Last week a 27 year old Australian woman was found guilty of smuggling 4.1 kg marijuana into Bali last October and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Schapelle Corby emphatically declared all along that she is innocent and that the drugs had to have been planted in her luggage.
This case has had huge media attention in Australasia where 90% of Australians believe she is innocent and national outrage at Indonesia is marginally short of explosive. There are troubling aspects to the case that do give rise to considerable doubt, but the Indonesian judges delivered a well reasoned verdict concluded on points of law that could not be refuted - she had been caught with the drugs in her luggage and could not convincingly prove her innocence.

Indonesian jails are hell-holes and her survival will likely depend on her family providing food for her daily as none is provided. Pictures taken inside Kerobokan jail where she has been held for the past nine months reveal cramped squalid living conditions for the up to five people who sleep, eat and wash in a triangular-shaped cell less than 3×3m in size. Prisoners can only wash themselves with a small bucket and ladel, use a hole in the floor as a toilet, and with only one bunk bed per room some are forced to sleep on the floor. Little natural light comes into the grubby cells where prisoners are forced to spend 20 hours per day.
The Prosecution is lodging an appeal to have her "lenient" sentence increased (maximum penalty being death by firing squad) while the Australian Government is looking at possible political solutions.

Since her arrest Schapelle has been allowed to attend church services in jail and was described as having a new-found faith. She reportedly spends much time in prayer and it is not difficult to understand how anyone in her shoes would naturally want, and probably be asking for, nothing short of the whole terrible nightmare to end.

I don't objectively know if she is innocent or not, but I am certainly troubled by her situation. I don't know how I would manage to survive if that was me in her place, knowing that this is Earth and not Heaven therefore truth and justice are not guarranteed to rule. On Earth, pinning hopes on such things can be totally futile. Thousands of prisoners rot in such places in this world and certainly don't get the media attention afforded this particular case.
If that was me, should I be hopeful that God might intervene and secure a miraculous release? Is that what Schapelle was praying for? But what if God doesn't intervene and do what I want Him to do? Who says God has to do what I want Him to do? Am I greater than He is, to be telling Him what to do? Oh, I can by all means ask… we are instructed to ask and to keep on asking, and asking and asking.
I wonder how long a new-found faith will hold out under such circumstances if there is no miraculous release, and maybe the Prosecution is successful in having the sentence increased to Life Imprisonment, or even Death. What happens then?

I think there are some choices.
How about an infant-type temper tantrum, throwing toys out of the sandpit, screaming in angry defiance, refusing to accept anything else instead, and sulking in mortal misery? That would be self-indulgent, and rather painful.
Or coming to the conclusion that God does not exist since He won't prove it by doing as He is told? That would be arrogant and self-defeating as well.
But there is another option.
How about doing what we are actually expected to do since being born - that is, get on with growing up instead? In the end, the latter option is really the only viable one in any circumstances.

Some (but not all) of my beliefs that help me to grow up (and I've still got a lot of that to do!) include the following:
1. I am not Number One - God is. He is in charge, not me. It is He who calls the shots. I don't.
2. God is my Creator - I am His creature. I exist only by His grace and favour.
3. I have stewardship, but not ownership, of those things given to me - my possessions, my time, my self, my life. They do in fact belong to Him for use according to His purposes. I am to serve Him by being a servant to others and sharing what I have.
4. God is real and has a relationship with me in which He expects me to be real as well - that is to be honest, authentic, close, and surrendered to whatever is His Will for me.
5. This world I live in is only my temporary home. But while I am here, where I am found is where He will use me, no matter where that is, no matter what situation I am in, no matter what is happening nor what outcome there may be.

Growing up is not about being self seeking, self indulgent and wanting one's own way regardless of how desperately that may be the case. It is more about removing the focus from self to God and one's neighbour instead. These were the summation commandments that Jesus told the Pharisees:

Matthew 22: 37 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

And when I am tempted to protest and stage some kind of temper tantrum, it helps me to stop and remember Jesus, His terrible agony and His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane that night before his trial and crucifixion.

Luke 22: 39 Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. 40 On reaching the place, he said to them, "Pray that you will not fall into temptation." 41He withdrew about a stone's throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, 42"Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." 43An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. 44And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

Thinking of what Jesus went through on the behalf of us all, the terrible cruelty of scourging and crucifixion, my own situation pales into total insignificance by comparison. Despite His extreme anguish and suffering, He did this obediently and willingly out of His great love for us. I am a long way from being grown up, but I know there is no point crying like a baby when God my Father intends to use the circumstances of my life, no matter what they are, so that I may grow to become like Jesus.

I will be praying for Schapelle and her new-found faith. Her situation is terrible, but if God does not see to her release from jail, then her opportunity to grow and serve Him in this situation is immense as well. Not knowing what He has planned for her, I pray that by His grace her new faith will mature to sustain her regardless, that she will not give in to despair and hopelessness, and that her relationship with Him will remain real no matter what lies ahead.

Sometimes people talk funny.

A classic example in this country is when a receptionist type person wants to know your name.
The question put is this: "What was your name?"
Sometimes the ratbag in me escapes and I choose a response from one of the following…
- You want my maiden name? (said with some surprise)
- Same as it was before. (said nodding enthusiastically)
- It hasn't changed lately. (said with a slight head shake)

I get the most amazed stares when I do that.
So I repeat my response, or swap it for one of the others to see if that goes down any differently.
Usually it doesn't at all.
Eventually I have to come to the rescue with (said as though I have just made a discovery) "Oh, you mean you want to know what is my name?"
By then the poor hapless receptionist type, fixing me with smouldering eyes, is quite ready to arrange my admission to some asylum as far away as possible.

Today I heard another quaint little gem.
The receptionist concerned was talking to the caller on the other end of the phone, someone who did not cause too much of a problem when asked what was her name.
The next question was "How do I spell that?"
Had that been asked of me, my ratbag would likely have replied "Well, I guess that is up to you. I can't really answer that."

Oh, you really meant to ask "How do you spell that?" Silly me. I should have corrected the pronoun for you. Well I guess I just did.

Why don't people say what they really mean?

OK, time to trot off and digest another helping of the dictionary.

I'm a bit of a C.S. Lewis fan and have read quite a few of his books.
One of them, which he said was very hard to write because he had to think from an awkward perspective, was his very popular "Screwtape Letters" .
In this book he had a senior devil, Screwtape, tutoring and encouraging his nephew, Wormwood, in the ways of guiding humans through a life of self-seeking misery to eternal damnation.

Another author has since followed the same idea but given it an interesting extra dimension.
Randy Alcorn, also a C.S. Lewis fan, has written "Lord Foulgrin's Letters" where he likewise has a senior devil, Lord Foulgrin, teaching and supervising an apprentice in the techniques for misguiding humans towards their own destruction.
Alcorn's other dimension is the inclusion (in alternate chapters) of a typical middle-class "family man" with ho-hum marriage, impending affair, miserable wayward kids, corporate job pressures, materialism and consumerism, and all the usual ordinary stuff of daily life.

Foulgrin has his work cut out for him when the man is befriended by a Christian who challenges some of the man's thinking and poses a different perspective. The battle for the soul ensues and the tricks and strategies expounded in Foulgrin's letters makes excellent teaching on spiritual matters.
Alcorn is as orthodox as Lewis, and I have now read many of his critics (both Christian and non-Christian) who will argue this way and that, but agree in unison that he is Scripturally accurate in everything that he writes.
Having already read Screwtape, I appreciated Foulgrin as well.

Why I mentioned this book was that the man in the story, having become a Christian despite all the efforts of Foulgrin and his apprentice, decides he must share the Gospel message with his dying father, a cynical and rather unpleasant person.
Just as he begins to do so, in walks the hospital chaplain who is of the type that has a watered-down faith such that he is completely insipid and useless, indeed dangerously worse. He says supposedly reassuring things about everyone going to heaven regardless, that "there is a little bit of Jesus in everyone" and other such weird euphemistic non-Christian notions.
Of course the father latches on to all this and uses it to stop hearing the truth, while the namby-pamby lukewarm minister smiles benignly and reassures everyone that God is love and that is all that matters. He makes Jesus into a complete non-issue, Foulgrin having the minister well under his thumb.

Since beginning to read the Bible more critically for myself in the last couple of years, I have discovered so much of that which I was taught was not always Scripturally accurate, and much that did have a significant bearing on things was simply left out.

A classic example is the standard "God is love" without the all important "God is righteous and holy" and what ramifications that has in combination, each one on the other.
I had decided it was completely unfair that God should hold us all responsible for what Adam and Eve once did – after all, we had not even been born! - and if he was also a just God, as is so often claimed, then that simply couldn't be so. He would naturally love us too much not to welcome us all into heaven, no matter what, let alone condemn us for something someone else did long before we were born.
It was C.S. Lewis and his exposition of moral guilt in another book "Mere Christianity" (together with some help from my friends) that suddenly made sense of it for me.
It should have been made to make sense way back in the very beginning, except that the unqualified "God is love" and "therefore everything will be fine regardless" message (which makes Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection, largely irrelevant) was the one that I had been given instead.
That was certainly not the message of the Jesus in the Bible.
And as one of my friends pointed out, if you don't regard the message of that particular Jesus, then you can have any Jesus you care to imagine - but he just won't be the same one that this whole thing is about.

Oh, and wouldn't Screwtape and Foulgrin both be so pleased!

Read more:
Lord Foulgrin’s Letters
The Screwtape Letters

Have you ever noticed how critics so often put themselves above the object of their criticism?
A critic being someone who was not fooled, someone really cool, someone who so often knows better.

Did I really know much (if any) more than whoever selects quotations for our morning newspaper?
You could say that whoever selected a quotation may have meant for some nitpicky type to have some kind of reaction, and hopefully blog about it somewhere to add further energy to the ripples radiating out from centre.
Maybe I was just a pawn in a little game. And even worse, maybe I was so gullible that I had not even recognized my humble place in the far greater scheme of things?

OK, time to reframe the whole thing…

That was not criticism - it was merely an observation. I was not playing the critic - I was just an observor.
An observor has a more comfortable role, there on the sidelines, not actually participating, not really doing anything for which they could possibly be called accountable, a kind of lack-courage position.
Oh-oh, maybe that's not so comfortable either. After all, I wouldn't want anyone to see anything in me that could have me branded a coward!

How about musings? I was just thinking, mulling over aloud, generously sharing some private thoughts.
Yes, that sounds much better. That shows I actually have something surrounding the ventricles enclosed by my skull, and even some of their number appear connected and firing, randomly though that may be. I probably won't have to be so accountable for musings. Perhaps even the ancient Muses had something to do with it, and I was just converting to words primordial vibrations detected from the cosmic unconscious… or something like that?

Oh yes, Judah, how much you like to think in spirals and tangents, playing the sounds of words in an orchestra of meanings, following will o' the wisps in the marshes of musings! I know you, Judah, you're pulling our legs!
Who me? You know I wouldn't do that. Well, don't you?

Beware of musings!
Cognition precedes behaviour, and beneath our thoughts lie our beliefs and attitudes from which they were born. Our thoughts may well be the little piggies in the middle, but no matter what their names (criticism, observation, musings) it is the little piggies that will eventually have their way.
Beware the little piggies!

A blog it is a funny thing
Full of words, a song to sing
A way of saying what I like
As ratbag, rascal, little tyke

What I write is what I think
The moment paper contacts ink
Or keyboard keys depress on touch
Just as my gears of thought declutch

You who read may have your say
Click on "comments", do I pray
Add your bit and share a line
Have your piggies play with mine!

Oink oink?

I have just noticed that our morning newspaper quotes a couple or so Bible verses in a little corner advertisement, probably meant to inspire us throughout the day.

Today's words were from Romans, chapter 2, verses 6-8

God will give to each person according to what he has done. To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honour and immortality, he will give eternal life. But to those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger.

My teenager told me today that his cousin had said he must come to her sister's dinner party. I believed it was unlikely my niece would have put it that way, so I asked what exactly were her words.

Son: "Would you come to the party?"
Me: "But that is asking you, not telling you."
Son: "But I thought she meant she wanted me to come."
Me: "She might well like you to come, which could be why she was asking you. But I don't hear her telling you to come."

So much fiction is passed around in conversations, the senders telling what they believe to be true, the receivers believing what they think they are hearing, and all the while the real substance of the message is becoming tweaked, coloured and thereby lost in transmission. What originally stood up to rational inquiry rightly falls over later due to irrational embellishments, context gets changed, and what is heresay becomes honoured with the same credibility as eye-witness accounts.
The same goes for reading something that is written.
It is so much easier (and lazier) to "read into something" by neglecting to think rationally about what those words actually meant. A lot of personal "hidden agendas" sneak into the message that way.
My son clearly had one in the conversation quoted above, wanting to go to the party and thinking his cousin would have more sway with me than himself.
Sometimes these agendas are conscious, a deliberate dishonest manipulation of meaning, but more often than not they are simply bad habits of thinking that lead eventually to believing misinformation without even the awareness anymore to discern truth from falsehood.
Thereby we deceive ourselves and distort our own perceptions.

Are you sure what you have read is indeed what I wrote?
Are you sure what you have heard is indeed what I said?