From my Window

From my window at Hotel Costa de Prata in Figeuira da Foz, Portugal, I could see the coast, the fishing harbour, a large open space with cobble stones, a few parked cars and an ancient stone building, almost in ruins, but with a notice of hope: a company has bought it to restore it! What a message lies there!
It is fenced in and secured with special boardwalks for pedestrians in rue Eugeneiro Silva. Most people walk past without giving it the eye. It is nothing to look at, really! The windows are all broken and the roof is rusted, the plaster work has been eroded and fallen off revealing the raw stonework underneath. The iron rails in front of the little balconies are brittle with rust and the marble slats around the window panes and door frames are riddled with holes and cracks.
There is no one inside. There are no birds nesting in the roof or crevices. The building in its dilapedated state is utterly forsaken...its former glory totally forgotten.
In the silence of the October morning Ihear the old building whisper, 'I once was a magnificent edifice...' but the stifled words are shut off from its mute mouth, the door space has been cemented in. Inside is nothing but dirt and dust - its not fit for human occupation now.
But there is a sign outside that says, 'under construction'! This is a sign of hope, a note of faith, a light in the darkness.
Someone saw potential in this old ruin on the beach front. There is someone who is prepared to go to great expenses and trouble to restore it to its former usefulness.
Paul wrote an epistle to Philemon in which he tells him about his former slave Onesimus. Onesimus means ' useful', but Onesimus stole from Philemon and the slave was imprisoned. Paul was innocently imprisoned for the Gospel's sake and found Onesimus in prison. He made a convert of him and sent him back at the time of his release to his former master, Philemon, with a letter from Paul.
In the letter Paul reminded Philemon that the latter owed him his life and that he wanted him to take Onesimus back, not just as a servant, but now as a brother in Christ. He that once was useless to you has become useful in the ministry! Paul offered to pay Philemon anything Onesimus might still owe him. Then Paul ended the letter by saying he will soon visit Philemon as well.
All of us had our lives ruined by sin. Our usefulness waned until we were no longer of any use to anybody. We were cast out on the ash heap of life. No one paid attention to us any longer. People walked right past us without noticing our need. People avoided us like the plague.
But then the Master builder, Jesus Christ, in his mercy took notice of us and looked beyond our ruined state and saw potential in us that no one else could see!
He fenced us in with his love and began the reconstruction process to repair the damage that sin had caused.
Perhaps there is a life out there that needs that sign of hope to be put onto the building!
Paul pleaded with Philemon to receive Onesimus ' as my own heart. he was once unprofitable for you but now he will be profitable for both you and me. For perhaps he departed a while for this purpose: that you might receiv him forever! If he has wronged you or owes you anythng put that on my account!'
Jesus put all our wrong doing and sins on His account and paid for it on the cross with his own blood - without blood there is no remission of sins according to the spiritual law. Here is the good news: God has accepted his offer to purchase your old ruined life so that He might rebuild it again...
Can you see what I saw out of my hotel window in Figeuria?

Love minus zero

In Castlecary I caught a program on Dylan on TV and listened how people described him. They showed The Newport Festival, The Madhouse (a Pinteresque play in which Dylan performed the lead role in Britain) and snatches of footage not seen before.
This morning in Birmingham Graham got me onto BBC Music where they feature a lot of Dylan's music and even his own radio programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/bobdylan/tvradio/
He sang: 'My love she speaks in silence...with no ideals of violence... at dime stores and gas stations people talk about situations...the night blows cold and rainy my love sits at my window like a raven with a broken wing...' (from Love Minus Zero). Images flow like water in Bob Dylan's songs and remain in the mindbanks of listeners for a life time. They once asked him how he remembers all his songs and he said, a song walks by itself: it is like a footpath in a field, once you find it again you just walk along the path. But he must have an amazing memory!
When he received an honoury doctorate degree for his contribution to the English language at a university graduation he wrote the song, ' The Locusts sang' describing how he wanted to get out of that stuffy place and how the locusts the dark hills of Dakota were calling him away. He described the pomp and circumstance of the academic occasion as follows: 'when I stepped up to the stage to pick up my degree, the man next to me, his head was exploding, I was praying the pieces wouldn't fall on me!'
He sings about ' Hazel, with your dirty brown hair, I would want to be seen with you anywhere!' and then of another love of his life, ' You angel you, I've got you under my skin'.
When Nola and I were invited onto the creative team of Youth For Christ in Johannesburg (in our young days!) we were asked to produce a night of Dylan's music because it became public knowledge that Dylans was now saved and he produced Gospel albums for Atlantic Records. So we did a lot of research and watched some old movies of him and The Band with Robbie Robertson touring through America and we read interview after interview in music magazines like Rolling Stone in libraries (there was no internet in those days to surf around) and put together a one and a half hour programme that we performed in the Old Rosebank Cinema in Orange Grove that became a church (Reg Bendixon, I think was the pastor's name). YFC posted the following on the Bill Board outside the building: ' Dylan Sat 7pm'
By the time we got there we couldn't get in! The place was jam-packed! In fact the stage was full of teenagers and we hardly had space to stand when performing. They were sitting around our feet. I had special front teeth made for the occassion and wore a curly wig and sunglasses and a white hat, but I couldn't sing with the false teeth over my own teeth, so I did without it.
They had to turn many people away - they all thought it was the real Dylan. At the back of the hall the director of the avant garde Market Theatre, Mannie Mannim, stood there and watched the whole performance. Afterwards he squeezed into the dressing-come-prayer-room and introduced himself and asked if we could come and perform it at his theatre. The rest is history! We performed it for the next two years around the county with our own band, The Road Band, and had tours up and down the country, to Durban, Cape Town, Kimberley! Aje our first born son grew up on stage in a way! He had his own little guitar, cowboy hat and boots. (When I worked for Pacofs as an actor he and Nola also toured with me from town to town and sat on stage while I performed!)
One night a man came backstage in the Market Theatre after a performance with tears streaming down his cheeks saying, ' I want to know this Jesus you are singing about!' We prayed with him. This happened everywhere we performed the show. We didn't make money and hardly covered cost, but we covered a lot of ground and reached a lot of people throughout our country. The show was entitled, ' Forever Young' and here are some of the words I remember:
'May God bless and keep you always, may your wishes all come true, may you always do for others and my others do for you, may you build a stairway to the stars and climb on every wrung, and may you stay for every young!'
When they asked Dylan about his faith when he no longer produced Gospel albums he said, 'I've said everything I wanted to say in those albums! I'm a song writer. I write songs. If you want to know what I believe, just listen to my songs!' At one live concert a few years ago he opened the evening with these words, 'Everyone has a hero. My hero is Jesus Christ!' and then sang ' You gotta serve somebody!'
A good idea would be to listen to his Gospel music and find out what he believes and then make up your own mind. He never minces his words - not even when he explains how to get saved!

I learned my lesson well

There is only one place in the world where the phrase, 'Firth of the Fourth' makes sense: Scotland. A firth is a bay! Scotland is so steeped in history that it would take a life time to relate it all. But there were many interesting anecdotes I picked up in my third visit to this beautiful land with its high black mountains, green flowing hills and valleys and a people with strange accents (of course our accents are strange to them again.) The same word and name could mean two different things in different countries!

Glaswegians are people who live in Glasgow! To us it would means something about glass! Dunoon is a popular place to visit in Scotland, to us in Cape Town it is a squatter village. Sutherland is a wild and wide place but to us in South Africa it is known as the place where all the observatories are located. Elgin in the Cape is known for its fruit, but in Scotland it is Macbeth area, where the witches operated from. Orkney is a little mining town in the West Transvaal, but to the Scots it is the place with precipitous cliffs dropping to the sea leading to the low hills of Orkney, near the Arctic circle.

There are many valuable lessons to be learned in the history of Scotland.

The first town on the border between England and Scotland is called Gretna Green. Here many runaway lovers from England got married by a blacksmith who performed the ceremony over his anvil and tapped his anvil to announce them as man and wife! According to English law young lovers have to be 18 to get married, but in Scotland 16 was the marrying age. They would elope and get the smith to marry them, being pursued by angry parents, of course! Parents struggle to understand the chemistry between young lovers! We need to have faith to allow God to bring people together in his way and his time or else we will experience Gretna Greens as well!

Common Riding is something the Scots do in summer: they ride along the borders on horseback to recall the days of the great raids in the moors! What do you and I remember about our nation's past? Is there something you want to commemorate? They turned evil raids into a pleasant past time for this generation.
The body snatchers were people in Edinburgh who dug up coffins to sell corpses to Medical Researchers who needed to dissect the bodies. This trade fell into disrepute when the merchants started murdering people to sell fresh bodies to the Medics! Greed makes murderers of us all - when the only driving force in life is to make a profit, all morals and ethics get thrown out the window!

John Gray's grave is famous because his terrier, Bobby, watched over his grave for fourteen years after his death. A statue has been erected to commemorate Bobby's loyalty to his master in Candlemaker's Row. Loyalty is something we need to restore in our relationships and our attitudes towards one another and to the cause we give ourselves to. Let us learn this lesson from the little dog, Bobby!
The coat of arms of Glasgow depicts a salmon. It refers to one of St. Mungo's miracles. The queen of Cadzow (now Hamilton) gave her wedding ring to her favourite courtier. The king noticed it and stole the rign from the courtier and threw it into the river Clyde. Then he demanded the rign back from her on pain of death. In despair the queen went to St Mungo and asked for help. He sent a man to the river and bring the first fish he caught back it to him. In the mouth of the fish there was the missing ring! Sometimes we also throw away what we most treasure and we need a miracle to recover it! But, miracles do happen - so do not despair.

The Clyde was a narrow, shallow river until they widened and deepened it to make Glasgow the second city in the Empire because of the new possibilities of trade and ship building! The Queen Mary and both the QE I & II were built in these shipyards. Perhaps we need to deepen and widen our outlook on life in order to be more productive and to enrich our lives!

Sterling Bridge was the place where both Brave heart William Wallace and Robert the Bruce defeated the English armies to bring independence to Scotland in their respective generations in 1297 and 1314. We have to serve our generations like David according to the will of God for our lives to set people free from sin and religious bondage! Let's be brave hearts for God!

Aunty Raper

Here I go again! Since I was 12 and old aunty Raper came to our house in 65 Gardiner Street, Brakpan, I have literally lived to fulfill a one line prophecy: 'Young man, you have a calling from God and God will also use you in other lands!'
I looked at Apostle Paul's travels and then drew a world map and traced my travels over the years...it turned out to be a work of modern art! There were too many lines coming and going to other lands! I think Paul would have loved to own a jet of his own! Imagine what he would have done - then again he needed the secluded time in prison to write all the epistles. I wonder if he ever thought that his letters would outlive him by 2000 years?
Luke wrote a thesis to Theophilus to convince him of the reality of Jesus Christ and the work of the Apostles. He never thought it would be part of a bible.
Well, someone said, we are all writing a bible, a chapter every day - say, what is the bible according to you? André's Gospel is just like the bible, I suppose: there are good thing and things I would like to forget as well! It is hard to understand how God can forgive and forget. We struggle to forgive ourselves, let alone other people!
Luckily God sent His Son Jesus Christ to come and feel what it was like to be a human being - with all our faults and inbuilt failure systems! Yet, being human is no longer an excuse for making terrible mistakes and being defeated, because Jesus offers his life when we are willing to deny our old lives and to put our faith in Him.
Faith is a strange thing...the moment you are too much aware of your effort to believe it dissipates the substance of faith! It is in self-forgetfulness that we achieve most things. A mother lifts a car at the scene of an accident to get her little child out from underneath the wreck! Ask her to do that at any other time and she won't be able to do it!
So, when I made my life's travel map, I suddenly became too aware of my effort to fulfill an old prophecy and didn't want to trace my steps any more. When I try to be perfect I make such terrible mistakes that I have to hang my head and confess I need some help!
The bubble of the rest of faith is something that brings success, godly success, without much effort. There is no self-talk involved. When we do everything whole heartedly as unto the Lord, we can do amazing things.
God is able to do all things. He gives us ability to do things. When we use our god-given abilities to do things, He is glorified in us. We glorify the one who created us by doing what he enabled us to do!
My dad was a pilot in the Air Force during WWII. Perhaps I have inherited some of his genes for I simply love to fly. So here I go again - off to Scotland this time, then on to Portugal and then back to London and back home again.
If I try to calculate all the costs involved in all my travels it boggles my mind...how on earth was I able to do it for a life time, never knowing where the money for the next ticket will spring from? Let me not think on't...
Something I love doing, that I have been doing for most of my life, that I am committed to do for the rest of my life as long as I am spared and kept healthy is to go to other lands to spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God and to help people to be free...to be themselves...as God made them! No longer slaves of systems and manipulation of others!
I prayed in John Knox's prayer room up in his house in Edinburgh the first time I went to Scotland. There is nothing in the room. Just a cement floor. Well, prayer needs no furniture or outward stimulation, it is an inward journey. So before I go to other lands, I go within, and pray and see in the spirit the land I am going to...I view the Promised Land and then go out to conquer...in the Name of the one who sent me with a simply prophecy from an old lady when I was 12. Who would have believed a little boy from Brakpan would have travelled the globe?