The 9:04am Sunday ramblings of a sleep deprived, fashion deficit, thirty something mum....

Oooh, I like that stripey t-shirt she is wearing, looks great with those cute shoes.  I don’t know if her bag matches, but I can see the look she is going for.  


Are they cut off jeans? Yes, but why roll them up so high?  Paired with a fluro t-shirt, now I feel old.  I wore fluro in Primary school, I used to wear fluro pink socks with my blue school uniform.  Cringe!  I do like the skirt that lady across the aisle is wearing, the chiffon really flows and looks dreamy, but burgundy and white?  I am not so sure about that. 


I wonder where Miss Z got that grape from?  I certainly didn’t pack any.  


Oh dear, my friend is wearing the same outfit that she wore yesterday.  I couldn’t do that, I would have to wash it.  She obviously doesn’t spill things like I do.  I don’t think she even has BO, she always smells good.  I should ask her what perfume she wears.

Oh a powerpoint, I wonder if there will be any photos, I like photos.  I must put our photos of New Zealand into a Powerpoint, dad has said he would like to see them.  Hmm, it would be lunch time in Auckland, it would be nice to have lunch at that little cafe on the harbour.  Boy I got sunburnt badly on the ferry.  


Hmm, Simon has a new shirt on... I do like blue.  I wonder if Mr Me would wear a shirt like that, probably not, actually then I would have to iron it.  I don’t fancy checking how high the ironing pile is, I bet it is higher that Miss Z by now.  Must get onto that after playgroup this week.  


Haha, Miss A just threw a sultana and it sailed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rows in front, she has quite an arm on her. Oooh, must must must not forget to send out an email about playgroup, have a few new girls coming, that will be nice.  I wonder if Mrs DE will come this year, she is lovely and has nice hair.  I can’t believe she says she doesn’t colour it, I bet she secretly does.  I could go and check her bins, no that would be creepy.

Oh, communion time.  Hmmm, yes, am very thankful for what God has done.  Agree with the sermon? Ummmm.... well..... I suppose I do, I agree with the philosphies upheld in the church.  Hmmm?  God been speaking to me?  Well.... does God really speak to people in the same way he did in the Bible? Yancey said something about that in a book I started reading a while ago....  Yes, the book with the nice cover, blue one with clouds.  I wonder if it would be too much to paint clouds on the ceiling in our bedroom?  Would I sponge it?  I might Google that when I get home.  Oh, communication cards... Prayer requests?  No, I am all good.  Nothing needing prayer for here.

Quote - Joanna Weaver

Discouragement is just around the corner from distraction.

Joanna Weaver from ‘Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World’

Sunday Mornings

I am about to admit something that I am not so sure if I should. I really don’t like Sunday mornings. I desperately want to say ‘hate’, but we don’t use that word in our house. 

I am not sure what it is about Sundays that turn me into a military sergeant wanting to be in charge of a vagabond band of unruly and unwilling troupes. To get my family out of the house requires all sorts of cajoling, pleading, tutt tutting and sometimes even yelling. So let’s look at a typical Sunday morning at my house...

7:30am – if the clock shows this time and I am not showered and at least dressed, I am already running late. Not a good sign. Children are usually up being their lovely needy selves expecting cups of tea and stories in bed. Daddy usually obliges while I blast around the house laying out clothes and shoes.

8:00am – must have at least started eating breakfast. Needs to be inhaled, I mean ingested, within about 15-20 minutes, shame my two year old cannot read the time and thinks mummy’s pleas to eat quicker are hilarious. No porridge, eggs or French toast on Sundays at our house, Weetbix or toast - don’t spill any crumbs.

8:15am – I finish getting ready and begin getting the girls into their clothes.  It is usually at this time that my husband, who is enjoying a morning not rushing off to work, disappears, for quite some time. I fluster about with our two daughters and their beautiful hair, requiring lots and lots of brushing, product and agonising over sitting still so styles can be performed in a reasonable amount of time.

8:30am – ensure all teeth are brushed and shoes are in place. Hide snacks in handbag in case service goes long or children become noisy.

8:45am – everyone in the car through a cloud of questions about toilets, teeth, hair, jumpers, permission to allow toy monkey church attendance and a final nappy bag check.

8:51am – walk calmly into church, shake hands with greeter, find seat (number 74, blue on aisle) and finally, look at husband and sigh.  Phew, made it.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? It is so hard getting everyone into their Sunday best and their butts on a seat by 8:59am. But why? I get my children ready for school all the time and we leave well before 8:45am.  I ponder these things between when the service starts and when my husband finally accepts that he has to love me despite my nasty pre-church behaviour.

I have two theories regarding my utter dislike of Sunday mornings.  

Theory number 1:  It is hard to keep it all together. ‘Sunday Best’ means just that. We have to look ‘right’, despite the pants kind of week we have had.  Lippy must be in place and hair done just right; ensemble selected and pressed on Saturday. Who makes up these rules? Me. I was raised believing that getting dressed in our best clothes was a sign of respect to our faith, which I still accept. And, I like to look as if I do have it all together; I mean really, what would people think if I turned up in my Oscar the Grouch pyjamas with bed hair, eating yoghurt straight from the tub? I would be whisked away into a quiet room given a cup of tea and a comforting hug from the pastor’s wife. Yipes! Not that Wendy isn’t totally lovely....    

I know that I say I don’t care what people think of me and I want to be as individual as the next person, but I don’t want to rock the boat. I want to look as if everything is okay, even when it perhaps isn’t. It can be easier to carry the illusion of togetherness rather than be vulnerable about where we really are at.  It is a shame, but an unfortunate reality in big churches.

Theory number 2: The Devil loves Sunday mornings at my house. I truly believe that Satan loves heading to my place on Sunday mornings, in fact, I think he comes somewhere in the middle of the night so he can get front row seats for the show. He then lets fly with his trickery, spite and impatience, revealing the worst in our family (me in particular). Why would he bother? Have I mentioned anything about God at all in this diatribe about church? Hair dryer malfunctions, spots on clothes, arguments with spouses, children who go crazy with Crayolas while wearing petal pink linen minutes before getting into the car, these are all things that distract me from thinking about God. Sunday is meant to be a day of rest and reflection, yet I have turned it into a mine field of potential disasters.

A few months ago I seriously considered not going to church again until both my children could tie their own shoes and make me a decent cappuccino.  It was all too much, but it was then that I looked down and saw my eldest daughter singing her little lungs out to ‘How Great is Our God’ and my younger daughter spinning in circles at our feet with her hands raised.  I realised that church is about worship and fellowship.  It wouldn’t matter to God how I was dressed or what my family ate for breakfast, but what does matter is that I give myself time to appreciate all that God has poured into my life.

I am getting better at Sunday mornings; don’t ask my husband, he may disagree.  But I am trying to learn the art of worship through the process of getting ready for church.  Beautiful music to listen to, earlier out of bed to calmly get myself together and taking the time to smile at my family have helped.  However, just for a laugh, one day I might turn up to church in my Oscar the Grouch pyjamas, ready to worship God and thank him for giving us a venue and an outlet to worship freely. Oh, and if I do, Wendy, I take my tea white, with ¾ of a spoon of sugar, not too strong please.

Quote - William Shakespeare

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Being a Christian

I was raised in a Christian home. My family worshipped at the Reformed Church. For those who are not familiar with that flavour of church - it was established by Dutch immigrants. They are very conservative, follow various Catechisms and base a lot of their faith on Calvinist - Lutheran philosophies. In a nut shell.

Looking back, I always believed there was a God. I loved the creation story and just knew that I knew that this is how the world came to be. I loved Sunday school and earned lots of rulers and stickers for remembering memory verses and I particularly enjoyed the colourful booklets we were given each week.

When I was ten, I was allowed to join the girls’ group run by the church, it was called ‘Calvinettes’ - I did not think it was at all amusing, for some reason my husband still laughs and thinks that this a hilarious name for a girls' group. I thought it was an honour. I loved it. I loved the uniform, the scarf, the badges, the singing, the creed - the whole thing. And I learnt more about God.

When I was 16 I stood before my church and my friends (and the cute guy I was dating) and did my ‘Confession of Faith’ which was the culmination of a couple of months of intense bible studies with the Pastor. It was a proud day for me, and my parents, as I was able to publicly declare my faith.

Throughout my teens and twenties I was part of various churches and married that cute guy who was at my Confession of Faith. We moved between Baptist churches and Pentecostal churches and learnt lots of things. Some of the things we learnt were great, like grace and forgiveness and how God cares about every detail of our lives and about healing. Some of the things we learnt were not so great, like how Christians can be weird, spiteful, hurtful, wicked and down right juvenile. I went through a period of time, and I am still not sure if I am through it, where I could not say that I was a Christian - I tell people I follow Christ, because Christians can be down right awful.

So, I am the classic Christian right? Pfft.

We are doing a series of studies at church at the moment on the parable of the prodigal son (The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller). It has been great, but something has been grating on my heart. I thought the story was about a son who wanted money, asked his father for it, got it, squandered it and then found himself having to ask for his father’s forgiveness. I thought it was a story of how we take our Godly inheritance and squander it and only when we have nothing, do we come back to God. The lesson being, stay close to God.

But, no. There is the older brother. He stays at home. He carefully watches his father and how he manages his remaining inheritance. The younger brother is seen as the wayward vagabond who squanders what he is given. The older brother is seen as the legalistic one, he stays at home and is obedient to his father. 


This can be taken further. The younger son is rebellious because he leaves and lives an immoral life, but the older son is rebellious in that he stays but only cares about what is going to be left to him. In a church context, this may mean forgiveness, or heaven.  Ouch, this is starting to hit home....

I have started seeing how much I demand from God and how much I squander the wealth of things he has given me. I live my life the way that I want, but tell people I go to church and that I do 'this and that' for God. In reality, the things I do fit nicely into my week, I schedule them and really do not much more than my fair share. In a lot of ways I am a pew warmer. 

It is easy to look down our legalistic, religious noses at those people who are not ‘saved’ or who don’t go to church. It is easy to think that we are better than others because we go to church and pay our tithes. But, are we squandering what God has given us on the other six days a week? 


I sometimes wonder if the younger son became closer to his father because for a time, he was away from his father... I sometimes wish, in a would never wish it in a thousand years kind of way, that I knew what this felt like. I have always gone to church, I have always believed and have always believed God loves me. What a luxury, what a blessing. But can this hinder me from fully knowing and seeking out God?

The series continues and I am hoping to hear more about this and come up with some real life things I can do to be more real with God and myself. Stay tuned.

Scared of Being Spiritual

I am scared to be seen as spiritual. I am scared that I will put people off. I am scared to be associated with those people who preach on street corners or who spend their lives converting the ‘lost’ in the darkest corners of the world. I am scared to put myself into the same box as anyone who is seen as ‘out there’. I don’t want to rock the boat.

But, I am also scared of not rocking the boat. I worry that between birth and death all I will take from the earth is Oxygen and all I will leave is Methane. I cannot imagine going from embryo to cadaver feeling that life is meaningless. I believe all these things show that God is pulling on my heart strings.

I have felt challenged to put these words down for a long time. But where? Who would read them? Who would care? I have had squidzillions of questions buzzing around my head for years and I have tried and and tried to find the answers with no real success.


Sometimes, the frustrating thing about God is his unending patience and ability to sit me out. He has been waiting. For me. Waiting for me to come looking. Waiting for me to stop dilly-dallying around and start looking in the right places for the answers to all my questions.  

Well, I am done with the dilly-dallying. I am done with the millions of questions that ricochet around my head unanswered. I am done with trying to find the answers on my own.  I. Am. Done.

So, why blog about it? I can’t actually answer that. All I know is that the thought of NOT blogging about these things seems somehow wrong. So, I will blog. I will blog my journey, and I have learnt that sometimes the easiest way to learn something is to read or learn from the tales of someone who has gone before me. Who knows, maybe someone out there will read these meagre words from a searching soul and begin their own quest.  Really, who knows?  Not me.

Last year I was re-united with someone I went to youth group with years ago.  She was (and still is in fact) a blogger, I was instantly jealous. I love writing and believe I have a gift in writing, but how dare someone else write a blog when I haven’t?!  I feel the same about Karaoke, I love singing, but it is such a personal passiony thing that there is no way I can do this as a sport or entertainment. 


So, I thought about it and realised that there was nothing stopping me from blogging myself.  In fact, I spoke about this with a dear friend who has proven very crafty (I do love calling her that, but she is handy with all sorts of craft as opposed to someone who steals money from pensioners - she would never do that) and she started looking into and soon began a blog herself - stealing my idea - so maybe she is crafty...  Anywho...  I felt strange about that. What was stopping me? Nothing. So again, I dillied and I dallied and I wrote a few posts and signed onto Blogger, but was too scarred to publish anything. After a while the heckling from God, myself and my crafty friend got too much and I published some posts and told some people about it. I got a good response. It felt good. 

But, I had restricted myself in what I was going to write about. The topic I chose to explore in my other blog is ‘coolness’ and its elusiveness. It has been a lot of fun and I have learnt a lot of things.  There were some topics I did not want to write about, like children (I feel I am not a very good mother, so why would I hang that out for all to view), craft (any shirt needing buttons gets donated to charity), or householdy things (really, how cool is that?). So I am quite restricted in the topics for that blog, but I will persist, because any writing is good practice.

Then in a time of reflection, that little voice (that is actually enormous, but can be blocked out - you know the one) reminded me about writing my journey to discovering God. Then in a flurry, it all made sense. The first blog was to get me used to being ‘out there’ in cybersphere and to be writing for an audience. This new blog - this is about writing a chronicle of my walk to be closer to God. The ever patient God had waited and taught me stuff as I dilly-dallied around, stumbling for a place in this world - silly me didn’t realise that I was in just the right place at just the right time.

So join me, a scared little thing as I try to be ‘out there’ - out there. This may be a raw ride for me.