Bloganuary

Coming Home

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Think back on your most memorable road trip.

It had been a fairly reasonable road trip.

We travelled from home to a wedding in Port Macquarie where we stayed a couple of nights. The wedding was idyllic, right on the river, followed by a party that it seems only Filipinos can pull off.

We travelled up the coast to Maclean and thence to Queensland. At Warwick we visited a friend, before going to Toowoomba to visit our daughter and son-in-law.

Rain in our part of the world had caused flooding. The direct route via Moree was blocked. No problem, take the slightly longer but more scenic route down the New England Highway.

We got to Tamworth, normally a two hour drive from home. We learned that the road to Gunnedah was closed, but we thought we could head further south and bypass the flooded roads.

It was not to be. At one stage, a reasonable looking road got smaller and smaller until, just beyond a rise, the descent went into a raging torrent that normally does not exist. After a ten point turn, desperately trying to avoid the mud that could leave us bogged, we went back to Tamworth for the night.

The next morning we were able to get home, but only by a detour that added another two hours to the journey.

It was so good to get home.

A 5 hour journey took over 24 hours.

Bloganuary Snacks

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What snack would you eat right now?

Snacking is the one habit that undermines my health goals.

We always have a cornucopia of food on hand, much of it the glorious sweet variety. I love chocolate. We have a special drawer in our fridge called “The Chocolate Drawer.”

What snack would I eat right now? All of them!

What snack will I eat right now? A crunchy apple, a flavoursome peach or a handful of nuts.

You see, I am training my habits to include healthier options.

My Mission

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In the bloguanary project, this morning’s prompt is “What’s Your Mission?”

My mission in life is to honour Jesus in all I do. This has not changed since my conversion in 1976. Of course, the focus has changed as I have journeyed through life.

I see this mission as being filtered through 3 main responsibilities in my life.

Firstly, I want to be the best husband possible to my wife. I am not always successful at this, as my own sins and insecurities can sometimes mar the relationship. But after 43 years of marriage, we are more in love than ever.

Secondly, i want to be the best father to my four (grown up) children that I can. Again, I am more often aware of my failings in this regard than my successes. Nowadays three of the four live a distance away from Narrabri. But I always notice that when they are all together there is so much laughter. Maybe, just maybe, I can consider that I haven’t done too bad a job.

As a pastor, I want to see my parishioners grow in their experience of Jesus Christ. I want to see them all grow to be all that they can be in the grace of God. This is not always easy, but it is a very rewarding mission.

I won’t ever get to the place where I can say “Mission Accomplished.” These are all life-long missions that will keep me busy for the time I have left on earth.

Time Matters

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I decided to write some articles for Bloganuary, an annual blogging start of year encouragement on WordPress.com

Today’s prompt: Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

As a pastor, I spend a significant amount of time thinking about the future. God gives us dreams and visions about how our lives as individuals and as a community of faith might develop over the years ahead.

To do this, I need to think about the past also. How does my past inform my future plans? What has worked or hindered the vision in the past.

In another sense, I have to think about the past whenever I read the Scriptures. The are God’s living words to His people right now. How do I reach into an ancient culture to understand the followers of Jesus in order to bring their experience into the present?

The Biblical understanding of “remembering” was very different to ours. When Jesus tells us to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in memory of Him, He is not just telling us to act out an event that happened two thousand years ago. Similarly when the Jews celebrated Passover, it was not just about ancient history. To remember means that we bring the events of the past into the present and allow them to transform us now.

Past, present and future all impinge equally in our lives. But then there is eternity, where time takes on a very different meaning. Followers of Jesus will live forever in a perfect, reconstructed heavens and earth. That seems like the far future, but really it isn’t that far from us.

Any one of us could die in the next 24 hours and find ourselves in the presence of God. Then all of our earthly lives will be past tense. We will be asked to give an account of our lives. Those who faithfully followed Jesus will be brought into heaven, while those who rejected Him will be “cast into the outer darkness.”