Heather Dowling, Revive editor, shares some useful tips for surviving the Christmas and New Year season.Continue Reading
Messages from the aether: Surviving the festive season
Opinion
Editorial: Congratulations GSI!
Good Samaritan Industries (GSI) is one of my favourite parts of the Uniting Church.
I’ve grown up shopping at Good Sammy stores, not only for the bargain but because my mum always taught us to be thoughtful about what we were buying, and that re-using second-hand clothes was better than piling them up in landfill. Continue Reading
Moderator’s column: You will have trouble
The Nobel Peace prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn knew first-hand the harsh realities of suffering.
He spent over ten years imprisoned in a Soviet gulag. It seems that the daily deprivations of prison life were somehow able to stimulate a creative genius in him. His books are now literary classics. His novel, One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, the book Solzhenitsyn considered his best, focuses on a prisoner, Shukov. This remarkable man accepted horror, pain and suffering as normative. A typical day would consist of forced labour, tiny rations and brutal guards, with disease and death never far away. Continue Reading
The Holy Book
Lilian Parker, from Boyup Brook Uniting Church, wrote this poem and shared it with her congregation during worship. It was so loved in church, that she was encouraged to send it in to Revive to share with the wider Uniting Church WA.
The Holy Book
What is this book, old yet new
This book mastered by just a few
A book of knowledge a book of love
A book of death, joy, no matter, never enough
In this book you’ll find how to live and live right
Following its directions keeping its words insight
Many stories for you to peruse and enjoy
Perfect for children, girl or boy.
There are sad yet wonderful events to be read
Some like poetry with lots to be said.
Prophecy, future told by many an interesting man
The books of Moses tell how it all began.
The history of our past is sometimes hard to bear
But read on to the Gospels and you won’t care.
History of the Church by St Paul in the book of Acts.
Many books of letters written on truth and facts.
This book tells of a man born like us to a girl
A man of purity, healing, sinless, miracles unfurl.
A teacher of life, doing marvellous things
Dying on the cross, our salvation he brings
Then we read about the future in Revelation
It is the final book from the birth of creation.
What is this book that made such impacts
A book written without error, complete with all its facts.
A collection of 66 books filled with God’s word to you and me,
Over one thousand and five hundred years and forty writers to make it be.
It is the Bible, the Good News, a message to get into our face,
It is the truth, God-breathed, unabridged, filled with God’s grace.
Lilian Parker
Messages from the aether: Promoting peace
Every day, we are in a position to create peace in our lives and for the people around us. If you need some positive ways to promote peace, Elsa Samuel recommends these sites. Continue Reading
Review: The Wind Blows Where it Chooses
The Wind Blows Where it Chooses, by Kevin Treston, Coventry Press, 2018
Kevin Treston’s passion is communicating faith in our context. His focus on emerging Christianity might be summed up in words of Bernard Häring: “If the church does not listen to the world, the world will never listen to the church.”
Treston seeks to listen well, noting consumerism, materialism, loss of ultimate meaning, disconnection between humans and the natural world, and Christian reluctance to reframe the Christ story within the universe story, among others. He advocates engagement with the paradoxes and ambiguities of life.
Treston also seeks to read the Gospels for this time and a need to reconsider tradition. For instance, he sees an obsession with sin as needing to be reframed, and describes resurrection as a cosmic event – for the whole of creation and not just humans. He follows with discussion about the life of the church and personal spirituality, ending with ‘Reflections,’ where he offers specific means of enriching spiritual life.
Treston aims at enabling conversations that promote holistic approaches to Christian faith and life. Although a Roman Catholic, he seeks to speak to all Christians to encourage connection with people, so that the gospel may be shared in this context.
Ian Tozer
Review: The Girl in the Ice
The Girl in the Ice: by Robert Bryndza, Hachette, 2017
The Girl in the Ice, an international bestseller, is the first book in the Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Erika Foster by British writer, Robert Bryndza.
Erika returns to work prematurely after some time off from a botched drug raid, where her bad judgement resulted in the death of her police officer husband and some team members. This traumatic experience leaves her a changed woman, harbouring a sea of guilt. Known for her skill in closing rape and murder cases, she answers a call from the South London police department to step in as the lead investigator of a highly publicised homicide investigation.
Andrea Douglas-Brown, found frozen in a lake in South London, is a beautiful, wealthy socialite and daughter of a prominent businessman and influential Labour Peer who demands justice for his daughter’s brutal death. Erika’s mission is to find the killer, manage police politics, deal with Andrea’s family and patch up her broken life. Despite the push back from her police peers and Andrea’s family, Erika is tenacious and her nononsense style made me want to high five her.
“Now, DCI Sparks, you are in danger of contaminating the crime scene. If you wish to continue to observe, I’ll ask that you follow proper procedure, suit up and shut up.”
She does comes across as cold, sometimes irrational, but as her story unfolds throughout the book, we see her vulnerability beneath the hard exterior. I admired her determination to do the right thing, even if it means pushing for answers until it physically hurts. The closer she was to connecting the dots, the more her life was at risk. Continue Reading
