A beautiful video on marriage, which made me cry. It might make you cry too when you see the love of Christ in this.

Bish chats about the book Religion for Atheists.

This is so cool! A guy using Rubik cubes to make a picture. Very clever.

Narnia or Neverland: what fantasy land would you visit?

A post on Why I am not keeping Sunday special

Tim Chester wrote a really good blog post about facebook, in fact he is writing a series of them which are really thought-provoking. I do always want to be careful how we engage with our culture and with facebook/twitter so embedded in our British culture, we need to be careful to not simply dismiss it out of hand. I think facebook can be used in a good way, we can redeem it for good but the lines are always blurry.

The real question is how real are the friendships we make online? Especially where we rarely make face to face contact, but most of the interaction is done through the computer screen? Are they real?

The danger perhaps is that its very easy to be more vulnerable online then it is face to face, because really no one can see your face if all you are doing is tapping away on a keyboard creating sentences. It’s easy to pour your heart out more and soon the person on the other side knows more about you then your friends in real life. But the difference is that they don’t really know you, because they don’t see your actions, your tone, the way you act in situations etc. I was in this situation not so long ago where through facebook chat I made a friend with a lady my age and doing a very similar job to me – we became close friends through facebook chat and we did meet up but mostly at conferences and the occasional visit. We became close friends very quickly because it was a lot easier to chat on facebook then it was to chat with someone face to face – she knew what I was thinking about at that moment in time and on some superficial level she knew me and I knew her. But in reality I don’t think it was a real friendship and I look back now and I think there were some real unhealthy attachments there which aren’t good and aren’t really based on reality. It got to a point where we realised that this wasn’t a friendship.

Why? Because it isn’t the same as going to the pub with someone and laughing together, crying together and sharing stories together. It isn’t the same as I meet up with a friend nearly every week for coffee and I watch how she interacts with her daughter and her husband and where they invite us for dinner and we share food together and encourage each other with the Gospel. It’s not the same as a couple of weeks ago I went to the house of a lovely lady and we chatted deep theology and spiritual things while drinking coffee and eating chocolate which was rounded off with some great time of praying for each other. You can’t do that on facebook.

Facebook and online communities may speed up “deep” friendships, but it misses out the important process for how we make friendships, how we connect and how we develop those friendships. Which can only properly be done face to face, with real life meetings.

Tim Chester’s says:

Facebook encourages you to live elsewhere. The gospel encourages you to live life here and now.

•      You can tend your Farmville farm or you can get an allotment.
•      You can catch up with friends on Facebook or you can go out on a cold, dark night to see real friends.
•      You can catch up with “Friends” by watching the latest episode on the television or you can serve your neighbours.
•      You can build a new city on Sims or you can be the city of God set on a hill with your Christian community.

Facebook is good for the on the surface stuff like arranging of meetings. But humans live to connect with the reality, the real life, the flesh! And community won’t ever really thrive through a computer screen, but through face to face.

Now the question that is on the back of my mind is – what about those that can’t get out the house? Where actually Twitter and facebook is a lifeline to connect with people? I would be interested to hear any comments on that. My hope and prayer is that there is a community around you that visits you, that connects with you. Does that happen?

http://uccf-arts.blogspot.co.uk/

Here are some fab quotes from the blog to wet your appetite:

“We are passionate about seeing Christian art students live wholeheartedly for Jesus: both in the way that you create,  and also in the way that you do life at art college.  We pray that this blog will bless, encourage and resource you to get digging deeper into gospel truths, and delight all the more in the gifts God has given you.”

“Artists are societies’ visionaries or to quote Mark ‘society’s equivalent of specsavers’!  As artists we help people to see what they don’t naturally see.  We are more deliberate in feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, and sensing the world around us because we study it in a more intense and deliberate way, and so we are making people see more of what’s around them.”

“Whether you are based in an art college, a university, or an office, they all have a culture of their own which has been produced by the people of that place over years.  Do you ask questions of the cultures you live in?  Are you contributing in a Godly way to your cultures, or are you just going with the flow?  Are you mindful of what you paint, sing, dance, design?  Cultural history is easily read through the art of the time so we really do have a great responsibility as the current generation of Christians making art.  Let us have dominion, make work and live lives that produce a cross shaped culture.”

Andy posts on the Silent Killer. A brilliant post on what we view to be our rights and entitlements.

This will make you laugh (hopefully). It’s an e-mail exchange between two people, one asking the other to make a poster for her lost cat. It made me laugh a lot. I hope it does for you to!

An inspiring talk on the Power of introverts from TED. Worth a watch.

Why should you care about M.E – a post written by Tanya. This is one post you want to read because the reality of this illness is often ignored, but people are speaking up and getting angry and wanting to do something about it.

“The Church needs artists because without art we cannot reach the world. The simple fact is that the imagination ‘gets you,’ even when your reason is completely against the idea of God. ‘Imagination communicates,’ as Arthur Danto says, ‘indefinable but inescapable truth.’ Those who read a book or listen to music expose themselves to that inescapable truth. There is a sort of schizophrenia that occurs if you are listening to Bach and you hear the glory of God and yet your mind says there is no God and there is no meaning. You are committed to believing nothing means anything and yet the music comes in and takes you over with your imagination. When you listen to great music, you can’t believe life is meaningless. Your heart knows what your mind is denying. We need Christian artists because we are never going to reach the world without great Christian art to go with great Christian talk.“

I think Keller highlights something really important here about Christians and Art. He is echoing CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer on this as well. But great music and great art can’t lead you to believe life is meaningless because they express something of the reality we are in – the need of a saviour. What better people to show them the true saviour then christian artists in our churches?

Yet we often celebrate those that can stand up and preach, those that can stand up and lead sung worship on Sunday and those that do cold contact evangelism. I am drawing a distinction between those that lead sung worship and those that play in pubs/clubs etc because I think the audience is different and perhaps the purpose as well. Although they are both artists. But what I am really thinking about is what about our artists in the world? Those that draw, take photographs, cook great food, write poetry, write novels, sketch, make models etc for the world to see…yet they often get the back seat. But the church needs them, because these people are speaking into the culture we are in and they are engaging with it in a different way. The are reaching people who the preacher alone could never reach.

But it’s also not about creating a christian sub-culture with your t-shirts and wrist bands, but it’s about creating art that speaks truth and hope into a culture that needs and wants a saviour.

Lets celebrate our christian artists and encourage them. Lets get the church releasing them into the world so that they can speak truth through their art.

• It’s time to make your move
• Perusing your plan
• Being strong and courageous
• God’s rules for success (that’s my favourite!)
• Facing the future
• Be strong for God is with you

I am sure we have all heard sermons of this flavour and countless times I have heard (from my own mouth as well) saying to people “be strong and courageous, just as Joshua was”. This especially happens just when someone is about to go on overseas mission or to something really important, we mantra – “Be strong and very courageous”!

After looking at this chapter again I have come to a different conclusion and think in many ways we and have missed something huge here. Part of the problem is who are we in this story? Who’s shoes do we put ourselves in? No doubt we place ourselves in the boots of Joshua and therefore take the words that the Lord said to Joshua to our own hearts. I must be strong and courageous. I must be like Joshua. The second part of the problem is that if we think of it like that then Jesus isn’t at the center of this story, but I have placed myself there.

Who does Joshua represent in this story? He is the saviour figure, the one that leads the people, he meditates on the word, he is revered above them all, he is the mediator between the people and the Lord. It’s funny because that doesn’t sound like you or me really. It defiantly sounds like Jesus and Jesus is the true Joshua, just as he is the true Moses and David etc.

Most often when we read the OT we come out with application on how to be a good Christian, like with Joshua we see we need to be strong and with David we need to overcome our Goliaths and with Boaz we need to redeem people. When we do that I fear we remove Christ from the picture and exalt ourselves. But lets place Christ back in the picture and if Joshua is pointing to Christ then that is where we need to look.

And if Christ is back in the picture then here is the good news – you don’t have to be strong and courageous, you just need to look at the one who is strong and courageous. You need to look at the one who is the saviour, the one who redeems, the one who is the true Joshua, the one who leads people from death to life. You need to look at Christ. Look at Him! Trust in Him! Doesn’t that sound more like the Gospel? Its beautiful and heart warming.

As you know, I love drinking coffee. I also like to read blog about coffee and I found an interesting article about how to make coffee and there are 22 ways of doing it! Check it out here.

Glen write about how there is “nothing adult about porn” which was a very interesting article and he linked to another post on women and porn written on the conversational theology blog:

“First, and I want to say this first because I really don’t think anyone else is saying it at all, chicklit and chick flicks are not pornography for women, pornography is pornography for women. There is a myth which the church seems to have bought into completely that women are not interested in pornography. That this sin is exclusively a male sin. Women are instructed not to listen when a preacher addresses the men in the church about this issue. For a long time, I believed this lie too. And then I discovered the internet.”

1. Catching and getting rid of monster spiders that lurk in the corners of your house!
2. Making phone calls to people who I don’t want to talk to (phone company, sky etc)
3. Pushing the trolley in Tescos and carrying heavy shopping bags
4. Makes me coffee first thing in the morning to wake me up! ( I need it)
5. Gives lots of hugs when needed
6. He often says he is praying for me which really encourages me
7. Make me laugh with silly faces and noises
8. Writes to me “Good morning” messages when he goes off to work or writes notes with my lunch!
9. He runs and grabs the washing when it starts to rain.
10. He picks me up from evening meetings and waits there while I am late…or very late
11. He allows me to choose a movie which may mean a really girly movie!
12. He often reminds me of Gods Grace

I must admit and not to sound cheesy at all, but since being married I have seen more of Gods Grace and love then I did before. This is so evident in times where I am pretty rotten and sinful and yet my husband still loves me and shows me such patience and love when I don’t deserve it. It is in those times I see just a glimpse of the love of Christ towards me and it reminds me that while I was far off and rejecting him, he died for me and won me back. Pretty amazing.

Before we got married we got many warnings about our first year, warnings that it would be the hardest year of our lives, that we would hate it and be ready for the divorce papers to be signed. So we went into marriage with a reality punch and found it surprisingly wonderful and a lot of fun. I guess people react in different ways, everyone is different and so some of that advice was helpful because marriage isn’t exactly the “happy ever after”, stare into each others eyes with fluffy bunnies eating grass around you and birds tweeting songs to your favourite love melody. Nope. You learn quickly that marriage is that of the mundane, where there is washing up, going food shopping, cleaning the house and working out finance. There are evenings where you just watch TV or read a book and there are weekends where hubby has to work. It’s not all adventures and romantic dinners because at some point the ironing needs to be done!

That’s life.

And its nice to share it with someone and that someone being my husband!