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The best and the worst of it

8/28/2018

Over the last few months we’ve been witness to the best and the worst of humanity. In the depths of Tham Luang cave in Thailand we saw a miracle take place. Not just the inconceivable rescue of 12 boys and their coach, but people from all over the world, from all walks of life, cultures and beliefs, working together for the common good. It was a beautiful sight.

So too is the view of convoys of trucks hauling the breadth and width of this vast land to support our drought stricken farmers in NSW and Queensland. Suddenly we are reminded of the depth of the Australian spirit as people everywhere find a way to give and help our Aussie brothers and sisters in distress. It touches a generosity of spirit that runs deep in the Australian psyche.

The stories are hard to hear. Just yesterday I heard an employee of an electricity supplier share his fury that a farmer he was sent to visit had to choose between buying hay for his cattle or paying his electricity bill. He chose to feed his animals and the employee had no choice but to turn off the farmer’s electricity supply. It is unthinkable in this affluent land that those who are the mainstay of this country have to make such choices.

While farmers and their families look out over the dustbowl that was once their livelihood, men who have been elected to govern this country, who are paid an inordinate amount of money to do so, are missing, squabbling behind closed doors. Not squabbling about the best way to lead the country forward or even how to support the desperate farmers, but about personalities and ideologies, vengeance, payback, power, bitterness and self-interest.

Politics seems to have a way of corrupting even the best of us.

For eighteen years we have seen instability amongst those elected to govern this country. On both sides of politics we’ve witnessed power, greed and self-interest override justice, compassion and working for the common good, the very attributes required by those who stand for such high office. We witness the power, manipulation and hypocrisy of the media, the corruption and cruelty of the banking system and big business, and we ache for a better way.

Photo: Bidgee

We ache for politicians who comprehend the seriousness of the present drought and its implications for Australia’s future, men and women moved to compassion to do better than handing out more loans that farmers have to repay, just putting them deeper into debt. To do better than providing enough grain to feed their sheep for three weeks and then asking farmers to wait 6 months for the next lot.

Politicians who can understand the despair that leaves no other option but suicide … who can feel for a farm family surviving without electricity or enough food on the table … who can move beyond their own petty squabbles and self-centredness to put the good of the country first. To stop 'selling off the farm' and allowing mining to undermine the farmers livelihood, and in the end, ours. Where are the men and women of integrity and compassion?

They are the ones driving hay across the country, putting together hampers to keep farm families in food. They are the ones feeding the homeless or finding them a place to call home … or rescuing victims of domestic violence … people who lead with their heart.

Crisis brings out the best and the worst in humanity ... war, cave rescues, bushfires, flood, drought, and broken political systems. Right now we have both the latter. What a contrast to see the ordinary mums, dads and children (10 year-old Jack Berne began A Fiver for a Farmer which has so far raised close on $500,000), pouring out their hearts in love and compassion while those elected to care for our country are otherwise occupied.

One of the greatest minds of our time, Albert Einstein, suggests there is a better way.
In a letter to his daughter, Lieserl, he said, “There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others. This universal force is LOVE. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfisness. Love is God and God is Love.

If we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer. When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.”

Take a moment to read this thought provoking letter: Farmer's poem

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The trolley man

8/21/2018

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Lindon Beckford knows the inner workings of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. For over three decades he has transported patients from the wards to the operating theatre, to treatment rooms or to the Radiography Department of the 672-bed medical centre.

But Lindon isn't your average trolley man. He grew up in Jamacia and singing has always been part of his life, so it was only natural for him to sing as he wheeled patients along the maze of corridors, navigated them up and down lifts and waited with them outside the operating theatre.

One day he was surprised when a patient he was transporting joined in the song. In that moment of connection he realised that music could minimise the anxiety the patients were feeling. He began intentionally singing to calm people’s nerves. Then he began asking for requests and often they would sing the song together.

Back then Lindon couldn't have known what scientists are now discovering with new research and brain scans about the way music can prevent anxiety-induced increases in heart rate and blood pressure and how it decreases cortisol levels, reducing stress. He couldn't have known that music increases dopamine levels and restores harmony to the body. Lindon knew because he'd seen it in action, in the faces and lives of the people he sang to every day. As Plato put it, “Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul”.

What a beautiful way to use a gift, not on centre stage like the surgeon or anesthetist but in the hallways and waiting rooms of life.

It reminded me of the time I was waiting outside the operating theatre for surgery. There had been an emergency and we’d been queuing for a while so I asked the man transporting me how long he’d been doing this job. “Oh this is my first day” he said, “I’m the cleaner but they were short staffed today and asked me to help!” So began a fun conversation and I was so very grateful as the tension I’d been feeling slowly ebbed away.

I want to be more like that. It certainly won’t be singing a song, I was tossed out of the school choir for being tone deaf, so my voice wouldn’t reduce anyone’s anxiety, probably add to it. But I do have a listening ear, a sense of humour, arms that hug and I can speak a timely word and sometimes that’s all it takes.

St Irenaeus said that "The glory of God is man fully alive", and that's the greatest gift we have to give; our true self. The grandparent who believed in me when no one else did ... the teacher who made time to help me when I was struggling, who saw my potential and helped me glimpse it too ... the friend who sat with me through the tough times, who held my hand and let me know someone cared ... the neighbour who brought me a meal when I was beyond cooking it myself and the trolley man who sang when I was scared of the diagnosis ahead.

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Nudges

8/14/2018

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It's a tiny bakery in a nondescript street in suburbia but the fragrance of freshly baked bread early in the morning is quite intoxicating. I was waiting in line to pick up an order of rolls for the lunch I was catering for at a missionary training seminar.

During the seminar I would also be teaching missionaries how to write newsletters readers look forward to receiving, and presentations audiences remember. I’d prepared my talks but wanted a story that showed how God cares about the small details of our lives and despite much prayer, no story came to mind.

As I went to pay for my order, to my horror I realised that I had forgotten my purse. If I returned home for it I would have been late for the seminar. Embarrassed and bewildered, I hardly noticed the woman behind, handing me the money. My immediate reaction was to say I couldn’t possibly, but she insisted. I followed her out of the shop and thanked her profusely, offering to return the money, but she stopped me midsentence.

She told me she was a Christian and God had nudged her to pay for the order. Both of us ended up in tears as I told her what the rolls were for. God had made us both a small part of the very story I needed to share at the seminar, a story I shared later that day, through tears. I doubt any story could have had a greater impact.

I learned a few things that day. God could have given me a story days before when I had time to type it into my carefully prepared talk to be delivered with professionalism, but he gave it to me just before I spoke, when my heart was overflowing with gratitude and wonder at what he’d done and the story came tumbling out with so much emotion that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

If they went away remembering only one thing from that seminar, I think I know what it was. For people about to head out to a foreign culture, an unknown language and dependant on God for the necessities of life, it probably was exactly what they needed to take away.

It reminded me to stay alive and alert to the Spirit’s nudges. We are constantly told to seize the day, grab the moment, but I think that’s the wrong way around. That’s the language of the west, shaped by our emphasis on work ethic and doing. That’s about me and my agenda. I think we are meant to let the day grab us. What if we were open to what the day wants to teach us, what in us it wants to refine and how the Spirit wants to make us part of God’s greater plan? Suddenly my whole day has a very different perspective.

George Mueller was one of the heroes of my young faith. In the early 1800s he ran an orphanage entirely on faith, committed to never telling anyone his needs, except God. There were times when he would sit 300 children down for a meal knowing there was no food for them to eat but trusting God to provide. Once a baker knocked at the orphanage door saying he’d barely slept as God kept prompting him to make extra bread for the orphanage. He rose extra early to make sure there was sufficient bread for everyone. Another time a milk cart broke down in front of the orphanage and the milk would have spoilt by the time the cart was repaired so the milkman asked if George could use the milk.

The kingdom of God is all around us in the nondescript bakeries of our everyday lives. We look for God in the big things but I’m convinced that God is most powerfully at work in small ways; that his work is taking place, quietly and most surprisingly through the lives and hearts of those open to his nudges.

That moment when you felt prompted to ring a friend only to discover that they were feeling low and discouraged and your call made all the difference. The day someone told me that God used something I had written to speak to her when she was struggling through a particularly bad day in her battle with Parkinson's disease.

It's in responding to the nudges that we come to better understand the heart of God.

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It all began with a treehouse

8/7/2018

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It all began with a treehouse. Locally known as the ‘crumpled brown paper bag building’, Frank Gehry’s first Australian building (University of Technology) evolved from a squiggle on a restaurant serviette. "Thinking of it as a tree house came tripping out of my head on the spur of the moment” he said. He imagined a growing trunk with branches for learning and reflection.

I remember the first time I saw it, feeling as if I’d walked right into a fairytale. Surrounded by the modern buildings Frank calls faceless, cold and unfriendly, its surprising and strangely inviting. It's bricks and mortar and imagination interwoven together in pure genius. Love it or loathe it, you can’t deny the sheer imagination that has brought it into being. And the interior is every bit as creative, with oval classrooms and a crumpled mirror staircase.

As a child Frank used to build cities and buildings from odd bits and pieces in his grandmother’s hardware shop. Unlike so many people, he has never outgrown his imagination. At 89 he is unlikley to do so now!

Sydney UTS Business building Frank Gehry

Imagination is boundless; it has no rules, that‘s the wonder of it. It has a passion for freedom and for venturing beyond known horizons. It can see what is not. It's the root of all creation ... of music, art, science, architecture and invention, of cooking and landscaping ... it is endless and ageless.

But more than that, imagination enables me to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. To feel the despair of the farmer as he looks out over the dustbowl that was once a vibrant crop, to smell the fear of crushing debt, of sheep too weak to stand and insufficient water to shower off the dust at the end of the day. It allows me to care. To find a way to help.

When we walk through dark woods or the barren wilderness, imagination helps us see beyond the now and envisage what lies on the other side, keeping alive a shred of hope.

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, Frank Gehry

Imagination; a gift beyond measure.

And yet for many people it has become lost in the forest of reality. We have become so busy making ends meet, striving for success or getting though bulging to-do lists that life has become colourless and monotonous and we come to believe that’s just the way life is.

That’s certainly the way life was for Mrs Basil E Frankweiler. Following her husband’s death, she became a recluse, locked away in a grand house, unwilling to see anyone. That is until an adventurous pair of runaway children find their way into her living room. There’s something about the girl that unlocks a memory of her young self, curious, adventurous and imaginative. In short, it changes her life. She throws open the windows, wipes away the dust of the past and begins to imagine again.

The mixed up files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiller is just a story but it illustrates a great truth. We were born with imagination and we never outlive the need for it. We bury it or ignore it at our peril. Without imagination something in us dies. Imagination connects us to our hearts and to each other.

Everything around us began in someone’s imagination. Once upon a time someone imagined they could fly, Lord Sandwich imagined an easy meal, or was it his servant? Electric light was once nothing more than a figment of the imagination and I love the story of 10 year old Jack Berne who just last week imagined A Fiver for Farmers and along with his classmates has already raised over $60,000 for our farming families.

When we imagine, anything is possible. So add a twist of lemon, a dash of sage or a splash of paint to your day and begin to imagine.

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The best and the worst of it

The trolley man

Nudges

It all began with a treehouse

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