Posts by Laura Puiras

Often when we think of surrender – outside of church language, aka Christianese – we might think of a battle scene, right? SURRENDERRRR or ELSE!!!! We might envision someone holding up a white flag to signal the end of a devastating struggle. The definition of surrender, according to Google, is really not that positive either: So… to summarize… whether we’re speaking in Sports language, Legal-ese, or Insurance-ish the translation of surrendering seems to be that you lose. You lose the…

It’s a pretty strange feeling to have an event you’ve planned for months and months finally be over, isn’t it?! Within just two weeks, both Family Weekend and our WildFire Retreat took place and I’m feeling a big mix of things… all of which seem to be undergirded with tired. Planning and preparing and organizing things can sometimes take so much out of us that we forget to save some energy for the event itself! We begin to zoom in…

I’m not sure who needs to hear this… but sometimes it is possible for the next steps forward to be: SLEEP! Apparently when I was just a newborn, by mum was concerned and literally called the doctor to ask if something was wrong because I slept so much! After she confirmed that I was eating and… eliminating waste… like I needed to, the doctor chuckled and told my mom to be thankful because it sounded like she had a daughter…

You know how we often talk about being aware of what God is doing around you? “Be aware of his presence…”“Consider where in your life God is at work…”“What is God speaking to you in the everyday, mundane moments?” Well, on Wednesday, God spoke to me through the Toronto Public Library. Yes, that’s right. Even the public library rules and regulations can speak to us about the heart of God. Back in October 2023, there was a massive cybersecurity attack…

I love finding new artists on Instagram! Not only is it fun to see how other people portray the world and daily life, I love getting to see the process of art being created. Closely related to this love of seeing art created, is my love of timelapse videos 😁 For those of you who are wondering if I’m making up words, a timelapse is an extremely sped-up video… think, watching a video in fast forward! The people zoom around…

Last Friday evening, WildFire went to SickKids Hospital… no, it was not due to a sudden injury or other health-related emergency. We went to pray. A concerned grandmother had contacted Rodney a couple weeks ago, asking for prayer for her granddaughter who was at SickKids. Being born with a hole in her heart, she had gone in for surgery to get it fixed. Unfortunately, there had been some further complications and one of her lungs had collapsed. That too had…

“My God is so BIG! So strong and so mighty there’s nothing my God cannot do…” These are some of the words to a kids’ song I grew up singing – a song I’m sure is familiar to many of you as well. It goes on to sing about how the mountains and the valleys are God’s and about how the stars are his handiwork too.   Learning these types of songs at such a young age began to develop…

Last week during one of my bus commutes, I witnessed an especially intriguing interaction that led me to considering who God is in a new way. A group of teenagers got on the bus, and after the first couple of them walked on and attempted to pay, the bus driver called out for them to come back because the payment hadn’t worked. Instead of going back to pay or even responding to the bus driver at all, they just stood…

Although there were so many gems in Karyne’s sermon on Sunday, one specific part really caught my attention. John 15 and the entire passage about needing to abide in the vine in order to bear fruit has been huge for me over the last couple years and I’m sure that this partnership of Karyne’s message with that passage will continue to challenge me moving forward. “We put a lot of effort into ensuring that the atmosphere around us is good.…

Yesterday, April 23rd, was the sixth anniversary of the Yonge Street Tragedy. It has been so interesting to see how, with every year that passes, as I pause with neighbours to remember and to honour and to pray, God will do something new every time. Maybe it’s a new story from that day or another testimony of how someone’s life was miraculously spared; consistently though, there is a new layer of healing that takes place. I had the privilege of…

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith,  we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,  through whom we have gained access  by faith into this grace in which we now stand.  And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings,  because we know that suffering produces perseverance;  perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts…

I recently saw a video on social media of a baby and a cat. (Go with it, haha I promise this will go somewhere.) The baby must’ve only been a few months old and was being rocked by a baby swing. The family cat was curled up with the baby in the swing seat and it looked very pleased with itself. The baby was “making biscuits” on the cat’s back!! This motion that is more commonly known as kneading (in…