I found it quite intriguing to see the inner workings and theologisings of a 7 year old so I have posted them on here, both as he wrote them (on paper) and in text that you might be able to read a little easier.

What I found amusing was the trinitarian focus in both songs. I’m sure if you ever want to understand the idea of one God in 3 persons that Sam would be able to set you straight!…

Oh God the Mity

Oh God oh mighty
You care for all of us
Your plans will never fail
You care with love
There’s only one God in three persons
Your Bible means all different words like ‘the book’
You and me look great
We shout to you to worship
When we get closer and closer to you we get to you
When we do we know that where in the safest place in the world!

This one had no title

My lord my lord all you have did my lord
You died on the cross for me
My lord he anseurs my prairs for me
My lord I said I’m safe in bed
Lord you make no mistake
Cos theres only one Lord
In three different persons

Clearly education is not equivalent to transformation.

I had an encounter again this week with a person who left me speechless with their attitude. I think there is plenty in the church that is worthy of critique, but when you stand on the sidelines and lob rocks without getting your hands dirty trying to effect change then you just make me want to vomit.

I had to leave quickly because I was about to offer some of my own insights back to them.

As you were…

Chuckle chuckle

If you don’t like public toilets then this one will knock you out… The first pic is of a woman about to enter a public toilet in Houston

And this is the view from inside the toilet – made entirely of one way glass…No one can see you from the outside, but when you are inside, it’s like sitting in a clear glass box.

Anyone getting nervous?…

Ok this one’s a beauty too. The floor of this bathroom has been painted on, but I still reckon it could be a little weird on first take! From

And just to show you how sharp (or strange) some people are here’s a true story of the ‘Pudding Guy’

In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.

He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.

There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.

I was reading Simon’s blog today and the neighbourhood initiatives he was writing about and couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we were to start a veggie patch in the front of our yard rather than the back – and what if we got others in the street to do similar and we allowed people to come and take what they wanted from what was created.

In his excellent book on neighbourhood mission and spirituality (God Next Door), Simon wrote about how we have lost the ‘front porch’ vibe in our streets and how most living is now done at the back and of course the end result is that we finish up living much more separate lives. It prompted me to consider how we design our homes and whether we could create homes that help us ‘live out the front’ a bit more.

Perhaps using that verge area for a veggie garden could be a starting point in redressing the balance and who knows, if it caught on it could change the whole vibe of a street.

Of course it has risks and associated problems, but wouldn’t it be a fund experiment?…

Now, if only I had the smallest interest in gardening I’d give it a go!

We were leading a church at that time and I had only just transitioned into the Team Leader role after 5 years as a youth pastor. It was therefore quite bizarre to feel this calling so strongly, and yet we couldn’t ignore it. We also felt there were 4 other families who we should invite to join us on the journey. Again there were very good reasons why each should have said ‘no thanks’, but despite incredible obstacles all said ‘yes – count us in’, and so the journey began.

That journey has been one of the primary foci of this blog, but last night it came to an end – officially. We gathered the core team over a meal and took some time to give thanks, celebrate and share memories of the wonderful time we shared together.

It was a pretty special night as we caught up, shared stories and reflected on the things we had learnt from our experience. What was really cool was that everyone was there – and they wanted to be there. The fact that Upstream ended wasn’t down to bad vibes and people disliking each other. It was just a whole bunch of circumstances that shifted and left it no longer viable.

I heard a number around the table say that if we could do it again we wouldn’t hesitate. In fact who knows… maybe one day we will…

So while there were tears and sadness at the end of a dream, there was also huge gratitude for the journey and for the friendships and for the learning. I think for most of us its been our ‘best ever’ church experience and has shaped up significantly. I actually don’t think we could have learnt any of the stuff we did and changed the way we did while doing ‘business as usual’.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the whole time was the way we were forgotten and virtually disowned by our home church once we made the decision. While there were a few quality people who prayed for us diligently and often, we never got invited back to share our learning and our requests for support or connection were not even responded to.

That has definitely left an ‘ech’ taste in our mouth and was an ongoing source of pain. Recently the church celebrated its 40th anniversary and in recounting the history of the church there was no mention made of the 5 families who left in 2003 to be missionaries in another suburb. Ouch.

To be written out of history like that wasn’t altogether surprising based on what we had experienced, but it was also disappointing as for all of us the church had been such a significant part of our lives and all of us had been long term committed members.

Despite that disappointment we can only look back with joy on a period of our lives that was significant and beautiful and give thanks for being able to do it.

from

He does it again here.

In case you don’t click the link the summary is ‘Dad’s ’showing up’ in your kids life is priceless and your absence will be noticed’.

I read this on a day when Sam has been particularly ‘avoidable’ and when I find my love and patience wearing a tad thin…

Thanks Simon.

My observation of some tradesmen I had dealt with over the last few years was that they turned up late, did a pretty average job, and then didn’t come back to fix issues that weren’t done properly. I was fairly convinced that just being polite, punctual, reliable and honest I could get a fair bit of business.

I think that approach has served me well – but even if it hasn’t got me any more work I can sleep well at night knowing that I have done the right thing by people.

However this week was shocker for small warranty issues, difficult people and a couple of perplexing jobs. For a while Phys Teaching started looking good again…

Interestingly I have had very few warranty issues over the time I have been working, but this week they landed! There was a leaky pipe (my mistake) , a sticky sprinkler, a broken sprinkler (just bad luck) and a frozen controller display – easy fix but pain in the butt to get there. All pretty small issues but then there was the Balga job…

I quoted this job just after getting back from holidays and because I was keen to pick up work I was happy to do it at a low price. However it took twice as long as I thought and has given me and the owner grief ever since. I finished the job late in the day pretty exhausted after having some wiring issues – but when I left all was working well.

Then a controller showed an error message. I managed to talk the owner thru the fix over the phone. But it did it again just after he had laid his turf… on a Sunday afternoon… so I hopped in the car drove down and changed it over. All my wiring was correct so it could only be the controller. And the new one worked fine, until yesterday… then it started misbehaving as well.

It was holding one solenoid open permanently meaning the 2 stations would come on together. Of course this was the unit where the solenoids were buried under the newly laid brick paving… In between getting this message I got another to tell me that one of the other controllers was playing up again and showing error messages.

I have never had this happen before so as well as being embarassing and making me look pretty incompetent it was also unbelievably frustrating!

Saturday is normally my day off but today I hopped in the car and drove back to Balga – an 80km round trip – to sort this once and for all. I decided I wasn’t going home till it was all fixed. I replaced 2 controllers just to be safe and went to check the problem with the solenoids.

It seemed that the controller was holding one valve open when it shouldn’t have, but oddly when I put another new controller on it the whole thing righted itself. Fortunately the owner was there to watch me and realised that the problem wasn’t at my end, but must be in his own electrics possibly frying the controllers or making them play up.

We agreed that I would leave him to get an electrician to resolve the issues and I wouldn’t charge him for my time, but neither would I go back to Balga again… ever…ever…

The stress of this job was compounded by an angry customer earlier in the week who felt I had done a dodgy job of laying his turf. He told me there were ‘massive 2 inch gaps’ between the rolls and I was going to need to meet him there to sort it out. It was right at the start of a busy day and it immediately raised my stress levels further.

I didn’t remember it like that at all, in fact I think I would have noticed 2 inch gaps! But he was pretty convincing so I figured I must have turned up drunk that day and made a real mess. However when I got there it was exactly as I remembered it – a very neat job with a few very small gaps where the lawn wasn’t cut quite right.

It got a tad complicated as he argued that it was ‘miles apart’, but the lawn we were looking at simply wasn’t. I thought I was going mad and my diplomacy was close to expiration. When I encounter a situation like this my approach is to ask the customer to tell me what they want and I will simply do it – so long as it is reasonable.

He couldn’t tell me what he wanted… and agreed we might just have to leave it and let it grow. I smiled politely and went home just relieved to be free of it.

I’m hoping next week is a little easier.

And if you’re read this far then you’d realise this post was much more for my benefit than yours!

My own reflections over the last few years had me resonating strongly with this. Parents who won’t ‘parent’ because their kids might dislike them are on the increase and its to the detriment of their kids and the broader society.

Fact is – there aren’t many teens who need more friends but their are plenty who really do need good parents.

Here’s an excerpt from McCrindle’s article in The Age

Generation Y has been shaped in an environment of more permissive parenting where their parents have given them more freedom younger, and for many, parents have morphed into ”peerants”. The lack of boundaries and a failure to emphasise personal responsibility has created a context where there are choices without an understanding of consequences. Far from instilling independence and maturity, too much freedom too early creates a ‘’safety net syndrome” where young adults are less likely to worry about the risks of their behaviour.

(HT Mark Sayers)

I have been putting together a website for our church community at Quinns over the last few weeks and gradually adding content to the point where it is now ‘open for business’.

Creating a website is a really challenging task because you are trying to describe and define yourself succinctly and honestly both to those who are part of the community and those ‘looking in’.

Like other tools of this nature it’s easy for it to become a marketing exercise where the whole look and feel of the website is at odds with the look and feel of the actual church community. In doing this I hope those who know both would say that there is a fair degree of congruence between both online and real life.

In this case I have chosen a wordpress / blog format as I like the look and ease of use for others in the community. It also keeps the ‘latest news’ front and centre and easy to access.

There are still some pages to be filled but feel free to stop by and have a look. Recently I was debating whether to put Sunday teaching online and I ended up deciding to do it but in a members section which requires password access. The reason for this choice was because the learning is specific to our own community and I am also wary of letting my words loose online. Believe it or not I am very selective about what I put in print, but knowing how much I ‘freewheel’ in speaking I am reluctant to put it out there at this stage.

Anyway… It’s a website… A way of helping our church community communicate better (amongst many ways) and a window to those in the community who want to get a feel of who we are.