Readers write: August 28, 2017 issue
National church needs to continue leading the way to reconciliation The following letter was originally written to Mennonite Church Canada’s Interim Council and is reprinted at the authors’ request. As walkers on the Pilgrimage for Indigenous Rights, we write to share our gratitude for the leadership and vision offered through MC Canada that made this…
A community with a sense of ‘we’
I was humbled and challenged when I spent the day with some of my Old Order Mennonite relations recently. My cousin Sarah invited me to a quilting at her home near Mount Forest, Ont., saying that she was inviting all her female Frey cousins. The Frey family is large and the number of female cousins…
Happy birthday, CM!
On my bookshelf sit 19 bound volumes of Canadian Mennonite. I’m looking at Vol. 1, No. 1, published on Sept. 15, 1997. Yes, that means that, come Sept. 15, we will celebrate 20 years of this magazine in its current form. On page 2 editor Ron Rempel welcomed readers to the new format and name.…
Relational trust
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own insight” (Proverbs 3:5). “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1). When all three of my boys were beginning to stand on their own and show some interest in taking their…
God’s heartbreak
While training as a family therapist, I learned the term “emotional cut-off.” It was not a dynamic I was personally familiar with; my particular family tends to be on the opposite side of the spectrum. We are often so closely entwined in each other’s lives that a little more breathing space would be desirable, healthy…
Contagious generosity
For many years my wife and I raised our family in an older community with many beautiful boulevard trees but very few young families. Despite our best efforts, our neighbours were aloof and at times confrontational, but we loved our little home and the family we were building there. Last summer, we made the big…
Sieburg women
Who are these five women from Siegburg, Germany, in 1919? We don’t know for certain, but on Jan. 13, soldier Gordon Eby wrote that he and an army buddy “called at the home of the Krohn family—Hubertina, Maria, Lena, Katie and Bettie.” Eby was a long way from his home and Mennonite roots in Kitchener,…
Simple but not easy
Catching up on Witness worker reports, I came across an update from Mary Raber, who teaches at the Odessa Theological Seminary in Ukraine, a country continuing to experience turmoil despite the absence of stories in the mainstream news media. In a class she taught about women in church history, she invited students to tell a…
I’ll melt with you
Our family was fortunate enough to see an iceberg this summer near Twillingate, N.L. It was a surreal experience for me. Everything around me paused for a brief transcendent moment, frozen in time, with the ironic exception of the massive spire of ice in front of me. “I’ll Stop the World and Melt With You”…
