Yesterday I was sitting with a friend who tearfully told me this amazing story.

Most of us will remember the news of Glynnis Nunn’s step daughter, Jodie Kearns, who died last week as a result of horrific injuries sustained in the Bali Bombing.

Her regular watering hole was the Story Bridge Pub.

After her death, friends were there, around the bar, having a wake and a few beers. This horror has hit us in the guts. It hit them in the guts.

And in a moment of spontaneity, looking for the most appropriate response to this loss, looking for hope and a spiritual connection they broke into the Lord’s prayer.

The journalist who observed and recorded events after Jesus sent the Holy Spirit records an amazing incident in Athens. Words that like the tragic Jodie Kearns story, still take my breath away and force me to consider how often I have missed God in his world, missed being, like Paul, the one to gently explain and open up the truth about Jesus Christ to those who want to know.

“From one human being he created all races on earth and made them live throughout the whole earth. He himself fixed beforehand the exact times and the limits of the places where they would live. He did this so that they would look for him, and perhaps find him as they felt about for him. Yet God is actually not far from any one of us; as someone has said, ‘In him we live and move and exist.’It is as some of your poets have said ‘We too are his children.’ “Acts 17 : 28 – 28]

At a wake in a pub, at an abortion clinic as a young woman faces her fears, in Brett Whitley’s studio as he paints his own darkness into grotesque crucifixion scenes, in the tea room on the 25th floor as a work team hammers out the why’s of Bali, at a Buddhist temple as worshippers try to find forgiveness, next door to you as your neighbours try to come to terms with a teenage pregnancy.

God is not far from any one of us – good and bad alike, believers, unbelievers, Moslems, Buddhists, Mormons, refugees, asylum seekers, politicians.

Jesus came and moved into the neighbourhood.[John 1:14]

Most Christians have moved out of the neighbourhood!

But there is a new wave of different seeing, a new eye-opening.. Maybe in the words of Acts 8 : 4 “…The believers who were scattered went everywhere, preaching the message…”the Holy Spirit is getting us to go instead of sit.

And when we do, we will find people finding him as they look for him, as they feel about for him…and maybe we will just happen to be in the pub at the right time…

Let grace flow

Peter B