As I glanced through the wad of applications, it struck me how many pluses these people had. I held the applications of twenty-five perfect people in my hand. And I didn’t know there were twenty-five perfect people in the whole world, let alone present and applying...
It was a sort of family wake, the family remembering things he had done and said. You know how it goes: the release of tension and the shedding of tears loosened tongues and it really was quite hilarious. It put balance back into life after days and nights and...
They probably call it ‘white-out.’ We were up there in a ridiculously tiny plane, totally engulfed in white cloud. We were utterly dependent on the expertise of the young man in the pilot seat. I felt as though some one had typed me into the cloud and then gone over...
As I grew up, I noticed that an elderly relative always wore a distorted shoe. I learned that, due to an accident in her childhood, she had to have one toe amputated. As a result, any shoe she wore always became twisted out of shape because one small toe was missing....
How do we face a challenge? But firstly, what is a challenge? The dictionary defines it originally as an accusation or a reproach. Apparently if you were accused or reproached you answered by drawing battle lines so we have come to regard a challenge as the command to...
Growing in our garden is a huge – I mean huge – Cecile Brunner rose bush. If you remember your rose catalogue, you will remember that Cecile Brunner is a delicate, pink miniature rose. It is sometimes known as the button-hole rose. Miniature blossom it may be but the...
Dust storms settled across the landscape and dust flowed through every breath we took. It settled on the roof of the house, on the tiles on the veranda, and on the leaves of the plants and trees. It was a hot and wearing time and we could do nothing to change it. Dust...
Six silk roses, a gift from somewhere in the past, as perfect as a pair of hands could make them, even to the simulated thorns down the stems. A tiny gold label, glued to one green leaf on each stem, said "Made in Hong Kong" so the creator of my six silk roses was...
I tried to describe a kaleidoscopic sunrise. It enveloped we who watched it, took us into itself and made us a part of its towering beauty. But words written on a piece of paper could not convey the real splendour of our experience. They could only stimulate and...
"Do this in memory of me," (1st Corinthians 11:24). The most revered Christian symbol is the communion service and I come to it with a sense of awe and humility. However routinely or impersonally it is presented, I am overawed by a sense of the presence of Christ....