Last March, I tuned my truck radio and heard coverage on a lawyer who just passed away after a successful career as an indigenous lawyer from La Ronge, Saskatchewan. It caught my attention because I had spent many years in the north flying lawyers in and out of northern communities to do court in La Ronge.  I thought maybe I knew this lawyer so was intent on listening to the coverage.  The report told of the several books he had written. After retirement, he lived on a trap line with his wife. I remember thinking: that is a great way to retire! One particular book that was mentioned, a synoposis of his life in the Justice System in Canada, was called Peace and Good Order. I obtained the book and have read it now several times.  I gleaned some very interesting and staggering statistics and facts about how the justice system, in his opinion, has failed.  I remember thinking that something is terribly wrong if someone has achieved such a successful law career and then feels it was such a failure.   The cover on Harold R. Johnson’s book summarizes his perspective in this quote: “A retired judge friend said that he was ashamed of his time involved in the justice system.  I, Harold Johnson, also feel this way about my time as both defence counsel and Crown prosecutor: ashamed that I didn’t have the courage to stand up in the courtroom and shout, “Enough is Enough!”   

I have been doing prison ministry for over thirty years in one degree or another.  I have also been a Justice of the Peace for eleven years and so have connected with the justice system and with those who are most affected by it. I have a burden to help people discover real freedom who have made big mistakes in their lives and have found themselves trapped in a life of addictions or other hurtful habits. Note these wonderful verses from John 8:32: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.  John 8:36: If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.  One inmate told me recently that he does want to be free from here, speaking of prison, but also free from here, pointing to himself.  I told him that only Christ can do that through faith and that he had come to the right place to find it, referring to the Bible study he was planning to attend.   

Christmas is quickly coming upon us again.  Do you realize there is a very interesting history to Christmas?  The Christmas we celebrate in our culture has only been practised for about 150 years in the Western World. Christmas has some very interesting background, beginning in the Roman Empire.  Much of what we do and how we run governments originated with the Roman Empire. However, even before the Romans, there were a mixture of pagan cultures that were adapted into the Christmas celebration.  Now, before you read any further, I am not trying to be a bah humbug Scrooge about Christmas.  I am simply hoping to educate our reading audience about the history of Christmas as we know it today.  I also want to encourage our readers to keep the sacred aspect of our Christmas alive and real.  We are losing all of the sacred aspects of our culture, and we are losing it because we are allowing it.   

During our Covid lockdown days between 2020 and 2022 I received a call from someone who said you need to meet a friend who lives in Saskatoon from Romania. I will not give her name at this writing.   Her and her husband fled communist Romania in a harrowing escape that needs to be written. I said, I would very much like to meet with your Romania friend.   An interview meeting was set up in Prince Albert.  She shared her story with me about her life in Romania and her daring escape by boat one cold night into the Black Sea.  Her and her husband  took a row boat on a calm night and headed out into the open ocean with the very high risk that they would not survive.   They knew somewhere out there that ships went by from Ukraine and other shipping countries.  They could only hope they might get spotted and rescued before a storm or rough seas would capsize them. There worst fear was being spotted by the Romania coast guard police.  The first part of their plan was to escape at night and if the Romanian police caught someone out after curfew in a boat they would be shot.   They did not know where they were going or where they would end up and very likely not survive but they had lost all hope in Romania under the communist rule. They were living in poverty and the police state kept it that way.  The interview was heart wrenching but what she said at the end of it was the most chilling.  She said, what I see happening in Canada is very similar to how socialism then Communism crept into Romania.  Free press allows us to learn lessons from history and censored press restricts it and eventually totally bans all history that created and preserves freedom.  Without the freedom of press we loose freedom.  This article by Dean Dwyer from Queensland, Australia will help us see what can happen when good people do nothing for too long. 

Hitler was a man who lived in a time no one likes to talk about.  It is associated with the worst darkness and evil that average people can hardly believe happened—but it did.  One of the greatest evils of that period of history was the Holocaust where over 6 million Jews from across Europe were shot, poisoned, murdered in gas chambers, their bodies then burned.  An evil man and an evil ideology led a country into the most unbelievable atrocities of evil and darkness known to mankind. And to think it was only one generation ago to a very intelligent Christian nation in Europe.