Restoration 2012: Restoring Power

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Restoration Ministry

John Bradshaw

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Our Father in heaven, we have just heard a prayer beautifully presented, and our hearts have been touched.

And so we pray now guide us, guide our thoughts, guide our intentions.

Please give us freedom here for these next few minutes.

So much going on in our lives, good stuff, but I pray that these next minutes would be all yours.

Help me Lord, without your Holy Spirit any words are just words.

So would you please take the words spoken tonight And then bring them home to our hearts with conviction.

And if somehow I just say the wrong thing, I pray that you'll paper over the cracks and allow folks to hear the right thing, just whatever it is that you need for them to hear.

We are grateful for this opportunity to be here and we ask for your blessing and we pray in Jesus' name, please say, Amen.

Someone asked me the other day what I miss most about New Zealand.

And you know, I couldn't really find a very good answer.

When I think back about what it is about my home country, I've been gone from New Zealand for 21 years.

I mean that's way more than half my life.

It's been 21 years and I've visited periodically, you know, and looking forward to going back this year and taking my wife and kids to see Nana.

He's turning 85 this year, so you know, we got to go.

You know, I think back to my childhood and the sort of the random things that stand out.

I remember being part of a rugby league team.

We were a good team, you know, and this was every winter we would play rugby league, which is like rugby but just ever so slightly different.

And I remember at 1 time we had a coach, his name was Tom McRoberts.

He was so interesting, this man had a profound influence on my life.

He was a Mormon fellow and took his faith very seriously, it seemed.

And he was a great big man, died young, I wonder why.

Someone said he was as big as a house, but only if you were referring to a very big house.

And he didn't run around on the field with the boys because he couldn't, you know.

But he won our respect and our admiration.

We just loved this man and he would always pray.

Before every game, he would gather the boys together and we would pray together.

We'd pray with this man who loved God, this Mormon man who loved God, and we would pray.

I think about things like that, and I think about my education at our Catholic school that I went to just down the road and that was big in my life.

I miss the river that I was raised on practically, and I miss the hills that I was raised in.

And you know, as I think back to my childhood, there are a few memories that just linger.

And it's funny when you do a little review, what pops up?

And my father's garden is 1 of those things that's just very big in my mind.

It's not that I ever spent a huge amount of time in the garden.

I feel very guilty actually when I think back to my father's garden, because my dad did all the hard work.

My father never had a rototiller, which is what we would call a rotary hoe.

Rowland's rotary hoe on a couple of occasions, but it was a terrible machine.

It didn't work very well and my dad didn't want to borrow it and send it back broken, you know, he didn't want to do that.

He would just rather use his shovel and the garden he dug, I remember it as being, oh, like a hundred and 50 yards across and 700 yards long.

And when Oxalis, this nasty thing, threatened to take over the garden, he re-dug that thing by hand and sifted the dirt and got the oxalis out.

He would plant everything and he would do all of the weeding and he would put the deris dust out, that's what the product was called, and he'd kill the slugs and the snails with deris dust.

That's probably why I have red hair, because of the deris dust.

John, would you go and get a bowl of peas?

We're going to have some peas for tea tonight.

That's what we would call the evening meal, dinner, it was always tea.

There's no sense in trying to explain that, it was just tea.

Or go and get some beans for tea, or I would go out and, you know, it was so wonderful.

What a privilege to be raised this way, what a privilege.

We're gonna have some potatoes for tea, why don't you go out and dig some potatoes?" And I'd go out to the garden and dig them up, man, and we'd just bring them in and boil them.

And when you boil potatoes, here's a hint for you, take a sprig of mint.

It was in our way, you know, just outside the kitchen window.

In fact, I've told people many times that New Zealand is where the Garden of Eden was.

And you'd get a sprig of mint and you'd put it in the potatoes and if you boil mint with your boiled potatoes.

Anyone of any sort of English extraction will understand what I'm talking about.

It's a very civilized way to eat potatoes.

Now my dad grew tomatoes and every year though it was the big question about the tomatoes, did they get a touch of the blight?

Dad would go out to inspect the tomatoes every year, it was like a ritual, and we would wait and We'd see what the verdict was it was like a court case and dad would come in I'm afraid the tomatoes have got a touch of the blight.

Oh We knew that would mean the tomatoes wouldn't be oh pardon me.

I have to translate A tomato is a lot like a tomato, but tomatoes are redder and they taste better.

And Dad would, he would invariably announce that the tomatoes had a touch of the blight.

You know, from then till now, I have no idea in the world what blight is or was.

All I know is that dad's tomatoes were constantly afflicted with the blight.

You could go out to the garden in December.

Well, wait, that didn't make any sense to you.

Wait, December is the middle of summer down there.

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