We put the young talent to work this month. It was time to develop a subscription promotion package, and we decided we needed fresh minds. A codger like myself who has been working with ChristianWeek for more than 17 years tends to make too many assumptions about readers and finds it easy to lapse into well-worn jargon. Not good enough.

So Naomi and Ryan and Julienne gathered around the table to come up with just a few words and images to encapsulate what we are trying to do with ChristianWeek. We are seriously hoping that the people who see the brochure we were working on will understand that they will benefit from buying a subscription to this newspaper. This is a tall order in an era of busy schedules and information overload.

After much discussion we agreed that one of ChristianWeek’s major strengths is that it provides “news for today” and “perspective for tomorrow.” As a newspaper designed to help Christian leaders in Canada understand our times, we determined that “ChristianWeek delivers the information you need to prepare for the realities of tomorrow.”

The many different news items, features, columns and perspectives are pixel points of information that add up to a big, colourful picture of God at work in our country. ChristianWeek, Canada’s leading Christian news source, enables its readers to get the big picture.

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Since you asked. A number of readers have kindly asked for an update on my health condition ("A problem with pain," ChristianWeek, February 3, 2004). The good news is, that difficult episode of my life appears to be behind me.

The bad news is, I had a rather rough go of it for another month after I wrote that article; altogether I endured eight weeks of nasty pain. Strangely, the hurt that began with an extracted wisdom tooth and moved to encompass the right side of my face, migrated even further afield and affected nerve clusters in my back and arm. Relief eventually came in the form of a prescription that attacked pain within the neuro-system.

By mid-March I was feeling pretty good and now the whole episode seems like a distant dream. It occurs to me that if we remembered our pain with the intensity of the actual experience, we would be afraid to live. Thank God for the blessing of fading memories.