“You see when you are middle class you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history will never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price to be paid for day to day comfort and silence. And because of this all happinesses are sterile: all sadnesses go unpitied”

D Coupland in Generation X

By and large I enjoy movies that tell a real story and that confront us with life as it really is and there’s no question Samson and Delilah does that.

Its the story of two aboriginal teenagers living on a community in central Australia who leave and attempt to find their place in Alice Springs. From beginning to end it depicts the tragic, meaningless existence of these young people and the lack of hope they experience.

I don’t make any claims to be knowledgeable on what its like to be an aboriginal teenager in the outback, but if this film has any currency then its not a pretty life.

The absence of dialogue combined with the non-stop petrol sniffing of the characters combined to leave you feeling hopeless and wondering where it was all headed… perhaps the point.

While the final scene offered a bit of hope it was still a tragic picture by any standard, but one that is worth watching if only to confront.

I had been using my previous blog template for about 5 years and today thought it might be time for a change…

Chances are I will play around with this a bit before settling on a format that I like so there may still be some more changes afoot.

But in case you thought you had arrived at the wrong blog by mistake, nope… its just a long overdue upgrade!

About 5 months ago we discovered that we had lost $250K, as a result of a failed property development. We don’t have a spare $250K sitting around to lose so it has been a challenging time.

More accurately we had the money stolen by the company director who illegally used the equity in our development to prop up his other failing projects. Ultimately he hoped to return the ‘borrowed’ money, but given he didn’t ask our permission to do so, and given those other projects fell over in the economic crash, it left a very ugly situation and many angry investors.

Just before we left for our trip we had heard that we were probably going to lose around $100K of the $250 K we had put in. It was bad news and caused us to re-consider whether we should continue to travel or whether we should just stay home and make up the lost ground. Given we had borrowed $200K of the $250K we were already back in debt and feeling a little edgy about things.

In the end we decided to go, but cancel the USA leg of the trip.

And we’re glad we did, as if we had known what was actually going to happen I think we would have felt it totally irresponsible to hit the road for six months knowing we were losing potential income and putting the cost of our trip on what had suddenly become a decent mortgage.

We have had both wins and losses with property, but this was a bit of a sledgehammer and we felt its effects over the trip. It has been both disturbing and challenging as we have had to address all the issues involved in this scenario.

There has been a heap of learning and I imagine there is a fair bit more still to come. For those who are interested here are some of the things we have been pondering and working thru over the last few months.

1. Perspective is everything - on the day we heard we were pretty angry and it caused a fair bit of anxiety as we saw the ground shift underneath us. I had a pretty bad day and even felt a bit of a panic come on. Our mortgage is now bigger than ever and I was feeling the pressure of it.

We are generally not financially driven, but we were investing in property as a bit of super / retirement plan. I went to bed that night knowing I needed to find some peace and in the prayer I was able to put things back in perspective. However they didn’t stay there… At various times as we were relaxing I would feel a panic cum anger attack hitting and for a week or so I was feeling almost depressed.

What really helped in those times was remembering that no one has died – no one has a terminal illness – our marriage hasn’t fallen apart – there has been no major life catastrophe.

We simply lost a lot of $$$.

And to put things further in perspective we are still way better off than many Aussies let alone when we compare ourselves to the rest of the world.

Perspective means I almost feel embarrassed at times talking about this as there are people whose lives have been much more screwed up than ours.

While its a lot of money and it has an impact, its still just money. And I don’t say that glibly. There are many things in life that are much more devastating than this.

Learning to Live Simply Has Been a Blessing - over the trip we were careful with cash, but not stingy. In effect we learnt how to live on a shoestring and we realised that if we could do it while we were away we can also do it at home.

So our home budget has been shaped around our experiences while travelling. Our goal is to pay the mortgage off again as quickly as doing that allows us space to breathe in other areas of life.

Our goal is to live simply and generously as we don’t want that element of our lives to take a backward step because of this event.

Contentment - I think some of our friends felt we were happy contented people because we didn’t have a mortgage and therefore life was cruisy. The truth is we were contented people 10 years ago and that didn’t change much with the absence of a mortgage. (What did change was the freedom we had to choose how to allocate our time)

I guess now is the time to live that again. I think we have been able to find contentment outside of the things we own, but its been a while since we have had to actually grapple with that.

Greed had a grip – I was conscious of this happening in me. I am naturally prone to greed so at times giving has been a spiritual discipline for me to counter this.

After a very successful property venture we had made plans to give a fair bit our windfall away, but we decided to invest one last time before doing so in a high yield project… Being fairly pragmatic I felt it was better to create a ‘goose’ than simply give a golden egg.

Danelle wasn’t convinced, but didn’t say much. Her intuition is usually pretty damn good and on this one she was right and it would have been good for her to be a bit more forceful. I think even she was asking ‘why not?’ as by all indicators the investment was a no brainer.

Lesson learnt.

Control is a Mirage - When it all hit the fan I sat down and worked out a plan for getting rid of the mortgage again asap. I did some numbers and looked at our potential income and expenses and figured that we should be able to clear the debt again in 5 years if I work hard.

Of course that all assumes that I don’t break an arm, get sick or that my business doesn’t dry up. Permanent sprinkler bans over here would see the end of my livelihood and we’d have to re-think those plans drastically.

This event itself has been a reminder that we have much less control over our lives than we sometimes like to think. In fact life can go belly up at any moment so in many ways we hang by a thread even we don’t see it.

———-

So I write this a long time after the event and I don’t write it looking for sympathy or anything like that, but simply because it has been a valuable lesson. Like most valuable / hard lessons you would never wish to repeat them, but I can say it has really forced us to chew over again what really matters and how we will shape our lives.

We both feel regret and anger that the money was wasted when it could have been used for so much good, but I have a feeling that an event like this will be formative in our own lives as we consider how we approach the question of finances and investing in the future.

Right now I feel fairly philosophical about it and I genuinely mean it when I say that compared to the crap other people have to deal with, losing money is a walk in the park. Its not a park I hope to walk in again, but for now we’re learning some new things as we make the most of an ugly situation.

It’s been a bit of a crappy week in business with one job turning to custard and leaving both me and my customer in a difficult spot.

I took on a retic and turf / landscaping job for a new house, something I really enjoy doing because it’s good hard work, pays well and the end result is always great to look at. However this week a series of miscommunications meant that my customer didn’t get what he wanted and I didn’t get paid as I expected.

It’s always difficult when things don’t turn out as you imagine and clearly the job that I completed was not what he had hoped for. We had misunderstood each other on the location of a retaining wall, on the acceptable slope of the lawn and on the product that was to be used to cover his garden beds, quite a few issues and considering we spoke on the phone numerous times and also sent plans back and forth it’s a bit bemusing how we finished up in the mess we did.

The garden issue was simple in that he asked me to supply woodchip when he actually meant mulch. His mistake and he accepted that.

The soil levels and retaining walls were more complicated. We were clearly talking about two different walls over the phone and my wall – which made perfect sense to me – was not the same wall he was expecting. On the soil levels I heard some mixed messages and in the end I didn’t remove as much as he wanted, leaving the turf on a slope, not what I would normally do, but what I thought he wanted as a cost saving measure…

So over the last few days we have been negotiating a fair settlement for what seems to have been a simple case of bad communication.

At the end of the day it came down to naming a dollar value for the work that he felt he needed to redo and that is where it got tricky. While we both agreed that we miscommunicated the apportionment of responsibility was much harder to navigate. I offered what I felt was a pretty fair cash amount as a gesture to compensate, but he felt it was half of what was fair.

Given he hadn’t paid the bill the ‘power’ in the equation was clearly in his court. At the end of the day I simply had to accede to his request or take the matter to higher authorities to try and get it resolved.

I don’t have the time or $$$ to do that. It would simply be an exercise in futility and a great waste of both time and $$$. So while I didn’t agree that the amount was fair, I accepted his call and decided to move on having learnt a rather expensive lesson.

The lesson is simply to be very clear on what is being done so that both of us have a shared picture of what the end result will look like.

I must say that while the ‘ balance of power’ lay with the customer in that he hadn’t paid me and owed a substantial amount, his attitude and approach to the situation made me much more amenable to accepting a loss than if he had been a jerk. If he were angry and accusatory rather than conciliatory I imagine I wouldn’t have made a cent and I would be sitting here fuming rather than feeling reflective.

In it all I am probably more annoyed that I appear to have done a crappy job than that I have lost some $$$. There is an element of personal integrity that gets called into question when someone feels you have let them down and I find that sticks in my craw.

So… another day of learning ends!

It seems that it has always been the domain of institutional Christianity to try and keep people in line. We invent all sorts of rules and artificial boundaries that might have little foundation in scripture but comply with our own sensibilities and preferences. Then we impose them on others.

Usually these rules have an air of holiness about them, but typically if you dig a little you discover that they are grounded in fear and have little to do with the gospel.

I was reading John again this morning and got up to chapter 5 where Jesus heals the lame bloke by the pool and tells him to ‘take up his mat and get out of there’. The man does as he is told and immediately gets in trouble from the Pharisees because he is carrying his bed on the Sabbath. Somehow the miracle of his healing had eluded them and they only saw a rule breaker (who was violating one of their own laws, as distinct from a God given law.)

This is one of the tragic results of being legalists – we miss the incredible good that happens because we are so concerned about dotting the ‘I’s and crossing the ‘T’s. When Christians / churches begin focusing on the minutiae of personal preference in matters of behaviour and then move to legislate (culturally) on these issues the gospel becomes completely obscured.

Jesus couldn’t care less if you wear a tie at the communion table…
Jesus doesn’t get upset if you leave your hat on when you walk into the church building…
Jesus doesn’t shoot concerned glares each time you open a naked pure blonde
Jesus doesn’t doesn’t care if… you can finish your own sentence here

In fact who was the person that told the man to take up his mat?…

Jesus.

Jesus!

Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. He is the one who flouts these crazy man made laws that only serve to obscure the bigger issues of grace and truth.

I have increasingly less patience for the ecclesiastical police who inhabit our churches and who seek to correct the behaviour of others by trying to conform others to their own standard. Whether it’s the dress code police, the language police, the consumption police or the ‘sanctuary’ police, I think Jesus would take great delight in flouting their rules and showing them to be mere preferences rather than divine commands.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for holy living, but let’s not confuse that with fearful living.

Just a few that I am pondering today…

> I enjoy my life as a part time church leader and part time blue collar worker as it keeps me well and truly earthed in the places ordinary people live, but… I also notice how hard it is for my head to engage more fully with the bigger picture church stuff and I am not sure what this means. Is this how it is meant to be?… Does this allow us to simply better function as a body or is this is going to be a problem?… I used to be a pretty creative thinker and regularly had new ideas flooding to mind, but I get the feeling that physical work and the subsequent tiredness has numbed that part of my brain.

> Because I am only officially employed 2 days a week there is clearly a limit to what can be achieved. As with most established churches, the Sunday gathering is currently our biggest single focus and while I am trying to limit the time it requires of me, I am also finding that a large portion of my paid time simply needs to be spent on this and the internal mechanisms of the church. I am pondering how I effectively lead people out of the buildings while investing most of my paid time within them…

> Compounding that question… In 2 weeks we have to exit the room we meet in for our Sunday gatherings. It is simply a large and fairly bland space that will be divided up into 4 classrooms. We have available to us possibly the largest auditorium in the northern suburbs as part of the school building. It holds around 1200 people and the 60 of us will rattle around like peas inside it. I know many would drool over the possibility of a stadium to fill, but I observe there are two significant tensions here.

The first is that it will shape our imagination and we will feel it is now our duty to ‘fill it’. I know there are plenty who dream of the day when the building is full… While I want people to come to faith I don’t share that dream for a big humungous beast of a ‘church’, because I think it would completely undermine who we are at present. The second tension is simply that we could choose not to meet the coliseum, but the set up required to meet elsewhere is much greater. There is virtually nothing to do in a dedicated auditorium, but it would require several people a few hours of work to set up another smaller room… So there is a tension… Which would you choose?…

> Pain and suffering have been a big part of the journey for the church community over the last few weeks. Some people have been doing it really tough and when you are a small community the pain is felt by all. I wonder what it means for us to be a missionary community in these times. The death of a leader, a cancer scare, families struggling with serious health issues all take enormous amounts of emotional energy and yet this is ‘who we are’ and ‘where we are’. I get the sense that there is a time to ‘look in’ and ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (to use the biblical phrase) and this is possibly the most important thing we could do at this time. To gee people up for work ‘out there’ when the body is going thru intense pain is like insisting you go to work on a day when your leg has been lopped off and you can’t get out of bed. A time for everything?…

> We have a church sign that sits on one of the most visible pieces of signage real estate in the suburb, but it is pretty lame and outdated… If it communicates anything it isn’t that we are a community you’d want to be associated with. As a person who isn’t really into signs, one part of me couldn’t give a fig about it… except that we have a sign and its a bad one and it is highly visible… So I am thinking that if we are going to have a sign in the most visible area in the suburb then we at least ought to have the best sign we can possibly have. If you’d told me 12 months ago I’d be pondering signage I would have laughed at you…

> So in the middle of the time constraints, physical challenges and the pain of being a church community I am finding myself having to re-imagine my own missionary identity and my own contribution as a leader. This is a new era for Danelle and I and I don’t feel like I am going back to ‘riding a bike’ and can simply hop back on. It would be easy to do that, but its not where we want to head.

One of the inspiring parts of the last 5 weeks for me has been seeing the extent to which Danelle has shared the leadership role with me. It is the first time we have been officially invited to be joint co-leaders and we are seeing it work out well. She is very pastoral and very good at identifying needs and working with people to get them met. We also function well together and value each others unique styles and emphases so it has been great to do that more intentionally in this setting.

Now that we’re back in the groove of church life I have been pondering whether we should record our Sunday gigs and make them available online.

I think this practice has pros and cons and I am still undecided, but leaning towards ‘no’.

I guess this is bucking the trend where you can access just about everyone’s stuff online these days, so let me express my reservations.

1. A sermon is usually intended for a specific community at a specific time and it may well be teaching for our church rather than a generic message that every man and his dog can access and listen to. That’s not insurmountable, but I am aware that I am speaking to a unique group of people and my message may mean less (or something quite different) to those outside of that group.

2. I wing it a fair bit and sometimes say stuff off the cuff that fits fine with my own community but I’m not convinced I’d want running wild on the net.

3. I might tell a story that I wouldn’t want out there. It might be about me, or it might be about someone else. While I ‘change the names to protect the innocent’ I still would be wary of that.

On the pro side:

1. It is a sharing of resources and I am more than happy to share learning.

2. It is a way those who can’t make it can tune into what we are doing. I am wondering if a passworded approach for ‘members’ could be a way to go

Actually at the moment there is more ‘gut’ resistance than reasonable and explainable objections…

What do you think?

Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

I actually download 4 or 5 sermon podcasts each week myself, so I am conscious of the value, but just not sure if its the way we should go…

We’ve been back from holidays 5 weeks now and its been good to settle into a steady rhythm of life. The first two weeks were quite weird as we adjusted to normal living, but we seem to have found our way again and are travelling well.

In getting back into church leadership one of the challenges has been the whole deal of teaching and the time it takes. I try to never spend more than 8 hours on a talk these days, but even that seems like a lot to me when I consider it to be half of the paid time I have allocated.

Previously when I worked several jobs simultaneously I used to just blur the edges and roll everything together. So long as the job got done I wasn’t counting hours or worried about short changing anyone. But in that time there was more similarity between the roles.

Now I hold two quite distinct paid roles and they don’t overlap very readily.

On Mondays and Fridays I like to put on my church leader hat while Tue-Thurs is when I pick up a shovel. Saturday is my day off from both and Sundays is a mix of church and relaxing. Life rarely works out as simply and discrete as I described it above ad inevitably I do some church stuff on Tues/Wed/Thur and occasionally a retic job pops up on a Monday or Friday that just needs attending to.

But for now that approach works well.

People have said to me ‘I guess while you’re digging a trench you can think about church stuff anyway?’ Oddly enough that’s not the case. As mundane as physical work may be I rarely find myself in a place to be dreaming or imagining and more often than not all that’s going thru my head when I’m digging are the words ‘dig… dig… dig…’

So it means that almost all of my focused thinking re church gets done on the days when I am not ‘reticing’ as I simply can’t find the mental space to do it while I am working and then in the evenings I am usually quite wiped out. I have found it hard to cope with being less tuned in at times, yet I am also appreciative of the fact that this is where 99% of people actually live.

While full time paid pastors get large swathes of time during the day to think thru the questions of church direction and strategy the part timers who work other jobs don’t have that luxury. While its frustrating at times, it helps me stay in touch with the average person is when it comes to church involvement. If people work hard during the day then chances are they haven’t got a lot emotional energy to give when they come to church meetings on an evening or a weekend.

It changes the way you look at church and leadership, but it also reshapes the way you look at life!

I don’t know about you but I tend to assume I have 80 good years and if I don’t get that many then I’ve been cheated.

This week we had a tragedy in our church when one of our friends and church leaders died suddenly in the early hours of Monday morning at the age of 52. John was a gracious and wonderful man and will be missed greatly by all who knew him. It has rocked our community and I can only imagine how devastating it has been for his family.

I lay awake for a couple of hours that night pondering many things, one of which was my assumption that ‘80 years is my birthright’ or what I am entitled to. Its a curious assumption… I don’t know why I see things that way.

My brother in law was recently diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease and barring a miracle he will slowly deteriorate over the next 5 or 6 years until he can no longer function. He hasn’t hit fifty yet… Then there’s an ex student currently battling some pretty heavy cancer in his late 30’s.

I am noticing that old age isn’t a ‘given’ and despite my expectations I may not get there either. I don’t think it changes anything in how I live day to day, but it does cause me to be grateful for the time I have rather than to simply take it for granted and fritter the days away, or complain about stuff that doesn’t really matter anyway.

A sudden and unexpected death catches us all off guard and in some ways its good to jolted and reminded that there are no guarantees in this life.

What has been really good is to see the way the church has swung into action to offer support and care for one of their community in need. If one measure of a church is their love for one another then I think it has been a very good week in that regard.

And yet while I ponder this and consider my own mortality, a really good bloke is dead and his family is without him. I don’t think there are ever any easy answers to questions of ‘why’ or ‘what’ in these times and we will be disappointed and frustrated if we try and make sense of the mystery that is both life and death.

I have the privilege of conducting the funeral on Monday and I hope it doesn’t sound odd to say that I am looking forward to it. While it will be a time of sadness I always find it inspiring to celebrate the life of someone who has lived well and about whom it’d be hard to speak a bad word.