♪ Do you remember the good old days? When we could walk to the corner store, pick up milk, chocolate bars, maybe a new bike? You can’t get away with that anymore. They have surveillance cameras now. Well, theft is no laughing matter.

♪ I was thinking about Adam and Eve while I pushed my wheelbarrow full of dirt and weeds to my discard pile. What was tending the garden like for them?

♪ According to the information we have from our churches across Canada, approximately half our congregations have a missions committee of some sort—though how they function varies.

♪ A prayer from the African pastor Augustine in the 4th century has stirred my thought for some time: God, “you were closer to me than I am to myself.” If you place that prayer alongside Paul’s prayer that the Ephesians be “filled [with] … all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:19), you quickly find yourself in a bottomless sea of wonder and prayer.

♪ ALEX IS THE boy nobody wants in their class. He’s in grade two and has seemingly limitless energy and zero attention span. His comments and questions are never on topic, and everybody is convinced that he is learning nothing. He’s usually facing away from the teacher, making faces or jokes as they try to teach, and the end of the year is a relief because he is finally somebody else’s problem.

♪ WHEN I ENTERED the academic world recently, I noticed changes in Christian education I had not been aware of. I had not realized education had become so focused on leadership development. Across Canada’s Christian colleges there are now academic degrees in leadership, reams of Christian books written on leadership, and faculty whose sole role is to teach leadership development.

♪ AT THE BEGINNING of this year, I read that DaySpring, the greeting card company, had a Word of the Year Quiz on their website. By selecting a few personal descriptors and Bible verses that resonated with me, I could find a pre-baked, pithy word to construct my life around for the next 365 days (366 with the leap year).

Winter’s first semester was warm, erring on the side of balmy. Albertans tentatively accepted the lingering fall weather, painfully aware they’d been fooled before by the sudden arrival of a tsunamic dump of snow or a frigid pop quiz.

Imagine an EMC time-traveller from the 1920s visiting us today. Would they find any clue that, of all the churches in town, this was their descendant?

One of the many gifts children give us adults is the freedom to be childlike again. There is nothing more freeing than running in a gym playing pool noodle tag. (The fact that I couldn’t keep up is neither here nor there.)

“16 million,” my son places his rent card on the discard pile. Grandpa’s brow furrows. “How did you get that?” My son points to his colorful wild cards.

We’re sitting on a gold mine. The world is gasping for it, and we have it, though we don’t always grasp its biblical beauty.