Have you ever noticed how many accident reports on the news end with the words “alcohol may have been a factor”?  Especially in the summertime.  The interesting thing is that it doesn’t really seem to concern folks.  If every weekend there was an accidental gun death, there would be a national campaign to ban guns. …

We are at Beulah Camp this week, and I heard Dr. Andrea Summers comment that more people die from taking selfies than from Shark attacks. And I had to check it out, and she was right. Bizarre.Of course, that led me down a rabbit trail of reading about people taking selfies. Between 2018 and 2021,…

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. . . that is the beginning of Rudyard Kipling’s iconic poem “If.”  It is also a fair description of an eight-second video that has recently gone viral.  The video shows a gentleman calmly eating a sandwich in a square in the French…

The other day, I saw a Facebook meme about the Jewish family who adopted Louis Armstrong when he was seven.  Maybe you’ve seen it. It started showing up in 2021.The story was very moving.  And very false. When Armstrong was a boy, his mother worked for the Karnofsky family, and they were very kind and generous…

I guess I never really thought about it.  In a recent article I was reading, Frank Jacobs elaborated on the theory of “Mental Map Oversimplification (MMO)” That’s not an actual theory, it’s just a term that Jacobs made up, but that doesn’t make it any less real.   Jacobs maintains that because maps are so…

It was my birthday the other day, and it was well celebrated on Facebook. As I read through the birthday messages, I marvelled at those who had taken the time to wish me a happy birthday. I heard from folks that I had attended junior high, high school and university with. There were posts from…

“One-third of Canadians fine with prescribing assisted suicide for homelessness.”  Seriously, folks, that was the headline in a recent article in the National Post.  The survey discovered that 27 percent of respondents said MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) should be available to those in poverty, while 28 percent said the same for the country’s 30,000…

This wasn’t the Penn I was planning to write, but it is practically impossible to ignore the wildfires that devasted our communities.A few random thoughts, I have never felt so helpless or heartbroken as a pastor than watching our community burn on Sunday evening.Angela and I opened the church in case it was needed and…

Is it enough to acknowledge that you made a mistake if you aren’t willing to make it right? That doesn’t seem all that helpful. Before we left for our vacation, I contacted my cell phone provider, asking them to put a roaming package on my phone. It’s a good package, and I often use it when…

The power of a word. Recently, while travelling in Columbia, Angela and I had the opportunity to visit several cultural sites.  And I noticed their history displays spoke about the church coming to Columbia to evangelize the indigenous people.  Interesting.  In Canada, it is usually said that the church’s mission was to convert the indigenous…