really important, but turned out not to be? The stop, drop and roll rule. I mean when you’re a kid, you think that’s going to …

Driving Back Down the Road

The year is still young, but already it has involved a lot of travel—before the end of February I had already spent time in six different countries. This is largely related to my EPIC travel project which, since January 1, has taken me to Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the United States and, of course, my own Canada. In many of these countries, and in many more to come, we are landing at a major airport, picking up a …

I Believe!

Every Christian believes. Belief, faith, is the gateway to the Christian life and we mark our conversion from the moment we first believed: I have heard the gospel, I have put my faith in Jesus Christ. I believe! Belief is the gateway to the Christian life but it is far more than that. I believed in the day I put my faith in Jesus—a once-for-all belief that can never be removed or revoked. But belief is also a decision I need …

Christians Great and Small

Friday morning was the funeral for evangelist Billy Graham, one of the most famous men in the world. Two thousand people attended the invitation-only event. On the guest list were presidents, cardinals, celebrities, and megachurch pastors—an A-list of significant and accomplished people. Friday morning was the memorial service for Irene Morrison. A couple hundred people attended the event which was held in a little country church a hundred miles from nowhere, and open to anyone who knew and loved her. …

2017: A Year in Review

It’s the time of year for blogs and other sites to provide their annual round-up of the year’s most popular articles. I don’t know why we do this, but it seems to be a tradition. On that basis, let me tell you who visited and what they read in 2017. The site served up well over 17,000,000 pageviews this year from somewhere around 5,000,000 people. These people visited from 233 different countries with 74% of them representing the United States. The …

2015: A Year in Review

I am not one of those good bloggers, those by-the-book bloggers. The good ones always know exactly who reads their articles, how many visitors they get each day, how people found their way to the articles, and on and on. But I have never paid much attention to such metrics. However, once or twice a year I put a bit of effort into generating some reports and thought I would share a bit of what happened here in 2015. Here is a …

I Saw Color For the First Time

It took a trip to Bavaria, but I finally saw color for the first time yesterday. Reds and greens at least. And it was pretty amazing. For many years I have known that I have significant red/green color-blindness (and am classified as strong deutan). This is a hereditary condition “caused by an anomaly in the M-cone photopigment gene sequence.” Basically, if you were to look through my eyes, you would see a world dominated by brown. What you see as …

The Major Life Decision That Put My Theology to the Test

It’s always a little easier to help others live the Christian life than to live it myself. It is easy enough to tell others how to face temptation when that particular sin has no hold on me. It is easy for me, a married guy, to give instruction on how to live the single life. And, as I recently discovered, it is easy to tell others how to make decisions when I’m not the one who is facing the life-altering …