On December 17 1903 bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright sent a telegram to their hometown from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The now-famous telegram reads:

Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one mile per hour wind started from level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty-one miles longest 57 seconds inform press home Christmas. Orevelle Wright.

The telegram was the announcement of the first ever powered, sustained and controlled aeroplane flight. A momentous, historic, world-changing occasion. There’s an apocryphal story told that the headline of the local paper that day was: Wright Brothers Home For Christmas. Now, no doubt, that news was worth celebrating, but perhaps the brothers themselves were expecting a different headline.

When Jesus healed ten lepers, I suspect he was expecting a different headline too.

Pastor John Strelan

If you’ve travelled along South Road recently you’d have seen that the T2D project is well underway. According to the promotional material, ‘drivers will be able to bypass 21 sets of traffic lights between the River Torrens and Darlington as they travel through two separate tunnels, connected by an open motorway’ saving up to 40 minutes in travel time! That’s the clincher isn’t it? We’ll be able to get to wherever we’re going quicker! Which, it seems, is what life is about these days. Quicker. Immediately. Instantly.

A 2015 Time Magazine article infamously reported that people now have shorter attention spans than goldfish*! (Are you still with me?)

So, perhaps we can relate to Habakkuk’s four-word cry: “How long, O Lord?” (even if it’s probably expecting too much to ask you to read the other 1384 words attributed to him).

It’s not just a lament for us in our instant-gratification world, but a challenge. Especially since God seems to run by his own schedule.

But, now that we’ll have an extra 40 minutes because of the T2D project you might spend 5 minutes of that time reading those other 1384 words.

Pastor John Strelan

* In case you were wondering, according to the article, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds.

Rihanna and A$AP Rocky welcome third child together. That was a headline in an online newspaper this week. Normally I wouldn’t give that sort of headline a second glance, but this made me wonder, what’s in a name? Apparently Rihanna (a.k.a Robyn Rihanna Fenty) and A$AP Rocky (a.k.a Rakim Athelston Mayers) already have two sons whom they named RZA and Riot. This third child they named Rocki Irish (it’s a girl, obviously!)

What’s in a name? Identity? Connection? Belonging? Attention? All of the above? Jesus told a story once about a poor man named Lazarus (I don’t think he was a rapper). The name means ‘Cared for by God’. There’s a lot in a name.

Pastor John Strelan