The observant among you will have noticed that I haven’t been pumping out copious blog posts since coming back from Holidays.
While not so good for you, oh blog reading public, the reason is good for me.
Essentially as of last week (Tuesday to be precise), I have a job, well am keeping a job more to the point.I blogged about this a while ago (here), but to save you the trouble of looking it up, my company was being taken over and this always equals restructuring (and job losses).
Anyway, I am not only keeping a job, but have been promoted. God has certainly been good to me.
The upshot is, I am now ridiculously busy with all things integration, hence blogging will definitely suffer.
Oh well, small price to pay in the overall scheme of things.
I gushed on Monday about Man Vs Wild and it’s Wild Man presenter, Bear Grylls.
Well my lovely wife helpfully pointed me to an article where Bear talks about his faith in Christ.
I have to say, I am not overly surprised he’s a Christian. Just watching him you get a sense, by how he talks and conducts himself, that there’s something different about him.
And that’s the way it should be, so that’s good.
Here endeth today’s lesson.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bear Grylls, Indiana Jones, Man Vs Wild, TV Shows
I love Man Vs Wild.
For the uninitiated, this show is about Bear Grylls, a former SAS trooper who demonstrates survival techniques in a variety of terrains from Rainforests to snow to desert.
And apparently he is the ladies choice to be the next Indiana Jones…
On SBS tonight @ 8:35.
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Mikey quotes Phil Jensen…
The Contemporary Calvinist get’s all reflective
Dave “I’m Pumped” Miers is hitting Cataract Park to talk to the kids about Christ. Go Dave.
Brewery workers take bosses hostage
One way to deal with being made redundant
That is the question.
Well actually the question is do we ditch the word “church” for something else when trying to communicate to non-Christians.
Matt, who is not above a bit of contextualisation, has some advice on the matter.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Advance, Church Planting, Driscoll, Guy Mason, Melbourne
Guy Mason, who was one of the original Oz29 gang, has got his own church planting thing going down in Melbourne. He’s even got Mark “the Dude” Driscoll hooked in.
Check out the website.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Children, Discipline, Parenting, Smacking
I have blogged before about smacking, and it continues (and no doubt will continue) to be a controversial topic.
A study out of the good old U. S. of A is reported on here, and says:
Young children spanked by their parents may perform better at school later on and grow up to be happier, according to a controversial new study that is drawing scorn from critics.
The U.S.-based research states that spanking children up to six years old made them more successful in school, more optimistic about life, more likely to take voluntary work, and more keen to attend university than their never-spanked counterparts.
Our local media picked up the story and naturally wheeled out the various child psychologists and others for whom smacking is tantamount to prisoner tourture at Guantanamo Bay.
What is frustrating is that anybody who smacks in any way shape or form is portrayed as a violent parent who lashes out in anger whenever their kids spill some milk. Now no doubt there are some parents who are like that, but it’s a straw man argument to lump everyone in that category.
I think the elephant in the room is the verbal abuse some (many?) parents give their kids. I never see this raised as a topic, but I can almost guarantee that this is having a bigger impact than smacking.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: John Dickson, Media, Michael Jensen, Peter Jensen, Sunrise
In light of my discussion with Matt over his criticism of Peter Jensen on Sunrise, I’ve been thinking about how Christians interact in/with the media.
I suggested that perhaps being involved in the type of deliberately adversarial TV slots (like the Jensen Sunrise one) is perhaps not the wisest choice. The issue being that the medium of 2 minute TV debates make it very difficult to present what are often complex issues in an adequate way (e.g. defending against the charge that science/evolution has debunked the Genesis creation narrative).
Contrast this against set-piece articles, two of which are online today.
Michael Jensen tackles the subject of “religion” on the ABC and John Dickson (in what seems to be an annual event) talks about the historicity of Jesus.
Both well written pieces that have enough room to properly develop and explain the ideas.
Bottom line; should we be wiser by turning down things like the Sunrise debate?
