Dear Inner Circle,

Through some mighty act of nature, perhaps a massive wave, millions of fish were left on a beach. Stranded fish make for a distressing sight. Movements natural in the context of water, look pointless, desperate and wasteful on dry land.

One lone fool jumped onto the beach and threw as many as he could back into the ocean. Those who could see the whole beach, criticised the lone fool. “What impact do you think you can have against the size of this problem?” they said. The fool replied, “I’m making a big impact on this one,” as he threw one more into the water and watched it come to life and swim off to its fishy destiny.

Many had only judgement for the stranded fish. It seemed clear that they must have been swimming too close to the edge where they made themselves vulnerable to the volatile moods of the ocean.

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Dear Inner Circle,

Wayside’s leadership is passing into good hands. Jon Owen and I were in Mount Druitt this week, helping to make a documentary about our succession. We stopped at multiple locations and always someone recognised Jon, embraced him and tried to catch him up on as much news as they could in a few minutes. Each time we jumped back into the car to head to the next location, Jon shared something of the story of the journey he’d shared with the person we just met. After the first couple of these, I was impressed by the compassion of a man who’d shared the worst of human tragedies with people, without for a moment thinking he’s achieved anything special. In one location, we stopped long enough to hear raised, cranky voices. A woman jumped into a car and before our eyes, ran it into the bloke at whom she was yelling. The car knocked the man to the ground and I’d wondered if he might have broken a leg. He quickly jumped up to his feet in time to kick the bonnet of the car before it sped off down the street. I was momentarily in shock. “In this part of the world,” Jon said, “that was just a negotiation.”

Mark your diaries for Sunday, 26 August 2018, 2pm to 5pm. That is the date set aside for Wayside to celebrate my fourteen years in leadership and to anticipate the next fourteen. This event is primarily for you, our inner circle. Maybe you’ve been reading these notes for years and we’ve never met – what a great time for us to meet face to face. It will be a celebration. It will be fun. It’s been an astonishing time for me and at every point and in every achievement, you, our inner circle have been involved and sharing it all. How fitting that we should attempt a get together and celebrate. More details to come as the time approaches.

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Dear Inner Circle,

Sitting in our café, I paid little attention to a young fellow who sat beside me until he rested his head on my shoulder. At first, I wondered if a substance was causing him to find it hard to stay awake, but it became clear that he was holding his head in a deliberate act of affection. No words had been said. Not all dialogue needs words. After what felt like some long minutes, we turned and looked into each other’s faces.Still without words, I got it. A fellow who had been doing well, was in a lot of trouble. “Can we talk?” he said as he got up and walked outside. It took a while to free myself from what I was doing, and find this fellow standing alone across the other side of Hughes Street. When the words started, they gushed. “Trouble” hardly begins to describe his situation. It was hard to understand how anyone could fit so much trouble into just a few weeks. The last time we met, he had the freedom of looking everyone in the eye. Today his eyes scanned every direction all the time, not just looking for cops; they are the least of his worries. I hugged the bloke and said, “Mate, you did this to yourself. There is no upside to this.” There was some more dialogue with few words. I hoped he could see his emptiness and my lack of words put us both together in a state of loss and grief. I hope by now he’s turned himself into the cops as he’d be a lot safer with them than just about anywhere else. My parting words were, “I’d rather be lost with you than saved without you.” We hugged once more and I pointed and said, “The police station is that way.”

I’m relieved that the same-sex marriage issue is resolved. None of us emerged from this period of debate well. The process has demonstrated with new clarity for me the polarising effect of the debate. The agony of these past weeks has been to see how people clustered together to push their point. Both sides, offering opposing arguments and gathering ever greater...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

Yesterday a group of business people asked me about resilience. The questions they asked made it increasingly clear that they thought that somewhere in everyone’s psychology lives a box that contains a quantity of resilience. “How do you keep the glass half full?” “How do you keep the passion for your mission alive and healthy?” “Don’t you get tired?” All these questions presuppose much the same thing. Some people are so certain of my inner resilience box that on occasion I get invited to write a book on the subject. Alas, the misunderstanding is profound. Our mission doesn’t live in me or in anyone else. It lives between us. There are times when I speak passionately about our mission of creating community with no 'us and them’, but they are only empty words unless the mission lives between us. The good news is that when the mission lives, I find myself to be necessary, significant and not central. Every time I flourish as a human being, whether in the context of my marriage, family, workplace or anywhere else, I find myself to be necessary, significant and not central. The joy that is unleashed by knowing it’s not all about me is all the energy I need. And it's all the energy we need at Wayside to keep doing what we do. When an occasion strikes where I think it’s all about me, I need to stand back enough to allow the mission to take the central position and to recognise it as living - not within, but between us.

Our mission is not difficult but it is counter-cultural. The last thing Wayside or any other workplace needs is people who have loads of patience for visitors or customers and loads of judgement for the colleagues working at their side. Religions everywhere have people who wish to love and serve the whole world, but have an intense dislike for their brother and sister serving beside them.

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Dear Inner Circle,

Our politicians well know that if they issued a postal vote on the question of ‘capital punishment’, many of the people would prefer we return to the dark ages. Thankfully, this issue doesn’t dominate us and divide us because a prior generation of politicians exercised leadership. No matter the result of our current exercise on marriage equality, I suspect we’ll pay a high price and suffer divisions and hurt that will linger for years.

At best, this exercise will tell our leaders how we feel, as if that were a sure guide to the right decision. Remember it was democracy that killed Socrates. A jury of 500 citizens found by clear majority that Socrates was worthy of death. A win for the democratic process deprived the world of its finest and clearest voice.

Not all who oppose this change are bigots, homophobes or even remotely religious. Not all who want the change are anti-religious or take any joy from merely overturning age old traditions. This is not a contest between lovers and haters but a cultural shift whose origins lie in a web of unnoticed or forgotten drifts in this highly fluid world of ours. People of good will are on both sides of the fence we are building.

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Dear Inner Circle,

Botanic names have always hit my ears as unintelligible noise. My admiration for gardening guru Costa Georgiadis is profound and yet my brain seems to anticipate any utterance of botanic names with an attitude of, “Caution: this is going to be unintelligible.” To my horror last week at our Sunday gathering, our text likened life to a garden in which there were both fine plants and vigorous weeds. In the metaphor, the weeds aren’t necessarily other people but patterns of behaviour that threaten the health of good plants, stealing the nutrients from the soil.

Finally, the hour had come for me to learn and use some botanic names. I discovered that the weeds referred to in our text have names. “Now see what you made me do” is a common weed. In the years when I was a prison chaplain, I think I saw evidence of this weed every day. This weed thrives when a good plant fears it is destined to fail but cannot and will not face its fear. Instead it looks for an opportunity to fail when there is a lesser plant around that can be blamed for the failure. Another common weed is, “Ah ha! I got you!” This pattern of behaviour causes healthy plants to be fixated on the wrong doing of others. Imagine being short changed by five dollars and then working this wrong doing into every conversation for years to come. This plant can irritate an otherwise healthy plant or it can grow strong and eventually choke a good plant to death. Another common weed is named, “I was only trying to help”. This weed does its work when someone really tries to impose their will on another but never admits their bald desire to impose their will. When there is push back or rebellion, the act of power is confused and camouflaged because, “I was only trying to help”. Another weed we see a lot is called, “Courthouse”. This weed is evidenced when in relationships we have a “judge” an “accused” and a “prosecutor”. I was called once to a home where a man...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

This week you have me again, Jon Owen, Wayside’s Assistant Pastor, stepping in for Graham Long. Thank you for welcoming me into the space you share together. Graham is recovering well and looks forward to sharing with you next week.

“Jonny, got a dollar?” My pockets were empty so I offered him a chat instead. This kid had sent us all into a spin when he inexplicably disappeared for a few weeks. The alert that he had gone missing was raised after a friend who hadn’t seen him for a while spotted him eating out of a bin in another part of the city. A few days earlier I’d stopped by his mum’s house to check in on him. I was met by her new boyfriend at the door who told me that the kid was “doing his own thing” for a couple of weeks to give them some space. He was 11 years old.

I was relieved to see this little fellow was safe and I told him how worried we’d all been. He shrugged, laughed his absence off and quickly moved the conversation along. His keen mind skipped around a variety of topics, using language filled with colour and regularly returning to the phrase “deez nutz” for comfort. The expression sailed right over my head, a clear sign I’m getting old. Much like a Sunday drive on a winding country road, our chat casually covered some ground and just when it all began to feel a little familiar, he steered it around a sharp corner. “I don't think anyone actually plans to have kids, they just happen and then they get in your way”. Then his mouth was off again in another direction until another flash of inspiration. “You know stuff about religion right? So did God have parents or didn’t they want him either?” His voice tapered off as he heard his own words spill out, realising it was too late to stuff them back in. His eyes darted to mine then down, in a look that was somewhere between shame and resignation.

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