At the end of a big weekend

It’s 9.03 pm and I am sitting on a train from Sydney to Newcastle. It’s the end of a big weekend – up at 3.30am Saturday to fly to Melbourne to shoot a promo for a church solar panel program A Just Cause and Baptcare are partnering on. Back home around 10.30pm. Preached at my home church this morning, then off to Sydney to talk at a church about refugees. Should be home around midnight.

At times I wonder if it’s all worth it and then I hear the news that 37 children who were to be sent to Nauru are now going to stay in Australia. Given the hardened intransigence of our government prior to this I can only assume that they buckled to the pressure that was coming at them from all quarters. From state Premiers who wrote open letters to the paediatricians who refused to release the children from hospital to the Christians from Love Makes A Way staging sit-ins in politicians offices to the 209 grandmothers against children in detention I met in Canberra two weeks ago surging through Parliament House resplendent in purple and song to the churches offering sanctuary to the Baptist leaders who went to Canberra a fortnight back to share their concerns about refugees, the homeless and foreign aid to the Greens and their tiReless advocacy to the 7,000-8,000 people in Baptist churches who sent a postcard to the PM as part of our Jesus Was a Refugee campaign to the e-mobilisations of Getup! to the myriad of other individuals and civil society groups who have spoken out.

It is immensely rewarding to have been one small part of one of these grassroots movements and a reminder that it takes a lot of people each playing a small part to create a movement for change. As Thucydides is reputed to have said, “justice will come when those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are.”

So I’ll take a couple of days off then it’s back to the work of stirring up indignation in this little patch of earth on which God has placed me.