Uncategorized

People Watching

Posted on October 11, 2022 by Pieter Stok

Currently we are on the return journey back to Bergen after having made it all the way to Kirkenes. The boat we are on is essentially a fancy ferry that transports locals up and down the coast as well as tourists. We stop at a number of ports each day for people to embark and disembark and to allow other passengers to go on tours or meander through the local town.

The ship is small by cruise liner standards but has some of the same facilities. My wife describes the decor as “Upmarket Medical Centre”.

The main attraction for me is the amazing scenery we travel through but there is also time to observe my fellow passengers – at meals, in conversation, on tours and in the general activity of the ship. There are groups, couples, families and singles. There are Norwegians, Germans, French, Americans and a smattering of other nationalities. There are extreme introverts, and the far more annoying, extreme extroverts and every personality in between – and you are all stuck together for hours on end. Then you have drinkers for whom the bar is the focus of the ship, and the knitters who look for a quiet spot to click the needles and observe the amazing scenery. Crossword doodlers, shutterbugs, readers, board game players and jigsaw puzzlers round out the menagerie.

Vardo

A game I play is to listen for the accents to guess where people are from and when an opportune moment arises I will ask them, to see how close I got.

On this particular trip we have had two very special encounters. The first was with a pastor and his wife who had been in a church in Melbourne for a few years and are now back in Sweden. Even more amazing, we knew the town they came from and I actually had a photo of a friend of his which I had taken when he gave us a tour of a museum. The second encounter was with an elderly retired German academic who shared with us some of his amazing life. This was a special privilege.

I shouldn’t forget the crew. They need to keep good order on the ship as well as keeping the passengers happy. Most are friendly and some officious. They all do their respective jobs well but don’t get back to the ship late! Then you see their dark side. After a week you become familiar with the waiting and cleaning staff. On our trip the real test came when there was a bomb scare. Suddenly the crew had to take on different roles in an unfamiliar environment. The threat happened just as people were returning to the ship in port. Shelter, water and food had to be found, frail people supported and information transmitted. This was a moment when some of the crew really stood up and showed leadership and others stood back and waited for orders – a microcosm of everyday life.

Anyway, people are coming back from their excursions so it is time to swatch again.

Categories: Travel, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

The Status of Preaching

Posted on September 23, 2022 by Pieter Stok

While reading Second Timothy as Paul instructs Timothy from prison to be a staunch and steadfast promoter of the gospel and to “correctly handle the word of truth”, it struck me that many of the examples of preaching that I encounter stand in stark contrast to that injunction. Pop psychology, platitudes, personal views and alternate readings, replace what should be at the heart of preaching – God’s infallible Word.

Even worse, some preachers encourage their hearers to find “their own truth” in the text. This is a very postmodernist approach where we all have our own “truths”. All we need to do is discover it. God’s truth, is secondary to our “truth”.

I found an alternative view in a church in Porvoo, Finland, a number of years ago. As the preacher approached the pulpit, above the door to the pulpit the cleric would have read: 1 Cor 1:21 “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” And as the preacher left, on the other side, 1 Cor 4:20 “For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.” For me, it highlights the fact of God’s truth is proclaimed through the foolish mouths of humans. However, this Word, as it comes from God, is empowered to change lives and destinies. It doesn’t give us an excuse to replace God’s Word with some fantasy of our own.

Our foolishness, however, does not give us liberty to stray from God’s word. This must always be at the heart of all preaching.

Categories: Bible, Christianity, preaching, Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Robe – A Gem

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Pieter Stok

I have travelled quite extensively around my area of the world but every now and then one finds a gem that has been missed in the past. In our recent trip to South Australia we went to Robe, in the South East corner not far from Mt Gambier. It is situated on an attractive bay. A stone obelisk on Cape Dombey which guided ships to the harbour, is still extant.

In the mid-1800s it was South Australia’s second busiest port. At this time Chinese migrants wishing to avoid Victoria’s arrival tax landed here and walked the 400 kilometres to Ballarat. It is estimated that 16000 travelled this path! The port became redundant with the advent of the railways and the wool and sheepskins which had previously been exported from here found another way of reaching their destinations.

What remains however is an attractive village which, by Australian standards, contains a collection of fine historical buildings – houses, churches and pubs. It is quite a treat to wander around the village with the aid of a pamphlet produced by the local council.

Today it is a holiday retreat with a protected marina for the keen fishermen. The fine old buildings are interspersed with modern units and houses. The town is alive and active but its C21st life is a far cry from the square riggers finding safe harbour here over 150 years ago.

The Pub
Customs House
Presbyterian Kirk
The Obelisk
Categories: Travel, Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

An Anniversary

Posted on July 14, 2022 by Pieter Stok

Today is the 28th anniversary of my father’s death (July 14th) and as anniversaries often do, it caused me to reflect on the influence of my father – especially as I am a couple of years away from the age at which he died.

Dad and his violin

My Dad wasn’t perfect. A tradition I have faithfully carried on. He had a quick temper and could be stubborn. Traits that I dutifully learned as a young boy. But there are many qualities that I should have learned but was slow to grasp. He was a generous man: generous with his time, possessions and the little money he had. He was a man who took a keen interest in people’s lives and tried to help them as best he could.

Maarten, my Dad, was uneducated and this was largely due to the time in which he grew up – in the midst of economic depression, and later, war. But he was intelligent and astute. He saw through pomposity and bravado. On the other hand, he saw the best in people. When I might have been dismissive of someone, he would respond and tell me I didn’t understand the hardship and trials that this person had been through and which had, in turn, shaped their lives and attitudes.

He had that sense of responsibility that characterised many of his generation. Responsibility towards his family, his church, his customers and neighbours.

Also, he had a wicked sense of humour, liked a glass of wine or a cold beer on a blistering hot Aussie day, and loved his music – particularly Bach.

Looking back, I give thanks to God for having this dad as my father. He encouraged, at times bullied, me into making the most of my learning – one that he never had the opportunity to experience. He passed on beliefs and values for which I will be eternally grateful.

Twenty-eight years dead but still very much alive!

Categories: Family, Reflections, Uncategorized | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Memories

Posted on June 30, 2022 by Pieter Stok

MEMORIES

Memories are enigmatic. Fact and memory are not necessarily identical. Are the memories real or constructed? Are they made from genuine moments or reconstructed by photos and family tales? Where, exactly, does the truth sit? Or when it comes to the past is truth only relative anyway?

My earliest memory centres on a wooden leg standing in corner of a darkened bedroom. Only many years later when I asked my mother about it did she tell me that it belonged to a great grandfather, and I had seen it when we visited him. I must have been about two and a half at the time and the disembodied leg has been etched in my memory ever since. Other memories from that time include hiding under a desk which had drawers on either side and feeling secure while the adults talked. Taking a lolly(sweet) from behind the counter at the barber’s is another. A warm recollection involves being held and cuddled by an Aunty and my bare foot exploring her coat pocket as she always had a treat for her one and only nephew. There are vague recollections too of the trip to Australia on the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt.

On board the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt

By the time I emigrated to Australia I was three and a half. This life changing event only holds vague and, on the whole, unreliable memories. There was a model of a ship floating in a barrel. My parents couldn’t substantiate that one. There was also an overall sense of sadness. Not, I think, from leaving Holland but rather from the separation on the boat from my parents for long periods of time. I am told that I was sent to a crèche and that I didn’t like being with crying younger children. One clear image is standing on a lower deck and seeing my parents on the deck above – that memory is always associated with a severe heartache.

My memories take on a firmness (whether true or not!) after our arrival in Australia. All the recollections of the Anderson family at “The Hill” in Mepunga West: Ola, Beth, Old Mrs Anderson and the rest of the multi personalitied clan, represent a tangled ball of wool in which times and events are, after 65 years, impossible to disentangle. The overwhelming emotions, however, are one of joy and security. Even if I wasn’t fully aware of having left a family behind I was now truly embraced by a new one. The main characters in this experience have all passed on but they are still solidly secure in my head and heart.

“Helping” with the milking, feeding hay to the herd and taking the full milk cans to the depot near Smith’s Post Office and telephone exchange (a room at the back of another farmhouse) and the glorious spread of the afternoon tea before the second milking are all memory-videos that I can replay in my mind without hesitation.

After a few months at the Anderson’s we moved to a house in Allansford opposite the Post Office.

The warning my father gave me about not entering the shed was crystal clear. Many years later I found out that there was a water storage under the shed but floor of the shed floor had become rotten over time and one could fall through the floor and drown.

I had two Uncles who had arrived two years earlier and had been welcomed by the Anderson family. One of these, Adrian, built me a cart.

A clear evocation is walking to the depot (a truck-tray height platform where farmers brought their milk cans every morning and evening) and hanging a billy(milk can) can on one of a series of nails alongside the platform and then picking up a billycan of fresh milk later in the day. The depot was a little way along the highway out of town. I am sure that my mother would have come with me but all I can recall is walking with the billy-can along the side of the road.

Christopher Ingles’ parents owned the local general store just a few metres from our house. Fortunately for me they were kindly people who communicated with my parents. I learned an important life lesson in this store which was that you needed to pay for things in a shop. You couldn’t just walk in and get stuff!

At The Hill, Mepunga West

I hadn’t started school yet and my mother had visions of me riding a horse to school. Mum got these visions from some of the films the authorities had shown prospective migrants about Australia. The only problem was that the school was 150 metres away – or should I say “yards” as this was predecimal Australia. In any case it didn’t matter as we moved to Ocean Grove before I started school.

These are some of my earliest memories. Just thinking about them brings an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. People’s faces flash past my eyes. Places and events parade in my mind. Real, partly real or imagined – to me, they live on.

Categories: Family, Reflections, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

The Princess Syndrome

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Pieter Stok

I wrote this nearly 10 years ago. If anything, matters have worsened.

Travels from Ur

With hindsight, it was easier to have six than one. Having “half a dozen unassorted”, as one doctor described them, (i.e. six daughters) turned out to be a blessing for them, and for us as parents. The girls had to learn to share, cooperate and compromise.

We told them they could have an “attitude” when they became a teenager. If they displayed an attitude after their 13th birthday we told them they missed their chance. It was on the day they turned 13 they could have an attitude. After that  was too late. With six, you set patterns and the others tend to follow with only the odd break out attempt.  In our family there was the famous dummy spit over a school bag. It is memorable because it was a rare event.   So the patterns went like this: “It is our family rule that we know who is supervising…

View original post 473 more words

Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

For a Time Such as This

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Pieter Stok

How has God been preparing the church, the people of God, for a time such as this? And what hints and leadings has He been giving us to be His active representatives on earth right now?cropped-cropped-isaiah.jpg What opportunities has He created? These are all questions my wife has been challenging me with in recent times. Hetty has written the following.

In 2005 we went to live in the UK for 16 months. I found myself with a lot of time and looked about to find something to become involved with. Our local church put me in touch with Bridgebuilder, an organisation that worked with schools to teach children about the Christian faith.

This appealed to me because for 15 years I had been a volunteer teacher of Christian Religious Education in Australia. Every week I spent 30 minutes in each class, sharing Bible stories, and praying with the students. It was a government legislated privilege to be able to do this.

In the UK things were different. The best Christian churches could hope for was to be invited into schools for a few hours every year. Bridgebuilder developed programmes and presented them to a hundred students at a time. I felt appreciative of our Australian system but knew that there was a lot of opposition building against it in the secular community.

Fast forward 5 years and my fears were being realised. The CRE programme was under attack, the organisation overseeing it was scrambling to adapt to the pressures. If the Government removed its protective legislation how would its mission to school children continue?

This was the moment that I thought back to my time in the UK. Could God have given me this experience so that I could now see a way forward in my local situation? Had He been equipping me for a future I didn’t yet know?

Today the universal Church is part of a universal crisis. Alongside health, economics, education, transport, employment, and a hundred other areas of human life, the Church is wondering how it will survive in a Covid 19 world and how it can keep being Christ to that world.

Many Christians and churches are trying to tweak what we’ve always done – drive thru communion, services in the car park while parishioners stay in their cars, and the like. Generally we are hunkering down and looking after our own flock. Missions means going ‘out there’, but we’re being told to stay at home.

But my thought is that God has been preparing His people for a Covid 19 world. What He was doing in your life ten years ago, or five years ago, or last year, was ‘the equipping of the saints’. Cast your mind back.

Look around your immediate vicinity. What appearance does this new world have? How has it changed? Then go back to our marching orders. What is a Christian’s primary mission, and what equipment and training have we been given by God to carry it out?

One example is the scandal of child abuse that has rocked the Church. The Church has become a stench to the world, and often it is trying to make excuses for the actions of its own people, desperately trying to salvage its reputation. I cringe whenever this issue is raised. I want to hide in shame.

So how should we view the sequence of events in our time with the idea that God is using them to equip us? And how do we move forward into the future with this massive millstone around the neck of the Church?

I believe God can and will advance His kingdom in spite of the wickedness of mankind. Abusive churchmen and women cannot thwart His plans. Perhaps the Church needs to fall on its knees, confess, repent, and seek forgiveness from those it has harmed. Never seeking a lenient sentence, but accepting judgement, and giving all it owns (every last gold goblet!) in restitution and compensation. A broken and contrite heart. Personally, I am waiting for the leaders of our churches to start this process.

Then we can be used by God to …

 

Categories: christian, Church, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

A Pandemic Rant

Posted on May 10, 2020 by Pieter Stok

My wife told me to write the following to get it out of my system.

 

I have become increasingly perturbed by the “sooking”, all the complaining and whinging coming out of society since the lock downs that been imposed. “Why can’t we do this now.(Clubbing, shopping, visiting)”  “I am depressed because I’ve got my kids at home.” I can’t do this and that and the list of complaints goes on  …

I am not denying that the coronavirus is a huge upheaval and people have lost their jobs, and life has been hugely disrupted – and people are dying. It is huge and it going to continue being an issue for quite some time. However, in the whole sweep of history it is not the Black Death with a third of the population wiped out, it is not a reign of terror by invading hoards, it is not the nightly fear of bombs dropping on our heads and living in the Underground every evening, it is not a nuclear holocaust. It is a pandemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen in many generations. Yet in most western countries, with a few stark exceptions, and certainly in Australia the impacts have been managed.

The virus has, however, revealed a deep lack of individual and community resilience. I believe we need to place ourselves in the context of history rather than in our self-centred C21st  bubble. My father was born at the end of WW1. The Spanish flu was running riot. When he was 10 the Great Depression started and by the time he was 20 he was picked up by invading Germans and forced to work near Berlin through the best part of his early 20s. At thirty-three he picked up his young family and migrated to Australia, worked hard, never made much money but also never complained. The thing is, he wasn’t unique. It was a characteristic of his generation. There was a resilience and tenacity. When I complained about the jobs I was supposed to do as a young boy there was, understandably, very little sympathy. He didn’t know the phrase “suck it up” but that was the intent.

The question I want to pose is, why do so many today, young and old, show a lack of resilience? With all the comforts, technology and government safety nets of our society, where is the sense of fortitude, courage and desire to overcome?

Is it that in the last few generations we have protected ourselves and children from tough choices, hard decisions and even the more mundane daily tasks that simply mean putting aside our discomfort and stepping up? If our children are told to hang the washing, weed the garden, clean the bathroom or wash the car is the expectation that they do it whether they like it or not. “Suck it up.”

What have we learned about ourselves over the past months? Are there attitudes we need to change? Are there areas of our life where we need to grow a backbone? This pandemic will be wasted if is all about returning to life as normal because it may just be that “normal” was not such a healthy state after all, for us, our families and society.

And finally, it is not simply about finding the “positives”. For many, particularly those who have lost loved ones, jobs and security, the message of “finding the positives” can be quite despairing because there aren’t any. The message, in fact, is far simpler. Life throws up many tough challenges and we need to have the courage to struggle against them whether they are individual, family or communal. It is a trait that should be learned from childhood. It is a resilience that enables communities to fight wars against evil oppressors, individuals to persevere over personal struggles and societies to fight pandemics. Is it that lesson we are all being reminded of? Looking around and observing social behavior I find the answer to that question quite disheartening.

Categories: community, Family, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 4 Comments

O God Our Help in Ages Past

Posted on January 26, 2020 by Pieter Stok

A reflection by Hetty

O God, our Help in ages past

Our Help for years to come.

Our Shelter from the stormy blast, and our Eternal Home.

I am a small girl, sitting on a hard wooden 1950s school desk.

High above the blackboard is a wedge shaped speaker, and out of the speaker comes a crackly, church organ led version of this hymn.

It’s Anzac Day.

A familiar tune that I only heard once a year in the same place at the same time. At first it was the melody that gave me comfort and peace. Every year I forgot, and then I heard it again and my soul remembered. I sat in that new classroom, one year older, and let the notes cascade over me, swirling around me, enveloping me.

Then I began to listen to the phrases. And in my young mind I joined the words to my life. Our help, my help. Ages past, my past.

There was only one event in my past. My father died. Whatever else had happened meant nothing to me. It loomed large whenever I glanced back and it touched everything that was now.

I let these thoughts skitter across my consciousness and then they disappeared until next Anzac Day.

Next Anzac Day. I was in high school now. No speakers on the wall, we were all in the quadrangle with the principal on a platform leading the service. We had sheets with the words of the hymns, and there it was – my hymn.

I stared at the words:

Our help, ages past. Our Hope, our Shelter.

Stormy blasts.

There was something I’d never noticed before. Our shelter from the stormy blasts. I’d certainly known some of those in my ages past. Oh, I knew it was meant to conjure images of soldiers hunkered down in trenches while bullets and explosions rained down on them. But I also knew the hunkering down I’d done while the circumstances of my life exploded around me.

Our Shelter, my Shelter.

My family began to attend a different church. Now we had a service every week and a hymn book in the pew. The services were long but the hymn book was a source of entertainment for a young girl with a good imagination. I silently read through the wedding vows at the back, choosing two random people in the congregation to marry. I read through the alphabetical index and the topical index and anything else I could find in that book.

And then I found it! My Anzac Day hymn.

There were more verses that I’d never known!

“Under the shadow of thy throne,

Thy saints have dwelt secure;

Sufficient is thine arm alone,

And our defense is sure.”

I hummed the tune under my breath as I read the words.

Here was the perfect marriage of my comforting tune and these life affirming words on the page before me.

I knew this. I’d lived this.

“Before the hills in order stood,

Or earth received her frame,

From everlasting thou art God,

To endless years the same.”

Did it matter that I’d lived through stormy blasts? Did it matter that more stormy blasts would be coming my way in the future? Not when I had the assurance of a eternal, everlasting Shelter.

“Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.”

This morning I woke up singing my Anzac Day hymn. Much time has rolled on since I sat staring at the speaker above the blackboard. They fly, forgotten, as a dream.

But Thou……our Guide, and our Eternal Home. My Eternal Home.

Categories: Christianity, Faith, Hetty's Devotions, hymns, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The Second Sunday of Advent Poem

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Pieter Stok

The Battles of Advent

Preceding ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’

The battle raged:

The snake in the garden,

The first murder,

The lies, deceit

And betrayal.

The Old Covenant sad stories

Reveal

The real struggle.

When David stood before Goliath

The real fight

Was in the heavenlies.

When David lusted after Bathsheba

The battle raged in places

Far beyond earth.

When the second Adam

Was nailed to a tree,

The Romans and Sanhedrin

Were not masters

But slaves.

When Christ arose,

The false Prince lost.

Categories: Advent, christian, Poem, poetry, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Blog at WordPress.com.