...His family welcomed him, and continued to love him, but he saw in Christianity the enemy. The enemy to freedom; the enemy to his own sexuality. He teamed up with the LGBTQI community and became and avid radical gay activist.

At the age of 19 he has a radical encounter with Jesus Christ. A student friend of his, somebody who had recently won a short film competition, a highly creative and intelligent young woman, a good friend of David met up regularly with him. She was a believer in Christ. And one day in a gay cafe in a gay area in Sydney they had this conversation. David was pouring out his heart about this dissatisfaction and his hatred towards all of the repression that the Bible and Christians and church community were seeking to impose upon him. She simply responded by asking him a penetrating question. Now you can ask all of your friends this question tomorrow, it won?t necessarily have the same effect because there is always the timing of God. You never know how long she had been praying for David, but at this time the moment had come. She leaned across the cafe table and said: ?David, have you ever experienced the love of God??

If anybody else had said that he probably would have slapped them. However this was a good friend, known to be a believer, who was not angry, judgmental, prejudiced or homophobic, but just opened to receiving people as they are. David paused and said ?You know what, I haven?t, I didn?t even know such a thing was possible.? So she said ?May I pray for you?? He said yes, so she reached out, laid a hand on him and prayed a very simple prayer ?Lord Jesus, would you reveal your love for David.? Right there, on the spot, in the cafe, David said that his heart was flooded with a profound sense of God?s love and he knew that as he was, not just a gay man but a gay man full of hate against the Bible and against Christians, that God loved him exactly where he was as he was. God loved him.

He also recognised that the love he experienced right then was the love he had been looking for in all his relationships, he was pursuing something by way of love that he had never been able to find and that?s not just to do with his sexuality, it?s to do with the love of God which is unique and infinitely higher than all forms of love that we will ever know amongst one another, and the deepest sense of love that we can have with one another is the overflow of the love of God in our hearts and minds.

...Not what people are asking you to do, even what you would like to do because you just like to take on too much.

People who teach time management talk about looking at every situation in terms of its urgency and importance and the high priority things are those which are both urgent (they have to be done very soon) and important (because they fit in with your life purpose and values). On the other end are the things which are non urgent and non important. The kind of things that fill up your inbox, whether they are advertisements or people wanting to talk about all kinds of different things. Make time for that, for what is more relaxing and maybe more frivolous. But if you?re not careful you get tied up in the things that demand your attention, the urgent things, even though they are not important.

I think spiritually though one of the things to remember is always to take a deep breath, relax, God is in control. He can lead you and direct you. All our planning is subject to God blue pencil. Also a great spiritual principle that I found is that God has given me enough time, enough hours in a day, enough days in a week to do what He wants me to do. So it?s a question of beginning with your focus on the Lord and then working out everything bit by bit. Careful planning that?s my part, prayerful planning that?s my part, but God tees over and does the rest.