Opinion

I have found that wisdom is generally not easy to come by without hard-earned vulnerability and dogged hope! I say this because I have learnt throughout my life that despite what many of us are taught from an early age, wisdom is not the accumulation of knowledge and title. Rather, wisdom is the result of courage, tenacity, brutal honesty, and ...

I was a teenager in the 1980s. While I know that this dates me, it was a time when the greatest anxiety in the world was the threat of nuclear war. We went to workshops to resolve how to deal with the existential anxiety arising from a time when we believed we would be annihilated by the press of a ...

With UnitingCare’s DV alert program—a program for frontline workers which focuses on how to recognise and respond appropriately to domestic and family violence—we examine the dynamics of a relationship where abuse is present. In a relationship where there is domestic and family violence, a pattern of repeated behaviours are evident and a power imbalance exists between the two partners. Key ...

Gospel peace flows from the headwaters or fountain of God’s life, finally and fully revealed in Jesus. I know a couple of songs about the flow of God’s peace: “Peace Is Flowing Like A River” … flowing out through you and me … and “It Is Well With My Soul” … when peace like a river attendeth my way. God’s ...

We live in world where the quest for peace and togetherness is ubiquitous, and where the paths put forward to achieve it are seemingly infinite. Every world religion, every political ideology, and sometimes it seems like every individual person, has their own idea of peace and their own particular plan for how it can be best brought about. Yet, when ...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a peacemaker as “one who makes peace especially by reconciling parties at variance”. Personally, I have rarely seen proper peacemaking. Most of what I have experienced could be classified as peacekeeping, which is “the preserving of peace especially international enforcement and supervision of a truce between hostile states or communities”. This means that a show of ...

Peacemaking … Peace … Shalom … Breathe in … Breath out … Be still and know that I am God. I’m sitting quietly in my sister’s beautiful garden listening to the sound of the birds melting into my daily devotion being read to me from the app on my iPhone.  Life is good—nature, beauty, family, prayer—I am at peace. Well, ...

We all dream, what we subject our brains to will determine the dreams we have. If we overstimulate the reptilian parts of the brain through media saturation, we will develop a lot of anxiety, suspicion, cynicism and confusion. In other words, bad dreams. In a recent conversation with a young man he shared with me why he is so anxious ...

Dreaming is an important facet of our discipleship journey, both corporately and individually.  Dreaming encourages us to “look ahead”, to “vision cast”, to “imagine a brighter, better future”. Dreaming also enables us to trust, to hope, and to walk by faith. The Bible contains many examples of “dreamers”. People who either experienced dreams which led them onto their life path, ...

You will not be surprised to learn that I dream big dreams; so much so that sometimes people even shudder when I start the sentence with “I’ve been thinking …”. However, last night I attended an event where I felt reborn into a church that has huge dreams for itself and the community in which it formed—amazing and inspiring dreams ...