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.