The Chronicles Of…

Just quietly, I’m looking forward to seeing updates on our blog.

Is our correspondent ready for another year??

I hope you’ve been saving up on sleep and have all morning meetings and appointments cancelled while its on so that rather than stay up we can just feel the excitement via your writings!!

Yesterday I put up a lovely ikea coat rack (as seen in the image) at our place. Before I go any further though I must warn you that if you visit it may not be a good idea to actually hang anything on it… this is what happened…

I got out the stud finder, a fantastic piece of equipment, and found that there was a piece of wood running horizontal in a fantastic spot behind the main door.

So I drilled the whole on the right, through the plasterboard and into the wood, fantastic, then I went to drill the one on the right, through the plaster board, and then into air, no wood!! Ok, so maybe there’s a bit of a gap for someone reason as the stud finder told me there was wood there, so I grabbed a longer screw, which took ages to find as I’m not stocked up on that sort of stuff, and then grabbed a drill bit to suite which was also longer. I drilled the whole and still nothing but air!! What the!!

I checked with the stud finder and found that it was still telling me there was wood there. Then someone said did you do the old fashioned knock test? No, of course not I have modern technology and therefore no need for that!!

But look I’ll do it…

Oh! no wood there, it stops just to the right of that, bummer!

I then grabbed, I don’t know what they’re called, but they have like a spring loaded V thing on the end of a screw that you drill a big hole for and put in the wall and it springs open so you can hold something up when there’s no wood behind the plasterboard.

So I grabbed my biggest drill bit and drilled, and for interest sake I pushed it all the way in, still nothing but air… anyway, I already had a solution…

Then I put the screw thingy with the V through the coat rack and into the wall only, I didn’t hear it click open but I wasn’t sure if I would, so I turned the screwed a little but then worked out it wasn’t working so I pulled it back out, and ripped a off a chunk of plasterboard about half the thickness of itself and twice the diameter of the whole. Oops! But there was still plasterboard there so I continued.

After quite a few attempts, and countersinking the head of the screw heaps into the coat rack I was able to get it to click open, I think, so I screwed it in and all seems fine.

Nat went to hang something on it, I gave her fair warning that I didn’t know if it would actually hold anything but now it’s main purpose was to hide a hole in the wall. She put a scarf on it, I was worried, but it is still up!

I even noticed a jacket on it this morning, she’s living on the edge I tell you!!

So if you need any handy man work done I’m more than happy to help.

So I was reading and discussing 1 Corinthians 12 with Bazz yesterday (because he’s preaching on that this Sunday in our 1 Corinthians series) and we’re talking about Spiritual gifts and what makes a Spiritual gift different from a skill or natural ability?

Then it hit me. Surely a gift is only a Spiritual gift when it used for the common good of God’s people, the church - his body (12:8). So somebody may be gifted naturally in playing piano (which ultimately is a gift from God) but is only a Spiritual gift when used in service for the common good of God’s people.

We love the house we’re renting. But our house has been invaded by mold… airborne spores of mold drifting through the air and forming new colonies around our entire place… It’s like something out of Aliens. And it’s just appearing everywhere…

I came home from my early morning bike ride today and could see all the mold forming on the tiles in the bathroom while I was having a shower, but not just the tiles… on the toilet cistern, the door, the window frames, EVERYWHERE! I flipped out and I declared war on mold. I grabbed a chux and just started scrubbing the bathroom while I was having a shower, but then the mold went out into the hallway, and then to the laundry, and then to the kitchen… next thing you know I had gone out of the shower and and into the kitchen scrubbing mold off the walls… in the nude… How did this happen?

This is not some fungo-erotic fetish here… I don’t make a habit of cleaning in the nude, but this mold has got inside my head… making me do crazy things… It might even be a alien mold that has started to infect my mind…

But the war is not over. The mold must go.

Now I get what Leviticus 14:33-53 is all about. I used to think that tearing down a house because it had mold was a little bit drastic, but I mean, if you cant clean this stuff, it just takes over… it’s got to go…

I think I want to organise a Leviticus 14 mold party… We can all get together and kill this thing! And if we can’t kill it… well… you know… this is a rental, but I’m sure the landlord will understand why his house disappeared.

So who’s with me?! Want to open a can of woop ass on some mold?! You know you do (it’s not that we’re too lazy to clean our own house… it’s just that this is military scale, this is big… and I’m not too proud to ask for backup).

I love to say “G’day”. All the time. It’s like my standard greeting. I’m not trying to be “Austrayan” I just say it without thinking and I like it.

But I’ve also just realised that I often add “how are you doing?” which comes out something like “G’day hay doun?”

And I’m just wondering if there is potential for this to become as socially accepted and as famous as G’day…

I’m not claiming to be a trend setter or anything… but… if someone else can truncate Good day into G’day, why not “hey doun”?

I ask you, why?

So after a LOT of delays from the mechanic, and considerable expense, I got my car back on Friday afternoon.

It feels good to be able to have that level of independence, and freedom to travel around on a weekend at home. To celebrate I’ve downloaded a few episodes of Harry Shearer’s podcast ‘Le Show’ to make the trip south a little bit more enjoyable.

The weekend has revolved almost entirely around food and good conversation, which is fantastic. Now I’m preparing for another week of learning in the Centre of Excellence.

But first I’m going to have my second lunch - veal tortellini and olive bread.

Yarp, the PT instructors would be proud.

Contrary to the christian tradition I was raised in (Church of Christ) I’m all for infant baptism. I myself was baptised as an 11 year old and not as an infant, and “believer’s baptism” - as it is sometimes called - was my default position. But things change…

I guess there’s been a combination of reasons for the change… I’ve studied the Bible and Christian theology in more depth, and I’m sure being part of an Anglican church (which baptises infants) has helped some…

But really the big thing for me has been understanding covenantal theology. As a basic summary (and I mean basic) covenantal theology is about God’s covenant with the family which is the pattern of how God relates with Israel in the OT. God gives the symbol of circumcision to Abraham (Genesis 17) and requires that all the males in his family, and his servants etc be circumcised and the custom is to go generation after generation as a sign of the covenant that God has made with Abraham. And it’s not as if a male was to be circumcised as an adult when they have the faculty and reason to declare whether they want to be in relationship with Yahweh or not (although new adult males converted to Judaism are circumcised) but the male child is to circumcised on the 8th day while they are an infant (Genesis 21:4). The basis of the infant circumcision is the faith relationship and covenant that the family has with Yahweh not the infants confession.

Skip forward to the New Testament - Colossians 2:9-15…

For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your sinful nature was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The apostle Paul draws a comparison between the sign of circumcision and that of baptism. if the parents of a newborn are in a family covenant with Jesus then their newborn is in that covenant too. The newborn child is reliant on their parents for everything, their food, their clothes, their shelter, their care, their hygiene, everything… including their faith. Children receive everything because they have nothing, and Jesus even says we need to receive the kingdom of God like a child, ie. with complete dependance and faith.

There’s even more to covenantal theology than I can be bothered to blog about here, but the point is that I find this convincing and I’m completely for the baptism of infants (if their parents or parent is Christian) and I reached this conclusion before Evie came along, and now Evie’s here I’ve got to put my money where my mouth is…

But I perceive a problem… It’s not with infant baptism or covenantal theology, it’s with confirmation.

You see, because infant baptism requires that parents make promises on behalf of the child, there comes a time when the child must make their own decision to either continue in the faith and covenant with Yahweh they have grown up with or reject that covenant and faith. So the rite of confirmation was created in church tradition to provide opportunity for people to confirm the covenant with Jesus they have grown up with. I am all for this rite and the principles that stand behind it.

But I am not for the arbitrary laws that are attached with the rite of confirmation in the Anglican tradition. Particularly that confirmation may only be performed by a bishop and only after the age of 14.

What if I get Evie baptised as an infant and she wants to confirm her faith at age 11 like I did? Do I tell her she’s too young to make that decision wait 3 more years…? i don’t want to do that. Confirmation is made for people, not people for confirmation. Confirmation should be performed when the person involved wants to confirm their faith. Not only this, but having a minimum age has encouraged a form of ritualism associated with Confirmation that turns it into a human tradition and a vain worship without the heart (Mark 7), so that when a person turns 14 “hey! its time to get confirmed!”. I’d rather avoid that danger.

To my mind, having the rite performed only by a bishop is also restricting. It means that confirmation may only be done at the bishop’s convenience, and it seems to me that this also will add a ritualistic dimension to the rite, so that packs of people will be confirmed all at once and out of those, surely some will be rushed to meet the set date when the bishop will be in church instead perhaps being given a couple of weeks longer for them to cement their decision.

For me it seems best that Evie be baptised when she wants to confirm her faith in Jesus. She will be able to pick the time when she wants to confirm her faith and will be able to be baptised by the local minister whether 11, 14, 21 years old or whatever. We will raise her and treat her as a Christian who is a member of our family covenant with Jesus, and we will encourage her to confirm her faith in Jesus by public baptism when she wants to own that faith for herself.

I’ve toiled over this decision ever since Evie has been born (9 months ago) and it is only now that I’ve come to this conclusion. Perhaps there might be other reasons for me to change my mind… But at this moment in time “here I stand”.

I’m enjoying twitter, I like the way some people will put up tweets just about what they are doing including the mundane, and others aim to be witty, funny, cryptic, etc. and still others do a combination of the lot… and in the end if they’re not enjoyable then you just stop following them.

So then there are a ton of applications out there to make twittering easier, which is a little funny because twittering has to be one of the simplest ideas out there, which actually also seems to make it hard for some people to grasp the concept of for some reason, but maybe that’s another rant.

I haven’t done all that much investigation into the different apps you can get, but I’m feeling cocky so I’m going to pretend I know what I’m on about and if someone corrects me then the benefit will be that I may be pointed in the right direction and find the app that I’m really after.

I downloaded Tweetdeck and after using for about 8 seconds uninstalled it, there was nothing too wrong with it, heck it was a good setup where you can group the people you are following and therefore not have to sift through the heavy twitter-ers (usually celebrities) to find updates from closer friends or other interesting sources that you don’t want to miss an update from. But the thing that just didn’t sit too well with me was how complex it seemed for such a  simple concept, maybe complex isn’t the word, but it just seemed so big and so much going on and the like for something as simple as Twitter.

Right now you should be thinking something like well what do you suggest then?? (go on, think it so I can keep the flow of this blog)

So now I can say, I’m glad you asked… Here’s my idea for the perfect app… actually lets call it a work in process that way I can’t be wrong cause I can always “redefine it” and as always I’m open to suggestions anyway…

So here it is…

Firstly it’s a small program and not web based in the sense that you don’t need a web browser to use it, that’s stupid because Twitter is already web based.

It would be just a small box, tiny, in the the bottom right of your screen, in the taskbar would be perfect if that’s possible, where you can Tweet. It would be always on top of all other apps, hence the taskbar being the perfect place as it doesn’t get in the way, and fromthis box you could just type your tweets in as normal.

The rest of the app would basically be a simple screen, like the twitter home page that displays Tweets from you and all those you follow. And naturally you could keep this screen small somewhere on your massive monitor for those who don’t want to take theirs eyes off the action while doing other things.

Then there would be an icon in the Taskbar tray area that would light up when someone on your follow list tweets.

Also an offline version would be great, maybe that’s for the portable version of the app, that you can update whenever you want and then when you finally connect to the net all your Tweets would flow onto Twitter all time stamped when you actually did them.

That’s about it. Maybe there would be a feature where you can arrange lists and the like of those you follow, but I don’t care about that at this stage, it just needs these other basic features.

I’m putting this out there, I don’t mind some of the music of Lily Allen, not sure how that will be received, but whatever, I like it.

I like the style of that music and actually it is her voice that really adds that extra bit of novelty/difference to it all.

Anyway, all I really want to say is why does she have to sing about such rubbish, I mean really, does she thinks those lyrics are what I want to hear right now!!

So all I’m asking Lily is that you think about me and my desires a little more…

Thank you.

Kind of linked with this chroniclesof post…

Banksy has an exhibition in his home town of Bristol UK. Here.