Dear Friends,

Mary and I recently had occasion to tell a little of our story as we talked with the young adults of our Waihi church over two Sundays. For me it was an encouraging experience both in preparation and delivery as I reviewed some of the milestones and kind of celebrated afresh the activity of God throughout the journey that spans seven calendar decades. It was also awe-inducing to acknowledge the huge variety of people, places, opportunities, adventures, risks, sufferings, and mistakes that have made up the richness of the years, two thirds of which we have shared with one another.

It is a Biblical thing to construct memorials marking the actions of God. We have not physically done this but we can mark places where events and experiences have occurred, some of which we would quite like to visit again, and others we probably want to avoid. It was good to reflect on some of the portions of Scripture that have been significant to me for shorter or longer periods.

One such is Ecclesiastes 7:29 (Good News Bible): God made us plain and simple but we have made ourselves very complicated. I first encountered this in about 1976 when it immediately made sense to me. Now it does have a negative if you take it to extreme in that it can be an excuse for not thinking through issues seriously or well enough. But the blessing is our faith relationship with Heavenly Father does not have to be complicated. Multifaceted maybe but so simple that a child can know the reality thereof. “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.........”