What I wanted to chat about is what I'm reading just now:  Richard Foster's Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home ~ but that will have to wait while I address another issue.

I vaguely remembered seeing something very disparaging about Foster & thought I'd just check before writing about what I wanted to write about.  See Foster has been accussed of New Ageism, Buddism, Psycho~babble & more & we shouldn't be putting a lethal cocktail like that into our minds now, should we?  Well, should we?

  The trouble is I've heard of Foster.  I've read his works & while there are things I very much disagree with [he's ecummenical] his fruit I consider good.  I had never heard of either Albert James  Dager or W.B Howard.   Having waded through several pages of vilification I decided I needed to know who these people are. Dager, conviently, is almost unknown.  He does have books on the market & the only review from a reputable source I could find confirmed my sense that the man was unbalanced  & slightly nutty.  W.B Howard is a woman & the founder of Endtime Ministries.  Eveything I could find of hers dates back to the early 2000s ~ & most of it hasn't come to pass; she argues, if I have understood her correctly, that the U.N has already instigated the One World Church.  Um, the U.N mught like that but do you see Islam agreeing to that?  Or the Christian Fundies?  Both authors belong to the *Ranter's School* ~ & not only do I dislike ranters on principal I loath not being able to follow an argument through logically because every time it gets sticky the paragims get shifted.  So I wrote them both of as not worth listening to.  Their thoughts don't count.

However...it is worth noting everything we think we know has been filtered through our perceptions of the world & will have some sort of a slant.  Everything!  That is ok.   So long as we acknowledge that fact & make allowance for the fact we could be wrong, just possibly, we should be able to navigate treacherous waters without shipwreck.  I know I very much appreciate middle~eastern viewpoints on the bible, which is a middle~eastern book & written with a middle~eastern mind~set~ because they have so expanded my understanding of God's vision & the inter~relationships of the middle east countries.

That being said, Foster is a Quaker.  He is a Christian Quaker.  He has studied psychology.  There are likely to be things not everyone agrees with but that should neither dismay nor deter us.  He draws on a number of Christian traditions, which is only to be expected when discussing the prayer tradition within the wider Christian church.  That many of these are Catholic should neither worry nor alarm us.  If the protestant church abandoned certain aspects of prayer the Catholic church can hardly be faulted if the only examples are to be found within their tradition.

OK. Then there is the thorny problem of  "Now this I mean, that each one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ."[1Cor.1:12] There is no need to squabble & create divisions ~ & the church has always been very good at that! Nope, hold everthing up to the light of the scriptures.  Take the good that is to be found, toss away the rest & let your neighbour do the same because not everyone is going to have the same understanding.    So even though Foster may not be of your tradition & worse, refer to traditions you disagree with, there is a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from his understanding of the practise of prayer.

As for the Buddism, New Ageism & all the rest ~ I can't say I've ever found any evidence for such accusations.  It may be there.  I read fast, I skim things that don't hold my interest & I tend to read thematically.  That is not sequentially but by pulling together associated ideas.  If you have never done this & don't know what I mean then you probably don't want to!  I will be discussing Foster's book in my next post but please do as scripture instructs & discern everything through a scriptual lense.  I have done my homework but that doesn't let you off the hook! ☺

The best way to garden is to put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell someone else where to dig.~ Texas Bix BenderI don't know if it's a sin; I do know I live too much in my head. It's exhausting ~ as Liddy is finding out.  So now the term is practically over & I can leave Star reading in bed with a good conscience I decided that now we oficially have autumn weather, crisp mornings,  cool evenings, it was time to do something I rarely get a chance to indulge in during term time: garden.  Naturally it has begun to rain.



Nothing detered I grabbed Marlow, who is prone to cry if I am out of sight for more than 2 minutes & drive the entire house insane, & joined Kirby in the yard.  Marlow was rather shocked to find himself  outside & unceromoniously dumped among the weeds.  Kirby, on the other hand, was absolutely delighted.  He parked himself to get the best view of my activities & watched with interest as I started planting these out. We began with 1/2 a dozen from mum's several years ago. They propogate themselves prolifically & are a wonderful groundcover & hole filler with the added bonus of getting a pretty mauve & white iris style flower with a yellow centre.  A little mondo grass to plug the smaller holes & voila!

We beat the rain~ just.  I called the cats & headed in.  Kirby shot between my legs at the fist spits knowing what was coming but Marlow, who I'm sure is as thick as a brick & unused to the great outdoors, was so taken with the novelty of the exercise he'd ignored my call. As the rain arrived in torrents he cowered on the ramp to the verandah  not wanting to slink round the corner into a biting wind & race for the door.  Instead he simply mewed pathetically. I had to go rescue him. He is pathetic.  Totally, absolutely pathetic.  And everyone in this house panders to him.  His neurosis is indulged.  Everyone from Dearest to Star pick him up & cuddle him  while making reassuring noises that they will find his alpha for him & life will be just fine.

So in between showers I will be digging holes & planting seedlings.  I will rake my yard because we don't believe in grass.  It's a surface feeder & heavy water user & no~one in this country of long term drought should ever grow grass ~ not that my opinion ever stopped anyone but thems my thinks.

I am hoping for some fine weather.  Liddy & Dino & I want to redo the veggie garden before the cold weather sets in.  I'm not real hopeful.  Easter here is sodden more often than not.  This year looks like running true to form.  Maybe I will drag out a canvas & paint.  A little time is a heady feeling.  I feel a rush of blood to the brain.

'All gardeners live in beautiful places, because they make them so.'~ Joseph Joubert

"I have been described as a lighthouse in the middle of a bog: Brilliant but useless." ~ Connor Cruise O'Brien.

 
We are having a rough year.  Some years are like that.  I knew from experience that by the end of grade 10 my kids have had enough.  They are waaay over being educated.  Star is no different.

The National Curriculum is not helping.  Schools are being squeezed into conformity ~ our umbrella school too.  As a family we don't do conformity well.  I am hoping Star will be all done before it gets really bad but we were struggling to get on top of her work before our end of term visit from our supervisor  ~ not helped by some dodgy curriculum.

Our school is generally very good & we have always had a good bit of leeway.  English & History have never presented a problem for us.  Whether I have curriculum or not we do well.  Star often nominates her area of interest & I go with that.  I can usually put my hands on at least a couple of books she won't baulk at completely.  I have never yet found a religious curriculum I like, let alone am happy with.  However the school said she had to carry a religious component & nominated Frank Hamrick's The Life of Christ from John's gospel.  Never'eardovit.  Wish I never had.   Now the link to a review is positive but I'm no Calvinist so when we started *digging deeper* I found myself baulking.  I didn't like the tone.  I didn't like the assumptions.  I didn't like what I was reading.  You cannot argue people into belief ~ which has never stopped people from trying.  Even Paul is guilty of that one. 

Now it is possible to work round someone else's theological dogma to some extent but I also find this text bits & piecey & if you've read here long enough you will know I abhor curriculum that does this.  I loathe a little of this, a little of that & a pinch of something else.  I am an immersion learner.  I am an immersion teacher & Star is used to me.  I was already going slightly nutty with a muttered running commentary under my breath that was hardly complementary when it occurred to me we needed to produce something for the school ~ which meant looking at the *digging deeper* topics. Ouch!  No way, Hosea, was I touching a goodly portion of those topics.  I was certainly not teaching them.

I expect many Christians will feel very differently about this curriculum but it is advertised as *non~denominational* yet teaches doctrine: the doctrine of the virgin birth,  the Incarnation, Gnosticism & all the rest ~ & that by it's very nature means the writer must take a particular point of view.  His does not happen to be mine.  Spare me please!  We don't need more Christians who can argue apologetics.  We need more Christians who know Christ.  It's not that I necessarily disagree with the doctrines discussed but I do dislike the way they are presented

I scoured the chapters we've read for something that wasn't going to have me frothing at the mouth, choosing the most harmless & secular which is a fairly meaningless exercise.  Then there is the bullying tone: do this, don't do that .....fairly gets my back up.  Just imagine what it would do to my child!  I have to edit heavily. So I  had to explain that we wouldn't be doing a fair bit of this curriculum, certainly not the tests because I couldn't *teach to the test* something I don't actually believe ~ at least not in the format in which it is presented.

If you like your Christianity hard & fast & straight down the line it will probably work for you but I am a Quaker.  I'm not generally in the habit of telling people what to believe or how to believe it.  I prefer to explore possibilities ~ which is a good bit messier I agree ~ & listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit & wait, sometimes a long time, for understanding.

Our supervisor is lovely ~ one reason we didn't want to lose her.  There is something about working with other Christians, particularly Christians of the gentle persuasion. M arrived with her hubby W in tow.  We have met him before & he is absolutely adorable~ a big one~of~a~kind man with an insatiable curiosity about everything, a deep love of God & a sweetness when dealing with messy human beings.  He is an ex~Anglican pastor & we are always delighted to see him.  Dearest stowed him in the car & off they went to see what had changed since W was last here.

Meanwhile M & Star sat down to do battle with Star's math.  Star was not feeling co~operative.  Math does that to her.  It really brings out the worst in her.  It brings out the worst in me too & let's face it; Star knows perfectly well I never did any math for grades 11 & 12 & I still have a uni degree.  Actually, although it was a required subject, I hadn't actually done any math in years.  I had the text books.  I sat through the classes.  I occasionally made random scribbles on paper but seeing how none of it made a single iota of sense to me it would have been a huge waste of everyone's time except I redeemed the time by reading under the table.  Perhaps I shouldn't admit that but as my children never tire of pointing out, I don't do bored well, & math bores me terribly.  And M knows she is on her own dealing with Star because my honest opinion ~ it's a waste of everyone's time forcing my child to do math.  We are all over it.  So is M as it turns out.  She thumbed through the work we had managed ~ about 3/4 of the booklet, quickly worked out Star had understood very little of it & cared less & admitted defeat.  Star couldn't believe her ears! 

I don't know how we are going to do this one because every text I've looked at I've known neither Star nor I can do.  Oh we can do bits of it but as soon as multiple steps are required our eyes start glazing ~ & multiple steps are required.  Take one ADD child & one clueless mother & you have a recipe for mathematical disaster.  And just so you all know;  I manage the finances in this house.  I do the budget, pay the bills, balance the cheque book ~ & I have done all our married life.  Star can do all those things too.  She can go at least one better because she can work out the sales thingy.  And that is what makes me so cross.  Star can do the everyday stuff very well.  She is actually really, really good at that.  She manages her small income from pocket money well enough to be able to buy a lot of her own clothing ~ & trust me; on our income she doesn't get very much pocket money.  She has saved out of that enough to pay for her ticket to Easterfest this year.  Liddy has agreed to take her if she can pay her own way.  She can work out, perhaps not according to textbook formula, how much material she needs for a sewing project.  She's a bright girl.  When she needs math for something she can work it out but doing exercises for the sake of it...? who in their right mind wastes their time like that? ~ & despite what some people seem to think, Star is very definitely in her right mind.

Everybody but us pothers about Star & her math but why?  See Star's not the only child I've had educational issues with & I have learnt something very important.  God, who designed our children, gave them everything they need to survive in this world.  My hugely dyslexic child has zero comprehension from the written word.  That's right ~ zero!  Yet he has multiple qualifications across a variety of fields~ fields where he could be the hands on learner he is.  The one who barely scraped a grade 10 pass & hated math joined the army to do computer techno stuff & aced algebra ~ a subject he'd never looked at before.  I could give example after example.  My kids are different learners.  They work best with a huge amount of autonomy & flexibility.  Every child is different & that is the first reason why a National Curriculum is doomed to failure before it even begins.  People are not conveyor belt parts.  Not everybody is going to learn the same things at the same rate.  Not everybody is going to be interested in the same things.  After the basics are mastered it should very much become a matter of personal preference.  The only real requirement is being able to read.  A person who can read can master anything, anything at all.

For here starts war, carrion birds sing, & grey wolves howl. ~The Fight at Finnsburgh.

  You ever get surprised by a book? 

 See I know Bernard Cornwell.  He did a series on Arthur ~ which I was foolish enough to read.  Irritated me no end.  Like any amateur historian with an interest in 4th/5th century Britain [ie King Arthur & the fabled Camelot] I have my pet theories.  I know whether I think he was  real or not.  A king or a warlord.  Whether He was Welsh, British or something feral out of the northern reaches.  I have a vision of the Britain that is from the history I've read & Cornwell didn't fit what was in my head.  Marion Zimmer Bradley [Mists of Avalon]  is closer ~ or Manda Scott [Dreaming the Serpent Spear].  Ok, yeah I know; they're women, but they get it.  They get the mix of hard~nosed realism & Celtic mysticism.  Cornwell went for the Roman angle & that has never ever fitted in my mind.  No one I've ever read suggested Arthur fought like the Romans.  He fought like a Celt & the further you go back, into the very first stories, the original ones Thomas Malory built his Medieval romance around, the less Roman he gets & more Celtic warlord he becomes, half god, half man ~ which is why Bradley & Scott make so much sense to me.  They've read the Celtic material.  They use the old symbols.  They understand the Celtic idea of the King being married to the land ~ to say nothing of Merlin who is very definitely a druid.  Forget priest or sorcorer.  The Druids were power hungry madmen & the real power behind any throne:  Brehons, genealogists, lawmakers, historians, councillors...so Romanizing this period is just sad. [And yes, I know about Mona so think Culdee.]  It was a lot of things but overly Roman it was not, though the Celts practically enough took what they liked of Roman ways: the baths [the Celts invented soap for crying out loud!], the aqueducts, the wine ~ very definitely the wine!

That being the case I was more than a little suspicious of anything else I came across of Cornwell's.  Actually I might have forgiven him his historical inaccuracies if his Arthur was interesting but he wasn't.  He was dull.  Almost as dull & irritating as Stephen Lawhead's Arthur ~ & don't get me started on Lawhead who did things completely reprehensible with people, places & times ~ for which there is absolutely no excuse! None.  Arthur might have been a lot of things, including totally imaginary, but he was hardly dull. At which point it is only fair to point out Cornwell is considered an extremely good amateur historian.

So what was I doing reading The Pale Horseman?  The honest truth? IGA was practically giving them away so I bought one. Now this isn't the first book in the series; it is the second one.  Not that I care & not that it matters.  Enough background story is shared so you can't get lost.  The world is the world that became after Arthur's death, a Saxon world.  At which point I deviate to point out the Scot's word for the English is Sasseneach ~ Saxon, & they are still hated with a passion!  Just so you know.  England is becoming but is not yet.  She is made up of lots of smaller kingdoms, each with their petty king, chief of whom is Alfred, king of Wessex ~ which is sort of in the middle of the south.  Cornwall was on one side, Kent & Essex on the other & to the north was the old kingdom of Mercia..  And the whole lot was being harried by the Danes.  As another aside Viking used to be a verb, not a noun, so viking was something you did, not something you were & what the Danes did was go a~viking, rather successfully as it happens.  Successfully enough they nearly stole Alfred's kingdom out from under him!

The Pale Horseman is the story of part of that war & it's definitely not for the squeamish!  The tale is told by Uhtred, a disinherited Saxon raised among the Danes, pagan in Alfred's Christian court, & a warrior among priests & scholars.  Yes, it is massively bloodthirsty.  No, none of the main characters are at all likable.  It makes you blush for the superstition & sins of the early Christian church but....it was un~put~downable!  It was a romping good read.  Not great literature.  Nothing lovely about the language but it is storytelling at its absolute best.  It grips you by the throat, pumps adrenaline through the bloodstream & keeps you turning pages long after your bedtime!  If you have a strong stomach, highly recommended.  I'll be getting the next in the series.

"The trouble with some of us is that we have been inoculated with small doses of Christianity which keep us from catching the real thing." ~ Leslie Weatherhead It is nearly Passover & I have so much on my mind I can hardly hold it all.  So let's see?  There is Easter from Eostre, an European fertility goddess.  Those fur bunnies & chocolate eggs belong to her too & have nothing whatever to do with the passion & death of Christ.  Mind you, I've seen some clever & innovative Sunday School teachers come up with some truly novel ways of Christianizing these things.  Kudos to them ~ but that makes them no less Pagan.  Something about the unclean always defiles ~ a principle found in Leviticus. So I am thinking what we will do this year.



And I am thinking about something the Lord first put on my heart over 3 years ago but which is gradually coming clearer & clearer.  It is especially pertinent as we come into the Passover season when we particually recall who is our Pascal lamb & why He was sacrificed. 

See what I find with scripture, & what I find with what the Lord Himself gives me, is I end up with something that resembles those beautiful Celtic knots: a tangle than goes round & round without beginning or end but which contains a perfectly balanced symetry & moments of illumination & perfect clarity.

The first principal is that judgement begins with the household of God.  If you think I'm wrong just think what has been going on in the church for the past decade or so.  What has been exposed?  The Jimmy Swaggarts.  The pedophiles within the Catholic Church.  The Jim Jones' , The Brethren, The Children of God or whatever they called themselves.  God has been methodically exposing the sins of His people to the light.  He has no qualms about calling a spade a spade, sin sin.  We are the reason the world is in the state it's in.  If we were even halfway toward being the people God called us to be there wouldn't be so many of those barbed little quips like Ghandis, "I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians"; "Please Lord, save me from your followers!" ; Jesus may love you, but he won't respect you in the morning.

There is one very simple explanation for the derision; we have missed the point.  Christ did not die so that we could have a bigger house, a faster car, put our kids in private schools & carry signs condemning the abortionists, the homosexuals, the socialist left & anyone else who takes our fancy.

So lets look at that cross because if we are good little Christians we are goinging to be able to tritely pop out all the right answers: God so loved the world...I am the way the truth & the life....No~one comes to the father except through me...to reconcile man to God ~ & none of that is wrong.  What is wrong is that we tend to stop there when God doesn't.  God goes on to say, Pick up your cross & follow me;  you must lose your life in order to gain it; If you love me you will obey my commandments.

The point was to call out a people prepared to humble themselves for righteouness sake, prepared to strip themselvess of the world in order to acquire holiness that the world might stand condemned of itself.  Instead we have tried to have our worldliness & deny it but Christ made it quite clear that no~one can serve two masters!

The judgement has begun.  One way or another God will have a holy people.  If we will not examine ourselves, if we will not judge ourselves, if we will not walk in holiness then Christ, who is judge as well as redeemer, will move to cleanse us!  Us first, because we've been told!  To us has been given the revelation.  To us has been given the Holy Spirit ~ & it is the Spirit we grieve, the Spirit we quench, when we choose worldliness over holiness.

God's love is not the soft & mushy sort.  It did not spare His own son!  If God did not spare His own son what should He do with us, who have had more of the truth than any other generation & done less with it, walked more selfishly?

Hebrews is not my favourite part of scripture but these verses are particularly pertinant at this time:

²⁶ If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, ²⁷ but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. ²⁸ Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. ²⁹ How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? ³⁰ For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,”^[a] and again, “The Lord will judge his people.”^{[b] 31} It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Heb 10:26~31

Time to go deal with the log in my own eye that I may see clearly.  Yes, indeedy...

I don't like Lemonade.

"A hug is worth a thousand words. A friend is worth more." ~ Charles Caleb Cotton.

Remember Sile?  She's actually a true blue Aussie but she's married to an Irishman & only visits every other year to see her father.  Her sons are my Star's greatest friends so when they visit everything goes on hold because 2 years is a long time between visits.  She is funny & clever & witty & one of the kindest human beings I have ever met.

When she was last here Dearest & I thought Sile wasn't quite her usual bubbly self & she was so thin!  We put it down to to worry about her dad, who's getting older [aren't we all] & displaying some problematic behaviours.  It's a long way to come if something goes catawumpus & you are needed in a hurry.  We put it down to having 2 teenage boys in a really tiny house & the slump in the European economy.  We put it down to everything except what it was ~ cancer.

Ever since Sile returned home she has been battling this illness with a string of hospital visits, Chemotherapy, operations, while Pedar still has to travel internationally for work & is gone for weeks & weeks at a time, Ireland has had some of the worst snow storms ever, her youngest started high school & her older boy is carrying the sort of school work load that makes Star's mind boggle.  And she's brave.  She writes cheery little notes on FB about how  her bright red hair fell out & so she bought herself a wig & some glitzy scarves, & how she sleeps all the time & how the strong silent men in her life are being, well,  strong & silent. 

When Sile went home last time, after Star & oldest leprechaun  had dragged Pedar out skirmishing & got him battered with paintballs & so exhausted he could barely move, & youngest had inveigled Star down to movie world ~ again! ~ & Sile was kind enough to say how wonderful it had been to have a daughter for the weekend & how much the boys had enjoyed having a sister, Dearest & I got to philosophising, the way husbands & wives do, on how peculiar it was that this friendship had endured the long between times, the ebullient reunions, the pregnant silences & we wondered how many more visits there would be before the boys had their own lives or dad passed away & there was no longer any need for those two yearly visits.  And we talked about scraping the cash together so I could visit, even just once, & career around Ireland with Sile & Star & the leprechaun boys.  It never once occurred to us there might never be another opportunity to sit round with hot cuppas laughing ourselves silly & putting the world to rights ~ but we may indeed have drunk our last cuppa together, shared our last laugh.  There may never be another visit.

Sile is very sick.  She has had a major operation  & is in Intensive Care ~ recovering slowly but she is there & I am here.  I leave prayers & giggles on her FB page.  I send the occasional card but it is not the same.  I miss my friend.  It would be nice to keep her for a little bit longer.

Some things you mightn't know.

This is not the Chile we want to build. ~ Ricardo Lagos.


They are beautiful, like children anywhere, descendants of the Araucanians, the Incas & Spanish conquistadors like Magellan, dark haired, dark eyed, spirited.  Even the ferocious Incas could not subdue entirely the peoples of Chile.

They inhabit a long ribbon of land on the western seaboard of South America, perched precariously above the Peru~Chile Trench that plunges to 26 463 feet below the ocean.  It does other things too, pushing the Nazca Plate under the continental plate at about 10 cm a year ~ which is quite a lot~ creating earthquakes & tsunamis &  the Andes Mountains.

The developing countries of Latin America have a dark underbelly with 40~50 million  Latin American street children.  That's 45%!  With a population of just 16.5 million as many as 15 000 Chilean children may live on the street.  4 000 of those may be involved in the commercial sex trade. 

We used to work with homeless youth in Australia.  Getting exact numbers is always dodgy &  there are degrees of homelessness, just as there are various reasons for choosing to live on the streets.  Few children live at home one day & are on the streets the next.  Homelessness is a slow, gradual  & predictable process as they exit from the family home, gradually spending more & more time with their peers.  85% leave for economic reasons & the move onto the streets often begins as young as 5 years of age.

Like many of the Latin American countries Chile has a double~layered society.  The conquering Spaniards have garnered the cream of the country's wealth.  The native inhabitants struggle with persistent poverty ~ & the handmaidens of poverty: alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, family breakdown & child abandonment.

At some point I became aware that they shoot street children in Brazil the way we'd shoot rabbits or feral cats, as vermin to be gotten rid of.  No white Australian child ever has cause for complaint in light of that.  Chile is not quite that bad but it is bad enough.

And I've heard it said often enough; Charity begins at home.  There's plenty of homelessness in Australia.  Our indigenous people have enough problems to occupy the mission oriented for a century or two.  Why Chile?

Who can say how a heart is captured?  There are things that were foundational, beyond Liddy's control.  Half her genetic make~up is Spanish: the light olive skinned complexion, the slim oval of her face, the brown of her hair & eyes.  She will blend.  She is a soccer fanatic, going to a country where soccer is king & known as the Beautiful Game. The majority, of the street children are boys ~ though that may be debatable depending on definitions~ who are soccer mad.  She adores children ~ & here are children in desperate need. That is the calling God has placed on her heart.  I am always amazed at how God likes to move His people around the world.

The thing too is that street children are far from helpless.  They often have really high IQs.  They have to survive & can be manipulative.  They form caring societies & have good self esteem unless they become involved in the drug scene.  These are strengths that can be developed & worked with but there is one thing more that is desperately needed: more than food, more than work;  more than education.  In a country where Catholicism is the dominant religion the gospel of Christ still needs to be preached & the light of His Holy Spirit shone into the dark places of people's lives to bring healing & wholeness.  Everything else is just a means to an end.

Totally random post.

The wheels in my head go round & round...

Did you know that reindeer antlers are soft.  They only harden just before the rut.  They are full of blood & if they get broken off before they harden the reindeer can bleed to death.  True.

There is a man out there who believes Mongolian shamanistic practices & horses cured his son of autism.  I don't know what to think about this one.

E~bay is insane. We were told it would be months before we sold anything.  It wasn't.  Dearest is pretty much computer illiterate.  Guess who is setting up E~bay?  It is doing my head in.  I don't have a business bone in my body.  I don't have an organised bone in my body.  I think stamps are really, really boring. Whose idea was this helpeet thing anyway?!  On the other hand I think Dearest is making money ~ well, it amounts to egg money at present but you know, there's Chile & someone we know is making noises about the National Eisteddfod to be held in Canberra.  Canberra!  I hope they're not thinking winter.  Canberra hosts that horrible white stuff.

Marlow lost whatever brain he had about 4am this morning & attacked Dearest's toes.  There was blood.  There was shouting.  Questions were asked & a certain someone was relegated to the floor.  Two someone's were very miffed.  I got up.  Dino had gone fishing at some point during the night.  I think he turned on every light in the house ~ which would not matter except he left them on so he could see to walk through the bush down our hill.  I walked round the house & turned them all off ~ at which point an insistent mewling began.  One crying cat was circling the house trying to attract someone's, anyone's, attention.  I assume he went outside with Dino but baulked when it came to the boat ride.

It seems to have been a very long day.  Is it over yet?

There is Liddy ~ & then there is everything else.  I am struggling. Too many mornings I am waking up with a burden of grief on my heart: for Japan, for Christchurch, for those the Avoca loved too well & those Yasi overwhelmed; for my friends in Rocky & Mission Beach & the un~named faces that stare out at me from the matchstick debris of their lives.   We live in perilous times & we have been warned; the worst is yet to come.

The natural disasters are big & in a sense so out of my control I can accept their awfulness.  What I have trouble with is a quite different sort of awfulness because it is within my control to do something about it.  I'm just not sure what.

Now I live with this all the time so it doesn't take very much at all to trigger a wave of angst & there are 2 parts to this.  I can not begin to tell you how much I envy Liddy & those like her who do not seem to be plagued by these burdens ~ even knowing full well they have other burdens to struggle with.   These seem to particularly plague those of us with a propensity for contemplating our navels!  Dino has similar issues ~ & I am no help because  I am busily wallowing in my own morass, drowning in too much muchness.

Ember hit a nail on the head, smacky~doo~dah! I always just feel like a  rather grubby little sinner.  No big  Pauline sins, just a constant stream of prickles littering my life, destroying my witness, undermining my faith.  Just Ugh.  It hardly seems worth bothering Jesus, yet again! with such a boring list of failures that I know perfectly well will continue to plague my life because I am not motivated enough to deal with them.  Small.  Petty.  Grubby. Dull. Insipid.  I'm not even an interesting sinner, let alone an inspired  sinner ~ or inspiring salvation story.  I have just one plea; Dear Christ, whatever happens, never, ever let me go!

I just want to take the Holy Spirit & ram Him down into the very marrow of my bones till His fire consumes me from within.  It's probably a good thing I can't.

To this unsavoury mix add this delicate balancing act from John 17:21 : that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me".  Everywhere I look there are Christians denouncing other Christians as they each make claim that they, & they alone, have the Truth.  The Truth.  Not a truth, not part of the truth, but The Truth.  Well they may but they proclaim it in such a way that nothing makes me want to be associated with that truth.  Mostly I don't even choose to read this stuff; it just gets thrown in my face & I can't tell you how much it distresses me.  See I don't read my bible as theology.   I don't read it as Basic Information Before Leaving Earth.  I don't even read it as great literature ~ which it is.  I read it as a letter from my God who wishes to chat with me about any number of issues close to His heart & share what is on His mind with those He chooses to call "Friends".  I read it as one trained in literature & comfortable with the nuances of paradox & metaphor & I read it as one who believes what God said to Job in the midst of Job's ranting: Come, let us reason together.

There are all sorts of errors in Christ's church ~ & some will prove to be fatal ~ but being human & fallible we tend to move to extremes & lose a balanced viewpoint, a reasonable viewpoint, & the love of Christ flees our hearts.  We throw out kindness & gentleness, the products of love, in our zeal & we judge before we know what the other believes or is asking & the Name of God is blasphemed because of us.  And when I read my bible I see Paul talking about the body & the different gifts & I don't necessarily think about individual ecclessia but about the wider body of Christ, to each of whom Christ has revealed something of Himself.    It creates a huge mess in my mind.

See I don't care about your doctrine ~ right, wrong or indifferent.  Can I see the Christ~light shining through you?  Do you see it in me?  When I speak is it with the clashing of cymbals or is it with the love of Christ?  Is my ministry blessed because it flows from the very hands of Christ Himself or am I striving in my wilful flesh? 

And I come back to the same resting point each time: Christ alone.  I can neither add to, nor take away from.    I must hold the All, the bits I like & the bits I don't like, what I understand & what I don't, the contradictions & conflicts because it is all true ~ or none of it is true.  I think we all struggle with this to a greater or lesser degree depending on what denomination we belong to, what we have been taught & how we have been taught it but Christ said it was simple enough for a little child to grasp it.  It is we who complicate it & make it difficult. 

And so I must place all these griefs in His hands, knowing even as I do how they must grieve the heart that prayed that His church would be one, that His church would be united, & that it's dominating tenet would be love.

"I am immortal till my work is accomplished,"  ~ David Livingstone.

I have a new appreciation for Gladys Alyward.  Who knew going to be a missionary was so fraught making?

See the girl is doing up brochures, nearly finished oh wonderful person who has requested one, & asked, ever so nicely seeing I was on the mainland anyway, if I would print everything off & in my delusional state, because I do actually know how to do this, I agreed.  I keep forgetting what a war zone we're in just now.  If you don't believe me I will just point out I have never ever had any of the following happen to me in a public library before.  Never.

Firstly I had to wait for a computer.  I know this is probably usual but see the above paragraph.  Then I got the computer next to the guy who was trolling a date site.  I kept seeing things I'd rather not out of the corner of my eye & he was creeping me out.  Who wants to download a missionary tract next to the guy ogling scantily clad maidens?

Then I think I got the slowest computer in the entire world but I am a patient woman so I just twiddled my thumbs & tried to ignore my neighbour.  The computer decided the first lot of documents were a hazard to its health & refused to process them but the 2nd lot were fine & I busily downloaded them.  Just as I was about to hit print the computer packed up shop & everything disappeared in a blank black screen &  the computer began rebooting.  What's with that?  Then, then the screen told me I was connected to the net but wouldn't let me access anything! So I toddled over to the librarian, male & superior because library computers don't randomly reboot.  After twiddling for a bit he informed me he'd never seen anything like it in his life & set me up with another computer.  I began again.  Just as I got everything up on my screen the loudspeaker announced the library was about to close & I needed to get out of whatever I was doing.

An hour to achieve absolutely zilch! The music lot mightn't exactly be heathens & infidels but they achieved a good bit more than I did last night ~ even with new music.   Liddy will have to try herself tonight.