John Bradburne.... "Vagabond of God"

"God's love within you is your native land.
So search none other, never more depart.
For you are homeless save God keeps your heart."
(JRB)

I learned a little about John Bradburne when a wonderful priest called father David who works with orphans in Zimbabwe, as part of an organisation called Mother of Peace, came to visit our church some time ago.
This Holy man has a truly humbling and inspiring story I would love to share.

John, who described himself as a Strange Vagabond of God, was a layman and a member of the Third Order of St Francis.
He lived a life of poverty that seemed almost directionless to many, until he found his true vocation, caring for lepers in Zimbabwe.

Many of his patients needed considerable care which John Bradburne gave them with unstinting devotion, until his murder in 1979 at the end of the war for Independence.
After Bradburne
was shot, the local people wanted to hide the body for fear of reprisals
from white security forces. As they were carrying it away, they heard a
choir singing, dropped the body, and ran. However, when they turned back
they saw a strange white bird, with three beams of light ascending
heavenward, hovering over the body. The villagers fled in fright.

Since his death there have been many signs of John's close friendship with Jesus.


Here is his story...

thE thREE lITTLE tREES...

Three Little Trees

author unknown

Once upon a mountain top, three little trees stood and dreamed of what they wanted to become when they grew up. The first little tree looked up at the stars and said: " I want to hold treasure. I want to be covered with gold and filled with precious stones. I'll be the most beautiful treasure chest in the world!" The second little tree looked out at the small stream trickling by on it's way to the ocean. " I want to be traveling mighty waters and caring powerful kings. I'll be the strongest ship in the world! The third little tree looked down into the valley below where busy men and women worked in a busy town. I don't want to leave the mountain top at all. I want to grow so tall that when people stop to look at me they'll raise their eyes to heaven and think of God. I will be the tallest tree in the world.

Years, passed. The rain came, the sun shone and the little trees grew tall. One day three wood cutters climbed the mountain. The first wood cutter looked at the first tree and said, "This tree is beautiful. It is perfect for me." With a swoop of his shinning ax, the first tree fell. "Now I shall make a beautiful chest, I shall hold wonderful treasure!" the first tree said.
The second wood cutter looked at the second tree and said, "This tree is strong. It's perfect for me." With a swoop of his shinning ax, the second tree fell. "Now I shall sail mighty waters!" thought the second tree. " I shall be a strong ship for mighty kings!"

The third tree felt her heart sink when the last wood cutter looked her way. She stood straight and tall and pointed bravely to heaven. But the wood cutter never even looked up. "Any kind of tree will do for me." He muttered. With a swoop of his shinning ax, the third tree fell.
The fist tree rejoiced when the wood cutter brought her to a carpenter's shop. But the carpenter fashioned the tree into a feed box for animals. The once beautiful tree was not covered with gold, or treasure. She was coated with saw dust and filled with hay for hungry farm animals. The second tree smiled when the wood cutter took her to a shipyard, but no mighty sailing ship was made that day. Instead the one strong tree was hammered and awed into a simple fishing boat. She was too small and too weak to sail to an ocean, or even a river, instead she was taken to a little lake. The third tree was confused when the wood cutter cut her into strong beams and left her in a lumberyard. "What happened?" The once tall tree wondered. " All I ever wanted was to stay on the mountain top and point to God..."

Many days and nights passed. The three trees nearly forgot their dreams. But one night, golden starlight poured over the first tree as a young woman placed her newborn baby in the feed box. "I wish I cold make a cradle for him." Her husband whispered. The mother squeezed his hand and smiled as the starlight shone on the smooth and sturdy wood. " This manger is beautiful." She said. And suddenly the first tree knew he was holding the greatest treasure in the world.

One evening a tired traveler and his friends crowded into the old fishing boat. The traveler fell asleep as the second tree quietly sailed out into the lake. Soon a thundering and a thrashing storm arose. The little tree shuddered. She new she did not have the strength to carry so many passengers safely through the wind and the rain. The tired man awoke. He stood up, stretched out his hand, and said, "Peace." The storm stopped as quickly as it had begun. And suddenly the second tree knew he was carrying the king of heaven and earth.

One Friday morning, the third tree was startled when her beams were yanked from the forgotten wood pile. She flinched as she was carried through and angry jeering crowd. She shuddered when soldiers nailed a man's hand to her. She felt ugly and harsh and cruel. But on Sunday morning, when the sun rose and the earth trembled with joy beneath her, the third tree knew that God's love had changed everything. It had made the third tree strong. And every time people thought of the third tree, they would think of God. That was better than being the tallest tree in the world.

The next time you feel down because you didn't get what you wanted, sit tight and be happy because God is thinking of something better to give you.

The Ant and the Contact Lens

The Ant and the Contact Lens

A True Story by Josh and Karen Zarandona

Brenda was a young woman who was invited to go rock climbing. Although she was very scared, she went with her group to a tremendous granite cliff. In spite of her fear, she put on the gear, took hold of the rope, and started up the face of that rock.

Well, she got to a ledge where she could take a breather. As she was hanging on there, the safety rope snapped against Brenda's eye and knocked out her contact lens.

Well, here she is, on a rock ledge, with hundreds of feet below her and hundreds of feet above her. Of course, she looked and looked and looked, hoping it had landed on the ledge, but it just wasn't there.

Here she was, far from home, her sight now blurry. She was desperate and began to get upset, so she prayed to the Lord to help her to find it.

When she got to the top, a friend examined her eye and her clothing for the lens, but there was no contact lens to be found. She sat down, despondent, with the rest of the party, waiting for the rest of them to make it up the face of the cliff.

She looked out across range after range of mountains, thinking of that verse that says, "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth." She thought, "Lord, You can see all these mountains. You know every stone and leaf, and You know exactly where my contact lens is. Please help me."Finally, they walked down the trail to the bottom. At the bottom there was a new party of climbers just starting up the face of the cliff. One of them shouted out, "Hey, you guys! Anybody lose a contact lens?"Well, that would be startling enough, but you know why the climber saw it? An ant was moving slowly across the face of the rock, carrying it on it's back.

Brenda told me that her father is a cartoonist. When she told him the incredible story of the ant, the prayer, and the contact lens, he drew a picture of an ant lugging that contact lens with the words, "Lord, I don't know why You want me to carry this thing. I can't eat it, and it's awfully heavy. But if this is what You want me to do, I'll carry it for You."

THE STORY OF THE EMPTY JAR AND THE TWO CUPS OF COFFEE.......

The story of an empty jar and the 2 cups of coffee…….
When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the story of an empty jar and the 2 cups of coffee.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.

When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large empty jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks until the top of the jar.

He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was!

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar.

He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

”Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, ” I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The rocks are the important things - your health, your family, your partner, your children, your friends, your favorite passions - things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car.

The sand is everything else - the small stuff.

If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks.

The same goes for life.

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal

”Take care of the rocks first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.”

The Story of Deepa... She gave out of her Poverty...

It was a hot south Indian summer afternoon when Deepa's father came to visit his daughters. He looked terrible. In the weeks leading up to the visit, his health had gotten progressively worse. He would frequently be found passed out in the communal toilet in his slum, sometimes lying in his own diarrhea. The man was obviously in the final stages of the disease. I thought his two little girls were going to splinter his frail bones when they jumped up onto his lap that afternoon.

A couple days after his visit, Deepa's father committed suicide. The humiliation, the pain, and the decay of his body pushed him over the edge. He took his life to bring an end to his suffering. As you can imagine, his daughters were heartbroken. Phileena and I rushed to the home to find Deepa and Charu weeping. We held these little ones close, prayed with them, tried to encourage them with Scripture, and promised we'd be there for them when they needed us. Our hearts were broken.

In the sad series of goodbyes that our lives seem to offer us, it came time for Phileena and me to once again pack up and leave Chennai. We spent our last day with the children at the home. Deepa and Charu stayed close to us the entire day. When everyone had hugged and exchanged tearful goodbyes, we walked past the gates of the home, turned around one last time to wave, and noticed Deepa had run inside. Before we could close the gate, she came running out of the home with a single yellow rose bud in hand. Deepa stood there, her face soaked in her own tears, holding out the flower to Phileena.


After her father had died, they cleaned out his slum and discovered that his only possession was a dismal potted rose bush with a solitary bud. It was her inheritance, the last reminder of her deceased parents. How could we take it?

I take that flower with me everywhere, showing it as often as I can to illustrate this little, tender, revolutionary heart. It is pressed into the place in my Bible where Jesus is in the temple spying on the donors to the treasury. In the story, he calls his disciples over and lets them in on the scene that's unfolding. There are some wealthy folks making substantial offerings, when out of nowhere comes a poor widow who puts some change in the collection, probably some near-valueless reworked Hasmonean copper coins.

These guys are eager to figure out what Jesus has in mind, but what he tells them must have shocked them. Christ does not venerate the high rollers in the group but points out the widow and claims her as his own. "She's mine," he must have thought. "I choose her." He goes on to say, "All of these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on" (Luke 21:4). The story suddenly became not about what was given, but what was left over--nothing.


Extract from Simple Spirituality by Chris .L. Heuertz.

The Smell of Rain

fred kofoed http://skychasers.net/page2.htm

A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. She was still groggy from surgery. Her husband, David, held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news.

That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency Caesarian to deliver the couple's new daughter, Dana Lu Blessing.

At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.

Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs."I don't think she's going to make it," he said, as kindly as he could."There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one."

Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Dana would likely face if she survived.

She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on."No! No!" was all Diana could say.

She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away.But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana.

Because Dana's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chest to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Dana struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl.There was never a moment when Dana suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there. At last, when Dana turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Dana went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.

Five years later, when Dana was a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She showed no signs whatsoever of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she was everything a little girl can be and more. But that happy ending is far from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Dana was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.As always, Dana was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent.

Hugging her arms across her chest, little Dana asked, "Do you smell that?"Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain."Dana closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?"Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet.

It smells like rain." Still caught in the moment, Dana shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."

Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Dana happily hopped down to play with the other children.

Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.

During those long days and nights of her first two months of life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Dana on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.

The little Stream called to the Sea

(c) Tomo Yun http://yunphoto.net/en/

“The Little Stream Called to the Sea”—A Sufi Tale

Once there was a little stream that dreamed of flowing to the sea. The stream started in an aquifer , a huge pool of water underground, but the call of the ocean was so strong that the stream pushed its way through nooks and cracks, up through the earth until it burst forth into the air and began its journey toward the sea. As its waters bubbled to the surface they ran down the hill carving the stream bed into the earth. Sometimes the stream babbled as it traveled, sometimes it gurgled , sometimes it roared . At times the stream traveled alone . Its waters were so clear you could see the pebbles that lined its bed. At other times the stream ran through great lakes , or tumbled over a cliff , or joined other streams to form a river , and then split again to travel alone, but always, always the little stream yearned to flow into the sea.
Sometimes the stream would run fast and deep , eager to reach the sea. Fish swam in its waters as it carried them swiftly on its journey. Sometimes the stream would grow wide and slow, and it would carry boats on its back as it continued its journey. But always, always the little stream yearned to flow into the sea.
One day, just as the call of the ocean seemed to grow a bit stronger, the stream found itself growing sluggish, its waters grew thick with mud, until sadly it pooled into a brackish mud hole right on the edge of the desert. “Woe is me,” thought the little stream, “now I'll never get to the sea.” It tried going around the desert—but the desert was too wide. It tried going under the desert—but the desert was too deep. Still (even with mud in its “ears”) the little stream heard the call of the ocean and yearned to flow to the sea. After what seemed like a long time, as the stream just pooled there in the sun, it began to hear a second voice . “I can take you to the sea, little stream,” whispered the wind. “Come with me, I'll carry you to the ocean shore.”
“How could you do that?” scoffed the stream. “You are only made of air.”
“I can carry you on a breeze,” whispered the wind, “But you must be very brave, for you must let go of yourself and change.”
“I've changed many times,” said the stream.
“But this will be different,” said the wind .
The little stream paused, but deep within, the stream still yearned for the sea. The stream let go… and the wind picked it up particle by particle. At first the stream was scared , for it felt lost, it was no longer a stream but was turned sort of inside out and had become moisture swirling in the sky . The view was like nothing the little stream had ever seen before. Not only was the whole world laid out below it, but it was surrounded by sparkling jewels . Then what had been the stream realized that all those sparkling jewels were parts of itself. Molecules of water, droplets of moisture, sparkling in the light. What had been the stream realized that it was truly beautiful on the inside.
Next the stream-turned-moisture saw that it was not alone, for the wind had whispered to other streams, and ponds, and even to the morning dew upon the oasis. All had turned into moisture. And all their parts were also sparkling in the sun. Together they were even more beautiful, for the sunlight had changed them into all the colors of a rainbow.
Then the little stream-turned-rainbow felt itself falling , and falling and falling. All the other droplets were falling too, until plop, plop, plop, plop— all the droplets ran together into a mighty river which rushed down the mountainside , across a coastal plain, and into the sea, where the waves pushed it back and pulled it forward and the currents carried it far out into the pulsing depths. The little stream was content.
But I understand that every now and then, the wind would breeze by, whispering to the currents in the sea … “Come with me, come with me…” and that the moisture would rise up into the wind and be carried away to start all over again.