“We need to get there first to show love or others will manipulate them into extremism.” The speaker was a tall, short-cropped Swede pleading with Christian leaders, gathered from thirty European countries near Stuttgart in Germany last week, to engage…
This week I learnt a new Russian word: Maskirovka. Derived from the word masquerade, it literally means ‘something masked’; a strategy of deceit, like the Trojan horse. It has a long tradition in Russian military history and it seems to…
Sometimes we need to be shocked out of our comfort zone. Jesus could see that the smug legal expert questioning him needed some shock therapy. After correctly answering Jesus' question about what was written in the Law concerning inheriting eternal…
Edvard Munch’s iconic image, The Scream, painted in four different versions from 1893 to 1910, took on deeper meaning for me this week. A very close friend, Albert Hoekstra, was drowned in Sri Lanka while swimming in the sea after…
‘I was hungry, and you threw food at me like I was an animal in the zoo. I was a stranger and you erected a 175-kilometer razor-wire barrier to keep me out. I was thirsty, sick and needed fresh clothes…
