Who reads all this?

According to my Site Meter, the most common searches that casue people to find my blog are (most common first):

1. Brits asking about Ford KA power steering fluid leaks (mine is on the steering rack, so I can either keep topping it up or get a new rack)
2. People in India asking questions like "How is life adventurous?" (India must be a dreadfully dull and predictable place)
3. Americans looking for an Arsenokoitai definition (It's a word invented by Paul, made by merging two words lifted direct from the septuagint translation of Leviticus, I don't think anyone REALLY knows what it means but it usually gets translated differently in Corinthians (homophobically) from Timothy (unspecified perversion). Personally, having delved into Leviticus and the parallel passage Deuteronomy, I think it refers to pagan temple prostitution - a view I used to reject vehemently but now think is right)

But it's supposed to be a general blog about normal life as a Christian. Are these people missing the point, or proving it?

Philosophy for the despondent

The glass is neither half empty nor half full:

the glass is an opportunity for further filling.

When you are in employment and your mortgage and lifestyle depend on the income from it, you are trapped. You dare not jump off the juggernaut. You are railtracked into continuing in that career and trying to advance and progress within it.

Being made redundant gives you an opportunity to completely rewrite your life. You no longer have anything to lose, so anything can be attempted.

So strangely, I am almost looking forward to it!

(Notwithstanding all the above, whatever direction the Lord takes me, please pray that I will be able to feed, clothe and house my family.)

Need a new client

The clock ticks ever closer to the end of my current contract, and I still have nothing definite to do afterwards.

There is one guy who is supposed to be calling me back on what is a very hopeful lead, but still by no means guaranteed. I am still in denial, still quite chirpy, depsite my finigernails getting rapidly shorter.

I know that God has always sorted me out in the past, and I trust him. But there's always the slight anxiety that Christians are not exempt from times of trouble, and that while God helps them through those times, they are still trouble. Sleeping rough is still rough, even with the Lord's comfort!

So I pray that a definite new client will be found, so that I can pay my mortgage in March and not put my wife and kids into homelessness. But this is all part of my normal life adventure.

It would be very useful to get the contract mentioned, because it is on the same business park and I could stay in touch with the same workplace christian fellowship. But for tax purposes, a more remote client would be better.

Normal Life Adventure, with homosexuality and arthritis, kids and money, and preaching.

This blog is full of posts tracing my exploration of the theology of homosexuality – which no one reads – and it also contains a few small posts about my wife’s rheumatoid arthritis, which get lots of readers.

What links these two topics? Nothing at face value.

But my blog is about how a normal life, if lived with God, becomes an adventure. So as well as all the mundane stuff, I have these ongoing adventures – things I would never have imagined:

1. Radical changes of theology
   
2. Living with disability
   
3. Having 7 kids (so far)
   
4. Stepping out of the boat in faith financially to buy a large house
   
5. Becoming self-employed
   
6. Becoming a Licensed Reader in the Church of England

Which reminds me: On Sunday I preached that Faith and Action work together, and as an example I said that if you pray for money, usually the answer involves you going out and getting a job and working for it. Now, my finances have been deteriorating for some time as one the one hand my income decreases (I keep finding mistakes in my company accounts that I have to make up for by reducing dividends) while at the same time costs have been getting larger (for example, a letter from my energy supplier telling me they will increase my monthly payment by £50). So, having told the congregation that financial miracles whereby someone knocks on your door offering money are very rare, a man knocked on my door and, cutting a long story short, I have signed up to change my energy supplier, saving me about 20%.

Now it might have happened anyway, but when the timing of things, the coincidence, is unusual, it smells of miracle (or God-incidence) to me.

So my normal life is an adventure with God.

And nice to think that even if I am toying with what might be heresy, He still cares.