Finding joy in the everyday

. . . . It could be any suburb near the city. Bird droppings smear footpaths already stained with spilt food and drink and spit. Discarded papers and cigarette butts swirl in the gutter. Amid all this, a frail, elderly woman, well dressed with a big floppy hat, edges a shopping trolley loaded with groceries painfully slowly along the path, battling the wind and a body sapped of strength.  It's awful to watch. A couple of high school kids accidentally bump the trolley and snigger. A trade (tradesman) leaning against a wall gnawing on a kebab catches my eye and looks away. I'm walking two dogs who are straining at the leash, intoxicated with the smells on the ground and in the air. No one is willing to help the woman. And so for the next 20 minutes she grabs my offered arm and we inch our way to a cab rank two intersections away, wrestling with the trolley, the dogs and dozens of passers-by who couldn't give a toss. At one stage a taxi rolls by. I plead with the driver, ...

A mericans throw away up to 40 per cent of their food every year, cramming landfills with at least $US165 billion ($158 billion) worth of produce and meats at a time when hundreds of millions of people suffer from chronic hunger globally, according to an analysis from the Natural Resources Defence Council. . . . the average American family of four ends up binning the equivalent of up to $US2,275 worth of food each year. ( link ) In Australia, we waste more than $7.1 billion of food each year, with Australian families throwing out $4.1 billion a year, over $1,000 per family per year (so we are doing a little than the Americans). We really need to do something about food wastage - just imagine how much money families could save if they stopped throwing away leftovers (and found ways of using it) and food that is spoiled (passed its due by date).  Not only would it save money, it would stop filling up our valuable land that could be used for something more useful than la...

There has been quite a buzz in the local newspapers and its all about submission in marriage. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Jensen explained why, he believed, a wife should ' submit ' to her husband on their wedding day, sparking a fierce debate on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. . . . According to Jensen . . .  brides will promise to 'submit' to their husbands under a new marriage vow that the Anglican diocese of Sydney is expected to approve at its synod in October . It requires the minister to ask of the bride: ''Will you honour and submit to him, as the church submits to Christ?'' and for her to pledge ''to love and submit'' to her husband -- and is already being used in some Sydney parishes. ( source ) Comments have been scathing, 100's of people have responded across the on-line newspapers that ran this story, very few were from Christians (but some were) supporting this change of the wedding vows, ...

O ver the last few months, the newspapers have been full of stories on the arrival of the latest boat people — illegal persons coming to Australia by boat (many in un-seaworthy vessels) from Indonesia and wanting to claim refugee status in Australia.   It has been become a political football with both sides of politics saying the other is wrong and no one is solving this complex issue. Comments, such as the one below, by the Opposition Leader don't help in any way. "I don't think it's a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door. ... I think the people we accept should be coming the right way and not the wrong way. ... If you pay a people-smuggler, if you jump the queue, if you take yourself and your family on a leaky boat, that's doing the wrong thing, not the right thing, and we shouldn't encourage it." ( source ) I doubt there is any easy solution to this problem and I doubt one solution will be the fix-al...

O n days when I am feeling lousy or depressed about life I should just look around and see that I am very fortunate woman with nothing to complain about. I have a roof over my head, good health, food on my table and surrounded by people who love me. I am living in my country of choice that is free from war, has a democratically elected government and I am free to choice how I live my life.  I should never complain about getting up to go to work in the morning as I have a wonderful job which I enjoy and work for people who are kind to me.  Because: Approximately 21 million people worldwide are victims of forced labour.  Three out of every 1,000 people worldwide are in forced labour.  4.5 million of these people are victims of sexual exploitation. 2.2 million are in state-imposed forms of forced labour such as prisons or held by rebel armed forces. 5.5 million (26%) are below the age of 18 years of age. 9.1 million (44%) have bee...

Have you noticed an increasing number of people whinging, complaining, just not happy, feeling very negative about life and some are even quite angry. Nothing seems to please them. They are unhappy about all sorts of things. It can range from the the cost of their electricity, how much food costs to the price of petrol.  And everyone is blaming the government -- perhaps because they have no one else to blame. I wonder if people complained as much during the depression, or did they just get on with living quietly. Interestedly . . . the thing that appears to make people most unhappy is the cost of living . . . but the cost of living has not increased dramatically.  Most of what we buy has not gone up exponentially at all.  However, the Opposition party (and the media) have jumped on this "feeling" that people have and banged away at the message of doom and gloom for months.  If a society is told enough times that it is glum, they will end up believi...

(Google imagines) THREE-YEAR-OLDS will be screened for early signs of mental illness in a new federal government program that will consider behaviour such as sleeping with the light on, temper tantrums or extreme shyness as signs of possible psychological problems. The Healthy Kids Check - starting on July 1 - will be predominantly conducted by GPs, who will refer children with troubling behaviour to psychologists or paediatricians. The program is expected to identify more than 27,000 children who the government believes will benefit from additional support, but who some doctors say will be wrongly labelled as having a mental illness. ''We have to be careful we don't medicalise normal behaviour and that's a real caution with children,'' the AMA president, Steve Hambleton, said. ''There are genuine kids who need extra support to help them integrate into normal kindergartens and classrooms and a lot of the funding for that is driven by diagnoses s...

Photo: Sydney Morning Herald So the people asked him, saying, " What shall we do then? "  He answered and said to them, " He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise. " (Luke 3:10-11) Sometimes there are stories that are truly newsworthy and in yesterdays news there was one of those stories.  Sadly it is a sad story but the man involved deserves to be remember for all the people he helped. We don't live in a society where people are willing to help others, however Don Ritchie didn't help just one person, he helped many many people over the years. He didn't do it for the glory or fame, he did it because he believed it was right. SYDNEY has lost a guardian angel. Don Ritchie, the man credited with preventing hundreds of suicides through his vigil at The Gap over more than four decades, died on Sunday. He was about to turn 87. From his home high up on Old South Head Road, Mr Ritchie would ...

To smack or not to smack your child?   This has been the question in our local newspapers, radio and TV in recent days. Dr Gervase Chaney said it was no longer OK for parents to argue "it never did us any harm" - and called on colleagues to stand up for children's rights.  It comes as a leading Royal Children's Hospital paediatrician says Australia is lagging behind other countries in outlawing smacking, describing some cases as tantamount to child abuse.  Dr Chaney is pushing for The Royal Australasian College of Physicians paediatric and child health division to officially support a ban as the body reviews its policy on smacking. He said it was likely to be supported and the college would then call on government to change the law. Dr Chaney, the division president, said he believed the current position - opposing the use of physical discipline as an "ineffective and unhelpful" - did not go far enough. (source link) Following this and other news stor...