Posts from February 2015

The doctor’s waiting room is crowded and despite the fact that you have an appointment your expected ten-minute wait drags out to an hour of paging through the magazines you don’t really feel like reading. Meanwhile your stress levels increase considerably and by the time you are called in you’re ready to give the doctor a serve about keeping to schedules. Scenes like this are all too familiar for most of us. Maybe in your case it wasn’t the doctor’s…

As one drives up from Sydney towards Uralla on the New England Highway you enter Thunderbolt country. “Captain Thunderbolt” (Frederick Ward) was a notorious Aussie bushranger in the early 1800s. A little before Uralla there is an area with many huge rocks just off the highway which is known as Thunderbolts Hideout. Years ago I travelled that stretch of road frequently on my visits to Toowoomba from Sydney. On one occasion I noticed that someone had painted some “Christian Graffiti”…

I note that there’s yet another book out about someone who claims they made a visit to heaven while being clinically dead. An earlier book on that theme sold more than five-million copies and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. I’m tempted to say that the author must be laughing all the way to the bank – except that it would be very ungracious of me to say that – and besides, the author is a pastor…

Some words that we use are very expressive. One such word is ‘homesick’. No! It doesn’t mean that I’m sick of being at home; it means that I’m sick because of my intense longing for home. Migrants typically experience homesickness. Some get over their homesickness very quickly; others struggle with it for a long time – even years. Some can’t get over their homesickness at all and decide to return to their former country. I have spoken to others who…