GO INTO THE NIGHT SINGING

Oh Holy Night is one of my favourite carols. The soaring musical finale is full of triumph.

            Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices!

            Oh night divine, the night when Christ was born.

But for many people, Christmas is anything but holy. It is a painful memory or an all-too-present horror, as broken and dysfunctional families tear themselves apart. Such Christmas experiences are as different as night from day from the triumphant carol.

            As I meditated on this I found myself writing a hymn to the hope that even the darkest of nights and the most painful memories may be redeemed by the Light of The World, Jesus Christ.

            Go into the night singing!

            For pow’rless hell no longer preens

            The shadowy spectres of ghosts once seen

            In those darkened minds of sorrow-bringing.

            Go into the night singing!

            Out of the mind and into the bliss

            Of brightest rivers of light which kiss

            The dawn of grace redeeming.

            Go into the night singing!

            With heavenly legions of glorious sound

            Bright clad with holy light all ‘round

            ‘Tis all divine and gleaming,

            Both night and day now holy, past and present blessed,

            Go singing out from night as Light’s most honoured guest.

           

May your Christmas be triumphant with peace and light.

Born To Live

The pandorea jasminoides climber that was planted long before our time had become the enemy - a creeping, scaling, climbing pest in pink. It had overtaken the fence-both sides- and was now invading the inside of the garden shed, writhing through bicycle spokes and coiling round the legs of folding chairs. No amount of cutting back had succeeded in quenching its appetite for greater territory. As with the Amalekites, Hivites, Jebusites et al, the only solution was total defiance and annihilation.

            It took several weeks - and numerous wheelie bin loads - to whittle away the upper foliage to the point where only stumps remained. We cut those off as close to the ground as possible, congratulated ourselves on a job well done, and made plans to put the shed back in place the following weekend. Or the one after that - we’d fought the good fight and were ready for R & R.

            It was with disbelief we viewed the tiny green shoots now forcing their way through what appeared to be dead, dry stumps. How truly glorious is the power of the Creator in the plant world. What is created to grow, blossom and reproduce continues to do so regardless of opposition. There have been such times in my life when I thought I’d given all I had to give and now please can I just lie down and die, but the dreams and hopes embedded in me by creator God, my beginning and my end, were always too strong for such defeatism. I was born to realise an identity and destiny designed by Him, and fulfil it I would.
           There is another analogy for the persistent pink pest in my garden. Unfortunately, pandorea jasminoides was totally wrong for our confined garden space. The only solution was to poison the stump and roots. Brutal but effective. In a similar way, there are times when we insist on trying to grow the gift that is in us in a way and a place it was never meant to be. The result is always ugliness and frustration. Not only is the gift God-given, there is also a God-given arena.  Find it and flourish.

Requiem For A Friend

Is there anything more delicious to the senses

Than stroking that face against mine?

The fine, miniature feel of bone-shape

 Finishing in softness of silken ear.

 His head under my hand

 He sleeps quietly on, until

 Seduced by my stroke

 He purrs.

While conceding I have loved every one of the cats I’ve owned over the years, my children insist I’ve never been as besotted as I was with Sergeant Milo, a Devon Rex with a coat of chocolate-smoke. It’s true he was allowed to sleep in our bed after breakfast on cold mornings (he hated the cold). And we did make special concessions to his habit of prowling over bench tops (was it fair to enforce new rules when an indulgent first owner had entirely failed to instill kitchen manners in the two years before he was ours?).

            His morning routine after making a toilet stop was a dive across the garden for the door to avoid the Murray Magpie - who just might be poised for a Spitfire swoop, all guns blazing - then, a manic dash for a sunny windowsill, slithering across ceramic tiles before gaining purchase on carpet and leaping from sofa, chair and coffee table to land, blinking, with a veil of terylene over his hindquarters. He would turn his head to make sure I was watching and blink twice as if to say, ‘You couldn’t do that in a fit.’

            At about 9pm he would leave whatever he was doing at the time to jump onto my lap and snuggle up with his nose hidden in the crook of my arm, or under the curl of his tail, and go to sleep. It was his signal for me to carry him to his bed in the laundry before nocturnal habits kicked in, in which case I was reduced to playing hide and seek and chasing him ‘round and ‘round the house until he deigned to be caught.

            Seven days ago Milo was hit by a car.  The damage was severe and my husband and I held him as the vet administered the chemical that stilled his generous little heart and turned his amber eyes to glass. It's hard to accept I will never again hear his soft morning meow, or stroke his velvety, chocolate-timtam face. It's hard to avoid the fresh spread of earth under the nectarine tree.      
RIP  Sergeant Milo.

A WRITER’S GOTTA DO WHAT A WRITER’S …

This morning I spotted an article entitled, “Do Authors really need to blog?” I tried to ignore it, truly I did, but it bared its teeth and barked at me until I rolled over and submitted. Even whimpering about being too busy didn’t work. I read it.

When I began blogging more than a year ago I was inspired. I wrote every other day. I couldn’t wait to do it again. And again. So I really identified with the first point in the article: ‘Some people try to blog daily, and many of them are eventually carried off in white vans with padded interiors.’  The thing was, I could kid myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t getting on with my novel, or the story for next week’s writing group, because I was still writing wasn’t I? But blogging was so much fun and so quickly achieved in comparison with my other writing that I simply wasn’t doing anything else. And the longer I left my other writing, the harder it was to return to it. Pretty soon I was ready for that white van through sheer frustration and guilt.  

But now I’m being told all the reasons why I should, indeed must blog (I feel rather like a sugar addict being told that one cream biscuit won’t hurt me). Those reasons, of course, are all to do with building a platform to promote my name and get my books published. The name thing is important. Apparently, the first thing a publisher does when presented with a query letter from an unknown author is google his/her name. That presented a problem for me because my blog goes out under the pen name of Arrowhead.  It seems I really need a blog under my own name. There’s even an exercise to find out how my name presently appears (or not) on the web.

So, I must zip, to quote the words of a recently retired Australian politician. I’m about to search for my name on http://google.com/ncr.

RESEARCH IS A WONDERFUL THING

The name, ‘Fyshwick’, intrigues me and submitting it as a prompt topic for my writing group was, I confess, a piece of whimsy on my part. I thought it would be great as part of a title for a short story. Having read some Graham Greene recently, I decided ‘Our Man in Fyshwick’ had a certain ring to it.

            I sat down with a coffee and googled ‘Fyshwick’ expecting to ramble through any number of bonny references to The Auld Country. To my dismay, there were no references to the British Isles whatsoever. There were no quaint villages so named, no colourful fish markets carrying its moniker and no character, male or female, rejoicing in its eccentricity. Fyshwick is entirely about a commercial suburb of Canberra notorious for the highest percentage of burglaries in the ACT and the only place in the Territory where prostitution may be conducted legally. I felt like a balloon five days after a kid’s birthday party.

            The name is a contrivance; a combination of ‘Fysh’, after Sir Philip Fysh, a Tasmanian politician who contributed to the establishment of Australian Federation, and ‘wick’, an Old English term for a dwelling place or village. I had no idea how I was going to make a story out of that, but a story I had to have. I had chosen the topic; I was determined to make it work.

            So I rambled some more with Google and found myself reading about the history of Fyshwick.  The land was originally cleared and developed as the site of Molonglo Internment Camp, built in 1918 to accommodate German and Austrian nationals who had been expelled from China.  Due to diplomatic intervention, these internees never arrived in Molonglo but were deported to Germany.  Several German families living in Australia were finally interned at the facility, but numbering only a couple of hundred, they rattled around in premises built for three and a half thousand souls.

            From 1942 to 1946 Molonglo was used as a naval auxiliary wireless station. Managed  by fourteen WRANs, it operated receivers for strategic radio links between Australia and Whitehall. Petty Officer Marion Stevens, who was in charge for all but the first year of operation, was famed for being the only woman appointed to run a transmitting station during the War. I couldn’t hope to do this material justice in a short story, but I found myself day dreaming about a TV mini series built around it. 

            In the meantime, I still have to come up with a story about someone’s man in Fyshwick.  At the moment I’m playing with some ideas based on its reputation as the burglary capital of the ACT.

            I have just three weeks to get my act together.

           

            

RISK: DOING THOSE PLANTS A FAVOUR

I’m not the greatest gardener in the world, but I’m keen to not be the one who incurs the wrath of the neighbours by lowering street appeal. Occasionally, I have gone beyond simple neat and tidy and attempted design and theme. It’s rarely successful, requiring as it does,  hard work and keeping at it - which might explain our having moved house more than ten times in forty eight years of marriage. Just saying.

However, over the years, I have learnt a thing or two about plants. One is that you have to keep re-potting your patio plants, otherwise they just don’t thrive. Oh, they do well for a while, then they get too big for the pot, get root bound, are invaded by pests, are worn out, like the exhausted soil they’re potted in. When that happens there’s nothing else to do but move them.  I admit I have killed a few in the process, but that was probably down to leaving it too late.

It occurs to me that there are parallel situations in life. There are people who stay too long in a job which doesn’t make best use of their true abilities or where their abilities are belittled. All too often they stay in the job because of paralysing fear, pleading age, family responsibilities, or past disappointments. Better to take a risk than to die slowly.

Then there’s the couple whose marriage is stale but either one or both won’t make the effort to seek counsel. The answer is not separation or divorce, but a willingness to change. I accept it may take only one partner to make an unsatisfactory marriage, but to improve it certainly needs both partners. Prompt action, nourishment, and ‘pest eradication’ are vital elements in that process.

Finally, as a follower of Jesus Christ for over forty years, I have observed some people slowly withering in their local church. Having exhausted what nourishment that ‘pot’ had to offer, it was time to move to a bigger or differently shaped one. They choose to stay put because of false perceptions of loyalty. It’s not that their church was a bad one, it is simply that it no longer provided what was necessary for them to thrive. A cot is the right place for a baby, but will prevent a toddler taking steps toward being a responsible teen. The children of Israel would have camped over-long in many places, but God required they follow His cloud by day and His pillar of fire at night. It was the only way they would receive spiritual food and grow strong enough to take the land of promise.

The call to growth will always require risk. I quote Bill Johnson: “God loves risk takers. It shows they are willing to trust Him.” 

TED THE MIDDLING BEAR

Ted Bear had a problem. He felt ordinary. He wasn’t cute like Little Ted on Playschool. He wasn’t a big Thorpedo sort of Ted. He was just a middling sort of Ted.

He only did middling, everyday sorts of things. Every morning he climbed out of his middling-sized bed, put on middling-sized trousers and jacket, ate a middling breakfast and cleaned his teeth with a small toothbrush.

At school he always sat in the middle row. Not at the back with the clever kids. Not at the front where the teacher kept an eye on the naughty ones. Even in footy games he didn’t kick goals, only behinds.

“I wonder if I’ll ever do anything special,” he said with a big sigh.

When the siren rang for lunch he opened his blue lunch box. It wasn’t as big as Troy’s and not as colourful as Tina’s. Inside there was a fruit bar and cheese. Now, he liked cheese and fruit bars, but sometimes he wished for something different…or more. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

“Could you put something else in my lunch box?” he asked his mum.

His mum thought very hard.

On Monday, there were bear-shaped carrot slices and on Tuesday, vegemite pikelets. On Wednesday, Ted found peanut butter and sultana balls. On Thursday, he had fritz chunks on sticks.

Ted sighed. Everything was very tasty, but still he wanted something different…something more.

On Friday there were tiny sandwich triangles. Ted unwrapped one. He popped it into his mouth. His eyes got round and big and then they squeezed very tight.

“Mmmmmm!” he said, licking his lips. “This is exactly what I want!”

He ate all the tiny triangles. He even smoothed out the wrap and tipped his lunch box upside down just in case he’d missed one. What made them so wonderful?

He ran all the way home to ask.

His mum showed him a big pot with a yellow label.

“Honey!” said Ted. “I didn’t know bears liked honey!”

“Bears were born to eat honey,” said his mum, who knew a lot. (*)

And that was how Ted discovered he had a BIG talent for eating honey.

He had honey on porridge and honey with carrots and honey on hazel nuts. He loved honey crackles and honeyed sausages, and even honey lemonade. He ate honey at breakfast and honey at lunch and honey for dinner. He ate it when he was glad and when he was worried and when it was rainy and when it wasn’t. And the more honey he ate, the more special he felt.

Ted became famous. People came from everywhere to ask him about honey. They came from Willunga and Wirrabara, from Darwin and Davenport. Some even came from the other side of the world! They came on bicycles and rollerblades, in cars, buses and  aeroplanes. Sometimes they walked.

The more honey he ate, the more he changed. Ted the Middling became Ted the Mighty. He conducted honey tours and wrote honey recipe books. He sang songs with his band called, ‘Honey For Jam’. He even had his own television show. With honey in his tummy nothing was impossible to Ted.

Now, when he climbs into bed and has his last spoonful of honey for the day, he licks his lips and smiles his biggest smile and reminds himself, “I was born to eat honey!”

(            (*)     Ted’s mum knew about Psalm 119:103 and Psalm 81:16 and a lot more where they came from!