As a student, from time to time I attended the Avenue Road Church in Toronto, where A.W. Tozer had been pastor until he died.

I knew there was a special presence of God in those services long before I knew anything about Tozer.

The last few days one of his incomparable quotations has resurfaced: A frightened world needs a fearless church. I wonder whether he wrote those words during the Cuban missile crisis, which was the last time the world experienced the kind of mass fear gripping it today.

We were in Chicago for a couple of days and I bought a copy of the New York Times to read on the train on the way back to South Bend. There’s a lot in there that I probably wouldn’t agree with, but on the other hand, if I refuse to listen, what does that say about me? In the end, it was three dollars well spent.

How often do we really stop talking long enough to listen to what others are saying?

The message of the book of Revelation has proven itself to be relevant once again as the world faces its current apparent pandemic crisis.

But the message is not what you might think. Years of enduring the fearful forecasts of the end of the world by end-times misinterpreters of the last book of the Bible have caused us to overlook its real message.

“You’ve got an agenda!” Once or twice I’ve had that comment thrown at me as if there were something wrong about coming into a meeting with a set of convictions or a plan to do something with those convictions.

Our agendas, of course, no matter how sincere they are, always have their self-centred flaws. But that is not the case with God.

What kind of parents would refuse to let their kids grow up? What kind of parents would try to keep their kids in a dependent state even when they have grown up?

We would instantly recognize that as highly dysfunctional behaviour. When it occurs, which from time time it does, we would see it as producing a very dysfunctional family.