Invited to dinner

Twice this week, Laetitia and I were invited to dinner by friends from church.

On Tuesday we spent the evening with Miranda and Lawrence and their three children. Miranda cooked us a delicious meal including a fabulous white cake for dessert, in spite of her nervousness about cooking for our special diets. We met their dog Boaz, ate outside on the back patio, and finished the night by watching Shrek the Third on their (rather large) TV.

On Saturday we spent the evening with Fiona and Craig and one of their children (Brandt). Now Fiona once ran a catering business. She (and Craig) cooked up a veritable feast! There was so much food! She had gone to some effort to prepare menus for us and all, printed on fancy paper:

(I've scanned the back of Laetitia's menu at the side, so you can see the back of the fancy paper.)
We took some photos of all the food too:

Over dessert we played 500 (teaching Brandt how to play in the process). Oh, and we also met their dog Tess, their new puppy Electra and their cat Sonic.

Thanks Miranda and Fiona for fabulous meals and great company—and for taking such care to feed us so well.

We need to move

One day in February this year, I came home from school during the day to find Laetitia having to hold herself up against the wall for support, and I knew then that this would be our last year in Mackay. It was time to move to somewhere less humid.

Laetitia's heart has a leaky valve, and with the high humidity here in summer (tropical monsoonal wet), each year she has found it a little harder to breathe than the last.

If it weren't for the summer weather (and the high cost of accommodation), we'd much prefer to stay in Mackay. We really like the people here: we've made good new friends, we love our church family, we've found clubs and hobbies we enjoy. I've really grown in skills and character through the support of my colleagues at work.

But now, it seems it's time to go.

Recording messages for absent missios — ideas please?

Each year in January, Laetitia and I trek off (all right, we usually drive) to Mt Tamborine for a conference run by our branch of the Christian mission organisation CMS. At the conference, people record audio messages for missionaries who can't make it that year.

Currently, we use cassettes for this. They're cheap, the machines are simple and therefore easy to use, and you can make do with only a handful of machines by swapping cassette tapes in and out, one tape per missionary (or family). Unfortunately, they're also low quality, the messages now have to be digitised to be sent (they're usually actually delivered on CD these days), and (believe it or not) tapes are getting harder to find. Oh, and eventually all the old cassette decks will die and it won't be worth trying to fix them.

Is it time yet to switch to digital? If so, how? If not, when?

From what I can see the most suitable digital replacement is something like an Olympus Notetaker, say the VN-3500PC (or older equivalents, VN-3x00PC) or the WS-210S. Of course, there are other brands and models, and I'm not particularly interested in their relative merits at this point. They're all reasonably affordable, at $50–$150 each (based on a quick check on ebay).

No, what I'm interested in is this: I can see three major issues with replacing the old cassette decks with these digital devices.

1. Price & convenience—to the dishonest. These things are useful and they are not cheap. If someone steals a cassette recorder (and who would?), big deal. But these cost a reasonable amount, they're extremely useful, very sexy, and small enough to hide in a pocket and walk away with. Think: at the conference, you'd have to tether them to something very well fixed, or implement a check-out or $20 deposit system.

2. Ease of use. The young, the techno-savvy and the geeks would be able to use them. I know I would have no trouble. But the over 60s who've never used a microwave, let alone a computer? Those with arthritis or otherwise poor dexterity? (The buttons on these things are small and often don't give good tactile feedback, unlike the satisfying clunk of a cassette deck.)

3. Organising the recordings. The devices are not cheap (see point 1) so you probably don't want to buy too many (unlike the cassettes). It's also not very easy (see point 2) to sort your recordings accurately into different folders on the device. So you would probably have to ask everyone to record who their message is for at the start (e.g. "This is a message for XX. Hi XX, this is..") and then have some techie spend a significant amount of time sorting through the messages after the conference to make sure they end up going to the right people.

Point 3 is not all bad, though. Indeed, it probably wouldn't take as long to sort the messages as it currently does to digitise them. And on the upside, people could record one general message for several people at once. ("This message is for XX as well as YY. Hi guys..")

Any ideas? Comments? Suggestions?

Hearing God

Some people say they hear God speaking to them as an audible voice. I don't. I've always felt confused, skeptical and even disheartened to hear people talking about God that way.

So when I was studying at CHC a few years ago, and I got a chance for a research assignment to choose a topic of relevance to my own spiritual growth, I chose “Hearing God”. For that assignment, I read a number of books and essays on the subject. One of those books was Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God by Dallas Willard. At the time, struggling to write an essay by a due date, and not yet ready for the deeper stuff later on in the book, I never got further than about half-way through it. But I knew I wanted to finish reading it some time.

Recently my wife bought me a copy, and I have now been able to read it carefully and thoroughly from cover to cover.

The book is excellent. The style is conversational and gentle, but precise and unambiguous. Firmly grounded in the Bible, most of the book is a theology of hearing God, as much about why as it is about how and when. Specific, personal communication from God is placed in the context of a life lived with God and for God. Theoretical principles are related to everyday life.

Theologically, I was most affected by Willard's profound description of “words” as being a personal expression. When you and I speak, our words are an expression of our very selves, of our desires, our will, our understanding. So too everything we call “God's Word”—the Bible, Jesus and any personal communication—is, in the same way, just an expression of God himself. And while our words are powerful enough, God's words have such authority and power that they always accomplish their intended purpose.

Practically, I have been encouraged on several counts. First, that I am not alone in struggling to recognize God's voice. Also that God's word (in the deeper sense just described) can also be heard not just in the Bible and through circumstance but from others who speak to us, and even sometimes when God speaks through us—all of which I can relate to, after looking for such occasions since I first read the book several years ago. Willard gives specific suggestions on how to practise and process living in a conversational relationship with God.

But the book is also somewhat confronting, in a very positive way. After all, if you don't actually notice and pay attention to your difficulties and faults, you will never be able to learn, correct your faults and grow. I found I had to take the last few chapters one at a time, and give myself time to digest and reflect on each before moving on.

Recommendation: A challenging but very valuable read. If you want to better understand how God communicates with his people, or you want your personal relationship with God to grow stronger, you could certainly benefit from reading this book.

Seven Deadly Sins

I love having time to read for pleasure (and learning, and self-development)!

Still Deadly: Ancient cures for the 7 sins is a collection of short essays edited by Andrew Cameron and Brian Rosner. Each chapter consists of a Christian reflection on and response to one of the (in)famous “seven deadly sins”, based on the work of a particular historical Christian figure; the chapter titles are: Luther on Greed, Augustine on Lust, Basil of Caesarea on Envy, Clement on Gluttony, Aquinas on Anger, Reinhold Niebuhr on Pride, and Calvin on Sloth. I picked up my copy at CMS Summer School in January, and have finally made time to read it.

The prose is academic, but in very readable style. The historical opinions are carefully considered in light of Scripture (compare Acts 17:11). The result is a challenging and at times confronting look at human nature and my own sinful attitudes and behaviour. But I found this book helpful and enjoyable, as well as challenging. The authors use their historical sources to provide a positive and encouraging approach to countering temptations and following God whole-heartedly.

Recommendation: Academic, but an easy read. Humour aplenty. Just be ready to hear God speaking to you as you read…

Camp Rapture

Our church camp this year was again at Cape Hillsborough, with a theme this year of “Camp Rapture: Don't be left behind”. This time I had a decent tripod to take along, so I got some nice photos on the beach at night.

I also had another play with my interval timer, making a couple of sequences of dawn and sunrise.

Mackay floods

Okay, I suppose it's time I made a blog entry about the flood, eh?

Friday morning about 3-4am it started bucketing down. We could barely get to sleep for the sound of the rain. The view at dawn was bleak and wet.




Apparently at 5:30am there was still no water in the classrooms at the school. By 8am it was over a metre deep. It peaked at around 9am. Looking through the small gap left in the window of my usual classroom and seeing the plastic furniture floating around was quite an experience!




The floodwater rose visibly while we watched. In the space of 15 minutes we watched it move up a road sign. Before an hour was up, the sign was completely submerged.




We went for a short walk. At the end of our street we saw some drivers taking their cars where no small car was ever meant to go: through flood waters across the street. There were waves breaking against the kerb of the traffic island!




At the Gooseponds we found a raging torrent. Seriously, the speed of the current was pretty scary; it's normally a placid little lake. Usually you can walk along a concrete path underneath the Maplethorpe Bridge, but not today.




We lost power at around 10am. We got a little of it back in the late afternoon, and I mean exactly what I wrote: enough for the radio to play, but not enough for it to light up its display; enough for precisely one of our inside lights, but not enough for the fridge, phone, microwave, toaster or anything else. Finally at around 8pm we got full power back.

More rain fell overnight, but not nearly as much as on Friday morning. Apparently Mackay received the equivalent of about a third of the usual annual rainfall in the space of 6 hours! When I went to the school this morning, the floodwater was still deep over the oval and rugby fields, but was no longer in the classrooms. I spent the afternoon at the school, helping with the clean-up. Sad sights abounded: ruined resources and waterlogged textbooks, filthy furniture, chipboard as soft as tissue paper… but by far the worst was these pianos:




Tomorrow, more cleaning up in the afternoon. Church in the morning—if we can get there.

By the way, you might also like to read Laetitia's blog about the flood, and there are more flood photos up on Flickr.