Our family had a pretty quiet Good Friday this year.
My wife and I tried to sleep in, but with 3 kids under 6 we should have realised by now it’s pointless.
We spent some time around the house, working in our vegetable garden, myself doing a few odd jobs in the shed and cleaning up from our family camping trip last weekend down at Green Patch in Jarvis Bay.
Then after some lunch and our two boys went down for sleeps (yay!) I packed the Fusion work car and took my 5 year old daughter with me to drive up to Mt Ainslie to help setup for the Good Friday all night Prayer Vigil.
It was such a crisp and beautiful day – from Mt Ainslie you could see right across Lake Burley Griffon to Old Parliament House and Parliament House.
After my daughter and I worked with some other volunteers to setup the Prayer Vigil, my wife arrived with our two boys and we all enjoyed a meal of fish and chips while in the background the Prayer Vigil got underway with the first slot ably led by Unity College.
That night was a quiet evening in after the kids were finally quiet.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because I wanted to ask you how your Good Friday went, and thought I had better share some of how mine went as a starting point.
I was fascinated the next day when an Aussie friend currently living and working with Fusion in London emailed through a story from the Sydney Morning Herald written by Wendy Harmer. Here’s the direct link.
Wendy was reflecting on Good Friday and how in her mind it is quite different now to when she was a child.
To her it was her favourite day of the year. A time to “ponder death, sacrifice, forgiveness. All the big stuff.”
Later on she writes, “There’s a hunger in this nation for something beyond the gaudy flag-waving of Australia Day”, and “You can see that our children want something more, too, as they flock to Anzac Day in record numbers, drawn by its grand, enduring theme of the ultimate sacrifice”.
I tend to agree with her.
It seems Australian society is lacking this sort of stuff. The space to reflect, to ponder, and to reconnect ourselves to something beyond us, bigger than us, transcendent.
As I looked out over Canberra with the setting sun on Good Friday, and I could hear in the background Christians of many different traditions singing worship songs and praying for our politicians, our children, our emergency service personnel, a shiver went down my spine and I thought this is right, this is good.
We all share a yearning for purpose and community – to have a reason to get up in the morning, to actually bother about things and to belong somewhere where others know enough of what life is like so that we don’t have to feel completely alone.
That’s what I love about the Easter story – it’s both an ancient and contemporary story that gives us all a way to find purpose and belonging.
So, how was your Good Friday?
– Brenton Reimann, Team Leader/CEO, Fusion Canberra
