Twitter

You may noticed from the sidebar that I've started using Twitter. I'd put off using it because I really didn't see the point; I still don't see any point to it, but it both fun and incredibly addictive.

Agree with God

In a Scriptorium essay, Fred Sanders defines confession of sins as "agreeing with God". I have to say I quite like this idea: God already knows our sins, and has made the once-for-all sacrifice on the cross for their forgiveness. Confessing (like prayer, or spiritual discipline) is not primarily about "making up" after falling out with God, or beating ourselves up about how bad we are. It's about seeing ourselves and the world in a way that's closer to the way God sees us, which is what the Kingdom is about.

Zude

Since I read and watched Robert Scoble talking about Zude, I've been trying it out. I'm sure that if I knew more about how bits of the web work, I could do more with it, but I'm happy enough with what I've been able to do to take the step of setting up a new home page that I will now use in my hotmail signature file (does anyone ever click on that?) and my website address when commenting on blogs.

UPDATE: What I really want is to be able to import my Google Reader feeds into a "work" page on Zude, so that I can have one site for work and home, but that doesn't seem to be very easy (at least not for me).

Charity makes you feel good

...according to this item from the BBC

Joy and service

I'm sure that there is a deep and profound joy to be found in serving others, but it's hard to find it in the act of unblocking toilets, particularly when you can't seem to rid your hands of the smell of other people's faeces.

Ambivalence

From Google Reader, an ambivalent use of the word "they":

In case you can't read it on the picture above, it says: "Many hospitals across England report having to turn away women in labour last year because they were full".

Happy genes

An article by Reuters reports on a study that finds that half of the traits influencing our happiness are genetically determined. It goes on to say that

"People who are sociable, active, stable, hardworking and conscientious tend to be happier"

Hey, at least I'm stable. Well, fairly stable. Sometimes.

Damn.

Priorities

Compare the number of people who have a picture of their home, family or pets on their desk or computer at work, with the number of people who have a picture of their workplace or work colleagues on the wall at home.

Test post

This is just a test, playing around with humyo.com

You can't give away what you haven't got

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently but not a lot of writing, so this is me wanting to get at least a couple of thoughts down before I lose them.
I've been thinking about who owns my life; that is, who is in charge of it. Now I know that there are a lot of Christians (myself included) who would say, with a variable ratio of truth and hopefulness, "God is." Part of the problem is that it's often quite hard to put God in control of my life, even when I want to. I know that there's always a temptation to believe that I can make a better job of running my life than the omnipotent Creator Of The Universe could, but that's just pride and foolishness; I know that I resist letting God be truly in charge of some aspects of my life, like looking at the spreadsheet for the monthly finances and tweaking our giving so that the graph for the balance doesn't go south quite so fast, but that's just fear that God won't look after us (and some selfishness - shall I order pizza or give more to church?) What I've been thinking about are the areas that I really do want to give over to God, the things that well-meaning Christian friends tell me to "lay at the foot of the Cross." (As an aside, I've never yet asked "Erm... how do I do that, exactly", which may be the reason that nobody has ever told me exactly what laying something at the foot of the cross entails.) Anyway, there's a load of stuff that I would love to hand over to God, to give up, to put under his control, etc, but I don't seem to be able to do it, and I think that part of the reason that I can't give it to God is that it's not mine to give.
This is stuff that I'm still trying to think through, so this might not make a lot of sense, but it's based on ides about the areas of our life where we (through habit or upbringing or apathy) hand over control of ourselves to other people. As an example, consider a (completely fictional!) person who has low self-esteem. He doesn't think much of himself, and depends on what other people think of him - or, more accurately, what he thinks other people think of him. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to create the right impression, and trying to work out what impression other people have received. If he goes to a Christian friend and talks about his chronic low self-esteem, that friend might advise him to give this issue over to God. And here's where I think the problem happens: my guess is that our fictional miserable man might come back to his Christian friend a week or a month later and say he's still finding life just as hard, and doesn't feel any better about himself. And my next guess is that this is because he has handed responsibility for his feelings to other people. How can he give something to God unless he owns it first? On the surface this is pretty basic: you can't give away something that doesn't belong to you, but the more I think about this, the more it seems applicable across a range of issues. How can you give your finances over to God if the bank/the balliffs/the people who decide prices at Tesco have more control over your finances than you do? How can you hand over your relationships if you still think that everything that happens in them is the other person's fault? Remember, making it all his/her fault is giving him/her all the power and responsibility; how can you hand over something you've already given away to someone else?
Now I'm sure that there are many people who genuinely have no control over the terrible things that happen to them, and I'm certain that God really is on the side of the oppressed, but I'm sure that for many of us middle-class, relatively wealthy and healthy Christians, there are a whole load of places where God has given us abilities and responsibilities that we have handed over to others and to the World, and then wonder why it's so hard to give them back to God.
Umm... I'm not sure how this goes from here. I know there's something about God giving us things so that we can give them back to him. Maybe the best example is the parable of the talents. The guy who hides his talent in the ground does so because he is "afraid"; he feels he has no control and so just buries his talent in the ground. I've heard this explained as a parable of how we must all use what God has given us, but perhaps there's also something about taking responsibility for what God has given us; being afraid and not taking responsibility means that we have nothing much to give back, and we lose what little we have. There's also something about the whole prosperity gospel thing, about the fact that God gives us stuff purely so that we can give them back to him, not so that we can hand ourselves over to the World's standards of wealth and comfort, but I think that that's enough for this post!