Well it actually was on the 28th of July but tonight we are heading out to celebrate it with Carlos and Eva and Jo and Jem.

I am very excited as I love dancing and I have not done it in sooooo long.

So I better go and get ready as they will be here in less than half and hour and I have to have a shower and I don’t know what I am wearing. I guess it is a good thing I don’t care about that sort of thing tooo much.

Obviously a little but don’t tell anyone.

Well I thought I would pick an easy topic to discuss tonight…… not… (does anyone still say that?)

I guess I have being thinking about prayer a lot lately but thinking about it is a lot easier than actually doing it as Eugene Peterson (The Message guy) puts it:

“Getting started is easy enough. The impulse to pray is deep within us, at the very centre of our created being, and so practically anything will do to get us started – Help and Thanks are our basic prayers. But honesty and thoroughness don’t come quite as spontaneously.”

That’s true for me. I want to pray desperately I do but being thorough and honest is so hard. Staying focused and not letting the mind waunder is almost impossible and if I am honest here I probably find even the basic prayers of Help and Thanks hard as I struggle with intercessary prayer adn so often those things become intercessary.

However Eugene goes on to say one of the things that I have found most comforting recently. I think this is something I know on an intellectual level or something I feel is true for everyone else but not somthing I really feel deep inside me is for me also. I gues that is what I am working on.

“Untutored, we tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best. It is not. Inexperienced, we suppose that there must be an “insider” language that must be acquired before God takes us seriously in our prayer. There is not. Prayer is elemental, not advanced language. It is means by which our language becomes honest, true and personal in response to God.”

Blogging is a bit like an exercise program, I start with lots of energy and I do it every day and then it starts to happen less and less and before I know it I am back to hardly doing it at all. I don’t why it is like that, I enjoy exercise and I feel good afterward like blogging but for some reason it is so kind of hard to do.

But here I am so I better make it worth doing and say something interesting…..

I just wrote an email to my mother in law which was kind of fun. I love her, really I do but our relationship has been a little strained, a little stressful and not altogether what I had hoped for. I guess when God called me to bring her out to Australia I did but I think I subconciously thought, ‘great I have done that now and God will take care of the rest and I don’t have to do anything’ but that wasn’t quite true. I then had to get to know her better and accept her more and love her much more and that was much harder but much more inportant and really the reason that she was to come here and although I had God’s support I had to do that. I did it a little but not as much as I should have.

Thankfully though life and relationships are journies and that was part of ours but now there is more and we can write emails and talk on the phone adn reflect on what happened. God keeps giving us the chance to know wachother more and love eachother more which is great, which I guess is grace.

Hey maybe it is like blogging and exercise. You start woth lots of energy and ideals about waht is going to happen and it is easy enough at first but then you have to work and you have to be committed.

I think I just posted the title by accident, before I had said anything. That is okay though because now I have said twice that today was a great day. That’s three times but it really was.

Martin and I went to visit our friend Ramon who we like very much. He is from El Salvador but now he lives in Forestville so as much as I would have liked to have visited him in El Salvador it was just Forestville. From Forestville we went to Waringah Mall so he could pick up some photos and then we went to Harbord so he could drop them to his daughter. He stayed there for about 40 minutes while Martin adn I drank lovely, hot tea and ate yummy banana bread in the cafe down the road. It was a great cafe that looked over the beach. Then we all went to Macmahon’s Point. We were aiming for Milson’s Point but ended in Macmahon’s Ponit which is very typical of an outing with me but it was all good as then we were able to take the ferry over to Milson’s which I had never done before. It was fun. We sat at Milson’s for awhile and chatted and then Ramon left us so Martin and I walked over the Harbour Bridge and through the Rocks to Circular Quay. I had done that before but only once and Martin hadn’t. In Circular Quay we ate chips and watched lots of good street performers and all the American sailors from the boat.

The final part of our adventure was catching the ferry back to Milson’s Point and wandering around Luna Park which was also fun even if we didn’t go on any rides. All the ones I liked Martin didn’t like and all the ones he liked I didn’t so we didn’t bother. I know that might not be very differentiated but we were not really that interested and rides are never that fun on your own and they’re expensive so you would want to enjoy if you are going to do it.

Now we are home which is also nice but I am very tired. I also just read my to do list (how good are to do lists) and I did not do any of the things on which is very unsatisfying as I can not cross anything off. Not to worry though cause it was a great day. Thank you God for days like these.

I am home alone. That does not happen all that much around here with five people living in the house plus fairly constant vistors. I would not have it any other way of course, as an extrovert I get my energy from people and being around them but I am enjoying this time. Mum is in Alice, Keith in Adelaide, Gem in Germany and Martin at the RSL watching the State of Origen so I have put on Luke, made some food, poured some wine and sat down to catch up on some emailing and of course some blogging……

I watched the Live8 concert on the weekend and like someone else mentioned in their blog, I have forgotton who but I know i read it, I think this whole Make Pverty History thing is the most exciting thing going on in my life right now. I really don’t think I amsayong that beacuse I have a boring life but because the fact that poverty could be halved in the next ten years and that I and my friends in our small way have made a difference in that is just the most exciting, inspiring, amazing, wonderful thing that I can think of. I am also really excited as I bought some of those Make Poverty History Bands and I decided that I would give them to people that I did not think would know much about teh whole campaign. So I gave them to the girls at work and since I did almost all of them have worn them most days and some of them, one in particular is getting really excited about it and always asks me what is happening with it all and then tells her friends and family about it. It’s great, really as I said it’s just the most exciting thing in my life.

That whole blog was in one paragraph. That sucks as I love having lots of paragraphs. It is fun and not to mention more aesthically pleasing, if your a bit wierd and anal like me.

Anyway I just wanted to put in a good quote for when you are feeling a bit crappy, well it helps me when I am feleing a bit crappy, it’s from U2, who I love.

“What you don’t have, you don’t need it now. What you don’t know you can feel it somehow”.

I am feeling a bit crap right now, I don’t really know why, well I kind of do but I think that I will thrash that one out in more detail in my private diary. Mum was telling us the other about a guy who read the blog of a lady that he worked with. He didn’t intenially look for it, just stumbled acroos it so he read it. On the blog the lady had said some mean things about some of the people at work including him. The man was quite by this so he confronted the lady who told him that he had no right to read her blog and she continues to be angry at him til this day, well the day that my mum told the story. Now I think that is stupid. Whether we write our blogs for ourselves or others or like me probably a bit of both we have to accept that it is on line and that others may read it. Even people we would never think would read it, that definitelty carries with it a certain amount of responsibility and therefore I am choosing not to discuss my crapiness here. There is also the fact that I discussed on my first blog ever that I have in the past often exposed myself emotionally in the past and just ended up feeling silly and vulnerable and while I still think that vulnerability in relationshps is very important one has to be careful. I imagine my grandparents never discussed the ethics surrounding what to blog and what not to. These are the ethics of the 21st century. Great now I have the found a title of this post. Yay post I said it right first time.