This week I will turn 40. It’s my fifth un-shared twin birthday, and the first significant (ending in 0) one since Red Twin died. We will not turn 40 together, as we did not turn 36 together, or 37, or 38, or 39… It brings with it an additional grief […]
In this year’s Christmas Day sermon, Pastor Dondo encouraged us to sing like the angels and share the good news like the shepherds and then turned his attention to 5 groups of people who appear in the birth narratives of Jesus but miss the significance of what’s going on. He […]
These are my top 10 fiction reads from 2022, in the order I read them. After Story, Larissa Behrendt Della’s daughter Jasmine left their Australian country town to become the first in the family to go to uni and her relationship with her roots is complicated. One day she asks […]
I’ve recently come across Vincent Donovan. He was an American Catholic missionary priest in Tanzania in the 1960s and 70s and wrote a book in 1978, ‘Christianity Rediscovered’, about his experiences among the Maasai* and how he came to see Christianity differently as a result. I had never heard of […]
If there’s any book of the Bible that lends itself to allegorical interpretation, it’s Revelation! In chapter 12, a pregnant woman appears, clothed with moon and sun and a crown of twelve stars. She’s pregnant and about to give birth. There’s a great dragon too, which we’re told is Satan, […]
The day before we came back from our holiday at the beach, I caught myself thinking, “I can’t wait to get home to see Red Twin.” Isn’t that weird? Red Twin is not part of our life in Dar. She’s never even been to our current house there. I did […]
Recently I was attacked while walking along a beach near our friends’ place out of town. A guy who was working on his boat on the shore called out to me after we’d greeted each other (essential in Tanzania) when I walked past, then followed me, grabbed me and stole […]
Meet Jesus at uni 