how it is in April

This is how today looked. The water was glistening green, the sky almost clear, and the air was mild. I hung out  washing, cleaned up in the kitchen, and sat talking to Isobella about Anzac Day.

How much can an eight year old really understand war? How much horror can an eight year old take? We read "In Flanders Fields" and read a bit about the Anzacs and their fateful landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula on April 25 1915. We looked at pictures, talked about the first and second world wars. We talked about who went to war in our families, and when. We talked about the Anzac Day ceremony Isobella was part of back when she used to do scouts. We tried to play a recording of the last post but the internet was too slow. I was glad. There is nothing more haunting than that.

I put on my favourite version of our national anthem, with all the verses, and thought of all of us who were thinking of death a little more today. And I found a prayer welling up within me, that our contemplation of death would lead us to think about life, our life. The one we have been given to live. And I hoped and prayed for all of us that a determination to live would grab us by the scruff of the neck and wouldn't let go. A determination to live the one life we have to the full.

Some days this week I've hardly been able to see past the mess in the kitchen. The piles of dishes on the bench, baking trays waiting dirty on top of the stove. It's not because I'm refusing to use the dishwasher, I have been using it when I need to. But even with the dishwasher the piles have taken days to dwindle. There is so much going on around here, and hardly any of it is me writing that novel.

But would I swap my life for anyone else's? Not at all. And would I wish I could live less of a life than this? Not for a minute. The dishes and the washing waiting to be folded and the blocks all over the table and the puzzles on the floor, they are all signs of life. A full life.

Mum is getting married a month from tomorrow. That is another story in itself, and such a good one, just you wait. But for now all I can say about that is that life is surprisingly wonderful, often when we least expect it. I've stepped up to all necessary wedding planning responsibilities, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I love planning a good party, and this will be a very good one.

coming out of rehab

Finishing up Lent was like leaving rehab. A few weeks before Easter I realised that we weren't going to be able to stay completely sugar-free. It's complicated. I already knew that both Greer and I couldn't eat too many salycilates, but then Abigail woke up one morning with the most hideous bright red nappy rash and I knew what it was. It was the honey they'd been eating every day on their porridge, the dates I'd been adding to the porridge, and the sultanas I was putting in those porridge muffins, not to mention the sultanas and cinnamon in the hot cross buns. Every natural sugar alternative is high in salycilates. (Except maybe stevia - I haven't figured that out yet.)

There's a reason that we had become so dependent on sugar, and it wasn't just the little quiet sugar addiction I had going on under the radar. Sugar is completely salycilate free. It contains no artificial colours or flavours, obviously, and it is completely neutral as far as Greer's asthma goes. Sugar is also an essential ingredient in most gluten-free baking, because it masks the strong flavours of the gluten-free flours. That pear cake I told you I made that weekend I decided to go sugar free, it takes TWO cups of sugar, plus one cup of pear syrup as well! But although that seems terrible to me now, I was so grateful for the recipe. Everyone loved that cake, and most people never even guessed it was gluten-free. So other than perverting our taste buds and filling us with empty calories, sugar was fine. Sugar was our friend.

That's why going sugar-free really was a revolution. To say "no" to sugar took a lot of gumption, and once I'd done it, as you know, I didn't want to look back. I felt amazing. I had visions of health and well being for all of us. When Abi woke up that morning with terrible nappy rash, my heart sank. We were not going to live happily off honey and sultanas forever after.

Interestingly, though, I had packed up all of our sugar and given it to Mum just the day before. The white sugar, the brown sugar, the icing sugar, the castor sugar and the golden syrup. I had smuggled it out without anyone seeing, and in the empty containers that were left I loaded up all the bread flours I had started using in the breadmaker. It was a good trade, and as much as I had to face the fact that some sugar was going to be part of our lives, there was no way I was letting all of it back in.

So this is where it stands. I am so scared of what chocolate can do to me that I don't think I'll be touching it for a very long time. The girls know why giving up sugar for Lent was good for us, and they know that as a family we now try to avoid it when we can. They like the muffins I've been making with only THREE TABLESPOONS of sugar in them. (If you'd told me three months ago that I'd be making muffins with only three tablespoons of sugar in them I'd have scoffed!) The pantry is now almost sugar free. After the nappy rash incident I added back in a small glass jar of raw, organic sugar. It's sugar, yes, but it's expensive. I won't be dishing up cups of the stuff in anything. The girls get a small sprinkle on their porridge, and I use it in the breadmaker and in those muffins. That's it.

I was worried about Easter. How can you do Easter without chocolate? How could I do Easter without chocolate? Then I saw some small Easter gift bags at the supermarket, and in a flash I knew I could do it. I bought a bag of dried apple rings, a bag of cashew nuts and a pack of Easter stickers. I bought the girls one tiny chocolate rabbit each, and I took one marshmallow egg each out of a bag I'd bought before Lent, and then gave the rest of the bag to Mum. I packaged up the dried apple and the cashew nuts, and tucked them under the chocolate. The photo doesn't really show how small it was. The rabbit was 35g of chocolate. I think we can manage that.

Me, this was my first Easter without chocolate. My first Easter in maybe thirty five years that I haven't eaten significant amounts of chocolate. I lived to tell the tale. I was tempted, but not tempted enough. There was no spare chocolate anyway. Once upon a time I might have sneaked some of my children's chocolate when they weren't looking, but this time they had so little that there was no way I would have gotten away with it!

But I got the jar of homemade strawberry jam my dear friend Amy had made for me for Christmas. I spread it thinly over cream cheese on a piece of toast, for the first time since before Lent, and I was happy.

I know a little bit about addiction. I know that for those who suffer the weight of an addiction, one of its worst curses is a self-hatred that's suffocating. Nobody feels good if they can't control their own behaviour. My little sugar addiction may have been small-fry amongst the hideous spectrum of addictions, but even still, I like myself better now. I can say no to sugar. I'm very proud.

alive

There's only one of these every year, a Resurrection Sunday. Just one chance to really let our joy ring out unabashed. All around the planet there are Christians meeting. Some in magnificent cathedrals, some in tiny wooden churches, some in school halls or sitting rooms. Some meet with candles and incense, following ancient patterns; others raise their hands to loud anthems. Where ever they meet, and however they do it, their focus is the same; Jesus.

Our congregation always manages to find a nice groove somewhere between ancient and loud, and this morning we sang the classic hymn "Thine be the Glory";

Thine be the glory, risen conquering son,
Endless is the victory, thou o'er death, has won.
Angels in bright raiment, rolled the stone away,
Kept the folded grave clothes, where thy body lay.


Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb,
Lovingly he greets us, scatters fear and doom.
Let the church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing,
For her Lord now liveth, death hath lost it's sting.


Thine be the glory, risen conquering son,
Endless is the victory, thou o'er death, has won.


There really aren't any other words better than those for today. It puzzles me that some would say you can have Christian faith without the resurrection. I can't agree. The resurrection, that other-worldly, incomprehensible battle against death is the crux, literally, of everything we believe. If it didn't happen, then we Christians, wanna-be's that we are half of the time, should just pack up and go home.

My good friend Heidi shared her story today in church. She's had her own other-worldly battle against death. A few years ago she became very sick. Mis-diagnosed pneumonia turned into multiple organ failure with frightening speed, and within hours she was in a coma. The coma lasted three weeks, and during that time she died nine times.

She stood in front of us today, her face bright and her smile wide. Heidi walks, talks, works, sings, loves her husband, gardens, cooks, eats and dances. She dresses with spunk and has a great sense of humour. She is infectiously alive.

There was a period of time where Heidi's husband and family were being repeatedly told to expect her to die. They were told this by doctors in such a resigned way that her husband, a normally reticent man, couldn't take it any more. "Stop talking about Heidi as if she's already dead!" he said to them as his frustration exploded. "You are robbing us of the dignity of hope."

The dignity of hope.


We can't live without hope. It's a tangible thing. We feel it, like a light or a flame inside of us. It comforts us and feeds us. It enables us to endure.

Heidi breathed through a tracheotomy while she was in a coma, and even when she woke up, that tube kept her alive. She said today that it's really lonely having a "trachy", because you can't speak, you effectively have no voice.

I think I know how that feels. When it comes to putting words to this faith of mine I've felt silenced. Like I've had no voice. There have been plenty of voices around me and in the public sphere, but I haven't always liked the words they used. They haven't spoken my language. And I didn't realise I needed to find a language of my own.

My faith is nothing more, and nothing less than persistent hope. It's a persistent hope that has never really gone away since the moment I prayed as a four year old asking God to be with me "for all the days of my life." That hope stuck around through a less than perfect childhood and through angst-ridden teenage years. It never left when depression lurked in the shadows of exhaustion, and it wrote itself over my heart while I took an eternity to figure myself out. It never left me through those shocking first years of motherhood, nor through the highs and lows of marriage. My hope remains.

Today, Resurrection Sunday, is my hope. The easily misunderstood, often mocked and barely explainable death and resurrection of Christ is the source of my hope. He lives, and so do I.

a good day

I went in to the girls' room this morning and I said "it's a good day girls, it's a very good day." And it was.

I spent most of it in the kitchen. Making hot cross buns for the first time, cleaning up from making hot cross buns, feeding people, cooking dinner. The sky was blue and clear and the sun was warm and the girls spent most of it outside. My thoughts were constantly turning back to this day two thousand years ago. That day, as I told the girls at breakfast, which was so sad and so wonderful.

We finally sat down to eat late. I put out green salad and potato salad to eat with schnitzel and lit a candle. It was haphazard, hardly planned, but beautiful. We prayed and ate together, and then Paddy decided to pull out his phone and read from John. It was about the time of the afternoon that Jesus died, way back then. When the sky grew dark. It wasn't dark here as we listened to those words, so familiar and yet new all over again, but our hearts were heavy.

I noticed something I'd never noticed before. In John 19 the narrator describes how one of the Roman soldiers was ordered to break the legs of the three crucified, so they could hurry up and die. Jesus was already dead, so his legs were not broken, and the passage goes like this;

But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you may also believe.  (John 19:32-35)


And it hit me that this is why I live the way I do. Because I believe the testimony of those people, all those years ago. Ordinary people who lived ordinary lives until they met Jesus. And then they witnessed the strangest, most unexpected series of events.

Bishops and televangelists and soap-box preachers alike all want you to believe that the story of the Christian faith is a seamless narrative. That it begins at the beginning, moves through to a second beginning, and will finish in good time and in a manner that can be predicted, if you read the clues right. They think their job is to convince you by making it all seem reasonable, believable. And right there is where they fail.

There's nothing reasonable about the story of Christ. It's hardly plausible, barely possible. It is filled with mystery. I can't give you scientific evidence for my faith in those witnesses of old, but I can tell you about the mystery. I can tell you that I felt my spine tingle as I listened to this song while I was busy in the kitchen. I can tell you that my heart warms when I pray, that the whisper I often hear is not my own. I can tell you about growth, and I can tell you about hope.

There is plenty of evidence that the gospels can be read as history, as reliable as any of the texts we have from those far away days. Sure there are discrepancies between voices, and some of the details get lost in translation. But many of the facts are confirmed from sources outside of the bible. It's a story that has more than a ring of truth to it.

After dinner we left Paddy at home perfecting another batch of hot cross buns, and went to visit the favoured brand new cousin. The late afternoon sun was still warm and the sky still blue. We took hot cross buns, of course, the best of them, and we cuddled and fed and doted on that precious boy. There was washing to fold, and stories to hear, and a family to watch as they tried on their family-of-six-ness for size. It was good.

Nothing is easy, and nothing is perfect, not on this side of things. But there's a sense of motion and growth amongst the Christ-followers I know. They believe the ancient testimony, and it changes them.

where I've been

This is where I went on Friday in the late afternoon, after I'd folded the washing and swept the kitchen floor. I said good bye to the girls and got in the car and drove the hour and a half trip here alone. I walked in the door with only my own bags. As soon as I got here I set my laptop up on that table you see and started writing. It was my first twenty-four hours completely alone for at least eight years.

It was a vague idea we've had for a while, that I could come out here to Mum's bach alone and work on the novel. It was one of those ideas that could have taken forever to make happen, or possibly never have happened at all. I booked the bach for all of us at first, I couldn't quite believe that I was going to get to come on my own. Now that I've done it once I'll do it again. And again.

I only wrote a thousand and something words but I finished the re-structuring I started a month ago and got my head around the part of this thing that I've been most scared of; the historical part. I'm not a natural academic. This is a big admission for me, and something I've literally only just come to terms with. It's to do with dyspraxia and the fact that my eldest daughter is not the only one in this family whose brain doesn't run in straight lines. I faced the fear that I wasn't capable of writing history. I'd had it in my head that I had to have all the facts straight before I could write, that I had to have an arsenal of verifiable and referenced details before I could do anything. But I'm  not writing a paper, I'm writing fiction. I can write whatever I like.

I drove back home with this deep sense of peace. I had spent a day and a night devoted to the the thing I want to do almost more than anything. I felt like a writer.