Just Another Week at the Office

I didn’t take any photos again this week, so these are just random photos taken over the past couple of months. One is just Brady Hearn’s sweet face as he poses for a picture for his mama. The other two are of a bush turkey we frequently see in the park across the street from the house, and of me at the office. I trust you can tell which is which.

Australia takes very seriously the concept of holidays. Apparently much of the construction industry takes a month off around Christmas and New Year’s Day. They use the word “breakup” here much more broadly than we do, to mean the end of pretty much anything, and it’s common to have a party to celebrate the breakup. So we had three breakup parties this past week, one for each of our three main regions, for our member builders to celebrate the end of the year’s construction season. We’d work at the office until about 2pm, then head off to the Sunshine coast beach one day, the Gold Coast beach another, and a park on the banks of the Brisbane river the third day, to enjoy cold drinks, prawns (shrimp), chips and nuts with our Trade Alliance members and suppliers until 6:30pm or so. That’s how I spent Thursday, November 23, which would have been Thanksgiving if we had been in the United States.

They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday here, and it’s kind of weird experience. The bush turkey roams the park, completely oblivious to the fact that he’s delicious. This may have been the first time in our lives that we haven’t spent Thanksgiving Day with extended family, eating Turkey, forcing down a bite of canned cranberry sauce, and watching parades and football on TV. And of course, the day after Thanksgiving is when we always put up our Christmas decorations and it was officially the Christmas season. There are just no clues like Thanksgiving and cold weather to clue you in that Christmas is just around the corner. Karen and Emmy fixed us a delicious traditional Thanksgiving dinner Friday night, so between that and three straight days of eating shrimp on the beach, it’s hard to complain.

Karen has started substituting at a nearby school for mentally and physically disabled adolescent students. She got scratched and punched and kicked by a mentally retarded autistic 13-year-old girl on the first day. Karen was perfectly in her element. It’s her ideal job. She’s a strange and wonderful woman. Meanwhile, Kaylah just started working at the same store that Charlotte works at. Six people in our three-car household have jobs, so that should slightly ease the transportation challenges.

I preached last Sunday, and the messages I preach are always mostly to myself, so it was helpful to me, at least. Tomorrow, Roland’s mother and I will visit another Nazarene church on our tour. We’re having fun.

Thoughts on Who We Are and Why We're Here

Neither Karen nor I took any photos this week, so I’ll just toss in one that Jake took. He’s never built anything or taken wood shop class in school before, but it’s one of his classes here. The school year here coincides with the calendar year, so he just got into the class for the last few weeks of the year. Nevertheless, he is deeply motivated to make good grades in all his classes because he elicited from me a promise that I would dye my hair pink and take him to the beach one day if he gets all A’s and B’s on his report card at the end of the year. Also, he’s leaning toward the idea of a career in the construction industry anyway, so he’s pretty proud of the end table he made in shop class, that he just brought home this week. It’s very nice, and for a first effort it’s brilliant.

The other picture is one from a few weeks ago, that just didn’t make it into the blog, but is representative of the kinds of meals Emmy prepares every night. This night was Chinese stir fry and lemon meringue pie – both homemade from scratch, of course.

Mainly what’s been on my mind this week, though, has been the sermon I preached this morning in our worship service. We moved here to help start a new church, and at the moment we’re just kind of preparing our own hearts before we begin looking for a sound system, a regular meeting place, and money for a proper marketing campaign for a launch service.

For me, preparing our hearts has revolved around Hebrews 11 a lot lately. That chapter is kind of the Hall of Fame of spiritual superheroes from the Bible. It talks about people who through faith “conquered kingdoms… obtained what was promised”, saw the dead raised and so forth. We want to conquer kingdoms here. We want to experience the power of God for great, glorious victories like those guys. We want a great church where lots of people experience the transforming grace of God, a place where love and joy and peace and healing and freedom and intimacy are commonplace.

But I noticed that the list of superheroes flows without a break from those who experienced victory to those who experienced only defeat, who were martyred, persecuted, tortured, destitute. And the whole list, winners and losers alike are commended in the same way, for the same faith. The faith for which they were commended was not fidelity, the faithful discharge of their duty; it was faith simply in the sense of reliance or trust. They knew unwaveringly in every circumstance that God is love and he’s on their side, and they are precious to him. It says on the basis of that faith alone, not because of whether they achieved great things, but only on the basis of their unshakable confidence in his love for them, that he “is not ashamed to be called their God.”

I learned this week that the word translated “called” means literally “surnamed”. God is so proud to be identified with us when we really know who he is, that he adopts as his own last name the fact that he is related to us. And he invites us, like the conquerors and martyrs alike, to be like him -- shameless.

Beaches, Unicycles and Music

This past Sunday after church we all went to the beach. The kids enjoyed it their way and I enjoyed it my way. My Sunday afternoon nap yields to no man’s worldly pleasures. And, okay, I know I’m overselling Australia as paradise, but I laid there under a warm, clear sky for 2 hours without sunblock and didn’t burn. AND, Charlotte’s hair is longer and thicker after 9 or 10 weeks in Brisbane than she’s ever been able to get it in Texas. Karen insists her hair is thicker, too. I don’t understand how that can be but it’s obvious.

Meanwhile, Jake and Jon are trying to learn to ride a unicycle that Jon’s pretty cousin Tahlia has mastered. I think they’re both up to about 2 seconds upright, now, but a clever photographer has managed to capture those moments.

Our intention is to plant a new church in Brisbane in 2007. That will require securing an adequate meeting place and sound board. Emmy has secured every Sunday off from Starbucks as a condition of working for them. Since she’s the primary worship leader, that was a necessary hurdle that has now been overcome. Until we have the meeting place, though, we’re settling for worship services every other Sunday morning in Roland’s parents’ living room (“lounge room” to Australians). On alternate Sundays we’ve mostly just been lounging around enjoying the time off and hoping the rapture doesn’t come on an off Sunday.

I’ve been meaning ever since we got here to spend the off Sundays visiting Nazarene churches in the area on my own, but that involves looking up the list of churches on one website, then trying to get service times from their websites if they have them, then printing out the map to get there, and I just haven’t gotten around to it. This week, however, Roland’s mother has agreed to pick me up and go with me to one of the Brisbane Nazarene churches. I’m looking forward to that.

In this entire major city only one station plays country music and none at all play the Mills Brothers or “Homespun Songs of the Confederate States of America”. As more and more of our boxes get unpacked, I now have about half of my music CD’s available to me again. Karen was hoping to convince me to put them all in storage here, but as I write this I’m listening to Ray Price singing “Funny How Time Slips Away” behind closed doors where no one else can hear – which is how they strongly prefer it.

Guns, Hills and Rain

One of the mild frustrations of trying to communicate the beauty of this place is that photos don’t easily capture three dimensions. The whole area is very hilly, almost mountainous, but the camera tends to flatten it all out. The picture of the houses in this week’s blog entry gives you some sense of the hills and valleys. The other two are just pictures Karen and Emmy took of each other in the car sometime in the past week or so. Emmy starts a new job in a few days as a shift supervisor with Starbucks in a nearby mall. In the meantime, our shipping container has finally arrived and she and Karen have been busy all week unpacking and arranging while Roland and I have been at work. Australia apparently frowns on anything remotely resembling a weapon. They’re not only holding our two rifles and a pair of brass knuckles and a metal throwing star thingy that the boys had, they’re even holding a paintball gun and an airsoft gun in their customs ARMORY! No more soft rubber sponge ball massacres in this country, boy howdy. Apparently, they don’t take it personally, though, and Wesley may be allowed to take it all back to the states with him in January.

We’re settling into a comfortable routine now. Roland and I work from 8-5 Monday through Friday, come home and eat whatever feast Emmy has prepared, and watch an hour of TV. Thursday night is “Family Night”, during which the Hearns retreat to one end of the house to do something together while the Mercers at the other end of the house usually play a board game together. This Friday night the kids all went to see a Hearn cousin in an apparently very clever, funny school play while the adults had a very nice dinner at a little out-of-the-way Swiss restaurant. There we were, an Australian couple and a Texas couple seated at one outdoor table and a half-dozen European college students at the next table, all being waited on by the Swiss lady who owns the restaurant along with her husband.

Saturdays I do whatever paperwork or chores or projects need to be done and get my weekly blog entry written. Saturday nights we all sit around together and watch a rented DVD and eat snack foods. This week we were going to go to the beach but a much needed rain has finally come. It’s supposed to last a week. Rain forests apparently require actual rain, and lots of it, and they haven’t had much in recent years, so this is apparently fairly important. If it lets up, we’ll go to the beach after church tomorrow. If not, we’ll have a house full of unhappy kids. We miss the folks back home, but this is really nice.