Resolutions

English: New Year’s Resolutions postcard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Have you made any new year’s resolutions this year? I think this is the first year in a few that I haven’t made any – not out of any active plan not to, it just happened that way – but they’re always worth thinking about, aren’t they?

A new year’s resolution says: I want to be better, and I think doing such-and-such will help me achieve that goal.

I want to lose weight, so eating less chocolate/going to the gym will help.

I want to read the Bible more, so setting up a daily reading plan will help.

Insert your own here.

It’s common knowledge that the majority of new year’s resolutions are broken before the end of January, but if the rest of the world’s anything like me, the first week or two are actually pretty good. Just a thought, but what if, instead of setting these goals once per year, we set them once per month, or once per week? Would that even work?

Would we allow ourselves to keep such short accounts?

Is murder always a sin?

Image via Wikipedia

This is a bit of a toughy. A sniper shooting a member of the public is a criminal but a sniper on the field of battle isn’t…but are both of them committing sin by killing a person?

In particular, if someone commits murder in self-defence, which of the following statements is true?

1. The person broke the commandment not to commit murder, therefore has committed sin.
2. The fall means that some evils are actually ok within certain criteria; murder is still, strictly speaking, sin, but in self-defence it’s not that bad.
3. Some sins, when committed within certain contexts, are the right thing to do and therefore are not sins; murder in self-defence is not sin.

A bit morbid for a Tuesday, don’t you think? Well on New Year’s Eve a widowed mum protected herself and her baby by shooting a man dead who had broken into her house. The story’s here and I’m confident once you’ve read it you won’t forget it.

Conclusion: I don’t know what the ‘right’ answer is to this, but I don’t think getting the answer particularly matters; the mum in the story needs Jesus for redemption whether or not this particular act is a sin or not. Thank goodness eternity won’t have any sin.

Pondering…

Image via Wikipedia

I’m quite often asked how I manage to blog on pretty much a daily basis, and my answer is pretty disappointing I’m afraid – I write them all upfront and then use the Schedule button to get them all lined up, Monday-Friday.

But the second question is then most often: But how do you come up with five different things a week to write about? Do you just re-use old material? Well, allow me to let you into a secret.

As a child I remember how exciting it was to go to a New Year’s party, to be allowed to stay up until actual midnight! But I wasn’t the sort of child who would let my excitement stop there; I wanted to achieve something greater. So, I set myself the target of being the first person in whichever year it was to speak a certain word. I’d wait until Big Ben chimed the new year in, and while everyone was cheering I’d be speaking out a list of as many random words as I could think of:

‘parachute, overalls, Neapolitan, pepper, tricycle, telephone exchange!’

To be honest, that’s pretty much been my target every year; I’m reasonably certain I was the first person in the whole world in 2003 to say the words ‘yoghurt pot’ together.

But I discovered recently that every individual apparently speaks something like seven sentences that have never been spoken or written down before, so I seem to have set my goals quite low.

But what that does show is that there is a virtually infinite amount out there to think and write about, so me coming up with five unique thoughts each week and communicating them isn’t actually that big of a deal. Particularly when you realise that lots of my ‘thoughts’ are just quoting what someone else said.

In any case, I’m going to keep on blogging, and I hope you keep on enjoying it (if you do enjoy it…if you don’t, why are you even still reading this? I’ve been writing for ages!).

So not a particularly profound post today, but don’t underestimate the value of what you have to say, you may be the first person in history to say it. And don’t underestimate the value of listening to what others have to say; you may be privileged to experience something no-one else in history has ever experienced.

The King of Fools

Title of a Delirious song and album from the 90s? Yes. But originally the title’s taken from the climax of a Medieval New Year celebration called the Feast of Fools.

The idea behind the Feast was for everyone in the town to get ridiculously drunk over twelve nights. They’d sing songs together, hold mock church services (in which you’d respond ‘hee-haw’ rather than ‘amen’), and cheer a young girl riding through the town on the back of a donkey, babe in arms. When she arrives in the town centre, the town would nominate the most hideously ugly person to be ‘the King of Fools’.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame we’re introduced to Quasimodo, and we see that he is blessed to wear that crown. He’s embarrassed, but as the outsider he is he’s quite honoured by the attention and the cheering crowds.

This is what it’s like to be human. We’re all so desperate to be part of the ‘in’ crowd, or simply part of any crowd, that we accept it even when it’s fake. We can’t tell the difference most of the time. We put so much effort into education, career, sports teams, hobbies, and all manner of other pursuits, but at the end of the day it’s Satan who sarcastically cheers us on, all the while mocking us for our folly.

But…

But there is one who genuinely accepts us. There is one who joyfully welcomes the outsider, honours us with a crown and cheers us on, but this is no mockery.

Jesus reached to the unclean in society like the lepers, the lady caught in adultery, and the bleeding lady. Jesus reached to the unloved in society like the tax collectors and the Samaritans, and freely welcomes us all.

How great is our God.