Friends

Sometimes in life, you find a special friend;

Someone who changes your life just by being part of it.

Someone who makes you laugh until you can't stop;

Someone who makes you believe that there really is good in the world

Someone who convinces you that there really is an unlocked door

just waiting for you to open it.

Nothing Stays the Same

I was rather dramatically reminded of this when I recently visited the town of my birth.

Of the shops and businesses that I remember there were only about 4 in the same place as they were before. Most were gone, and others had moved. Road layouts had changed. The house where I lived for 12 years was nearly unrecognisable! All the large bushes and trees from the front were gone. The house had been painted a rather bright yellow, instead of the white or cream I remembered. The cyprus trees in the farm block nest door had all been removed, and where we once had a view of the hills to the front, there was a line of trees - none of which were there when we moved out 13 years ago.

Even the Baptist church we attended had changed. The big holly tree out the front was gone - not even the stup remained. It too, had been painted.

The only things that were the same was the public library, the train station, and a friend's house (although even their garden was a little different - tidier).

I think if I had been there, living through the changes it would not have been as much of a shock. But I saw all the changes in less than an hour. I knew it would have changed, but I didn't expect things to have changed as much as they had.

Whatever happened to the simple country life where things go relatively unchanged for generations?

It makes me think of a line in the hymn 'Abide With Me' by Henry F Lyte, which says "Change and decay in all around I see;O Thou who changest not, abide with me."

My Country

My Country
byDorothea Mackellar
(1885 - 1968)

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die-
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold-
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land-
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand-
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
Dorothea Mackellar

Sometimes when a light goes out of our lives
and we are left in darkness
and we do not know which way to go,
we must put our hand into the hand of God
and ask Him to lead us.

-Helen Steiner Rice

Teach Me

Teach me to give of myself in whatever way I can,

Of whatever I have to give.

Teach me to value myself -

my time, my talents, my purose, my life,

my meaning in Your world.

-Helen Steiner Rice