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I am Johannes Viljoen du Toit, and as I reflect on my family history, one theme shines brightly: the name Francois du Toit passing like a torch through the generations. This series of posts will delve deep into the saga of our Du Toit family – from its Huguenot origins in 17th-century Europe to our lives in the 21st century. In telling this story, I write in my own voice – a voice shaped by a Reformed heritage in the spirit of Calvin, Kuyper, and Althusius, unapologetically t

The month began in silence. Not an emptiness, but the deep breath before speech. October had been a field left resting after harvest. The soil was turned, but waiting. Out of that stillness rises a quieter current: Vox Vitae , the voice of life returning. This space, johandutoit.com , was never built for noise. It is a slow work of remembrance, of faith learning to speak again through the layers of history. Its pulse runs through Huguenot teachers, reformers, and wanderers wh

Last night, strikes on energy infrastructure silenced much of the city. Generators hum faintly in the distance; the rest is still. Yet...

It is just before midnight in Kyiv. The sirens have begun again, that familiar wail that threads its way through every conversation,...

The two photos say what time cannot conceal:my mother, eighteen, fresh from high school, standing on the edge of her life’s beginning,...

Four years ago, I made a promise. It was simple in words, weighty in meaning: to tell my mother’s story. Not as a monument in marble, but...

“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty” (Psalm 90:10). So prayed Moses, measuring the brevity of days...

It is the silence I notice most. Not the quiet of peace, which is open and full of breath, but the held silence between sirens, which is...

The moment is etched into the canvas of my consciousness. I stood at a bus stop on the road to Berlin, the anonymous hum of traffic in my...

Resilience is not a word I pluck from a textbook, nor a slogan for a poster. It is the sound of sirens that cleaves the night at two in...