For an entire generation, these words were synonymous with the fast food chain, Dairy Queen. I still remember listening to a fellow student reading a Bible lesson in grade six and hearing the phrase and thinking the reader was a smart-ass sneaking in a Dairy Queen ad into the Bible. The phrase has…

This is a statement of (apparent) fact that the material possessions we might accumulate in our lives are not of any use or service when we die. It leaves open the question about where we might go when we die. It works equally well whether you believe that your body just stays in the ground, or that your…

First, they must be made alive by Christ, [who] is alive and liveth forevermore … and quickened by him, before they…can be ministers of the spirit, [and] be able to receive heavenly and spiritual things….So, all must be called by Christ…out of the world…and receive his power, spirit and grace and truth and faith [before] they can preach Christ…. They must see him and know him and hear his voice, and have spiritual things from him …and they must all receive their gifts from…

This quote is most often attributed to Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was shot in the back in his own driveway in June of 1963. A variation is “you can kill a protest singer but you can't kill their lyrics.” The point is that what we are witness to is greater than ourselves. The word martyr,…

A great host of aphorisms call us to persistence. Don't give up this ship; don't halt before you are lame; hang in there; the darkest hour is just before dawn; while there is life, there is hope; always give people more than they expect; the expectations of life depend on diligence are but a…

Quakers are encouraged to “contemplate death . . . both their own and the death of those they are closest to.”[i] Death is to be seen as a “fact”[ii] and such an understanding is meant to set us free from fear and avoidance. Mourning and grief are not to be hidden and Quakers…

In 1390, John Gower wrote an extended work on the seven deadly sins, Confessio Amantis, which contains the phrase, "and tuo han more wit then on." I believe in the truth of this phrase and put that belief into practice. Not only was this book formally edited, I shared my early drafts with anyone who would…

While there would be universal acceptance of the notion that some things require a partnership of sorts, marriage and boxing for example, these words appear in the 1952 song by the same name, which has since covered by many. The song, first made famous by Pearl Bailey, pretends to exhaust the many things one can…

This is a restating of the Latin phrase, quid pro quo, which means, “two things exchanged for equal value” and is often used in criminal court when explaining a plea bargain where both sides truly give something up and both sides truly gain something. This phrase describes what is rather than what ought to be. In…

These words come from a popular 19th Century Celtic song. The song cautions against trust and risk ending with the couplet: “And I have no wife to bother me life, no lover to prove untrue, the whole day long I laugh with the song and paddle me own canoe.” Such wisdom is contradicted by phrases like, “there is strength in numbers.” Winnipeg has a relatively small population of people with African descent. And while a few African gangs were kept apart from each other, the correctional…