It doesn’t matter all that much what you talk about, preparation is always important.  I was thinking of that when trying my hand in the kitchen recently.  The recipe I was reading had two time slots given: a preparation time and a cooking time.  Neglect the preparation time and the cooking time probably won’t matter all that much.  Spend your preparation time well and the cooking time has every chance of success. Preparation time becomes even more important when we move from the kitchen to the office.  How many business presentations have been a flop, precisely because the presenter skipped on...

There’s a book on my bookshelf called, A man without influence.  It was written by a fellow who died forty years ago this year.  He lived the whole of his life in a small country on the other side of the world.  In these memoirs this man, who was born in 1885, talks about his early childhood years, and how, in his days, infant mortality was high and death snatched away siblings who had not even reached adolescence.  With a touch of humour he talks about his years in the army and how he graduated as a corporal and later as...

There’s a saying that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  With Christmas just around the corner some of us will soon be putting that saying into practice.  The truth is that there are Christmas puddings and there are Christmas puddings.  Some will be a sheer delight to eat but others we’ll probably eat just to avoid someone being disappointed.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Of course this proverb wasn’t concerned merely with Christmas puddings.  The idea that this proverb brings home is that the real value of something can be judged only from practical...

There were two brothers living in our town – both married with children.  For some time they had been putting pressure on their widowed elderly mother to move down from Sydney so that she could be closer to her children and grandchildren.  Since she was getting very frail it made good sense and they did promise often that they would look after her.  It took them some time to convince Mum that moving would be a good idea and that leaving her friends behind would be more than compensated for by being with the only family she had in Australia.  So...

I grew up in a family that took absolutely no interest in football.  There were several different football codes that our family seriously did not follow.  At primary school I briefly played Aussie rules until a bad ankle injury put a stop to that.  In early adulthood I played soccer for a church team for a few years. However, in the mid-1960s I married into a family that were mad keen Hawthorn supporters.  Their passion for, what was then, the Victoria Football League (VFL) was an education.  If the Hawks won on Saturday I could be sure of having a great...

In last Saturday’s newspaper a writer confessed that as a 61 year old adult she found death something hard to grasp, and then added, “So goodness only knows how a child can grapple with the concept.”  She then quoted a line from some lyrics of Jackson Browne’s song, 'For a Dancer':           "I don’t know what happens when people die, can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try." Well, I guess that writer is in good company.  Death could be compared to a punctuation mark in a sentence of writing - and for many people today that punctuation mark...

crusade

I was in third year of high-school when American Evangelist, Billy Graham, came to Australia to hold some evangelistic rallies.  A schoolmate and I took the train into Melbourne and we walked to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.  It was a standing-room only crowd of over 70,000 people and an event that made a big impression on this teenager.  However there was something about the Billy Graham meetings in Australia that would grate on us today.  They were called: Crusades; the Billy Graham Crusades of Sydney and Melbourne. Today any such mass meetings organised by Christians would definitely not be named...

Remorse

Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Brave New World’ was first published in 1932.  Huxley wrote a foreword to a later edition of the book.  That foreword begins with a quite a remarkable and telling paragraph.  Let me quote: Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.  If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.  On no account brood over your wrongdoing.  Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. It seems to me that Mr Huxley hit the nail on...

Wanting to catch the news headlines over breakfast, I tuned in to an early morning TV program.  The program hosts were just interviewing the winner of some kind of championship.  I caught the words “air guitar” and that aroused my curiosity.  I had once heard the term when a local air-guitar competition made the news.  I was surprised to hear that “playing” the air-guitar is now a worldwide competition.  Is it really going to be ranking up there with the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup? For those of you who are unfamiliar with the air-guitar, let me assure you that it’s...

When I married in 1966 at the age of 21, TIME-LIFE had just begun publishing a series of colourful books called their “Life Nature Library”.  We subscribed to the series and I’ve lugged that set of books around with me as I moved house more than a dozen times over the intervening years.  Now that they belong in a museum I’m finally getting around to reading them in my retirement years. This Life Nature Library covers quite a variety of subjects, from birds and fish to insects and continents.  One I just finished reading is entitled Animal Behaviour.  Much more information...

The lady who was serving put the coffee and the muffin on the counter and said, “That will be six-dollars-sixty thanks!”  I said to her, “So, you’re from New Zealand?  How long have you been in Australia”.  She looked at me a little strangely and answered by telling me that it was almost a year ago that she had arrived from the other side of the ditch.  How did I know she was a Kiwi...?  Well, an Aussie doesn’t tell you that your coffee is “sex-dollars-sexty.”  It was her accent that had given her away. I had another incident some years...

There’s a common complaint about the Christian Church that I’m sure you’ve heard too.  It’s possible that you even have voiced that complaint yourself: the church is full of hypocrites!  Or maybe for you it came across just a little differently.  You invited someone to church but they replied that there were too many hypocrites in the church. There are two replies I am tempted to make when people complain about hypocrites in the church.  Part of me wants to say to such people: “Well, come on in, we’ve got plenty of room for one more hypocrite.”  Of course that’s not...

A generation ago our nation put strong pressure on the government of South Africa to abandon its policy of apartheid.  It did so most successfully in the 1970’s by Australia boycotting the all-white cricket and rugby teams from South Africa.  Not that we Aussies were all that squeaky clean when it came to our relationship to our own indigenous people... to say nothing of our white-Australia policy that was only effectively abandoned in 1973.  Today, as I read things, South Africa virtually has apartheid in reverse with preferential treatment given to blacks.  In more recent times we’re seen a huge protest...

Mirrors are rather handy aren’t they?  You would be an unusual person if you didn’t use a mirror today.  For starters there’s that bathroom mirror.  You can’t not look into when you are there.  And when it comes to putting on your make-up...?  Or shaving... or trimming your beard...?  Suddenly a mirror becomes an important piece of equipment.  If you drove your car today it would hardly be possible to do that without a frequent look at the rear view mirror.  Mirrors are part and parcel of life. But sometimes mirrors have another side to them... a metaphysical side.  Maybe the...

FOOT-IN-MOUTH You’ve no doubt heard the expression ‘foot-in-mouth disease’.  Someone mentioned it the other morning at the Men’s Shed over a cup of coffee.  I was curious about the origins of the expression so I did a little research.  Mr Google tells me that the expression actually goes back to the 1870s.  It took its starting point in that deadly virus found in cattle, foot and mouth disease.  The name of that disease was then applied metaphorically to people who say things that get them into serious trouble.  I guess that just as foot and mouth disease in cattle can be...

Our new vacuum cleaner was playing up the other day.  My wife and I tried and tried to get it working.  We were using an attachment that we hadn’t used before and we just couldn’t get it to do what it was designed to do.  Maybe you’ve found yourself in a similar situation.  Perhaps it wasn’t a vacuum cleaner but some other appliance.  You get to the point where in utter frustration you do what you should have done in the first place: checked the manufacturer’s instruction booklet.  It’s amazing how quickly that can solve your appliance headaches. I thought of...

I want to reflect once more on humility because I am convinced that a shortage of humility gets us into all sorts of trouble.  More than forty years of counselling as a church minister has driven home to me the problems that come from a lack of humility.  Often I have sat with alienated people trying to bring about reconciliation but one or both parties could not find the humility to say, “I’m sorry!”  Or I think of the man whose house burnt down and he had no insurance.  Our church wanted to give him some money to buy necessities for...

I had to smile: the car in front of us had a sticker on the window that read “It’s hard to be humble when you own a bull terrier”.  Amazing, isn’t it, what people take pride in?  A bull terrier is just a dog.  And a dog is a dog is a dog!  So, what’s the big deal?  And yet... change the words a little and that sticker might well be appropriate on the back window of your car or mine.  It’s hard to be humble when you’re driving a Tiguan.  It’s hard to be humble when you’re living in Narrabri. ...

Humility is not exactly the flavour of the month.  In fact humility is a notoriously difficult virtue to cultivate at the best of times.  Our problem as human beings is pride – one of the seven deadly sins – and that deadly sin of pride so often gives humility the boot. The lack of humility often finds its most potent expression when it comes to our relationship with God.  That struck me on one occasion in a particularly vivid way.  An older lady, about my age, had just moved into town and we were soon on a ‘good friends’ basis with...

A friend of mine said recently that before he became a Christian he used to say, “God is for the weak.”  That’s a little like saying, “Religion is a crutch!”  Those who think they don’t need either God or religion can be very dismissive.  Karl Marx, the father of communism called religion “the opium of the people.”  He said that we have constructed religion as a kind of a drug to help us cope with the pressures and hardships of life. But think a little deeper.  What really lies behind the statement that God is for the weak… or that religion...