GordonMoyes.com

I have been accused of many things, but I have never been accused of having excessive humility. Yet Jesus told us to have the humility of a child. I wonder why Jesus made the promise that the greatest among us would be those who become as little children? Humble greatness is required in adults. We are to repent, turn, to become as little children.

So what really makes someone between the ages of 13 and 24 happy? It’s not what most parents or even MTV might think. According to an extensive survey, spending time with family makes the young cohort happiest. Next was spending time with friends and then a significant other.

57 years ago, 110 boys, all in grey suits, short pants, ties and caps, started in year 7 (form 1) at the Box Hill Boys High School, Victoria. I was one of them. The school had 850 boys in 1951 and recently I joined with over 300 of them at a dinner in the Box Hill Town Hall.

We have been successful in allowing CDP members to present their views on issues concerning their attitudes to Muslim immigrants. As we expected a majority of members agree with our current immigrant policy, but it was surprising that 95% of respondents wanted a moratorium against Muslim immigrants extended indefinitely. In other words our members do not want any immigrants to our country who are Muslims. No thinking person can understand how a nation could hold a selective immigration policy based on religious discrimination.

A person becomes what he thinks about. Have you ever evaluated what you think of yourself and the world in which you live? Paul gives us an outline of positive thinking in Philippians 4:8-9.

The elections have not changed anything in Zimbabwe. The old leader has been defeated but he will not accept that the people do not want him. Mr Mugabe believes that after twenty eight years he is indispensable. As a Catholic he says that God wants him to stay. The people don’t want him for they have defeated his party in the Parliamentary elections. He is not improving his country one bit while clinging to power. He does not accept the will of the people and will demand a fresh election.

I am a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Over all these years I have been in Parliament, and those years of being the Superintendent at Wesley Mission, I have never ceased to preach the Gospel and most Sundays I am in some pulpit in some church somewhere. There is real joy in preaching in churches of all denominations these days as well as in my own.

Two weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph reported (Tuesday April 08, 2008) that youth homelessness has doubled in the past 20 years and it will take at least $300 million to fix the problem, a national inquiry has revealed. The number of homeless teenagers aged 12 to 18 has doubled to 22,000 in the last two decades, according to the National Youth Commission’s (NYC) Australia’s Homeless Youth report. In total, at least 36,000 young people under 25 are homeless on any given night. The problem is so severe that 50 per cent of young people seeking a bed in supported accommodation are turned away because services are full.

I was on a bus passing Randwick Racecourse last week, and some of the comments I overheard on the subject of World Youth Day were pretty stroppy. Traffic, so the feeling went, should trump transcendence. It’s not the first time I have heard the view that a dying and increasingly irrelevant religion should not be allowed to bring this city to a halt.

During the past week Charles Stuart University made several significant presentations at Parliament House. The first was by the University’s distinguished Professor of Theology, Rev Dr Professor James Haire A.M., KSJ, MA, PhD, DD, Dlitt, DUniv. Professor Haire is the Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. He has had a distinguished career as an academic and missionary. He is a foremost teacher on the relationship between Islam and Christianity having spent thirty-six years as a missionary in Indonesia. He was appointed by the Indonesian Government to the Commission on the causes of the armed conflict in the Malaccas, Sumatra and Ambon provinces.