0ne of Ellie’s front teeth has been loose for a few weeks now but she hasn’t been able to get it out. Yesterday at school one of the women in the canteen offered to pull it for her. Danelle was helping out and she agreed it would be ok.
Ellie was keen, so the lady reached in with her tissue in hand – pulled – and out came both front teeth!.
Oops…
Or as Ellie is saying now ‘oopth’
Tonight was our first church leaders meeting with Quinns Baptist.
I have found it really hard to shift gears mentally these last few weeks and was feeling a little concerned at my lack of impetus.
Being with the crew tonight was actually a catalyst for igniting some passion and enthusiasm for what lies ahead. I can see places where we can actually offer some good leadership and help them/us become a healthy community together.
I am looking forward to what lies ahead.
I remember as a youth pastor that I had a fair swag of ‘you can change the world’ sermons in my kit bag. It was a regular theme in my own communication and in most of the talks that I heard other youth speakers give. I even got pretty good at it!
The basic gist was that God wants to do extraordinary things in this world thru you. And if you were in touch with him then you would be able to be a ‘history maker’ or a ‘world changer’ or a ‘person of prominence’ or…some other equally wanky term.
You know the deal?
I remember when I was giving those talks I really believed what I was saying to be true. However today I am less inclined to believe that I or you will actually tilt the earth on its axis one way or another. In fact chances are that God doesn’t
want you to be a Martin Luther King or a Nelson Mandela. Chances are you will live a life of indescribable ordinariness and apparent insignificance….
And I’d like to say ‘that’s ok’. Most of us are ordinary people, living ordinary lives in ordinary communities and it is extremely unlikely we will ever be world leaders or superheroes.
The problem with the rhetoric of ‘you can change the world’ is that if you don’t, then you can feel like a failure – like your measly suburban life really doesn’t count for much at all and you are a nobody in the scheme of things, or maybe you have missed ‘God’s best’ for you. (just to keep the jargon rolling 🙂 )
“My pastor told me I was made for greatness… that I could change the world… and all I do is change people’s sprinklers…”
When we speak about people like David or Gideon or Paul, or other biblical heroes and suggest that it is our responsibility to live lives of similar consequence then – while I would agree that it is a possibility some of us will be world changers – I would also suggest we disempower people from fully living the life they have been given.
When we suggest that God has a destiny for us that is much greater than humble suburban living we inevitably finish up with people who live perpetually dissatisfied with life as it is right now and who are constantly waiting for their ‘moment’, when the planets align, when they are ‘called up’ by God and when they get to shine.
In the mean time life – real life – goes on and passes us by… and if that day never comes we wonder what all the fuss was about… all those prophetic words we were given…
My message these days is that God does
want to use your life in all of it beautiful ordinariness and simplicity and while you may never be written up as a hero of faith, you will get to live a life of great meaning and significance if you can view your weekly endeavours thru a different lens.
I finished the ‘Art of the Engine Driver
‘ yesterday and found it a brilliant read, but not in the way you might normally expect. It was a slow moving, almost meandering type of book, but it drew you into the lives of the characters in a powerful yet deceptive way.
The story is set in one of Melbourne’s frontier suburbs in the 1950’s and explores the lives of the folks who live in that street. It is unapologetically ‘ordinary’ in its content matter yet it is superb in its writing and in the way it delves into the issues that confront suburban people at the outer edge of the city. As you read you cannot help but feel drawn into their lives and from there to reflect on your own experience of suburban life.
Here’s the publisher blurb:
The Art of the Engine Driver is the story of one evening in the lives of the residents of a new outer Melbourne suburb. As a mighty steam train leaves Spencer Street Station on its haul to Sydney‚ a family of three ? Vic‚ Rita and their son Michael are walking down their street to an engagement party. George Bedser‚ a shipbuilder from Liverpool‚ is celebrating the engagement of his daughter‚ Patsy. He has no family here and has invited the whole street to the party. Vic is an engine driver‚ looking to be like his hero Paddy Ryan and become the master of the smooth ride. As the neighbours walk to the party using a mixture of description and internal monologue ? we hear their stories and are drawn into the lives of a bully‚ a drunk‚ a restless young girl and a happy family man. On this hot summer?s night the old and the new‚ diesel and steam‚ town and country all collide and nobody is left unaffected. This is a distinctly Australian novel in the spirit of Tim Winton and Robert Drewe‚ a luminous and evocative tale of ordinary suburban lives with an extraordinary power and depth.
I really enjoyed being part of the pathos that is so often assumed to be ‘normal’ life. From the confused girl to the worka/alcoholic husband and the resigned wife. These are all people I know and somehow that makes it that much more incisive.
I have just started his latest book, The Time We Have Taken – which is the third in the trilogy (I couldn’t find the second!) and is a Miles Franklyn winner.
Its great to have discovered another Aussie author who genuinely makes me want to keep reading!
I don’t think I have ever had an alcohol induced hangover in my entire life. If I had started drinking alocohol as a teenager that might have been a different story.
But in its absence I have been able to do rapid turn around travel to Melbourne with long meetings in between and I imagine the result is somewhat similar. I got some last night at 10.30pm from 2 solid days of Forge meetings in Melbourne and thankfully I was smart enough to leave this morning completely unscheduled. For some reason the ‘morning after’ always leaves me foggy and weary and bordering on depressed, irrespective of how good the meetings have been.
So this morning I have been chilling, finishing an excellent novel based around relationships in the Aussie suburbs (The Art of the Engine Driver
) and generally catching my breath.
I think some of my weirdness of feeling comes from the fact that yesterday I resigned as the National Director of Forge and now (having resigned from my WA role) I have no official function or role in an organisation that I have been an integral part of. On the one hand that’s no big deal – most people have no official role or function in Forge – but when your life & identity has been so tightly enmeshed with what you do it does leave you a little disoriented. I identify with Wayne Carey when he gave up football, but I’m hopeful I will respond a little differently.
My resignation from both roles comes at a time when I just knew that my ‘work was done’. In WA Forge is up and running, is stable and healthy and my work as the founding leader was over. It was time for someone to come in and give it some new life and direction. I could feel my vision and creative energy waning and was aware that it was time to hand it on.
In the National Director role I have been aware that the challenges ahead of us lie a bit beyond what I am capable of managing well. We need to re-invent ourselves and re-structure if we are to have a significant influence in the future. I am fairly good at strategic planning and the like, but Phil McCredden is a bloody genius at it and yesterday as we were discussing the road ahead I offered to step down so that Phil could give us the leadership we need at this point.
He has accepted so another stage of the Forge journey begins. I believe Phil is the right bloke for the job and I will continue to serve on the national team in whatever capacity I am needed for the next twelve months and we’ll see where it goes from there. Phil is a highly gifted man of great integrity and I am really pleased that he has accepted the challenge of leading the next phase of the the transition. We are good friends and I feel very satisfied to be able to pass the baton to him.
From a personal point of view, the last 2 years have been an interesting exercise in leadership and I have found myself functioning in a way that was somewhat unfamiliar – yet at the same time necessary. In cricket you sometimes see a normally aggressive batsman playing a slow deliberate innings because the teams needs it, and while it is not ‘normal’ it is occasionally ‘necessary’. I guess I feel a bit like that. I have been leading differently to usual because the need of the team was different.
So as I woke this morning I realised that my ‘world’ had contracted significantly. From being connected with people all across Australia and pondering major questions of direction and influence for a national movement, I am now finding my focus is here in Butler and the surrounding suburbs and my questions are also very local – at least for the forseeable future.
I imagine it might take a little getting used to, but then that’s ok too…
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