Day 57-73 (March 28 - April 13) - Brisbane

Well we had a lovely time in Brisbane!

It was great to all catch up again, and the kids really carried on from where they left off. In the Status Update post I provided some photos so you've probably already seen some of what we got up to, but here are some of the highlights.



We arrived on Friday March 27. For the three Sundays we had a Sunday meeting together at home - once from a recording and twice by tuning into a live stream from the Wilston ecclesia.

The first Sunday afternoon we went out to Bribie Island for some socially distant exercise. A couple of other days we went down to a park / linear park / scooter track. The first time was before skate parks were closed off. There was plenty of swimming in the pool at home as, apart from a couple of patches of rain, the weather was almost always really nice. I got plenty of business work done in the first week particularly.

Supervising some of the stunt work with the 'hanging' scene!

The kids had been working on post-production for some videos they'd shot at home before we left, and we'd suggested they might like to do a video with all the kids. So Bek put a script together, ran it past us and then got the others organised in the second half of our stay to shoot all the scenes. Most days there were scenes of baddies, horses, a hanging (!!) and various other medieval events going on around the house. It was quite entertaining to watch, so take a look and see what you think!

The cousins have always loved listening to stories. I think the tradition started in Perth about six years ago! On our last trip I read them Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' and 'The Witches', and this time it was Enid Blyton's 'The Secret Island'. Perhaps inspired by this and their video, Bradley, who is all of six bless him, proceeded to write a great little story of his own 'The secret of the hidey house with the secret door', and for a six year old it was very neat, well illustrated and well written! I read it out to them one evening and we all enjoyed it!

During the second wee I put a light bar on the Pajero. We'd done some night driving unexpectedly and felt we could do with some extra light. This project took a little while to ensure the bar didn't wobble around but that worked fine in the end. It doesn't really beam the light as far as I'd like, but it does help to fill things out a bit at night.

Another little highlight of our time here was that I finally managed to finish this book I'd been reading - 'The Trial: "Did Christ Rise from the Dead?" '. I bought this book around the start of 2019, having read of it previously, and have read it during our trip to Bible School in April last year, on our last road trip, and on this trip. If you're not familiar with it, Robert Roberts, who lived in England in the mid to late 1800's, spent some of his early journalistic career as a court reporter so was very familiar with the processes within courts of law. This book is written from the point of view of a group of plaintiffs arguing that those who believe in the resurrection of Christ should be stopped from preaching of this, on the grounds that those who have adopted this teaching have withdrawn from the various activities of society and thus deprived society of the benefits they had previously offered. The grounds of the case come down to whether the resurrection of Christ was a fact or not as documented in the New Testament - a document which the plaintiffs maintained was a fraud and only written a few hundred years after Christ as a way of consolidating the various myths of his resurrection circulating at the time. Here were a few of his counter-arguments:

1. The New Testament is quoted by a number of non-Biblical historians who wrote from AD150 and onwards. Therefore, whether it was a fraud or not, it must have been in existence prior to that time, otherwise there would be no New Testament to quote from. And for it to have been quoted so widely, it must have been in existence for some time prior to AD150 in order to receive such an acceptance by so many writers.
2. Given the events written about only occurred between AD0 and AD100, it follows that it must have been written very close to the time the supposed events actually occurred. If it was a fraud, those who were contemporary with those events would have authoritatively debunked the fraudulent document and it would have ceased to be an authority. That this did not happen shows the New Testament is accurate and reliable.
3. People accept the authority of historical works such as Herodotus, Pliny, Josephus and others, when very few manuscripts have survived and often are dated many hundreds of years after they were written. There are thousands of copies of the New Testament, complete or in part, which date from less than 150 years from the event (since the book was written more fragments have been discovered (the Dead Sea Scrolls), which date only to 30 years after the event). Therefore we have enormously more evidence for the accuracy of the New Testament than any of the other historical works which are accepted without challenge. Therefore if we are to accept such other historical works as accurate to what was originally written, we are bound by the same rule to accept the New Testament.
4. The New Testament is not written in a sensational style, as a hero-worshipping biography might be, and the miracles of Christ it records are simply documented as events which took place, without any fanfare or sensationalism. Its character, thus, is one of an honest account.
5. Those who wrote these accounts generally suffered widely for their beliefs. There would be no motive for them to allow themselves to suffer imprisonment, persecution, torture, exclusion from popular society etc., if they secretly knew what they were preaching was a lie. Nor could they simply be deluded, as there were so many individual eyewitnesses to the resurrected Christ (over 500 at one time). Given the New Testament had been proven as historically accurate, the court had 500 eyewitness accounts of the resurrection of Christ, and in any other situation 500 eyewitnesses would assuredly provide grounds for the court to accept the claim as fact.
6. Our objection to the Bible is often due to our reluctance to accept miracle, such as the resurrection of Christ. Yet there are many many things in life we don't actually understand how they work which we accept because the evidence shows they happened. We don't actually know how a flower grows, or cells divide and reproduce, or ultimately how gravity works and so on. We accept them because the flower has grown, and we see the evidence of gravity, etc, but we don't actually, ultimately, understand they processes. Our attempts to explain them only shift the 'why' a step further off, and ultimately we have to accept we don't truly know how these things work. They are, by the same measure, miracles - yet we accept them because we see the evidence, and in a sense are so accustomed to their happening that we cease to see them as marvellous. Our acceptance of the Bible's record of miracles, therefore, must not be based on whether we can understand the HOW to everything, but whether there is sufficient evidence to support the claims.

There were many other such arguments. If you are interested in this subject and like following through a clear and logically structured argument, then I would highly recommend this book!
While in Brisbane we posted some old books back to Adelaide we'd finished with. I kept The Trial because I might just read it all over again!

Skink collecting from the local park

Throughout our stay the kids made a collection of skinks and geckos, collecting them from around the house and setting up a terrarium outside for them. On Easter Monday we'd been down to a local park to play some tennis and collect more from an adjacent nature reserve. You may have seen the quick video clip we put on the Facebook group of a poor gecko with a lead! On the odd occasion these managed to come free from their owners and escaped in the house, so they had to be kept strictly outdoors!

Medusa with her skink??!

In the second half of the stay I resumed my intended plan to go running a few times a week as I'd done earlier in the trip. Matt and Jordan joined me for one morning, and on other days we had a range of different people come along until on our last morning we had nearly everyone there! It was a nice way to start each day.

We had intended to leave Easter Friday, but as mentioned in the status update we thought the better of that and stayed the weekend. Each family had a little more time to themselves over the weekend as it had been a pretty manic couple of weeks but the kids got to finish off their video, in particular all the editing and post-production which always takes so long!

All in all we had a great time and will take great memories of our 2 1/2 weeks in Brisbane!

-- Greg