Speaking of choices there were three dinner meals – Jon chose the beef stew, I chose Korean rice and received it in three sealed containers to mix together and another container of hot sea weed soup. I think the way Koreans eat must be very healthy. They all seem slim and trim. The meals have more than one watery soup served with. Surely this is significant, too. Last night, in the traditional food restaurant we enjoyed with Hongs, there were four soups, plus 15 other dishes (!).
Jon has been reading along at Leonard Sweets’ book, The Real Church in a Social Network World, and shared with me these thoughts today:
“Not only did Jesus dislike eating alone, He ate with just about anybody. He was an equal opportunity relationship builder. It was in His DNA to invite the strange as well as the stranger into a table relationship. It makes sense when you consider Jesus’ actual DNA. A Moabite woman, Ruth, a forbidden foreigner stands at the start of the Davidic line of Jesus. The book of Ruth ends with the genealogy of David where there is not only Jew but Moabite and when Jesus said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me, he was instructing: share table companionship with Moabites and Levites, with idolatrous outsiders like Ruth, and adulterous insiders like David” (Sweet 27).
In the Brisbane airport, the customs’ scrutiny seems tighter than other places. They used a small dog to check out our bags. He discovered something in my backpack so the officials opened it and found a small Tupperware that had some fruit juice in it from the cut up melon we had brought and eaten in the plane. Way to sniff, doggie!
We had sent our picture to John Kerr who walked up to us as we walked through customs. He and his wife, Lorraine are parents of a friend of ours, Jillian, from European Nazarene College days. We wrote to her when we were considering a stop in Australia for this trip, and she encouraged us to come and volunteered her very mission minded parents, “retired” pastors to help us get settled in, since she lives
5-6 hours away from Brisbane. Help us they did! With such a loving, kindred spirits. We had a great day with them. They were the perfect welcoming team for us. Thank you, Jillian! Thank you, John and Lorraine.
As we wheeled our 4 suitcases to their car, we noticed a nice feature about airport parking – there are fixtures of led lights along the backside of the parking spaces. When a car is there, when lights are red, when the space is free, the lights are green, so drivers can simply look down the row of lights to find an open space. Clever, huh?
We traveled in their car from the airport on the NE corner of the city to the college south of the city, in a place called “Thornlands” so we had good time to talk with them. We found out that they are currently church planting in the North part of Brisbane where there are far fewer churches, but previously they pastured and built one church near the college and also pioneered the work of a new district in the huge province of Western Australia that has the cities of Sydney and Perth. They lived in Perth, where their son and four grandsons live now. Lorraine’s father was Greek, so she and her children read Greek. Their son is in a Greek Church of the Nazarene in Perth.
Arriving at Nazarene Theological College of Australia, we met Rev. Bob and Val Thompson, who live in the building where there are guest flats.
The guest-house complex sits in front of a dormitory unit which is not needed for resident students of theology at this time so is leased to a Christian organization called “Transformation” which is a social rehabilitation program for former drug users.
Val showed us several different room arrangements, and we chose Guest Room #3. The complex has a shared kitchen where she assigned us an empty shelf in the cupboard and in the frig for us to use during these days. Kerrs had planned (well) for us to sleep, then to take us to lunch, shopping, then to tour the campus. The planned worked great for us. The two hours of sleep on the plane were off-set with a morning shower and nap, so we were ready for them to take us to Australian Sizzler. The salad bar had several concoctions with greens, seafood, and/or fresh fruit in them. We had a lingering lunch sharing how we came to know the Lord and be called to ministry, discovering people we knew in common, and discussing ministry to Gen Xers. Rich fellowship. We shopped at a local bakery and bought “tiger bread” (like we had in Queluz, Portugal), at an IGA, and Jon bought a cell phone chip so we have a working phone here, the first time in three weeks!
Back on campus, Kerrs took us to the Office building where we met the President, Dr. Bruce Alder, the Dean, Dr. David McEwan, who had helped us via e-mail to get set up for the visit, who I had read and heard at the Global Nazarene Theological Conference in Guatemala. We found out he’s a friend of Filimao Chambo. We also Richard Giesken, Dean of Students, who is South African, from Witbank, which we know well from trips from Maputo into Johannesburg. We set up a few plans for the week: dinner tomorrow at McEwans’, Mateus Divino (?) service Thursday night with Richard, Good Friday with Dr. Bruce and sunrise service at 5:00 a.m. It’s Holy Week!
John Kerr walked us down the road that leads through the 28-acre campus, beautifully wooded with eucalyptus trees. We spied two little wallabies in the grass near one of the faculty houses but they hoped away before we could take a picture. John said kangaroos still show up occasionally, but not as much as before because of the construction of a residential project behind the campus. We heard kookaburras and saw magpies and Asia Minors, a bird new to us.
He showed us the blocks he made to build a building that houses the chapel and the lounge on the ground floor and classrooms on the floor above.
As John led us in prayer before he and Lorraine left to journey northward, he prayed for the new friends who seemed like friends of long, long years. Ahhh, such is the truth we experience in the family of God, and even more especially in the Nazarene family of God. Imagine what fellowship is going to be in heaven!
For me sleep deprivation was a stronger force than hunger for anything to eat. For Jon, his sneezing and coughing was moving to his chest and he was fevered, so we fell into comfortable beds by 7:30 p.m. Now even the kookaburras’ chatter can’t bother us. Zzzzzzzzzz.
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