It’s Australia Day!
Australia is a great place to live and grow up. We have so much: ready access to endless tracks of untamed nature, clean air, high life expectancy, abundant essentials of food, water and energy. We benefit from the hard-fought legacy of western institutions – democratic government, rule of law, presumption of innocence, trial by jury, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. Thanks to our prosperity we enjoy a generous welfare safety-net, ever-ready health care, education we can pay for after we get it, and loads of annual leave. There is no war happening on our soil, and of all countries, we have the best coffee.
Everyone on earth has much to thank God for, but we have been especially blessed.
I pray that our country continues to be blessed, and that we would do better – to care for the fatherless and the widow, to provide justice quickly, and that communities that are dysfunctional would be transformed. I pray for a deeper blessing – that all our material gifts would not continue to fuel self-absorbed, self-sufficient, hedonism, but would be met with thankfulness to God, repentance, humility, determined contentedness, hard work, unity and joy. That the miasma of spiritual dullness that lies over our land would be lifted. That they may say of our generation “in those days, men began to call upon the name of the Lord” (Genesis 4:26).