Ramble for Kirwan Uniting Church Keeping in Touch newsletter 10 April 2022

 I took flying lessons for a while in UK, before I ran out of money. I have my logbook somewhere, lurking in the recesses of an unopened packing box. It’s much more expensive to learn to fly in UK than it is in Australia, because you pay for your booked lesson’s instructor, even if a lesson is cancelled because of bad weather. There is a lot of bad weather in UK, you might have heard. I still don’t have the money that I ran out of, but I’ve been idly googling “What’s the oldest that you can learn to fly?” Have I run out of years as well as money? With caveats, it seems that late 70s is still do-able. In case you wonder, Leisa won’t be worried by this revelation, she knows that my fantasies come to nothing. One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands:

“You know I've always been a dreamer (spent my life running round)/And it's so hard to change …”

William Carey, the great Baptist missionary and social reformer, famously said “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God”. I don’t know, perhaps one or two of you have thought that the time has passed when you could try out Carey’s motto. You’ve run out of years. Well this Palm Sunday, let’s think about a certain donkey. The prophet Zechariah (9:9) cheers up Israelites newly returned from exile, their temple in ruins:

“Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

Five hundred years would pass before a donkey’s owner in a village outside Jerusalem heard the words : “The Lord has need of him.” (Luke 19:31) No, you haven’t run out of years. And the Lord hasn’t run out of need for you.

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