Waxing lyrical

My weekend:


Saturday

• Arrange new phone contract for 2nd daughter
• Buy banger (cheap old car - £600) for 3rd son (choose from Autotrader, phone up, vehicle sold (repeat), eventually get one still available, view, go home, move money around from one account to another, arrange insurance (£1500 for 19 year old, with black box), go to cash machine, back to dealer, buy car, follow son home anxiously.
• Worst ever head louse infestation in 4th son – he looks like a freshly-poked anthill. Apply chemicals etc.
• In between all the above, try to do the usual housework and attend to wife and 4 year-old.

Sunday

• Clean house frantically before church.
• Church (Very good!!!! God IS real!!!)
• 3 hairy lads from church having legs waxed for charity. Deemed inappropriate event for church building therefore doing it at our house (hence the cleaning). 27 teenagers from church plus youth leaders in crowd into our lounge along with the ‘beauty therapist’ and her large padded table thing. Very hot weather – windows wide open. Screams of tortured pain echo down the street. Funny looks from neighbours!
• And lots of other hot exhausting stressful stuff.

Today - back to work for a rest!

Spurgeon on "little sins"

http://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2013/05/five-timeless-quotes-by-charles-spurgeon/

Current marital status III

Original post deleted.

It's fair enough to pour out my troubles at the time, but there is no need for a permanent record of the grizzly details.

This note remains to confirm that (like everyone else) my marriage has its ups and downs, but through the prayers of friends things can be resolved.

Current marital status - II

Original post deleted.


It's fair enough to pour out my troubles at the time, but there is no need for a permanent record of the grizzly details.

This note remains to confirm that (like everyone else) my marriage has its ups and downs, but through the prayers of friends things can be resolved.

Current marital status

Original post deleted.


It's fair enough to pour out my troubles at the time, but there is no need for a permanent record of the grizzly details.

This note remains to confirm that (like everyone else) my marriage has its ups and downs, but through the prayers of friends things can be resolved.

Binary opposites

Hell is where you get everything you deserve.

Heaven is where you get everything you don't.

Still hanging on.

I find that my faith has, on an intellectual level, taken a real battering by my wife's teaching on Daniel's lions.  If the story does not have at least a source in a literal story of a man being saved by God, if it is just an invention projected back on a King Arthur type figure, then it is of no value.  It cannot say 'God saves people' if in fact he did not save on that occasion.  It is a delusion.

So why do I still believe in Christ?

Because he speaks to me.

When I am at rock bottom, I call for an answer.  And it comes.  Not every time, but on the key moments.  Not as an audible voice, but through other means.  In the most recent case I was calling for deliverance from temptation, and received an email which said in summary "It depends what you really want".  The temptation was very desirable, but the life I would have by resisting was better.  It was the Word of God to me at that moment.

And I have had my moments of unexpected spiritual ecstasy.  My moments of divinely inspired preaching. 

And there is of course the fact that having been brought up as a Christian, I just don't know how to live as a person of no faith.  I don't know how to behave day to day.  I don't know how to live without the constant conversational prayers that involve Christ in my day-to-day.

Of course, these could all be just psychological.

But Rob Bell writes in Velvet Elvis that our faith should be one that can survive finding out that we were wrong on core doctrines.  God is bigger than our transient theologies.

So my faith perseveres.  Just.  I have some evidence for it, and I don't know how to do without it.  But my brain questions the faith and my logic for hanging on.

And I'm hoping to apply for ordination??!!??

It links back to dirty pictures

Blogger, this site's host, provides me with a very basic 'stats' facility that says where visitors to this site have come from.

It doesn't explain why on random days I get surges of visitors who have been referred to this blog from sites which - when I follow the back links - turn out to be full of naked men and women doing rude things to each other, which I find disturbing.  OK, some of my posts do refer to sex usually in a theological context, but those are not the pages that the people have visited.  The pages on my blog that they do go to seem to be quite mundane, boring and random, but there will be four times my usual daily total going to the same one on one day.  In some weeks I have had more referrals from one of these sites than from Google.

So why?

Is my web site being abused by some malign net-criminal for his/her activities?

Or is God diverting people - in the course of their sins - to a place where they can read about his love and how he will help them to a better life if they will only let him? 

Begging for comments

Please comment.

I've not had a comment for ages.

This either means I'm very boring, or that you've tried to tell me how wrong I am but for some reason the comment didn't get posted to me.

So, please make a comment, even if its just a single ".", so that I know the system is in working order.

Just a test

 

I don't seem to be able to upload photos from my office computer.  This is just a test of my home laptop.