... the nature of things

it's something of a chicken-and-egg question, i suppose, but in a lot of ways i don't think it is, not really. what comes first, love or obedience?

i was wandering home from church tonight, listening to my ipod and turning over in my head some things i was thinking about writing about, when the question occurred to me, when i was being a "good boy", why was i? was i being good because i loved my family, or rather because my family loved me, or was it to show my family i loved them, or rather somehow to have them love me? did the obedience, the action or desire to be a good boy, spring from being loved or the desire to be loved? perhaps the second question is similar, whether it was born of love or the desire to show love?

i am always torn by my conscience in regard to obedience to God. my hyper-self-criticism and low self-esteem did not magically evaporate on my conversion but was (and is continually) tempered by the love of God that he shows in my life, in my heart by his Spirit, in his Word by his actions in history, in the grace i see in my life and the lives of those around me. when my father became a Christian i was amazed and thankful that God should show his mercy in such a way and that the father i had here on earth should be my brother in heaven. i wish i had prayed more for him while he was alive and i wish i prayed more for people now (please pray for me that i will!) because part of me wonders that if i had, perhaps he would have come to faith sooner. my head says that dad came to faith when God intended but my heart doubts.

that same conflict between head and heart manifests in my own desires for my life now and how i re-evaluate my life thus far. was i a good boy because i felt loved or was it to earn love? do i obey God because of the salvation i have, the new nature of who i am (a child of God adopted through the redemption of Jesus' death on the cross, and assured of it through the power of his resurrection and the imparting of his Holy Spirit) or is it as if to keep by works that salvation received as a gift?

i think it is the battle between my new nature and my old one, between the spirit and the flesh, that poisons the things i do and the way i think - it is the remnant of sin in my life, like guerilla soldiers on the losing side of a war, refusing to surrender. it is like the people of israel, of whom we are told, "so the people of israel put away the baals and the ashtaroth, and they served the Lord only" [1 samuel 7:4, esv ], but who proved so faithless that they kept turning back to those same idols over and over again. how far away did they put those idols? did they destroy them and need to make new ones each time they went back to them? were they like the household gods that rachel hid from her father laban? or like the treasure that achan hid beneath his tent after the destruction of jericho, coveted by him even though he proved ashamed of what he had done?

where am i going with this? i'm not sure, i think. perhaps merely exploring the ways in which we don't really sin in new ways but more often continue to return to our old rebellions. the people of israel always wanted to be like everyone else. they wanted a king like the nations around them, they wanted gods they could see, that they could worship in ways they felt comfortable. the great lie the world tells us is that that's not such a bad thing, that surely five billion people on the planet can't be wrong. well, let's see. the populations of china and india make roughly two billion people; if we are generous and say that ten percent of them are Christians, people bought for himself by God through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and his resurrection, that makes 1.8 billion people who are wrong - and i don't think that the other 4 billion people on the planet are all Christians.

i believe that believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ - that he came to reconcile us to God in his death on the cross and through the power of his resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit to his servants, those brothers and sisters thus adopted by God and promised a place in heaven with him, and that it is because of nothing that we have done but purely by God's goodwill towards those he has chosen before the creation of the world - is the only way to be saved and restored to a right relationship with God. i think that atheism is wrong, i think islam is wrong, i think hinduism is wrong, i think buddhism is wrong, along with a whole raft of other worldviews and philosophies about religion and what happens after death. the little i know of these raises more questions than answers, they seem illogical to me, and all seem to me to be mutually exclusive.

i don't share the gospel with enough people, i don't tell people what i believe as often as i should, and it is because i am afraid. i am not afraid that they will laugh at me (although i don't want that either) and it is not because i am afraid that they will hurt me (although again, not something i want): it is because i am afraid that all the fears and criticisms i have of myself (real or imagined) will be communicated to the people i'm talking to and they will reject the message because of the messenger. that is my fear.

well then, i hear some people say, pull your socks up in your Christian walk, my lad, and maybe you won't be so afraid.

i tell myself the same thing and do you know what? i keep thinking of colossians 2:21-23 [esv]:

"do not handle, do not taste, do not touch" (referring to things that all perish as they are used) — according to human precepts and teachings? these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

i return to john piper's quotable quote: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him". if this is true (and as i tease it out and compare it with the scriptures - "oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!" psalm 34:8 [esv] - it seems more and more to be borne out as what God desires for his people) then pursuing satisfaction in God is the right way to go.

so how do i do that without making some new checklist for myself?

... curious

is it just me or is it just a little bit ironic that i saw a woman very carefully applying the brakes of the pram her baby was in so that she could light a cigarette?

... new tunes for old songs

so, once upon a time, i bought a double cd that was on special at a Christian bookshop in sydney. it was not a bad entry into the world of Christian music, if i wanted to listen to more than just the latest choruses from one large church or another, and gave me some names to check out to see if there were other cds i'd be interested in buying.

to be honest, i don't think i bought any cds off the back of that purchase. i listened in-store to a bucnh of others cds that didn't really grab me and the (to my mind) slightly unreasonably hefty price tags on those cds also made them hard to buy. now that i'm earning a bit more i can afford such a cd once in a while (i probably buy a brand-new cd every month, on average). it did get me listening to Christian pop music a bit more though.

cut to ten years later and i bought another double cd in the same series. wow hits 2006 brought together a bunch of Christian artists that this time i'd heard a bit more of, having friends who regularly listened to Christian music in their cars and being in a workplace that had Christian radio playing in the background most of the time. listening to the cds for the first time was like a game of "pick the tune you recognise". off the back of this compilation i have (to date) bought seven brand new cds... and counting. it's a bit scary, actually.

there's a word book store in the melbourne cbd (something else to love about melbourne!) and as i was browsing in there one day i noticed a small flyer for one of the bands on the wow cd that i quite liked - barlowgirl. i like their tunes, their harmonies, their great collaboration on a track with big daddy weave called "you're worthy of my praise" (which also features on bdw's cd what i was made for but has barlowgirl less prominently mixed). that they're young and gorgeous is a plus but, for what it's worth, i liked their music before i ever saw a picture of them.

i bought tickets and went to the concert. myself and several hundred adoring fans heard them play an hour-long set about six hours into their jet lag. they were very gracious while signing autographs in the foyer of richmond aog's church building (where i also bought some other cds at richmond aog's book stall) and had only good things to say about fellow studio stablemates superchic[k].

since the concert a little over a fortnight ago i've been listening to little else on my ipod than barlowgirl. they rock a great deal and i love the lyrics to their songs. one song has rung true for me, on my own. i'm posting the lyrics here but you really should check their cds out. (these are availbale from their website too!)

I can't believe that I'm here in this place again
How did I manage to mess up one more time?
This pattern seems to be the story of my life
Should have learned this lesson by the thousandth time.

'Cause I promised myself I wouldn't fall
But here I've fallen
I guess I'm not as strong as I thought
All I can do is cry to you.

Chorus
Oh God you have to save me
You're my last and only hope
All my right answers fail me
I can't seem to make it on my own.

Always thought that I would be strong enough
What made all of them fall couldn't take me down
Yeah, did I think that I was above it all?
I have learned that pride comes before the fall

I can't promise myself that I won't fall
'Cause here I've fallen
I know I'm not as strong as I thought
All I can do is cry to you.

i don't know how common this is - i imagine it's quite common - but i often feel like i fall down a lot more than i make forward progress in my life. there are the little idols i have in my life, my little dreams that aren't so big, and it occurred to me the other day while i was reading ezekiel in my morning quiet time that these are exactly the kinds of idols that God was condemning israel for having.

the israelites didn't start out by setting up huge statues of dagon in the temple, they rebelled by inches until suddenly without even realising it they were miles away from where they were supposed to be. looking at faithfulness from this perspective makes the parable so much more applicable - "you have been faithful in a few things; i will put you in charge of many things". God gives ezekiel a vision of the city of jerusalem to see all the things the israelites had ended up doing; a nation that had begun with one man travelling from his home to a new unknown land, that had been given every opportunity to be in a more intense, palpable, living, real relationship with their god than any other nation on earth, that had ended up choosing not to make sacrifices from flocks and herds but instead give their first born children to the flames of sacrifical altars of the "god" molech; God shows ezekiel that the israelites left in jerusalem after the first deportation of judah to babylon were surpassing their predecessors in the idolatry that led to their judgement.

this barlowgirl song has been a bellwether for me, reminding me each time i listen to it to ask myself the question, "what am i putting between myself and God?" what are my idols? what are the things i'm letting block my relationship with God? the more i think about it, the more i find myself going back to old things that i keep having to give over and over back to God to take care of. i feel like a child stealing the cookie jar, gobbling down cookies, then feeling guilty and returning the jar, asking for forgiveness, then stealing the jar again. stain, rinse, repeat!

so i guess i'll keep listening to music that's going to keep helping me ask these questions, keep praying, keep reading God's word. ezekiel is amazing and such a blessing to be reading and i think God has totally put it in my way at the moment to give my introspection some depth and some perspective.

so that's me... how are you?

... in other news...

i don't know how many of you follow links from the right hand side of my blog here, but i made a comment on a friend's blog and thought i'd repost it here... i'll revisit this idea - i'll be thinking about it throughout the day, i think.

in my (selfish) heart of hearts i don't really want change except for this - that tomorrow be pretty much the same as today, except maybe a little bit better.

Christians have a hope in amazing change, their entire lives are invested with change, their very nature is defined by a change that begins at conversion and ends in glory - never actually ending at all, since an eternity of relationship with God will only reveal more and more his glory as we grow in our renewed, intimate relationship with him.

we fear it and hope for it all in the same breath. change is tomorrow, it's the unknown - it's the unknowable. like turning on your computer every day, starting your car every day - no change in what we do but constant change in how we do it, what we're doing it to, what we're doing it with - all changing so continually and minutely and imperceptibly.

our dna changes every time it replicates, apparently. something like this: each time a dna strand is copied there's a little tail on the end that is the strand's use-by date, effectively. when that tail tails off, so to speak, the dna strand stops replicating properly and the cells it's a part of begin to break down. old age. there are strands of dna inside us that are leftover from x-number of copies when we were in the womb! how true it was that the psalmist says,

For you formed my inward parts;
     you knitted me together in my mother's womb. 
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
     my soul knows it very well. 
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
     intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
     the days that were formed for me,
     when as yet there were none of them.

Psalm 139:13-16 (ESV)

... classic assorted

it's Easter. yay... all kinds of stuff happening, lots of public holidays...

here's a few things that have been on my mind.

• my monitor, a leo 15cx which i've had since i got my first windows computer, finally gave up the ghost on wednesday night. i still don't know why or how but it now refuses to power up at all. it's a shame, because i quite liked it. i don't know anyone else who has a leo brand monitor, which i see from the label on the back is made in shanghai. i downloaded drivers for it from a website somewhere and at that point i think i did get slightly better performance from it but i think it was probably just its time.
  
  upon replacing the monitor (i'm now using a philips 105s) and powering up my computer, this second monitor also failed to provide an image. i thought that perhaps on its way out my leo monitor had taken the video card with it. i searched throughout the melbourne cbd yesterday for an agp video card comparable to the one i thought i would be replacing.
  
  upon further testing this morning, mainly down to the classic "take-it-out-and-put-it-back-in-again" style, my old existing video card has proven to be working fine. i now have a new video card i need to get a refund on. if i cannot get a refund or exchange on the card, i guess i'll have a new video card on this machine after all. we'll see.
  
  
• i saw 300 and it was pretty much what i expected. good to see lena headey again, especially since i don't know that i've seen her in anything much since stephen sommers' the jungle book with jason scott lee, cary elwes and john cleese. sommers made that before he made the mummy so it's a been a bit of a while between drinks for myself and lena. i wish i saw her in more stuff.
  
  gerard butler has huge teeth. brian blessed style teeth. seriously.
  
  
• i went to a barlowgirl concert and have been the victim of some scorn for doing so. i don't care. i enjoyed the concert, i like their music, i'd see them again if i had the chance, and i hope they had a great time here in australia on their first visit and that they have a safe trip home tomorrow. i got autographs. :)
  
  
• i'm still looking for a church. i've visited a couple now, notwithstanding one i wasn't ever really going to look at going to and another i've kind of been basing my evening worship out of, and next sunday i'll be checking out a third. please pray for me that i'll give it a good, consistent run, that i'll be looking not merely at how i'll be ministered to but also how i can minister to others there, that i won't be immediately put off by quirks of worship style or service format, and that i will have ears to hear and eyes to see the things that God is teaching me each sunday as i visit.
  

... a devil's choice?

i was discussing hair dye with a friend today.

my impression of the satisfaction that hair dyeing must evoke is pretty much summed up by a t.v. advert for (i think) clairol: she comes home in tears, slamming the door behind her - she slaps at the photo of the happy couple (bastard!) and it falls from the bookcase to the hallway floor - she stars at her panda eyes in the mirror - she grabs the hair dye in the bathroom - we hear tick-tick-tick-tick-tick - cut to her hair, the tresses being dragged out of the sink, shocking red, leaving a blood red dye draining into the plughole - she looks in the mirror again - she stands erect, glamourous, in tall, high-heeled boots, little black dress, firey red hair wild down to her shoulders - she steps uncaringly on the photo, cracking the glass, then out the door (so over it!) and out into her new life...

i imagine that when people dye their hair they must be looking for the feeling i imagine that woman in the tvc is feeling - screw the past, i'm making a new life starting tonight!

so i asked if she was feeling like a new woman, and we went on to discuss the inner satisfaction of the whole hair-dyeing experience. we talked a bit about why people dye their hair, the needs or perhaps more the... weaknesses(?) they are seeking to shore up by dyeing. later on, the conversation centered briefly on a comment by a balding man who claimed that if he could have hair transplants that looked utterly natural then he would get them regardless of the cost.

at first blush that to me seemed a little excessive. however, given the current near-ubiquity of cosmetic surgery of all kinds, from botox to more extreme makeovers, the comment is actually more genuine than excessive. to me, it says that for this man there are things more important in life than mere money; that the money in his life serves deeper needs than its mere acquisition, having for the sake of having. no scrooge mcduck this man, he isn't interested in swimming in a money pool. he would be willing to do whatever it takes to feel more like himself than he does now.

it does beg the question, who do we think we are? do we see ourselves in the mirror and say, look, there i am! or do we look in the mirror and wish we saw someone else?

in a quirk of coincidence, we turn to the seeming incongruity of matching light cheese with full-fat salami (on toast, for dinner). it reminded me of a routine by Christian stand-up comedian steve geyer, talking about being a guy taking a girl to mcdonald's.

guy: well honey, what do you want?
girl: weeellllll, i'll just have a cheeseburger - and just a big mac - just a quarter pounder with cheese, just a mc-b-l-t, just a hot fudge sundae... and a small diet coke.
guy: [thinking; oh great, miss piggy's on a diet, that's great...]

it reminded her of billy connolly commenting on pizza-eating and how someone will order a pizza the same size as the coffee table - and a bottle of diet coke...

so the question then, the devil's choice is, if you will: fat or sugar? would you rather be fat (and drink the diet coke) or toothless (and not drink diet coke). putting aside the sugar-goes-to-fat-as-well argument, it isn't a very nice choice to have to make.

i don't like diet coke. i won't drink pepsi and i feel mildly icky choosing from the soft drinks available at kfc (which only stocks pepsi flavours and solo, which i think is from cadbury schweppes). since moving to melbourne i don't think i've bought a soft drink from a vending machine and certainly wouldn't from a train station here (all pepsi machines). i like coke. i know i don't take great care of my teeth but i'm doing better now than i used to, brushing teeth more and drinking coke less. and if my teeth do all fall out, i'll be able to get false teeth like my gran and pop, whose amazing false teeth tricks i found thoroughly entertaining as a small child.

it seems to me that the devil's choice between being fat and being toothless (the diabolically logical end result of these two paths) is utterly a choice that comes to us from the world we live in. both choices will kill us, in the end, with the death of a thousand cuts. each time we take the diet coke, we salve our conscience about our decision to eat the coffee table-sized pizza; each time we take the coke, we salve our pride and say that we made our own choices and we're individuals not sheep like the rest of them...

neither one is true. the fad for diet drinks is just as much a fad as the fad of post-marlboro man individualism. both fads take our eyes of the real issue, they play to our weaknesses, the very weakness they purport to cure, though it is never said: they are the cure for sin.

isn't the greatest modern sin shame? shame of who we are, of what we do, of how we look, of how others perceive us? we're too fat, too skinny, too poor, too financially insecure, too selfish, too much of a walkover, too indecisive, too intolerant! we're too much ourselves - we need to be more like... them. more like someone else. less like us.

interesting... so where do we go from here? if all this is true, where do we go from here? how do we know who to be like? who should be our role model? mother teresa? she's good for tolerance, but not so great for financial success. donald trump? great for financial success, but not so great in the looks department. kate moss? gorgeous, but isn't she an anorexic druggie? tom cruise! he decries even drugs from a certified medical practitioner, doesn't he? yes, but let's face it... he's a bit of a pratt.

i don't think the greatest modern sin is shame. i think it's actually pride - which is less a modern sin and more the classic sin. lucifer is traditionally held to have been cast out of heaven for pride. pride cometh before a fall. and it's pride that says, "my little dreams aren't so big" - "it's not too much to ask" - "i deserve this..."

pride masking itself as humility. pride masking itself as generosity. Jesus condemned such pride. the pharisee declaring his own good deeds before no one but God was condemned when compared to the tax collector who was too ashamed to even approach the altar of the temple. those people who rang bells in the streets to say when they were giving to the poor, but who were more concerned about being seen giving to the poor than actually saving them from their poverty.

i know what i'm like. i have those little dreams that i don't think are so big. my generosity is meagre in nature and desires recognition in action. i think that more often than we care to admit, we're all like that.

the other thing i know is that despite this ugly truth, God loves us. despite this inability to rise above our nature, despite whatever earnest desire we may sometimes entertain about our ability to rise above that nature, God forgives us. and despite the wealth of evidence supporting God's love and forgiveness, we continue to ignore him.

we won't believe because we don't want to, but we can believe because God wants us to. you don't know he's not calling out to you.

so how do i know he's called me?

i know because i answered. i turned around from my faults and failures and admitted to God that i couldn't run my life the way it needs to be run. that i keep turning back to God after i go awry is more evidence of God's forgiveness and love. that i keep needing to is more evidence of my sinfulness. i thank God that his forgiveness is greater than my sinfulness.

he's greater than your sinfulness. don't believe me?

"oh taste and see that the LORD is good!
     blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
oh, fear the LORD, you his saints,
     for those who fear him have no lack!
the young lions suffer want and hunger,
     but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing."
--- psalm 34:8-10 [esv]

... jiggedy-jig

very short trip but i'm back at work. hard to believe that four hours ago i was in the check-in queue at sydney airport and three hours ago i was waiting to board my flight back home (!!!) to melbourne.

up at 4.30 this morning (praise God!) and the yha help was great. easy ride in to sydney airport, slower ride out from tullamarine but that's morning traffic for you. i'm having a banana and an arnott's classic assorted oatmeal biscuit for breakfast. thank goodness i'm having an early lunch!

i'll miss Bible study tonight, go home for an early night - or as early as i can make it after doing washing. the wedding was beautiful, seeing friends in chatswood was great, but i haven't missed the sydney weather at all... melbourne's cool morning was just what i needed to feel. forecast top of 26 degrees today - hopefully we won't make it!

(is there an inordinate number of exclamation marks this morning or what?!)

... gate 1, melbourne domestic

so i'm waiting for my flight to sydney for a wedding and i've managed to brush away the insane desire for some chilly chilli smoothie that boost juice has to offer (they'll sell it to unsuspecting customers but don't actually try it out themselves - what's up with that???) and i saw this netkiosk booth and thought i'd quickly check my email and then i figured, well, i've still got another (13 minutes and counting down) to use on this thing before it signs itself out, why not fire off a blog post?

work has been good this week, although it's the first week without one particular staff member (she left to have a baby, and God bless her) and already i'm starting to feel the ... strain of adding to my routines. another one has left for two weeks holidays in south africa and his absence will be a little harder to bear. i'm kind of filling in for him while he's away, which simply adds to my workload, and while i'm doing my fill-in stuff there the woman who has taken over the job of the woman who left to have the baby is going to have to do the stuff i'm supposed to normally be doing - which is what she was doing before i was trained up to do what she was doing. confused?

me too.

but i'm looking forward to flying tonight, not so much flying back on monday morning, but such is life.

they're calling for the gate and i need to eat this strawberry yoghurt. well, i didn't say i didn't buy anything at boost, did i?

... ironically, less romantic?

i ran out of soap the other day.

i'm not too picky about most things in my life. if anything, i am stuck in a rut with my habits (weet-bix or museli(?) or the odd box of froot loops will do me for brekkie thanks) or my wardrobe (i don't know why everything from rivers is so comfortable but it pretty much is and it's cheap at the warehouse outlets so... yeah, anyway...)

you get the idea.

the soap that i'm particularly keen on is your everyday run-of-the-mill oatmeal soap from the chemist's. if you're lucky or you know where to go you can get a dozen bars of soap for less than the price of three litres of milk. having moved not too long ago, however, and having also found it increasingly difficult to obtain in places i thought i knew i could get it, i didn't hold out much hope of finding it cheaply down here in sunny melbourne.

so i picked up some "pears transparent soap" at safeway. is there a soap that smells so nice? it smells almost good enough to eat; a nice, heavy bar of soap, hard until you wear the edges off of it; see-though once you're worn away the embossed branding of the pears logo... sometimes i wonder why i don't use it all the time and then i realise i just paid for three cakes of soap what i might have paid for a dozen of what i'd run out of!

i like the scratchiness of the oatmeal in oatmeal soap; i like to feel that i'm almost roughing away the dirt when i'm washing in the shower. the pears transparent soap is an unexpected luxury.

what's your favourite soap?

... hopeless romantic

a post for valentine's day, considering genesis 2 and the creation of woman from man's rib:

"... That the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved. Adam lost a rib, and without any diminution to his strength or comeliness (for, doubtless, the flesh was closed without a scar); but in lieu thereof he had a help meet for him, which abundantly made up his loss: what God takes away from his people he will, one way or other, restore with advantage."

[ from Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Bible ]

... well, here we are

long-time readers will know that i have a tendency to repeat myself. it's not that i'm just as lazy with my writing as i am with my bedroom tidiness - it's that i repeatedly feel the same kind of... sense of place? sense of time? sense of experience? i feel that there are events or eras in my life that mirror or reflect others, almost to the point of repetition. so, here we are.

i was trying to explain this last week. on thursday night, i participated in a market research evening. it was one of those nights where some researchers get a bunch of people - sometimes from a variety of target markets, sometimes from one narrowly defined one - and discuss some new product or service with them, or pitch one to them, or get an idea of what they think about some product or service they are already consumers of. the one i sat in on was for wine.

obviously! you say, dear reader. you're such a wine buff! why they'd be lucky to have your opinion. well, i must confess i felt rather a fraud to begin with but really began to get into it by halfway through.

we were looking particularly at dry white wines, discussing the things we found appealing about the ones they showed us, and explaining why we felt so. one group in particular spoke to me in this way:

when i was a child, child of television that i was (am), there was a tvc that really spoke to me. it was an advert for coca-cola, in the days after the giant beach ball and the pontoon at the beach/lake (or wherever it was). it featured about eight or ten people dancing around a giant kitchen, making spaghetti bolognaise and salad for dinner, drinking coke and basically having a great time together, all to the sound of aretha franklin singing freeway of love. i think i was about nine or ten years old (circa 1984) and to me... look, i just fell in love with it.

not with coke. not with aretha franklin's freeway of love, although it's a great song and a real marker for me of the feeling this commercial aroused in me. not even with spaghetti bolognaise, although friends from my high school in year 7 may remember that the slops bowl on our table (the boys from 7c) was very definitely void of any scraps that night at teen ranch.

i fell deeply and passionately in love with the idea of friends gathered around food; having a great, fun time together preparing a meal that everyone would sit down to and keep talking about all the things they'd been talking about while they were making dinner.

it's an image that is echoed in films from the 80s too, i think. the big chill, the breakfast club, stand by me; they all resonate to me with the sense of friends as family, which i think is a kind of clichéd catch-all phrase that comes close to encapsulating that feeling. you often see advertisers trying to attain it in commercials about pasta; for some reason there's an idea that pasta=italian=large numbers of friends and family having fun for no other reason than to get together. and maybe there's something in that too.

so there you go. repetition. in expectation, in feeling, in experience, in apprehension of surroundings... in blogging!

well, here we are.

i'm in melbourne. i'm in my new place, sharing with a friend of mine from church in sydney who moved down here a few years back to pursue a stellar education in classics at university. i'm enjoying the cooler, milder weather - boy, am i! it's lovely. even the hot days are nice. compared to the muggy days in sydney i'll take 45 degrees in melbourne any day.

work is interesting. (i mean that in a chinese curse kind of way, actually.) i'm not saying that it's bad. it's not, not at all. it's just... interesting. the most interesting part about it is trying to navigate the systems at play in the business, how things are done and tracked. trying to find products in the computer can be like exploring a haystack for a needle, only to find it's called a "sewing device". the words i've been used to using for some products for the last twelve years i now need to learn new words for. i have to narrow my definition of a c.o.d. to match how that's defined within the parameters of sales (as opposed to a "cash" sale, "stats", "print", and account sales). i keep making the same mistakes over and over, asking the same questions over and over, and if i'm annoying people then i'm annoying myself even more!

in short, i'm finding the whole learning experience very frustrating. i love learning new things. learning things under pressure is not how i like to do it. still, this is the section of river i've decided to fish and dang-nabbit, uhm a-gonna fish it until uhm a-sure i dun tha best jub ah kin.

finding a new church is the next big thing on my agenda. up until now i've been attending the two churches my housemate attends. that situation would have been changing anyway, since she is consolidating her church attendance (sounds better than cutting one, doesn't it?), but where we'll be going over the next few months will be completely different.

i'll be hitching my cart to the scots' church in the city, what they call the 1730 congregation, i think. i missed the first bible study i was planning on attending with this church (i thought it was tonight but turns out it was last night!) but it was more in the way of a getting-to-know-you night... hopefully, missing it won't be disastrous. that will be my evening church group. i'll be doing my church-shopping in the mornings, the first port of call being st kilda presbyterian, starting this sunday.

this is good in a couple of ways. first, it's not badly accessible by public transport, so it seems. i'll know the truth of that on sunday, and believe me, i'll be leaving in good time to be sure i've time to get there if things go awry. second, the annual general meeting of py in victoria is there next weekend (the 17th). going to church in st kilda this weekend, then, will be something of a reconnaissance mission for the following weekend. third, my sister doesn't live far from st kilda and this might be an opportunity to catch up with her on the weekend! (what do you reckon, sis?)

i'll be coming along for about a month, see how i find it. i don't think you can really tell from one week. at the end of four weeks at st kilda i'll be in sydney for a wedding and i'd like to try and stay in sydney on sunday night, go to my latest old church, fly back down here monday morning and go straight to work. i could leave a change of clothes at work to alleviate my baggage weight too. *shrug* i guess we'll see what happens.

what else...?

i've been visiting sticky, a great shop run by volunteers committed to the support of 'zines and other small press stuff. i've bought some great stuff there recently, including a couple of dvds, one called a hundred dollars and a t-shirt and another called cantankerous titles and obscure ephemera vol.1. they're both very interesting examples of how some people in the 'zine world have approached digital video without going down the binge and purge road that youtube and the like seem to typify. both of these dvds are probably able to be sourced through amazon, but why go there? try microcosm publishing instead and deal directly with the producers! there's lots of other cool stuff available through them, and i'll be adding the link to my sidebar when i remember.

as a result of this, i'm going to be trying very hard to put out some 'zines of my own. i've got poetry 'zines i can reissue, which i've not sold through a place like sticky before, and i have one or two ideas for other things to do as well. one is kind of like a "passport to melbourne", where i'll document weekend day-trips around the place. with my new mobile phone being able to take pictures, adding images to my 'zines will be nice and easy - something i've not been able to get the hang of yet for this little gem of a blog.

anyway, i'm sure that's enough. i'll probably have to go make a cup of coffee while this uploads. ciao :)

... a rose by any other name

... might still be paper.

i found this site while i was webbing from a link posted on cafedave about jazzing up your rental residence kitchen space. i don't have anyone to give these to this year (i might in previous years have dropped a bouquet off at my favourite cafe for the staff there) but, having just moved, i don't feel i'm at a stage where i can even in jest give flowers to anyone. nevermind.

the instructions look pretty complicated, and there are youtube links further back that i didn't bother to follow up. these instructions do have a link to an .avi file that explains the most complicated step in the whole thing, but having not tried to make it yet i don't know how necessary it is.

i haven't been interested in doing anything origami in a while. looks like it'd be a challenge and might even turn out to be fun!

... confession

yes, it's been a while since i posted.

it'll be a little while longer.

... the other shoe?

i'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

i'm not quite into the baked-beans diet yet, but i'm very glad that i now have a job that i start on the 22nd!!! rent is due on the 1st of feb, so i'll be guesstimating (to a certain extent) how much i need to keep in my bank account to pay it. i have a weekly ticket, so i'll be doing some hardcore exploring this coming week(end) and then next week i'll be buckling down to sort out any other bits and pieces before i start work on monday week.

all of my stuff has turned up from sydney that came with the movers. so now i'm a mexican!

da-da-dah da-da-dah da-da-duh-daaah...

:)

... argh!

o.
m.
g.

you'd think that with the number of times i've moved house i'd be practically a professional, but no; in actual fact, i'm no more organised now than i was when i moved from wollongong to sydney on the first of may all those years ago (1994, actually). when it comes to moving, i'm so completely last-minute, it's ridiculous.

in a lot of ways i'm so like that in my life. things i should say earlier on i leave until it's utterly inappropriate (but occasionally i finally have the gall to utter) and other things that i should do i don't until it's almost too late for them to be of any use to anyone. at the moment i'm boxing crap, although, to be fair, there's not much sorting of the crap to do, it's simply a matter of putting said crap into sturdier boxes!

but still... procrastination figures largely in my activity. hence this post!

i've got love actually playing on my dvd player with the commentary track running, which is quite nice since it gives me something to listen to while i'm doing other things.

i have several people coming over for breakfast in the morning, including the delightful couple who are (good friends of mine who persist in the belief that i'm not actually moving, despite the fact they're) driving me to melbourne over the next forty-eight hours. i count myself incredibly lucky to have such wonderful friends who although they don't agree with my choice in this instance nevertheless are very supportive of me making my choice and running with it.

i am so blind to the people around me, it amazes me that i have the friends that i do. they have been so kind, so gentle, so thoughtful, so supportive, so prayerful, so encouraging - so loving, in fact, and despite their protestations to the contrary i can't help feeling that i've been an abysmal friend in return. thoughtless, tactless... they are all the greatest blessings to me from God, short of his Son, of course.

i love my friends deeply and thank God for them every time i think of them. i'm going to miss them deeply while i'm in melbourne and i hope that they will take opportunities to visit, if they ever present themselves. my housemate and i have deliberately chosen our new place so as to keep a spare room, for visitors and blow-ins to stay in.

i haven't made any new year's resolutions this year but if i were to make one then it would be that i want to stay in close touch with the friends i've left behind. five emails a week - one each weeknight to a different friend, perhaps - is do-able, i think. please don't hold me to it but i'll do my best to try.

and none of that yoda rubbish. there is try: it comes before do.

... bah, humbug

i'm not feeling terribly jolly tonight. after coming to the end of my career at my most recent old job (where i've been selling office supplies these last six years) i have been confronted with the vast amount of packing i actually have to do before i move to melbourne. on the plus side i think i have only about 6, maybe 7 cubic mettres of stuff to move. hopefully it's not too late to get that on the truck.

i'm wrapping some presents tonight. maybe write some more Christmas cards in the morning. finish watching a movie, funny ha ha, which i picked up on recommendation from a friend and which, despite being slower than a wet week, is pretty good and totally captures the indecision and false-starting that can so often dog people in (or not quite in) relationships.

i'm off to my old church tomorrow for the Christmas day service, then off on a train to meet my mum and sister for lunch. then back here again for another late night's attempt at going to sleep. then off to camp. and back here new year's day, then down to a mate's place for a trivia night and last catchup before i move to melbourne.

and in amongst that, more packing. to tell you the truth, i can't wait until it's all over and i've moved.

so merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

(i know i sound pretty humbug about all this, and in a lot of ways i am, but in a lot more ways i'm not. Christmas is great. if you want to know why, go to church this morning and find out. if nothing else, it'll put some space between all that chocolate you eat while you're opening your presents and all the food you'll be eating at lunch.)

:)

... some cool sites i found

i'm not generally one for posting lists of links, but for an entertaining ten minutes i just connected to some random blog sites and links from those sites... i've found a few i like or am interested in finding out what other people think of them... feel free to comment:

• remember the milk
  
• bitchasaurus
  
• good clean jokes
  
• curious cook
  
• damn cool pics
  
• anna's cool finds
  

... joke?

i found this on another blog and though it was funny... a good joke in that you can tailor it to your audience - much like the aristocrats...

It started out innocently enough.

I began to think at parties now and then -- to loosen up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone, to relax. That's what I told myself though I knew it wasn't true.

Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time. That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?" One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss.
"Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."
"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"
"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."
"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as university professors, and university professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money."
"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently.

She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some John Raulston Saul. I roared into the parking lot with ABC on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors...

They didn't open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe that a Categorical Imperative was looking out for me that night. Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for some rational empiricism, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.

Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I took out a subscription to the Telegraph, started to watch the news on Ten.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today, I joined the Liberal Party...

... for whom the bell tolls

one of my favourite metallica songs is for whom the bell tolls - i think it's from ride the lightning - says "time marches on", set in the context of men fighting a war they don't necessarily know the reasons for, and don't even know the reasons for the tasks they are given ("for a hill men, men would kill. why? they do not know...") within the war itself. the men in the song are pushed into a situation they have no control over, they blindly move forward without knowing what they're doing or why. they're a lot like the people i see around me every day.

i'm moving house, moving interstate, moving from sunny sydney to marvellous melbourne. sydneysiders and melbournites alike express amazement and surprise at my decision, both commenting that the usual mode of flight is melbourne to sydney, not the reverse, and certainly not for my chief stated reason: i hate sydney's climate.

the lease has been signed, we have a phone number, i have three train stations, a tram line and a few bus routes all passing within a twenty-five-minutes'-walk radius of the house. i have a very cool housemate, good prospects for work, good friends helping me to move down there.

it's been a plan of mine for some time, around eighteen months to a couple of years, to pull up stumps from sydney and move south to cooler climes. i don't like the humidity in sydney but sometimes i feel like i'm the... focus of circumstances outside of my control.

i know that that is the cosmic truth. the nature of life in a fallen world, properly considered through the lens of the Bible, is that the control we think we have in our lives is at best temporary and at worst utterly illusory. to a certain extent, i'm a victim of my own flesh; to a certain extent, a victim of sydney's (australia's) obsession with "financial security"; definitely contemptuous of the ways such "security" ties people down... something of a golden cage.

who wants to be told they're a prisoner? we fly from one place to another, one experience to another, one opportunity to another... education, business, relationships, experiences... philosophies, religions... all to distract ourselves from the truth that we have no control - we are slaves. "you are a slave, neo."

so i'm flying south...

... for the winter ;)

... miracle

5 "Look among the nations, and see;
wonder and be astounded.
For I am doing a work in your days
that you would not believe if told.
6 For behold, I am raising up Dr Maya Vale,
that strange and lackadaisical fellow,
to march over the breadth of New South Wales,
to find a dwelling in Victoria to call his own.
7 He is dreadful and fearful;
his raucous laughter and twisted humour go forth from themselves.
8 He has no horse, is no swifter than sloths;
less fierce than the overfed koala;
he goes by train, when they actually go.
He travels by bus also;
for one, or two, will take him where he goes.
9 They come every fifteen minutes or so,
all their windshields forward.
No passenger will sit beside him; he rides alone.
10 At ticket inspectors he scoffs,
and at mortgages he laughs.
He laughs at every fortress,
for the repayments and interest rates pile up.
11 Then he moves onto a new lease,
a untrammelled man, whose comfort he carries with himself!"

i don't know. i'm feeling a bit silly tonight. the actual passage comes from habakkuk and is about how God is going to judge his wayward people. he is going to judge them by using the world superpower of the time to do his bidding, but they will take credit for it and he will see them fall for not giving the credit to him, God, who gave his own people into their hands.

i've been reading chronicles on the train on my way to work from the city. 1 chronicles is pretty tough reading and if you ever get picked for a genealogy reading at Christmas, don't complain. rejoice, with great gladness! why? because they're a picnic compared to the genealogies in chronicles. i'm praying hard that God will teach me something from this, but i'm confident that (if nothing else) i will have gained a greater familiarity with scriptures that old testament prophecies tie in with - a good thing, given i'll be helping lead study groups over the summer doing surveys of the old testament. i'd like to read esther, ezra, nehemiah again as well, and maybe daniel, ezekiel, isaiah, jeremiah... (i've studied the last two before, a while ago now, and ezra and nehemiah more recently in church.)

... tired

i've been asked a few times when i'm going to post next, and now i'm posting. i'm tired. it's been a really long few weeks - work's really busy with all the stuff that's going on there, getting ready to move to melbourne is taking a surprising psychological toll, and heading into Christmas means getting ready for summer camp which brings with it its own pressures and deadlines.

one of the things i did was go to see a movie the other week. the movie was called trust the man, starring julianne moore, david duchovny, billy crudup, and maggie gyllenhaal. i quite enjoyed it, even though it was rather more of a chick-flick than i was allowed to expect. in the words of a good friend, "it's about how men fail women and get away with it". i suppose that's one way of looking at it. i give it two and a half stars.

hmmm, yes well, that's about it from me for now. more later, maybe. i wan't to try to get into the one-post-a-day thing i did a little while ago. not sure when i'll do it though - evenings i'm barely compos mentis enough to do more than watch tv... which does little for the diagnosis of compos mentis!

... books, film, and a disturbing thought

"as i was travelling to st ives..."

actually, i wasn't. i was travelling home, my seventy-odd minute commute from work suburb to home suburb. i changed trains more than i needed to, and one of my change point was at town hall. i was waiting for my connecting train (due in about ten minute) and i saw a woman reading mona lisa overdrive (by william gibson) in the exact same edition as i have. gibson's novels were one of the reasons i wanted to become a writer; they encouraged my experiments in role-playing games; they were a complete world of escape - they are a complete world of escape. a future (in the cyberspace novels and short stories, at least) extrapolated from a past that didn't quite happen, where the usa had kind of ceased to exist and the soviet bloc had managed to survive the cold war. (gibson ruminates on this in an introduction to an anniversary edition of neuromancer.) i love seeing people read gibson's work, and mona lisa overdrive was a great way to end the cyberspace trilogy. go check him out for yourself.

as i was nearing my destination, a woman sitting across the vestibule from me was reading a book by ann patchett called truth and beauty. it seemed an interesting enough title to me, although what actually caught my attention was a brief smile as our eyes met when i was looking around the train. in sydney, i've noticed, not many people are willing to lock eyes with strangers much less start conversations with them - melbourne's seeming friendliness from my point of view stems in large part from a very positive experience of this kind of thing during my stays in melbourne.

stopping off at a couple of friends' house on my way home, i borrowed one of the books on the bookshelf there: prozac nation. i finally finished dan brown's digital fortress today, and read deception point last week. neither of them filled me with much excitement and to be honest i found them to be a bit east to guess what was going to happen. matthew reilly without the excitement.

i watched a movie tonight called mozart and the whale. the characters are mostly people with a variety of mental illnesses and disorders, and the leads (played very well by radha mitchell and josh hartnett) both have asperger's syndrome. i found myself sympathising with the characters a little too much for comfort.

it made me revisit a recurring... nightmare (?daymare?) where i find that everything i think i know is true turns out to be a hallucination. the kind of solipsistic dystopia the philip k. dick wrote so compellingly, where i wake up on day and find out that all the people i know don't know me at all, have never met me, call and have me arrested. all the phone numbers i have in my phone are disconnected, all the addresses wrong, all the photographs someone else's. a more horrific version of this is that i don't know that i'm crazy; like someone with the kind of aphasia (a kind of brain trauma, i think) that sees them speak volubly, not realising that between their brain forming the words and their mouth speaking them a disconnect has occurred and they have become completely unintelligible to anyone listening to them, i don't know that i'm not intereacting correctly with the world - like the tarot deck's fool, walking along the cliff's edge, utterly insouciant or unknowing of the danger nearby...

... inspired?

a list after a recent post by the always delightful prue...

1. favourite beatles song: when i'm sixty-four
2. favourite rolling stones song: paint it black
3. favourite doors song: love her madly
4. favourite bob dylan song: hurricane
5. favourite led zeppelin song: stairway to heaven
6. favourite tv theme song: coupling
7. favourite prince song: kiss
8. favourite madonna song: live to tell
9. favourite michael jackson song: billie jean
10. favourite queen song: who wants to live forever / i'm in love with my car
11. favourite motorhead song: ace of spades
12. favourite ozzy song: n/a
13. favourite public enemy song: n/a
14. favourite song from a cartoon: oh susanna (from any warner bros cartoon)
15. favourite bruce springsteen song: i’m on fire / born to run
16. favourite depeche mode song: n/a
17. favourite cure song: love cats
18. favourite song that most of your friends haven’t heard: 100 games of solitaire - concrete blonde
19. favourite rem song: everybody hurts
20. favourite beastie boys song: (you gotta) fight for your right to party
21. favourite clash song: n/a
22. favourite police song: every breath you take
23. favourite eurythmics song: who's that girl?
24. favourite beach boys song: god only knows
25. favourite cyndi lauper song: she-bop
26. favourite song from a movie: the time warp / sweet transvestite (the rocky horror picture show)
27. favourite duran duran song: view to a kill
28. favourite peter tosh song: n/a - who????
29. favourite johnny cash song: i walk the line / don't take your guns to town
30. favourite song from an 80’s one hit wonder: video killed the radio star - the buggles / mickey - tony basil
31. favourite song from a video game: theme music for galaga
32. favourite kinks song: lola
33. favourite genesis song: i can’t dance
34. favourite thin lizzy song: boys are back in town
35. favourite inxs song: just keep walking / falling down the mountain / anything from "kick"
36. favourite weird al song: smells like nirvana / pretty fly for a rabbi
37. favourite peter gabriel song: sledgehammer
38. favourite john lennon song: ewwww... n/a
39. favourite pink floyd song: brick in the wall
40. favourite cover song: stairway to heaven, covered by the doug anthony all-stars and barry crocker
41. favourite white stripes song: n/a
42. favourite dance song: re-jigged 80s stuff usually does it for me... not that i actually dance :)
43. favourite u2 song: all i want is you
44. favourite song from an actor turned musician: confide in me - kylie minogue
45. favourite disco song: ymca - the village people
46. favourite power ballad: love bites - def leppard
47. favourite guns n’ roses song: welcome to the jungle
48. favourite the who song: pinball wizard
49. favourite elton john song: crocodile rock
50. favourite song, period: probably a love song or something sappy... we learned to sing "touch the wind" in 3rd grade and the few lines i remember still make my eyes tear up
51. favourite ryan adams song: n/a
52. favourite green day song: good riddance (time of your life)
53. favourite alanis morrissette song: your house
54. favourite jamiroquai song: virtual insanity (is that the track name?)
55. favourite foo fighters song: monkey wrench
56. favourite david bowie song: ground control to major tom
57. favourite metallica song: nothing else matters, and anything on "rise the lightning" and "master of puppets"
58. favourite jeff buckley song: lilac wine
59. favourite pearl jam song: n/a
60. favourite grateful dead song: n/a
61. favourite def leppard song: let's get rocked
62. favourite dixie chicks song: changes
63: favourite cowboy junkies song: n/a
64. favourite james brown song: i got you (i feel good)
65. favourite barenaked ladies song: one week
66. favourite creedence clearwater revival song: down on the corner
67. favourite garth brooks song: n/a
68: favourite chuck berry song: you never can tell
69: favourite willie nelson song: on the road again
70. favourite tom petty: n/a
71. favourite van halen song: jump
72. favourite old school soul song: i gotcha
73. favourite song that totally kicks righteous ass: love shack - the b-52s
74: favourite song of yours that everyone else hates: sweet transvestite - the rocky horror picture show
75: favourite zz top song: legs
76: favourite ac/dc song: thunderstruck
77. favourite blondie song: heart of glass
78. favourite bob marley song: buffalo soldier
79. favourite violent femmes song: the country death song
80. favourite alice in chains song: n/a
81. favourite wallflowers song: n/a
82. favourite james taylor song: n/a
83. favourite counting crows song: n/a
84. favourite blues traveler song: n/a
85. favourite drinking song: anything you can karaoke to
86. favourite hendrix song: all along the watchtower
87. favourite break-up song: simple twist of fate - concrete blonde
88. favourite allman brothers song: n/a
89. favourite rusted root song: n/a
90. favourite dave matthews band song:n/a
91. favourite elvis costello song: she
92. favourite beck song: n/a
93. favourite muse song: n/a
94. favourite radiohead song: creep
95. favourite stone temple pilots song: the big empty
96. favourite the eagles song: new kid in town
97. favourite janis joplin song: mercedes benz
98. favourite coldplay song: n/a
98. favourite soundgarden song: black hole sun
99. favourite 70s song: dancing queen - abba / bohemian rhapsody - queen / heaps of karaoke tunes!
100. favourite joan osborne song: dracula moon

... my ticket has been maxed

yes, today i went beyond the bounds of my 1+2+3 weekly metcard ticket - i had to pay an extra $8.40 for a return connection from werribee to geelong. pretty bloody inexpensive, i reckon, and i was very impressed with how cushy the v-line trains are. or at least the ones i caught.

attached to this is a tale of two eateries. the first eatery was a hotel bistro at apollo bay. the second was the wharf shed cafe at geelong. one impressed me greatly. one did not.

i had what i felt to be a delicious porterhouse steak with even more delicious mashed potatoes (and i love good mashed potatoes... just ask, i don't know, anyone who's seen me eat at sizzler (although that might descend into a comment like, "doesn't he take a dinner plate to the chocolate mousse section of the dessert bar?") or perhaps at my mum's place when she's cooking rissoles - and hers are par excellence), along with some stir-fried vegetables and a delightful peppercorn sauce. all-in-all, scrumdiddlyumptious. the table-clearing was pretty damn efficient too, i might add. the meat was cooked so well that i thought i may well have to explore the other meat-cooking categories one or two south of my usual "well-done". not blue, or bloody... but maybe medium-well-done, or medium.

i also shared a pizza with cheese, pineapple, and chunks of virginia ham. it wasn't very big, and while it tasted delicious i didn't think the size or quality warranted the rather inflated price-tag attached. what put me off more than the price (and i paid almost twice as much for my steak meal, so please don't think i'm being a cheapskate... in this particular instance!) was the service. i really felt like i shouldn't have been there, and i felt like i didn't earn enough to be there. given the prices they were charging for the drinks on the menu, and given a reasonable guess as to the cost prices of those drinks, i think they could have spent more money on water jugs so that any table that wanted to keep one on their table would be able to. i was singularly unimpressed by eatery #2 and will not be returning.

i'll leave you to mix and match which goes with which.

p.s. i also got to see the remains of the twelve apostles. (part of the reason for the road trip from geelong.) very cool. the long and winding road that is the great ocean road, however, needs regular stops for replacing of... ummm... convenience bags. excuse me...

... swm seeks impetus

i'm a little bit tired. haven't been sleeping fantastically, but that's hardly surprising given where i'm staying. i think the reason i feel so blurgh today is that i have to do (finally) my washing. oh the trials of life!

... slow news day

well, it's a slow news day today. it's about 8am and i'm getting ready to go down to elizabeth st to pick up my morning coffee at hudsons before i wind my way out to surrey hills. i was recommended to go to surrey hills presbyterian by a friend in sydney, so i figured what they hey. who knows who i might meet? (after my brush with fame last sunday!)

i started to do a small 'zine last night that i'm hoping to photocopy before i go and leave at sticky on or before friday. if nothing else it gives me something to do in my downtime besides watch tv here at the yha. the people running the place here are very nice.

there is a small child... if you know my definition of a small child you know this could be anyone between the ages of 12 months and 12 years - this small child is toddling around and definitely bends more towards the 12 months limit.

there is a small child wandering around behind me in the internet cafe here at the yha. she's as cute as a button, with funky grandparents who are looking out for her while her parents enjoy a holiday here also. the grandparents are doing a great job, and it strikes me as a pretty cool way to holiday. you can have a family holiday with the kid(s) and your folks, or a second honeymoon with your spouse and leave the kids with the doting babysitters. everybody wins!

sigh... i probably need more sleep. toodles!

... late night in

well, tonight (wednesday the 18th) i decided to have an early night in. i ate some things that are bad for me for dinner, and i don't think i'll be feeling the ill effects of them until about 8am or i have a myocardial infarc, whichever comes first.

i'm up late because the yha had channel ten showing in the lounge and i was hoping (foolishly) that i'd get to enjoy my wednesday night viewing. ncis was ruined by noisy people playing pool and battlestar galactica was ruined by noisy asian poker players about six feet away in the dining area. i'm glad i called mum anyway, not least because (hopefully) she taped both shows for me tonight.

today i visted pakenham. it was pretty much what i expected, reminds me a lot of dapto when i was growing up, but with more shops (rather like warrawong or cronulla now). the area itself (surrounding pakenham) is very dry and kind of country. mum says someone told my sister it's a bit like campbelltown; i don't know if that's socioeconomically true, but it feels like it might be. i grabbed a bunch of flyers from the library along with a copy of the local rag and posted them home - i hope my sister can make some use of them.

i also got to visit one of my favourite shops in melbourne: sticky, a community resource for people involved in small press stuff, 'zines and what have you. every time i go there i spend at least twenty bucks and today was no exception. i must have spent about $38.80, give or take. one collection of books, from the states, is called caboose and if you want to find out more about it you can email the writer, liz saidel. (i don't know if that link is going to work, but try it and see!) very cool stuff. i hope that once i move to melbourne i'll be able to somehow be involved with what sticky are trying to do. city library here in melbourne is also trying to help out zinesters and small press peeps by getting a 'zine library up and running: good on them, i say, and i hope to get involved with that too.

hmm, what else? i may have to move rooms tomorrow. apparently there have been a lot of school groups through here recently; this is the reason that the wine and cheese night last night never eventuated. alas.

... surprisingly tired

funny, you know. i was pretty tired before i left for my holidays and guess what? i'm still tired! add to this that this morning i rolled over (my patented roll-over-and-get-another-thirty-minutes-of-sleep rollover) a good three or four times and i was up at 7:30!!! what the...?

so the last couple of days have been cool, very relaxed. i feel unhurried, which is nice, although the side tasks i allotted myself for while i'm here (find a job, place to live, for january) are starting to weigh in on me a touch. that being said, i feel that i'm likely worrying over nothing.

yesterday i did a lot of wandering around. visited two or three cafes here in the cbd, including my little alley-oop, which is still there, even though i have a sneaking suspicion that susan isn't running it anymore. i'll have to check again. found a great cafe that was almost literally a hole in the wall - i though alley-oop would have been the smallest eat-in cafe i'd been in, but this little one (whose name escapes me, something starting with a "p"? tiled steps leading up from an alley near some fashion shops, like bathroom floor tiles?) definitely gave it a run for its money.

i also stopped in at word bookshop in the port phillip arcade. that was pretty cool, and i always enjoy the very brief wander around that it is. i have a sneaking suspicion that they have more music than koorong. maybe it just feels that way. i don't know. i may go back and pick up one or two bargains, but until my last friday i'm trying to hoard my money a bit.

that being said, i did lash out tonight on the best pumpkin risotto i've ever had. the pumpkin soup which precursored it still wasn't a patch on mrs thoms' pumpkin soup (the quality of which, i think, may never be matched), but the risotto tonight was amazing and i got the biggest glass of lemon, lime and bitters i've ever drunk. (ironically, a british girl who's here for a year on a working visa was working at the same shop earlier today!)

i will be buying up some 'zines once i get to sticky when it's open (they trade wednesday to friday from 10 until 6) and if i'm really lucky i'll be able to get "a is for..." which is a 'zine i spotted last time i was there but which i wasn't able to get that time. it's a rather subversive little text which uses crimes and other... distasteful thing to illustrate letters of the alphabet.

i'll be dropping into sticky on the way back here, however, after my day to the end of the zones: my 1+2+3 weekly ticket allows me to travel right to the very edges of civilised melbourne society (i don't think it takes me all the way to geelong) and tomorrow that edge will be pakenham. my sister has got a job there (cue irrepressible cries of "huzzah!" and thunderous applause, thank you very much) and i thought i'd check out where exactly it is that she's going to be working. i'm told that it's a growing place, no longer a sleepy little hamlet at the end of a train line but rather the thriving hub of a vibrantly growing collection of housing estates. i can't say i'm expecting to see many trees.

lots of people have been asking me if i'm liking melbourne. i am. that being said, i have noticed one or two little quirks about melbournites; in particular, melbourne drivers.

i know i don't drive; i feel that i've been passenger in cars often enough to have some measure of skill spotting good drivers from bad ones, and at least being a passenger means i'm not necessarily supposed to be looking where i'm going while i observe said drivers in their automalconduct.

melbourne drivers don't seem to spend much time shouting at each other. they do seem to be quite willing to curse pedestrians. this interests me, i suppose because trams (and, by default, pedestrians) figure so heavily here in melbourne. there are generally more people in the roadways sharing space with cars that maybe drivers feel they have no choice. i remarked that in sydney drivers shout at other drivers and simply run over pedestrians. that is a slander and a slur on the inimitable and unparallelled skills of sydney drivers.

trains run more on time down here than in sydney. more explanations are offered than in sydney. far fewer people use them here than in sydney. i heard that some had to stand in the train for three whole stations before they could find a seat. oh my.

more later, i guess. the road goes ever on and on, the road goes ever on...

... touch of fame

i had a pretty great day today.

i rounded it out with my friend barb at koko black on lygon street, where i enjoyed a pretty amazing hot chocolate (frothier and lighter, not as heavy as a hot chocolate from max brenner's - not better, just different) and used their toilet (adequate to requirements). while i was there i took a picture of my hot chocolate with my mobile phone and tried to send it to my friend dave. i don't know if he got it because i've had no reply and i've only just this last week has mms messaging activated on my phone, but i thought with all the photos of coffees he takes perhaps he'd like one of a hot chocolate.

in the evening (before koko black) i went to a... retelling of the book of esther by a group called backyard bard (there's a website, i think it's backyard bard dot com but i can't quite recall right now and i have three minutes left to write this entry). it was fantastic. if you get the chance, go see 'em.

visited my friend sue ellen's church, which was ok and reminded me a lot of my old church in dapto.

and the touch of fame?

lunch at the chiswells'. you know? the chiswells'? graham and nicky? well, i know a lot of you who read this (i.e. the maybe dozen or so friends who read this) probably have already met them, i know dave knows them quite well, erika too, i think. but it was big for me.

and now? on to sunny melbourne!

... fifteen degrees cooler

i'm now in melbourne, enjoying temperatures fifteen degrees cooler than in sydney! yahoo!!!

the plane left sydney at 13h15 and when i was crossing the bridge earlier on the bus i checked the temperature and time on the kyocera building in north sydney - 36 degrees. so glad to be enjoying cooler weather here.

enjoyed a hudson's coffee as soon as i could arrange it and getting from the airport to the yha couldn't have been easier. checking in was also a breeze. i'm going to pick up some shopping at coles, brekkie cereal and milk, maybe some bread and cheese for lunch.

i have my weekly travelpass thingie, and i'm going to spend my holidays wandering around melbourne, getting a feel for it...

i feel relaxed already!

... friends

hey, i don't know what kind of friends you have. i'm sure they're great and all, but i am fairly certain i have the best friends in the world. God has blessed me with awesome friends and while i don't show them the appreciation i should always show, or pray for them as often and as earnestly as i should, or keep in touch with them as closely as i should, i don't think i've ever felt like i'd be better off without them.

and heaven will be better than my friends! wow...

... the (not) ugly (at all really)

to the woman who was sitting in the second car of the hornsby train that left central at 6:29; on the vestibule seat on the left side of the train, nearest the connecting door to the next (my) car; with amazing fair skin, strawberry-blonde hair, freckles and smiling eyes...

you quite took my breath away.

... the bad

a brief note on escalator ettiquette.

the "keep left" signs are there for a reason. not everyone wants to wait an extra three minutes watching you get lovey-dovey with your other half - some of us simply want to get past.

functionally, escalators are there to move people up and down stairs faster than they would simply on foot. like a moving walkway, they are not there as a comfort accessory - they are not there for you to have a rest after your long, weary day sitting at a desk in an office or sitting in a train from [fill in the name of a station here] - they are there to get you from a to b without having to actually say "to".

if you must rest, read the above section on keeping left.

... the good

i went to black stump last weekend. i'll blog about that another time.

tonight i went to see the devil wears prada. yet again, i wish i'd held out and read the book first, because i think that it'll be hard to get the performances of the actors in this film out of my head for some time. (this is one of the reasons i haven't seen memoirs of a geisha yet, and that's already out on dvd!)

prada really was good. i laughed out loud in more than a few scenes, and while in some respects it was fairly cookie-cutter fare, in others it had some quite good stuff in it. the style of the film was very cool and while i (as anyone who knows me will attest) know nothing about fashion i thought that the calendar-flip-style sequence of andy sachs' fashion evolution was quite nifty. stanley tucci demonstrates once again how incredibly underutilised he is.

anne hathaway is an actress to watch, i feel. i get an intense audrey-hepburn-esque impression from her; she is very clean, even when her characters aren't taking the moral routes they should be. i am confident that she will be in the industry for a long, long time; not a bad thing (unlike, for example, gary busey or eric roberts) and i hope that she will lend hollywood some of the class it has lost since the heydays of actresses like lauren bacall, rita hayworth, bette davis, audrey hepburn, and katherine hepburn.

... bungee idolatry

when i'm coming home at night i typically cross the street at the top of my street, turn into my street, walk past the two driveways before my own, then up my drive and footpath to my front door. before i get to the first driveway, i'm usually distracted by something shiny on the ground.

it's an old piece of tar or chewing gum or something similar, something that has been stuck to the footpath for some time, worn flat with the passage of time and pedestrians. it has a dull sheen to it which, glinting in the light from the shops behind me, makes it look like a dollar coin.

i know it's not a dollar coin. i know a dollar coin is hardly worth bending down to pick up (but a dollar's a dollar and enough of them makes you a millionaire, i suppose). i know it's just something stuck to the ground. but i check it anyway, because in my heart of hearts i hope it's a dollar.

and here's the awful truth people: i want something for nothing. i want free comfort. i want contentment without investment. i want things my way and i want them that way now and i don't want to have to wait.

now here's the amazing truth: i know that i'm wrong. it's a crock, a big crock of kobold droppings. because there is no comfort, there is no contentment - i can't have things my way and it's probably for the best.

idolatry is where people put something in the place of God in their lives. it's the thing that keeps you going, that makes you say when the rest of the world is crashing down around you, "well, at least i have that". here's a few:
* "i still have my health"
* "another $10,000 a year would be fine"
* "once the house is paid off it'll get better"
* "i've worked all year and i deserve a break"
* "it's wafer thin, monsieur!"

most of them don't sound so bad, i think, and in and of themselves i think some of them are just fine. some of them are actually good. (despite my low esteem of my own body, i think it's important to make some effort towards being healthy!) still, none of them are the best thing to have uppermost in our mind.

God is who we should have uppermost in our mind. consider:
* "so, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." [1 cor 10:31, esv]
* "and he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God..." [acts 17:26,27, esv]
* "the Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom i take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold." [ps 18:2, esv]
* "when i look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?" [ps 8:3,4, esv]
* "i say to the Lord, 'you are my Lord; i have no good apart from you.'" [ps 16:2, esv]
* "so i became great and surpassed all who were before me in jerusalem. also my wisdom remained with me. and whatever my eyes desired i did not keep from them. i kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. then i considered all that my hands had done and the toil i had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun." [eccl 2:9-11, esv]

worshipping God is what we are made for; it is its own blessing; all else is a chasing after the wind...

i was thinking this evening that repentance is much easier on the knees than on the heart, because bruises on the knees fade, but scars on the heart cut much deeper. we pray to God in repentance, asking his forgiveness for our inability to put him first in our minds, and thirty seconds later we're thinking while we're praying about which movie we're going to see tonight, or the aftershave of the man behind you that's slapping you about the nose, or the book in your bag you'd rather be reading than your Bible... and if we catch ourselves, we repent again and get back to the job at hand.

for me, i desire to live simply, to have a wife and family. i don't think we need to own a house and i don't think we need to have high-powered, high-paying careers. they might make some things in life easier or give us a greater feeling of security and they might enable us to give more to ministry work or missionary work. in and of themselves, they are good things. a friend of mine, though, has a saying: good is the enemy of best.

my idols are good, but God is best. i keep forgetting that, and i hope that i will continue to have people around me and God's Spirit within me to remind me of that.

... what to say?

i've been a Christian now for about... oh, i'm practically coming up to my sixteenth rebirthday, about sixteen years now. i don't think i was a Christian before that, and if i had lost my life beforehand i imagine that i would have died "in the flower of my sins" (as the bard has it) and gone to hell.

some people i know would contest that; holding to a calvinist understanding of predestination as i do, it's somewhat of a contradiction in terms that i believe dying before my conversion would have ended with me in hell - surely if you're predestined to be converted you wouldn't possibly go to hell? i suppose my reasoning is that my predestination at that point wasn't to convert in time, but rather predestined for the judgement of God rather than for his efficacious salvation. now that i am converted from living death to eternal life, i know my place in heaven is assured; next question, please.

but what do i say to someone who doesn't think that? the text we looked at last thursday at Bible study (not last night, but thursday night last week) was on paul's second missionary journey and the events particularly in phillipi. the disciples meet lydia, they heal a slave girl of a demon, and they meet the philippian jailer, who like lydia is baptised along with his household.

i don't know if the general thinking is that the slave girl was likewise converted to Christianity but i don't think the text makes it a natural extrapolation from the narrative. it would be great if she did but i don't think it's a fait accompli that she did.

concurrent to this, i have just finished reading the New Testament, which i was reading every workday morning on the train leg of my journey to work. the revelation to john pulls no punches when it talks about who will be with God in the new heaven and who will not. john elsewhere talks about those who had seemed to be Christians but who left the church and in doing so proved that they never were Christians. did they know that the whole time? had they fooled themselves into thinking they were when they actually weren't? and what kind of God would let people think that?

these are questions that might be asked by one who has been a Christian for some time and now no longer knows why he believes what it might be expected that he believes; he questions if there really is a God at all; he hangs his future actions and happiness on the answer to a question it seems he has already decided for himself.

paul says to the corinthians that "if in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" [1 cor 15:19, esv] but until we die we have no ultimate way of knowing if our hope has been directed correctly or not! the Christian says by faith that he knows he will be in heaven; he trusts the scriptures are true; he trusts that the Holy Spirit in his heart is interceding for him when he prays; he trusts that Jesus' blood shed on the cross makes him clean before God. the Christian trusts that God has done everything for him, then lives trusting that it is so.

i say, "the Christian does such-and-such", but that is the Christian when not torn by doubt, plagued by insecurity, overwhelmed by circumstance and emotion. "the ordinary Christian" does suffer from these; some feel them more acutely than others.

does this cancel out the efficacy of that in which we have believed? by no means! rather we have moved away from God, not trusting in that which he has provided for us.

so if we will not pray, if we will not read the Bible; if we will not be persuaded by our brothers and sisters; if we will not consider our hearts from other than our own perspective; if we will not believe God, what then remains?

for me, nothing remains. my faith is literally what keeps me alive. if i do not believe, then the last sixteen years i have lived are all for nought, and i should have done what i'd planned in that bath tub so long ago. i can see no sense in the world without God, no point to this "quintessence of dust" except to eat, drink and be merry. the writer of Ecclesiastes is equally bleak about a world without God; that his words remain long after he fell away does not undermine their power, but rather proves that God's truth outlasts all things.

don't get me wrong. i'm not saying i'm perfect, or that i am the Christian who actually manages to do such-and-such. i have done more wrong after i converted than ever i did before; and yet i know that my redeemer lives - i believe God, and trust that he credits that to me as righteousness. i struggle to show my faith by my deeds.

don't we all?

(... to be continued, i think...)

... a few things

i realise with a few guilty feelings that it's been a little while since i blogged. to be honest, i haven't really felt pushed enough by my thinking on the things that have been happening in my life. Bible study last week was good, but didn't ... provoke the same push to consider things that earlier ones had. so i thought i'd put up a short (probably longer than i'm expecting here in the first paragraph, though) post about what's on my mind right now.

i'm feeling the imminence of my time in melbourne. next month i'll be down there for a couple of weeks, sussing out living and working arrangements, and hopefully having both sorted out before i move down in january next year. i've been keeping half an eye on the weather, half an ear on news... i'm looking forward to it with a growing anticipation that is beginning to reflect what so many feel to be the enormity of this "big step" of moving south. i have a league team (the storm) that i follow, and an afl team (essendon) i also follow, so my sporting interests are covered, although i'm told that the afl tribal boundaries of melbourne are beginning to dissolve, so i'm not too worried about living in st kilda territory and barracking for the bombers.

time is flying. i turn thirty-two this year, which isn't terribly amazing in and of itself, but moving has made me a bit of a calendar watcher, and i'm aware that the remaining weekends have been filling up rather quickly. i have sixteen saturdays left before i move in the second week in january; of those, i think i have activities that fill up the saturday on nine of those weekends.

i was thinking while i was sitting on the loo earlier that all buying and selling for profit is tantamount to gambling, so is insurance, and i wonder if i can perhaps grow a little respect for people who make their livings as professional gamblers.

... cut to the quick (long post)

tonight we looked at hebrews 10-12. it's a little bit dry but it's still interesting, and it's encouraging as well... much as a stiff drink in the face of an unwelcome chore or bad-tasting medicine in the face of dire illness.

hebrews is widely regarded as a letter of encouragement to Christians, especially those facing opposition from the world without and backsliding fellow-believers from within. i was unsurprised to hear (joseph, called) barnabas being put forward as a possible author for the book and adding him to the list of other suggested authors, including paul, apollos, priscilla, and aquila. in these particular chapters, i feel the encouragement is slightly stick-and-carrot and it feels that way to me because of the particular people being encouraged in this section - those thinking of giving up on their faith.

in chapter ten the writer to the hebrews sets forth a strong argument supporting the new covenant in Jesus over the old covenant of law - he demonstrates Christ's superiority to the angels who delivered the law; Christ's deity; his sonship; his high-priesthood; his sacrifice being of immeasurably greater efficacy than the sacrifices offered by priests in accordance with the law. in every way, Jesus is presented as being in one man everything the law should have been and could not be. in chapter eleven he gives the "roll-call of faith", people in israel's history who looked forward to the salvation that God would put forth in Christ. in chapter twelve the writer deals with the hardships that the hebrews have already dealt with, those that may be to come, and why they should persevere in the face of such experiences.

i think what makes this passage a bitter pill to swallow is that it's not just as easy as holding up under persecution. if society rounds up all the Christians and says, "right, you lot - it's time for you to go to the wall - recant or die", history seems to show that lots of Christians tend to find enough faith to say something like, "for eighty-six years i have been his servant and he has done me no wrong. how can I blaspheme against my king and saviour?" (polycarp at his martyrdom, smyrna, a.d.155)

what i think could be harder to deal with is when family, when friends, when even oneself is faced with the possiblity is recanting one's faith in Christ. i am always torn because i know in my heart that the gospel is real and true. i always have, ever since i was a small child at sunday school or in scripture classes at school. i never once thought that the Bible was full of lies - although to be perfectly honest, there have been times when i have wished it was. i have more than a few times wished that i could be free to live like everyone else, uncaring of a life after this one, unworried of how the way i live my life now might impact the health and welfare of my soul after i die. in so many ways life would be so much easier!

the temptation to give up my faith is always there, as paul says, "so i find it to be a law that when i want to do right, evil lies close at hand." [romans 7:21, esv] however, i consider it a great blessing from God that i find that temptation too obvious, too easy, too false to even pursue the thought very far. i sin - heaven knows, i sin - but when i sin i pray to God for forgiveness, for strength to resist the temptation to sin again, and for faith to no longer dwell on past sins but focus instead on future opportunities to serve him.

but that is me. when i see people falling away, what can i say? what can i do? i can encourage them, "read your Bible! pray!" i can do the same. i can "be there" for them, spend time with them, hang out with them, pray for them, do my best not to be a burden to them, give them their space to work things out. what kills me is that i can't make them change their minds, and i can't know if God will or not. it's not that i don't know if he will or not - God will, or not, according to his will, and his day-to-day will is not something he advertises on billboards. his eternal will - that all people should hear the gospel and believe - has been sent out all over the world. no surprises there. how that is effected throughout the world? loads of surprises there.

i get thoroughly disheartened when i hear that someone has turned away from being a Christian, or has "fallen away". i think so little of myself and my mean little belief that when i discover someone else has let go of Christianity, i am rocked that someone might have less faith than me or that maybe i am wrong. "if in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." [1 corinthians 15:19, esv]

such a feeling lasts only a little while, because God soon reminds me that my faith (small) has a great object (God, eternal, infinite) which gives my faith an eternal and infinite impact. God isn't about, oh, that's your last chance, no more opportunities, you've really blown it this time! God is all about redemption, saving us from our sins, saving us from ourselves - saving us for himself. those people who have turned away from God can turn back. every breath they take is an opportunity to turn back to the one who paid for their lives with the blood of his very own son. (would you let your child go to the electric chair instead of jeffrey dalmer? would you put your baby in front of the car that hoon is driving down the street if it meant that that hoon would then be able to go to heaven, pimped-up ride and everything? - God did!)

so i pray for all those who have doubts, who are falling away. i hope they can feel that they're falling, that they become worried about it, that they seek help. i hope that when i feel like that, people will do the same for me. our God is a consuming fire, so he deserves reverence and respect - we shouldn't take him for granted, even if he does promise rest from this weary life. if you're falling away, don't give in. fight tooth and nail. if you once believed in the gospel, ask what has changed for you to stop believing in it - i guarantee the only thing that hasn't changed is the gospel. and it is no less trustworthy now than it was when you first believed - perhaps you've just become less trusting?

once you were sitting on balloons in a room full of pins, moving from one seat to the next, never quite knowing when you could relax. one day you sat on a milk-crate, and for the longest time you didn't have to worry about your seat disappearing from underneath you. all anyone in that room wants - at the end of the day, in one way or another - is rest, rest from work, from worry about the future, from trying to provide for every possibility. so now that you have that rest, why trade your seat for another balloon?

... rain

it's late and it's raining. not very hard, at the moment, but the rhythm of the rain against the eaves, the windows, the path next door... it contrives to promise downpours and storms without any evidence to back the promise up.

i've been missing the rain. i like the rain. winter this year hasn't felt terribly wet, or at least it hasn't felt so to me. one of my favourite nights was about twelve and a half years ago. i was living in north wollongong, sharing a flat with a friend from school, and a quite heavy rainstorm hit about seven or eight o'clock one saturday night. tim was out somewhere and i had been at the computer trying hard to conquer dune in westwood's game "dune 2", a fantastic precursor to the revolutionary command & conquer. i smelled the rain coming before the storm broke, keeping one eye on the screen and one on the window in case i had to turn the computer off in anticipation of an electrical storm that might cause a blackout.

once it started raining there came no indication that it might ever stop. it felt primordial, ancient, as if every droplet of rain was a tyrannosaurus compared to a front-garden skink. i stood on the verandah for a few minutes, breatheing in the coppery air. it was invigorating.

i took off my watch and glasses, shoes and socks, put on beach sandals, put the house key in my pocket and wandered out the door. i went walking in the rain for an hour or two, i don't quite recall how long for. it felt very liberating to be ambling along in the rain, taking all the time in the world, while everyone else that i passed seemed to be very keen to get in out of the rain.

we seem so strange to everyone else, i think, wandering around in the rain when everyone else just wants to get out of it. while i'm wandering in rain, i'm rarely worrying that i'm in the rain. it can't rain all the time and a time is coming (and is not far off) when it won't rain - some of us will be enjoying a city without sun or stars and a river running through it.

thunder's coming.

... grace

i'm typing this in editpad lite because typing it into the blogger page using opera can have some nasty typo side effects if you're not careful about what you're doing. i like using opera for its keyboard shortcuts and handy mouse-gesture shortcuts, but occasionally it bites if you scotch a bunch of stuff you just spent five minutes typing for what should have been a really quick post.

i was going to put up a follow-up post to my one on acts 15 but my opinions on the passage have not changed and i remain convinced that the application regarding table-fellowship is a natural outworking of the passage but not the main thrust of the passage itself.

i am going to say a few words about grace. ironic perhaps, given the vehemence of my previous paragraph, but heartfelt nonetheless.

i love that God loves me, that he sent Jesus to be punished for my rebellion against God and my inability to live up to God's righteous requirements for entry into his heavenly kingdom. i love that there's nothing anyone, not even i myself, can do to separate me from that love that God has shown in his work of salvation in Christ. i love that when i pray, my weak and distracted thoughts and words are transformed by the Holy Spirit's power and intercession into prayer that glorifies God and shows my life in submission to his will. i love that everything that makes me Christian is entirely an act of God and none of mine. it's very comforting.

relient k, in their song be my escape says, "the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair", and that's the truth because what we mere humans forget is that the definition of fair is not ours - it's God's. we say, "that's not fair!", because we feel it's not fair to us. it's like a dog barking to its owner that it's not fair that it's getting meaty-bites again!. it's not up to the dog what it eats - that's up to its master. we don't like to think of God being our master because to us, to our teensy-weensy pea-sized brains, it's not fair. do small children always know what's good for them? how do they learn? what's the best way? in the face of eternity, surely it's hubris to think that we know better than God what's good for us.

the thing i love most about the grace of God afforded those who after receiving it call themselves Christians is this: all you have to do is repent and believe the gospel. that's it. admit that you don't do things God's way, accept that Jesus' death is punishment for your sins laid on the one God chose to punish, trust that Jesus' resurrection is the preview of your own resurrection, and welcome the Holy Spirit into your heart and be changed by him.

that's it. you don't have to follow rules to become a Christian. you don't have to make some huge sacrifice. you don't have to sell your house. you don't have to quit smoking. you don't have to quit drugs. you don't have to leave your boyfriend and go back to your wife and family. you don't have to do any of these things to become a Christian. the offer is made to anyone with ears to hear and mouth to say "yes".

what you do after you become a Christian will reflect your understanding of what God has done and what he says his ideals are for your life. sometimes that means change, sometimes not. sometimes what you didn't have to change when you first became a Christian will become something that has to change as you mature in your faith. that happens in any relationship - some things you do with friends are only appropriate after years of friendship, some things you outgrow.

all the things i do that are wrong; all the things that are right that i don't do; all these things i repent of, now and for as often as you require of me, o God. search me, o God, and know my heart, test me and find all my evil, then lead me in ways that will be everlasting and i'll serve you, my God.