Ramble for Townsville City Central Mission newsletter 13 October 2024

 It’s TCCM’s Church Camp this weekend. I don’t know if that means a posh retreat centre, or members’ own tents or caravans, or kipping under the stars in a swag, or a mix. My tent camping has been of three sorts. Fun Boys’ Brigade camps, not-so-fun field camps during Army basic training, and fun again in our own tent in assorted lovely locations, in Australia and Europe. Those Army camps, often on Dartmoor: Imagine a treeless Qld/NSW border wilderness in winter. Barracks, not usually associated with happy thoughts, were yearned for. Luxury, as Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen would have put it, compared to a flimsy two-man tent in a cutting gale.

So its easy to understand how a nomadic shepherd would have longed (Ps 23) to “dwell in the House of the Lord for ever”. And what comfort has been derived over the millennia from the assurance that there’s room for everyone in that House, (John 14). “there are many rooms”.

We look at houses through two lenses. One sees other people’s houses, particularly celebrities or Ideal Home or Vogue. The other sees our own, and our friends’. In fact, through that second lens we don’t really notice the house at all, all we’re interested in is the people, the loved people, who make the place what it is, a refuge, a source of joy and belonging. As a child, it used to strike me that grown-ups talking about “In my Father’s House are many Mansions” were looking through the first lens, at gold pavements and the other trappings of what they imagined would be the consolation for spending their earthly lives in miners’ back-to-back terraces. While my brother and I were only concerned with will our friends be there to play.

“Don’t let your hearts be troubled” says Jesus. There’s plenty of room, no need to turn the attic into a bedroom, no need to convert the garage to a kitchen. In fact, Jesus’ reassurance to the disciples doesn’t touch on what His Father’s House is like as a structure, only that there’s room for everyone and that He’ll be there, having got it ready for us, and that we’ll be there.

If lockdown a few years ago taught us anything, it’s that TCCM isn’t a historic building on Wills St. It’s you and me, with our troubled hearts. Like Hogan’s Sgt Schultz and Fawlty Towers’ Manuel, we know nothing about the layout of this Father’s House, except from Hebrews 11, it has foundations, and its builder and maker is God.