My house was burgled last night whilst I was down in Oxford with two of my housemates at a friends wedding. I’m not really bothered to be honest, but my computer was stolen so I don’t have ready access to the internet for the time being.
If for some reason you need to contact me, the phone would be your best bet.
I need to post a few letters, and I wasn’t sure exactly where the nearest postbox to my house is, so I asked Google. First of all I was rather surprised that Royal Mail don’t offer a postbox locator service themselves, this seems like a massive oversight on their part as it would be a very useful tool.
Second to that, I have discovered that the Freedom of Information act is rather neat. Some friendly folk wanted to put together a website where you could search for a postbox yourself, and lo and behold they were able to acquire a complete listing of postbox locations direct from the government on request. Furthermore, that information was made publically available (all be it in a pretty horrible PDF file) here: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/location_of_every_post_box_that
Thankfully someone then took that and converted it into a much nicer format, which can be found and browsed easily here: http://edwardbetts.com/postboxes/
Since the information is there now, I suspect someone will take the time to make a search by location database available in the near future. The internet is nifty!
I have chosen to spend some of my time this term studying the Biblical view of Men and Women. I chose to look at this area for a number of reasons, the main one being that it is a serious area of contention in the western Church today and as such I wanted to be sure of my views on the matter and more importantly sure that my views agree with the Bible. I also chose to study manhood and womanhood because I am a Christian guy, and as such the Bibles definition of a man applies to me and I should seek to be the kind of man that the Bible says I should be. This is I think especially important in todays western Church climate where there are many more women in Church and masculinity is under attack from the culture around us.
This morning I listened to a great sermon on Ephesians 5:15-33 by Russell D. Moore (pick it up here) in which I was reminded of something really essential that I often forget. A large part of what Moore had to say was that we often read passages like this and think “ah, so Christ’s relationship to the Church is a picture of what marriage should be like”. The reality is that Paul is saying something very different, he is in fact saying something more like “marriage is a picture of what Christ and the Church are like”.
This shift in focus from God picturing life for us to us picturing God for others is an immense thing. We go from a self centered perspective of asking God how he can help our situations to a totally outward looking evangelistic perspective of our lives. When we think like this, the real question is no longer “What can you do for me God?”, but instead we ask “How can I show you to others God?”.
I am reminded of a great song by Tree63 which sets out not only this wonderful attitude towards God, but clearly explains why this is an appropriate attitude if we have understood the gospel!
I haven’t been the same
Ever since that day I called Your name
Yahweh
Yahweh Look What You’ve done for me
What can I do for You my Lord?
I want You to know my heart is Yours
It’s not a question of what You can do for me
But what can I do for You my Lord?
Up to Your cross I crawled
Now I am standing teen feet tall
Jesus my saviour look what You’ve done for me
Free at last I’m free
I owe You my life completely
Yahweh
Yahweh look what You’ve done for me
Gratuitously stolen from Marcus Honeysett (see this post), word clouds are a handy way of analysing content and so I created one for recent blog posts just to see what would show up.
If I can be bothered I might look for a sidebar gadget to create up to date word clouds, because they’re nifty and it’s nice to have an indication of just what it is I’ve been writing about. Anyway, here is the result:
