That I've been carried away promoting a conspiracy theory

I'm sure we've all shaken our heads over weird conspiracy theories at some time. Some of them are well known. When my son, Logan, was studying with Open Access College, his Science teacher always got riled up whenever somebody suggested that the moon landing might have been a conspiracy theory. A student would only have to say, "Surely the atmosphere would have killed them," or "Somebody saw Neil Armstrong going into a fast food joint back then," to set the teacher off, ranting and fuming for ten minutes. The students used to do it on purpose, to postpone their work and enjoy baiting him.

We'd never be part of silly conspiracy theories, right? Just last Christmas Eve, it occurred to me that I was going along with one of the hugest, most well-kept ones ever dreamed up. It was my birthday, and instead of enjoying it with my feet up, I was driving around with an enthusiastic little boy, pretending to look out for a reindeer-drawn sleigh in the sky. Then when we got home, he logged onto a website which was supposed to track its progress. "Santa is only just heading over the equator now and he'll be visiting New Zealand and the eastern states of Australia before he gets to us."

I have to ask myself, why do we buy into all this? Is convincing our kids that something is real only to rip it away even a good idea? Logan gradually grew out of the idea of Santa Claus and Co. but Emma had a rude awakening. Andrew once announced to all his relatives, while she was within earshot, "I wanted to stay in bed but I had to get up and do the Easter Bunny thing." At the moment, Blake seems to have almost wised up, and I'll be relieved, in a way, when he does twig.

Why do we do it anyway? I remember loving the fantasy and fairy-tale quality of the whole thing when I was a kid. I guess I automatically went along with the conspiracy theory because I didn't want to deny my own kids a dose of the 'special magic', but why bother keeping some made-up farce going? There is such a lot I believe is true and legitimate which we can teach our children in good conscience that should make them even more excited.

God's love and care of us, Jesus' Resurrection, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, guardian angels protecting us, the immense spiritual realm of which we only glimpse the tip of the iceberg at times. All that is far more awesome than an old, fat guy in a red suit who owns a magical toy shop in the North Pole. As it is, I've got to wonder, does our promotion of these fables as absolute truth make real truth harder to take on board? Are we doing our kids a disservice instead of a favour?

When they hear true stories of miracles, healings, unmistakeable answers to prayer, angel sightings, near-death-experiences when the curtain between our realm and the next is lifted, the fulfilling of prophetic words and the slotting together of seeming coincidences into a serendipitous God-incidence, beyond all odds, do they shrug their shoulders and relegate it to the same class as Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and all their cronies? If we stretched the truth over that, might we not be capable of stretching it over these too? That may be a fair question for them to ask.

As I said, Blake, aged 9, is almost through with the Santa Claus myth. He was telling me all the reasons he's beginning to doubt. "How can everyone be asleep in the same district at the same time? If his workshop is in the North Pole, how come some of the presents are clearly marked as coming from particular local shops? Why do I sometimes see the same wrapping paper we've had before?" I'm through with trying to convince him. Maybe it's just that I've had years altogether of going along with this inherited farce, ever since his siblings were small too. I just grinned at him and said, "You're getting suspicious, are you?" The truth is, I'll be relieved when it's all through. Conspiracy theories get hard and irksome to keep up.

One of the least favourite questions I've had to deal with is, "Why did (insert some lucky friend's name) get the (insert some ultra-expensive gift) I wanted, and I asked Santa for it too but he only gave me cheaper stuff? Doesn't he like me as much?" Once, I even heard Andrew joke that Santa may take their parents' pay checks into consideration. Truth be told, I'm not sure I even like having to scrimp and save in December, then having to explain that we're broke while the old fat guy gets the credit for the largesse found beneath the tree. "Mum, I know you get worried about spending too much at Christmas but you don't have to get much for me. You can just let Santa take care of it."

Maybe if I had the chance to do it all over again, I might have done it differently. One thing I'm not going to change is to emphasise all the wonderful things I've listed above which I believe are genuinely true. There are all the great works of fiction too, whose themes are full of the sort of truth we want our children to take on board. We can even tell them the historical factual tale about the real Saint Nick without stretching it to the extent we have. And of course, way above all, is the reason why we celebrate Christmas at all, that Jesus was born for us. How great that we live in a world which is full of such marvellous and awesome truths that we really don't have to make up any extra embellishments.

But I guess we'll still be watching people like Tim Allen and Vince Vaughan each Christmas, hamming it up in movies such as 'The Santa Clause' and 'Fred Claus.'

A surreal, foreign experience showed me why fiction is important

Sometimes just one moment can change the way we look at things.

An eye-opening experience I had was stopping over at Tokyo Airport on the way to Heathrow, when I was 20 years old. As we walked through the long airport terminal, the only three Anglo-Saxon faces to be seen anywhere belonged to me and my parents. The rest of the vast crowd was comprised of Asian faces, Japanese specifically. There were thousands of pretty girls with glossy, jet-black hair, cute toddlers and smart-looking men. Undoubtedly, a stream of western tourists turn up in that international airport all the time, but at that moment, for as far as I could see, there was just us.

We were getting covert glances and sometimes smiles. Growing up as a fourth or fifth generation Australian in Adelaide, I had carried an unconscious sense that most people were like me. We were the 'common' type. Of course I'd been taught at school that the vast majority of the world was filled with other races, who had different coloured skins and spoke different languages. The dry facts and text book photos obviously hadn't made it sink in. Now, during that long walk with our suitcases through Tokyo Airport, I had my first experience of feeling 'foreign'. The world was a far bigger place than I'd ever imagined.

I sometimes remember my impressions of that day in 1990. It's healthy to think of ourselves from someone else's point of view for a change. I find it a good remedy for remembering that the world doesn't revolve around me. It's wise also to consider how easy it is for individuals to carry a sort of delusion of grandeur and self-importance. Although I am ME to myself, the crucial person in my life's story, I am an OTHER to everyone else on our planet, who are busy being the centre of their own stories. From this perspective, any special sense of entitlement has to be rejected.

It's the same for why fiction is a good medium to read and write. When people ask me why I write it, I've sometimes felt put on the spot, unable to come up with a reasonable sounding answer. I have an inner conviction that it's excellent and important, but a simple, "I've always enjoyed it," seemed a self-indulgent answer and certainly not acceptable. When I remember my impressions in Tokyo that day, I think it's all tied in with the reason why.

Fiction enables us to remove ourselves from our own egos and look at the world from the perspective of others. Studies I've read about have indicated that fiction readers really are higher on a measured empathy scale than non-fiction readers or non-readers. This doesn't surprise me. When we are reading a novel which switches from one character's point of view to that of another, we are filled with new ways of looking at the world. We may begin a story automatically endorsing one person's opinion and rejecting another, but when we read part of the story being told from the opposite point of view, it allows us the experience of entering a head which is totally different from where we might have expected to find ourselves.

It's so easy not to realise that all this is happening when we are simply reading a good story. What a great exercise for helping to understand and broadening our tolerance, even if just a little bit. This is what I often aim to do with characters who don't seem so lovable. In my opinion, being able to see a glimpse of the world from someone else's perpective, even just a flash, is well worth the effort a fiction writer may have to put in to provide this.

That the Bible is full of holy 'liars'

 Telling lies is always wrong, right? God is Truth and anyone who wants to follow God should not allow a trace of falsehood into their souls. We hear such remarks from teachers and preachers as, "There is no such thing as a white lie." Then we get uptight when we find ourselves in awkward situations where stretching the truth may seem the kind or prudent action. And we believe that the Bible is full of supportive evidence that we should never once let a lie cross past our lips.

* Cain told God that he had no idea where Abel was. We know his famous line, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
* Abraham and, in turn, his son, Isaac lied to foreign rulers, pretending that their beautiful wives were really their sisters.
* Sneaky Jacob tricked his blind old dad into bestowing his brother's blessing on him. He had to leave his beloved mother and travel miles to their ancestral homeland where his foxy old uncle doled it right back at him.
* Elisha's servant, Gehazi, chased after Naaman, pretending that his master wanted a reward for the counsel that led to his healing. Gehazi earned himself the severe punishment of Naaman's leprosy clinging to him and his descendents.
* David started an unfortunate series of lies and cover-ups concerning the faithful soldier Uriah and his wife, Bathsheba. God forgave David but didn't regard the lies lightly. David's lineage was filled with a history of familial discord from then on.
* Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, each suffered fatal collapses for pretending that they'd made a larger offering than they really had. This one, I find most chilling. You'd think this is scary evidence that lying is not okay, wouldn't you?

But a further delving into the pages of scripture seems to suggest that lying is allowable at times. Not only that, but liars even get rewards and pats on the back from God.

* Two Hebrew midwives went against royal Egyptian orders to slaughter new-born baby boys and left them alive. They explained this with the lie, "The women are so hardy that by the time we get there, the babies are already born." God dealt well with the midwives and even their names, Shiphrah and Puah, were recorded in Scripture for all time.
* Moses himself told the Pharoah that they were only going to lead the Israelites on a three-day journey into the wilderness to hold a sacrifice and feast to their God. It could be argued that Pharoah was right to be suspicious, as we know very well they intended to hightail it out of there and never return. By demanding that the women, children and herds stay behind, he was acting with strategic sense.
* The power games Joseph played with his brothers, when he was Governor of Egypt, were based on lies. He directed his own goblet to be placed in the mouth of Benjamin's sack and then reacted with feigned surprise and horror when it was discovered. He kept his brother, Simeon, in prison based on the lie that the brothers had taken it.
* Rehab, the prostitute of Jericho, lied when she told the king that the two Israelite spies had managed to escape out of the city gates. In reality, she had them hidden beneath flax stalks on her roof. Not only were her family spared from the wrath on Jericho but she was also included in the direct lineage of Jesus.
* Saul's son, Jonathan, and his sister, Michal, repeatedly lied to protect David from their vengeful father. Michal even put a dummy of David in the bed on the night he escaped.
* King David once tore his garments and let spittle form in his beard, pretending to be mad. On a much later occasion when his own son was leading a revolt against him, he asked his friend, Hushai, to approach Absalom, pretending to be on his side, with the purpose of making the advice of Absalom's real follower, Ahitophel, sound foolish.
* Jesus himself (in John 7:1-27) told his brothers that his time was not yet come so he was not intending to accompany them to the feast in Judea. Then when the brothers had gone, he also went, not openly but in secret. And after his Resurrection, he joined Cleopas and his friend on the Road to Emmaus, pretending to be a traveller who had no idea of the things that had just happened in Jerusalem.Isn't that acting a lie?

What's with all this, then? How come the first group of liars reinforce to us that it is sinful behaviour and deserves punishment while the truth-stretching of the second group is commendable? After studying the two lists carefully, my first feeling was that the motives of the second group were way different than that of the first. While the first group were lying with self-enhancing or self-preserving motives such as pride and fear, the second group were doing it with the love of God and true welfare of His people in mind.

History beyond the Bible is also filled with examples of noble lies. The families crowded together in Anne Frank's secret annexe lasted as long as they did because faithful friends pretended to the Nazi authorities not to know they were there. Our favourite stories are filled with wonderful heroes who are tortured by villains, yet grit their teeth and keep stating that they have no idea where their allies are? Doesn't all this suggest that it's possible to technically 'lie' in the spirit of truth? God's word and his dealings with men are full of paradoxes. Is this another?

Having Jesus as the last example on my list is really interesting because as we know well from Scripture, He never sinned once. His innocence of all sin is what gives us the confidence that He was an acceptable sacrifice for our sins. A man who was tainted by the same guilt that we bear would never have been able to stand in our place and take it all. That means that His apparent 'lies' mentioned above cannot really be regarded as lies at all. Is there sometimes a rock solid truth beneath the apparent stretching of the truth which puts it over on the side of truth? I'd be very careful to come down harsh and renounce anyone as a liar. Jesus Himself said, "Do not judge according to appearance but with right judgment."

I also ask myself whether we may also sometimes be more Pharasaically intolerant and self-righteous about lies than God Himself. Remember, the Angel of the Lord was gentle with Sarah when He discovered her telling an outright lie. He'd just revealed that she laughed with resigned disbelief when she overheard Him say that she and her husband, Abraham, would soon be parents of a son.

"I didn't laugh," she tried to cover up, when she knew she'd been exposed.

"Yes, you did," he simply said. And the promise still came to pass in her life.

To keep my words salty

My 14-year-old daughter was telling me that some of her friends feel very down about themselves. They look at themselves in the mirror and get depressed because they don't think they have a thing to offer or admire. One name made me quite surprised. I asked Emma, "Doesn't she pay any attention to all the Facebook feedback she gets on her posts all the time?"

Anybody with young teenage girls among their Facebook friends may know what I mean. A typical comment could be something like, "OMG, you are so stunning and gorgeous! Can't you leave a bit for the rest of us? How R we to compete with U?" This sort of thing gets shoveled on enough to become a bit tedious and the boys in my family roll their eyes if they walk past and see it.

Emma's answer was sadder still. "That doesn't count. You can't believe any of that because everyone does it." She went on to describe how it's an unspoken code among teenage girls she knows. If you want to get any positive feedback, you have to pour out praise on others. That way you know you'll get it back, because other girls are obligated to respond. "If you don't tell them they're beautiful right back, you'll come across as mean and full of yourself and get paid out. The problem is, you can't believe what people are telling you because you know why they're doing it."

What a miserable way for things to be, yet I know if my generation in the '80s had had Facebook, we would have been just the same. If ever anybody does give some genuine, heartfelt praise, you might be inclined to ignore it because you suspect the person's motives are insincere. It makes me reflect that perhaps we adults may be in the position to have some impact on the teenage girls. If we give them honest and warm feedback, they may not have the same reason to question our motives. However, it also makes me realise something else too.

It is a prime example of words losing the power they were meant to have. It makes me think of what Jesus meant when He spoke about salt losing its saltiness. "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men" (Matthew 5:13). That applies to our words for sure. If they're bland and watered-down, like the pumpkin soup I made yesterday, they're not good for anything. What good are words that have lost their power because nobody believes or trusts them?

It's not just the words of young female teens that lose their saltiness but all of us. Politicians' promises get scoffed at, based on a history of let-downs. Advertising claims are ignored. When my cheap shampoo doesn't make my hair shiny and healthy, I don't get indignant because they didn't keep their word. When my McDonalds burger doesn't look like the picture on the board, I don't get all upset either. And recently, when I said, "We'll see," to a request from my son, Blake, he said, "I'll bet that's just a fob-off comment that'll end up meaning no." That got my attention because he was right. What a bland, flavourless "you'll see" it was.

If we make an effort to keep our words salty, I'm sure we can be people who speak and write with flavour, at least in our own lives. It's surely well worth making an effort to use words sparingly and then only say what we mean. We don't have to be blunt or brutally honest. We can just stick to the old rule, "If you don't have anything constructive or worthwhile to say, don't say anything." We don't need to make stuff up. Then people will believe our feedback and trust our claims.

By the way, I'm happy to say that with a bit of salt and pepper sprinkled in my bowl, that pumpkin soup tasted fantastic. I can confidently tell the others, "If you season it to your taste, it'll be lovely." Those are salty words.

I'm also delighted by what Emma said at the end of our conversation. She gave a little shrug and said, "I don't think I'm really like the others. I don't waste time thinking about all that stuff. When I look into the mirror, the face I see is just who I am. I can't change it, so if that's what I've got, that's what people have to take."

Salty words indeed.
 

To know when to push in and not take no for an answer

I was reading on my chaise lounge when a fly landed on my knee. I swiped him away. He buzzed in a circle for a few inches and returned there again. When I shooed him off the second time, the same thing happened. It was repeated for about five or six times. I said, "You silly wally. What a pea-brain." No, he was smaller than a pea himself, so it would have to be a dot-brain. "What will it take to make you realise that it would be better to land anywhere but there?"

That got me thinking how human beings can be similar to flies sometimes, going around the same dead-ends repeatedly. I picked up my notebook and jotted some ideas about how we tend to make the same mistakes until it dawns on us that it's time to change, similar in our actions to a dumb housefly whose memory is only a split second. Why else have people written sayings such as, When you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always got? I wondered whether celestial beings are inclined to shake their heads while watching us, just as I did with the fly.

When I finished, I looked up and noticed that fly was back on my knee again. As far I'd knew, he'd been there ever since I got sidetracked with writing. I shooed him away but this time, I knew the joke was on me. Here I'd been, writing about his stupidity, and he'd got his way for far longer than I'd intended. Maybe he'd just taught me something about the power of persistence and focus.

For whatever reason, he'd decided that my knee was the best place in the whole room to be, and nothing was going to deflect him from his goal. He didn't go off all depressed and decide to settle for second best. He gave no signs of feeling sorry for himself and thinking that circumstances and providence were pitted against him. For all I knew, he might have been calling me a silly wally.

So as there's wisdom for both points of view, how do we know when to pursue something and when to stop? You can't flog a dead horse holds just as true in some circumstances as Hold fast to your dreams and never give up does in others. That's been a question that's frustrated me, but I'm sure being buffeted by waves of circumstances has taught me something I never used to know. When we do our bit, making an effort to stick close to God through prayer and studying His words and precepts in the Bible, He finds it easier to reveal His plans for us through the promises He's made for His followers for all eternity, which are recorded in His book, and through the gut instincts and promptings we get from our own hearts. Many who are saturated in the Christian tradition call this the guidance and leadings of the Holy Spirit, although you often hear it expressed as intuition, hunches and gut feelings too. When we have clear declarations to the effect that God is going to keep the covenant He's made with us, that's when we need to get a clear idea of what those covenant promises are and push in, sticking to them and expecting them, just as that fly did to my knee.

My history of faint-heartedness and timidity has sometimes disqualified me for receiving the promises because I simply haven't persisted. If I'd been the man who knocked on his friend's door at midnight, asking for bread for my guests, and he told me to go away, I would have slunk off with my tail between my legs thinking, "If only I'd got here before they all went to bed." If I'd been the widow who wanted justice, I would've taken just one scolding from that old curmudgeonly judge and thought, "This is definitely not going to work." If I'd been one of the fellows who carried their paralysed friend on his stretcher to see Jesus, I would've taken one look at that crowd and said, "We didn't get here early enough." I've been quick to acknowledge closed doors without even attempting to give the handle a bit of a twist and a rattle.

Two of my faith heroes are elderly people who lived in the vicinity of Jerusalem's great temple. One was a devout old man named Simeon who had a revelation that he wouldn't die before he'd seen the promised Saviour in person. There was also an old prophetess named Anna, who'd been widowed for 84 years and now lived in the temple vicinity, devoting her life to seeking God's will in prayer. When Joseph and Mary brought in the tiny baby Jesus, both Simeon and Anna recognised instantly who He was. In their expressions of joy at the sudden blessing they were witnessing, they, in turn, blessed Joseph and Mary (Luke 2).

What really grabs me about these two is how persistent they must have been in their prayers and expectation. Jesus was little more than newly born, yet Simeon and Anna had been awaiting his arrival for decades. She'd probably been living her devout routine at the temple for over 60 years. Like that fly, they'd returned to the same place over and over, fueled by their inner certainty that their prayers for the Saviour's arrival would be answered. After a mere 30 or 40 years of praying and hoping, they didn't just shrug and say, "Oh, well, that hasn't happened. There might be some mistake."

But unlike the fly (well, as far as I can tell), they had solid reasons to believe that their persistence would yield its reward. They had the promises of Scripture recorded with words, and Simeon had his personal revelation to support it. We have promises in Scripture recorded with words too. Knowing that's true, I love to figure out what's definitely promised to me and press in for it, even when it seems I'm getting shooed away.
 

That we can honour by remembering

Tonight, I was reading through some genealogy research I'd typed out for my dad several years ago. There is a long and interesting section about his father's experience in the First World War. Charlie Mitchell was born in 1892. He was nicknamed 'Red' because of his bright hair colour. My father, Bryon, is his second youngest child, born in 1932. I am the youngest of the next generation, born in the very last week of 1969. I'm proud to have had a grandfather serve his country in WW1, although he and my grandma both died in the 1960s before I was born.

The true story of Red Mitchell's war experience begins when he left Adelaide, just before Christmas, 1915, with the expectation that he and his fellow soldiers would reinforce the ANZACs on the beach of Gallipoli. It turned out their battalion evacuated Gallipoli one week earlier, so they joined them at Alexandria, Egypt. Next, they joined the trench warfare in France.

Typing it out brought the hardships vividly to life. My grandfather was one of the brigade runners, whose job it was to sprint and deliver messages between trenches, the sort of thing we now use electronic communication for. Running at top speed while trying to breathe through a gas mask took its toll on him, and he suffered from rhinitis, which was severe inflammation of the mucous membrane. At one time, he was severely shell shocked while running, and couldn't avoid breathing in a lungful of chlorine gas. He never recovered his sense of smell for the rest of his life.

Dad's story describes how the soldiers lived with deafening and unceasing shell fire, unable to get any quality sleep. They had to march through muddy trenches, after weeks of downpour. The boggy ground sucked their gumboots off and seeped through to their skin. Whenever anybody peeled off his boot to examine his chafed feet, it was almost impossible to wriggle them on again. 'Trench foot' was the most common condition treated by the medicos.

I think my extended family still has an old postcard, sent from Charlie Mitchell to his mother in Adelaide, telling her that they were soon expecting to go to the front line but for her not to worry.


Here is one of my favourite parts. One day, Red Mitchell and a mate were walking in the vicinity of a German prison camp and heard wild cheering and singing from the captives within the walls. They popped into a bistro in the nearest village to learn that the War was declared over. Something about both sides being united in their happiness and relief touches me.

Throughout my life, I've had moments of being a worrier and control freak. Reading this brought something home to me. If I'd been conscious somewhere in 1915 to 1918 to witness how many times my grandfather's life had been at risk, I might have panicked about never being born. As it all worked out without my input, I find it a good reminder to entrust other aspects of my life to God too.

Still, I think of the young soldiers in several wars who made the ultimate sacrifice and never returned home to have children. In the 1970s, when I was a little girl watching the ANZAC march in Adelaide, there were still a number of frail old diggers from the first World War, as well as a pretty large number from World War 2. My mother would always cry.

Having all this at my fingertips really makes me want to try writing a story in the form of a novel about this time period, but I haven't mustered the confidence yet. I believe we do honourably to remember those brave men and the women they left at home, who all sacrificed so much, enabling us to live safely in our beautiful country. I'm probably going off to our local Dawn Service at 6.30am tomorrow morning. Will you do the same? And if you want more food for thought, why not get hold of a copy of "The Greenfield Legacy", the novel I co-wrote with my friends Meredith Resce, Amanda Deed and Rose Dee. It has a strong ANZAC theme running through it, as one of our pivotal characters won the dubious 'lottery' making it compulsory for him to serve in the Vietnam War. We consider it our tribute to those soldiers. When I think of the spirit of Australia, still a reasonably new nation at the time of WW1, rising to the serious occasion, I feel very proud.

Why Jesus didn't speak a word

A careful comparing of all four Gospels is needed to figure out the order of what happened to Jesus from the moment he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane to when he died on the Cross. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John don't highlight all the same details but we can piece it together with some detective work.

It seems Jesus was brought first to the household of Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas, that year's high priest (John). Annas referred the case on to his son-in-law, and after some questioning and severe beating by the people, Caiaphas had Jesus turned over to Pilate, the Roman Governor. Pilate, suspecting that the charges were trumped up and Jesus had done nothing wrong, tried to free him. When he found out that Jesus was from Galilee, he tried to pass the responsibility on to Herod, saying that Jesus was under Herod's jurisdiction (Luke).

Luke goes on to say that Herod was delighted to have Jesus stand before him as he'd been curious to see him perform a miracle for a long time. Yet when he fired a barrage of questions at him, Jesus said nothing. Herod and his soldiers got tired of that, so after dressing him in a kingly robe and making fun of him, they sent him back to Pilate. At this point, Pilate once again tried to free him, but when the people behaved as if they were ready to start a riot, he decided to give the crowd what they demanded.

When I used to read Luke's account of the events, I wondered why Jesus refused to reply to Herod. As a young person, I assumed there must have been a touch of insolence there, some bravado like a schoolboy being called before the principal, whose only comeback is to sullenly clam up and ignore questions. But one day, in a book about God's favour, I came across an explanation which is completely different. Perhaps Jesus didn't speak because he was so powerful and full of so much favour from God that if he'd opened his mouth, he might have prevented himself from being crucified. The fact that the words we speak are surprisingly powerful has been in the media a lot recently, from both secular and spiritual sources. If this is the case, imagine the possible effect of any words from Jesus declaring his identity and innocence.

In Exodus, when Moses dared ask God's name, the Lord replied, 'Tell them I AM sent you.' That was always a confusing, bothersome scripture for me. What sort of a crazy name is that? Yet when the soldiers in the Garden said that they were looking for Jesus from Nazareth, he responded simply with the same words, 'I am he,' and it was enough to make the soldiers keel over with his power (John). It amazes me that they still had the audacity to take him before the high priest after that. I would have stuttered, 'Sorry sir, I think we got the wrong person,' and run away.

It does make sense that because Jesus knew his time had come, keeping quiet in Herod's court was to help make sure that God's plan was fulfilled. He had many chances to get out of the situation before. He'd always operated under God's favour and now was no different. He didn't have to be in Jerusalem at that time, he surely could have escaped in the Garden when the soldiers fell backwards, and Pilate was willing to let him go. Even Pilate's wife had a revelation in a dream that Jesus was an innocent man and sent a messenger to her husband, warning him not to harm Jesus (Matthew). Any ideas of Jesus as a victim and underdog I retained had to go. All the time, he was master of the whole situation and chose to face the Cross for us, when he could have got himself free at any time.

Many people understand that when Jesus died on the Cross as our sin substitute, part of the benefit for us is having our sin cleared away and forgiven when we look to him, because he willingly took our punishment. It follows that when God looks at us, he sees people who he regards just like his son, Jesus, because we've been cleansed from our sins. We're like the adopted siblings of Jesus and he's like our big brother. The Bible also calls us joint heirs of the kingdom of heaven. One of the most exciting parts of the Easter story for me is that as adopted children and joint heirs with Jesus, we may experience similar favour to that which he could've used to prevent him going to the Cross at all. Amazing! We don't need to think of ourselves as sinners, worms, hopeless cases, underdogs or losers either. Each Easter reminds me to act like it.

Our new position is what inspired Jesus, when risen, to assure us that we'd be able to do similar things to those he was recorded doing, and tell us to go everywhere in the world telling the Good News to everyone.

Have a blessed Easter, everyone.