Celebrations.

This is a quick update before our holiday because today is our 8th wedding anniversary. Hooray! To celebrate I made secret brownies in the middle of the night so that Ruth could stuff her face full of chocolate when she woke up. They worked out pretty well considering I finally finished the icing at half-past midnight and felt like I'd lost all sense of what was real and what was unreal. The mini M&Ms are supposed to spell out "I heart U" but my hands were shaking from lack of sleep so they really spell out something like "fbjihnihir". It made sense to me at the time.

The rain from a couple of weeks ago has stirred up the river so much that our water is still full of river mud. It's meant that Ruth has had to be careful with our laundry - washing some white clothes in red mud has some undesired results. It's also created some interesting bath time situations. I don't know if we're supposed to use rain water for bathing babies, but we've always been crazy, anarchic kind of people.


Australia is so much more an outdoor place than the UK. It's not that we don't have outdoors in England. We do, and some of it is amazingly pretty. It's just that it seems a lot less attractive when you have to dress up like Scott of the Antarctic to mow the lawn. Here's something that you'd never find in the UK for example. A public grill. A communal BBQ. You'll frequently find them in parks and the like. Free cooking methods! You can actually turn up with your shrimps and snags to a park and cook them there. Who pays for that I wonder? It would be a nice break in your morning walk to work if you could cook your own bacon and eggs on the way, wouldn't it? I think they'd work really well in some of the London parks - especially if you could convince a pigeon to land on one mid-frying. That's teach those flying rats a lesson they'd never forget!


Here's something that I'm beginning to understand. Even the most ordinary of life's events can become an occasion for joy if it's understood to be a gift from God and treated as such. Enjoy the ordinary things over the next couple of weeks. We'll let you know how we got on.

Queasy Rider

I had another go on the dirt bike last weekend. Matt decided that I was ready for stage two and let me wear a helmet this time. We zoomed round the paddock by the mat shed (where the magic happens) on a dirt track made slippery and unpredictable by the recent downpour. Well, Matt 'zoomed' round on his bike. I think that what I was doing could be more accurately described as a 'trundle'. I have learnt a new Aussie term as well - 'stacking' the bike i.e. to crash it. I'll leave it to your imagination as to why I've become acquainted with that particular turn of phrase but suffice to say that it was a good thing I was thrown well clear of the wreckage this time or it would be my obituary that you would be reading right now. Note to self: wait until mud has dried and less slippery before riding again. Maybe next week Matt will let me take the training wheels off.

Wednesday night was the second stage of the State of Origin 'football' game. In Australia they are also afflicted with that colonial disease of calling their national game (in this case Rugby League) 'football' despite the fact that it is played with the hands. The State of Origin is an annual grudge match between a side made up of players from New South Wales and a side made up of players from Queensland. There is a fair bit of rivalry between these two states and it's quite an entertaining show. Despite living in NSW I decided to support Queensland on the grounds that it is the 'underdog' state - plus being asked to choose between 'Queen' and 'Wales' was only going to end one way. Queensland beat NSW in the first two games (in a best out of three series) so have already won. So this is what supporting the winning side feels like? It's pretty good. Maybe I'll have to support Australia in the Rugby World Cup.

'Football' is also known as 'footy'. This isn't unheard of in the UK, but surely here it should be 'footo'? This is a country where I would have been known as a Bappo minister, so why the selective suffixes?


I've got some more thoughts on community for you all. I think that one of my primary convictions about community is that it's an immensely powerful thing for evangelism. It seems to me that when God calls Abraham He does so to establish a nation - a community. The purpose of this national community is then to be a light to the surrounding nations. In Deuteronomy 4:6 Moses explains that God gave the Law so that the other nations will see the wisdom of a God-centred life. Furthermore, in Exodus 19:5-6 God explains that the role of Israel is to be a 'kingdom of priests' - in other words be a nation of people who mediate God's presence and intercede to the surrounding peoples. One of the main reasons that God establishes communities is for the purpose of mission. Therefore a true community focused around God will model an alternative lifestyle that will be at the very least noticeable if not downright attractive. I think that one of the hallmarks of this alternative lifestyle is relationships that go beyond the surface, relationships where genuinely rejoicing together and genuinely confessing together is a priority. I suppose that the question each of us needs to ask ourselves is how we make that kind of community happen.

Just to let you all know that we're heading off to Queensland on Friday so we'll be out of contact for a while. We're heading off to take part in this Scripture Union camp before having a week's holiday on the Sunshine Coast. I probably won't be able to update the blog in that time, but at least the next time I do you'll get some nice holiday photos and news from another part of the country.

It never rains...wait, yes it does.

Anyone for a game of volleyball? It rained for the past forty-eight hours solid here and it finally stopped this morning. It's the most rain Australia has had for five years and it's already the biggest June rainfall for thirty years. This is a good thing. You're probably aware that Australia has been suffering from a severe drought for years so everyone seems to be really happy at the moment. This is nice, because in the UK two full days of constant rain would push most of us off the edge into a psychotic episode.


After my wife's efforts I thought that I should have a go at riding the bike. You can see from this photo that I soon took to the machine like Paris Hilton to jail. That's me burning around the paddock without a helmet on. Aren't I cool. I have to say that learning to ride a bike has given me more respect for my motorcycling friends. It's more complicated than I make it look and it's very easy to get confused. I, for example, managed to put on too many revs and took the clutch off too quickly. As a result I shot forward like Reid catching the scent of cheese and ended up in a crumpled heap at the end of the paddock, my leg trapped under the bike and my pride severely damaged. You can see from the photo to the right the life-threatening injury that I sustained in this near-death experience. I'm also very happy to say that Ruth caught this incident on video. You'll be reassured to know that the sound of my horrified screams are drowned out by my wife's cackling laughter. Apart from this, my first lesson was a resounding success and I can now see the appeal of zooming along like a demented badger with nothing except your own skill protecting you from the taste of concrete death.

My conscience compels me to add that the photos of the redback and the sunset in my last post came from the camera of Jane, one of our neighbours. I had intended to credit her in the last post but forgot and am correcting that now to prevent you from making the mistaken assumption that I had suddenly got good at taking photos. In the same manner there are a couple of photos from this post that were taken during a camping trip a couple of months ago by Jane's sister, Lucy. Bonza!


The photo of me didn't seem to appear in either The Daily Liberal or even Dubbo Photo News. How is this possible? Why is it that Dubbo Photo News can spare the space to include photos of Sheila's twenty-first birthday party but not of living legend James 'Mat Fu' Webb? Where's the justice in that? It's not a total waste though as there is often some quite interesting stuff in the DPN, apart from the TV listings. For example, there's a section every week where they ask a small Dubbo child some random questions and record their answers as spoken. So for example in this week's paper Tayla is asked, amongst others, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" ('He can't do that because my mum has to hold his hand'), "What does the Prime Minister do?" ('He's a boy and he shops') and "What's the best thing about your dad?" ('He grows up when he was a little baby'). Calvin was asked the same questions and gave the respective answers 'He crossed the road to lay an egg', 'Licks his hands' and 'He's old'. Thanks son.


"This week I have been mostly thinking about COMMUNITY.". I've been asked to talk a little bit about it to the Dubbo teams next week, which I thought was strange seeing as I'm a newbie and don't really know what I'm doing. I really appreciate that Cornerstone is a genuine effort to do community properly - and this means not getting to pick and choose the face that you let other people see. If you live with someone for long enough it becomes very hard to keep up the pretence, and you can't avoid having to be real with other people. Furthermore, in Cornerstone there is ample opportunity for 'enforced genuine-ness' (TM) - meetings where we are encouraged to share about our lives beyond the surface. It's intense and hard work but there's something powerful about it and it just reinforces my conviction that God created us to move and breathe and have our being (and do mission) in community. After all, when God wants something done He tends to establish a community to do it. Maybe I'll share some more about this once I've had a chance to think about what I'm going to say. Have a good week.

It's a Dangerous Life

We've had to buy a new computer. The old one just cannot be fixed in Oz, so we've bitten the bullet and got a new one. It's pretty snazzy. Just the thing for updating my blog and writing sermons. I might find time to install a couple of games as well but we'll see. After having finally got to grips with Windows XP I'm now expected to learn how to use Windows Vista. Too much change!


As an example of the nightmare flux of my life here is a picture of Darren tiling the floor of our laundry. I'd just got used to the hardboard floor and now we've got a magnificent mosaic instead. It's too much.

And my wife! She's only gone and started riding motorbikes again. I don't think I can cope with all this craziness and risk-taking. As fellow-student Ian said "If anything happens to the cook, you're a goner.". Why can't life be more sedate and peaceful? You'll have to excuse the blurred photo - it was an 'action' shot and I hadn't got the camera at the right setting.


See that? That's a Redback spider - a nasty little poisonous critter that lives round these parts. The colder weather forces them indoors. This particular specimen was found nesting in the pushchair that belonged to our neighbour. See what I mean about the danger involved in my life? I'm going to have to go and have a sit down and watch the finest Saturday night entertainment that Australia has to offer - namely The Bill. That's right. The Bill is prime-time TV fare here. In fact, much of the TV seems to have been sourced from the UK. It's quite interesting.

So anyway. With all the danger and old British TV why am I enjoying it here at all. Let me show you another picture and you can hopefully see one of the reasons why. Have a great week!