This is not a "niche" blog. This is everything that makes me, me - or at least the bits I write down. There's no such thing as a "niche" person.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Family lives in haystack for four years

I saw the headline for this story in the "most popular" sidebar on Reuters and I just loved it, especially the detail about keeping a child off school so he didn't have to draw his house. The world is full of fantastically wacky people.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Therapy

Went for an introductory session with a guy called John Baker at the GP surgery this morning. Unsurprisingly, talked about addressing my needs rather than just trying to placate them with chocolate, hopefully it will be useful for looking at some of my recurrent Romans 7:15 moments.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

"Searching For God Knows What" by Donald Miller

After enthusing over "Blue Like Jazz" and getting everyone I could to read it, I thought I'd put a bit on here about "Searching For God Knows What". Quite often I'll read a book I really like through once quickly and then again more slowly, but I have to admit that I had to read "Searching..." again from the beginning before I understood some bits of it. This has a lot to to with Donald Miller's style: he offers lots of fragmentary episodes and thoughts and it's only after picking up quite a lot of the pieces and looking at them that I was able to get an idea of the whole picture. Then again, one of the clear aims of the book is to talk about why Christian self-help books, or a theology of three easy steps, are missing the point, so there's an (I guess) conscious avoidance of that kind of formula. Basically he expands on some of the ideas in "Blue..." and looks in more depth at what it means to have a relationship with God as a person, rather than as some kind of heavenly vending machine, giving out miracles and tickets for heaven in return for the appropriate amounts of faith and prayers. There's an assumption that, as an unregenerate social constructionist, I was happy to go along with, that we are created so that someone or something else tells us who we are. So we're intended to find our identity through the first and only perfect relationship: with God, in Eden. But then sin spoils this, and from then on we're spending all our time looking for someone or something else to tell us who we are. Miller uses a couple of different analogies to talk about the effect of sin: Chernobyl and Mount St Helens. Both are examples of a one-off catastrophe that has ongoing effects, and Miller says that this is like the effect that sin has on the human heart: we're conscious that we've become imperfect, and so we get into one of the main themes of the book: the lifeboat game. This is the game that still often gets played with small children and at team-building events - you have to imagine that there are certain people in a lifeboat, and one of them must die if the others are to live. How to make the decision about who is to die; in other words, how do we make decisions about other people's (and our own) worth? Miller goes into a lot of depth about the different ways that this game gets played out, and in how many areas of life we compare ourselves and others; how putting others down, establishing who is "in" or "out", distinguishing between one kind of person and another, are all part of the lifeboat game. We may know we're doing it, but we still do it as long as we're aware that sin has somehow ruined us, has separated us from the one perfect relationship that lets us know who we are. We still try to find our place in a pecking order, desperate not to be down at the bottom and having our worst fears about ourselves confirmed by a jury of our peers. The message of Jesus, in this context is this: Stop playing the lifeboat game. Give up trying to be rich - give away your goods to the poor. Give up trying to be in with the right crowd - go and spend time with the people nobody else wants. Be small, be last, be as unimportant as a little child in a grown-up world. And do this, not because it's a step in a four-step programme, or because it's a spiritual discipline, but because Jesus through the cross has taken away the sin that scarred and disfigured you, and through the resurrection has opened up the way to a relationship with the Father that can truly let you know who you are, and through the Spirit is transforming you more and more into the likeness of the One in whose image you are made.

Now this (especially the last bit) is my understanding of "Searching..." rather than an accurate precis, and is more a statement of how it is fitting in with my thinking at the moment anyway. As Miller points out, in this book and elsewhere, relationships with real people are much scarier than interacting with a vending machine, and I suspect that a lot of the time I still think of God as some kind of unpredictable/benificent/powerful vending machine, rather than as a person whom I would like to get to know better. I'm encouraged, however, by this book and others, to keep taking steps towards finding out more about who God is, and finding myself more in him.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

100

This is the 100th post on this blog, and to mark this occasion I've just sat and read all of the previous 99 in order. Gosh, don't I go on and on and on about the same old stuff! There are a couple of pieces in there that I think are worth reading, that make me think I'm glad I wrote that thought down. Sadly these are the minority of posts, and I feel quite ambivalent about the fact that I am not very different from how I was 15 months ago. I'm pleased that I don't feel quite the same way, that I have moved on; on the other hand it's sobering to see that I haven't really changed very much, and that a lot of the things that I think are "progress" are simply reworking the same old ground. Maybe one good thing is that I'm more hopeful, that joy is still a transient experience (which I think is one of the characteristics of joy anyway, but that's a subject for one of the next 100 posts), but a slightly more common one. Now to see if I can manage to get to post number 200 before April 2009!

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

An observation

The unavoidable deep puddles that result from heavy rain are no fun for those of us who have holes in their shoes which let in water and who will have cold wet feet all day

Monday, January 07, 2008

Eschatology escapology

We were joking in the car last night about the possibility of escapochatology: the study of how to get out of the end of the world. Weirdly, today I followed some random links and found this.

Monday morning

I'm struggling to stay awake this morning, even worse than the average Monday. It wasn't that long after midnight that I went to bed, but the 6:30am alarm interrupted a really bizarre dream, and I felt as though I hadn't slept that well. Still, we did win the quiz again (quite a common occurence these days - we're becoming the new Monkey Tennis), partly due to James coming to join us. It's a good feeling to be part of this little group who get together on Sundays. Realised last night that we're not going to be there next Sunday because we'll be with Rachel at the Fonteyn Nureyev Young Dancers Competition. I'd totally lost track of the fact that that is next Sunday. Mind you, I seem to be temporally disorientated at the moment anyway: having remembered that we're not here next Sunday evening, I then spent five minutes worrying about who was going to do what at Conversation, until it occured to me that that is on the third Sunday of the month - and earlier I'd told several people that I'd left decorations up past Twelfth Night because I spent several hours believing that it was the 7th January yesterday.
Perhaps I should go and work in Japan.

Friday, January 04, 2008

A picture is worth several dozen words

Sometimes I really miss my camera phone. Walking through town I passed the window of Ann Summers and realised that no matter what my verbal skills, there was no way that a simple description of a large window, with two mannequins in minimal bikinis emblazoned with the word "Sale" partly obscured by a large sign saying "Extra 20% taken off today only" would work even a fraction as well as a picture. Oh well. Feel free to use your imagination...

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

The world has not been designed to my specifications

Went over to Asda yesterday to buy some lunch (why is it that you can buy a French baton loaf and a piece of reduced-because-nearly-out-of-date Brie for 72p but people still buy cheese sandwiches for four times the amount?) and felt annoyed at a group of people who were dawdling along speaking a language that I didn't recognise. Just for a moment I caught myself feeling like they ought to be speaking English, and then I felt guilty for not embracing a diverse and vibrant multicultural society and acting like some kind of Daily Mail hatepig. But thinking about it later, it occured to me that a lot of the things that I don't like are a reflection of how I feel the world ought to be; secretly I'd quite like the world to be filled with people who have similar attitudes and behaviour to me (and I tend to feel uncomfortable or unhappy with people from very different social and cultural backgrounds). There are lots of things that I feel negatively about, not because they're intrinsically bad, but just because I wouldn't do them. I'm not sure that this is anything more that the rather profundity-free thought that "There are some things I don't like because I don't like them"; on the other hand I suspect that it's worth examining some of my prejudices, to see if they fit with a wider (Christian) worldview: I don't like graphic depictions of violence (generally violence perpetuates rather than solves problems, repeated exposure desensitises people), but on the other hand I don't like smelly people (I'd quite like them to wash for my benefit, I dislike them rather than the poverty/low self esteem that is causing them to be smelly in the first place).

Happy New Year

Good grief! I've just looked at this blog and realised that I hadn't posted anything since November, and that wasn't exactly chatty and uplifting. Thankfully, I'm feeling more positive than I did back then, so I will try and put slightly more on here in the next few weeks and months. This isn't a New Year's resolution: I haven't made any, partly because I never keep them, but also because I'm a chronic maker of resolutions, and I know that keeping on saying to myself "From now on, I will/will not do x any more" is often another way of saying "I don't like myself because I do/don't do this thing", which then means that when I don't keep that resolution, I've confirmed what a no good/unreliable/unlikeable person I am. So, no resolutions.

Not that this means I'm not aiming to be more like the person I was created to be, or that I don't want to improve my relationships, or that there is nothing I want to achieve. But rather than setting a list of tasks and targets, I'm more interested in developing my relationship with God and allowing him to change me. That way, the things that I do more or less of are outward signs of internal change, rather than things to beat myself up with.