GordonMoyes.com

If I was in charge, then the next Young Australian of the Year would be Sophie Delezio. It is impossible to imagine what the recent years have been like for Sophie Delezio and her friend Molly Wood.

The first thing you notice is his size. He is head and shoulders above everyone. And his shoulders – they are wider than the barn door. He often wears shorts to church (ours is a relaxed fellowship!) and that is when you realize his thighs are like tree trunks.

All over the USA are thousands of theme parks, each one different from the last, and each one bring life to cities and remote country towns. All of them together cannot satisfy the American thirst to be entertained.
Communities scratch in the dust of their history frantic to find some historical event from the past that will give them a hook upon which to hang their future, much the same way as Glenrowen is Ned Kelly’s town and the Eureka Stockade gives life to Ballarat.

OK. It was not the sort of thing that people who know me would expect me to be doing – speaking at the opening of a sex shop. And even though I have spoken at the opening of more than four hundred buildings – retirement villages, nursing homes, hospitals, children’s homes, unemployment training centres, educational facilities, – this was the first of its type I have even been in, let alone officially opened. And why have a prayer at such an opening?

Every federal election has some journalist indicating that this particular one is the most important election since World War Two. Perhaps the election of 2007 was.

Some Christians shudder when another missions offering is announced. Money for local needs. Yes. Money to aid the poor. Yes. Money for outreach. Yes. But why give to missions, whether they be for nations far away, or for the homeless in the inner city, or for indigenous people or for someone’s pet project? This question is raised by people whose God is too small! Understand more about God and you will support His mission.

As a teenager in Christian Endeavour, I was deeply moved when a former missionary to China, Mr H.A.G.Clark, explained how the Christian missionaries in China had been expelled after the Communist take over in 1948 and what was happening to the persecuted Christians left behind. Especially Pearl Anderson. Pearl was a nurse, who had been adopted by Mr and Mrs Albert Anderson, Churches of Christ missionaries in China, after she was abandoned as a baby.

Stephen Lungu began life as the oldest son of a teenage mother, who was married off to a much older man by her parents while living in a black township near Salisbury, Zimbabwe. The marriage was violent and after many attempts, Stephen’s mother eventually took the children and ran away from his father. Worse was to come. Stephen was three years old when his mother abandoned him as well. She had taken Stephen and his younger brother and sister to the local market, where she told Stephen to watch them while she went to the toilet. She did not return.

The ABC TV Program “Compass” over two weeks screened “The Delusion of God” featuring Professor Richard Dawkins. He accused the three main religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – of beliefs that defy science, and of stunting the mind’s capacity for understanding. He embarked on a personal, controversial and, at times, humorous journey [...]

The discovery of your roots in the past, gives meaning to the present and hope for the future. When I was a boy growing up in Box Hill, Victoria, my widowed mother was concerned that I could defend myself against rough boys like the fighting O’Gradys next door. So I went to boxing and [...]