June is Busting out all over

Well she'd better buy a bigger brassiere then, hadn't she! Sorry, I couldn't resist that: it may be thirty years this month since I took my O'Levels but the schoolboy humour in me fairly does bust out every time I hear that wonderful Rogers and Hammerstein song, and particularly when we get to this grandest month of the year from my perspective. Here's how that familiar refrain was introduced in Carousel:. I trust Richard Rodger's estate will not be sueing me for copyright infringement, but I have lifted it from "Jenn's Blog" which comes out fairly high on Google:

March went out like a lion, a whipping up the water in the bay.
Then April sighed, and stepped aside, and along came pretty little May.
May was full of promises, but she couldn't keep 'em quick enough for some.
And a bunch of doubting Thomases kept predicting that the summer'd never come.
But it's coming by gum. I can feel it come.
Loook around, look around, look around.

June is busting out all over--all over the meadow and the hill.
Buds are busting out of bushes and the little river pushes every little wheel that wheels behind a mill.

Because it's June. June. June. June.

Just because it's June, June, June!

You can just feel the vibrant summer hopes in those lyrics can't you. Well, it may be the case that "flaming" June- it's other most notable adjective- did that regularly in 1940s New England where the memorable musical is set, but in Old England we've not seen much sign of the sunshine in these first 34 hours or so of the mid month of the year. Bit more like the gloomy winter our friends in Oz and NZ are now commencing, I guess.

I hope the weather will soon improve, and particularly when it comes to the last week of the month when I celebrate my birthday- hence why I find this month so special. Blessed is he who expects nothing, so I won't tell you the exact date and you won't find it in my profile any more. It seems the only way you can get Blogger NOT to feature your "starsign" is to take out your birthday, a rather bad piece of programming in my view.

Many people view astrology as harmless fun, but it takes more than inanimate celestial objects to determine the future. Rather, the loving, compassionate, supremely intelligent One who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God in three persons, celebrates every birthday, every life and every passing. His care for us is so great that he takes an intimate interest in every detail of our lives- not just our feeble efforts to offer him our thanks and praise on a Sunday morning or in a mid-week meeting, or even in our private thoughts and moments that nobody else sees.

But this God is in no ways an interfering tyrant, which seems to be so sadly the way some have portrayed him. God gives us free will to make both good and bad choices each day, whether at work, rest or play. He doesn't need a Mars bar or a far star to determine the fates of individuals and nations for with a paradox our finite minds will never quite grasp, although we have free will "He's got the whole world in His hands" to quote a classic spiritual song which is just as joyful to sing in June as any other month of His year. Alleluia!

I'm grateful to my Ozzie friend "Lynn345", who you'll often find in the Friends Reunited Connections chat rooms, for pointing out the error of my ways in keeping a starsign reference up and prompted by her I took steps to remove it. Christians don't need to be self-righteous, but they should always be self-evident: the self in this case being God's very self as revealed in His Son, Jesus Christ.

Of course, the paradox does not escape me that Jesus' birth was heralded to wise men from afar by a star, but this like all of scripture needs to be read with intelligent discernment, which the Holy Spirit helps to give us. An alternative viewpoint of the Magi's appearance of course- and I'm aware that I'm at the wrong end of the year here but, hey, we've been talking about Australia where the seasons are back to front, after all- is that Jesus's coming into the world was of such cosmic significance that it brought even the sages of old, the wiseacres who went west, to their knees. Even they could not have known just what this most important event in the whole of human history was to signal for their age and the age to come- but they knew it merited the finest birthday presents going for the finest man ever to have lived!