Ok this is purely a PSA for anyone else who happens to back into things and smash their tail-lights!

I smashed the first one two years ago – not badly – just a small piece of the glass missing. I could live with it and barely noticed it. Then a year ago I jack-knifed the caravan and did the other one – a bigger piece missing, but all still functional.

With 75k on the clock I was feeling it is getting close to trade in time, so I figured I’d fix the lights up. I already knew a genuine light assembly was around $1350/side so I wasn’t keen to go that route. To claim insurance was gonna be $700 excess per claim (separate incidents) so I figured I’d hunt until i found some online – which I did at eBay for around $150 each.

So I removed the old ones, installed the new ones and felt like I’d had a real win! $300 instead of $2700. But… then the blind spot radar, cross traffic indicator and rear camera all started flicking up fault codes.

With it due to go in for a service I just figured I’d ask the guys at Ford to check it out and clear them.

So I dropped it in, picked it up and it was still flashing like a Christmas tree – the apprentice doing the $400 oil change on my car didn’t think to attend to the codes… So I had to come back, but with the promise it would be attended to immediately and while I wait.

I dropped the car, took off for an hour and then came back – to see the car still sitting where I’d left it… Hmmm not good… I ‘expressed my disappointment’ at the time wasted and got it looked at straight away.

The verdict was that both rear radar sensors were gone and they would need replacing – but the guys at Ford didn’t want to do the job as they old replace whole assemblies. Really?… And then the radar units were $400 each…

So this is starting to become less of a win and more of a pain in the arse!

With a fairly open day I cruised down to Osborne Park to a mob called Adas who specialise in the recalibration of these units. (Up until now I hadn’t realised they needed recalibration.) They spent a couple of hours on the car but couldn’t get the left radar to function. The conclusion was that it had probably got water in it because of how long I had left it exposed. Oh and the wiring harness also needed replacing due to corrosion. I left there and drove home thru traffic frustrated at a day spent ‘waiting’ and then to no avail.

Today I was to pick up the radar and the harness return to Os Park and let them fit and calibrate. So I picked up the radar ($400 – but then Ford had told me I needed both…) and the harness which I was guessing would be a ridiculous $70 or $80 turned out to be $200… ouch!

I dropped the car back at Adas and took off as they felt they may need it overnight. No worries – what’s another trip to Ossie Park from Yanchep! Turns out they got it fixed the same day, all for the sum of $1137 – which covered scan. fault finding, and a couple of calibrations. It was about twice as much as i was expecting, but to be fair, these guys were brilliant. Fast service, squeezed me in and knew what they were doing. I’d recommend them to anyone – but they aren’t cheap. (Lucrative business opp for someone I am thinking…)

I drove home realising the whole exercise had cost me about $2000… and a couple of days of wasted time.

In hindsight an insurance claim should have been the way to go, but then i wasn’t aware of the need for recalibrations and the dodgy parts.

While the $2k end result wasn’t what I expected a little bit of research, pulled up another owner who had spent $1300 on the light and then needed 3 hours of labour by Ford at their workshop rates to calibrate and fit… Makes your butt cheeks clench just contemplating it!

So if you have backed into your caravan or a lamp-post and damaged your rear tail light my tip is claim it on insurance and do it quickly so the internals don’t corrode, otherwise they may not be covered under the claim.

As you were.

Best thing we have ever done as a family?

It would have to be the big lap of Oz back in 2009 when the kids were 6 & 8 and we were in between church gigs. I hear lots of people thinking about doing something like this, others putting it on their retirement list (which of course, assumes you live that long) while others feel its just too complicated to pull off. No doubt that is true for some.

Every time I hear the Waifs song, ‘Take it In’, it takes me back to Cable Beach where we strolled, enjoyed amazing sunsets and played in warm water. One line in the song says ‘this is a time that will not come again…’ and I remember back then actually thinking savour this time because it is precious, so very precious. It will never come again. Your kids will never be that age. You will never be able to do the things you can do today. It will not get cheaper and easier…

If you’re a family pondering whether you can pull it off then chances are you can… if you arrange your life in such a way as to make it a possibility. Yeah it would probably mean long service leave, or even just resigning and taking a leap into the unknown.

Perhaps you wonder why bother with something like this? What’s the big attraction? Well, part of it is simply doing something that is a little risky and against the grain – although it’s becoming much more common as influencers try to make money along the way (not as easy as it looks by the way!) Most of it is the memories you get to create as a family – as well as the way it can shape and form a family. And then there’s the raw experience itself of seeing a place like Oz. We have a fantastic country and there is so much to be amazed by.

My original plan was to buy a big bus / motorhome and drive that around – but along the way common sense (Danelle) prevailed and we settled on a 1996 Nissan Patrol (with an intermittent air con issue that we never were able to fix) and a 2003 Jayco Eagle. Yeah – the 4 of us spent 6 months in a pop up camper van! I think about it now and it seems ridiculous. Our Jayco Silverline ‘mum and dad’ van is like a hotel room on wheels, while the Eagle was more like an overcrowded cubby house with canvas for walls.

While I would encourage every family to do something of this ilk, I’m less a fan of being ‘full time on the road’ as people say. It sounds exciting and fun, but I would fear for the lack of substantial relationships we would all have, for the impact of living what may be seen as a completely self indulgent and selfish life and of the lack of purpose that would accompany this type of life. I’m a firm believer in the importance of significant relationships – and these don’t happen when we are flitting from town to town. I’m also a believer in being ‘rooted’ somewhere and the lack of roots could potentially lead to a sense of isolation and un-belonging – anywhere. Some may argue that the traveller life means you belong everywhere, but I’m not convinced.

And while the laughs we had and the memories we shared were invaluable, I hope (and believe) that it also taught our children that you don’t have to fit in and do what everyone else is doing. You can drop everything for a time and hit the road. When Ellie took off to NZ on her own at 19 I was proud – and I wonder if the earlier experience of our family travelling may have helped her take that risk. Before he died, Sam had made a couple of Troopie trips to the North West with Cosi and I could easily have imagined them ‘on the road’ with their kids for a good slab of time. Sadly, not to be.

When I think of ‘before and after’ (sliding door) type moments then our decision to travel was definitely one for our family. For ever after the very first thing that got slotted into the year ahead were holidays – we had even negotiated 6 weeks annual leave with Quinns Baptist rather than the usual 4 – because we just didn’t think 4 was enough…

That trip was a fabulous time and it sits in my memory as my favourite experience the 4 of us had together – closely followed by our time in Ireland, but it wasn’t all roses. The church had been in a time of difficult conflict before we left and there was a vote in July to either keep us as pastors or vote us out. In a church of 32 members it only took 8 to see us sent packing. I clearly remember getting the message while we were walking the Strand in Townsville. On one hand we felt disappointed and even moreso for the people trying to bring some freshness to the church. On the other hand it had been so ugly that I wasn’t sad to be free of the burden.

It was also around that time that we had joined the dots on our ‘investment’ that we had hoped was going to fund the trip. We had put $250K into a joint venture project with an expected return of 40% – it was just before the GFC and very doable. However then came the GFC… Our project manager illegally borrowed money from our project to prop up his other failing projects, however when they fell over the whole thing came down in a heap and we kissed $250k goodbye. We had never been big money earners so that was a massive hit Having paid off the mortgage with a fluke investment, we were now back in that space with a loan bigger than we had ever had and with only a fledgling retic business to pay the bills. I would lie awake at night wondering how I would ever pay that loan off… I would tell myself ‘No one has died. No one is going to die. It’s just money.‘ We discussed packing up and heading home to get stuck into work and clear the debt, but we made a firm decision to stay the course, enjoy the time we had and figure the rest out when we landed back in Perth That was a good decision. There would have been nothing gained by coming home – and 2-3 months of wonderful memories would have been lost.

So if you’re pondering and even hankering to take off and do something like this, then just do it… Just make a plan, hit the road and live life in a whole different way for a period. It will enrich your family life and it may set a culture in your family – a love for adventure and exploration. It won’t all go to plan but you will come home changed and your family life will be richer for it!

A blood test… two actually – and at different pathology labs… ugh…

But it was Friday and my workload was light, so I figured I might as well go sit in line and stare at my phone for a while until the nurse could stick a needle in my arm.

I arrived with 25 minutes left on the clock – they were closing at 1pm – and there was one person in front of me. That person was in and out in less than 3 minutes, but I wasn’t sure the phlebotomist had seen me there, so I went up to stick my head in.

‘Just checking if you have time for one more?…’ I said gently.

Without looking up she told me to go and wait and I’d be called shortly.

‘Ok – sorry…’ I said, ‘wasn’t sure if you had seen me.’

Not a warm reception at all I mused. I felt like a spanked child. Wonder what’s got into her today?

A minute later she called me in. We brusquely moved thru the paperwork while I confirmed that I really was who I said I was. She didn’t look at me once and it felt like a heavily strained interaction. Sometimes you can tell when someone is on the edge and I surmised that for some reason this woman was holding it together with string and duct tape – and the string was almost worn thru…

I didn’t want to pry into her day so I just smiled and answered her questions. Once the paperwork was done she went to gather her needles and collection tubes into the little grey, kidney shaped dish they all seem to have.

The she looked at me, took a breath and said ‘It’s been hell today.’

The needle penetrated my arm. But her words also penetrated. She certainly looked like someone who had been thru hell and now she had told me about it. So the choice now is to ask further or just smile and nod (none of my business really).

‘Oh really?’ It seemed the best ‘ambiguous’ response. I wasn’t sure whether to ask exactly what ‘hell’ looked like.

‘I called my boss in tears and resigned’, she said. That took me back. I had never met Jenny before but it was obvious she was no beginner at this stuff. She was mid 50’s looked and sounded like she was a strong, no nonsense kind of woman. But she was now telling me she was on the phone resigning – in tears.

‘Can I swear?’ she asks. Then before I can consent she simply speaks the words ‘F–k, f–k, f–k…!’

‘That good hey?… So what did happen today then?’ I asked. She didn’t look someone who would easily drop her guard with a complete stranger. She had that professional nurse air about her that wanted to keep to the job at hand, but she was clearly reeling and she had opened the door and invited me in.

So she began to tell me the story of being in a very busy centre as the only person on deck, meaning people have to wait in line – and some people don’t like to wait and instead get nasty and angry and abusive. And some people think blood tests are always a 5 minute thing, but sometimes she has to make phone calls, complete forms, check information and the slots get longer and the waiting customers get gnarlier and gnarlier… She took a breath. All this while blood is draining from my left arm.

‘It was actually only one person who was terrible,’ she clarifies.

‘One’s enough sometimes.’ I said.

It was about here that I had ‘a moment’ where I realised I could get her to ‘wind up the whinging and just take my blood‘, or I could pause, lean in a little and allow her to talk. It actually became a conscious moment of decision – because I too had other things to do too – like lunch. I was on the verge of ‘hangry’.Not pretty.

It literally was only a few minutes of listening and asking a few more questions as Jenny unwound her day and her frustrations with the lack of staff. She was angry at being mistreated – and fairly so. Those ‘please treat our staff with courtesy and respect’ signs we now see in various offices are there for a reason. She felt taken advantage of, being slotted into a very busy room with only her on deck. Andshe didn’t really want to resign – but had just had enough that day.

As she talked she was completing the forms, and trying to get a little piece of cotton wool back on the needle hole in my arm. And as she did I was conscious too that the room was feeling lighter – that her countenance had shifted and that we were both smiling.

I’m not always attuned to these moments – in fact I’d imagine more go thru to the keeper than I will ever know – but it was just a reminder today of how easy it is to simply be a decent human being to someone who has been on the rough end of the stick all day.

People sometimes ask how we ‘sense God’ in our everyday lives and I imagine moments like these are there often, if we are able to live at a pace where the call to interact can get past the busy thoughts, or hangry feelings that so often occupy our brains.

I hesitate to share this as I don’t want to make myself sound more attuned to God than I really am – because truth be told it’s not my sweet spot. But this was just one of those moments where the Spirit got my attention and I was able to take a breath and listen – just for a few minutes. It was quite beautiful.

I’m getting used to shedding tears in public places.

Last week at Elixer cafe as Danelle and I had lunch and talked about Sam and what we were missing we both found our eyes brimming. In church on Sunday we sang a song that he loved to sing and I quietly dabbed my eyes as I caught a memory-glimpse of him deep in worship. I had coffee with my friend Ed last week and we talked about Sam it was with tears in my eyes. This is who I am now.

A number of friends have invited us out for coffee, some who are close and others who we don’t know so well and they have asked us how we are going. Again, tears are almost inevitable. I neither seek them nor restrain them. They are just part of our way of being now. The ‘grief wound’ has scabbed over a little but it only takes a bump or a scratch to draw blood again. And so tears roll.

A son is missed and so many situations are ‘fixable’, but this one simply has no solution. Today I scanned thru my computer looking for a file I needed to send to a friend and I saw a folder simply called Sam – one of the various places we store videos or pics of him. My fingers doubled clipped on a scratchy 4 second moment of him rock hopping out of the surf, long hair straggling down his back while he laughed. One video was enough to take my breath away again. I didn’t click on any other videos – not today.

The reality is still terrible – still utterly unimaginable… I wonder ‘how we are going’ now and I’m still not sure how to answer that. It is over 18 months now since he died, but it seems he is thought of now more than ever.

A friend said to me recently ‘it is said that we die twice – the first time when we have our physical death – and the second when no one mentions our name – when we are forgotten.’

Thank you to those who continue to mention his name and to ask that one simple question that opens the door, ‘how are you going?’

But I know, darling, that you do…

Ok I just munted a Nick Cave song (which I wrote about previously) for my own purposes 🙂

But I really don’t believe in a ‘transactional God’, who keeps a tab with us constantly asking that we settle our side of the bill. I don’t believe in a God who punishes us when we get things wrong, or who sends trouble our way to balance the ledger when we sin.

But I used to. I remember thinking that if I did something dodgy during the day and then backed my car into a bollard that evening, that it was just God balancing the score. I’m happy to say that phase of my life and theology has passed and I no longer find myself waiting for divine retribution if I happen to give the finger to another driver in a minor road rage moment.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised that this type of thinking is so prevalent among Christians, as it had infected my own life in my younger years. It was probably reading Phillip Yancey’s 20th C classic What’s So Amazing About Grace, that jolted my thinking from transactional to grace. I was going to say ‘karma to grace’, because I sense my understanding in those days was more based around a karmic idea that around anything Christian.

I don’t think my church was preaching a form of ‘karma’, but I somehow drew these conclusions – that God rewarded good behaviour and punished sin by meting out pain on the people who wronged him. The thing is if we hold this view (that God punishes when we fail) then chances are we hold the opposite view too – that God will take care of us if we live a good life – that faithful adherence to the ‘script’ (and that will change depending on the denomination/culture of church you were raised in) on our part will mean that he will keep us safe from sickness, accidents or even death.

How do you know if you hold this view? I imagine you will get disappointed with God if you lose your job, your marriage busts up, or you get scammed for a lot of money. God has let you down even though you did your part.

In your mind it sounds like this: ‘I was a decent Christian – attended church every Sunday, went to Bible studies, I even gave money!… and now this?… What’s the deal God?’

It’s transactional, just in the opposite direction. It’s typically a stance that younger Christians may have, simply because our brains are formed in a cause & effect world and we know that part of the Christian life is to ‘please God’, from which we then deduce that he should then look after us.

If you hold a transactional view of God then you can expect your faith to come unstuck somewhere along the line. It’s that simple. It will… And if/when it does the solution is not to ‘forgive God’ and go back at it in the same way. Trying to relate to God transactionally is like to trying to run Windows on a Macbook. It just doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t operate in that way.

What Yancey wrote that was so powerful, was the simple line; ‘there is nothing you could do to make God love you any more – and there is also nothing you could do to make God love you any less.’ If you have never heard that then read it again and let it sink in.

And as an out come of that God won’t give you a promotion in your job if you never skip a week at church, or if you sign up to help out in Kids’ ministry. Nor will he allow your house to flood, or your car engine to sieze if you drink too much one night when you are out.

He isn’t like that.

God is a lot of things, but fundamentally he is love – and he is good. And from him comes what Yancey calls scandalous grace. When you genuinely encounter this God and his unrestrained grace, you will no longer even see the transactional God.

It’s an interesting time to be making any kind of observation or declaration on social issues.

I literally haven’t had time to offer my informed and distilled two cents worth on all that is transpiring in the world – and there is a LOT going on. But what I’m observing is people cancelled, fired, reprimanded or otherwise sanctioned for having opinions that are counter to the party line of their workplace or tribe. And then there are those asked not to comment either way on issues that are contentious – best not offend anyone at all…

This morning a well known local Christian leader (Peter Lyndon James) wrote that he found himself with no choice but to resign because his voice on immigration appears to be at odds with his role as a CEO of Shalom House. Of course there was the cancelling of Jimmy Kimmel’s show for his comments on Charlie Kirk and there have been several other incidents.

It’s an interesting challenge, choosing how and when to use your voice for what purpose – and at what cost… 

I’ve never held back on this blog, nor have I felt constrained by any entity whose reputation as an organisation may be tarnished by my views, and it’s a line I intend to keep holding into the future. If I ever find myself with an opportunity for employment again in a larger/diverse organisation it may need to come with the condition that my personal opinions are not going to be restrained because of my involvement. No doubt there would be some employers and orgs unwilling to take that risk.

I should clarify that this doesn’t make me unaccountable – just not reportable to someone who controls my salary. I do listen to push back from friends and ministry colleagues who may not share my opinions and when I feel like I’m wrong I try to correct it. 

All that said it feels like we are increasingly living in a polarised world where it is difficult to hold and then present a nuanced point of view on contemporary issues. And I hesitate to speak as I don’t want to get dragged into the mud of other people’s wars and cast as ‘one of them’ or ‘one of those’ if I am neither.’.

I do hold opinions on all current events – drawn from what I’d hope is a wide spread of sources – but I sense were I to express them I would end up in the same debates I see festering on various friends FB pages and blogs. I’m not convinced much of it is productive.

I’ve also been writing for long enough now to know that my immediate response isnt always my best response. But perhaps one of my biggest concerns is around the lack of space to dissent and the suppression of unpopular views. I have always believed ideas stand or fall on their own merits. But at the moment in parts of the world it is the ‘left’ suppressing dissent while in other parts it seems the ‘right’ is now doing the same.

My interest in this is partly for its own sake, but also for how we form and hold communities of faith in the middle of the polarisation. It will not serve the world for us to retreat into ‘leftie churches’ and ‘right wing churches ‘. There are Christians living at all places on the political spectrum and if we only listen to like minded voices then we will only be further apart. That said it takes great wisdom to lead in this current climate. I’m musing on how we speak into the situation in different types of communities – large and regional or small and local. Each one brings a different tension into the communication process and the hope for peace and acceptance of difference 

(Anyway, maybe someone will instead castigate me for not taking a visible and firm stance on current issues!)

A few weeks back someone came up to me after I’d be teaching in their church and said ‘you’re Sam’s dad right?’ I said ‘yeah.’

He said ‘can I tell you about a moment I had with Sam?’

My heart lit up. Of course! Tell me… And he shared a story of meeting Sam at the local skateboard bowl, and thinking he was a bit crazy because he was immediately dropping in on the steepest section of the bowl with no (apparent) fear.

‘Really?…’ I said. I hadn’t seen Sam skate for a while and the last time he wasn’t in that kinda zone.

‘Yeah… we were a bit worried for him. He was just really going for it!’

I can’t remember where the conversation went from there, but I do remember feeling a real sense of joy simply because someone had chosen to remember him.

After 18 months I imagine some folks aren’t sure what you should say to us or Ellie, or Cosi. Do we talk about Sam? Do we ask about how we are going? Will that cause more pain?

Is it best just to say nothing and allow us to raise it?

Prior to Sam’s death I would have been one of those people wanting to care, but not knowing how to jump in, so then just doing nothing and hoping someone else would have the conversation. What I’ve learnt is that I really value my friends who keep Sam in the conversation and who ask genuine questions about how we are going. We have been blessed with some great people in our life who have stayed in touch and not let him or us be forgotten.

I just spent half the day doing some brick paving in the back yard and 18 months later the thought running through my mind was just a loop of ‘Sam is gone… how did this happen?…’ or some variation of these. I feel like he is ever present in my thoughts – probably more than he was when he was alive even. And while I feel like I’m in an ok place with accepting his death, I certainly don’t ever want to move on – or have him dropped out of the conversation.

If you’re a person who wants to walk with us and keep his memory present (not every conversation obviously – that would be annoying!) then here are a few things I have observed that have been really valuable to me.

• friends just checking in and offering a coffee just to catch up and hear how I’m going. It’s clear they want to know what’s happening for me in regards to Sam so I feel permission to open up and be as ‘full frontal’ as I want or need to be.
• texts and messages sometimes on significant days eg father’s day or his birthday, or even just random texts to say they are thinking of me.
• people who are willing to shift the conversation to Sam at any time and talk about him or their memories of him.

If you are one of those people who just don’t know what to ask or where to start here are a few questions that you could ask that stretch beyond a simple ‘how are you going?’

What have you missed this week?
How has grief come up this week?
How has.… significant event felt with the absence of Sam…?
What do you miss most?
What has been hard recently?
What catches you off guard these days?
What do people say or do that hurts that they may not consider?
What do you feel you need of people at the moment or is it too overwhelming to know?
What are your favourite memories?
Tell me about…
Do you want to process any of the traumatic memories?
How do you find your day to day life harder or different to before?
Is there anything I can be more sensitive of?
What of the future do you feel robbed of?
How are you going managing grief in…… setting?
What is helpful for you when you are feeling … if you know?

The bottom line is please talk to us and keep him in the conversation. We miss him terribly and we love it when people are willing to share memories, or to delve into our lives and ask the kind of questions that go beyond the surface

And of course a huge thank you to those friends who have done this and cared for us so beautifully over this time.

It’s amazing how simply hearing one throwaway line can completely rewire your imagination.

I was walking along the beach this morning with Tahnee listening to a podcast on the subject of Vocation where author Karen Swallow was being interviewed about her new book ‘You Have a Calling‘. I am speaking this week on the subject of Vocation and I had some teaching ready to go – a fair bit of old stuff with a few new ideas from more recent reading and experience. It’s a subject I am familiar with and I enjoy teaching around it, but something was bothering me and I couldn’t seem to find the itch to scratch it. Something just didn’t feel quite right in the content.

The conversation on the podcast was around the calling of Paul and the high visibility and clarity of his calling – yet at the same time acknowledging that a literal calling of that type from God is rare and exceptional. Swallow went on to say:

“And so, but there’s so much joy and satisfaction that can be had in the ordinary and mundane. And we miss it if we’re looking for something else that’s not there or not ours to follow.”

From A Theology of Hustle: You Have a Calling: Karen Swallow Prior on Work, Vocation, and Beauty, 26 Aug 2025

She went on to use the analogy of the Lord of The Rings

“But I always like to think about the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. And like, man, the hobbits are an example of this to me. Like, they’re just like very simple people, and they carry on, they party, they hang out, they like live like pretty mundane lives, especially compared to the other characters, these elves and these wizards. And it’s God’s mission that’s carried out through the mundane in so many ways. Like, it’s only the people who are mundane that are able to walk out that calling in so many ways. And I just, I love how he brought that out in that work, so. Yeah. Where most of us are called to be hobbits.”

Most of us are called to be hobbits…

I love that line. It makes so much sense. As I reflected on what I had prepared I realised much of what I was drawing on from scripture was call narratives of people like Abraham, Moses or Paul. And while they are graphic and inspirational, most of us aren’t those kinds of people.

Most of us aren’t Aragorn or Boromir either. We are Frodo, Sam and Pippin living simple ordinary lives in 21st C suburbia, so when we sing that song in church about being ‘history makers’ it feels like there is a bit of pressure to step into a vocation that is not ours to own. My guess is that few of us will be Nelson Mandelas, William Booths or Wilberforces. But we can be ourselves if we can be content with that.

We can be the people God has made us to be in the place we find ourselves today.

As I pondered where to head with this new insight I felt drawn to re-explore the book of Ruth – a story of some difficult life situations, some formative choices and some (relatively) insignificant people living out their calling in a beautiful way.

Ruth’s story could easily be over looked as one about vocation because she doesn’t appear to have a moment of revelation where God speaks to her directly. In fact as far as we know she wasn’t even a worshipper of the Hebrew God.

What we do have however, is a woman responding to her own tragic circumstances with selfless love and care for her older mother in law. Could that have been her calling? Was this a form of ‘aged care’ in her time? It seems she made a very firm choice to set her course on the care and protection of her mother in law even at the expense of her own happiness.

Her choice to follow Naomi back to Judah and to stay with her until the end is a beautiful story, but it isn’t grandiose in any way. It is just a simple depiction of love, kindness and selflessness – even to the extent of marrying Boaz and having a son with him. It’s hard to imagine that Ruth ‘loved’ Boaz in the sense that we imagine romantic love, but being with him and having a son with him was part of her care for Naomi.

And it didn’t go unnoticed.

⁴ The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! ¹⁵ He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.

Ha… your daughter in law who is better than seven sons…

Yeah – there are Abrahams, Moses and Pauls in our communities, but more often we have Ruth types who live their lives faithfully and with integrity, and who generally go unnoticed. And if my wife happens to read this to the end – then yes – I see you in this – and you have been a beautiful example of a life lived in quiet, usually unseen service to others – one of whom is your mother in law and to whom you have been ‘better than seven sons’.

There is a quote from Henri Nouwen that I read years ago, but Danelle flicked across to me again recently that feels like it echoes more of this sentiment.

“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems.

“My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress.

“But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simple like them, but truly love them” (Gracias: A Latin American Journal, 1983).

It’s not a bad thing to be a hobbit and to live the simple life, to sit on doorsteps and play ball. It might even take some of the pressure off (unless you happen to be that one hobbit who finds the ring…)

In reflecting on vocation or calling, it has led me to seeing it a little differently; less a moment of God encounter and more a compilation of our life circumstances and backstory, merged with our innate capacities and then driven by the decisions we make in critical times. Yes – there could be a burning bush type thing going on, but maybe most of determining vocation is ‘letting your life speak’ to quote Parker Palmer.

I’ve been savouring a few biographies and autobiographies lately and the one that I have really enjoyed was ‘Belfast Child’ by John Chambers, a boy born to a ‘mixed faith’ couple and who grew up in the very same era as myself.

Chambers describes a Belfast I remember quite well, even though it was 50-60 years ago now – a place where alignment with the wrong tribe could bring some heavy punishment. As a 7 or 8 year old I remember walking through a park and being stopped by two older boys who asked me if I was a protestant or a catholic… The wrong answer may have resulted in a flogging, but fortunately my ‘protestant’ response was what was needed to keep walking freely.

Seven years old… You can understand how living in a city that divided forms a deep sense of ‘good and evil’. We were good.. and them… well, they were catholics and were clearly evil. So it goes in the mind of a young child. Chambers articulates the tension very well as he describes the moment he realises that while he is growing up in a loyalist protestant neighbourhood and ‘identifying’ as protestant, his mother is a Catholic. She is the enemy.

Eventually ‘the family’, insist that mum and dad separate and mum is given her marching orders. She leaves for England and the children are told that she is dead. For all intents and purposes she may as well be dead as she is not welcome back in Belfast again. The book follows the young boy’s journey from growing up in a militant protestant community, taking part in riots as just weekend or after school fun, witnessing violence of all forms and then eventually being enlisted in the UDA – the Ulster Defence Army – a paramilitary organisation dedicated to keeping the north of Ireland protestant and ‘pure’. Along the way he discovers the truth about his mother – a secret he must keep for his own personal safety – but so begins his quest to find her and be reunited with her.

I have memories of this tragic city that I simply accepted as normal as a child, but which are utterly bizarre now. Armoured cars at the end of our street, barbed wire and armed soldiers checking you as you passed. Lying in bed at night and hearing bombs explode in other parts of the city or being in the shops and hearing a bomb alarm sound and then running for the exits. This was all ‘normal’ in my childhood – but of course it is far from normal in any other peaceful part of the world.

The 12th July is the annual celebration of all things protestant, with the Orange Order bands provocatively marching the streets and reminding catholics of their minority status. My grandfather was in the Orange Order so attending these marches was a thing for us kids, albeit from the sidelines rather than direct involvement.

I remember being taken to Ian Paisley’s church one evening – (why – I have no idea…) and listening to this politician / pastor rant and rail against the evils of popery and all those associated with it. Looking back I wonder how it ever came to this – how Jesus words in the sermon on the mount could somehow be aligned with the sectarian and divisive theology that infected the churches of my childhood. I imagine had I stayed in Belfast I may have grown up and continued to think that way. Interestingly, Chambers records his own experience of Christianity, firstly in his local community church and later in a Pentecostal gathering. Clearly any understanding of faith was going to be filtered through the lens of the cultural and political situation in Belfast at the time. It seems drug taking replaced faith in Chambers’ later years – which isn’t surprising as faith that is sectarian and aligned with politics over Jesus is never going to satisfy.

On my last visit there, about 10 years ago we visited a centre that was focused on peace and reconciliation where I read that it takes around 400 years for a nation to heal and move on from the kind of trouble that had framed the 60’s and 70’s in Belfast. That’s a long time… 400 years… But when hostilities run so deep it kinda sounds about right.

I will always be grateful for my parent’s decision to remove us from that world and bravely make the move to Australia in 1974. The early 70’s was the height of the trouble, but we left on a ship firstly to Stranraer in Scotland followed by a second 28 day journey from Southampton to Fremantle. We literally began a new life in Australia – a place that had no knowledge of our inbuilt prejudices and biases.

The book finishes with an older, wiser John Chambers also beginning to see the world differently, as the fundamentalism of his youth is slowly stripped away. But it took a literal re-location to England (as a way of escaping the paramilitary org) to give him the space in which to re-think his worldview.

While I don’t think of Ireland as ‘home’, it is still a significant part of my heritage. The tensions have eased in the country now, but I’d bet if you walked into either a long term loyalist or republican neighbourhood that it wouldn’t take long to realise that this worldview is still there even if it isn’t being expressed in violence. 400 years is a long time…

If you want to read a sample of the book then you can do so here.

So it’s July 20, almost 16 months from Sam’s death.

‘Sam’s death’… it still sounds virtually incomprehensible, Our boy was here on March 23 and then on March 24 last year we were called to the Mandurah boat harbour to identify his body.

It’s been 16 months, and it will be many more months without him…

It seems he is still in my thoughts every day – sometimes just a glimpse of a photo foofs the sadness in me back into flame. Sometimes it settles and I barely notice it. Those settled moments rarely last, as there is too much of him still present in our lives.

This week the Coroner’s report came in (yeah 16 months after the event) and it told us he drowned. Thanks for that information… It also told us he may have had some sort of issue with his heart that contributed to his death. An email describing your son’s death at 1.43pm on Monday is like a grenade launched into your life. I read it guardedly, as I had stuff to do that day, but it still slipped thru and punched me in the guts.

At 16 months I reflect on how we are all going – Danelle, Ellie, Cosi, our families, friends, the random people I still stumble across who knew Sam and who were impacted in some way by him, even the people who just hear the story second hand.

How are we going?

I don’t think there is a collective ‘we’ response I could give as ‘we’ differ greatly. I imagine I would appear to be one ‘least affected’ by his loss, largely because little has changed in my day to day life, or how I appear to those around me. I probably look like I’m doing fine – and in a sense I am. I have come to terms with the awfulness of what has transpired in our life and accepted it’s reality. I also feel and hold enormous hope for the life to come and I anticipate that life more than I ever have before. Were I to get a terminal cancer diagnosis tomorrow, as terrible as that may be, there would also be something wonderful to anticipate when this stage of life ends.

Last week at our Yanchep church I spoke of what happens after we die – of the hope we have and of the questions that surround that hope. As much as the biblical record is somewhat vague on exactly what heaven / new creation will be like, I have enjoyed imagining the re-union and the possibilities that will be in that future reality. I hadn’t spent much time in real focused thought here, but I when I did it was a beautiful experience. I genuinely look forward to what is coming next.

That actually does ease the ‘here and now’ pain somewhat. It’s probably because I operate firstly from my head. I have been able to look at the situation with some degree of rationality and a) accept the loss b) look forward to the re-union in probably 30-40 years at most (that would make me 91-101… very old…)

Of course, being able to process cognitively doesn’t negate pain – but it seems to give me a place to put it. This week I was chatting with my mate Morro, who wrote that beautiful song for us shortly after Sam died. He needed a video for the recording he is doing, so we began to skim the old footage we have saved. I checked out after a few vids as it was searingly painful, but Danelle kept going, sorting and processing. As we chatted about it later she said it was possibly because she has entered into those spaces more often over the last 16 months than I have. My ‘memory bank’ has largely been courtesy of Facebook memories – a daily recap of where we were and what we were doing up to 16 years ago – one of the upsides of social media for sure.

But most of those pics and memories have been of ‘little Sam’, the cute kid who followed all the rules, was obsessed with science experiments while also being scared of Heffalump. When it comes to 21 year old Sam the bite is much harder, more searing because this was the version of him we lost. I looked at a photo of him on Danelle’s bedside table this morning – the last one we have of him and Ellie – and my heart skipped a beat. Again… that question… ‘How can you be here today – gone tomorrow?’ – just no warning.

And as I look at 21 year old Sam, I wonder about 25 year old Sam, 30 year old Sam and so on… the Sam we will never get to see or know in this lifetime.

So 16 months on I’m doing ok. I have no problems working on caravans, with speaking around the place, meeting with people, with daily life tasks, or with exercise, although the tell tale that I am not firing on all cylinders is that I haven’t got on top of my eating habits. It’s so socially acceptable that no one would ever see it as a problem, but it’s a glitch in my life that before Sam died I had been starting to overcome. For now it’s a comfort thing and I’m just saying ‘whatever’ to it, all the while knowing that I can’t accept that as a long term response. Yep I’ll have another biscuit, cheesecake, brownie whatever… but hopefully in the next few weeks I will find the grace and will to put this issue to death one more time.

I also have moments of scouring realestate.com.au looking for an idyllic rural property where we’d have surf and forest, mountains and ocean… possibly some sort of a co-housing project that would be both creative and communal – and it excites me for a short time. I enjoy the dream…Then I think of the red tape and bureaucratic BS we’d need to carve thru just to have a chance of creating something innovative and I shudder.

And while we probably could do something in that regard if we wanted to, I also have moments of walking my dog and bumping into local people, appreciating the beauty of where we are and of the life we have been blessed with over the last 14 years in Yanchep and I realise that to have all this again would be nigh on impossible. We live in a beautiful place and we love the people who we get to share this life with. The mental image of ‘another life’ always has a lot of allure, and I will probably always tinker with alternative ideas… all the while recognising that sometimes you just have to look around and see how good you’ve got it… As I pondered in my recent reflection of the new creation, perhaps that will be time to implement all the things I will run out of time for in this life.

When I read and watched the dvd of Cloudstreet many years ago now I remember writing this – even then I found it beautiful. Today it says all I want it to all over again:

The spirituality throughout the series is fuzzy and eclectic, but the final scene is a beautiful one. I forget how the novel ends but the DVD concludes with the two families – the Lambs and Pickles – enjoying a picnic at the river. Sam’s hand has healed… Everyone is enjoying being together. Two young aboriginal girls who had suicided in the house play in the river alongside the white kids, Ted (who also died) is resurrected there with his wife and kids and all is well. All is good and what you imagine it would be like in the kingdom come.

Fish takes off for a swim – the swim he has been longing for – and it is good… even though he ‘dies’. He has been waiting so long for this…

Subtly but clearly we hear the narrator tell us of ‘ the river – the beautiful the beautiful the river’ and you can’t help but see beautiful hope as the ‘saints’ gather by the river.

And some don’t seem so saintly and some really don’t deserve to enjoy the river, but then maybe that’s just how it is… Winton grew up in my own flavour of conservative evangelicalism so he knows what he’s writing even if many won’t pick it.

Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river; gather with the saints at the river, that flows by the throne of God.

And one day we will…

One day…

So, again, a big thank you to those people who stay in touch, who ask the questions and who remember Sam with us. It’s been a steep ‘grieving curve’, but I think the very worst of it may be over.

And – if – like me – you are new to the world of grief, then perhaps the one very simple word of advice I would give, is to not hold back on either asking how I am going or on talking about Sam. The reality of his death and absence is never far from my heart and mind and I really appreciate when people take the leap into that space. What’s more noticeable and difficult is when people shy away from any conversation here – either because of their own dis-ease or because they don’t want to make it hard for us. My learning has been that ‘it’s hard’, but it’s ‘better hard’ when we talk and reminisce than when we avoid any difficult conversations.