This weekend I spoke at a youth retreat in Northern Michigan. I won’t get more specific than that because, well, I can’t. I followed some vans full of teenagers from Flint and stopped where they stopped, about an hour and a half north. We settled in at this rather nice little Christian camp in what…
A couple of weeks ago I reviewed The Christian Lover by Michael Haykin, a collection of historical love letters sent from one Christian lover to another. Despite feeling like a bit of a voyeur, spying on private communications, I enjoyed reading these letters, and highly recommended the book. But it got me thinking about my…
There is some “25-Things” meme making its way around Facebook (and, from there, to the web beyond). I’ve been tagged a whole bunch of times. It has, after all, apparently been completed some five million times. Such memes are not really my thing. Some people take these things way too seriously and offer facts that,…
Barb claimed to be a psychiatrist, but my guess is that she was not a very good one. One day she had asked our friends, her next door neighbors, to help clean up her house a little bit. She was having trouble with her finances and wanted to sell off a few valuable possessions. But…
I kind of feel like I should be screaming in joy and wonder right now. Like I should just scream out “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M DOING THIS! THIS IS AMAZING! THIS IS AWESOME! CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!”Just a few short hours ago I was in my home town of Toronto, on the shores of Lake…
Continued from yesterday… It was almost seven years ago that I was laid off and started my own company. I began without money and without loans. Since that time we have never lacked for anything important. There have been times where we have had to be frugal to get by, but God has always provided.…
Some years I make new years resolutions; some years I don’t bother. This year I haven’t sat down and narrowed in on one or two things I’d consider resolutions. Instead I am going to continue on a trajectory I began several months ago–a trajectory leading toward control and simplicity. In a wired, digital world, I’ve…
Continued from yesterday… Every now and again my son decides the time is right to build a paper airplane air force. He raids my printer to get the stacks of paper he’ll need and then opens up The Dangerous Book for Boys to try out some of the designs printed in that book. But after…
On July 23, 1983, Flight 143, an Air Canada Boeing 767, lifted off from Montreal’s Montreal-Dorval International Airport on its way to Edmonton, Alberta. On board were 69 passengers and crew. Sometime around the flight’s halfway mark, while over the tiny community of Red Lake, Ontario, near the border of Manitoba, an alarm sounded in…
Here is a brief introduction to a Challies family Christmas. It’s really the only kind of Christmas I’ve ever known and it’s one I’ve come to love. I grew up as part of a tradition that celebrated Christmas but did not generally emphasize it as a day to remember the birth of Jesus. It was…
On Saturday night, Aileen and I joined some friends to take in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. And what a performance it was. It featured the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. It was, in a word, sublime. Conductor Noel Edison clearly understood the piece (I guess I should say “the oratorio”) and…
You’ll have to excuse me for re-posting today. It was a tough night dealing with a sick kid and then this morning I had to take the kids to school and then shovel out after a pretty good snowfall. As I was shoveling this morning I thought of a post from last winter and thought…
Yesterday I swung by Chapters, Canada’s answer to Barnes & Noble. It was actually the first time in a long while that I had been inside a real brick and mortar bookstore. Though I browse books on a near-daily basis through the internet, rarely do I actually go into a store. I had almost forgotten…
You may have seen me mention Liam’s name in a previous blog post. Liam is the son of our friends Kim and Jason and a friend to Nick. Today he is having a major surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. Even if the surgery is 100% successful. he will be in the hospital…
Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking at Chinese Gospel Church in downtown Toronto. It’s a church right in the heart of the city in the area known (not so creatively) as Chinatown (if you ever go there you will quickly find out why it has this name). I told the people there that, when…
Lloyd-Jones on the KindleGreat Doctrines of the Bible is available for the Kindle for a measly $7.99. You’re not going to find the printed edition for anywhere near that! Behold the TempleJustin Taylor writes an article for Boundless about the temple. “Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to step inside Herod’s…
I receive a lot of books in the mail. A lot of books. Choosing which ones I am going to read and review is always a bit of a chore. This morning I tidying up the disaster area that is my office floor and was trying to figure out which of the books would be…
It’s Friday and that’s a good day to ramble. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to share just a couple of items of “miscellania.” Personal Updates I’ve had a couple of people ask for updates as to what I’m up to these days. So here goes. My fall travel schedule is very light, for…
A couple of weeks ago, I went to watch the Toronto Blue Jays take on the Tampa Bay Rays (baseball, for those of you who may not follow professional sports). For the first time in recent memory I went to the game on back-to-back days, both Friday and Saturday. When they announced the group that…
In the past months the server that hosts this site has been dragging a little bit. It has gone down a few times and has begin consuming too many resources. And so I’ve decided to move to a new server with a host that is dedicated to supporting Movabletype, the software that runs behind the…