Not of God.

It has been coming for some time. Bit by bit I have been culling my FB friends list.  Finally I have

reduced it to just family & Church ~ with just one or two others.  No, I haven't closed it completely.  I have our church page, which must be linked to a private account, & there are ministries I follow but the vitriol, the partisanship, the lack of logic along with purely emotive pictures & language, horrify me.  Enough is enough.

What I am seeing is a complete lack of balance coupled with venom for anyone who disagrees. This is not of God.  It is satan who seeks to kill, destroy & steal, who enjoys seeing the church divide like the Red Sea over 1 man.  The *Social Gospel* is not the gospel at all.  The gospel is Christ crucified to return us to relationship with God the Father & nowhere in scripture do I see Jesus expending His energy fighting for change.  Yes, in His relationships He was radical ~ but he led by example, not by rallying the troops to fight social injustices ~ which is rather interesting because the Jews were certainly looking for that sort of a Messiah.

Deuteronomy 32:8 has this to say: When the Most High assigned lands to the nations, when he divided up the human race, he established the boundaries of the peoples according to the number in his heavenly court.

God allocated land to the different peoples of the earth ~ with borders! This free flow across open borders is not of God. God is orderly. Governments, leaders & authorities are given to us by God ~ He raises them up, He takes them down. We get the governments we pray for ~ or fail to pray for.

Yes, there are terrible social injustices.  Yes we are to help the poor & downtrodden but we over~ride other biblical principles regarding the government of our countries at our peril. Our loyalty to a cause should  never over~ride our loyalty to God. Jesus lived under Roman government.  Rarely has there been a more corrupt, power~hungry, globally minded government yet Jesus still said to render unto Caesar that which is Caesars, & unto God that which is God's. That so many Christians seem to think marching in the streets alongside people who smash in windows, riot, litter, scream obscenities, disrespect the government, the police, the very process of democratic government is somehow more godly that those of us who retreat to our prayer closets & petition the One who can actually effect change boggles my mind.

Changing Horses mid~stream.

I often find myself at odds with Christian communities.  In Australia @ least, many people take a laissez faire approach to their religion, a *She'll be right, mate,* approach as they throw another snag on the barbie. Few people are passionate about their beliefs, possibly because a convict heritage cultivated a lack of trust in any form of organised authority [including the church], or possibly because the dominant religions were Irish Catholic & Anglican, both of which discouraged any overt expression of love of God while encouraging adherence to the practices of Mother Church. The charismatic is still viewed with suspicion in many quarters, the messianic almost unheard of.

I bite my tongue a lot ~ or @ least I try! Like my mother announcing out of the blue that the bible is not meant to be taken literally. Well, that depends who you're reading, what you're reading & where you're reading it.  A little understanding of Middle Eastern literary forms clears much of that up quite quickly so that what is left is actually meant to be taken literally ~ including all the things that make my mother uncomfortable.

Anyway, what I discovered when I began to deliberately listen for the voice of the Lord, was that the Holy Spirit wanted to share some quite surprising things with me. He began with the obvious: Jesus was an orthodox practicing Jew. Duh! However, knowing next to nothing about Judaism I had never made the obvious connection between belief & practice. As the Holy Spirit revealed the connections the New Testament sprang into vivid life. Everything from Jesus baptism to how the woman with the issue of blood was healed had roots in the Old Testament & it was hugely exciting & immensely satisfying   to discover the connections.

However, one of the things the Lord began to show me was the importance of the Festivals. I was shown very quickly there was an Old Testament application with a New Testament revelation & a prophetic understanding to each & every one of the major festivals, the one's God initiated for memoriam ~ & @ least one minor one, Hanukkah

Everyone who knows me knows I have trouble with practical applications. The doing comes hard; the knowledge is easy. So I began with Passover which has direct parallels & can be @ least just a one day celebration.  I never initially meant it to be more than a one of thing with the girls, the only ones still @ home but it sort of grew & now our church celebrates it each year & everyone looks forward to it because God knows how to teach in a fun way! The girls, who thought they knew & understood the Pesach story, learnt so much. Occasionally one of the boys finds the lamb bone hidden in the depths of the freezer & wants to know why that old thing, meatless & dried out, is residing in our freezer.

TI was the child who was home the first time we did Hanukkah, the 2nd festival we experienced, though I worked my way into it by teaching about it before actually doing it. I did find it difficult to sustain my enthusiasm for a whole 8 days because let's face it, Christmas is only one day of madness & you're all done & dusted for another year. Hanukah goes against the flow of the culture for a whole 8 days.

As a Church we mark Sukkot each year & are gradually working into the other festivals as well but for the most part I thought it was just God indulging one of the quirkier quirks of my nature. That our church was fascinated & intrigued by the Festivals I sort of wrote off so it has taken me a while to grasp that the Lord is actually doing a work in all this.

You see TI got married & has spent the last 2 Christmases in S.A with his wife's family.  I know he was hoping to be on the island last year to go fishing & crabbing over his short break.  What I didn't realise was how much he was looking forward to doing Hanukkah again.

As I have said I find the doing difficult. By day 8 that first year I was distressed. I thought I had ruined the holiday season to no purpose.  I couldn't think what I had been thinking to try & change horses mid stream when all our lives we had celebrated Christmas.  I was over the cooking & the leading & the organising.  Sadly, in our house I am the learner, researcher, teacher.  Anyone who wants to know something asks me first in the hope I will know & they won't have to struggle with Google. And I was tired.  So come the final day I was just going to let things slide but TI had other ideas.  As the sun set he lit the candles, in their correct order, from the shamash & recalled each & every covenant we remember. I was blown away.

He has remembered.  As he celebrated Christmas down south with his wife's family this year he explained Hanukkah to them & how we celebrated it, remembering the covenant journey God has made with mankind from the fall in the Garden to the resurrection of the Messiah. They were blown away. They expressed a desire to celebrate with us.  Why? Because it was God centric.

I'm sure that Hanukkah, just like Christmas, can be celebrated in secular fashion with little regard to it's spiritual implications but many Christians, distressed by the secularization & commercialization of Christmas, & looking for more authentic ways to mark Holy Days, have turned to the Moed for inspiration.  In my case I have so little idea of what I'm doing I stick like glue to the prophetic revelations.  I look for Jesus.  He is there: in the symbols; in the scriptures; in the revelation. And because we are the wild olive tree grafted into the root that is Israel He is to be found & it is a very wonderful thing.

The Bitter & the Sweet.

January is the bitter/sweet month. We have just come through 2 anniversaries &  are about to land on a 3rd when I pack my bags & head north to my mother.

Because numbers really do not exist I survive the anniversaries quite well.  I am unlikely to remember this is the day I got the phone call @ 5am to tell me my youngest brother was dead or this was the day I saw my father lying still warm but very dead under a hospital sheet.  My mind does not work that way.  Days are just days but a light aircraft droning overhead can send my heart palpitating suddenly with visions of metal falling from the sky while grey haired old men of a certain age & height can cause me to suddenly burst into tears distressing everyone around me.  Deary, deary. Life can be a terribly uncomfortable thing.

Why, asks the ODD, do all my relatives die @ Christmas? They don't, of course.  It just seems that way. Still January is when I try to be with my mother as the 3rd anniversary approaches because we spent so many Januaries with them celebrating my father's birthday & he always said his birthday went for the whole month & took every excuse to purchase something sweet to celebrate!

I expected, as I got older & the demands of my children grew fewer, that it would be easier to get away to spend time with my mother.  It has not happened.  Instead it has become more difficult. There are the cats, the church & 2 businesses ~ all of which apparently need me. There is the garden & bible study & a host of other things & of course my mother continues to get older. She is finally starting to slow down, distressed as year by year the circle of family & friends grows ever smaller.

So ODD collected me & drove me north & for a week I didn't do much of anything.  I ate.  I slept.  I read. I listened to the stories of my mother's life ~ again ~ & I didn't begrudge it. We all know tomorrow is not vouchsafed us.

And so it begins...

As we move through January life is beginning to settle once more.  Much as I love my children they bring an inordinate amount of chaos into my life. The yard stinks. Whatever the lads used for fishing has been dumped summarily somewhere I have yet to find but the smell is wafting... The CG has returned to Chile & we are not a family that does well with goodbyes. I will now get random phone calls until she has transversed the globe & landed back in Santiago.

Just when we were most emotionally vulnerable our little church came under serious attack. I did not realise how strong our *little, old, grey haired, ladies were*.  They refused to lay down & die. Rather they rose up as they have been trained to do, stood on the Word of God, declared we already had the victory in Jesus Christ & were champing at the bit. The victory is ours.  I am so very grateful.

In a few weeks we will tear out our old kitchen & revamp the whole thing.  I am not looking forward to the chaos & mess but I will very much enjoy having a working kitchen again so it will be worth it in the long run.

Meanwhile the wildlife continues to parade through our yard.  The curlews have a new chick & there is a stray egg laying about that no~one seems to want to claim. The little wallabies & paddymelons are continually being spotted foraging along the foreshore & one week our bible study were astonished witnesses to sharks herding mullet into shallow water then partially beaching themselves to feed before wriggling back into deep water.  I knew killer whales did this but had no idea about sharks. It was astonishing, terrifying & totally mesmerizing.

As usual CG abandoned anything that would not fit in her suitcases so I have a mishmash of her things lying about. She barely made her weight restrictions as it was so obviously nothing else was returning with her. As I dislike housework it will be some weeks before I have pulled my house back into some semblance of order. This is not helped by running 2 messy businesses out of our home & preparing to instal the new kitchen ~ obviously none of this will take precedence this week as this is my preaching week & that takes priority ~ not something it is hard to convince me of.  Research I do like.  Writing is tolerable.  Housework makes me want to curl up in a ball & go to bed.  Sometimes I do. Happy New Year!

December's End.

 After a week of lowering skies & thunder the sky flared with mare's tails, hot & muggy as Queensland summers are meant to be.  We are burning mosquito coils because the mosquitoes have arrived with the summer weather in black clouds so that it is impossible to work outdoors.

As the MOTH & I gave plants as gifts this year I had to go & dig & water, the hose waving wildly as I swatted bities.

Our garden is something of a mish~mash.  Like so much else it was begun before the MOTH broke his back & ground to a halt through the years we struggled from day to day & week to week to get him back on his feet, functioning, but only able to work from home.

I got our canopy in ~ essential as our west cooks, baking the ground like cement.  The canopy reduced our outside temp by about 15 degrees! I picked at the garden over the years but never really had the money to go for it full on, nor the time to devote to it while I was running all over Brisbane with the ODD. That has now changed.

 Some things remain unchanged.  We will never do much with the waterfront & embankment.  This harbours our wildlife & is rapidly becoming the final sanctuary for birds & beasts alike. The birds are cluey.  They know we have cats & there is always a watchman on guard duty at the birdbath.  Even so, the young birds are vulnerable.  They have not yet learned to be wary even of doey Marlow & just this morning I had to prise Marlow's jaws open to release a young friar bird ~ & you have to be pretty dopey to be caught by Marlow!

The half acre or so around the house is another matter, & good for the sort of arguments that break marriages.  The MOTH is a trained horticulturalist ~ a scientist, a specialist & a planner.  I am a gardener, unscientific & prone to produce chaos.  The bush house, the air plants & orchids are anathema to a soul that delights is abundance, lush greenness, wildness. Compromise has to be the name of the game we are neither of us good at!

Just the same we have begun under our northern windows with what we could agree on: azaleas!  I love their abundance of flower as much as I mourn their lack of fragrance but I seem to have finally convinced the MOTH that not all gingers will run rampant through the whole garden & we will get the most glorious fragrance!

Then there is the food! Latkes for Hanukkah ~ & I do love me some latkes, but apparently I drowned the sponge instead of soaking it so the trifle was exhorbitantly alcoholic for a family who rarely drinks anything stronger than butter beer ~ yes it is a thing though where ODD actually got the recipe I have no idea! Ours is a *tropical trifle* ~ or at least my version of it because nothing would induce me to add pineapple to something as wonderful as trifle. The alcohol is meant to be cointreau though any orange flavoured alcohol will do ~ & does as the cost of a bottle of cointreau is more than I am willing to pay! It won't be touched until next year either ~ & perhaps not even then.  It depends who's home.  Not all of mine like their trifle alcoholic.

Done & Dusted.

The nicest Christmas we ever had was the first year we did Hanukkah instead. It was relaxed, stress free & Christ centred. Ever since stuff has conspired to turn this into the 3 ring flea circus that is Christmas in Australia, further complicated by the fact our kids didn't grow up as PK's but now they are. *sigh*

As it turned out I wasn't even consulted this year.  The CG arrived home with baubles & strings of tinsel & fairy lights & proceeded to decorate ~ a proceeding promptly destroyed by Marlow who found the tree in his favourite napping place & sent it flying so he could, well, sprawl. Twice.  So the girl had to hide it practically behind the t.v set where both cats are still eyeing off the hanging baubles.

I put my Hanukkah candles in the kitchen window.  Not being Jewish I feel no need to have a *proper* menorah.  I just choose some pretty coloured candles & nice glass wax catchers & I found a lovely menorah card decoration on~line that I could size to fit behind each candle with the day's covenant reminder & bible reading & I just flip it over come sunset when I light the candles.  I was happy to be just me but surprisingly the MOTH has wanted to join me for the bible readings & has appreciated the candles, which he has deemed pretty & attractive lined up along the windowsill with all the greenery behind them.

So it's been a mix & muddle sort of year with different flavours but our kids are big & we only had two home so the pressure to conform is not there.  Libby, just wanted to enjoy her first Christmas @ home in 5 years, even going overseas for her church's carol night despite a burgeoning migraine.  I just wanted the least stress possible.

 I went nowhere, not even to the island carol night, for the first time ever.  I have been unhappy with the carol night the past few years.  The godly lady who began it & ran it died several years ago & since then it has degenerated into something I wouldn't want to take a small child to with questionable & suggestive songs & costuming. It is such a pity but another example of the secularisation of our society & the pagan influences driving the Christmas phenomenon.

Meanwhile ODD has been working 15 & 16 hour days from one performance event to another, & was in Toowoomba for Christmas Eve, singing in the mall.  She is welcome.  Absolute madness. T1 was in S.A with his wife's family but the OT arrived bearing a BBQ all prepared to set up for the big day only we woke to thunder & lightening & torrential rain so that was never happening.

Done & dusted for another year & I can't say I am sorry.  Wondering how many pieces people will have to put back together in the coming days, all in the name of a God they don't believe in.

One Fire Raging.

We went to the mainland Thursday: CG, Rabqa, me.  Mostly we were doing a hit & run on Koorong to pick up some teaching materials for next year but as we returned to the jetty, this is what we saw!

Only 2 options: Either it was Straddie or it was us.  It was us.  Huge fire in the middle of the island with a long front & spot fires happening as a wind gusting to 40+ knots fanned the flames. Ugh.

In 30 plus years here we have never seen a fire like this.  Being subtropical we tend to be more dampish during the fire season but this year has been both hot & dry with very strong winds that have blown nearly constantly.

Poor Rabqa arrived after they closed the roads with her cat locked in at home & both she & I praying like mad he would be safe.  I did feel the Lord say all was good but it was 7.30pm before they let those not in the fires immediate path through & then, much later that night, the fire came to within 150m of her place.  Much excitement we could all have done without with fire crews arriving from the mainland, bulletins coming up on what to do & evacuation centres, heaps of boys in blue, the IGA staying open till past midnight just in case ofs & an extra ambulance...

And after all that the firies did a super job.  No lives lost, no homes burnt.  The worst was a couple of sheds incinerated.  Meanwhile it wasn't affecting us at all as we are at the other end of the island, right out of harm's way, but the kids kept ringing [think they were peeved to be missing all the excitement] & I rang my mother before she saw the news & panicked.  Then I rang a lady we know in a wheelchair to make sure she was ok & I counted up how many beds we could conjure up just in case we got refugees.

It burnt out of control through the night but then the wind dropped, the fire got contained & we are now more or less back to normal.

The sad part is it was probably arson.  The bad fires usually are but what sort of a maniac thinks fires raging out of control burning everything in their path are fun?  Meanwhile I eyed my gutters full of leaves knowing full well we have so many trees that my gutter are the least of my concerns & they never stay clear anyway. Christmas in Australia.