For the Outdoor Enthusiast

2025 – Can’t wait to get back on the water. 

I managed two big trips last year. The first was with James to the Nuchatlitz, launching out of Little Espinosa for a great four-night adventure. James introduced me to some excellent new food ideas, and I provided the wind at our backs every day we were on the water—which never happens!

My second trip was with Chris, an ambitious journey around Cape Scott from Port Hardy to Coal Harbour. We completed the trip in eleven days, making for an unforgettable experience.

My solo trips continue to be invaluable, offering the challenge of solitude and the opportunity for personal reflection. If you’ve ever considered a solo trip, I highly recommend it—it takes courage, but it’s worth it. Let me know if you need help planning one!

We, as human beings, are driven by something we do not have and cannot fully grasp.
For the philosopher, it is truth. For the artist, beauty. For the activist, justice. For Paul Tillich, this felt experience of not grasping—of constant failure—is the essence of the religious experience.

It is in the striving, in the repeated attempts and inevitable failures, that knowledge, depth, and progress are born. Any claim that truth, beauty, or justice has been fully captured, Tillich calls demonic—an attempt to live within the illusion of certainty and completeness.

Religion, at its best, does not exist to overcome our anxiety or to shield us from it. Rather, it exists to help us tarry with it. Good religion prevents itself from becoming demonic. It does not declare that we have found truth, beauty, or justice—it helps us remain open to their call. True religion sustains our longing, our reaching, without claiming arrival. It keeps us open to what lies ahead—a future that never quite arrives. It is the Kingdom of God that is both here and not yet.

To be human is to experience lack—a sense of dissatisfaction, of alienation. But embracing this lack can free us: free us from the demonic, from the ideologies that promise what they cannot deliver.

These are the themes I explore unapologetically in my writing—not with the approval of bishops or superintendents who serve only the status quo, but with a commitment to honesty and depth.

I have been a hockey player, pastor, and entrepreneur. I love life, the outdoors, and listening to people's stories. I have been married forty-two years to my wife, Kelly. Together, we have raised four boys. We now have two beautiful daughters-in-law and four grandsons. 

I have always carried questions about life and death and what is on the other side of the stars. I have discovered that I will need more lifetimes to read and study the information now available at our fingertips. My curiosity has led me to study theology and philosophy and, narrowly, the theology of the mystics, continental philosophy, and some psychoanalytical thought. All writing has a bias – mine is no different. We all have a unique lens to see and understand the world, so welcome to my world. 

My overall theme might be obscure, but I am exploring what is behind or what is common in all ideologies. What is one thing we can agree on? Is there a way to move forward in all the chaos we are experiencing?