God Whispers

A few days after we arrived in New Zealand, we bought a bright orange 1949   Vauxhall. We called it Amazing Gracie as we paid only $120 between the five of us for this old car. Little did we know how often it would earn its name. We prayed our way all around New Zealand. We prayed for Amazing Gracie to keep going despite an ongoing oil leak and other problems, we prayed for fine weather, for vacancies in motor camps for us to spend nights . . . One day we visited a trout farm. ‘Aren’t they beautiful,’ Peter commented. We five Aussies gazed at the trout swimming gently in the water beneath the little stone bridge.   We admired their delicate colouring, their graceful movements.   ‘Where can we buy some to eat?’ Peter asked the guide. ‘You can’t,’ he told us. ‘Well, can you buy them as fresh fish and cook them yourself?’ ‘No. The only way you can get trout is if you’re lucky and you’re given some. Only licenced people catch them.’ We al

No wonder our New Zealand holiday sparkled with little miracles. It seems it was God’s idea in the first place. It had been a hard year. I was a young Christian in my late twenties, very dependent on God because of ongoing health problems. It was October and I was exhausted.   I’d been living at my mother’s house, half way up Burleigh hill, while I taught at a school nearby. We never tired of our wonderful view out over the ocean, up the coast and out west to the mountains. But by the end of the year I was weary and a bit depressed. I felt bored with everything I was doing. In fact, I didn’t feel like doing anything at all. Not even the view brought me joy as I gazed out to the horizon over the aching blue of the ocean. The future looked bleak. Mum was on holidays with friends in New Zealand. She arrived home refreshed and in love with the beauty of the New Zealand countryside. “You MUST see my slides,” she told me. So, partly to humour her

God Whispers These stories are not in chronological order but just as they come to mind. Some prayers are prayed only by very unusual people or brand new converts . I was, at least, a new convert. When I became a Christian, the charismatic movement was in full swing. At the same time the Jesus People (a hippyish type of young Christians) were gaining popularity, even finding a place on the cover of Time Magazine. Perhaps some of their hippy values seeped into our charismatic Christianity. Like giving things away instead of selling them. Sharing what we had. The early apostles did, after all. It was easy for me to embrace as I’d gone straight from my university course in Brisbane to the arty scene in Sydney. To the ‘city hippies’. There were lots of God whispers, perhaps even ‘God shouts’.   Several months after I became a Christian, I bought my first car – a   second hand Morris 1100. I loved it. But after several months it began to break down in out of

  There were whispers from God long before I became a Christian, even when I was little.   Most of the time I was unaware of God, but I believed He was there somewhere. Occasionally it seemed He swept aside the veil between us and I was aware of Something More. It was not until I studied philosophy at university that I was persuaded to use my ‘common sense’ and become an atheist. (“Can you see him, Jeanette?” my philosophy tutor asked me in front of the tutorial group. “Can you hear Him?” I cringed with embarrassment. No, I couldn’t see or hear Him.) * One night in Sydney, where I was involved in film-making and acting, I huddled, quivering with adrenalin, in a doorway in the Ensemble Theatre. I was waiting to rush on stage in the darkness between scenes, to collect a chair and some bits and pieces. It was theatre in the round, so there was no curtain. Just black-clad figures running in the dark, transformi