Ramble from Singlets to Kashmir

Another "you know you're a Queenslander when" moment over the long weekend - I packed for 2 days/nights away and arrived to discover the following:

* Shirts = 3 x Bonds singlets (albeit different colours)
* Shorts = cut off trackies
* Shoes = thongs only
and although it was rainy when I packed ....
* Sunscreen, hat and sunglasses - but no umbrella.

Hi-Larious.

So here we are in April (bloody-near over actually) and there's nothing to explain the thundering lack of output/blogging/writing/inspired living from me.

I've been thinking a lot, but that doesn't really translate well to paper when I put it like that. The stuff I've been thinking about has lead to the odd catchy little brain-burp, but I'm quite keen at putting something a little more substantive than a burp together. Of course, that leads to the cycle of producing nothing at all. *sigh* But I will prevail! Even if I do so in a singlet top and cut-off tracky daks. You love me for my wit and vim (thankfully. If you love me at all of course) and not for my sartorial tastes which were never strong have waned and died a wilted death here in sub-tropical land.

Today I wrote a post card to Aunt in NZ and talked to a man who is passionate about building a bakery in an African village. I have been curious about this "let's help the Africans" approach to helping people and I feel a bit uncomfortable that we prefer to help those who are far away, and possibly a lot easier to patronise. So I asked Renee, who is both a church person and an African helper, and she said that her church goes to Africa to build orphanages and wells and so on because people to help are easier to find and accept the help. Huh. I hadn't thought of that part. Apparently the food baskets for poor folk were rejected by local persons of need simply because they came from a Church group (she's some kind of Uniting Church type denomination- not a weirdo/full-on-cult. Although I know that for some readers *any* Christian is cult-y enough). So folks, if you're wondering which charity to support here in Australia - go with the Smith Family - we're much more of a secular country than the media and pollies like to admit.

I don't know how I got onto a religious thing... oh yeah, Easter and crucifixion (My 13 year old Niece said "What's crucifixion?" wish I'd been able to get to that age without knowing that!) so Compass had the British theologian Robert Beckford on (in the last of the 2 part doco called "The Hidden Story of Jesus") following many things including the trail of the (heretical!) Gospels of Thomas and the just-so-crazy-it-might-work story (that pisses everybody off) that the big J didn't die on the cross but scarpered to Kashmir where he preached on, married and had a family and eventually was buried. Hi-Larious! I love that. Particularly the tiny little old guy with a bazillion pieces of paper and clues that point to it being true, but neither church wants it to be true, so very inconvenient!
Turns out I really like British theologian Robert Beckford. (Not to be confused with Michael Beckwith. Who, you-know, is also ok, but slightly too Hollywood for my tastes) He's not afraid to keep it all mixed up. More chaos, that's what we need, more chaos in good ways, and the thing with chaos is that it is very likely that you can't tell what's good and what's not for a long time after.

Except for Alan Moore, he's good right now.