Sarah's birthday

Sarah, 6 years old and birthday cake (not 6 years old...)

Josephine, home from hospital

I think her long fingers are from me.....

Baby Josephine and her building

Meet Josephine Eve Gardiner, Rebecca's first child and granddaughter number three!

Josephine (1 day old) and her great-grandmother Nana Muller (80+ years old) (Irene's mum)

Building project during last week. It is an outside cupboard for storing garden tools etc. at the back of our house

The building completed Thursday 8/07/09 (Josephine's birthday)

So it will be called "The Josephine Eve Complex" in her honour

Note: Sarah, G'child#1 has my 1914 veteran car named after her.

Laura, G'child#2 has my Gold 1971 Damlier luxury sedan named after her...

The lectern

A trip to the wood show at Malaney, north of Brisbane. So many pieces of wood to choose from.

This piece of wood from the Walnut tree is a fine grain and very heavy and is ideal for the base of the lectern. It was cut in three pieces to fit in the little car.

It finds its way into my humble workshop and work begins.

The top piece is sculpted to reduce the weight.

I was so busy that I forgot to take photos before it was finished...




The metal is stainless steel and the design fits in with the rest of our church furniture.

The artwork represents our Living Faith motto;

"Caring with the heart of Christ...

... serving with the gifts of the Spirit"

Baptism Boxes

Living Faith Congregation has a tradition of gifting a "Baptism Box" to children who are baptised in our church.

Several gifts are placed in the box.

• A soft toy lamb to reming us that "I am Jesus' little lamb" and "The Lord is my Shepherd"


• A Bible story book


• The monogrammed Baptism cloth used to dry the head after baptism


• The Baptism Certificate

Production in my humble workshop

The crossed are made from old pieces of silky oak that were previously part of the furniture of the old Sandgate Church

Finished and ready to go to church

The baby's parents together with God parents present the child for baptism

The box is presented

Many members of the congregation make similar boxes. There are a lot of baptisms in our church!

Wedding of Nephew John

"Sarah Kate", Moanna and Naomi, John and Gail, Christoph and Amy
Gail and "Sarah Kate" - isn't she beautiful....

John's brother, friend, friend, John and Gail, Gail's sister, freind, Gail's brother

Our family

Chris, Steve and Kathryn, Amanda, Irene and me, Rebecca and Richard

At Work

Dawn, on the road to Nepabunna Station Community.

We are 8 hours driving north of Adelaide. in South Australia.

The road is empty as we get close to our destination. The country is awesome and just so empty

The catering tent is just awaking and cooking fires are lit as we arrive.

People starting to drift across from the catering tent to the "Federal Court" tent

And ta da!!!, you can see me actually working (not the person talking, I am in the lower left on the picture)

Well, I don't look to be working too hard but by the end of the day I was very tired.

Sarah Kate

This is the morning of Rebecca's wedding

Nice and shiny

And so is Rebecca

Mandy's wedding - a year or so later

My baby

The Batak Feast

Mrs Irene busy cooking for our Batak Feast. Shopping took about 5 hours as it was hard to find correct ingredients We were expecting 25 people to come but 42 people arrived

Not all people were young enough to sit on our mat.

But those who did enjoyed it

We are getting more and more things as we travel to Sumatera. The Buku Ende is from HKBP Sidikalang

The room was decorated with many ulos - about 15 of them.

The program and menu were in English, some Batak and some Bahasa

We had two guest speakers who spoke of other projects in Sumatera Utara.

Mr Ces and Mrs Shirley Reynolds spoke of theit visit to Sidikalang (with photos) and Mr Graham and Irene Donges spoke of the Pementang Siantar part of their visit, (also with photos)