“Thrive on thrills, and have GO!”   Brigadier Arthur McIlveen.
 
The worker hefting a crowbar making a hole for a telegraph pole snarled at the Salvation Army officer peddling past on a country road with an arm load of Warcry newspapers, “Go and work you loafer!” He’d picked the wrong man, because Arthur McIlveen was a bushman used to digging fifty postholes a day. The feisty Salvo dropped his bike, fronted the heckler demanding the crowbar and, in a flurry of dirt, proceeded to out dig him - much to the amusement of his workmates!
 
‘Pugnacious’ was the word used to describe the chaplain whom the Diggers at Tobruk declared the best known Australian during the bitter six month siege of April to December 1941.  Coming from the legendary 9th Division ‘Rats of Tobruk’, that was highest praise.
 
Arthur was known for covering dangerous miles between trenches just to be there handing out tea and coffee to men returning from bloody fighting patrols. As did other chaplains, he simply materialised out of the dust of battle carrying the wounded, offering comfort and counsel, burying their dead comrades, listening and helping them write letters home.

It’s a bit unnerving when you wake up one morning thinking “Y’know, I might have wasted nearly sixty years of my life!”  I mean, when I think about the amount of time and energy I’ve put into telling the Easter Story, I‘d have to be seriously deluded or certifiably crazy to have made the investment of my one precious go at life on this planet on a purely fictional event. So, I re-ran the movie in my mind just to check.
 
I first took the Jesus story on board as a kid because trustworthy adults around me lived as if the whole thing was true and they had found it worked in making sense of life.  Some hard-bitten cynics at university gave my basic faith a much needed workout, but an equally tough minded bloke showed me the evidence for the resurrection could stand rigorous inquiry. He took me with him to stand up in public spaces to debate the case with all sorts. It put muscle and sinew into my beliefs and gave me a road tested world view.

Since then, I’ve preached it on city streets and beaches, up and down the coast and into the Outback. I’ve acted it in plays to big audiences of young people.  I’ve told the story to kids in classrooms, I’ve sung it in churches, schools, universities and camps. I’ve spoken it on radio and written it into books and blogs, magazine and newspaper articles. I’ve held it out as bright hope at the bedside of dying friends and spoken it as comfort to family and friends standing over their open graves. I‘ve taught it as bona fide fact to men and women from countries all over the earth in classrooms and churches and seen it change their lives.

I have a vivid ‘Crocodile Dundee’ moment locked in my memory that always makes me chuckle. Picture a young bush lad who’d grown up chasing cows on the frosty hills of Yackandandah, passing through the ornate entrance of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. Kind friends have taken their colonial visitor Bill to hear George Frideric Handel’s famous Messiah – the whole works, full orchestra and choir.
 
Everyone is suitably dressed for a posh occasion - after all, this was where the most famous choral work in history had first been performed in England in 1743. When it crescendoed with the rousing Hallelujah Chorus, it was reported that Billy couldn’t contain himself. Sheer exhilaration swept him up into that mighty hymn and the young Aussie jumped up on his plush theatre seat and started punching the air in response to the thundering Hallelujah’s!
 
Mind you, Yackandandah Bill was not the first to rise to the occasion. It’s said that when King George I heard it, he too could not remain seated for the powerful Chorus and rose to his feet to honour the greater King. For over 250 years concert goers have followed suit. Composer Joseph Haydn is said to have heard it and "wept like a child" exclaiming, "He is the master of us all." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart agreed. "Handel understands effect better than any of us – when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt … ”