This coming week our family is moving... again.  For me that shouldn’t be too much of a big deal.  If I counted right this will be the 29th time I’ve changed my accommodation.  I should hasten to add that all my 28 previous moves – with the exception of the first move – have all been within the Eastern states of Australia and mainly due to changing circumstances with work; early in life my parent’s work, then my own and more recently, my wife’s work. But that’s not always the reason why people move, is it?  I began my working career...

I’m putting this blog together on the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the twin towers in New York.  For some days already that has been commented on in the media.  I guess the numbers 9/11 will forever be linked to that day when terrorists flew two passenger planes into the World Trade Towers and a third one into America’s Pentagon building. So why is this horrible event still commemorated twenty years later?  Wouldn’t it be best to just try to forget what happened?  Well, I guess that for the thousands of people who lost loved ones it’s good to pause...

Someone recently asked me a question about the church I served as pastor ten years ago.  I replied that since my retirement and departure I was a rather out of touch with the state of affairs in that church.  That’s a rather common expression isn’t it?  Being out of touch!  We speak of politicians being out of touch with the concerns of ordinary garden variety citizens.  Or maybe you’ve accused your boss of being out of touch with his employees.  Being out of touch is a metaphor.  To put it bluntly, it’s a metaphor for ignorance. Being out of touch can...

Around the corner from where I live a construction crew were busily putting up a new fence around the school.  At first glance that seemed rather odd.  There was a perfectly good fence around the school already.  A closer look made clear what the problem was: the old fence was apparently not high enough.  The new fence was at least half a meter higher.  I figured that the education department was having trouble with people clambering over the existing fences and causing damage on school property.  Well, the new two-metre high, spiked fence was bound to stop trespassers. That led me...

Malcolm Fraser was Australia’s Prime Minister from 1975 to 1983.  He once got himself into hot water when he responded to criticism of government welfare by saying, “Life wasn’t mean to be easy!”  The media had a field day with that quote, implying that Fraser lacked compassion for those on welfare.  You can still find that quote on the internet among a dozen or so of his most memorable sayings: Life wasn’t meant to be easy. Malcolm Fraser was by no means the only one who saw life as being tough.  You may have heard of psychotherapist Scott Peck and his...

Apart from the news and an occasional game of tennis (when an Aussie is playing in the finals of a Grand Slam) I don’t watch much television.  However, being laid aside for a few days in hospital this past week I watched a little more than usual.  A program I was particularly interested in was a documentary about American evangelist, Billy Graham, on SBS.  I recall going to a Billy Graham rally in Melbourne as a fifteen-year- old kid with a couple of school mates.  I must say that Billy left a big impression on a kid who was just at...

It’s not hard to find disillusioned people.  All kinds of people are disillusioned for all sorts of reasons.  Some folk are disillusioned with the government.  Others are disillusioned about their career.  It’s even easy to find people disillusioned with the church. Being disillusioned means that something or someone failed to live up to our expectations.  A simple example of disillusionment is when a child discovers one day that the tooth-fairy is a myth and that it’s really Mum who exchanges the tooth for a coin.  Being disillusioned means that an illusion we operate under has just been shattered.  In this case...

A good friend of mine was diagnosed with a brain tumour.  He had been a smoker and so, not surprisingly, they discovered that the cancer had actually started in his lungs.  The disease was brutal in its effects but mercifully short.  Some weeks after the funeral his widow lamented to me, “Something I am really struggling with is that some folk who I thought were good friends have been totally avoiding me.  Anyone would think I had leprosy or some other serious contagious disease.”  I pointed something out to her that she not considered at all: the possibility that her friends...

My cousin was left a set of plates in his mother’s will.  Not the kind of plates from which you eat your dinner.  These were beautiful, decorative works of art that were on display in my cousin’s lounge.  Problem!  His sister thought she should have been left those plates by her mother so in her anger and resentment she refused to have anything to do with her brother.  After years of alienation my cousin decided that his relationship with his sister was more important than those plates, so he carefully packed them up and sent them to her with a note...

The Rubik’s cube was invented back in 1974.  It has become a popular puzzle that’s still readily available today.  I’m sure you’re familiar with the Rubik’s cube.  That cube has 9 coloured spots on each of its six faces.  The idea of the puzzle of course is that, when it has been scrambled, to get all nine similarly coloured dots back onto the same face of the cube.  The six sides of the cube, with nine dots on each face mean that there are a total of 54 spots on a Rubik’s cube.  Mathematicians have worked out that your chance of...

I once read about a victim of a hit and run accident who lay mortally wounded on the corner of the street.  A priest in a clerical collar happened to pass by and those helping the victim asked if he would please speak to the injured man and pray with him.  The priest knelt beside him and asked, “Do you believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit?”  The man looked up at those standing around him and replied, “Here I am dying and he’s asking me riddles.” So, is there a riddle at the heart of Christianity? ...

This morning in church I held up for the children two soft-drink cans and asked them which of the two cans they would choose.  Well, that was a no brainer.  It wasn’t much of a choice because the cans were an identical brand.  But that changed when I pointed out that although the cans were identical the contents were not.  One can contained only fresh air; the other can contained a passionfruit soft-drink.  It was no longer difficult for the children to work out their preference.  My drink-cans became an object lesson when I pointed out that people can be like...

Normally it’s a problem when we get into trouble for something we didn’t do.  Some of us still have painful childhood memories of a sibling managing to shift the blame so that we copped the punishment from Mum or Dad.  Protests of our innocence fell on deaf ears.  The punishment was painful but it was made worse by the fact that we were unfairly treated.  Mum preferred to listen to your brother’s story rather than to your own.  All of that becomes ten times worse when it happens to us in adulthood when the stakes are so much higher.  I’m thinking...

In 1944, when she was just 13 years old, the Nazis arrived in Mady Gerrard's home town in Hungary.  Mady’s family was Jewish and so under the Nazi regime they were forced to wear the yellow star of David, which Mady called the "cruellest, most humiliating" of the Nazi policies.  In that summer of 1944, Mady and her school friends were sent to the concentration camp of Auschwitz.  Of 13 girls only two survived.  Mady, now 90 and living in England, was one of them.  She relates how every night, overnight, they saw the flames and smelled the smell of the...

Cosmos

It is becoming increasingly common!  I was sitting around chatting with some fellows the other morning over a coffee.  One of the chaps mentioned a stroke of good luck that he had experienced that week.  He continued by saying that he was thankful to the universe for what had happened.  I was about to compliment him for being so religious but someone else interjected before I had the opportunity to speak.  The moment passed, so I “let it go through to the keeper”.  On Saturday morning I sat down to read the newspaper and there it was again.  A fellow called...

I brought a bottle of vinegar along to church last Sunday.  I got the kids to come out to the front, showed them the bottle and asked them if anyone would like a glassful of vinegar to drink.  Not surprisingly, no one did.  None of the adults in the congregation was interested either.  I then asked the children if they would perhaps like to have just a tablespoon of vinegar but there were no volunteers for that either... there were not even any takers for just a teaspoonful of the stuff.  Vinegar, it would seem, is something that people generally avoid...

Confession is good for the soul, so I’ll say it right from the start: I could easily become a choc-a-holic!  I dislike going into supermarkets at this time of the year when the first thing that greets you inside the door of most grocery shops and department stores is... Easter Eggs!  To say nothing of a further tantalising assortment of chocolate products! I’m sure that there is a diabolical conspiracy afoot to get me to buy more of the stuff than is good for me.  These days when I pull into a service station to tank up my chariot, all is...

As I usually do at the Men’s Shed, for smoko, I made myself a coffee and then took a biscuit out of the communal biscuit tin.  One of my Men’s Shed friends looked a little puzzled and then remarked, “John, you’re not supposed to have a biscuit are you?  It’s Lent!”  Well, he was right about one thing: It was Lent! Lent is the forty-day season in the church-year leading up to Good Friday and Easter.  In many Churches today Lent passes without much thought or comment.  Do we really need a forty-day period of preparation for Easter?  After all. the...

Back in the late sixties and early seventies our family subscribed to a then popular series of TIME-LIFE books.  There were several series of these books: a Science Library and a Nature Library, to mention only two.  My children occasionally used those books as reference books during their school years when doing school projects.  Some older readers may still have some of these books on their bookshelf but generally these days you find them only in Op Shops.  Before relegating mine to the Op Shop I figured that in my retirement years I should really read them before disposing of them. ...

Back in 1957 Dr Seuss produced his well-known children’s story, The Grinch.  The Grinch is an unpleasant grouch... who lives alone.  One of his characteristics is that he’s always out to spoil things.  In a movie made from Dr Seuss’ book he particularly rages against Christmas.  Lifting a Christmas tree over his head he declares. “I hate Christmas!” Well, Dr Seuss was not the first one to write about someone who hated Christmas.  A hundred years earlier Charles Dickens wrote the book, A Christmas Carol.  In that story Ebenezer Scrooge also rages against Christmas. At one point Scrooge says: “Christmas?  Bah,...