We are called to be people of God. We are called to live as pure a life as we can and, in effect, to be mini-Jesuses in this world. We (well, I at least) often point people towards the truth and purity of Jesus and his life when we are confronted by the contradictory behavior of supposed fellow brothers and sisters. We cannot confuse Christians with Christianity, and we cannot confuse Christianity with Jesus.

Yet my problem is this – what makes us different from someone who’s simply very nice?

Technorati Tags: christianity, faith

Recently I’ve had the opportunity of working with a wide variety of people. The bar work industry arguably has a higher turnover of staff than any other industry. Consequently many of these people have been really great individuals. I’m also just lucky to have these great people work with me of course.

So my point is how am I any different? How would someone looking at my life be inspired to look closer at the claims of Jesus anymore than if they were also acquainted with a very nice person who doesn’t know Jesus?

I’m well aware that my salvation doesn’t depend on me being nice. But holiness of course should follow at some point thereafter.I suppose the question is ‘Am I being an ineffective Christian if there’s really nothing extra special about me?’, or ‘Am I just missing something?’.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem to add up that I’m connected to the God of the universe through his Son and all that follows and yet I don’t make a big splash in this world.

So I lied. I haven’t been updating this like I said I would and I need to redress that. So Bernice and I moved without major incident, settled in.  We’ve been here 4 weeks now. Time enough to get over the initial excitement, time enough to begin to truly evaluate whether we’ve made the right move or not. Time enough to see whether we’ve been a bit silly (for those not up to date, we’ve just left a 3 bedroom house we were renting in London, sold all of our stuff, moved into a single room in a shared house in Manchester and are both doing a part-time TEFL course). So, what do we think? So far things are going great. I haven’t felt this at peace for a long time. One of the most liberating things is not wanting to buy anything. We must have sold/given away/given to charity shop about 25-30 boxes of stuff just in the week before we left the house and there’s still a bit more there to move! It was so difficult selling all our furniture and bits that you simply do not want to buy anything more. It really helps you to see the real value of these things. They are worthless. No-one will pay you anything for them. So much money and time wasted.It also helps of course that Bernice and I are now only living in one room – which we fit into very comfortably actually. I really thought we might be crowded in there, but we’re not. Plus, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re leaving in the house when we leave anyway, so we’ll have even less stuff! It’s very freeing walking around Manchester City Centre, seeing all these people shopping – especially for clothes (every 2nd person seems to have a Primark bag…) and not wanting any of it. It’s a real liberation from the oppressive consumer culture that we live in. It’s not that we were very materialistic anyway, but you can’t help but absorb some of that “must have that thing” kind of mentality.The only thing I want now is a decent MP3 player like the new IPod Nano.Anyway, in addition to that I’ve started working in a bar just at the weekends and I’m really enjoying that. Although that gives my life a very different rhythm now – I’m busy every night apart from Sundays. Monday – work, Tuesday to Thursday – course, Friday and Saturday – work. Sunday – recover. So now I’ve become a proper little night owl.Bernice is working 5 mornings a week but we still see much more of each other than we ever did in London doing full-time jobs. That’s enough for now. Stay posted and I’ll try to keep this updated more. 

…Is getting rid of it all! Truly, getting rid of all your stuff is a real task, no matter how good quality it is.

As I was wrapping up our fancy china it just occured to me that we hadn’t used it as much as perhaps we were planning to. Back when we first got married I think we thought we’d have more dinner parties and stuff like that. But then we never did. Sure we had people over for dinner, but it was always pretty informal.

And so now it just seems like a bit of a waste. All this really nice stuff that wasn’t used much, and not it’s going to be stored for at least a few years. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for people having bought this for us on the wedding list. Nor is it going to go off of course – it will always be there to be used whenever we come back or settle elsewhere and have stuff shipped out to us. But it was depressing.

The whole process of selling our stuff has just made me never want to have much stuff ever again. It’s just not worth it. You’re never going to be 100% sure of how your life is going to turn out and what direction you’ll take – like what happened to me.

The same is true of our car. We have this lovely red Rover Convertible and it’s been great. But now that we come to sell it we might not get what we thought we would and again it’s a reminder of our throwaway society and just home much some goods do depreciate. It’s made me never want a decent car again! You put money into them and for what? To lose even more! It’s ridiculous.

Yep, at last school’s out. I’ve finally completed my NQT year and got out of teaching. Word’s cannot express how I feel, because I’m not sure how to feel.

I suppose that like GCSEs, A-Levels and more recently, a degree, these things can turn into something of an anti-climax. On the day (Friday 20th) I really didn’t know what to do with all that now-free space in my head. For the last 2 years my mind has been dominated with my job. That’s kind of how it goes with education I’d say. You can control how much time it takes – I kept that under control this year at least unlike my training year! But it’s difficult to keep it out of your thoughts. You end up talking about it with people, because everyone seems to be more interested in your job than you yourself. You’re thinking about how to make your job easier or do it better over the weekend. It’s never that far away.

Once you’ve been trained to be an educator, it never quites leaves you I think. Even if you’re not doing it for a job, or even part-time or voluntary, it’s still in your nature. It still affects and moulds how you think and how you do certain things.

So then, how do I feel now? Well, it’s obviously a relief that I don’t have to go back. Plus, since beginning teaching I’ve kind of been locked in for 2 years. Once you start you might as well finish and when you’ve survived your training year, well, it would be foolish to not do the other year and keep the qualification.

So now I have some control of what I’d doing again. But I don’t think I’ve had much chance to process it all yet. I’m so busy selling all my stuff it hasn’t really gone in.

Yay!

Finally I got myself an AppleMac. After thinking about it for just under 12 months, we finally took the plunge. We were in the Apple shop and got a £250 discount, so how could one refuse?! After 17 years of sworn allegiance to PCs (though not entirely to Microsoft Windows. I did defect to Linux for a while – particularly the old Mandrake and SuSE) I have made the switch to Mac OS X and the glorious refined white curves of Apple. I am in fact typing this post for y’all on a spanking new 13.3″ MacBook. Not only did we get a discount and not only are they lovely anyway, but all the MacBooks got a speed and hard drive upgrade recently – only 2 weeks ago – so that was all pretty good timing!

Perhaps this is a bit sad to be so gushing. But I don’t really care. I use computers A LOT and they play an important part in my life. And when everything works just a lot smoother and a lot easier then life just feels more hassle free. It feels a little like changing religion though, such is the switch.

But I would exhort everyone who is thinking of shelling out for a Mac to do it – it’s great (so far anyway after a few days). In particular the 13.3″ MacBook (as compared with the MacBook Pro models) is particularly well priced for it’s size. Size is important to us at this stage because of our impending travels – you need something small but not too small, and not too highly priced. Anyway, as Borat would say – NICE!

WE NEED GODMAN

Just been switched onto this website via a friend’s profile on Facebook. Some humourous cartoons kind of asking the question, “What would Jesus do in an American comic-book obsessed society?”.

For all your people who’ve been asking about Bernice and I’s recent trip to Malaysia to see Sam and Neeltje and Dave and Becky, here’s a flickr link for a quick survey of the photos that I’ve uploaded to flickr. I took loads but have only uploaded a few to give a good overview of the holiday and so you don’t have to trawl through a whole load of crap.

Malaysia 2007 photos

(for those of you who don’t know who these people are, Sam and Neeltje used to go to Glorious Undead church before they moved to a new life in Malaysia. Dave and Becky are friends from Manchester University. Dave was my house mate for two years. Lucky chap!)

Have just got some finishing touches to put to my CELTA application today and then Bernice and I will send it off to Manchester Academy for thier perusal.

For those unaware of our plans  of late, we’re hoping to get accepted on the 18 week part-time course at the above institution and then move to Manchester  to live between August and December. The idea is to get a room in shared house so we can cut our living costs right down and then study part-time, work part-time and doss and chill part-time.

That’s the idea and ‘the dream’ if you like. Not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out. I’ve always got teaching to fall back on and Bernice has some excellent office skills to temp with. But here’s hoping for something a bit different and perhaps a bit more dead end for a change!