The Faithful

My innermost dream is to see a Christian revival throughout the country, if not the world; and possibly be part of that revival. I want people to experience God in their lives

The energy around our dojo is contagious. When we joined, it was initially because we wanted to do an activity together, as a family. We found an extended family here; we made many wonderful friends and most importantly, we found some amazing mentors. The laughter is contagious, particularly when there are so many young children around and soon enough, I noticed what a difference it made, when one is smiling while training. 

I have always admired Sensei Craig’s way of channelling kids’ energy and gently guiding them into action. In time, I grew to admire more and more the type of person he is. We share the same sense of humour and sometimes we commiserated over parenthood dilemmas, as our daughters used to be in the same class.
However, the reason that made me ask him to be a sitter in this project was his great ability to juggle his own several hats each day.

- “I wear probably 4 or 5 hats daily, depending on the day of the week. I am a husband, a father, a priest, a Sensei and a soldier. It’s very hard to choose a favourite. It will be a close draw between being a father and a husband; I am a family man.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a pilot. Back then it seemed something exotic and wonderful and exciting.
I have no recollection of a favourite story or anything from my early childhood. I was 6 years old when I suffered total amnesia. 

My foot got caught in the stirrup of a horse that bolted and I got dragged for a couple of hundred meters. I was unconscious for a week. The earliest I can go back in time, I think I loved Snow White because of this idea we have of happy endings. Snow White is the standard fairy tale with the happy ending.

I used to paint my pinkies in pink because that was a tradition for men many years ago; and because I could fight. I used to be a rebel; I used to do everything different. I wore an earring for a while in high school but then when everyone else started to wear one, I took mine off because I was only doing it to be different.

Coming out of high school, I decided I wanted to be an engineer. I studied for a couple of years but then I gave up. Freud would tell you that I was probably seeking my father’s approval and that I was pursuing engineering for the wrong reasons. Eventually, I swapped after a couple of years and I went to study law. I never finished law either.
I was searching for God at the time and I had ethical dilemmas with studying law. Then something happened. In my first year of law studies, I found out that I had dyslexia; more exactly Irlen Syndrome, which at the time was considered a form of dyslexia. I didn’t realise it until a point when, after spending three days and three nights studying, I could not catch up. I started to ask some of my colleagues what their average speed was and I was blown away to hear that other people go through 20-30 pages per hour. My average speed was 2 pages per hour. Until then, I wasn’t aware I had a problem. My previous reports would say I was lazy and did not study, but they haven’t pick up on my inability of reading because I had a high enough IQ to cover that. I just assumed that everyone read at the same speed.

My dream back then was to prove myself to my father and to end up wealthy and successful; -pretty much to be the image of everything that the secular society told me it would make me valuable”.

- How do you think you did with that dream?

- “I abandoned that. I found God and I realised how hollow and empty those pursuits were and that I was never going to find happiness or my self-worth in pursuing those things”.

- How did you find Him? Was it a revelation or an intrinsic self-search?

- “I always knew He was there. I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that God existed. I used to always ask a series of questions to lots of people when they were trying to Evangelise to me. And most of them failed answering those questions. Then something changed when I joined the army the second time. A chaplain was able to answer my questions and that was the beginning point of where I had a mature understanding of who God was and what a personal relationship with God is. 

I like who I am now, because I realise I found purpose in what I am doing in life. All the things I was previously doing, they felt empty. Instead, now I have God - given purpose in life. 

- My innermost dream is to see a Christian revival throughout the country, if not the world; and possibly be part of that revival. I want people to experience God in their lives.
The way society is going, people are searching for something to fill their lives because we were not made to be alone. We are meant to be in a relationship and without that, people tend to fill the empty space with things – things that can be quite destructive; drugs, sexual abuse, promiscuity, alcohol, trying to fill the emptiness with things. We are made to worship and when we are not, we become isolated, we are filling our needs with the wrong things; be it our cars, our houses, you name it. Something else becomes our god and when that happens, we don’t end up fulfilled because those things are not able to replace spirituality”.

- What about scientists? Do you think their lives are not fulfilled? That being said, Newton was a scientist and a man of God.

- “Science is trying to prove things with empirical proofs. That’s fine. But if we were to apply science on God, scientists are not able to prove the miraculous – because by definition the miraculous doesn’t have any proof; you have to dismiss that in order to have the science. Then you still have this emptiness around, not being able to experience the miraculous that exist.
The Big Bang theory explains the creation of the world back to 10 to the -23 seconds, I believe, forward but cannot explain the creation of the Universe from point zero.
Even in the science world there are disputes about creation because it doesn’t address it fully.

The things that keeps me going and motivated are my relationship with God and my faith that what I am doing is His purpose for my life.

In 5 years’ time, I see myself in Townsville as a chaplain in the Defence Force, preparing for my eldest child to complete schooling and move into their next stage of life. At the same time, my youngest child will start his school. They will both need guidance and the acceptance that they can and will make mistakes. I would love to provide that support.

If I had those 15 minutes of fame, I would like to use them to share the Gospel message, that God came into the world as Jesus and paid the price for our sins and died on the cross so that our sins can be forgiven and we can have a relationship with God.
Whenever I have a Baptism ceremony, I give them a band with 4 colours on it that represents the Gospel message. The colours are: Green – in the beginning God created the world and everything was perfect. Black – sin entered the world. Red – Jesus came and paid the price for our sins and White - we are forgiven, now God wants to have a relationship with us again.

My first role model was Jeff Webb, the priest who brought me to my mature faith. And of course, Christ is my ongoing role model because I believe we are made in the image of God and that image is revealed to us in the incarnation of Jesus Christ;I am trying to model myself after Him, being a good Christian.

My favourite movie is the new Ben Hur. It’s even better than the original; in the first movie the Christian message was quite covert. The new version is more open.

My only regret in life is not doing it with a smile. If there is one single thing I could go back and change, it will be this, doing everything with a smile, be it bad, good or indifferent. Everything that happened in my life shaped me into who I am now. At times I struggled against that and resisted instead of smiling and accepting that everything has a purpose".

- Is that the reason you ask the young children to smile while we train in the dojo?

- "The reason I am a Sensei, the reason my class has grown is because I am there to give people confidence, to encourage and help them when they want to be helped. I don’t want it to be about me. If I stand in front and yell commands at people, telling them what to do, it becomes about me. When I tell them to smile and enjoy themselves, it’s about them learning in a fun way. I had a little boy who became intimidated when hearing commands and started to cry; I sensed pretty quickly that something had happened in his life, for him to react like that. I made a point not to yell, to make him comfortable, to build him up and show him that he could enjoy himself. I don’t demand respect, respect is earned.

The most peaceful place is at home with my family.
I am always in the presence of God and I don’t need to link him to singular places. The Church is the gathering of the people not the building. Limiting God’s presence to a building, is basically putting God in a box and basically saying God only exists in there.

Home is the only place where I can be me and I don’t have to worry about how my actions will be perceived by the people seeing me wearing all these many hats.

I met my wife when we were in University; we were flatmates for a while. She hated me so I move out but kept in contact with her. She had this vision that she was going to meet her husband at a certain party, wearing a certain dress. She also knew that her husband would have green eyes, but she didn’t know more because all she could see was him sitting in a corner. I knew exactly what that meant; because since I had moved out, I had always watched over her and I had kept in contact.
Years later I took her to that party; I already knew by then that I wanted her to be my wife. I used to pray for someone like Julie-Ann, but I wanted someone who was also Christian.

I didn’t realise it, in the beginning but somewhere down the track, it clicked. When we were talking on the phone, she always used to say “I have to go” but she never said where. Then one day, she confessed that she was going to church. An Anglican Church, so I knew that moment that she was going to be my wife.

I sent her a rose picture on Valentine’s Day, confessing my love and then we decided to be together. I was about to move out of town and Julie-Ann said she would move with me. I wanted her to come with me, but I didn’t want to live together playing husband and wife, so two weeks later I proposed to her. That was on the 1st of the 3rd of the 3rd: I resigned my commission on the 2nd of the 3rd of the 3rd and then I became a soldier on 3rd of the 3rd of the 3rd “.

- How does being a soldier and a priest work together?

- “I am going to be a chaplain, which encompasses both. Interestingly we see soldiers in a popular light; we don’t tell them not to be soldiers. We tell them not to be dishonest, but never to stop being soldiers. If you look at Christ; Christ gave his life to save us – soldiers do the same, they put their life on the lines, protecting communities and countries. 

I have been on Peace Keeping missions. They were very hard to understand at times and that is why it’s very important to have the conviction of who you are and why you are doing it. The hardest thing I had to do – I caught a young boy stealing electrical wires from an abandoned warehouse, he was going to sell it. I gave him a stern talking to. A couple of weeks later, one of the other patrols in the area found him injured and they had to take him to the hospital. He was about 9 or 10 years old. It’s very difficult to know how to react in these situations, I suppose I was trying to be a soldier and a parent at the same time. It was a case of working out what I needed to do to keep him away. In hindsight, I should have scared him off but it was one of those awkward circumstances, would I be a soldier or a dad for this little one”?