I do a fair few Baptisms, 6 already this year, and most of the people attend are not church goers. It’s lead to all kinds of interesting conversations before or after a service, but there is one thing that I seem to hear quite regularly and it makes me wonder.

(I should note that, having a little heritage listed church in our parish, too small to hold our normal church services in on Sunday, most of the baptisms we get are “private baptisms”, where the family are keen to have it held in that building and therefore the congregation is just made up of the friends & family. It’s a battle for me in some regards, because I think it sort of defeats the purpose (or at least one purpose) of baptism to have one that doesn’t have the Church family there for it!)

So I’m there after the service, standing at the entrance/exit, saying G’day to people as they head out, and on, gosh, 30 or more occasions over the last couple of years, I’ve had people say to me:

 “That was really nice. You made it all relevant.”

But what does that mean? I think they could mean one of one things?

1. The day-dream possibility is that they have heard the gospel, and as we gather together to celebrate a baptism, it all makes a little more sense than it has before. They’ve come to see that Baptism into the church isn’t an anachronistic habit that we can’t quite let go of, but it is a powerful statement about relating to the God of the Universe!
2. One middling possibility is that it’s possible that they are being complimentary. Maybe they liked the sermon and could see that I tried to make it meaningful. Maybe they liked the fact that I usually exegete why we do different things in the service and what they actually mean when we do them. Maybe they are just saying that it was thoughtfully connected to what we’re doing.
3. Part of me wonders whether, when people say that, what they are really saying is “I thought I was going to come to a dull, slow, painful service, led by an  out of touch relic in language that I don’t understand. Instead, I actually understood what you were saying and I didn’t mind the service that much at all.”
4. Then the pessimist in me says that if people found it really enjoyable and “relevant”, then maybe it means I didn’t preach the gospel clearly enough, and what I should be aiming for is statements about it being “unsettling”, or “challenging.”

Whatever people mean, I’m glad for the opportunity to be able to share the gospel regularly with people, I’m comforted by the fact that any family that comes to bring their child for baptism hears what being in a relationship with Jesus is about, what being a part of the Church is about, and they look me in the eye and tell me that they can make baptism promises confidently. Finally, I enjoy the challenging of crafting what I do a little more each time. Can I be clearer, can I be more engaging, and can I go about everything in a winsome way that shows that being a friend of Jesus is the most relevant thing there is!

It started with a podcast.

With a fair bit of time in the car over the last week and a couple of late night walks, I’ve been delving into the podcasts, and one of the first suggestions I got was the Mystery Show. Shows like this are the perfect reminder that a story, well told, can be about almost anything. I listened to an episode that was all about tracking down the owner of a belt buckle that was lost 20 years ago. It sounds as dull as dull, but I enjoyed every second of it & even felt a teensy bit misty eyed at the end (you’ll have to listen to it yourself to see why!)! Starlee Kine does a wonderful job at taking those everyday little mysteries (on the way home from a wedding yesterday, it was how tall is Jake Gyllenhaal? could that really be entertaining? Yep, it was awesome!) and deconstructing them in a magical way.

So this all got me thinking.

I took a funeral last week, and, with mysteries floating around in my head, I spoke about it a little during the funeral. Not the podcast (that would be a little weird), but the idea of mystery. One of the reasons I think it’s become so popular to say of funerals “it’s not about mourning their death, it’s just a celebration of their life”, is because people feel fearful/anxious about the sense of mystery that comes with death. It’s seen as the great unknown. We’ve lost someone and we don’t know what is in store for them, or what it means for them to have died. We see a little of this tension played out in the fact that, no matter how staunch people are as atheists in the everyday, inevitably, they tend to get caught up in “I know X is looking down on us today” rhetoric when speaking of death.

We feel the tension. We don’t like the anxiety.

I shared last week, that God doesn’t want us to feel that fear/anxiety, and there’s an answer to it.

This Thursday, I head down to Sydney to attend the funeral of a member of my congregation and former Sydney Bishop, John Reid. He was a great man, humble, honest, friendly and very intelligent. I have no doubt that I’ll hear some amazing eulogies about a truly lovely guy, but what makes me look forward to his funeral is not that I’ll get to hear people wax lyrical about him, not that his many accomplishments make for a nice hagiography, but that he was confident that he knew that God had revealed the greatest of all mysteries to him. John knew that God himself had taken on human flesh, had lived a sinless life, took the penalty for John’s sins when he died on the cross, and then rose to life three days later, robbing death of its sting, and offering an answer to the mystery “what will happen to me when I die?”

John knew that nothing that will be said about him at his funeral will be the reason why God welcomes him into heaven. He rested wholly and solely on the person and work of Jesus Christ. The veil had been lifted, the mystery solved.

Though I’ll certainly miss his presence (and occasional constructive criticism) in the meantime, John was confident, as I am, that he has gone to be with God, and that we’ll be reintroduced one day in the future.

 

 

New year & all that.

As usual, I’ll make another attempt.

Some say blogging is dead. On Facebook the other day, a friend said that blogs were pretty much dead to him. Everything he needed, he could get from a couple of different podcasts.

I have to say that I’ve been enjoying the podcasts a fair bit.

Digression #1
In November I turned 40 and one of my presents was a “fitbit“. I’m the kind of guy who likes to be able to count things, and while at Bible College I was the only one in the group who wanted to play basketball without keeping score, I enjoy being competitive against myself. I’ve enjoyed the fitbit, because it lets me know, right there on my wrist, exactly how many (or how few) steps I have done that day. I’ve been aiming for 10k and if I get to the end of the day and I’m only at 6, I find that a real kick in the pants… so much so that I’m likely to whack my shoes on & walk for an hour or so, so that I can have 12k (the extra two thousand steps is just to show the fitbit who’s boss)!
It does’t always work, but so far I’ve been walking a lot more on average & I enjoy the fact that my resting heart rate is going down!

back to the action….

Now that I’m walking more (see digression #1), I need something to keep my mind occupied when I do so and podcasts like “This American Life” and “Serial” have done the job admirably. I’ve got a couple of new podcasts to listen to in the New Year, but they might remain blog-fodder for the moment.

With all that said, I don’t think I have a podcast in me personally, and despite the fact that I’ve been horribly inconsistent over the last 5 or more years, I really enjoy the process of blogging and know that when I’m doing it more regularly, I certainly feel more creative. So I’ll give it another go, maybe throwing in a New Years attempt to use my diary & evernote more for keeping my ideas in the forefront of my mind.

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So, we popped down to Sydney today so that Shona & Pumpkin could go to an hour-long intro to  ballett thing in Chatswood. Whilst we were down there, we dropped some meals off at a friend’s house and they had a late birthday present for me (they had an early one too, but that’s a different story).

This is the coolest book I’ve seen in ages. Basically, the author Randall Munroe explains any number of complicated things, but the book only uses 1000 most common words in the English language! I’ve read a couple so far & they’re awesome.
Here’s another.

 

After playing drop-off, we drove to Kirribilli to drop something off to my niece. While we were there, we finally took out another present, this time a Christmas present that was for Gumnut.

 

If you can’t see from the picture, it’s basically a paper aeroplane. Not too exciting.

BUT, when you get a paper aeroplane that comes with a small rechargeable motor (which can be attached to just about any plane you can make) that’s a different animal!

The Powerup 2.0 was the unexpected winner from Christmas. It was small, easy to make, you can download more templates from the internet, but best of all, it exceeded expectations! I thought it would be one of these gimmicky things that gets an extra 5 meters out of a plane, but we had it take off & stay airborne for close to a minute!

It’s always enjoyable to get a photo of one of your kids with an authentic beaming smile.

Of course, spending time with my (including siblings up from Wagga & Melbourne) was the real highlight over the Christmas period. No amount of cool presents could compete with that. That said, it’s nice when you get something that is just cool, and even better when it’s not a thousand dollar iDevice, but a book or a paper plane!

I should start by pointing out that the Goldsmith household was very lucky. We didn’t lose power, and only had to contend with mobile towers being down and a lack of phone lines and internet. The rest of the Coast, however, copped it this week! Schools and daycares shut, roads blocked everywhere. You know it’s bad when even the McDonalds and Coles in Kincumber were down for three days!

I drove round to visit a number of people in the parish who live in spots prone to cop it from storms. This is what greeted me at one end of a road when I was trying to do a loop rather than go back the way I came.

Well, the cleanup is still going. There are still houses without power, but we’re mostly through it & life goes on.

It was a close one though in Saratoga. Lots of that area still damaged, but they had power at the RSL for Saturday dawn service, where ANZAC Day saw at least 2000 people come to pay their respects. Always an honour to be a part of proceedings there.

 

 

I heard it for the first time the other day, having coffee with my mate Dan, but it turns out he was quoting Maslow’s “Law of the instrument.”

“If all  you have is a hammer, then every problem is going to look like a nail.”

I love a good turn of phrase, and that’s the first thing that drew me to the statement, but I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, for a day or two now.

From my work perspective, do I get caught up in a narrow attitude to the many different elements of my job, causing me to hammer away at all of them? Am I failing to look at people and tasks in a nuanced way? And if so, am I failing to love those people I serve, by understanding them within their own context and with their own specific needs?

I want to have a lot of different tools at my disposal. And I want to make sure that, as I serve God in full-time ministry, I’m doing the job right!

So can you guess what this is for? I’ll give you a minute, then you can scroll down…

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OK, so I surf every Saturday. Many Saturdays the surf is small & I don’t have a problem. Some days the surf is a little bigger & sometimes I feel a little nervous. Occasionally the surf is massive, and on days like that I chicken out! It’s not that I fear being dumped that much. My experience so far has shown that being dumped doesn’t really appear to hurt much. My big fear is drowning! You get dumped, you get held down, and you can’t make it back up for air… there is nothing worse than the feeling than being “rag dolled” by a wave and panicking about getting a breath.

But there are two things that have helped me.

#1 – On one particular day I was trying to psyche myself up to get out there, when a mate called Brendon saw me on the beach & said g’day. I told him about my concern, & he have me the best surf advice I’ve ever had. He said “watch some of the surfers out there, particularly the ones who get dumped. When you see a guy go under, count how many seconds they stay underwater. I bet you it’s rarely more than 10 seconds and often much less…. but when you get dumped, it FEELS like it’s forever.”

He was right. Ever since, if I get dumped I start counting, and the longest I have ever been down was 13 seconds, and that was on a wave that would have had a 10-foot face! The advice has also helped with rips & things like that. Rather than freak out & let my anxiety be the cause of a difficult situation, I count slowly, breathe calmly and realise I can always get myself out of situations (so far).

#2 And now we come to this device. I was saying to my mate Colin that my biggest concern is that I can’t hold my breath for a long time, and I don’t have the kind of time I would like to put serious work into my cardio. At some point we remembered that there are breathing regulators you can buy that you can use during the day that restrict your airflow, make you work harder to breathe and can therefore increase your lung capacity. A search on the internet, however, showed that they are pretty expensive.

One night Colin turned up at church with the hose fitting in his hand. I had no idea what it was, but he told me it was a flow regulator… but of course, there is no reason why it wouldn’t also regulate air! I had a SCUBA regulator mouthpiece from another failed project. Throw in a zip tie & now I have a breathing regulator so I can improve my lung capacity whilst working on sermons!

The last thing to add is one of those little nose clips that synchronised swimmers use. They are between $5-$10. For a princely sum of $15, I have a fun little tool to help me breath better, AND help me surf better.

Thanks Colin. I thank God for problem solving friends like you!