Opinion

In 2015, some of the summer staff at Mennonite Church Manitoba’s Camps with Meaning wrote a song called “This Ground.” The song makes the simple observation that nature inspires us to pray. It encourages us to notice the beauty of creation all around us, hinting that there’s much to learn about God in the natural world.

I was driving the night shift that week, hauling wood chips to the pulp mill in The Pas, Man.

I pulled into the Esso C-Store in Nipawin, Sask., a little after 11 p.m., closing time. As I filled my mug, I apologized for keeping the clerk around so late.

“Oh, no,” he assured me. “The fair closes tonight, so we’re staying open till midnight to catch the traffic going home.”

In Dr. Seuss’s book Oh the Places You’ll Go there is a section about “the waiting place.” It is depicted as an undesirable and useless place to be. I wonder if our Advent waiting sometimes feels like that kind of waiting. I wrote a little poem in the style of Dr. Seuss about Advent waiting:

‘We are in a climate emergency’: MC Canada
Mennonite Church Canada leaders released the following statement on Nov. 4 during the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland:

Herb Wiebe, facing camera, visits with an inmate at the Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby, B.C., in 1970. A growing number of British Columbia Mennonite men volunteered to befriend inmates through the M-2 (Man to Man) program, a prison visitation program then in its early days in Canada.

After a month in the woods by myself, my sabbatical plan is to spend three months listening to people who aren’t a part of church culture, to see how they view church and understand why they don’t go to church.

I remember a conversation with my mom when I was a child.

“Why is there a Mother’s Day and a Father’s Day, but no Children’s Day?” I asked.

My mom’s answer was rather predictable, “Every day is Children’s Day!”

Our lives—Holly’s and mine, that is—changed to a significant degree. Our oldest granddaughter, Maeve, who is 19, has moved into our home. Maeve comes to us from Ontario, where she left her family behind to begin the next portion of her life.

I miss my Opa.

A few years ago, my daughter Ellie had a school assignment for Remembrance Day to to write about someone she remembered that served in the armed forces. She wrote about her great-grandfather (Opa). Helping her write a few short sentences about his life made me realize just how little I knew about his story, specifically his time in the war.

I walked into my curling club for the first time in 11 months and saw my team preparing to go out on the ice. I immediately teared up, telling them, “I’m so happy to be here, I think I’m going to cry!” We shared a laugh and hugs, and revelled in the moment of our mutual love of a sport and the camaraderie associated with it.

I am pondering yet again the “Mennonite” label, and what it means for us today in Canada. There are three things that recently provoked these questions.