Avatar Movie and its pantheistic push

Yesterday I had a chance to watch "Avatar" in 3D at the movies, the latest hollywood mega blockbuster which is starting to break box office records. It was an enjoyable movie and entertaining as you'd expected. Two nagging thoughts lingered in my mind after the movie though. You could see the post-modern influence - man with it's technological advances, fighting a primitive alien tribal group. It is the primitive tribal group which triumphs and portrayed as more noble. Secondly, the pantheism in the movie. The object of worship of the Navi (the alien tribal group) is a tree which has life giving properties. It reminds me of the movies by Japan's most well known and respected movie director, Miyazaki Hayao ("Spirited Away" and other animated movies) which has a similar pantheistic push.

It is sad to see people to reject the true creator of this universe to worship a tree.

"When people cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in everything" G.K. Chesteron

Christmas 2009

Lisa's family Boxing Day

With my family Christmas Day

We weren't expecting to be in Sydney this Christmas so it was an wonderful blessing to be with family and friends this Christmas. There was lots of food, time with family and too many presents.

Target Asia

Last month we shared at the OMF Target Asia meeting along with other missionaries on home assignment, missionaries preparing to leave for the field and short-termers who had recently returned. OMF Australia organise 4 Target Asia meetings per year. I find them extremely helpful in finding out what God is doing in other parts of Asia and working in the lives of people. Unfortunately, the majority of the attendees (apart from those who were there to share) were older people. What would be do without these faithful and prayerful older people? How can we get younger people to attend these great meetings?

The next Target Asia meeting is on Saturday 20 February. I encourage you to go if you live in Sydney. The meeting is for the morning only and concludes with Lunch together. Contact OMF Australia for details.

Kiama. The best place in the world?

Last week we had a week's holiday in Kiama, which is about 2 hours drive south of Sydney. Lisa's parent's were able to join us for the first 3 days and my parents for the final 3. It was so good to be able to have our parents on holidays with us to help look after the children and help with cooking and cleaning so that it actually could be a sort of holiday for us and not just looking after the children.

Lisa's parents met an English couple on holidays in Kiama and they claimed that it was the best place in the world! I don't know about that but we certainly had a lovely time there and there were plenty of things to do with a young family. We went to beach most days were our eldest son started to get into body surfing. There were great parks and paths for the kids to scoot on. In the last couple of days we went fishing which was great fun (for me and hopefully for everyone else too). At night with the washing up done by our mother's while we were putting the kids to bed, we could actually have a couple of hours at night to relax. Nice.

All in all it was a fantastic holiday and it ended all too quickly.

Pain and the Chinese acupuncture man

Last Sunday morning I was helping one of sons in the bathroom and I just leaned forward when I felt a jolt of excruciating pain in my lower back. I couldn't get back up again so I had to drag myself across the floor and spent some time resting on my back. I've never had any problems with my back apart from some minor niggles which always went away so I was hoping that within a couple of hours I'd be o.k. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I was able to start walking again but with considerable pain. My parents called a Chinese man who'd helped my uncle's back with acupuncture and he was able to come that evening. I was willing to try anything at that stage if it would fix the problem.

He told me to lie on my stomach. He dug into my back with his thumbs to see where the pain was and then started to stick the pins in for acupuncture. That wasn't too bad until he started to twirl the pins around while they were still in my back and then it started to hurt. I thought I was just in for acupuncture, but then he starts grabbing my legs and twists my back to manipulate my spine. It was the most pain I've felt in my life and I was screaming in pain. The kids had been watching up until that stage but then they were led away. At that point I thought calling this man might have been a grave mistake. I was concerned that he was doing more harm than good. All would have been forgiven if at the end all my pain had disappeared. Unfortunately, I was a little better but still in considerable pain. I'm slowly getting better but there is still a lot of pain when walking and my mum notices that my right hip is higher than my left when I walk. Fortunately, Lisa's back is not too bad right now, otherwise we'd be in a lot of bother. I'm praying that it continues to get better day by day.