Into the Blue

We’ve been off the grid for the last week attending CMS (Church Missionary Society) Summer School. I am lucky that I get study leave for the week, but, truth be told, I’d take holidays if they didn’t offer it.

Things to love about Summer School:

1. My Boss: Allan & his family also attend. For the last couple of years, they have also shared accommodation with us, allowing us to stay at the house of a friend of theirs. It’s been incredibly generous of them (who wants 4 little kids humming around them for a week?) and we’ve enjoyed it both times!

2. The Missionaries: So, the story with Summer School is that CMS supports a bucketload of missionaries. When they are back home on furlough, they come along & do a bunch of different seminars about their work & mission in general. It’s also an opportunity for supporters to meet them in person.

3. The talks: Each year they get a key-note speaker. This year it was a guy called Andrew Reid who took us through the book of Exodus over 7 sermons. It’s great to spend a week in an intensive, hearing a new talk each morning.

4. The People: The main auditorium holds a couple of thousand people, and the children/youth programme caters for about 1000 kids! It’s wonderful to sing in the big hangar with so many people, and it’s great to see so many kids being challenged in their Christian faith.

5. Mountains weather: The Blue Mountains are not cold by US mountain standards, but in the middle of summer, it’s lovely to have cool days and nights.

6. Time with Family: It’s full-on, but it’s great to hang with the kids for the week, and I love the opportunity to sit next to my wife during sermons!

So, we had a great time, but now it’s back home. How lucky am I that I also love home, and work!

Back again

It’s 37 degrees today (100 fahrenheit) and I’m sweating in my office, trying my hardest not to move, and wishing it was the weekend already, so I could be up in the Blue Mountains, where we have a better than average chance of some cooler temps!

It’s been a busy year, 2013. I can’t believe it’s 2014 already. Christmas is done & dusted, and I’m thinking about what the next year is going to look like.

As usual, I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon, but I do have aspirations.

Again, as usual, I’ll make up for it with some recent photos.

Seals for Gumnut's's Birthday — Seals for Gumnut’s’s Birthday

It wouldn't be at trip to the zoo if we didn't have a pic on the Elephant! — It wouldn’t be at trip to the zoo if we didn’t have a pic on the Elephant!

More fun when it’s family

On Saturday afternoon, Mum, Dad, Amy & I headed down to the Middle Harbour Yacht Club to celebrate my cousins Michael & Sanam. They’re heading off to Dubai to get married!

But….

To make things legal in Australia, they needed to get married here too. Why do something like that at a registry, if you can ask your ordained cousin to take the wedding for you?

I enjoy most weddings. It’s a time to see people who are head over heels for each other, and, despite it being a stressful time, they are fun gigs to facilitate. Weddings for family are even better though! To welcome a new member into the family, to get a front-row seat to the festivities, and then to get the first selfie afterward!

Awesome.

Creativity

I guess I churn out my fair share of stuff. I write at least one sermon a week. I write an article or two for our e-news, maybe another for our parish newsletter, and occasionally write stuff for our diocesan newspaper. I’m not banging out Shakespeare or anything, but it all takes creativity, and you have to work out a new subject for everything. I find myself looking for an interesting angle on articles in the news, or rethinking what it was that I did over the week.

What turned the corner for my photography (sadly, lapsed IMHO) was just doing more of it. It helps to have an eye for photography, but the more you shoot, the better you get at it and the less times the shutter needs to flip to achieve your intended result. You start to see the patterns in the world around you. You grow in your appreciation, not only of the foreground, but what surrounds the centre of your attention.

I’m trying to embrace every opportunity I have to write about stuff. I love the fact that, the more you think about the stories that live in the world around us, the easier it is to see them. I hope it will make me a better illustrator during sermons, it could make someone a better conversationalist, and I hope it might encourage my kids to see a bigger, brighter world.

And not a single picture was taken.

I had a massive weekend. I had intended to take shots of everything, but never got around to it.

1: Saturday morning, 6am: The sun is up early, the surf was fairly big, and Colin, Aaron & myself headed out to the point at Copacabana. I’ve always been a “no pain…. no pain” person, avoiding anything that might hurt too much, so surfing on a point (waves breaking over a rock ledge) has been a bit much for me. But the waves there were great!

If I could have taken a picture, it would have been of the first duck dive I did under a big wave, only to see the rocks a couple of feet under me.

I didn’t get dumped onto rocks (though I did end up in about 3 feet of water at one time) and it was a great morning. The only downside was that it was short because:

2: Saturday morning, 7:45am: St. Bede’s was having a mens breakfast. Dominic Steele was speaking on “how to really love a woman” and he did a pretty good job. It was nice to see some younger blokes from our evening congregation there, and it was nice to have pretty much a full house. I was able to stick around for a while, but had to head home to spend an hour finishing off a sermon before:

3: Saturday morning, 11:30am: We were off to have lunch with some friends/friends parents/parishioners. Connors, Garrards and Fryirs, in sunny Fountaindale. It was a yummy & relaxing way to spend my afternoon. It too didn’t last too long, though, because Dan had to take a wedding & I had more to fit in my day…

4: Saturday evening, 6:30pm: 20yr School reunion! I headed in to pick up Matty, then we were into darling harbour for drinks on the HMAS Vampire, followed by some time in the Maritime Museum.

It was awesome to catch up with some old friends, and lovely to chat to people who I wasn’t friends with at school. It all went in a little bit of a blur, and I had to leave a little early because:

5: Sunday morning, 8am, 9:30am, and Sunday evening 5pm: I was preaching three times on Sunday. I got home from the reunion at about midnight, then was up at about 5 getting ready for the morning. I’ve really enjoyed our 2 Corinthians series, and, thankfully, felt on top of the passage. After 9:30 there had been an intention that I might be able to get an hours sleep in before the evening service, but that went by the wayside because of the strangest thing in my weekend (but wonderful).

6: Saturday afternoon, 4:30pm, then Sunday morning 9:30-2pm: As I was heading toward my reunion, I got a call from my long-lost brother Michael. He’s moved down to Sydney, and was interested in catching up. He ended up coming to hear me preach on Sunday morning, then spent lunch with me & the family!

The last time I saw Michael was the day I got married, so it was wonderful to catch up on everything he has been doing & what his plans for the future are. I would have loved to spend more time with him, but with the evening service looming, I had to be ready for that.

7: Sunday evening, 5pm: It’s always hard to work out at SE@K. With 5 minutes to go, it was almost an empty church, but by 5 past, we were pretty much full! In the last couple of months, we’ve had a whole lot of new people join us. It’s great being able to get to know new people, to encourage and be encouraged as we seek to know more about Jesus.

I was wrecked when I got home. I fell asleep in front of the TV & finally woke again at midnight to go to bed.

It was a good weekend though.

And it all starts again this morning.

Back in the Saddle

I keep threatening to get back into the blogging saddle.

I have a plan this time, and we’ll just have to see if it works.

meantime, I have a bunch of photos of my kids (the only thing I take photos of these days) that might entertain.

1. Would you believe the twins are over 1 now! Boss is doing a fair bit of walking, and the bear is threatening to do so. Here are some pictures from their birthday & their birthday Zoo visit.

Friday is my day off.

It’s a lovely little tradition to be able to walk down to the coffee shop, stop & feed the ducks on the way, then have a run around in our old Church grounds on the way home…

Life, otherwise is busy, but good. Lots of stuff to do at work. Lots of catching up to do with friends & family, and a 20th anniversary reunion for school this weekend!

Here’s a couple of final family shots.

Maybe just one

You might love or hate most of their work, yet they can still rise above for that one cinematic masterpiece.

Will Ferrell did it with Stranger Than Fiction. Most of his movies are like fairy floss: you don’t mind consuming them too much, but you know they’re not good for you, and too much makes you feel sick. Then out comes Stranger Than Fiction and the guy absolutely nails it!

Ben Stiller is another guy that I’m not too fussed on. I’ve seen Zoolander more than once, and some of his other bits & pieces elicit an embarrassed chuckle or two, but The Secret Life of Walter Mitty looks absolutely awesome! I like the story idea, I like what cinematography I’ve seen in the trailer, and the music is spot on! Of course, I’ve been led astray by a preview before, so I’m not going to bet the bank on it, but if it turns out as good as it looks, I reckon this one could be Stillers Magnum Opus.

Why not check out the preview below & let me know what you think in the comments.

A Velvet Mouthed Preacher

Piper’s Biographic lectures are some of my favourite listening when I go out for a walk.

I loved this story that a man recorded of George Whitefield’s.

“I’ll tell you a story. The Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1675 was acquainted with mister Butterton the actor. One day the Archbishop said to Butterton, “pray, inform me Mr. Butterton, what is the reason you actors on the stage can affect your congregations with speaking of things imaginary as if they were real, while we in the church, speak of things real, which our congregations only receive as if they were imaginary?”
“Why my Lord,” says Butterton, “the reason is very plain. We actors on the stage speak of things imaginary as if they were real and you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary.”

Therefore, added Whitfield, I will bawl, I will not be a velvet mouthed preacher.”

[I was about to write “do we,” but really… I ought to ask myself this question first & foremost]

Do I shy away too much from emotion? A relationship with God is fundemantally a relational and personal thing: have I allowed it to become too much of a head thing & not enough of the heart?

I’m not a Whitefield (who is? the guy preached up to 1000 sermons a year!) but that doesn’t mean I ought to shy away from the emotional truth of the gospel.

Something to think about.

My Kind of Boss

I love my work for a whole bunch of reasons. Who wouldn’t love it when you’re job is to share the most life-changing news with people full-time?!

I also love the people I work with, and particularly my boss.

Here’s just a couple of reasons from monday.

1: We were having a staff development day, and I started the day joking about how I’d told me wife that we’d be going to a favourite restaurant for lunch, just to stir a little. So what does he do? He actually takes us there!
Just to top things off, his lovely wife also took Shona & the twins there too!

2: During the work part of the day we worked through a leadership profile thing not unlike Myers Briggs. It was fantastic. It’s a lovely affirmation to see that different areas where we do things reflect different skill sets we have. It’s also great to see new ways that we can work together, using each other’s skill sets effectively.

3: After all of this, despite the fact that it was his day off, he came around & fixed up our front door lock, taught me how to replace washers in a tap, then helped me fix a towel rail too!

What’s almost as good as telling people the good news about Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection? Having a boss who displays what this actually means to him in the way he lives his life!

A nice challenge for me to live up to.

Oh, I better not forget the food!