Posts from August 2014

It is fifty years ago this year that in Victoria I made a special trip from Dandenong to Geelong. The reason for the trip was that the Geelong Reformed Church was presenting to the other Reformed Churches in Victoria a new program for children and young people. A minister and his wife (George and Harriet Van Groningen), who had come to us from the Christian Reformed Churches of North America, had introduced the Geelong congregation to the American Cadet and…

The death of Robin Williams this past week caused much commentary in the news and a flurry of responses in the social-media. But the commentary was not just about the death of an iconic actor and comedian. It appears that the actor, who was just 63, took his own life – apparently as the culmination of a long struggle with depression. That has led to much soul-searching and (understandably) an increase in calls to charity help-lines. As someone commented on…

Has it ever happened to you that a certain word comes into your mind and you keep repeating that word to yourself? The word rolls off your tongue – at least mentally it does – and you relish the sound of it. You then begin to wonder how that word came to be. Why did that particular combination of vowels and consonants come to represent that particular thing? I had that happen to me the other day with the word…

It’s one of the earliest words that very young children learn to say: Mine! A three-year-old will say it defiantly when he snatches his toy from his younger sister. The sad thing is that some fifty-three-year-olds can still say it just as defiantly. It’s one thing to endorse the right to ownership and private property, it’s quite another thing to cling so tenaciously to what is ours that we lose sight of the fact that under God we are merely…