I have been having some design work done on a logo for our team letterhead and any material that goes out in public under our name. Its not a huge deal, but in the world we live in I reckon its worthwhile having something of this nature.

I am after something simple, clean, easily recognisable, not cheesy and that embodies the idea of swimming against the dominant current of society.

I put a list of 10 different options to our team the other night and got ten different opinons! I should have known better. Still I like other people’s feedback and perceptions so here is a chance to ‘cast your vote’.

After a bit of sifting this is the short list of candidates. Lets call the top image 1 and the bottom 4. Tell me the one you would see as best depicting us as you observe us thru this blog (which I realise is only one lens)

thank you for smoking download free

Twenty one years ago I set out on my first teaching assignment in the little wheat belt town of Wagin 2 1/2 hours south east of Perth. I was excited that I had been given a posting and was really looking forward to the year. I immediately attended the Baptist church and was dreadfully underwhelmed. While my city church wasn’t exciting this one was struggling even more. I decided to visit the Uniting church – which had an even less appealing reputation than the Bappos.

The night I went a local bloke was preaching and I was quite amazed. He was good. Very good. Inspiring, direct and no crap. My kinda preacher. I decided that whatever else may have been up with the church that was where I would base myself of the year.

Gavin and his wife Helen became really good friends over that one year. It was also the hardest year of my life – the year my engagement busted up. Ouch… It was good to have some people around who cared for me when I was a bit of a mess.

As much as we didn’t see much of each other over the next 5 or so years, Gav ended up being one of my groomsmen when Danelle and I got married. It was a measure of the respect I had/have for him.

Over the last 15 years we have seen each other probably no more than 10 times, but it is one of those friendships you pick up like an old jumper and fit into comfortably.

I asked Gavin and Helen to be on our prayer team when we made the move to Brighton and they agreed. He mentioned that he liked the sound of what we were doing and would even consider coming to join us. Ok…

As if!

Gav is a 3rd generation farmer (I think) so I took his interest as nice but nothing more. He mentioned it a couple more times, but still I didn’t pay much attention.

The came the email saying he had put the farm on the market.

Crikey!

That’s serious… especially for a farming family. Four days later came a rather shocked phone call telling me the farm had sold and they had just bought a block of land across the road about 800metres. ‘We’re coming to join you’. After 21 years we were going to spend some serious time together again.

In Australia when someone is really serious about something we sometimes use the expression ‘I’d bet the farm on this.’ Well these guys did. This is not a test run where if it doesn’t work out they go back to farming. They have taken a huge risk. Gotta admire that!

For the last 12 months their house has been under construction and on Friday it will be completely finished except for landscaping.

As things turned out my in-laws were looking for a place to stay for a few months while their house was being built. So they offered to look after the empty property. Sounded good for all until they got offered 2 months of relief teaching in One Arm Point – one of north west Oz’s beauty spots, and also home to my bro in law. They took that up, so Gav was left without a house sitter – always a bit dodgy in newly developed areas when you are the first house on the block.

Then yesterday we were chatting with Andrew & Jo Dowsett who have been here a month now from Sheffield and they let us know that as from this Monday they have nowhere to live, despite looking all over.

A plan starts to brew in my mind…

‘Come with me’ I said to Andrew. ‘Lets go meet a friend of mine who might like to meet you too.’

The upshot of all that is the Dowsett family will be living in Brighton for a couple of months as of sometime next week. I reckon that’ s a great thing.

It’ll be great to get to know them better and have them around the place for a while as they figure out exactly where God is leading them.

Then after Christmas Gavin and Helen move in and we pick up the journey with them all over again – 21 years later. How bout that?

I’m not one who sees God in absolutely everything – I reckon sometimes stuff just happens – but I get the sense that there is some kind of gracious hand at work herein the relationshio with Gav and Helen, the Dowsett family arriving in Oz and the provision of a house at just the right time. Sometimes you really do just say ‘wow God – good work!’

Last night at our team meeting we began looking at the book of James and discussed chapter 1.

Its always interesting to see where a conversation gathers energy and where it dithers along. Usually my approach to leading this type of meeting is to do a heap of background study and throw it open and see what people want to discuss. There was no aspect of James chapter 1 that was ‘gripping’ me personally, nor was I feeling like I needed to really press something home to us as a team in any way. I arrived hoping that others had been inspired or that the Holy Spirit would take us somewhere none of us had expcted.

After 20 minutes of fairly uninspiring discussion we began to look at verses 9-11.

The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. 10But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. 11For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business

The conversation that came out of this stirred the room a little more.

You see, we are all rich. Some would even say filthy rich. It depends on who we compare ourselves to I guess. We are a bunch of middle income Australians – probably averaging $70K / household some with average mortgages, some renting and decent cars all round (except for us!)

By world standards we are wealthy. So are we people of ‘low position’? Is our wealth something of a hindrance to following Jesus in this world? Ought we try to extricate ourselves from our possessions?

Maybe…

Now… before you trot out all the reasons why its ok we own stuff – that the world needs the wealthy as well as the poor – that if we gave it all away then we would be poor – the early church had to own stuff to share it – yada yada yada, just stop for a minute and consider how gripped we are by our wealth and how it shapes our lives. (Or is that just me?…)

As we began to explore the (hypothetical) possibilities of giving it all away and moving into a different suburb and then living at a different socio-economic level it was interesting to see our struggle. When I was a teenager I would have given it all away in an instant. Easy.

Now I am 41 year old with a lot of stuff, a family and a way of life that I am familiar with and that I enjoy. I am deeply wedded to my lifestyle and at times I feel infuriated by it. At other times I am really grateful for what I have.

We were discussing how difficult it is to help middle Australia really engage with the gospel. People who are ‘almost there’ and will (apparently) soon be content once they have a bigger house/better car or whatever else are rarely looking for meaning outside of possessions – at least it sure appears that way.

We asked the question if middle Australia is so difficult to penetrate maybe we ought to pull stumps and go to a really rough suburb where folks are poor and maybe more open to hearing Jesus good news. (Just for the record – we don’t feel God taking us anywhere – anytime soon) As we discussed this and the possibility of selling our stuff and giving it to people who need it more than us we struggled to really have a decent conversation. Its hard to really think clearly when you are so mired in your own wealth, worldview and background.

We agreed that for all of us to go somewhere downtrodden would be quite difficult for us as we would be engaging with folks from a very different walk of life to ourselves. We probably would struggle to be accepted and connect in conversation easily due to our vastly different life experiences and backgrounds. (This has been some of our experience here in Brighton.

Even to help the poor and needy round here seems like a lame option at times when millions of people in other parts of the world die from inadequate resources.

I really don’t think there are any easy answers here – if there were we would have found them a long time ago. My answer to this sort of stuff often seems to be the same these days – do what you feel the Spirit is leading you to do.

That’s not a cop out. Its the only safe way to go without creating a legalism.

So, could we simply walk away from the affluence we have at this stage in life? Probably not ‘simply’. but I’d like to think we could make that choice if genuinely faced with it.