In Cairns, Australia

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This week I've been in Cairns, Australia. It's the closest Australian city to Papua New Guinea, and it's also a good connecting place for meetings of people from throughout the Pacific. This week it has been the location of a gathering of SIL's Pacific Area Language Program Services team. People on the team represent Anthropology, Linguistics, Scripture Use, Technology, Language Learning, Training, Literacy, Assessment, Orality, Sociolinguistics, Communications, and my own area, Ethnomusicology & Arts. One of the purposes of this team is to look at the big picture of the Pacific region and find ways to make connections that go beyond the individual countries.

In a devotional time this morning of singing and reading the Bible, we looked together at Isaiah 42. I was especially struck by 42:16:

And I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, 
in paths that they have not known I will guide them. 

I will turn the darkness before them into light, 
the rough places into level ground. 

These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them.

We considered this and other verses in light of finding the way forward for our organization, but it resonates with me personally too, in times when I don't feel like I can see very far ahead.

Outside of the all-day meetings, I've enjoyed early morning runs, in the balmy, tropical Queensland neighborhood streets, accompanied by the mellifluous singing of the many colorful birds in the area. The Cairns suburb where we're staying, Stratford, is very pleasant. There is a lot of nostalgia here for me as well; this is where our family lived for three months in 2004, when we came to Australia to deliver Cameron. 

Here are pictures of some of the views I've found in the mornings:
TreeTops Lodge: where we stayed and also where we had our meetings
Downtown Stratford
A crocodile warning at the Barron River
A beautiful view of the Barron River




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