Censorship

In Turkey, people are very religious and spiritual. That's just part of their makeup and their everyday lives. So you can talk with them about anything and religious stuff will come up one way or another. It's not like that in Australia. Here we have a very clearly defined spiritual/secular divide, and spiritual discussion is only permissible in certain contexts. But when it comes to this we Australian Christians should act more like Turkish people and less like Australians. Our faith and spiritually is at the heart of everything we think and do. It pervades even our humble deeds. If we fail to talk about it, it must be because we are actively stopping ourselves from doing so. So let's resolve to be more natural and true to ourselves, and to our God.


H/T Peter

Getting along

Anglo Australians have some okay conflict management skills. We know how to talk things through and we may even be able to do so calmly. But our skills can make us a little too atuned to being wronged and leave us with the expectation that every issue must be sorted out. Chinese Australians, on the other hand, have pretty decent conflict avoidance skills. They can overlook wrongs and bear with other peoples' failings. But they can also bottle stuff up inside until finally they explode in anger. So there's things we can learn from each other.


H/T Paul

The community of church

On mission I learned about church in the innercity and about connecting with strangers. Actually I've since realised another thing - that I already have relationships with various people in my community; it's just that they're not very good relationships. So I don't need to feel overwhelmed at the thought of getting to know new people. These people are already part of my life; it's just that I need to get to know them better.

Another thing we witnessed on mission was community. I went along to a few different church groups - an evening community group in the pastor's house, a lunchtime workers' group in the workplace and a morning Mums' group in the pastor's house again. Each group did different things, but they were all marked by the loyalty and care of their members. Maybe we only noticed this because we were newbies looking on, or maybe there's something special going on at St Peters. Shane the pastor and his wife Ali were certainly eager to be hospitable and made all fifteen of us feel at home. I also noticed that Shane's focus on community came out in the church services - with plenty of communal reading aloud of Bible passages and confessions of faith. It was all good stuff and a privilege to be part of it for a week.

Sydney

Here are two things I love about Sydney:

1. When you indicate, the driver nearest to you will pause for a moment so you can duck in. Every time. This never happens in Hobart. There, you have to indicate for half an hour before you want to change lanes, and even then, the other driver will only let you in if they've had their morning coffee and didn't fight with their wife.


2. When you want to get rid of something and it seems just a little too special to chuck in the bin, you put it on the nature strip. Everyone does this. Someone else will come along and take it. Or it will just sit there. This never happens in Hobart or Melbourne or Canberra. People would mind.

B1 and B2

Here's my two bobs' worth for someone starting a ministry apprenticeship:

1. Sleep in once a week. Even if you don't actually do this, knowing that it would be okay will give you permission to sleep in when you need to.


2. Consider the apprenticeship as you having given yourself over to ministry. You are no longer your own. You've been given enough money to free you up from having to do a regular job, in order that you might dedicate your life to serving the church. This has at least two implications: 1) you should devote yourself to the people of your church and community, and 2) there is no set way to order your life. You are not being paid by the hour. It doesn't matter how many hours you work or when you do the housework or see your friends. You just need to determine what works for you, knowing that the only measure of your faithfulness is to be unashamed before God.

H/T Benny and Mikey

Settling in

Frank the Missionary can't help but be wise. His is the sort of wisdom that confounds the wise. Here's his advice about settling into a new culture:

• Work out the local sense of humour. If you can get understand that, you've understood the culture - and you can be winsome and really start to enjoy the local peoples' company.


• Be vulnerable.


• Do routine fun, escapist things. For some inexplicable reason, the example Frank provided of this was walking down to the swamp with his wife each Sunday.


• In your ministry, spend the majority of your time doing stuff you love. Do this even should you be depressed. It'll look different then - it might just be washing the dishes.

Dig in, enjoy and come back for more

Many of the Masterchef contestants say that they cook to bring people joy. This makes me wonder if cooking is perhaps the most selfless of the arts . . . I think that the other arts do tend to be more serious or self-focussed. So, while you might dance to perform, you also might do it just to revel in the experience, or - for the professional dancer - to communicate. It's only sometimes about bringing pleasure to the audience. With writing this is even more true. Of course you write to give something to your readers, but you also write for yourself and in pursuit of some literary end, which is as like to be sad as happy. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the other arts, yet there is something admirable about the reasons for cooking.

Scrambling

Probably everyone knows about this guy Jordan Belfort, a filthy rich guy who got that way by legally selling stocks in the beginning (making $1 million a month) and later by doing illegal stuff. I read about him in The Australian. (We love The Australian.) Here's one thing he said:

The problem on Wall Street is this. You're not creating anything. There's no
satisfaction. The only barometer you have is money. And money has no meaning. So
what do you do? You try to attach meaning to the money by buying
possessions.1

This sounds like something from Ecclesiastes. It's funny because I'm afraid to say that I think of luxuriant possessions as evidence of having made it, as a display of mighty achievements. But he's saying that possessions are actually an attempt to put a face to meaningless achievements.



1 W Leith, "The Man Who Sold His Soul" in The Weekend Australian Magazine April 17-18 2010, p19.

Forgiving and letting go

Over Easter I cooked for some people at Katoomba Easter Convention. To me this is perhaps the single most iconic Sydney evangelical event, so I enjoyed seeing its mystery unveiled. I had pictured a ginormous, plush convention centre, so there was something oddly pleasing about the fact that it looked like the inside of a big (not ginormous) shearing shed, set amidst bushland. There's something good about humble Christian buildings I think.

As I've said before I'm not a particular fan of conferences, so it was great to be able to cook for the teachers-of-the-kids-of-the-grownups who are. It was also great to sit in on a couple of talks and rejoice that all these people have come to hear really solid, heartfelt Bible talks.

In one of the talks I half-listened to, John Lennox spoke about forgiveness. He said that in the Bible the Greek word has a wider range of meaning than its English translation, "forgive". In Greek, the word can refer to 'letting go' as well as to actually forgiving in a formal sense (acknowledging that the wrong done against you no longer incurs a debt). Lennox said that, while Christians are commanded to forgive in the first sense - not to dwell on wrongs and to let go of them - that it is only if and when the wrongdoer repents that the second sense of forgiveness comes into play.

I feel a bit uncomfortable about this, but then I didn't follow his arguments closely and I haven't had a careful look through the New Testament. Nevertheless I feel like this distinction sets up an expectation that each time a person sins against another person, that they must receive forgiveness from both God and that person. I think this is generally appropriate and should be done (Luke 11:4), but I also think that even if the wrongdoer were to seek forgiveness from God alone, then that would be sufficient (Psalm 51:4). Even if Lennox is right and unless the person repents you don't have to forgive in the second, formal sense, I can see another option. I wonder if, at the very least, you can chose to hand it all over to God, to leave all judgement and forgiveness in his hands because it is able to do it all (1 Peter 2:23).

What do you think?


Postscript: thanks to Laura's input I've sured up my thinking about this. Have a read of the comments to see where I'm at now.

Cheerful chooks

Thanks in large part to Our Pam I always buy Free Range eggs. I see this mundane, apparently abstract consumer choice as an clear opportunity to take moral action. I'm so convinced of this that I'll happily pay extra money and not purchase any eggs if my corner shop doesn't stock Free Range.

This was all good and fine until I realised I was inconsistent in buying Fair Trade chocolate. An egg is an egg, but all chocolate is not equal. Turned out that I cared more about taste than I did about the lives of very poor people. How could I act on behalf of chickens but not on behalf of people?

Since then, I've been more consistent in my purchase of Fair Trade chocolate, coffee and tea . . . But I'm very happy to report that the dichotomy between taste and social justice has just become a false one.

Mundoview

An old friend of mine takes staggeringly beautiful photos.

Don't believe the lies

I get so used to death being a part of this world that I forget its horror and sometimes even half-believe the arguments made in its defence. The following wry exchange was a dose of reality. It's from White Noise, a brilliant, darkly entertaining, wonderfully written satirical novel by Don Delillo. Murray and Jack are speaking, fellow lecturers at the College-on-the-Hill.

"Do you think it's a sense of incompleteness that causes you the deepest regret? There are things you still hope to accomplish. Work to be done, intellectual challenges to be faced."

"The deepest regret is death. The only thing to face is death. This is all I think about. There's only one issue here. I want to live."

. . . .

"This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monongraph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years."

. . . .

"Do you believe the only people who fear death are those who are afraid of life?"

"That's crazy. Completely stupid."

"Right. We all fear death to some extent. Those who claim otherwise are lying to themselves. Shallow people."

"People with their nicknames on their license plates."

"Excellent, Jack. Do you believe life without death is somehow incomplete?"

"How could it be incomplete? Death is what makes it incomplete."

"Doesn't our knowlege of death make life more precious?"

"What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing."

"True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about . A wife, a child. Does the specter of death make a child more precious?"

"No."

"No. There is no reason to believe life is more precious because it is fleeting. Here is a statement. A person has to be told he is going to die before he can begin to live life to the fullest. True or false?"

"False. Once your death is established, it becomes impossible to live a satisfying life."

"Would you prefer to know the exact date and time of your death?"

"Absolutely not. It's bad enough to fear the unknown. Faced with the unknown, we can pretend it isn't there. Exact dates would drive many to suicide, if only to beat the system." (p283, 284-85)