i wanna sit here, daddy!

I'm emailing this from target shellharbour where zoë has decided to sit in the storage rack underneath her pram!

Why Zoe is a girl

This article explains why Zoe is a girl but fails to explain why we can't conceive at the moment!

Heard it on the 6am news while on my way to Kiama for some exercise.

It just goes to prove that ministry is stressful!

"The Jamberoo Railway" update

Here we go:
As of today, all the track is painted a 'rust' colour, and the table top has been cleared and vacuumed ready for the back scene to be repainted a lighter shade of blue and the ballast (little rocks) to be applied to the track. This marks the beginning of the scenicking side of the layout building.

Bad footy tipping week for NRL

Two firsts for me in footy tipping this week: 6 out of 6 correct for the Super 14 and 0 correct for the NRL! My bad!

Guidance revisited

Back in January I had a bit of a rant (here) about the pagan teaching that is passed off among Western Christians for guidance.

You know the drill: you pray lots and then you listen to the 'still, small voice' of God (a misquote of 1 Kings 19:12 (best in the KJV, for misreading anyway) which makes that verse say the opposite of what it really says).

And if the 'still, small voice of God' is convincing enough, you can do what you like... oops I mean you can do what the still, small voice of God told you.

Of course, the other sure confirmation that something is God's will is the opportunity. So, a woman has the opportunity to preach, and so that overrules any Scriptures that say women should not preach. Someone has the opportunity to have an affair, that proves that the affair is ok. Of course, the guidance pagans never really admit that this is the end-result of their dodgy theology, but if we answer the question, "Should I be a missionary" with "well I can afford the ticket" as 'proof' that this is God's will, then every time I get the opportunity to have an affair it must be ok, using this logic.

My rant about all that was blogged about way back in January. But on Sunday our systematic Bible reading was 1 Samuel 24. It occurred to me as I was reading it to the church that the 'opportunity' method of guidance is knocked out of contention by this passage. David is hiding in a cave. Saul comes in to do a shit. David has the opportunity to bump Saul off: his own troops take the "opportunity equals guidance" view. But David refuses to accept that opportunity equals guidance. His loyalty is to the Lord's anointed. Read it here in the excellent New Living Translation.

Of course, the New Testament conveys a similar notion. In 2 Corinthians 1 Paul speaks of his opportunities and how he did not follow them because they weren't the wisest way to go. Opportunity DOES NOT equal guidance. Bloody hell, every time someone rejects the gospel we'd give up sharing it if we took that view!

Church member's house (original post sent by mobile phone!)

The view from a parishioner's driveway. Tough parish!

Train

While taking the bride to Kiama for a birthday coffee we saw this late-running train.

More pics of the Illawarra Fly

Here they are:

Our ad in the Kiama Independent

Here is today's ad in the Kiama Independent for our church.

Illawarra Fly

We the Farrells of Jamberoo (not to be confused with the other Farrells of Jamberoo) visited the new attraction just up the hill from us, The Illawarra Fly.

No, it's not an humungous zipper in the pants of the region, but an aerial walkway in the treetops just metres from the cliff face on the Illawarra Escarpment, and just a few kilometres from our place.

The photo is pretty crappy, Zozo wasn't co-operating.

But the view is awesome. Go visit. In the meantime, visit our Picasa web album.

Photos from the big wet

The Big Wet

These photos are from "The Big Wet" of 5 February 2008 (see original post here)

The Great Train Show

The Great Train Show is a podcast "radio show" on the ABC, hosted by former PM Tim Fischer.

A couple of weeks back they asked for humorous train-travel stories, so I sent mine in.

Here is the extract from last week's podcast.

Horsing around in Jamberoo

Well, I've blogged the cor transfers that run through Allowrie St (the main street) of Jamberoo.

On Sundays church is often interrupted by large numbers of loud motorbikes passing by on their way to the pub.

Sometimes during prayers in church on a Sunday we hear the clip-clop of horses as recreational riders take their gee-gees out for a walk.

But this was on a Thursday! And the bloke had your typical farmer look, with wide-brim had not a helmet like the weekend riders!

At our front gate!

We love living here. Truly we do, that's not being sarcastic.

Michelle's new hobby: tennis

I got a pretty good shot, hey? And yes, it was a real game! The ball is not photoshopped or anything.

Funerals

I am taking a funeral on Monday - the first in over 8 months. This is remarkable given that I minister to an ageing church where most members are over 65, and a significantly large minority are over 80!

Elva is a dear Christian sister. All the time I've been at Jamberoo she has been a shut-in.

But I grew to love her. She has a great sense of fun. I had scheduled a hospital visit for her one time and arrived in the ward dressed fairly casually, as is my habit. I wore jeans rather than shorts for a change, but otherwise was very casual.

But all the ladies in the ward were done up to the 9s, because Elva had told them the minister was coming. Such was the build up that the ladies had insisted on their best nighties and the nurses had had to put make up on the ladies! We all had a good laugh. One of the nurses thought the archbishop must've been coming, such was the preparation.

Another time Elva was snoozing on her front verandah, and I just went and snoozed next to her until she woke up. He had a good belly laugh when that happened.

But now Elva is with the Lord Jesus. A great Christian lady, with whom we will be reunited at the resurrection.

She is a Jamberoo girl through and through - from one of the old families in town - a generation that will pass within 20 years and break the historical links with the beginning of white history in our beautiful village and valley.

Imperative Verb + adjective + noun + , + proper noun = basic sentence

The two year old today did something we've not noticed before: she made a sentence all on her own.

Sure, she's been chattering away for ages now... but every sentence etc comes from the copy-cat phrase book. "Whatchya doin'" etc - all copied from what she's heard.

But tonight I was singing badly and she took an imperative verb: "stop", an adjective usually used only to describe her #2 nappies: "yukky", a noun: "song", a comma and a proper noun: "Daddy". The result: "Stop yukky song, Daddy".

Brat.

A Sydney whinge

With the Sydney Moaning Socialist reporting that 1 in 5 Sydneysiders wants out, I'll share my 'grumpy old man' style account of my trip to Sydney yesterday - a reminder that I'm glad to be out of town!

Had to drive to Rockdale to get the mobile phone fixed (another whinge in the making there... 'update your phone via the internet' morphs into major disaster needing a trip to Rockdale... and it's a common problem!). (And an additional whinge about spending a day off in such a boring way!)

P-platers zooming past at well above the speed limit.

Tailgaters in the 50 zone at Heathcote... the very same idiots holding me up in the right hand lane doing 90 in the 110 zone further back...

Then there's the vintage VW ute (you know, the Kombi thing with the fold down sides)... looked great, but if he goes so slow, why did he have to pull out in front of my at the red light at Sylvania, only to be the last vehicle to get going? When I, and the 25 cars behind me, got around him, only then did he move to the left lane for Tom Ugly's Bridge!

How about the nut case in the rubbish truck who nearly wiped Zoe and me out. We were turning right from West Botany St into Marsh St, Kyeemah. There are two lanes; both are right-turn lanes with the left lane also allowing traffic to continue along West Botany St to the Princes Highway at Arncliffe.

Anyway, we're turning right legitimately from the left lane, following a truck, when there is this blast from a horn. Another truck comes from behing, goes around us and continues up West Botany St. The driver stops past the intersection and leans out his window and gesticulates madly. Get this: he is abusing my for making a right turn from a right-turning lane, when he tried to go straight from a right turning lane on the outside of me. What a moron. 10 minutes later I heard on the radio that a truck hit a car on the Princes Highway at Tempe... couldn't help wondering if it was my new friend.

Glad to be back in God's country.

A plea

Today I am writing a plea for help.

It's about days off.

We all need them. Some of us are such workaholics or whatever that we don't think we need rest. Others are so lazy as always to need it!

I'm not lazy but I need my one day in seven. That's not to say I'm a Sabbatarian in sense that we usually mean by it - I'm a Sabbatarian in that I believe the OT sabbath foreshadows the Sabbath-rest that is to come in the age to come... but I'm not a Sunday-replaces-Saturday type of Sabbatarian (as an aside, if the Westminster Confession handled the OT law better I'd be a card-carrying Pressie. But the Sabbath is one area they clearly fell down).

It's just that I go nuts if I don't get a day off. And I need a full 24 hours off. Hey, I'm not prescribing this: I know others who take their 'day off' in 1 hour blocks throughout the week (which also suggests you're not allowed 'down time' unless it's your 'day off', a dangerous consequence!).

Anyway, my list of day-off 'things to do' is so long, and I never get anything done from that list. Why? Because the family thinks that the 'day off' is their day. And to be resentful of this would be sacrilegious (although the temptation sometimes overflows into sin in this regard).

So how can I have a 'day off' that lets me just put my feet up, work on the model railway (which I was given so I'd have a hobby!), work on my 'virtual trainz' on the PC, and read books as well as catch up on the newspaper.... and fit the family in?

Advice please!

BJ McCracken and itchy eyes

When I married Michelle I inherited an elderly blue Burmese called BJ.

BJ was so named because when Michelle got him she was a little girl (I said he was an elderly cat!) she thought he was black and so called him 'BlackJack" or BJ for short. When it became apparent that he was blue and not black, he simply became BJ.

For some bizarre reason, when we married I decided to call him "BJ McCracken" which became "Mister McCracken". Other times he became simple "Meow Machine" as he is a very talkative cat.

Anyway, BJ is beautiful. He is a lovely, affectionate, talkative, communicative cat. I have always hated cats, but BJ is a lovely exception. The fact that he is so old that he doesn't hunt and kill wildlife probably helps. But after nearly 4 years of co-habitation with him (ie nearly 4 years of marriage!) I have suddenly become allergic to him!

I'm sitting here typing through weepy itchy eyes because he's just been head-butting me (the cat way of saying hello) and it's terrible! How can you be allergic to something you love so much?