After months of complete desiccation, the Narrabri Lake is just centimetres from overflowing. When I last looked a couple of days ago, there was just a shallow layer covering about half the total area. Since then, hundreds of megalitres have flowed in to fill the lake. And the birds have come flocking in.
Narrabri, like much of eastern Australia, has been in the grip of drought for several years. The creek at the back of our house has been pretty much dry for months.
Yesterday, we received 45 mm of rain which is 3/4 of our average rainfall for the whole of February. Heavy rain on the Nandewar Ranges, east of Narrabri resulted in minor flooding in the eastern side of the town.
This morning our creek is full of water, and there is a cacophony of frogs that is almost deafening.
These are our smart water meters.
I decided last week to register my meter on the narrabri.miwater.co web site, just to see how much water my household uses. Two days later I got a text that said “Possible leak at your property. 55 l/hr” It seemed a bit unlikely that they would know that, so I got it checked. Sure enough, there was a small leak under the house.
55 l/hr isn’t much in the scheme of things, but it adds up when you multiply it over 24 hours every day. At the current cost of 97 c/kl that was costing me $1.28 per day. Again it’s not much, but over 3 months that adds up to an extra $116 per bill.
I love Narrabri Shire, but I can do better things with my money than pay for wasted water.
So if you use water you need to go to the web site with your water bill in your hand. Sign up and you might end up saving money.
Congratulations to the Shire for making this service available. If we have to have water meters, we might as well have ones that work for the customers.
The last month has been full of ups and downs. My birthday was 5th April (as it is every year) and for my 60th, my offspring bought me a Canon 800D camera. Very sweet!
Alas I was too busy to use it, apart from at The Big Family Gathering which was a Combined Churches community fun day on April 7th. I had a lot of fun on that day taking a bazillion photos, but it was all point and click with no real thought abut the camera and the fantastic capabilities that it has.
Then we received some news that rocked our emotions somewhat. And my fish tank sprung a leak and we had to do an emergency fish transplant and buy a new system, which I might have enjoyed more if it hadn’t been so dramatic.
I don’t think I mentioned the termites that we discovered in the church.
And we bought a car (a brand new Hyundai Tucson) but there was no space in my emotions to get excited- not even about the awesome technology that it has.
Saturday night we had our “official” 60th party, and it was good to get together with some great friends.
So today, my day off, I thought it was time to give the new camera a test out. These photos are straight from the camera, unedited and unimproved. The full album is on my Google photos page:
The last month or so has turned out to be very wet. Some towns have set winter and monthly records for rain. Last night we had rain and wind, so it was a bit wild.
It’s always good to see the lake overflowing.
On 20th February we celebrated 25 years of ministry in Narrabri. In January 1991, Margaret, Tim, Philip, Susannah and I arrived in Narrabri to start an adventure that we had no idea would be so long and so joyful.
Photos from the night are here.
Tonight as we were praying, the Lord gave me this word for Narrabri:
A Flood of the Spirit
There is a flood coming, but not of water. The Holy Spirit is coming in a gentle flood in which many will be saved.
Many in the church will be unprepared because they have failed to heed the flood warnings. People will come looking for salvation or healing or forgiveness of sins and the churches will not know what to do.
The flood is coming. Be ready.
Some churches are so tightly tied to their moorings that as the flood levels rise they will not be able to rise with the water and they will sink.
Be flexible and trust me.
While I was looking for Isaiah 60:22 which God gave me in the past as a promise for our church I came across Isaiah 59:10-20
“From the west, men will fear the name of the Lord,
And from the rising of the sun they will revere His glory
For He will come like a pent-up flood
That the breath of the Lord drives along.
The Redeemer will come to Zion
to those in Jacob who repent of their sins” declares the Lord.
Free writing is just writing what is in your head for 10 minutes (or any other time length) with minimal editing. The aim is to free the creativity and exercise the brain.
One of the unusual things about Narrabri is our system of seasons.
Spring often feels a lot like summer, especially in a dry year like this one. But then natural variability is so wide that winters can persist until November when summer strikes back with a vengeance.
About 5 years ago we were hitting temperatures well into the thirties in mid-September. The westerly winds blew from parched drought-dried land in South Australia bringing dust and heat such as I’ve never seen before.
Often spring can be really benevolent with warm days and enough rain to make everything grow in a sea of luxuriant green. the farmers like it to dry out before harvest, though, as warm weather causes the wheat to improve its protein content.
The meteorologists are predicting some rain on the weekend which will be really refreshing after weeks of dryness.
Today was the big day! After a couple of months of being starved of “discount variety” shopping our Crazy Clark’s store reopened as Crazy Sams. To avoid confusion, they’ve left the old signage up, restocked with pretty much the same stock and re-employed the same staff.
The whole town seemed to be squashed into the store and traffic on Maitland Street was really heavy- more like a Saturday before Christmas than Monday morning.
Margaret spotted some magnetic cross plaques with flowers and Bible verses- ideal for our christian book shop. They were $2 each, and after some debate we decided to buy all 25 of them. We’ll sell them on for $3.
We toured the shop and bought a cheap roller blind for one of the doors at home where the sun shines through in summer. A few other odds and ends and we went to the checkout.
After lunch, I got to install the blind and a couple of venetians. I did a creditable job and didn’t get too grumpy.
Late in the afternoon Margaret decided to go back to Crazy’s and buy another blind. As she headed to the checkout she heard the man we had earlier spotted as a Head Office type (he turned out to be the owner of the chain of stores) talking to Matt, the store manager. He was saying that the biggest selling item of the day was the crosses. He was thinking that Narrabri must be a particularly religious town. A lady from the AOG church heard the conversation and told Matt that she had seen us buy all those crosses. Matt told Margaret he didn’t care if we bought them all for $2 and sold them for $4, but he had better warn the owner not to get too excited about buying more of them.
Meanwhile the guy from Head Office saw Margaret with the roller blind and he told her he had got them really cheap and was wondering how they would be. So she told him that we had bought one in the morning and we thought the chain to roll it up and down was too clunky and probably wouldn’t last long, and that there were no instructions so some people would find it hard to install them.
So within a few hours of our purchase, the staff knew who had bought which items and what we thought of them!
All part of the fun of living in a small community.
It was quite windy on Monday, so I went for a walk around the lake instead of my usual bike ride. The lake is looking splendid after the recent rain.
New Life Narrabri 