Category: Newsletters

READ THIS ​When we experience seasons (the more Christian-y way of saying a period of time) where God doesn’t seem close, when we feel lost, it can feel like a Dark Night of the Soul. St John on the Cross was a 16th-century Spanish monk in the mystic tradition whose poem – Dark Night of…

READ THIS I first started running when we lived in the French Alpes. I had crashed my mountain bike, doing several summersaults on/off it, and had to carry my bike back out to find the trail. Apparently, I had popped my shoulder out of joint and then back in as I fell – and I…

READ THIS Last year our family suffered a violent armed attack in our house. Armed men entered our house, robbed us, and seemed to be set on killing me.The attack was possible partially because a man who had worked for us since the week we arrived in the country betrayed us. He schemed with the…

READ THIS If you fly low over Burundi you see a network of paths, connecting clusters of houses spread over the hills. You notice the lack of cities and highways, but also this web of red dirt paths cutting through the lush green hills. Drive a Land Cruiser down one of those paths and you…

​READ THIS I need to start with this: I often say to people: “you can’t tell yourself you’re not allowed to be sad/disappointed because ‘someone has it worse than you’ – any more than you’re not allowed to be happy because ‘someone has it better than you.’ I really don’t agree with the response “well…

READ THIS I can still remember the day, the afternoon, the moment even, very vividly. We were living in France, where I was completing my Ph.D. One of the things I realized very early (like day one of each class), was I was behind essentially all my classmates on the actual subject matter of our…

READ THIS Yesterday I sat down to watch the sun rise over the valley in front of our house. Due to this being almost the shortest day of the year here 2°south of the equator – the sun came up just after 06.00 instead of just before 06.00. I had my bible out, and I was praying “God be present…

​READ THIS Imagine this situation, which plays out every day on the hills around us. A young child gathers firewood or fetches water. Getting older they’ll graze the family’s three goats if they’re a boy, or tend to younger siblings if they’re a girl. They help with tilling, planting, harvesting the family field. As they…

READ THIS The job I currently have involves spending a lot of my time overseeing the construction at our hospital here in rural Burundi. I spent 12 years in post-secondary education, culminating in a doctorate that specifically trained me to be a research professor of management. So let the record show that I am no…

READ THIS The job I currently have involves spending a lot of my time overseeing the construction at our hospital here in rural Burundi. I spent 12 years in post-secondary education, culminating in a doctorate that specifically trained me to be a research professor of management. So let the record show that I am no…