She turned up at the meeting with a huge bruise on the side of her face. When someone asked she shrugged and said something about turning around in a hurry and colliding with the open kitchen door. Well, it sounded plausible but I knew she was lying. I'd been to her home after her daughter had turned up in my Church Catechism class in tears. On that occasion I had seen the holes in the plaster wall of the dining room. To say that her husband had an anger-management problem was an understatement. Usually it was the wall or an item...

The joke wears a little thin sometimes so I have to remind myself that people mean well and that they are really just having some fun at my expense. In this case the joke came up in the context of my being retired. The person suggested that it really shouldn't have been all that different for me to retire because I only worked one day a week anyway. I was waiting for the rest, but it didn't come so I filled it in for him: "And even then it was only just one hour a day." Fortunately most people in our...

On my walk through the mall on the way back from the supermarket I was shocked. For a moment I wondered whether I had heard right. Perhaps my hearing is getting worse than I thought. But no! The words were repeated. I have to say that I don't get shocked easily about "foul language". Some years ago the schoolteacher of the student that I mentor in our Kids' Hope program felt that she had to explain to me why my student was not at school that day. She told me he had been suspended for using some very colourful language with...

The doctor's waiting room is crowded and despite the fact that you have an appointment your expected ten-minute wait drags out to an hour of paging through the magazines you don't really feel like reading. Meanwhile your stress levels increase considerably and by the time you are called in you're ready to give the doctor a serve about keeping to schedules. Scenes like this are all too familiar for most of us. Maybe in your case it wasn't the doctor's waiting room. Perhaps it was an appointment with your bank manager. Or perhaps you were stuck on a motorway that had...

As one drives up from Sydney towards Uralla on the New England Highway you enter Thunderbolt country. "Captain Thunderbolt" (Frederick Ward) was a notorious Aussie bushranger in the early 1800s. A little before Uralla there is an area with many huge rocks just off the highway which is known as Thunderbolts Hideout. Years ago I travelled that stretch of road frequently on my visits to Toowoomba from Sydney. On one occasion I noticed that someone had painted some "Christian Graffiti" on the huge rock-face fronting the highway. Among the many other things scrawled there one could now read the words, "Jesus...

I note that there's yet another book out about someone who claims they made a visit to heaven while being clinically dead. An earlier book on that theme sold more than five-million copies and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. I'm tempted to say that the author must be laughing all the way to the bank – except that it would be very ungracious of me to say that – and besides, the author is a pastor and pastors don't normally laugh all the way to the bank...! I read that book (90-minutes in heaven) some years ago....

Some words that we use are very expressive. One such word is 'homesick'. No! It doesn't mean that I'm sick of being at home; it means that I'm sick because of my intense longing for home. Migrants typically experience homesickness. Some get over their homesickness very quickly; others struggle with it for a long time – even years. Some can't get over their homesickness at all and decide to return to their former country. I have spoken to others who remained homesick for their old country all their lives but who nevertheless stuck it out and made the most of their...

I guess we've all seen the documentaries where, in some thick rain forest, someone has discovered the ruins of some ancient civilization. The scene is one of crumbling masonry that has been almost totally overgrown by vegetation. The jungle now has a stranglehold on the remains of what was once a thriving human settlement. I can relate to that in a fresh way. When we moved to our new location in March last year Merle and I spent quite some time cutting down that intrusive weed, lantana... and the even more intrusive prickly pear. We took loads of it to the...

At the recent end-of-year Awards Night of our local Christian-Parent Controlled School it was a delight to celebrate the completion of another school year and to rejoice with the students as their gifts and labours were acknowledged. For a fleeting moment I questioned the giving of awards.  Some students were bedecked with three or even four awards.  Other students had to be satisfied with the book that all students were given to mark their transition to the next class in 2015. My mind turned to the kind of thinking that was prevalent in some circles some years ago (perhaps still today?)...

It's that season of the year when the Christian church is again making its Christmas preparations by focusing on the coming of Jesus. Last Sunday in church we were reminded that for us today it's not only about the first coming of Jesus; we are looking today for His second coming. Often during the season of Advent I have found myself thinking, "Yes, but we've been looking for that second coming of Jesus for almost 2000 years now." That's a puzzle that has often occupied the minds of God's people. In the book of Revelation Jesus says that He is coming...

In a matter of one week I heard three very similar stories. The first was when a friend of one of my siblings died after a long battle with cancer. I heard that the lady's husband had left her soon after she was diagnosed with the cancer and had begun the lengthy process of chemotherapy. He wasn't able to handle that and threw away some thirty years of marriage to escape this painful and difficult family situation. I was still trying to digest that news when a discussion with an acquaintance led to learning why there was quite an age gap...

If you're not familiar with an urban myth let me enlighten you. Urban myths are really just a modern form of folklore. They are stories that do the rounds and those telling them usually (but not always) believe them to be true. Sometimes the stories have an element of shock or revulsion that is generally taken as quite believable. These stories tend to do the rounds for a while, often recede from prominence, only to take on a new lease of life as another generation picks up the story. A classic example of an urban myth was the story that was...

Years ago when we were in the middle of the "worship wars" I was talking to someone about the trend towards entertainment. I expressed concerns about a congregation becoming just an audience watching a performance on the stage. This person replied, "That's wrong! The congregation should never be an audience. It's really the other way around: God is an audience of one, and we're putting on some worship for Him." In the context of our discussion that made sense. Last week I visited the Synod of The Westminster Presbyterian Church (WPC) in Buderim on behalf of the CRCA. At the opening...

Wire-rope is made of various strands of wire woven together into a helix – it's often called 'cable'. Wire-rope is used in cranes for lifting and for supporting structures such as suspension bridge. In some applications it isn't used as much as it once was. When we moved into our new property there was an old rotary clothes line in a heap of rubbish in the paddock. The old "Hills Hoist" had wire-rope, on which the washing was hung to dry. The new rotary clothes line in the backyard doesn't have wire-rope. The wire-rope has been replaced by a synthetic, plastic-looking...

The tragic deaths of three young men in one congregation in just fifteen months, is not only sobering but also leads to lots of questions and soul-searching. That happened to the congregation I served in Hobart in the early 1980s. A young man and father of two drowned while having a scuba-diving lesson. While the family and the church were still coming to terms with that, another of our young men was taken by a shark – his body was never found. That was followed soon after by the death of a young man who wrapped his car around a tree....

Bettina Arndt is not a person from whom I would have expected to hear that children are better off living with both parents. Maybe it's my preconceived ideas. Arndt became "famous" (or should that read "notorious"?) for her editorship of Forum, a sex education magazine in the 1970s. Arndt trained as a clinical psychologist specialising in sexual therapy. As I recall she was quite a controversial figure who didn't have too much credibility among conservative Christians. But time does move on and Bettina Arndt has broadened her interest to include the well-being of families. In the Weekend Australian of August 23rd...

It is fifty years ago this year that in Victoria I made a special trip from Dandenong to Geelong. The reason for the trip was that the Geelong Reformed Church was presenting to the other Reformed Churches in Victoria a new program for children and young people. A minister and his wife (George and Harriet Van Groningen), who had come to us from the Christian Reformed Churches of North America, had introduced the Geelong congregation to the American Cadet and Calvinette programs - a church activity geared to boys and girls from age nine to fifteen. This year Cadets and Calvinettes...

The death of Robin Williams this past week caused much commentary in the news and a flurry of responses in the social-media. But the commentary was not just about the death of an iconic actor and comedian. It appears that the actor, who was just 63, took his own life – apparently as the culmination of a long struggle with depression. That has led to much soul-searching and (understandably) an increase in calls to charity help-lines. As someone commented on Facebook, "If a man with such a good sense of humour can do himself in because of depression, where does that...

It's one of the earliest words that very young children learn to say: Mine! A three-year-old will say it defiantly when he snatches his toy from his younger sister. The sad thing is that some fifty-three-year-olds can still say it just as defiantly. It's one thing to endorse the right to ownership and private property, it's quite another thing to cling so tenaciously to what is ours that we lose sight of the fact that under God we are merely caretakers. I thought of that again this past week when we were discussing in our Bible Study group the essence of...

Questions about God's existence and questions about my own salvation have rarely bothered me. I'm blessed that on both counts the Lord has gifted me with confident assurance. But there is one question that has periodically troubled me over the years. Why do some people seem to get much more than their fair share of pain and suffering in life? I must have been barely out of my teenage years when that question hit with particular force. The friend of a friend was a girl who had been born with a hole in her heart. Many surgical procedures had failed to...