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.

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.

Thrills and Spills

This week it was cloudy and rainy all week, which is wonderful for the folks who live here, because we’re in the 6^th year of a drought, but for Wesley, who only has 3 weeks here, it’s not so great. We took him to the Sunshine Coast on Christmas Eve for the beach experience, and hope to take him to the Gold Coast this coming week. The picture is of Wesley on a boogie board in the surf on the Sunshine Coast. Yesterday he and the rest of the Hearn and Mercer kids went horseback riding at a spot on a river that’s a popular swimming hole. Wesley swung off a rope into the water and landed on a rock, leaving a pretty nasty chunk of skin peeled away from his foot (also pictured here). We doused it in Hydrogen Peroxide, put some ointment on it, and bandaged it up. We’re hoping it’ll heal enough and the weather will cooperate enough for the planned trip to the Gold Coast and to the Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin’s zoo – the Crocodile Hunter). Christmas was great. With 11 people living in the house and 8 of them working, there were lots of presents.

The rest of this past week was mostly just sitting around listening to the rain. Wesley has done a good bit of hiking through the national forest across the street. Yesterday morning, before the horseback riding, I took Wesley and Jake for a one-hour hike through the rainforest at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was fun and beautiful, but most of the pictures somehow got deleted. One we did get is of Jake and Wesley together at a spot covered with boulders and a large, fallen tree, where they’ve climbed high above the trail where I stayed. One photo we lost was of a large loop of vine hanging down from a tree like a natural swing. Jake and I each got up in it and swung.

I’m including one more picture of the previous week’s trip to the Green Mountains, just for the fun of it. We have later, cooler photos of Jake with parrots, after he got used to it, but my title for this one when they first landed on him is: “Why Jake’s Not a Pirate”. You gotta love that boy.

By the way, the overwhelmingly-no-competition worst soft drink I ever tasted, a yogurt soda I bought several years ago at a Pakistani convenience store in Texas, now has competition. I bought it yesterday at a little sidewalk café at the top of Mt. Glorious. It was an Italian soft drink called, innocuously enough, a “carbonated citrus beverage.” The citrus fruit turned out to be something called chinotto, and it was unbelievably, shockingly awful. The only description I can think of is incredibly intense licorice.

Jake, who has a deeply held, life-long conviction against ever, ever trying any new food or beverage, jumped at the chance to try this soft-drink when I started spitting and saying how awful it was. Unfortunately, he agreed. But at least now I know what to say to get him to try something new. You can read about Chinotto on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinotto but don’t believe what it says about the taste.

Wesley’s “Home”!!!

Wesley arrived in Brisbane this past Thursday, the 20^th of December. He missed his connecting flight from Sydney to Brisbane and had to catch the next flight, so he got to us 3 hours later than expected, and we didn’t know why. Having never been away from us so long before in his life, we were missing him pretty badly anyway, and pretty desperate for his arrival. As a result, when we did finally get him in our arms, Karen and I both burst into tears, and he called us crazy people.

He wants to pack as much as he can into his brief time here before he leaves again on the 10^th of January for his return to school at SNU for his final two semesters. On Thursday and Friday he did a lot of hiking through the part across the street from the house, seeing parrots and giant lizards and strange trees. On Saturday we went to Lamington National Forest in the Green Mountains. Tourists there feed the birds so much that they’ll come right up and land on you, hoping (usually with good reason) for food. We saw some wonderful panoramic vistas on the way up and down the mountain.

At the top of the mountain we hiked through a dense rainforest. One of the unique features of this particular rainforest is a treetop walk. A suspension footpath bridge takes you out to a point 15 or 20 metres above the ground. You’re actually walking around in the canopy of the trees, high above the forest floor. Then you come to an especially tall tree that has a metal ladder, surrounded by a wire cage to keep you from falling. You can climb it another 20 metres to a little platform at the very top of the tree, and look out across the whole rainforest, across ranges of mountains and valleys.

On the walk we saw a couple of wallabies, which are basically small kangaroos. Then on the drive home we saw a full-sized kangaroo bounding across an open field past horses and cows. All in all, Wesley had a thoroughly full day of uniquely Australian experiences.

Today, Christmas eve day, he saw 3 or 4 wallabies on his walk in the park across the street. Later today we’ll go to the beach, and then over to the home of Roland’s parents and his sister Kammy and her husband Kevin Crowther this evening for a short worship time singing carols and so forth, and apparently a meal.

Cricket and Kangaroo

The game of cricket is a major phenomenon in Australia. The biggest thing in cricket is “The Ashes”, a competition between Australia and England approximately every year and a half. A “test match” in cricket is a single cricket game that takes 5 days to play. The Ashes consists of 5 test matches, played across a couple of months. It’s such a big deal here that on certain key playing days, internet usage by office workers increases 20-fold as workers check scores and watch video of key plays on cricket websites. It’s like the world series and super bowl rolled into one and extended across two months or so. It’s being played in Australia this time (it alternates between here and England) and literally 10’s of thousands of English fans have traveled to Australia to watch the matches in person.

The most diehard of them are called the “Barmy Army”. A weekly TV series here right now is about an Aussie who travels around to the matches with the Barmy Army of British fans. Each match is being played in a different Australian city. Baseball is derived from cricket, and cricket fans have the same love as baseball fans of endless statistics and in a game that may feature 500 runs per team, there are lots of stats. Discussion before and after the games takes as much time as the game itself.

So lunch at work these days means beating a path the few meters from the office to Roland’s parents’ place where his mother feeds us lunch while we watch cricket and they discuss the strategies of the game. I’m getting to the place where I can toss in a comment here and there like I know what I’m talking about.

Yesterday’s lunch was a salad and ginger beer (ginger ale with LOTS of real ginger in it. No, it's not like Vernor's, which is still just ginger ale, albeit a good one). The salad was kind of a chef salad, with lettuce, tomatoes, bean sprouts, apples, cheese chunks and meat chunks. The meat looked like medium rare beef steak. It was actually kangaroo steak that Roland’s mother had found on sale at the local grocery store.

My sister Janet once found kangaroo meat at a new grocery store in Dallas. She invited me over, fried it in a skillet and we ate it, or tried to. Roland had previously told me that the best steak he ever ate was a kangaroo steak at a restaurant in Australia. On that recommendation we bit into our fried kangaroo with great anticipation. It was terrible. It tasted like liver or something. We couldn’t finish it. We gave Roland the leftovers and he insisted it tasted fine – nothing like liver.

As a result of that experience, I wasn’t eager to try it again, but this steak in the salad was actually quite good. Roland’s mother said it’s especially important with kangaroo meat not to overcook it, so maybe that had been our mistake.

Kangaroos, by the way, far from being an endangered species, are so common as to be a pest here, apparently. I’m told that Roland’s brother, who lives in a small town several hours into the interior of the country, has hit as many as a half-dozen or so kangaroos on the highway over the course of one drive from there to here. Nearly everyone who lives in rural parts of Australia has a “roo guard” installed on the front of their vehicle to prevent damage to the vehicle when it collides with a kangaroo.

For Texans, think skunk or Armadillo, only 50 times bigger. And tastier.

AAARRGGHH!!! Failure!

I was just getting proud of myself for having done such a great job of establishing a routine and faithfully writing on my blog every week for three months; then last weekend I forgot.

I was going to do it on Sunday evening instead of the usual Saturday morning, because I knew Roland and I were going to take Karen and Emmy to a little roadside café on a mountaintop near here for tea after church, and I could write about that. We took a walk together through the rainforest while we were there. I forgot my camera so we relied on Emmy’s camera. It’s a new phone so she didn’t yet know how to upload her pictures to the PC for use in my blog and as it turned out, the phone takes pretty bad pictures anyway and somewhere along the way I got wrapped up in the issue of the phone and its pictures and forgot that the point was the blog. I didn’t even think about it until it was nearly this weekend. So, I’m doing two entries this week to make myself feel better about the break in routine.

The most interesting thing we saw on the walk through the tropical forest was these big, bright, vivid blue berries. It was the bluest plant life I’ve ever seen. Roland and Emmy didn’t know what they were. The internet being the amazing thing it is, I was able to come home, go to Google, click on “Images”, type in “blue berry tree Australia” and click! There was a picture of the berries I’d seen, with the name “blue quandong” under them. They’re edible but apparently not tasty, and they’re native to the rainforests of Queensland specifically.

The little café is right on a little two-lane road over the mountain. On this Sunday afternoon it was packed with motorcyclists. It’s owned and operated by this couple in their 50’s. The man is huge and loud and gruff and he and his wife both tease and joke with the customers and make it an experience to be there. They had incredibly delicious scones (hot biscuits, really, but don’t tell them. It sounds so much fancier when you call them scones.) with preserves and butter on them, and a nice hot cup of tea. Then we took our walk along the mountain path through the rainforest, past all the exotic bushes and trees with their above-ground root structures and unfamiliar berries. One kind of tree has a big parasitic vine that grows up around it and gets bigger and bigger until it kills the original tree and just leaves a hollowed out place in the middle of what looks like a big, twisted tree of its own. And of course it’s cool to look down at the steep, deep valley beside the path, that you know no picture would really adequately capture. Anyway, it was a nice little outing, and the glory of cell phones meant the kids could take a separate walk and still be back at the café when we wanted them there.

I still haven’t seen Jake’s report card, but the other kids have gotten theirs in the last day or two, so his should be here in the next day or two. It looks like my pink hair day will happen after Wesley gets here. Stay tuned.

Adventures in Ordinary Life

This week’s photos are of Jake being Jake, the view from our bedroom window and the view from our front door.

This past week had some interesting moments. At lunch at school one day, some kid threw a piece of ice at another kid, as I understand it. The kid who got hit asked who did it. Some other kid jokingly replied “Texas”, meaning Jake. So the kid who got hit by the ice physically attacked Jake, who was apparently holding his own too well, so a friend of the attacker joined in. Jacob still acquitted himself well in the scuffle, despite being outnumbered in a surprise attack. He had a little mark on his cheek and a bump on the head, but wasn’t much worse for wear.

The amazing thing was that the school responded with common sense. Dallas area schools are firm believers in “zero tolerance for school violence”, by which they mean that they punish assailant and victim alike, and call the police when a 6-year-old kicks his teacher. I actually had personal experience of those things as a parent advocate in Dallas. In Jake’s case however, the school recognized that one kid was the innocent victim and the other two were unprovoked assailants and told Jake so, and expelled the other two kids. I love this country!

To make it even better, he had a number of friends offering to go beat up the assailants for him, which offers he of course declined. And the next day, he had to dispel the rumor that he had gone after the original assailant and beaten him up after school. So in one fell swoop he managed to be completely innocent while proving he can adequately defend himself if need be, he got to be gracious in response to the protective indignation of his friends, and he got to see the depth of devotion his new Australian friends feel for him.

Karen would tell the story completely differently, of course, but to a father, it was a moment of pride more than horror.

Charlotte and Kaylah worked at the same store for the first time this week, but their schedules were so different that they actually worked together only 30 minutes the whole week. Karen distributed flyers in a couple of retirement communities a couple of weeks ago, offering to run errands and clean house for a fee. She got her first call back this week from that. And the substitute teaching looks like it’ll keep her reasonably busy right up until Wesley gets here from Texas 18 days from now! YEEHAH! We can’t wait. Life is good.

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.