Archive for category: Home Featured Article

by Linda Macqueen

A young woman making her own way in the world isn’t always going to listen to her mother’s words of wisdom. But Heidi Gellert does try.

She’s thankful for the life her mum gave her 26 years ago—and then again, just last year.

‘I should listen to Mum’, she says. ‘After all, without her, I’d still be on dialysis and I wouldn’t have the life I’ve got now.’

Last year, her mother Annie gave Heidi one of her own kidneys. But that’s not the first organ transplant she’s received.

Heidi was born into a Lutheran farming family at Willaura in western Victoria. When she was just 13 months old, she became Australia’s youngest heart-transplant recipient. Readers of The Lutheran might remember an article about her, in the March 1990 edition. When Annie wrote that story, Heidi was recovering beautifully from the operation, much better than anyone had expected.

Then one day, five months after the heart transplant, Heidi became ill and was rushed to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, three hours away. There she suffered a massive stroke as Annie held her in her arms.

‘God was looking after Heidi’, Annie says. ‘If the stroke had happened at home, Heidi would have died.’

Even so, the little girl would spend the next eight weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, desperately ill. ‘They didn’t think she would survive’, Annie says. ‘If she did, she would be severely physically or mentally disabled, they told us. The doctors spoke to us about turning off her respirator.

‘One day, in the midst of despair, I heard Jesus say, “Trust me”.’

During those harrowing weeks, each time Heidi faced a new crisis Annie would ring her church community and ask for prayer (and she still does). She thanks God that again and again he heard their pleas and pulled Heidi back from the brink of death.

‘For all her life, Heidi’s been aware that God has saved her, several times over’, Annie says. ‘And her health struggles are not over yet, and probably never will be this side of heaven. She’s grown up facing the constant reality that her life is fragile. She learnt from a very early age that she has to trust in God for every precious moment, every day.’

But Heidi is quick to point out that hers is no fairytale faith story. In her early teens, she reached a frightening low, even thinking about suicide.

‘I’ve learnt to depend on God, that’s true’, she says, ‘but I’ve done a lot of kicking and screaming too. I haven’t always been happy with what he’s doing, and not doing. I wouldn’t want people to think I’ve got this super-charged faith. I haven’t. It’s just that my circumstances have forced me to trust in God … because I have nowhere else to go.’

Subscribe here to receive stories & upcoming issues in full

by Sheree Schmaal

They say music is a universal language. A young Lutheran composer is using it to help audiences discover God the creator.

Humans speak more than 6500 different languages. Yet God’s word—as recorded in the Bible— has been fully translated into only 531 of these. Another 2352 have at least one book of the Bible translated—but that’s still fewer than 40 per cent of languages.

They say music is a universal language. So wouldn’t it make sense to have a musical translation of the Bible?

It could be called the New Instrumental Version—an album of 66 tracks that translate God’s word into melodies and harmonies, and reveal the glory of his creation, power and saving grace not through words or lyrics but through instruments, notes, rhythms and keys …

But is it really possible for the Holy Spirit to speak through music?

Composer Kym Dillon believes it is. The 25-year-old member and musician at St Paul’s Lutheran Church Grovedale, Victoria, sees music as ‘a sort of language that can communicate aspects of God that are very difficult to convey through mere words alone’.

His compositions—including two largescale orchestral pieces commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO)—are not overtly Christian or ‘sacred’. Yet he says it’s impossible to separate his creations from his faith in God as his creator.

‘I am fascinated with the human creative process, and our abilities to be creative artists, considering we ourselves are the result of God’s artistic creation, and are also made in his image’, Kym says.

‘I often reflect on my own creative process as a composer through this lens of our God as, among other things, an artist.’

These reflections are explored in Kym’s 2012 and 2014 works for the MSO, LOGOS and Liber Creatorum.

The Victorian College of the Arts graduate says he has found Liber Creatorum (Latin for ‘book of creation’ or ‘book of the creatures’) a great place to start when sharing the gospel with non-believers.

The eight-minute orchestral piece centres around Kym’s interest in natural theology. He believes that if you look at the universe in all its complexity and beauty, and trace these things back in time to their origins and simplest parts, you will find clues about its creation by a divine force, and what the nature of that divine force may be.

Subscribe here to receive stories & upcoming issues in full

by Nick Mattiske

Christianity has a long—some would say indispensable—history of pacifism. At the very least, followers of the one who asked us to turn the other cheek should be wary of war and its promoters.

This anniversary year, as we are bombarded with war imagery, in a climate where the television industry, breweries and sporting codes all cash in on the Anzac legend, how can we Christians be critical of war without disrespecting the war dead? How do we remember them without glorifying war?

First, we need to avoid oversimplification, including the idea that the Great War was inevitable, or that it was simply a case of sober Britain responding to German hotheadedness. Lately, some fine research has solidified into books such as Gordon Martel’s The Month That Changed the World, which covers the month after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo. Martel surveys the complex political and diplomatic manoeuvring as multiple European powers with their elaborate system of alliances and agreements delicately moved around each other, eventually becoming hopelessly entangled. Or so it seemed. There were opportunities to halt the march, with many working frantically for peace, even though in the end they were lost opportunities.

A select few wielded power undemocratically, and often secretly. This was accentuated by erratic and eccentric personalities, such as the German Kaiser, who was, at various stages, a sabre-rattler, a peace-activist, and maddeningly indecisive. Like most people, these elite were contradictory. They played dangerous games while fully aware that millions of lives were at risk. One persistent myth is that these figures couldn’t envisage the extent of the coming Armageddon, but they could— and were horrified by the prospect—but in the end a mix of fatalism, inability and pride succeeded in making their nightmares come true. War is not simply the product of impersonal forces but of sinful human beings.

Australian historian Douglas Newton argues that Britain’s participation in the war was far from unavoidable, but that some in government were more than reluctant participants. Prime Minister Asquith’s liberal cabinet was split, and early on most were desperate for peace (which would have, of course, kept Australia out of the war). But the great debate was steered and ultimately silenced by the warmongers, not least among them Winston Churchill.

Subscribe here to receive stories & upcoming issues in full

by John Schubert

For many of us with German heritage, this year’s commemorations of World War I might create an uneasy tension.

After all, for generations Germany was seen as the spiritual and cultural heartland of Australian Lutherans— notwithstanding the fact that many of our ancestors came from Prussia, or from the many other smaller Germanspeaking states. These states only became ‘Germany’ long after the Lutheran immigration to Australia, and decades before 1914. Such distinctions rarely registered in the public imagination, however, particularly as the Great War branded all things ‘Prussian’ as synonymous with aggressive militarism.

In the stereotypical eyes of popular culture, at least, the land of Luther and the Reformation, of Bach and Goethe, was also the land of the ‘murderous Hun’, led by a war-mongering Kaiser. The war memorials standing sentinel across the country are mute witnesses that condemn the monstrous conflict that took away the innocence of Australian manhood, and left a legacy of grief which has passed down generations.

For those of us with a ‘mixed’ ethnic heritage, this tension can be even more personal. My maternal ancestry is Anglo-Celtic, and I grew up with my mother’s soulful litany of war deaths. Her uncle died on the Somme in September 1918. That auburnhaired boilermaker from Port Adelaide succumbed to his wounds as the hellish trench warfare ground slowly to its inevitable conclusion. The news of his death came to his brother (my grandfather) at the north Wimmera flour mill where he worked. The date was 11 November, and the telegraph boy had pedalled his message of loss through a town resounding to the cries of ‘Armistice’.

Then there was the old digger who lived across the street as my mother was growing up. Every so often, the unending war in his head would prove too much and he would seek consolation in a bottle. Alcohol and the effects of poison gas made a corrosive cocktail, and my grandfather would be called over to restrain him until the doctor arrived to administer a merciful, if temporary, oblivion.

Subscribe here to receive stories & upcoming issues in full

by Julie Hahn

‘Are you excited yet?’ we asked Otoli, Ariet and Jackson two months ago.

The immigration papers for their family to come from Dadaab Refugee Camp, in Kenya, were in their hands. To us, it was evidence that our prayers of four and a half years were being answered.

But to our question, ‘Are you excited yet?’ their answer was ‘No, not yet’.

Over the past couple of months, that question has been asked of them many, many times. When we knew that the medical checks had been passed; when the children had safely returned to the camp from their long and dangerous trip to the Australian embassy in Nairobi; when bribe after bribe had been paid to officials; when the International Organisation of Migration had accepted payment for the airline tickets; when the flight schedule arrived in an email …

Still their answer was ‘No, not yet’.

How could they dare to get excited, when for ten years they hadn’t seen their children? The children had been left with their grandmothers in Ethiopia when Otoli and Ariet had run for their lives, carrying little Jackson in their arms. They hoped then, that by splitting the family, at least one of them might survive.

‘Are you going to have a party?’ we asked Otoli in the few days before the plane was scheduled to arrive.

‘No. I would rather give thanks to God. And I want to thank the people at the church.’ He explained that at times when he felt as though he should give up hope that he would ever see his children again, someone from the church would ask, ‘How are things going? Are your children coming soon? We’re continuing to pray.’

When he looked forward to having their children come here a couple of years ago, there were not enough humanitarian visas available to meet every desperate cry for help. When it looked like they could come, Australia had a change of government and a change in policy; when it looked like they would come, a grandchild and husband were added to the equation (so that the process had to begin again). Every time his hope had run out, Otoli was comforted that others were praying. And he was encouraged to hope again.

Even as we stood together, watching the first of the passengers walking from the plane onto the gangway and into customs area below us, Ariet’s answer was still ‘No, not yet’. Otoli’s smile, though, grew wider and wider.

‘My heart is going boom, boom, boom inside my chest!’ he said. Jackson, now fourteen and taller than his dad, maintained his Aussie-teenager

Subscribe here to receive stories & upcoming issues in full