Wh - a - - t?

I used to be Dead is on Amazon: My novel about the naughty and funny daughter of Jairus the Synagogue official in Capernaum is out now. It hit No:1 and 2 in its categories in its first week and is getting nice reviews too. You don't even need a Kindle device to read it. You can open it in iPads and iPhones with the Kindle App which is free in the iTunes Store. Get it and come back to the page to record your review.

If you've received this from a friend, you can subscribe at my web site for free. Click on the big Stay in Touch box when you get there. Stuff happens Am I right about this? The bottom drops out of our basket and we fall out. Some of us have this debilitating tendency more than others but I think I am right in saying most of us have it. When things don't work out, we have great difficulty in seeing the good in it. I do. I admit it. I go down like a cast iron jet. No-one plans for 'stuff' Demand for our product wanes, a competitor comes into the market with lower prices, our business folds, we get laid off, we don't get the price we wanted for the home or car we sold, a child departs from the ways in which he or she was brought up, our child does something dreadful, our spouse does something dreadful, we emigrate and spend the next 30 years recovering, our parents become senile and dependent, our Pastor shacks up with the music leader, we run out of savings, Labor gets back in and Collingwood wins the 2013 Grand Final. And these are only the external disappointments. There is an entire mountain range of personal mistakes to regret. We didn't plan any of it. In fact, we had glorious hope for the exact opposite in every single case. We really did. We genuinely planned and hoped, believed and prayed for it. Consider Moses Yesterday in church we had a lesson about the end of Moses' life. It's pretty rough. For doing his lolly one day when God told him to speak to the rock in the desert to get it to give the Israelites water and whacking it instead, and giving everyone a mouthful of abuse in the process, God told him he would never enter the Land of Promise. Not only that, but (nothing to do with Moses) the people he had brought there would soon go off the rails and behave like pagans. So he died knowing that he had spent his life doing everything he could to get a homeland for himself and the Israelites and it was in effect, a fizzer. How far down would your cast iron jet have taken you, if you'd had that news? However ... Here's what has happened since. Moses has been known to three enormous religions as one of the Great Prohets He's known to many nations as the ultimate law giver and leader. His laws have become the basis of civilised living. His miracles are astounding. People have sung his praises for three thousand years for his courage, patience, wisdom, determination. Moses got to stand on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus , the Son of God, right in the land of Canaan/Palestine/Israel. From Moses's faith, billions have some to know God. So? So, it's never over, until it's over is it? Did you think that just because you hoped for something it was your right to have it? That's as silly and sad as a five year old wishing she'll grow fairly wings. Persevere. Wait until the end of time to read the last chapter, not just the end of your days. Endure. Plough on, one foot up and one foot down. Who knows what the family, your friends, even the historians will say of your perseverance? Anyway — To infinity and beyond. Live long and prosper. Colin Pearce

Stuff happens

Am I right about this? 

The bottom drops out of our basket and we fall out.

Some of us have this debilitating tendency more than others but I think I am right in saying most of us have it.

When things don't work out, we have great difficulty in seeing the good in it.

I do.

I admit it.

I go down like a cast iron jet. 

No-one plans for 'stuff'

Demand for our product wanes, a competitor comes into the market with lower prices, our business folds, we get laid off, we don't get the price we wanted for the home or car we sold, a child departs from the ways in which he or she was brought up, our child does something dreadful, our spouse does something dreadful, we emigrate and spend the next 30 years recovering, our parents become senile and dependent, our Pastor shacks up with the music leader, we run out of savings, Labor gets back in and Collingwood wins the 2013 Grand Final.  

And these are only the external disappointments. There is an entire mountain range of personal mistakes to regret.

We didn't plan any of it. In fact, we had glorious hope for the exact opposite in every single case. We really did. We genuinely planned and hoped, believed and prayed for it.

Consider Moses

Yesterday in church we had a lesson about the end of Moses' life. It's pretty rough. For doing his lolly one day when God told him to speak to the rock in the desert to get it to give the Israelites water and whacking it instead, and giving everyone a mouthful of abuse in the process, God told him he would never enter the Land of Promise. Not only that, but (nothing to do with Moses) the people he had brought there would soon go off the rails and behave like pagans. So he died knowing that he had spent his life doing everything he could to get a homeland for himself and the Israelites and it was in effect, a fizzer.

How far down would your cast iron jet have taken you, if you'd had that news?

However ...

Here's what has happened since.

Moses has been known to three enormous religions as one of the Great Prohets

He's known to many nations as the ultimate law giver and leader.

His laws have become the basis of civilised living.

His miracles are astounding.

People have sung his praises for three thousand years for his courage, patience, wisdom, determination.

Moses got to stand on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus , the Son of God, right in the land of Canaan/Palestine/Israel.

From Moses's faith, billions have some to know God.

So?

So, it's never over, until it's over is it?

Did you think that just because you hoped for something it was your right to have it?

That's as silly and sad as a five year old wishing she'll grow fairly wings.

Persevere.

Wait until the end of time to read the last chapter, not just the end of your days.

Endure.

Plough on, one foot up and one foot down. 

Who knows what the family, your friends, even the historians will say of your perseverance?

Anyway —

To infinity and beyond.

Live long and prosper.

Colin Pearce

What IS the Bible all about – really?

•   Is it a handbook for Jews and Christians?

•   Is it a layout of God's plan for humankind?

•   Is it a rule book?

I guess my answer will not make me popular.

Dr. Billy Graham writes in the forward to Dr Henrietta Mears' famous book, What the Bible is all about:

Millions of people today are searching for a reliable voice of authority. The Word of God is the only authority we have. It sheds light on human nature, , world problems and human suffering. But beyond that it clearly reveals the way to God through Jesus Christ.

I wouldn't want to argue with that. I just made a discovery of my own though. 

I endeavour to read the Bible every year and last year I tried to do it in The Message. It's taking a lot longer than normal because there's a lot of in-text elaboration. 

That aside, one thing has bothered me. Yes, the will of God is there. The authority is there. The wisdom and the worship are there, but something this last year has really stuck out.

Big discovery

It reads like someone tried to cram as many pompous jackasses as possible in between two leather covers.   There are hundreds of them. Upstarts, social climbers, johnny-come-latelies, and arrivistes.  Pompous to the max, one and all.

Pompous 

(adjective) affectedly and irritatingly grand, solemn, or self-important: a pompous ass who pretends he knows everything.

It starts on page 2 and gets worse: Eve, Adam, Cain, Nimrod, Noah after the flood, Abraham lying about his 'sister', Lot and his wife as fools, Isaac as a goose, Jacob as a cheat, Joseph as a braggadocious little pain, his brothers as adults, Moses before his call out, Pharaoh, the Israelite leaders in the wilderness, the spies in Caanan, the settlers mixing with the Baalites, the false prophets, King Saul, King David, King Solomon, his son Rehoboam and his ex-captain Jereboam, Assyrian Kings, more stupid Israelite and Judaic kings, Nebuchanezzar ... I'm tired already and I haven't got to the Pharisees, the Saducees, the dumb disciples and the squabblers in the early churches.

What IS the Bible all about then?

Just for now, for this week while I think about it, it's about the folly of arrogance, it's about the daftness of opinions, it's about the pointlessness of being pompous. It's about submission to God in all humility and abandonment to our own importance (as we've assessed it to be in our own pomposity.)

There's something to chew on over Easter.

To infinity and beyond.

Live long and prosper.

Colin Pearce

Christmas – what a funny old mess.

Christmas – what a funny old mess. For example: > I have a Jewish friend who celebrates Christmas because he likes presents, turkey and pudding. He doesn't have a clue that the true meaning of Christmas is Santa Claus. > When I was about 20, I had a Pastor who abhorred Christmas as a being a Christian festival and wouldn't hold a Christmas church service because he was a Puritan and Christmas was 'draped in the rags of popery'. He did however like pudding and turkey and presents. > I was in Bethlehem this year where the Greek and Armenian priests hold their annual Christmas punch-up about who gets first dibs on poking their head in the place of Christ's birth. The actual 'supposed' slab where the manger is said to have been placed is filled with candles and is encased in bird wire and looks like a ferret's cage. I must have missed something, because other people were crying in awe. I got the giggles. > There is supposed to have been a woman who complained aloud in a card shop when she saw a nativity scene on a Christmas card, 'The (*&*&%^&$ church! They try to get religion into everything.' It's a mess.  With Father Christmas, Santa Claus, Sinta Klaus, trees, baubles, tinsel,  televised carols by candlelight shows, pudding, charity appeals, suicides, turkey, rampant alcohol abuse, rampant gluttony, rampant present abuse, rampant card abuse, superstition, emotional pap about it being Jesus birthday (spare us!) the invention of Winterval, Chrisukka, Happy Holidays, political appeasement and cultural sensitivity, deaths on the roads and it only being 11 months since last one, I don't know whether to take up arms and oppose the whole thing or just go back to watching the cricket on TV and have another fruit mince pie. So what's Christmas all about? Apparently Christmas is about whatever you like, and as long as you don't think your take on it is true, I'm OK with that. My reality is that as long as I get turkey, pudding and a present on Christmas day I'm happy because I celebrate the reality of Jesus everyday of the year and that he took action and conquered death and that he is not the reason for the season but he is in fact The Season and will remain so, day after punishing day, until the Great Day when we shall know him as he is. Anyway, have a happy – (fill in your preference)

Christmas – what a funny old mess.

Christmas – what a funny old mess.

For example:

> I have a Jewish friend who celebrates Christmas because he likes presents, turkey and pudding. He doesn't have a clue that the true meaning of Christmas is Santa Claus - or is it the Easter Bunny, or tinsel, or an angel up a tree?

> When I was about 20, I had a Pastor who abhorred Christmas as a being a Christian festival and wouldn't hold a Christmas church service because he was a Puritan and Christmas was 'draped in the rags of popery'. He did however like pudding and turkey and presents.

> I was in Bethlehem this year where the Greek and Armenian priests hold their annual Christmas punch-up about who gets first dibs on poking their head in the place of Christ's birth. The actual 'supposed' slab where the manger is said to have been placed is filled with candles and is encased in bird wire and looks like a ferret's cage. I must have missed something, because other people were crying in awe. I got the giggles.

> There is supposed to have been a woman who complained aloud in a card shop when she saw a nativity scene on a Christmas card, 'The (*&*&%^&$ church! They try to get religion into everything.'

It's a mess. 

With Father Christmas, Santa Claus, Sinta Klaus, trees, baubles, tinsel,  televised carols by candlelight shows, pudding, charity appeals, suicides, turkey, rampant alcohol abuse, rampant gluttony, rampant present abuse, rampant card abuse, superstition, emotional pap about it being Jesus birthday (spare us!) the invention of Winterval, Chrisukka, Happy Holidays, political appeasement and cultural sensitivity, deaths on the roads and it only being 11 months since last one, I don't know whether to take up arms and oppose the whole thing or just go back to watching the cricket on TV and have another fruit mince pie.

So what's Christmas all about?

Apparently Christmas is about whatever you like, and as long as you don't think your take on it is true, I'm OK with that. My reality is that as long as I get turkey, pudding and a present on Christmas day I'm happy because I celebrate the reality of Jesus everyday of the year and that he took action and conquered death and that he is not the reason for the season but he is in fact The Season and will remain so, day after punishing day, until the Great Day when we shall know him as he is.

Big Hearing-from-God incidents.

Big Hearing-from-God incidents. There is some confusion for people about whether God actually directs our paths, whether God speaks at all today or whether it's all up to us to use our God-given brains. In most of the decisions I've made to take this or that path I didn't ever hear a 'Word from God' as it were, such as 'God told me to become a member of  Franchise Association.' So I am today mostly a result of stumbling along from ditch to disaster with only the occasional meadow of flowers, and that wasn't how I thought it was supposed to be. So if you feel as though you have been ditched, I write this to say, it does work out in the wash. I have had many astounding interventions but this one takes the cake. The strongest leading or direction or intervention I've ever had was when we moved to Port Pirie in 1976 to work with Pastor Bill Wheatland. He and I met for prayer on the first morning and I asked God for a teaching job and Bill Asked for me to get a TV job. I was aghast that he could be so dumb because I had been firmly rejected 2 months before in an interview that lasted 2 minutes after I had driven for 3 hours in 110º heat in an un-airconditioned Ford Cortina .  After prayers I went out job hunting and before morning tea scored a job at the Catholic High School. 'We were wondering how to fill that position for a Year 8 teacher,' said Father Pulis.  I was pretty chuffed.  Meanwhile the Manager of the TV Station (the one who had told me I was totally unsuitable for television) had fallen off his boat the Saturday before I arrived and had broken his arm and the Managing Director had driven in from Sydney to take over. On that Monday morning, his PA found my letter from 3 months before wedged between two files in the engineering filing cabinet and said, 'Jim. you might like to read this.' It was within minutes of the time Bill was praying that I would get a job on the telly. The rest is history. By 2:00 PM I had a job at the TV station presenting a children's show for 15 minutes a day. After a week he turned it into a 2 hour show and after two months made me Sales Manager for the network. After 2 years Channel 7 offered me a job in the Children's Production Unit in Adelaide. I've hardly been out of a TV or video production since. It was the single key that opened my life into selling, speaking all over Australia, New Zealand, 28 states of the USA, and 15 or more other countries. It paved the way for writing books, making training packages and best of all – meeting YOU. Nevertheless I struggled for years and years over the fact that it was not a straight shady path with chocolate-crepe stands along the way and that if God had so clearly changed my direction how come it wasn't 'nice' all day and every day. There were personality clashes, role-confusions, financial struggles and deep misgivings about whether I was in the right place – even a life-long struggle with the slobbering three-headed black dog of depression. That often made me wonder if I'd made it up as well as messed it up, too many times to count. Looking back I can only say, God has been directing my path like a chess piece knight being moved at right angles, one square here, two squares there, two sideways, one back, waiting for the bishops, pawns and castles to move into my path or to be positioned for the taking. That one incident though was too God-like to be disputed.  In the middle of it I felt lost more often than not, but 36 years later I can see it all as clear as day.  God does direct our paths— pulls us out of ditches, saves us in disasters and when we realise it, often sits us in flowery meadows. So trust in the Lord with all your heart and he will direct your path. Anyway To infinity and beyond. Live long and prosper. Colin Pearce Address: Unsubscribe / View in your

Do you hear the voice of God?

Do you hear the voice of God?

I have nearly finished my novel – part of my M.A. in Humanities (Creative Writing). 

The characters – four bratty kids – live in Galilee at the time of Christ. At one stage, trying to work out whether the miracle-working rabbi is the real deal they ask their old Greek teacher Zoticus a question about their studies of Homer:

'What do you think about the way Homer's gods spoke to men, Master Z? Have you ever heard the voice of God.’

He looked away to the sky outside and sighed, ‘Only in  the songs of birds, the wailing of foxes, the howling of wolves, the rumble of thunder, the singing of children, the pleas of beggars, the moans of the hungry, the whimpers of the sick,  the whispers of a lover,  the tears of a widow, the laughter of babies, the humming of bees,

Addy and Okky pretended to be enthralled by Master Z’s word pictures and said in a mocking tone,

'and the wind in the trees,
and waves in the seas,
and a flag in a breeze
and a donkey’s big sneeze,
and a grandfather’s knees
and a dog scratching fleas
and Master Z. eating cheese.'

At that Master Z pretended to be cross with us and sent us out to clear our heads and get some sunshine.

So I ask you: Are you waiting for the big announcement from the sky or are you in tune with God's voice in your day-to-day events and encounters? He's speaking but you have to listen.

Anyway

To infinity and beyond.

Live long and prosper.