Cool purity, arranged in shadings of white, had caught itself inside an ever-changing mass of cloud, bubbling and floundering and spitting across the contours of the Hawekwas. A purity that sharpened further and further as the evening arrived. At last the night ground it fine and spread it over the firmament in pink shadings full of haziness. Heart-movingly beautiful — an event that ought to have made the front pages, and yet, unseen, slipped away with the twilights of earlier centuries to be hung in an art exhibition somewhere in a heavenly gallery. Not a mortal's day or life moistened by it. Perhaps one, and one front page — the one in your hand. The twilight conducts its own conversation with the approaching evening; a conversation meant to prepare your heart for the calm stillness in which the night will receive your spirit. A sensitive interaction.

Restlessly tormented for more and bigger and better, we live parallel to it, unaware of the blissful blessing that surrounds us in the beauty of nature — free therapy. The little strings to which the foundation of our earthly existence is tied flap bravely and fragilely under the onslaught and the weight of our busying about. Stretched thin as we shy away from meaningful interaction with our heart (in which eternity is lodged), hankering after everything that glitters with the appearance of success, no matter how temporary — adrenaline junkies, always in a hurry and always on the way. And those who are not themselves adrenaline junkies make sure their children are.

To complain about this does not help. What turns up in our lives is not what we would like to have, but who we are. What we sow becomes real in our lives. Our words are the seed, and we sow it in our own thoughts. So the Bible teaches us, and Einstein confirms it. He says that nothing happens until something moves. That initial something that moves is always a thought, long before it turns into words and into feeling. If what manifests in our life (or in the life of our community) is what we do not like, then what we do not like is what we are thinking about. The reverse is equally true. Einstein goes further. He says that every person comes, sooner or later, to this decision in his life: do I live in a friendly universe or in an unfriendly one? The answer to this question determines, most of the time, your own disposition. Those who experience their world as hostile will be the same people who live with the expectation that things will go badly, or that things will go wrong. And expectation has a way of not disappointing.

Habit and conformity are any community's greatest enemies. The habit of being negative is an unconscious reflex personality trait in many. Fault-finding is a virtue of the masses. Creative thinkers spend more time optimising solutions than analysing problems. A well-defined problem does not need meeting upon meeting. If all the time you hammer on where things are instead of on where you want them to be, you activate where they are and slow down where you want them to go. We build on sand when we let the storm winds of front pages and electronic crime-alerts tear our hearts and our faith out from under us with their bad news. These messengers have faith only in bad things happening. Their message instils fear, and fear is needed to control the masses, because fear eats away at rational thinking. Fear indirectly keeps their product in demand. Fear is the opposite of faith. Only perfect love drives fear out.

There is a better alternative. The Bible speaks of messengers whose feet are lovely as they stand upon the mountain. They come to bring good news, the news. News that God reigns. God's own thoughts set a striking example for us. The thoughts God thinks about us are good thoughts, to give us a hopeful future. God makes the reality we offer Him subject to His good intention for our lives, and He ignores the facts that surround our day and our life. In Wellington we have no shortage of examples of a faith that brought heaven down to earth to make what is true there true here on our own soil. The spiritual patriarch of the town, Andrew Murray, knew the secret of a safe peace in his heart and a safe peace for his town, and let it manifest itself during his lifetime. Let us become desperate to discover this secret for ourselves. Nothing less is going to bring it back into our midst. The seed of his prayers has ripened into a harvest for us for a time like now — ready to be picked. This hero of faith has just celebrated his 185th birthday at the same time that Val du Charron celebrates its 18th. Grace that piles up in time falls out as age on our calendars. Thank you for eighteen years of friendship.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer