I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.

It was on to the Spirit of Tasmania to head down south. I was pretty nervous because I really dislike the open ocean (or more acurately, the process of throwing up every time I go into deep ocean). Still, I was assured that I would be fine & I was dosed on sea-sickness medication, so I was primed and ready.

Sydney put on a nice view for me as I headed out past the heads. As it turns out, that was not the biggest surprise! It turned out that I really loved the trip! I ran into a friend on the boat, I ate WAY too much for dinner (Buffet style, but a la carte quality). I must have eaten 300gm of smoked salmon alone!

The arrival at Tassie was a sunny one & spirits were high as I decided to head off to Cradle Mountain.

If I wanted to know why this sweet vehicle had rusted, I didn’t have to ask for long. It started to rain about one minute after this picture.

I did make it to Cradle though. I had a chance to fire off 4 or 5 night shots before clouds rolled in and spoiled that parade too.
When I got there I found out it would cost me $30 to visit the park in the day, not including camping fees. I ended up camping in my car, by a small river outside the national park. It would have gotten down to about freezing point, but I was in a very toasty sleeping bag (thanks Stevie T). I set the alarm for 5am, (easy when you go to bed at 7:30 in the evening) and the next morning saw thicker rain clouds, so I decided to give up on Cradle & see how far down the west coast I could get… But that is another story…
TCG.>.

Whenever I get back after a little while, I feel a bit at a loss, cause I don’t know where to start.
There are all kinds of happenings from the last week, but those that just happened are far more fresh in my mind.
Well, I might give you all a bit of a taste of what is to come!
Nights sleeping in cars on top of mountains, Star Wars style landscapes, gian cliffs, long walks, freaky possums, distilleries, old mates, new wedding couples, fun photos, sea trips, and sea scapes!
It has all worked toward yesterday that saw me touch down in Melbourne & then basically drive for 17 hours to do the whole great ocean road, then make it up through Victoria & part of NSW to get to my big sister’s place!
I have my camera here, but no way to upload photos, so right now the story reads “leave a small note of my movements & then enjoy hanging out with nieces and nephews, and hold off travel tales till Friday.”
Love your work.

OK ladies & Gents, I am most likely to be missing in action over the next couple of weeks. I’m off to Tasmania tomorrow, driving around there for a week, then knocking off the Great Ocean Road for a couple of days, before visiting my sister in Wagga Wagga! Hopefully I will have a nice pic or two to show you all when I get back. In the mean time, here are a couple of shots from Charlotte’s birthday today.

Charlotte shows Peter (my brother’s father in law & a great guy) how to play some hot licks on the “Wiggles Guitar”

Charlotte gets a little help from P&K with the blowing. She’s great at many things but her candle blowing… sucks… (OK, a painful play on words, but I couldn’t help myself)

I got to sink a beer while watching (and very occasionally helping) some of the adults put together a kids play set. Fun for all the family!

In the midst of exams….
No time to write something…
Barely time to take any photos…
Three pics just for fun.

“The Crew”: This is pretty much my whole church. We had our annual can drive on Sunday. A great day for the church & a good time to get out into the communinty. Of course, I spent pretty much the whole time either studying in an office, or taking occasional pictures like this one.
Incidentally, I got my first media credit for this shot! Click Here to visit the Sydney Anglicans site & read the article about the Church & see my little picture (with my name down the bottom. Yay!!!)
OK, on with the pictures.

The calibre of student we have @ SMBC!
Someone decided to decorate the “Mezzanine” level of the library (basically some weird kind of loft) with a couple of monkeys, some hibiscus flowers & a couple of coconut trees, all made out of cardboard!
It kept me amused!

I just like the perpsective here. Books (actually they are magazines, but who am I go be fussy) disappearing off into the horizon. Bibliophilic bliss!

OK, a couple of pics for you.
The first represents my world. Prep for my monday exam. As you can tell, my glasses aren’t that strong, so I couldn’t get a good effect like looking through Michaela’s, but they help me concentrate.

The second picture is just a little shout out to the Cedarville singers. I have a CD full of photos ready to get mailed out to the first Cedarvillian who requests it & sends me their postal address!
I’m pretty sure the look on their faces was the joy they felt at finding out that we were giving them tubes of Vegemite to take home with them!

It’s all about perspective isn’t it. What you see, what you don’t.
One struggles for perspective come exam time. In a week an a half I will be getting a boat down to Tasmania. I’ll be driving back to Sydney over a 2 week period after that & I haven’t even really thought about it! I will get to shoot a cool wedding, camp in sub-zero temperatures, drive the great ocean road, visit my big sister, hang out with my nieces and nephew, but at the moment, it is all a background blur.
Exams, dear friends, take up the focus in my current frame. Only three this semester, but they are doozies. Thoughts, stresses, study and stuff, crowding the mind & stilling the imagination.
How do you get a right perspective? How do you keep both my present reality & those things coming in the future in focus? Maybe if those study plans at the beginning of the year had come to fruition, then right now would just be a little time of review.
It’s nice to dream of such things. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy the sharp focus that I have right now. Poring over God’s word, flicking through commentaries, and piling up notes! At least I know that in a week I’ll be done, and when the pen goes down, and the fog lifts up, the view is going to be awesome!
In the mean time, here is your discussion topic (and an opportunity for you “silent readers” to leave a comment). What is the future that you look forward to? What is it that feels obscured now, that you look forward to coming into clear focus? Thoughts both funny, philosophical, or theological are all accepted!
TCG.>.

Warning: This is going to be a fairly long post. I would like to think it is worth reading, but if you are just not up for reading long blogs, then you can go ahead & scroll to the bottom. I put a picture at the end of this just for you!
Have you ever been to the Postsecret page? A fascinating experiment where people write a secret confession on a postcard & then send it to a postbox in the states where they take a picture of it & then put it up on the website.
It’s fascinating reading. Creativity, and confession. It makes me wonder though. Who would send one of these in? Who is seeking absolution for their secret shame by posting to a strange individual & then sharing with the world? What drives us to the need for some kind of confession in the first place? Maybe it fulfils desires for both infamy and anonymity? That’s possible I’m sure. Maybe, though, it’s about finding a way to relive the tension in life. The taught wire that lies between our thoughts and our experience, or worse, our thoughts, and everyone else’s thoughts of us!
This all came up, as things tend to, as I walked down the street to grab dinner.
Life is tension.
Our Tension is in our relationships.
It’s the distance between being comfortable with who I am as a single man, and the yearning you feel to love another fully and to be loved. Or it is the tension between wanting to love and honour someone in a holy and sacrificial way, and the realisation that I have failed, one way or another, to do that in all of my relationships to date.
The relational tension in family is played out through the attention you expect from your family and the time you devote to being consistent in your attending to them.
Our relationship with the day to day people is possibly one of the greatest tensions of all, threatening to warp everything. When you sit back & honestly reflect on your own character who can reconcile the difference between other people’s perception of you and the reality of your actions, or maybe just your thoughts? The confident and competent image you manage to groom vs. the fractured and fumbling man who gazes at you in the mirror of a morning?
I guess it is really an existential thing. People struggle with the tension between the need (or want) to view mankind as essentially good and the evidence through social injustice, capitalistic rape, fruitless war and general discontentment, and our ambivalence to them all which implies quite the opposite.
So what is the answer? How do I reconcile a thousand aspects of my character that seem to be contradictory? An eagerness to bury myself in classic literature with a willingness to go & see the latest X-men movie? A character that, like so many men, wants to find some definition through one’s physical prowess, lying in tension with a body, broken and unable to achieve what once came easy?
Is Postsecret the solution I need? Is absolution found in an anonymous card to a foreign country? Is it hiding behind Psychology? Maybe Psychiatry? If I’m honest about my past? If I am cautious about my future? Less risks? More risks? A dumbing down to the basics, or seeking solace in the symmetry of the sophisticated?
The answer, not too surprisingly, lies behind possibly the greatest tension of all. We’re a people who feel like we have eternity written on our hearts, but we are confronted with the fact that life (at least life as we know it) comes to an end.
God holds on to a tension too. That these people, His creation are sinful, petty and small minded, essentially devoid of characteristics that would inculcate a feeling of love or admiration, yet He loves us with an everlasting love, expressed ultimately in the sacrifice of His son on the cross.
And there’s the greatest tension right there. That the piece of silver, or gold adorning our necks, the fashion accessory of stars and kids alike, is the symbol of the place where all of the tension between God and man was born in the body of the one whom had never caused it in the first place.
So just one tension remains. That of being between the gift that God graciously offers and that which humbly I receive.

OK, for the patient…. an old pic I took of Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness.

I have decided that I like this random pic of me that Ads took a couple of months ago. Playing around with my lensbaby lens.
I wouldn’t mind keeping Ads Oakley’s that I wear in this pic either….

I’ve written more in the last 48 hours than any man should have to. I can’t complain though, when it is my own fault at this, the busy end of the year. Still, I look forward to holidays whe life can gain a little more texture.
In the mean time, here is a little photographic texture.

I love all the colours & the little whisps…

OK, so last night we had youth group with the Cedarville Singers.
They are cool people, it was fun times.
Again, this picture looks better if you click on it & check out the larger size. Some of these dudes got some serious height on their jumps!