From the BS Inseminators sticker and faded canary yellow paintwork, to the Bundy Rum sticker and the overload of spotties – this is a beauty.

Just for fun…

Ok back to my sermon writing…

Chuckle…

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 really couldn’t give a rodent’s posterior whether nametags gain traction or die, but that the church is renewed and re-inspired to focus on the things that are close to God’s heart… well that’s a biggie.

I was a missionary before I knew about emergent, missional, organic churches and I don’t think anything is going to change that. I have been blessed to be heavily involved in the conversations, training and agitating to see the church re-imagined, but I’m not going to die for a brand or a name tag.

In fact the need to sustain a brand is in my opinion one of the potential undoings of any move of God. We then ossify what was once dynamic and in doing so drain it of the potency it once held.

Let’s keep focused on the stuff that matters and that gives shape to the kingdom and let’s not waste time on the stuff of ego and empire.

I don’t think I am a prude or a feminist, but I do think these T Shirts being sold now by Roger David are very very dumb.

Sure, on a philosophical level it raises questions of ‘what is art?’ ‘How does censorship work?’ etc, but on a practical day to day level you just have to look at it and say someone had their head up their butt when they made this decision.

Interestingly Roger David have defended their decision on their facebook page…

There is an online petition to object, or you could just walk into the store and let them know what you think…

I reckon a hundred angry customers in each store would see the T shirts disappear in a day or two. At the moment while they may be getting muddied on one level, but they are also getting some free advertising, however I don’t think they’d be too happy about people asking questions in person and expressing some rage in person in store.

I imagine if this was ‘art’ at an art exhibit it would come with a ‘warning’ at the entrance about the nature of the images, but obviously this doesn’t happen in a clothes store.

Reality check for RD!

Here are some links related to the issue:

News article

Melissa Tankard blog post

Roger David home page

Online Petition

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.

I was just reading on his facebook this morning that it turns out to be serious gall bladder issues – which is absolutely sensational (relatively speaking…)

We’re going to catch up soon to have dinner so it will be good to hear some of the journey this family have been on as they have had to face a potential death sentence and then be given a reprieve. I imagine it would make you see life quite a bit differently!

I guess the question comes up – ‘did God heal him or did the docs get it wrong?’

And while I still believe in miracles I couldn’t give a fig which of the above is true and I am pretty sure they’ll take either option as well!

Very happy to hear such great news.

Sadly another good mate Kim Hammond has just found out that his little fella Carter has been diagnosed with leukemia – bloody terrible news – so if you’re the praying kind then I am sure the Hammond family would value anything you’ve got.

For example, I no longer subscribe to a literal 7 day creation view, holding more to the view that God created, but evolutionary processes are still in place and that these were his idea too. I realise for some that is anathema, but I think it is both faithful to scripture and reason.

I am less convinced of what it means to be ’saved’ these days and what constitutes a ticket to heaven or a one way route to hell. As Dallas Willard says ’surely salvation is about than God inspecting our brain to make sure we have an adequate theology of the atonement’. I find myself a lot more circumspect about making any of those ‘in’ / ‘out’ judgements and I continue to wonder what critical theology we (as evangelicals) have got wrong that God will overlook in his grace.

But while the more debatable aspects of faith have seen me tempering my views and admitting my own limited understanding I haven’t lost faith in the miraculous. We are about to read John 6 as part of our teaching at Quinns and the story of the miraculous feeding of 5000 people doesn’t lend itself to a lot interpretation. It feels like a story we either take at face value and say ‘wow – no idea how – but wow!’ or we toss it and the rest of Jesus’ miracles out.

Of course the Bible gets pretty thin then and when we stop allowing for the element of supernatural we really aren’t talking about Christian faith any more.

I guess a creationist could argue that God ’supernaturally’ created in 7 days calendar days… but then the weight of evidence to support an alternate view is strong and it does not compromise the integrity of the Bible to hold a different view.