Life's a Beach

Jake wanted a trip to the beach for his birthday, which was the 19^th of February. For the adults, that means an hour’s drive to a good beach, an hour’s drive back, and clothes and car full of sand at the end of the day. We put it off one week because of weather and dangerous conditions in the surf, but this Sunday Karen and I broke down and took Jake, Charlotte, Kaylah and Tylah to the Sunshine Coast. They had a great time. Tylah and Karen and Charlotte collected seashells, watched hermit crabs and so forth. Jake practiced his skim boarding, using one board for each foot at one point.

As is my custom on such occasions, I took the opportunity to take a nap. In my blog entry of 11 November 2006, I wrote this about an essentially identical experience:

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.

Well, the same two-hour nap on the same beach in February produced a very different result.

Everywhere that wasn’t covered is red as a beet. So, one lesson for the next trip is to apply sunscreen liberally the minute I get to the beach. A lesson for some future trip to the beach a few months from now is to start exercising to build up my stamina enough to spend more than 15 or 20 minutes jumping around in the water so I have something to do besides sleep while the kids are playing.

Back to the sunburn issue, Charlotte has the same weird superpower as her Aunt Janet. Her skin is as white as snow and she can apparently spend all day in the hot summer sun in a swimsuit without burning, tanning, freckling – anything. They both seem to be completely impervious to the sun, which is extraordinarily rare in really light-skinned people.

Obviously I don’t have that special power.

I’ll be preaching this coming Sunday about Naaman, the man in the Old Testament who was healed of leprosy. By then I should be peeling nicely so it should all work out perfectly. I’ll be my own sermon illustration.

Spiders and Spirit

Our church service this morning was the most interesting thing we experienced this week. Roland’s sister Kammy Crowther and her husband Kevin have six of their seven children still living at home. Their 18-year-old son Grant has a bedroom that is a part of our little office building on the family property. Their 24-year-old son Brett has his own separate, self-contained living quarters with separate, outside entrance at one end of the residential building. Roland’s parents have a two bedroom apartment next to his. Then there’s a laundry room with separate, outside entrance. The rest of the building is the home of Kevin and Kammy and the four youngest children.

Our worship service is held every other Sunday morning in the living/dining area of Roland’s parents. Because the Crowther place is out of the way and the room is small, we haven’t generally felt ready to start inviting anyone else to attend, yet. Attendance is usually just the people from our two places, but that makes 20 people. Occasionally, though, one of us just won’t be able to resist inviting a friend to experience what we’re beginning to experience, or we’ll find ourselves talking about it to a friend in passing and they’ll invite themselves. This morning was one of those times. A friend of Brett’s attended with him.

The presence of that visitor probably made us all sit up a little more and, beyond just interacting warmly with him, we sought to genuinely experience worship in a way that he could be drawn into with us. The songs that Brett chose this week were great. Emmy’s worship leadership was a little more spirited than usual, and we were all drawn into a real encounter with a real God who is really making us who we were always born to be.

Then Roland began his message, and something brilliant, unscripted and more or less unscriptable happened. His text was the verse in I Peter that says “cast all your cares on Him, because He cares for you.” As he began to talk about anxiety, where it comes from, how we respond to it, and how it shapes us, a big spider appeared on the wall behind him near the ceiling.

A few of us wanted to take control of the situation and interrupt the sermon to dispatch the spider, but Roland asked us not to. He talked about how our instinct, instead of giving our anxieties to a caring God, is to try to take control of our circumstances, believing that by being controlling of the people and things around us we can avoid the things we fear. As the spider started walking across the ceiling toward the part of the room where Charlotte and Kaylah were sitting, they started scrambling from one end of the couch to the other, trying not to squeal. At that point Roland came to the next point in his message, where he talked about the tendency for our anxiety to be created not by what’s actually happening to us, but by what we’re afraid will happen to us. We could see that the spider was almost certainly not going to fall off the ceiling onto the girls, and nothing was, in fact, happening to them at all.

Bad things certainly can and do happen to us, but it’s not usually the actual bad things that separate us from God; it’s our anxiety about what we fear may happen in the future. So God tells us not to worry about tomorrow, but to seek first his kingdom, and to cast our anxiety upon him, because he cares for us.

Like the parables of farmer or fisherman, that image of the spider on the ceiling helps me remember something about the heart of God at work in my real, daily life.

1402

What ought to have been the most memorable event of this week for me was attending the Samoan Nazarene church yesterday. I didn’t take any pictures there, so I just grabbed this one off the internet so you’d know what Samoans look like (and not confuse them with Somalians like Karen did). It’s a South Pacific island and they have a significant group of immigrants in Brisbane. The Somalian church is the largest church on the district. They had a lot of children and young adults, which set it apart from the other Nazarene churches I’ve visited. Like all the churches we’ve visited, the people were warm and sweet.

Weirdly, though, the most memorable moment of the week was Friday evening at home. For some reason, Karen, Emmy, Roland, Kaylah and I wound up all sitting on the stairs just talking. It reminded me of “1402”. My great-grandmother owned a home at 1402 E. Washington Avenue in North Little Rock, Arkansas. I’ve just always referred to it as “1402” and it represents the idea of home to me. My grandmother lived and died there, and my father lived there for most of the first 30 years of his life. I lived there off and on for the first 7 years of my life, attending the same next-door elementary school my father and grandmother attended. It was a big house and we were poor by the time I came along, so the two outside wings of the house were rented out, one to a family of 5 and one to a family of 3. In the middle were the 7 of us – me, my sister, my parents, grandparents and great-grandmother. The house was also the gathering place for the more extended family and the neighborhood. You never knew how many people would show up for dinner, and all the adults seemed to have parental rights and responsibilities for me.

Whatever you grow up with in your earliest years seems normal to you, no matter how odd it may actually be. That arrangement at 1402 has always, at an emotional level at the back of my mind, represented home to me. I took in stray people throughout our marriage, much to my wife’s chagrin. She and I lived with my cousin and his wife early in our marriage and it still seemed like a good arrangement to me long after it had driven both women to distraction. I’ve always fantasized about being able to afford some big boarding house in which my whole extended family lived.

So as we all sat there on the stairs talking, the physical and relational closeness felt like that childhood idea of normal. My kids talk to Roland or Emmy when they aren’t comfortable talking to us about a problem. Karen ferries Hearn kids to work and school. Tylah plopped down beside me this week for help with her homework. Roland and Emmy and Karen and I sit out on the patio in the cool of the evening with a cup of tea and it’s just relaxed and comfortable and good.

I’d still love to have a huge mansion big enough to add my parents, siblings and dearest friends to the mix. I’m sure it’s no one else’s idea of normal, but it feels like home to me.

I imagine that some glorified version is what heaven will be like, when everyone really loves their father with everything they are, and loves their neighbor as themselves. My mansion in the sky will be filled with people I love, and by whom I am loved, and with the sound of their laughter.

Snakes, Pickles and Transforming Grace

The big story this week is a 6-7 foot long python in amongst the chooks at Roland’s parents’ place. (Australians call chickens chooks.) Roland’s mother keeps a few chickens. Friday she came running to the office saying there was a snake in the chicken coop. We found the biggest snake I’ve ever seen in the wild, curled up in the coop. Roland said it was a carpet snake, or carpet python. They aren’t venomous, but they’re very impressive looking. While we were trying to figure out how to catch it and dispose of it, it slunk off underneath something where we couldn’t see it or get to it, so it’s presumably still hanging around, waiting until it’s hungry enough to eat a chicken, or at least a few eggs. Since I didn’t think to bring the camera with me at the time, here’s a photo of a carpet python from the internet.

It was basically a slow week, so the other big story is another of those jarring little culinary cultural differences. Dill pickles are pretty much a staple food item in the south central United States. Any mom-and-pop convenience store is likely to feature a giant jar of giant pickles on the counter for individual sale. Any supermarket will have competing brands of one-gallon jars of dill pickles and a nearly endless array of variations on the theme in smaller jars. The only pickle-related controversy in my childhood was whether drinking the pickle juice would really dry up your blood, as my mother always warned.

Here in Australia, pickles are nearly non-existent. You may, if you search carefully, find a little jar of tiny sweet or dill gherkins and that’s it. You’ll have to look closely though, because there aren’t many of them. Emmy, bless her dear heart, has been doing her best to find us all things Texan to ease the cultural transition for us. She’s found a brand of dill pickles, made in India of all places, that are as good as any dill pickle anywhere. It’s a totally alien food to the Hearn household, except for Brady. He and I will finish off a 1.95kg jar (4 pounds maybe, or about a half gallon or so) in 2-3 days. It’s wonderful. It’s such a foreign concept here, though, that Roland was having to explain the concept to his sister at church this morning. “No, they aren’t gherkins; they’re big cucumbers in a big jar, pickled with dill weed. They eat them. I don’t understand it either.”

It was one of those “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto” kind of moments.

Roland and I have begun to think through NewStart-RiverCity’s pre-launch launch. The idea is to first put up a basic website; then find a regular meeting place for Sunday mornings; then find a way to do a little bit of essentially free advertising to attract our first few completely unchurched people who can begin to let the grace of God transform them and become a part of the initial core group we need for a proper launch. We’re thinking maybe we want the website up in April, the meeting place nailed down by June, and the free advertising around that same time. Then ideally around the following Easter, we’d have money to do a proper launch with a sufficient advertising budget to bring in as many first-time visitors as we could effectively work with. All of that will, of course, be covered in prayer before, during and after everything.

Interestingly, the postal service here delivers mail to your mailbox, but they don’t pick up mail from your box. If you want to mail something, you have to go to a drop box somewhere in the neighborhood. On the other hand, they don’t have a rule against other people putting stuff in the mailbox, so we could just print off fliers and drop them in boxes around our meeting place.

Anyway, we’re convinced that God is God and love is enough and we’re going to see him work in Brisbane in loving, transforming power in the days ahead. We’re going to get to tell the old, old story again in language that is fresh, understandable and compelling to this generation.