What a great place to start a business!

From today’s UK Guardian:

Read the full article here. There is a more in depth (and gloomy) one here.

Song – Where I go you cannot follow

Delighted to have some new music to bring you.

A friend, Hannah Merriman, has produced an EP and here is one track from it:

 

It’s inspired by Jesus in John’s gospel – enjoy!

God loves you…

and everybody else has a wonderful plan for your life.

“Seven Stanzas at Easter” (John Updike)

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

 

Seen here.

Badajoz Bathed in Blood

At least it was this time 200 years ago…

Tomorrow, curiously coinciding with Good Friday, is the 200th anniversary of the siege of Badajoz. It’s one of the few times Badajoz has come up on the radar of British history.  In fact, the only time we encountered people in England who had heard of Badajoz before we came were people of a certain generation who had studied the napoleonic wars at school.

You can read a fuller account here, but essentially the French were occupying Spain and were holding the city of Badajoz. The British and the Portuguese joined forces under the Earl of Wellington to attempt to liberate the city. Their siege was successful, with soldiers displaying great bravery and dicipline through the siege, but suffering huge losses – with 3,000 killed.

Sadly, what followed the victory was an atrocious looting and ravaging of the town from the same soldiers who had been fighting to liberate the city just hours earlier. As many as 4,000 spanish civilians were killed with mass looting and rape by drunken soldiers ocurring before order was eventually restored 72 hours later.

Wouldn’t want to speculate how this kind of event affects a city long term… but it does leave me pondering the cost of winning a strategic city, and the propensity of us humans to forget what and who we’re fighting for.

Would love you to pray for Badajoz today.

Unintended Consequences – some feedback

Have had a fair amount of email re: the ebook I put out for free a few weeks ago. Really grateful for everyone who has engaged with the content so far. Wanted to put a couple of bits out which for me have been helpful in furthering discussion.

Here’s an excerpt from a good friend Russ’s email:

“I generally found the book thought-provoking and challenging. It got my hackles up at some points as there isn’t much affirmation of the good things a church does, which could be repackaged if desired (because they don’t connect with people) but actually do serve real needs in the community. The main thing I thought about whilst reading the book was this: “what about the anointing?” I suppose what I mean is when an Ephesians 4 level guy, when Heidi Baker, when your apostolic leader is around, you want to be there. I mean the long term average Sunday preach can be a bit repetitive and maybe a lot of people do agree with whats said, but I’ve really been appreciating the hope, freedom and equipping that comes from these kinds of guys in the package of a 30 minutes (usually plus) sermon. You could call it imparting faith, rather than talking.

Anointed leaders inspire and equip. And there is something special about the spoken word. And also worship… you’re obviously not surprised I picked up on this. I think that by undermining the validity of singing songs together (which is a form of prayer) and making it out to be unbiblical, you run the risk of sapping faith for other things. What I mean is, something happens when a group gather together and sing praise. Something else happens when the praise moves to a tender place of adoration. What I’m gunning for when I lead worship (or lead a meeting) is plural spontaneous participation (the package of the average prayer meeting in the e/c model) but also giving people a strong enough lead that they’ve got some truth to get behind, and often it’s this that really releases faith and hope in people to believe God for great things. So, if you want the church to be a praying church then I think you will be blessed by having a singing church!

I also find it interesting that churches that have thrown caution to the wind regarding a Sunday meeting, are re-discovering the goodness of it. St Thomas’ (Network church), Sheffield and St Andrews Chorleywood being examples (I know you read a lot of Mike Breen) where they’ve tried all sorts and have come back to encouraging their people to make it along regularly to a Sunday gathering.

In summary, I found you raised lots of good challenges but not always in a way that inspired me or built me faith for something better than what I’ve got. Perhaps I’m just trying to justify what I do. I think I loved the values, found the tone difficult at times and thought the conclusions were a bit imbalanced. Perhaps I’m too evolution and you’re too revolution?

We’ve bounced a couple of emails back and forth since honing in on some of the points, and are probably in slightly different places at points – but isn’t it great we can still be friends.

If you’ve got feedback about the book – it is gratefully received!

Any thoughts on the above?

Steps to Learning a Foreign Language part 2

This concludes yesterday’s guest post from Anthony Flora:

Step 5: Utilize your learning style.

If you are a visual learner- make sure you are reading in Spanish and poring over grammar books. If you are auditory you should be listening to music in Spanish. If you are a kinesthetic learner, click here. However your learning style ultimately needs to be linked to this: spending time with native speakers. I am predominately a visual learner, so I spent a lot of time reading and digging into my grammar workbooks, but at the end of the day that, and whatever else we happen to use, must be combined with spending time with native speakers. Even if it’s 15 minutes a day conversing about something you didn’t the day before. With the bread shop owner about their early morning baking schedule. With the man next to you on the bus about your common destination. With your neighbor about how cars drive too fast down your street when the kids are outside playing. Whatever your learning style- utilize it, and then make sure you are spending time everyday listening and speaking.

Step 6: Intentionally do something EVERYDAY.

Just in case it wasn’t clear from steps 3 and 5. Whether its rememorizing 5 vocab words, the past tense of a verb type or taking 15 minutes to walk in the park at that hour when its packed with people chattering away. Be intentional and persistent.

Step 7: Know that for every hour of hard work…

You will get one minute of satisfaction in the beginning. You will spend hours memorizing vocabulary and then days listening to the unintelligible machine-gun fire of words from natives while feelings of hopelessness cave in on you. Then suddenly your newly developing ear will catch it. In the middle of 10 seconds of incoherent sounds you will suddenly pick out a word. A word that you had memorized several days before. You will understand the entire sentence from the context of that one word. Because you understand that sentence, you will respond with a jumbled sentence fragment of your own. You have communicated. Now know this: the following week you will get five minutes of satisfaction for every hour of hard work. And the following, fifteen minutes. That is how language works- it gains momentum from itself. Know that eventually the relationship between hard work and satisfaction will be the inverse. You will gain hours of satisfaction and only be putting in five minutes of hard work. It is a beautiful thing.

Step 8: Learn culture as well as language.

Learning a new language in a new culture can be a double whammy (to use what I think is exclusively an American phrase). In the beginning you and your culture are a novelty for the natives, and this can lead to a sense of connectedness that is somewhat superficial. The basis of your relationship with the natives must be based on what you have in common, not just your cultural differences. This means you must assimilate to a certain degree. Now I do not mean that you renounce who you were and where you came from in order to be something you are not. In that case you would simply be imitating and something of a fraud. The point is to develop things in common with natives, to embrace aspects of the new culture that resonate with who you are and make them your own, while all the while still being true to who you are. You will no longer be just “English”- but at the same time you will not be “Spanish.” Do not abandon your cultural background, but rather seek to become a unique blend of two distinct cultures.

Step 9 (and final step): Keep a life-balance.

Everyone is different and responds differently to language and new cultures. Know how you are created and what motivates you, as well as keeps you sane. In the midst of all the effort associated with learning new language and culture, make sure you have time and space to cut loose. If you love sport, get involved in sport (it’s great common ground). If you love nature, take hikes. If you need alone time, make sure you get time alone. Learning a new language and culture is a long process, and one that can get thrown off-course when the rest of our life is off-kilter. So keep your focus on God, guard time for you family, and remember to enjoy life and your newfound language.