Ninety delegates from across Canada and Bermuda gathered at the College for Officer Training (CFOT) in Winnipeg in October for the annual Officership Information Weekend.

The 2017 International Conference of Leaders concluded with a meeting in which Commissioner Silvia Cox invited everyone to rejoice following a week of meetings attended by Salvation Army leaders from around the world.

Kamal Dhillon endured more than 10 years of domestic abuse before she finally found refuge at The Salvation Army’s Kate Booth House.

Allow me to paraphrase an old folktale. Thousands of starfish have washed onto a beach, where many of them will die. A young boy gently tosses one back into the water, then another and another. An onlooker asks, “Why are you bothering? You can’t save them all. You’re wasting your time. How can this make any significant difference?” The boy looks at the starfish in his hand, smiles, and says, “It makes a difference to this one.”

We arrived in Niagara Falls, Ont., to begin our first year of ministry as a family 443 days ago. It’s hard to articulate how many emotions and discoveries that number represents. We had no idea what life was going to look like. As Salvation Army officers, we have the freedom to grow together in ministry—to invest in our marriage and our children. After all, God called us as a family, didn’t he?

While Remembrance Day ceremonies allow us to recall the horror and inhumanity of war, they also serve to remind us of the displays of human compassion that so often interposed themselves between the long periods of enmity.

After 20 years of ministry in Germany, Lt-Colonels Marsha-Jean and David Bowles return with fresh insights for the Army in Canada and Bermuda.

Following the shooting at a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in which 26 people were killed, The Salvation Army dispatched officers and staff from nearby San Antonio. The team was able to provide much-needed practical, emotional and spiritual support to the community, which was rocked by the sudden and violent loss of life.

I’m pregnant with hope right now. Which is weird. Because, well, things aren’t so good on a global scale. On the way to a conference recently, I had a frank conversation with my Uber driver. She’s not so hopeful. She talked about the horror of the shooting in Las Vegas and the hopelessness she felt about the American political system and the results of global warming on the world, and lamented the fact that she chose to bring children into this god-forsaken place. But all the time she was sharing, as I listened to her pain, what I felt was hope. Which is weird. Why am I feeling hope at a time that seems so perilous and hopeless? And that’s when it hit me.

In Embu, mere hours from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, an elderly woman and her son rake a maize field, where one stalk of corn remains in-husk following their harvest. On the same property, chickens roam free among the tiered fields where women collect tea into wicker baskets, and rows of coffee trees find shade under a canopy of banana leaves.