Australia Day

This past Friday was Australia Day, which commemorates the day in 1788 when the first governor took office in the first British colony in Australia, making that day in effect the birth day of what would become the nation of Australia. We got the day off work and I celebrated by sleeping away most of it. It was wonderful.

A radio show host here in Brisbane did a bit on Australia Day allegedly to determine how much Americans knew about Australia. He called a woman in the U.S. at midnight her time, waking her up. He told her he was with the Australian government tourism department and asked her if she’d mind answering a few questions. They were all multiple choice. One was: “In what year did Tasmania almost tip over: a: 1947 or b: 1954”. She guessed 1954. Another was: “In what year did Adelaide get electricity: a. 1999 or b: 2000”. She guessed 1999. The last was: “Who is the king of Australia: a. Steve “Hot Dogs” Bunning or b. Wally Lewis. That was the only one he told her she missed. He told her after she answered each of the other questions that she’d gotten it right. When she guessed Wally Lewis on the last question, he sadly told her that, no, King Hot Dogs was actually the king of Australia. She seemed not to find anything ludicrous about any of the questions, and felt pretty good about herself that she’d only missed one. No telling how many people they had to call to find one like her, and it wasn’t very kind, but gracious it was funny. (And by the way, in case you’re with her, Tasmania is an island and they don’t tip over; Adelaide is a large, thoroughly modern city that got electricity a hundred hears ago when major U.S. cities did; and Australia does not have a king. If they did get to elect one, though, they probably would vote for the one named Hot Dogs.

Roland and I had a very nice visit last Thursday evening with Michael Schmidt, the district superintendent of this district of the Church of the Nazarene. He’s a good guy, doing his best in a very difficult assignment. We’re looking forward to getting to spend more time with him, just for friendship-building and prayer.

Roland’s mother and I went this past Sunday to the Redlands Church of the Nazarene after she was invited to attend their special service celebrating their 25^th anniversary at their present location. Their pastor always just oozes warmth and humor. And the former pastor who preached the message spoke of the simple Christian obligation to love one another, to speak words of encouragement and affirmation to each other. It was the most thoroughly positive service we’ve been in yet in a Nazarene church here in Brisbane. A group of people who were mostly old, who’ve seen their numbers decline and many years pass since they regularly witnessed God’s grace transforming people in their midst stopped to take stock. They looked around and remembered erecting that building and they recalled glory days when they were impacting their community and God was moving around them and they reminded each other that it wasn’t always like this, and that it needn’t always be, and encouraged each other in a discouraging time to be again a people of hope and expectancy and love and spiritual power.

We sang the old songs of victory with them, and I found myself tearfully praying for them that God would do a new thing in their church and give them the deepest desires of their hearts, not for the forms or the methods they remember, but for the victories they remember. I prayed that God would help them to see clearly and love deeply and expectantly the people around them; that they would lift up Christ in such a way that all people would be drawn to him.

I think that day is coming.

My Thoughts Wander Toward Wonder

Well, I don’t recall any big excitement this week. We worked, ate, slept, watched TV and enjoyed each other’s company. And missed Wesley. The pictures here are from earlier weeks.

But I’m preaching this Sunday. In fact I’m re-preaching for our little group in Australia a message on the prodigal son that I preached a couple of years ago in Texas. That story speaks to my own fears and aspirations and I needed to think about it again and hear it again. I generally figure if I preach honestly to myself, someone else in the group will probably be struggling with the same issues and need to hear the same message. So Sunday morning I’ll re-tell that story to myself in front of about 20 people with whom I’m learning to love like God. I actually wrote out the sermon verbatim when I first preached it, and posted it here on this blog on the 29^th of August, 2005.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what it means to be the prodigal and experience grace, be the dutiful, loveless, angry older brother and experience grace, and be the father and see the worth of both sons more clearly than they see it themselves, and extend grace. I want to be able to instinctively receive and extend grace, confident in the father’s assessment of my own and my brother’s worth, even when we act out of fear and pain.

Then a couple of days ago a dear friend, whom I greatly admire, wrote on NazNet, an internet discussion board, about how he has been shaped by me, Roland, and three famous, beloved Christian authors. It occurred to me that I only knew about that dear friend or Roland or those three particular authors because of NazNet. It occurred to me how deeply indebted I am to good, great, lovable, admirable people for extending grace to me like the father, and modeling Christ to me. It occurred to me what a glorious thing it is to be genuinely valued and admired and enjoyed by genuinely valuable, admirable, enjoyable people. Songs in the church that say things like: “though no one join me, still I will follow” may say something true about the rare, Daniel-in-the-lion’s-den kind of situation, but it’s not a good expression of what God intends for the ordinary life of the ordinary Christian. We are designed to exist in close community, loving extravagantly and being extravagantly loved. I think the offer to include someone in that kind of community – that kind of church – is Good News indeed. I think it appeals to the most primal spirit at the core of the most jaded, sophisticated, apparently self-satisfied on the one hand or despairing on the other hand in our post-modern world. We are made for something radically better than boredom and duty and superficiality and defensiveness. We are heirs of the Most High King. We are made for contagious love.

A Great Foraging Victory!

My dearly beloved friend Emmy has succeeded in finding pinto beans in Brisbane. I couldn’t find them in any grocery store I checked. Even my internet search found only a Brisbane university organic agricultural cooperative from which I could order pinto beans for later home delivery, but only if I paid a fee to join the collective and volunteered my time to work there. Their website featured an article extolling the virtues of agricultural practices in Castro’s Cuba and so forth. Basically, I could get pinto beans in Brisbane only if I joined the local communist party, overpaid and then waited a week or two. I decided I wasn’t that hungry, yet.

Then this week Emmy walked in with the wonderful news that she had scored a kilo of pinto beans at a local organic health food market right in our neighborhood. Victory! I can now just walk into a store any time I like and buy pinto beans. I’m cooking rice and beans today!

On the other hand, the bean dearth is one of the few flaws here in paradise (and Roland, inexplicably a bean-hater, doesn’t consider it a flaw). Karen and Emmy and Roland and I went out to eat earlier this week at a local mall. The trees lining the sidewalk at our sidewalk café were full of multi-colored lorikeets.

The next night the Mercer side of the household ate out at a nearby restaurant called the “Hog’s Breath” and I wondered if it could have been inspired by a bar of the same name in Oklahoma City, across the street from an apartment complex I lived in when I was in college. (No, I never visited the bar.) The plausibility of that question was strengthened when we ate there the other night and saw, there in Brisbane, Australia, a Diffee Motor Company license plate over our booth, among all the U.S. license plates that decorated the walls. Diffee was a car dealership near Southern Nazarene University, owned by a Nazarene family.

The final thrill Wesley was determined to experience on this trip to Australia was to get his picture taken with a pretty Australian girl on the beach, to complete the task of maximizing the jealousy of his friends back in the States. He told me he was just going to find a cute girl on the beach and walk up to her and tell her more or less the truth, that he wanted a photo of himself with a beautiful Australian girl so he could show his American friends how beautiful Australian girls are. And blast if that smooth-talking, good-looking boy didn’t do it exactly like that. Don’t know if he got her name, but he had a nice little chat with her and got the picture.

The New Year

We went into “the city” (downtown Brisbane) for a fireworks display on New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t as impressive as River Fire on the weekend we arrived, but it was still fun. Then on Wednesday we went to the Gold Coast to Surfers Paradise where Wesley rented a surf board (but no lessons) and Wesley and Jake both tried their hand at surfing – with very limited success.

On Thursday we went to the Australia Zoo. That’s the zoo that was owned and run by Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. The kids all three got to have their picture taken with a real, live koala. The koalas and kangaroos just run around loose, with zoo workers making sure you don’t bother them too much. In their habitat you can pet the koalas and kangaroos and feed the kangaroos. You can only hold the koalas with the guidance of a zoo worker at a photo studio.

We also got to watch trained crocodile handlers feed the crocodiles, which was pretty exciting.

The Australia Zoo was plenty interesting and entertaining, but it was also kind of sad because Steve Irwin was everywhere. His larger than life personality was so central to the zoo, and so dear to the hearts of Australians that you couldn’t escape it. They had a Crocodile Hunter video running in one place. A video of him preceded the crocodile show. Big cut-out figures of him allowed people to have their photo taken looking like they were standing with him and a crocodile. A memorial wall still had shirts like he wore, signed by thousands of people expressing their admiration and grief. The souvenir shops included little action figures of him, including one in scuba gear posed directly over a toy shark. That hit a little too close to home. So the whole thing was just an odd mixture of life and energy and fun and loss.

Last night we (Roland, Jon, Brady, Wesley and I) went to a cricket game. It’s a brand new, speeded up version that is played in “only” three hours” instead of the usual 1-5 days. It was probably about as fun as cricket gets for a total beginner. The score was 174 to 130-140-something. Our team won. It hasn’t been around long enough for the organizers to have a good feel for its appeal and they vastly underestimated last night. They were expecting 10,000 and had food and drink stocked at the concession stands for 17,000 and wound up with nearly 30,000 people. They had to just let the last half of the crowd in for free because they didn’t have enough ticket takers and sellers to get them all through in time. Wesley sat beside Roland the whole evening and asked lots of questions, so he feels like he’s pretty up on the basics of cricket now.

Tonight Karen and Emmy and Roland and I are going out to eat without the kids, as a Christmas gift from all the kids (their dime). Tomorrow (Sunday) night, just all five Mercers will go out to eat together on my brother Roy Lee’s dime (another Christmas gift). Wesley’s hoping his mother will be able to take him to the beach one more time on Monday or Tuesday, then Wednesday he’ll be heading back to the U.S.

He plans on moving back here to be with us when he graduates from university in a year. We can’t wait.