It’s taken ten days, when it usually takes me only three, but finally soul, spirit and body have fallen into happy agreement that we are home.  At home, in fact, in Paradise.  This unity of being is welcome and very good.  I am no longer living in two or three disparate worlds, no longer split between present reality and the taunting dreams of yesterday, yesterweek, or yesterlife.

Outside my glorious new window ice-white sheets of heavy rain are rippling across the greening hill, the tall gums on the ridge completely veiled.  There is no sound of wind tearing through their leaves this afternoon, only the cacophony of a downpour: solo drips, drops and splashes against a backing choir of white rain noise.

The rhythms of life are returning, and with them a wholeness that I can scarcely believe I had forgotten so easily.  Somewhere further inside the house my Little One is watching her daily allowance of ABC 3 children’s programming (which for some reason she always refers to as “ABC 2”), having recently come inside from her usual round of trampoline bouncing and swinging on her “playground” (a swing set). My Favourite Wife and I are the ever appreciative audience for this performance, which we take in as we share our afternoon pot of tea in the cool of the day.  Somewhere else inside the house the Favourite One is right now busily at work on the finishing touches of a sewing room, one of the not-insignificant advantages of adult children finally leaving home!  As my cousin pointed out last week, you come home from holidays with “fresh eyes”; and indeed we did.  We have potted plants, hung pictures, changed rooms, cleaned cupboards.  It’s almost too farfetched to credit, but this mania even extended to a whip around the workshop!

Some years ago I greatly enjoyed an English preacher at one of our denominational conferences gently chiding those ministers who travel the airways, endlessly flitting from one pulpit to the next, seemingly never at home.  (It occurs to me, only now, that this Brit was addressing us in Australia………….?).  But his point was well made, and he illustrated it with Jesus’ own adult life, lived entirely within about a 70 km radius.  “Go home”, our speaker intoned in rich English cadences, “And stay home! All that you need to learn about life and about men and about God you will learn there”.  That is, perhaps, overstating it a little.  I’m ever grateful for each of the many journeys I have made, and I rather think that travel can be the most broadening experience, especially in one’s youth.  Nonetheless, I take his point: Home is rich in every way.  Richer than we think.

Last night a visiting friend was summoned by my Favourite Wife to leave our couch during the tense Grand Slam final and bravely man our new Dyson Vacuum Cleaner: the perfect weapon against the robustly hirsute arachnids that creep into our home from the adjoining bushland.  We have sucked up some whoppers in the few days we have been home.  Monstrous huntsmen spiders, fiercely defying the upstretched nozzle!  One particular specimen that I exposed to a deadly stream of negative air pressure would have spanned both my palms without trying.  Uugh!  My Best Girl loathes them more than anything else in all creation.

Except for one thing.  There is one other creature in all the wide world that is more loathsome to her than sp*ders, and later in the evening she trod on one of these in the garage.  Where the former horror has a terrifying leg count of eight, this creature has none at all: an evil concept entirely.  Trod, barefoot, on a SN*KE.  I daren’t say the word aloud for fear of starting another stampede!

Paradise is a place of great peace, great blessing, and also great challenge!  And so it should be.

Rejoice!

I dread holiday’s end. A day or two before we leave I begin to see each familiar sight with wistful, so-sad eyes. It’s a little pathetic, but I’ve never been able to muster the discipline to shun this annual round of self torment. Following the packing and the fond farewells comes The Drive, an exquisitely tortuous event that combines endless hours of contemplation with irrefutable evidence of the miles that separate holiday and home.  Unlike the drive toward a holiday destination, which is a delightful feast of anticipation, the drive home is a joyless musing of fading bliss. Inevitably, during this morbid marathon, my thoughts will arrive at the same unanswerable question: Why, oh why, do we live so far away? With each move over the years we have put more distance between ourselves and our family; and more miles between our home and the beach.

This miserable state of mind has played itself out countless times in the last few decades; and I should have long since conquered my fears. As a Boy Scout I felt the sharp stab of homesickness gnawing within as we trudged endlessly under overgrown rucksacks. And yet, at the very moment the homebound train disgorged its load of sweat-stained, smoke-infused boys at Central Station my emotion would swing to excited thoughts of another bush adventure in the weeks ahead. Some years later as at teenager I used to keep my gaze away from the moon at night, especially a big bright moon, because the knowledge that the same moon was shining in the window’s of my family home was too much to bear!

Much like my former Wolf Cub self (“dib dib dib, dob dob dob” – what on earth did that mean?) I am confident that my mood will improve within a day or so, three at most, and I will become attuned again to the routines of normal life. But for now the sting is sharp – and I have to deal with this irrational need to reverse the flow of time, striving to will myself back into last week’s time and place.  It’s a mindset too bizarre to sustain for long: but I find myself sometimes completely unwilling to admit that here is here and now is now; such is my longing for then!

At this strange time of year I often ponder a strong New Testament statement:

From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. Acts 17.

I look there for reassurance about our geographic isolation from family and friends.  A simple reading seems to offer exactly that: that our place and our time are divinely given, exactly determined.  Or is that too literal, too simple?  Is it only a description of the broader pattern of nations and eras through the span of history? In recent years we have moved by force of circumstance, and yet the choices we have made have been our own.   Is this family Diaspora God’s will, or my own?  It’s Double Agency: the thorny question of when and how an action can be ascribed to more than one agent.

The verse that follows next makes the outcome clear, even if the causes remain oblique:

God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’

Here there is a note of discomfort, of a pebble in the shoe that causes us to search for answers.  Scripture is so often the story of wanderers; people who are exiled, or sent, or called, or in other ways placed upon a strange path.  With that as our heritage, is it any wonder that we sometimes feel adrift, alone, misplaced?

There is an annual rhythm emerging in my writing; and the uncertainty of the year ahead is no doubt colouring my view.  If you think this is bleary, you should read A Donkey’s Take on Unemployment, last year’s back to reality blog.  Now that was sad!

 

Rejoice!

Happiness would surely be the most common hope I express for everyone I know.  I say it all the time.  Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, Happy Travelling, Happy Christmas, have a Happy-rest-of-the-day, and on it goes.  And yet…   and yet…   happiness is not something in which I place much confidence at all.

?Happiness.  I’ve learned this particular spelling from our GP who puts a question mark before the disease that I may or may not have.  It’s rather a good way to describe a matter under suspicion, or something whose merits remain unproved.

?Happiness is quite real, of course. I’m quite happy reasonably often, and like most everyone else I love being ?happy. Light hearted confidence, smiling with friends and laughing at the world. ?Happiness is an addictive sensation.  Many things make me ?happy. My family make me ?happy – while ever they are ?happy of course. A bright sun and a cool breeze make me ?happy.  A friend’s success is quite likely to make me ?happy – so long as I am warmly disposed towards said friend.  Success of my own making is sure to make me ?happy.  Any word scoring more than 30 points in scrabble is going to do it for sure! Washing my own hands with soap and running water in my new accessible basin makes me extreeemely happy.  And here is the first of my several concerns for the legitimacy of ?happiness:  I can be ?happy without giving a thought to anyone else.

When my Favourite Wife and I were newlywed we took our family of five away from the town where we had met, and made our first home in the bush. We farmed chickens on the lonely bend of a creek, without a neighbour to be seen in any direction.  Our driveway was a couple of miles long, and then only met a dirt road. The farm cottage was ‘older’, I guess you could say.  We walked noticeably uphill from the kitchen (a cosy little room with a wood stove taking up half the space) to the living room with its worn floral carpet and open fire; and then down again into the couple of bedrooms behind.  We almost broke into a trot on the downhill side.  It was the sort of house where the wind would blow and the curtains billowed – even though the windows were all tightly shut. A glass of water on our bed-side table would sometimes freeze over during the night (absolute fact!).  And we were happy.  The creek – nearly a river at times – was only meters from the house, and many evenings after work and many weekend picnics were spent on its sandy banks and in its cool rock holes.  We were happy together, happy with our lot in life, we had little and we worked hard.

That’s a romantic picture of ?happiness I guess – and there is another of the faults of this elusive gift.  ?happiness seems more tangible in memory or in anticipation than in experience.  This gives rise to many of our euphemisms’, such as ‘the good old days’ and, ‘the grass being greener’.  There is nothing wrong with happiness.  I think happiness is a good thing, probably, but whatever goodness it has is unlikely to be its own.

I did my carpenter’s apprenticeship under the watchful eyes of some old codgers from the bush.  Along with the rudiments of timber craft, they also passed on treasured folk-law, such as the true facts concerning Goanna Oil.  True goanna oil, as it happens, cannot be contained in a glass bottle.  Any goanna oil enclosed in such a glass bottle is only there by pretence: true goanna oil is far too thin and will run straight through.  (Which makes me wonder: did they ever tell me how you actually do keep goanna oil?….).  ?Happiness is just like that.  You can’t keep it, nothing will hold it for long, it’s precious and it’s rare.

To even notice that you are ?happy is to risk losing the moment forever.  Looking for ?happiness is more foolhardy still, an enterprise doomed from the outset.  Try and be ?happy and the most likely outcome is boredom.  ?Happiness is found along the way. ?Happiness is a by-product; it happens to you when your attention is given completely to something else.  It’s like the patch of cool air you pass through beside a stream or a wet rock face when trekking through the bush. It’s like the richness of conversation that arises when friends are working on a task together, completely absorbed in the job at hand.  It’s like the unexpected comfort of a hard concrete path when you take a break from long, hot toil with a pick and shovel.

To wish one another a “?Happy New Year” sounds to my grumpy old ears like hogwash.  Better, wiser, to wish one another a Loyal New Year.  Loyalty: now there is a path to happiness.  Concentration is another: nose down, push other thoughts aside and focus on the task; and soon enough ?happiness drops in to visit. But don’t forget: ?happiness is a shy commodity, it flees attention.

So I wish you a Loyal New Year, a Fruitful New Year, and a year attended with Concentration, Diligence, Perseverance and Faith.  I wish you a Prayerful New Year and a Challenging one too; a year of Need and Provision, of Questions and of Hope.  Eyes forward, hands to the plough, one step at a time; and who knows?  We might just be happy with that.

Rejoice!