A birthday, family, sadness and spring growth

Last Sunday was my birthday.  I had some friends over for afternoon tea, but didn't take any photos of that - instead, here's the living room decorated before they came :-)

My Aunty Elspeth and cousin Karlene were also visiting Auckland that weekend.  Here they are with Martin at the Oakley Creek waterfall (although they're looking at the waterfall, so it's not visible in the photos).  It was neat to share something so special to me with people who appreciated it so much :-)

Then on Monday morning a friend from university, Rachel, who'd been ill with a heart condition for some time (she'd been ill with it her whole life, in a way, but much worse recently) died in her sleep. Here's Rachel (at the front - it's Jo at the back) at our place for my birthday a few years back.  She was a kind person who was good at noticing people and watching out for them - I will very much miss her and I expect many others will, too.

And spring has come.  Here's the view in our street, plus a few close ups of one particularly impressive blossom tree that I was savouring a day or two ago.

When life sends you lemons ;-)

A bit over a week ago we were in Te Aroha, on holiday with Martin's aunty and uncle.  Their lemon tree was hugely laden with fruit and they sent us home with a big bag :-)  I already had plenty of lemon juice and zest in the freezer, so wasn't initially sure what to do with them.  In the end I made a few jars of Moroccan preserved lemons and a batch of lemon and grapefruit sauce - some for me and some of which will be Christmas presents.

I love the vibrant yellow in the jars :-)

Things I'm learning as life gets rather busy

I've become really busy with Just Kai stuff in the last wee while.  In particular, I recently spoke at two events two weeks apart, followed by speaking with my local MP a few days after the second speaking engagement.  I also managed to get quite a bad cold over that busy period and am now on prednisone to try and clear my lungs and antibiotics to kill the bugs from a secondary bacterial infection.  Life's feeling exciting, but also not hugely sustainable.

I've been thinking a lot about how to respond to all this.  On the one hand, I firmly believe that God healed me so that I can do this work.  So just ditching it doesn't feel like a good option.  But it also all feels like a bit much and I don't believe God wants me to burn out, either.

What to do?

Speaking about Just Kai at Ponsonby Baptist

Sunday nearly two weeks ago I spoke about my Just Kai research at Ponsonby Baptist.  I've written that up on the Just Kai blog here - click through for a few photos as well as a video of the actual presentation kindly compiled by Tim Bulkeley.

A lovely Saturday

Martin and I had a lovely day on Saturday.

In the morning, we went to visit our friend Andrea for breakfast at her place in New Lynn.  Getting there involved initially biking along Ash Street (which is pretty busy and not that pleasant) but then taking a cycle way through Ken Maunder Park.  That bit was really nice - biking along the edge of the Whau and seeing mangroves and ducks, and going across a fun bridge where they'd given the metal decking a grippy surface by embossing it with a repeating pattern of slightly cartoonish numbers :-)  We could have talked all day once we got there (although settled for simply making Andrea late for her next appointment...) and are keen to catch up again before too long.  On the way back we passed kids playing Saturday morning soccer at the the Lynn Avon club, then stopped at the Avondale library to pick up some more violin sheet music for me :-)

In the afternoon we went to the Hollywood theatre in Avondale to watch Inna de Yard, which was showing as part of the NZ International Film Festival.  It was a documentary about a bunch of reggae 'greats' getting together to record an album, and interspersed their music (both at someone's house in the hills above Kingston and at a theatre in Paris) with various of them reflecting on their lives.  The music was fantastic!  I don't exactly follow reggae, but one of my friends in Pittsburgh was from Trinadad and she introduced me to it, so I knew I liked it.  And there was a lot of joy in it, if also a lot of poverty and hardship.  These people live with so much violence - a particularly sobering story was one guy telling how horrified he was to see someone get shot in his front yard, only to have his friend point out that the 'someone' was his own sister.

I think the musicians were all also rastafarians, and Far-I and Jah-jah were referred to frequently.  I would like to have understood more of that.

And, going with the rastafarian theme, almost all of the musicians had impressive dreadlocks (although they don't seem that common in Jamaica as such - not that many people had them in the street scenes), creating a need that doesn't exist in my culture: very tall hats.  There was a wide range of capacious head coverings - from crochet slouch hats to head wraps to exceedingly tall baseball-style caps - to accomodate everyone's voluminous hair :-)

If you'd like to see more, there's stills and links to the trailer here.

All up I biked about 13 km that day (including heaps of up and down!) and managed fine, although I was struggling to stay awake during the second half of the movie - it was fascinating, but all the exercise had made me super-sleepy!

And apologies for not blogging for so long.  The Just Kai stuff has been very time-consuming recently, although that should calm down a bit from the middle of next week :-)

God saving people because other people are righteous

I've grown up with the idea that "God doesn't have grandchildren": if you want to be 'saved' you personally need to repent and ask God for help.  You can't rely on your parents' salvation or, indeed, on anything else.  Recently I've been wondering how Biblical this is.

On plastic straws and lollipop sticks

I'm going for a walk twice a week at the moment, mostly around Oakley Creek and the neighbouring streets and shared path.  As I walk, I pick up rubbish: I ignore things that will biodegrade reasonably quickly, but gather most of the plastic, metal and glass that I see.

I have noticed that I seem to pick up similar numbers of plastic straws and plastic lollipop sticks.  These seem similar to me in terms of environmental harm: if a straw can get stuck in a turtle's nostril, surely so can a lollipop stick?  So why do I see frequent calls for a straw ban (and bans already enacted in many places overseas), yet never a call for a plastic lollipop stick ban?