The Blurb

The lost

Sunday 25 July 2010  10.26 pm

A bit of a light-hearted cartoon this week, based on a lovely little phrase you hear churches use sometimes.  I started thinking, as I sat on a train one day, what a church with a "passion for the lost" might look like.  I have a few ideas, and here is one.

I take it when churches say "the lost" they don't mean people hopelessly gone forever, but merely those willing to question whether their sat nav of life really is telling them porkies, and ask for directions.  Quite often Christians get lost too.  Even those with full colour church maps.
 
Comment on this entry

The truly in-tents experience

Saturday 17 July 2010  10.46 pm

It's festival season.  Holiday season.  Camping season.  And the shops are full of tents.  I might even buy one myself as I'm thinking of going under canvas for a night or two.  There's something alluring about living the truly simple life - just you, a tent, a sleeping bag and some basic essentials.  Everything you need on your back.  Just like a snail.

You can even make camping thoroughly middle-class if you want to.  With the simple addition of a tent with a dining area, a patio table and chairs, a mini fridge, a barbeque, a small generator, a couple of hampers of cutlery, crockery and food, a set of camp beds and a gazebo, you really can live the simple life in style.

Just don't try to put that lot on your back!
 
Comment on this entry

Free to be stuck

Sunday 11 July 2010  12.04 am

Who is freer: someone with more restrictions, or someone with more choices?

When I left university with a good degree, I could go anywhere in the world and train for almost any job I wanted.  I had almost unlimited choice, and felt totally paralysed.

Seven years later, I've narrowed my field to Web design, and I'm looking forward to getting a permanent job in a particular place.  I'm placing restrictions on myself, and I love it.  In fact, the more decisions I make, the more relaxed I feel.  The fewer my options become, the lower my anxiety about making mistakes.  With a thousand life-changing decisions, I can hardly breathe, but with just a few, I have energy to live.

It's possibly life's greatest paradox.  The fewer my choices, the freer I become.  (Ask any bride and groom in this wedding season why they're restricting their options!)

Is Christianity, with its guidelines for life, really a straitjacket?  I find society often imposes harsher rules on the way I should behave than Jesus does, and his give me a real sense of freedom.  I believe in God of course, but even if I were to find at the end of my life that he didn't exist after all, I would have lost nothing.  True freedom is a real win-win, and I recommend it to anyone.
 
Comment on this entry

Plug and fly

Saturday 3 July 2010  7.58 am

Have you heard about those environmentally friendly electric cars?  The ones that you plug in in your garage overnight, then drive 40 miles at 40 mph before running out of juice five metres short of the electric socket?  Well, for fellow fans of such things, here's an idea that could solve all our aviation pollution problems.  Just don't forget to pull the plug out.

This silly little entry comes as a distraction from a week where both England and Andy Murray (not to be confused) left their respective tournaments.  You've got to laugh, haven't you?

Actually, it turns out that there really is an electric plane.  But it uses solar cells.  Much better idea.  It would have done its first night flight this week if it weren't for lack of a spare part.  C'est la vie.
 
Comment on this entry

In with the old

Saturday 26 June 2010  8.49 am

Do you ever find yourself doing that?

I have a PDA.  That's a "personal digital assistant", which is a bit like a PA except without the mood swings and days off.  I've had one pretty much since I was 11 - cos I was way ahead of the curve back then.  My latest is a Palm TX, which even though it's 4 years old, is still the latest (get me).  Maybe it'll be the last handheld computer ever made that doesn't take phone calls.

It has my calendar in it, and it's a notebook, Bible and music player.  It even plays games, like the one called "Stressed" where you get to hit the screen with the stylus and watch it crack.  Hours of endless fun.

So if this technological marvel does everything except the washing up, tell me this: why do I keep sticking handwritten notes to the front of it?  Why do I write out my "things to do this week" on bits of A5 paper?  Why do I reach for my pocket NIV instead of the six versions right there in digital form?  And why did I challenge the floor of Clapham Junction Station recently to a game of "Stressed" with my phone?  (The phone lost.)

Because fun as technology is, there's still something quite satisfying about writing on real paper with a real pen, flicking the pages of a real book, and actually interacting with old fashioned objects.  Try it sometime.
 
2 comments