Simply Simon

God is Life

2011-10-21T22:16:00.000+10:00

Haveyou ever stood atop a mountain, and been stopped by a breath-taking view. Whydoes this happen? What draws us to gaze at a star-filled sky? What makes itinspiring? Oxford professor, Alister McGrath, suggests the reason we find ourhearts drawn beyond ourselves in these situations, is that creation has beendesigned for this very purpose. “Maybe the spectacle of the night sky is meantto trigger off such patterns of reflection within us.” McGrath further points out that we seem tohave been created to ask questions – to try to make sense of what we see aroundus and how we fit into the greater scheme of things. What if the sense oflonging and yearning that is evoked by the night sky is meant to lead us on avoyage of discovery? What if nature is studded with clues to our true meaningand destiny, fingerprinted with the presence of God? Has God planned theheavens to lift our hearts and minds beyond ourselves? Are the mountains thereto reflect his majesty, the oceans to model his grandeur?

Itcomes as a surprise to many that the Bible answers these questions quiteplainly, “. . . what may be known about God is plain to them, for God has madeit plain. For ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities,his eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen. They are perceived inthe things God has made.” (Romans 1:19,20) The appropriate place to beginrelating to God is as our Creator.

TheBible opens with a vivid portrayal of God as our Creator, the author and sourceof life. In fact, he is the Creator of everything. “In the beginning, Godcreated the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

JohnDickson reflects on the idea of creation: “While some religious believersattempt to prove that God exists, many Christian philosophers are contentsimply to affirm that God’s existence explains the universe we live in betterthan God’s non-existence. How so? A universe that ‘banged’ into existence withsophisticated and elegant laws of physics already in place (as cosmologistsremind us) is more likely to be the result of a great ‘Mind’ than a bigaccident.” Cosmologist Stephen Hawking: “The odds against a universe like oursemerging out of something like a Big Bang are enormous. I think there areclearly religious implications.”

Whywould Hawking make a statement like this? Possibly because there are logicaldifficulties in assuming that something with a random beginning could becomeinherently ordered. Random causes produce random results. As Edwin Conklin,Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University said, “The probability of lifebeing created by accident can be likened to the chance that a set of encyclopaediaswould spontaneously form as the result of an explosion in a printing factory.”

Dicksoncontinues, “Add to this the fact that this universe eventually produced beingslike us, with minds that can grasp these laws and the accident theory seems evenless satisfying. In short we have just the sort of universe you’d expect ifthere is a creator behind it and the kind of universe you could never expect ifthere isn’t. This does not prove God’s existence, but it goes some way towardsexplaining why, without proof, most people throughout history have believed insome sort of God.”

Starting with 'God'

2011-10-20T10:32:00.002+10:00

Whatis God like? How would you describe him (of course, you might not use thepronoun ‘him’, preferring to use ‘her’ or ‘it’ or something else altogether)?

Iremember once speaking with a young woman who was an atheist. When she foundout I was a Christian she immediately assumed we had nothing to talk about. Theconversation went something like this:

“Youwon’t want to talk to me. I’m an atheist!” she said.

Iasked, “Does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

“That’sright,” she said.

“Thentell me, what sort of a God don’t you believe in?”

“Whatdo you mean?”

Isaid, “For you not to believe in God you must have some idea of what otherpeople think God is like in order to reject that notion.”

Sheworked out what I meant and proceeded to describe what she thought other peoplethought God was like. When she finished I said to her, “If that’s God, then I’man atheist too!” The God she described certainly wasn’t anything like the one Ibelieve in, nor that the Bible describes.

J.B.Phillips once wrote a brilliant little book called Your God is Too Small. It deals with some of the ideas people carryabout God. The chapter headings reflect people’s views (which Phillips labelsas distortions): the resident policeman, the grand old man.

Phillipsworks through a dozen or so misconceptions and clearly implies that one of thebiggest hindrances to people finding life and reality in the Christian faith isnot unbelief, but that people just don’t bother to find out what God is like, especiallysources that claim to be God’s self-revelation.

No onehas an understanding of God that is faultless. John Stott once said, “If youthink you have God in a box in your mind, it’s not God in the box.” But God hasgone to considerable lengths of self-disclosure and, in the Bible, we have aremarkable account of God’s nature and character.

Accordingto this account, I would suggest there are three essential things tounderstand if you wish to grasp God’s self-disclosure:

1. God is Life

2. God is Light

3. God is Love

So, I'm planning to spend some time pondering these three things over the next few days and seeing what we come up with.

Why is it 'Good News'?

2011-10-18T23:56:00.000+10:00

Welive in an age of spiritual ‘hunger’, but people seem unsure where to findspiritual ‘sustenance’. The first time one lady visited our church (her firstever visit to any church) she indicated to me afterwards that she was veryinterested in spiritual things, but never expected to find any ‘spiritualreality’ in a church! She expected to find ritual, tradition, ceremony, but itcaught her completely unawares when she sensed (in her words) a divinepresence.

Thebrilliant French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, once suggestedthat in every human being there is a ‘God-shaped void’. As long as it exists weare restless and incomplete. We try to fill it: money, power, position, career,even family are squeezed into the space. But none of these satisfy – the holeis God-shaped!

I meeta growing number of people who recognise within themselves a hunger, a longingto discover ‘something more’. Prince Charles once spoke for his belief that, “Forall the advances of science, there remains deep in the soul a persistent andunconscious anxiety that something is missing, some ingredient that makes lifeworth living.” There must be something more! As a convinced atheist, ErnestHemmingway lived without reference to God. He concluded: “Life is just a dirtytrick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness.” In contrast, the 4^thcentury theologian, Augustine, penned: “Our hearts are restless until they findtheir rest in Thee.”

This blog will hopefully be a simple series ofreflections and questions attempting to explain the Christian faith in a clearand accessible manner. It works on the assumption that there is ‘somethingmore’, which billions of people have discovered as they have encountered ‘God’as described by the Christian faith. I Intend toinvestigate a trio of key dimensions in Christian experience: relating to Godas a Father, making sense of Jesus Christ and discovering the dynamic power ofthe Holy Spirit.

Blogging the Gospel

2011-10-18T23:51:00.000+10:00

Althought the word 'gospel' is used in a variety of contexts, it carries special meaning within the Christian faith. Literally, the word means 'good news'. Trouble is, many people I talk to seem to think the Christian message is bad news or irrlelvant news or ridiculous news. Even more common is the assumption that the Christian faith can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Create your own version is the order of the day.

So, I'm wondering whether it is possible to blog the heart of the Christian faith. Probably lots have tried before, but I think I'll have a crack at it: just a bit at a time, trying to connect with both Jesus teaching and recognised Christian ideas (often called orthodoxy) to see if it has anything to say to me today.

Stay tuned - hope I can see this through.

The Heart of Things

2010-02-26T21:53:00.000+10:00

Charles Bradlaugh, an avowed athiest, once challenged the Rev. H.P. Hughes to a debate. The preacher, who was head of a mission to the homeless in London, accepted the challenge on the condition that he could bring with him 5 men or women who would tell what had happened in their lives since trusting Christ as their Saviour. They would be people who once lived in deep darkness, some having come from poverty-stricken homes usually caused by the vices of their parents. Hughes said they would not only tell of their conversion, but would submit to cross-examination by any who doubted their stories. Furthermore, the minister invited his opponent to bring a group of non-believers who could tell how they had been helped by their secular worldview.

For some reason, Bradlaugh, the famous atheist, withdrew from the debate.

Empty Inside

2010-02-09T23:31:00.002+10:00

Lily Allen is a British pop singer who recently visited Brisbane and played at the big day out and various other venues. She’s often in the headlines for her off stage behaviour and eccentricities. A number of social commentators have suggested (and I agree) that she has a rare gift of being able to express western society’s zeitgeist – the collective mood, the spirit of the age. Listen to these words:

I want to be rich and I want lots of money
I don't care about clever I don't care about funny
I want loads of clothes and f**kloads of diamonds
I heard people die while they are trying to find them
I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
'Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous
I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror
I'm on the right track yeah I'm on to a winner

Life's about film stars and less about mothers
It's all about fast cars and passing each other
But it doesn't matter cause I'm packing plastic
and that's what makes my life so f**king fantastic
And I am a weapon of massive consumption
and its not my fault it's how I'm program to function
I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror
I'm on the right track yeah I'm on to a winner

Forget about guns and forget ammunition
Cause I'm killing them all on my own little mission
Now I'm not a saint but I'm not a sinner
Now everything is cool as long as I'm getting thinner
I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
'Cause I'm being taken over by fear

Too many people in our society are chasing those sorts of things: self-interest, money, becoming famous, fast cars, packing plastic – a weapon of massive consumption – but it’s all OK as long as we’re getting thinner. For so many people who live in the units and houses of Toowong – those things are all they have in their lives. They’re trying to make sense out of life using hopelessly inadequate tools and values.

Have you ever had the experience of needing to hammer a nail into a wall and you don’t have a hammer? What can I use? Spoon (not heavy enough), slip off your shoe (nail just digs straight into the heel), mobile phone (no). It’s torture. The tools our society has placed in people’s hands and with which people are trying to live will never allow them to successfully find meaning and value and worth.

David Tacey is a professor at Latrobe University and a recognised commentator on Australian spirituality. I quote: “There's a massive spiritual hunger in the Australian community that's grown out of disillusionment with the Christian churches. So many people are walking around saying 'There's a hole in my life. You know, there's just something missing.'"

Despite living in one of the most defined religious societies in history, people in Jesus day were starving for spiritual reality. They desperately wanted to connect with the living God in living ways. And in Jesus' teaching and in his person, they saw the chance to do this.

In the fourth century, Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Blaise Pascal, the brilliant 17th century French mathematician whilst working on the theoretical mathematics associated with the concept of a vacuum, made the spiritual proposition that perhaps we all have within us a God-shaped vacuum or void. And we are never satisfied until God is filling that void. We try to fill it with all sorts of other things: Lily Allen named many of them in her song – we even try to fill it with religious practice – but none of those things fit because it is a God-shaped void and only God will fit into a God-shaped void!

When people listened to Jesus’ teaching and related to his person, they found their God-shaped void being authentically filled for the first time ever. That’s why such large crowds flocked to him. It's probably still why people come to him today.

Love: Feelings and Choices

2010-02-02T12:38:00.002+10:00

The second law of thermodynamic implies (with apologies to scientists for a crude layman’s definition): that any closed system left to itself tends towards greater randomness. That is, it tends to break down, unless energy is inserted into the system to create order. Whilst this law was intended to describe physical systems such as a chemical reaction in a test tube, I believe it applies to other realities. Our garden at home illustrates it well. If we leave our garden to its own devices, there’s no way it will remain ordered. In no time, the leaves fall, the plants wither, the weeds grow, the edges of the garden bed disappear. A beautiful thing is spoilt through neglect. To maintain the order of our garden energy has to be spent.

This applies to human systems as well. I get the sense that a lot of people assume that as long as they do nothing destructive or detrimental, that their friendships and relationships will simply look after themselves.

That’s just not the case!

I often say to couples when I conduct weddings, as they look dreamily into one another’s eyes, I have no doubt that during and after their honeymoon, the two of them will have no problems communicating and relating to one another. But to remember that becoming immersed once again in mundane life, as the days roll into weeks and the weeks become years and decades, loving one another may become something that needs to work at in a disciplined and systematic way.

And that shocks them. 'Surely if we’re in love,' they think, 'things will always just happen naturally, it will be spontaneous.' Well some couples are blessed with a natural inclination to relate easily, but not all. Good communication, caring action, attentive understanding are skills, like any others, which develop with time and practice. Some couples need to learn to garden, some need to learn to budget, some couples need to learn to communicate, others need to learn to love one another. It requires work and effort.

A man who had been happily married for 40 years once said, "It's easy to look for love outside your marriage and think that the grass is always greener of the other side of the fence. Actually, the grass is greenest where you water it."

All this implies that love is not so much a feeling as a choice. Bearing one another in agape (one of the words translated 'love' from the New Testament). William Barclay defines that type of love in these terms: it means that nothing another person can do will make us seek anything but their highest good. That of course means that Christian love, agape, is not a feeling. If Christian love means loving those who are not lovely, then it must be more than a feeling. It is a resolution, a decision. Don Francisco penned it well:

“Jesus didn’t die for you because it was fun.
He hung there for love because it had to be done.
And in spite of the anguish, his word was fulfilled.
For love is not a feeling it is an act of your will.”

Prejudice

2010-02-02T10:22:00.002+10:00

When The Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegard was a boy, a circus visited the village where he lived. Because there was no room for the big top tent within the village itself, the circus set up several kilometres beyond the village in a green field.

Preparations were made for the opening, which in the early 1800’s was a big deal for the people of a rural village.

But on opening night, a tragedy struck. Two hours before the curtains rose, someone knocked over a bucket of hot coals and the big top itself caught on fire. The circus people gathered and watched helplessly as their beloved tent was engulfed in flames and realised that soon the fire would spread to other tents nearby.

Most of the performers were only half dressed, but the clown had readied himself before the others and was fully dressed in his costume, so it was decided that he should run into the town to get some help.

He set off at a dead run and on the outskirts of the village, he encountered a group of people. Slightly puffed from the run, he franticly tried to explain what was happening as he gesticulated wildly to draw their attention to the crisis.

Observing his dress and actions, the villagers assumed this was a promotional gesture for the evening’s performance. Quite a crowd gathered to applaud and laugh at the clown’s strange behaviour. The clown, realising that people were completely misunderstanding his intentions, eventually fell quiet. And it was only then that the villagers noticed a column of smoke rising from the nearby field.

The word prejudice means to pre-judge. It means, like the crowd with the clown, to make a judgement of someone based on their outward appearance, their manner of speech or your assumptions about them rather than on accurate and first-hand knowledge of the person and their circumstances. How different could the world be if we resisted our natural inclinations toward prejudice? We do it so easily. Keep an eye out for where it may be lurking in your thinking today!

The Heart of Things

2009-12-14T12:08:00.001+10:00

Max Lucado tells of a week long, high school fishing trip with his father and best friend. The secluded mountain destination overlooked a picturesque lake. Arriving late at night, dreaming of warm sunshine, easy boating and rigorous fishing, the trio awoke instead to horizontal rain and sleet. Three days of bad weather, endless Monopoly games and out-of-date Readers Digests frayed the friendship. Patience tired, tempers shortened and when the father called it quits on day four, no-one disagreed. Lucado reflects on the lesson he learned: “When those who are called to fish don’t fish, they fight!” Like youngsters kicking a football inside, external intended energies used internally quickly become destructive.

Lucado likens his high school experience to that of Christians - called to be ‘fishers of men’ - sitting inside the church misusing their energy. They miss the point. God calls people in, to send people out. Our coming to God is not an end in itself. Yes, we enjoy His forgiveness, love and transforming power. But, like Jesus and his disciples, he draws us, in order to dispatch us. Most Christians know they are called. Not all seem convinced they are sent.

Too many Christians today are keepers of the aquarium rather than fishers of men. (anon)

Discerning the Spirit's Direction

2009-12-14T12:05:00.000+10:00

One of the questions people often seem to struggle with is whether the church is an organism or an organisation. Some people want to assert that the church is primarily organic. To be successful, we need to let its life spontaneously emerge. It’s like a plant which will grow by itself, but if we handle the plant too much with human effort we’ll probably damage it. The emphasis here is on God’s sovereignty. “If God is at work, we must step back and let him do his thing,” say those who see the church in organic terms.

At the other end of the spectrum there are those who think of the church as an organisation and it needs lots of human attention and energy to improve the way it works. Like tending to a well oiled machine, we need lots of planning, lots of committees, lots of effort and lots of strategies to make the church achieve what it should.

So, what do you think? Should we see the church in organic terms, or as an organisation?

These two opinions seem to rarely meet in the middle, but I’d like to suggest that the church needs to be marked by both the spontaneity of organic life and the order of organisation.

When Jesus sat on a rooftop in Jerusalem late one night trying to explain to Nicodemus how God’s Spirit worked, he said, “It’s like he wind, you don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going to but you can feel its effect on your face and in the swaying of the trees.” God’s Spirit is like the wind.

So, the church needs to be a yacht. We need to be organic in the sense that we are powered by the wind of God’s Spirit, but we need to be organised enough to hoist our sails at the right time and set them in the appropriate way to make use of that wind.

If we’re too organic, allowing any old thing to happen at any time, we’ll be like a little dinghy, without oars or outboard motor, spontaneously bobbing on the waves, completely free, unfettered but generally going nowhere. Free to move but having no direction.

If we’re too organised, too structured, too fixed in traditions and plans and committees, then we’ll be more like an oil rig, highly ordered but fixed in the one spot. The wind can blow all it likes but an oil rig is not going anywhere.

But imagine if we could be a yacht: organised enough to hoist our sails, free enough to move with the wind of God’s Spirit.

The trouble is, though, sometimes we raise our sails but the wind is not blowing. So often in the church we hoist our sails with a good idea and then find there’s no wind, so what do we do? We start blowing ourselves, and when the yacht doesn’t go very far or very fast we blow harder. Before long we’re either exhausted or we’ve hyperventilated. What we need to do is have the courage to drop our sails when the Spirit’s wind is not blowing and to better tune ourselves into the prevailing breezes.

The Living Dead

2009-05-05T07:50:00.002+10:00

A guy in a taxi wanted to speak to the driver so he leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. The driver screamed, jumped in the air and yanked on the wheel. The taxi mounted the curb, clipped a powerpole and came to a stop inches from a shop window.

The startled, wide-eyed passenger said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to ask you something.”

The taxi driver, breathing heavily, replied, “It’s not your fault sir. It’s my first day as a taxi driver. For the past 25 years I‘ve been driving a hearse!”

This might sound a bit whacky, but I think that coming to church is a little bit like that driver’s experience. You turn up and are seated for most of the time. Normally you just expect to sit there and not be disturbed. But you just never know when God’s going to tap you on the shoulder or whisper in your ear. You never know when He’s going to take the words of a Bible reading or a song or prayer or even a sermon and say in the deep places of your own heart or mind, “Hey you, I want you to listen to this. This is for you.” Or he might even say, “I want you to do something about this.” God’s not a dead passenger on life’s journey, and we come into church not just to talk to him, but hoping that he might respond, and in different ways, talk to us.

A Sign of the Times

2009-04-06T10:37:00.002+10:00

Last Sunday, I was delighted to discover . . . that I was wrong! We recently purchased a new sign at Toowong Uniting Church - one with movable letters so the message can be changed weekly to offer the impression of 'life' rather than a fixed sign with static information. Last week in church I explained the rationale behind the use of our new sign: hoping it will become a stepping stone to bridge the gap between the life of our Christian community and those who have never been to church before. I said that I was under no illusions— I wasn’t expecting people to be converted because of our sign, nor was it likely people would be flooding into the church because of it. If you imagine two banks of a river quite some distance apart, you’re on one side facing someone else on the other; it's unlikely if you just stand on your bank and yell at them, “Jump across,” that they will. They’ll take one look at the distance and walk the other way. But if you can break that big gap into smaller steps, perhaps by tossing some stepping stones in the water, then the journey suddenly becomes far more accessible, more doable, more likely. Our sign is just a stepping stone.

Little did I know that as I was uttering those words last Sunday morning, two Hindu women were walking past the Church. They read the sign and decided to come and see what happens in a Christian worship service. They sat through the service and then spent some time afterwards asking a number of people in our congregation about their beliefs. It was exciting to think that such things still happen.

I still don’t think we’ll have people flooding into the church because of our sign. Perhaps those two ladies were already part way across the river. Perhaps the few words on our sign simply became the next stepping stone on a journey they were already on. We don’t know. So we keep serving to the best of our ability - I will keep placing the most engaging statements I can find on the sign each week and I trust that the congregation will continue to extend to those who worship with us a sincere, warm and open welcome. The rest is in God’s hands.

Heart of the Problem

2009-02-25T21:13:00.002+10:00

When you meet someone for the first time and exchange initial greetings, one of the first things people ask is, “What you do for a living.” I’ve discovered that when you answer that question with the words, “I’m a Pastor,” it’s an absolute conversation killer. So to try to avoid that sort of conversational suicide, I’ve been trying to think of different ways I can explain my vocation without immediately losing people.

Recently someone said to me, “What do you do for a living?” and, a little experimentally, I replied, “I’m in the recycling business.” They were very pleased with that, people like an environmentally responsible vocation, so the next question naturally followed, “What do you recycle?”

Do you know what I said? “People!” Then I quickly added, “Actually, I don’t recycle people. I work for Someone Else who does.” It got us talking. After he realised I hadn’t been recently released from a mental health institution, he said “I thought when you first said 'recycling', you meant you were doing your bit for the environment.”

“I am.”

“How do you mean?”

I said “Which is the better way to look after the environment, to pick up and recycle rubbish that has already been dropped or go right to the heart of the problem and change an individual’s motivation, change a person on the inside, so that they no longer want to drop rubbish and but desire to treat the world with a sense of care because they have come to understand it belongs to God and they are responsible as one of his stewards?”

Thanks?

2009-02-25T21:05:00.002+10:00

Martin Rinkart should have felt God-forsaken. Rinkart lived in Saxony between 1586 and 1649 and was the Lutheran minister in a little village called Eilenburg. During the 30 Year War, which occurred in Europe during that time, this walled town of Eilenburg was surrounded and besieged by the Swedish army. No one was allowed in, no one could get out. Food ran out very quickly. People started dying, disease spread as the Swedish army fired their cannons randomly into the town. Over 800 homes were destroyed. The ministers of the town were under enormous strain as they had to conduct dozens of funerals daily for the poor perishing people of Eilenburg. Eventually Rinkart was the only surviving minister in the town. For about a month he conducted an average of 50 funerals a day and did his best to care for those who lost the ones they loved. This was very familiar for Rinkart because, as part of the siege, one of the people he buried from disease was his own beloved wife.

Eventually the Swedes demanded an enormous ransom, in exchange for sparing the lives of the remaining residents of the town. Rinkart left the safety of the walls to plead for mercy. The Swedish commander, so impressed by the faith, courage and dignity of this minister, reduced his demand to one twentieth of his original figure. The city paid and the siege was lifted. In all, he had buried 4480 people.

If anyone deserved to feel God-forsaken, Martin Rinkart did. Yet when he sat down to reflect on what he’d experienced, he pondered the fact that nearly his entire life had been marked by blessing, love and provision. And he questioned the tendency he found in himself to abandon his own love for God because circumstances didn’t fit with his expectations. He tried to step back and look at the big picture, not only of this life, but of this life in the context of the next life and the promise of God to continue the process of righting wrongs and healing pain and correcting injustices and restoring souls beyond the brief limitations of however many years we spend on this planet.

Rinkart turned these thoughts and reflections into poetry, which in turn became a hymn. In the face of such suffering and misery, Rinkart wrote these words:

Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices
Who wonderous things has done, in whom this world rejoices
Who from our mothers arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love and still is ours today

Fire and Floods

2009-02-11T08:55:00.001+10:00

Adequate words are elusive when reflecting on the events of this past last week. The extremes of fire in Victoria and floods in Queensland have physically devastated large sections of the Australian community, but also broken the hearts of most Australians as we watch the anguish and pain of our fellow citizens.

Few could view the news broadcasts without grieving alongside those who have lost family and friends in such tragic circumstances, or tremble with a renewed awareness of our own mortality and the fragility of life. Trying to imagine the destruction of whole communities has left us reeling. In the midst of such despair, one assurance remains: our God, who entered the very heart of human suffering in Christ and experienced the agony of crucifixion, weeps with those who are weeping and mourns beside those whose loss is so great.

Helplessness has been one of my dominant emotions this week. We want to make a difference. What can we do?

Here are some options:

1. Join us for an evening of prayer this Tuesday night, 17th Feb at 7.30pm at Toowong Uniting Church, 82 Sherwood Road, Toowong. As the reality of people’s loss sinks in, they will be needing our prayers for some time.
2. We will be receiving a retiring offering at church, both this week and next week, for the victims of both bushfire and flood. Two vessels, one for each cause, will be available for you to contribute to. The flood money will be sent to ‘The Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal’ and the bushfire money will be sent to the ‘SHARE Bushfire Appeal’ through the Vic/Tas UnitingCare office.

DOG and GOD

2009-02-06T13:12:00.003+10:00

Many years ago when I was teaching in Miles (Queensland country town), I got my first dog as a giveaway from the Miles show: a German shepherd/boxer-cross called Jesse. Beautiful dog, but an incredibly destructive puppy. One work day, I accidentally left the back door open, and Jesse got into the house. I doubt that dynamite would have made more mess. She pulled all the sheets off the bed, chewed up my good shoes, knocked over tables, ate a few pages out of my bible, ripped my good trousers, broke my clock radio. She was a whirlwind!

When I was telling the cleaner at the school about it the next day, (a retired farmer) he said, “If you want my advice, I’d shoot her. Dog like that’s trouble. Need to shoot a dog like that.”

Naturally I was horrified. I said, “I don’t want to shoot my dog, I love my dog.” And as I uttered those words, I realised something about God's love. It doesn’t depend on the one being loved, it depends on the one doing the loving. My love for my dog isn’t about whether she’s good or bad, its about me, about the fact that I love dogs. God’s love for us isn’t about how appealing we can make ourselves to him, instead it relies on him being a loving God, whose very core and nature is love.