I have felt your presents

Christmas is coming. And if I’m honest, I get a bit tired of it sometimes.

Obviously I know the whole Jesus malarky is quite good - as are the family get- togethers, the nice food and (if we’re lucky) snow.

But I do get a bit jaded by the rampant commercialism of it all, and the “thou shalt spend” message that gets rammed down our throats. I’ve often thought it would be nice to do something different with Christmas, if only a good enough idea could occur to me.

But then Join Me’s Karmageddon charity plans sprung to mind. The Leader, Danny Wallace, has designated International Care and Relief as Karmageddon 4’s nominated charity, and has challenged us to raise £5,000 to equip a school in Kenya. There are various things being done by The Leader and joinees to raise funds, such as an auction, and I thought it might be nice to do my bit.

So I have proposed to my family that they don’t give me any presents, and I don’t give them any, and we instead give what we would have spent to Danny’s project (although I’m making an exception and still buying a present for my 1 year old nephew, who’s not really in a position to negotiate!).

I know Christians are called to give to good causes privately, so feel a bit bad going “public” here. However I’m writing this to raise the profile of the good works that Join Me does.

Oh yes, and if you’re a friend or relative who never got my message, or even if you’re a total random who feels compelled to buy me a present, I’d rather you gave to the project and not me. It’s easy to donate online: it’s quick, safe, secure, won’t hurt any animals, and no salesmen will call.

Thanks.

Mucking about with the Middle East

Justin sent me this very interesting article in the Armed Forces Journal a while back. Reading material in his work staffroom has clearly gone highbrow.

Anyway, the article argues that the major problems in the Middle East stem from borders, and argues that the simple solution would be to redraw them all. The author offers a new prospective map of what he thinks the region should look like. The suggestion is radical - Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia would be significantly changed, and there would be new states for the Kurds, Baluchs, Arab Shias, and the holy Islamic cities.

While I both agree and disagree with elements of what the article proposes, it raises the bigger picture of how much fun you might have rearranging borders throughout the world.

And it got me thinking. What other revisions could we make to the world map? An independent Texas? A left-handers’ homeland? The People’s Republic of North Kessock? Or how about uniting Slovakia and Slovenia so nobody gets them confused any more?

Let’s have your suggestions - but no marks for the boring, obvious ones such as Scotland, Tibet or Palestine…

This weekend and next

The men’s weekend was fun - a nice chance to relax, get to know people, and get out of Glasgow for a bit. And just as I suspected, there weren’t any women there.

Which I suppose is where they got the name “men’s weekend” from.

I’m away again this weekend as well, to London’s annual Join Me extravaganza, Karmageddon. It should be an exciting trip, a fun chance to meet old and new joinee friends, and above all an opportunity to raise shedloads of money for charity.

Men’s weekend away

I’m off in a couple of hours on the church men’s weekend away in Comrie, Perthshire. Having never been on anything like this before, I have no idea what to expect.

Apart from, presumably, an absence of women.

Toilet evangelism

I’d like to share an interesting observation from church yesterday.

No, it wasn’t the morning sermon on welcome, which David kicked off by telling the story of when my church search came to St Silas. I wasn’t actually there as I was in Edinburgh over Saturday night seeing friends. It’s probably good that I wasn’t there to be embarassed, and it would be nice one day to move on from that episode and be known in St Silas for something else other than my blog review - perhaps my magnetic personality and dashing good looks. Incidentally, it was a very good sermon and you can listen to it here, as I did.

Neither is my observation about last night’s Deeper service. Which by the way was absolutely excellent - beautifully put together and very challenging.

Instead, it was the fact that in the men’s toilets in St Silas (I was caught short in the middle of the evening service) there is a poster quoting Colossians 1:11 on the wall:

“May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy”

I wonder who chose this verse and why it was deemed especially appropriate for the men’s toilets. Strength, endurance, patience, and finally joy? Was it put there with constipated people in mind? I’m just glad they they didn’t decide to use Leviticus 15:1-15…

New Zealand: 4 more mullets

Apologies that the blog has been quiet on the mullet-hunting front lately - things are at something of a hiatus while I attempt to work out how to get to the Americas and Albania to finish off the mission once and for all. And more on those developments in due course.

But just as there was a light at the end of the tunnel, the list gets agonisingly longer again. I received an email over the weekend from Carolyn, a friend from Inverness who recently moved with her husband to New Zealand. She has unearthed four mullets in the land of hobbits, hakas and clipped vowels: a Mullet Bay, a Mullet Point, and two Mullet Creeks.

So there goes another thousand pounds and another fortnight of my life…

Baptism of fire

It’s been a weekend of “first times” for me so far, at least on the church front.

Yesterday I went to the Ochils on my first trip with the St Silas hillwalking group, and it was quite an experience.

After 7 hours, 11 miles, 2,500 feet, 3 summits, and enduring more or less every form, speed and direction of precipitation you could imagine, I am left bruised, aching, and completely physically exhausted. And the others commented at the end that it was one of their easier expeditions! They’re not nicknamed “the Deathmarchers” for nothing.

Mind you, experiencing and surviving the trip gave me maximum bragging rights in church this morning, a service which was also of note for me because I was on welcome duty. I was asked recently to join the welcome team (something I couldn’t really say no to, given what I wrote after my first and second visits to St Silas!) and this morning was my first time on duty. It was good fun thanks to the guidance of the others on duty, and it was a real privilege to begin to serve the church I have come to love being a part of.

After my blogs, I’m not sure if me being on the welcome team counts as poetic justice or irony, I can never remember the difference. Or maybe it’s just punishment…

101 Reasons Why Liberals Can’t Play Football

St Silas has an excellent football team, which plays in a local church league. The team has been doing very well this season and is currently joint top of their division.

I enjoy hearing in church and reading in blogs like Graham’s and Darren’s about how the team gets on. It’s not only a well-organised league and a seemingly very high standard of play, but it also creates great outreach opportunities as apparently not all players are Christians (something which I believe applies to the other teams too).

However, one thing I’ve always been intrigued about is the league St Silas play in - the Strathclyde Evangelical Churches League. Why is the league strictly limited to evangelicals, to the exclusion of churches that might define themselves as liberal?

Being a raving liberal nutter myself, you’d think I might be offended. But instead, I am quite sure there are very valid reasons why liberals aren’t allowed to complete in organised church football.

101 reasons, in fact…

1. Liberals would allow any red-carded player to stay on the field as long as they wanted.
2. Liberals would shuffle the goalposts along the line to make it easier for strikers.
3. After a defeat, a liberal team would argue they should have a second chance to win the tie.
4. Liberals would dispute that there should be such a limited definition of “goal”.
5. Liberals would introduce rolling substitutions, saying it enables constant renewal.
6. Footballing talent would count for nothing in a liberal team - everyone deserves an equal chance of playing, no matter how awful they are.
7. When defending attacks down the wing, liberals don’t focus on the cross as much as evangelicals.
8. Liberals would want to keep reinterpreting the offside rule every season.
9. Liberals would be at a huge advantage on the field because evangelicals would want to stop to pray for their “misguided” opponents at every tackle.
10. Relegation would be abolished, and everyone would get promoted, regardless of results.

Your suggestions welcome…

The latest scores

Last night, “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon” came in a rather pathetic 11th place in the Basement Bar pub quiz, I’m ashamed to report. We weren’t at full strength admittedly, but I hadn’t even noticed there were as many as eleven teams in the pub, so it was a disappointing score.

As the quiz was going on, meanwhile, the Inverness CT v Aberdeen match was on the telly. It was an important match as the winners would have finished joint second with Hearts in what is proving to be a congested top half of the SPL. It finished a 1-1 draw, and although Celtic seem to be running away with the title, just a handful of points separate 2nd from 9th. The SPL is proving to be fascinating again this year, with a real dogfight on for 2nd place, thanks to surprise slip-ups from Rangers and Hearts, plus strong showings from Inverness, Aberdeen and Kilmarnock among others. It may not be the prettiest season but it’s definitely one of the most unpredictable and competitive in recent years.

The most interesting score, however, is my recent battle with mosquitoes: it’s currently Simon 1, Mosquitoes 0. Yes, I don’t understand why I’ve got mosquitoes in Scotland in November either. But the distinctive buzzing sound and occasional glimpses of them prove it’s definitely not anything else. I killed one a few days ago, and the second one woke me a couple of times as it dive-bombed me last night, but fled when I put the light on to swat it.

I’ve not been bitten yet though, and am determined to get this second kill. Victory will be mine…

Jesus the haemophiliac?

I got an email the other day from Neil, a friend in Edinburgh, who I had not been in touch with for a while. Like me, he had been in Berlin recently, and he went to a service at the Berliner Dom, the city’s beautiful and imposing cathedral.

Neil says he took communion at the service and was intrigued to discover that the wine they used was white sherry. Perhaps they’d run out of red wine, or else the German Lutheran Church believes that Jesus was a haemophiliac.

Quite what their evidence would be I am not sure, especially as there was no reference to his blood being white at his crucifixion. But they seem confident enough to use white wine, so who are the rest of us to argue?

And it got me thinking. What other things could feasibly be used at communion to represent the blood or body of Jesus, and why? How about cod liver oil for example, to represent all the fish he caught? It would at least purge communions of all but the most dedicated…