Why I blog (and maybe you should too)

The Thinking Man sculpture at Musée Rodin in Paris (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I started thinking a while ago about blogging – whether I should continue with it or not – because blogging has a significant number of downsides:

• The time it takes to write posts takes time away from other things which are arguably more important.
• It impacts on my thought life; something happens, and I immediately start thinking about how it would fit into my blog.
• I don’t feel like I get loads of visits so it’s not as if I’m changing the world by blogging – I could probably save the internet a good few megabytes by cancelling the whole thing!
• The responses I see are generally negative; far more people leave critical or angry comments than grateful comments. That doesn’t make me feel too good.

But, of course, it’s not all bad:

• Blogging makes me better at communicating – looking back at the first year or two of blog posts makes me cringe at my own naivety, aggression, and uninformed opinions. I’m sure I still have a long way to go, but I’m heading in the right direction.
• It impacts on my thought life; a few years ago, life just happened. Now I’m far more analytical, I think things through more logically and clearly, enabling me to appreciate God’s grace in creation, other people, and myself.
• I’m handed a heavy dose of humility whenever I see the stats or the eloquence of those who disagree with me.
• I’ve learnt a lot about how to deal with people who disagree with me.
• Having to face challenges head-on, and thinking through tough things, has only ever strengthened my faith in God. It’s good to have had that experience.

For the moment, I think I’m going to keep on blogging. Not many other people seem to read my blog, so doing it for the benefit of mankind would be a bit silly, but I’m going to maintain these objectives:

• Get better at communicating.
• Think about lots of stuff so that when people ask, I have an informed opinion.
• Create posts about Jesus so that random internet browsers are more likely to read something about him.
• Hope that some book publisher out there asks me to write a book that becomes an international bestseller, meaning I can think and write about Jesus full-time.

Oh well, I suppose three out of four wouldn’t be too bad.

This man receives tax collectors and sinners, and eats with them!

Just a thought…if a middle-aged, middle-class straight white male were to walk into a ‘typical’ British church the chances are he’d feel pretty normal.

But if Dizzee Rascal did, I imagine he’d feel a bit out of place.

As The Church, do we receive people in the same way as Jesus did, or do we judge people against some odd man-made standard?

I think I need more grace than I allow myself to think.

Celebrity-endorsed charity

English: Pamela Anderson attending “The 6th Annual Hollywood Style Awards” Beverly Hills, CA on Oct. 10, 2009 – Photo by Glenn Francis of http://www.PacificProDigital.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From memory, I’ve never quoted Pamela Anderson before, so this is a new experience for me. Not as special as I thought it would be.

Anyway, at a recent rainforest charity reception at the House of Lords she said:

Sometimes I wonder if I am making it worse, or making it better…Am I legitimising these causes? Or the opposite? Who knows?

Well, luckily for you, the UK Public Opinion Monitor carried out a survey asking that very question, and it turns out that:

50 per cent of respondents indicated they take no notice of the message presented when celebrities promote charities and organisations and 14 per cent were put off their message.

…At the same time, 55 per cent felt that others pay more attention to such campaigns than they do themselves.

So it would turn out that when you’re watching Children in Need or whatever, and you think ‘if these celebrities genuinely supported this surely they’d give a whole bunch of cash, but I’m sure someone else will give instead of me,’ you’re pretty much thinking the same as most other people watching.

What was more interesting for me to find out, however, is that there are actually awards for celebrities who make a big difference in charity work – A Good Thing, you might say. Of course Angelina Jolie’s won five gongs.

But do the actual charity workers get anything like that? Of course not.

I wonder. In our celebrity-saturated post-modern culture, how do we balance the ethical issues of capitalism, not-for-profit charities, sports stars earning more in a week than many will earn in a decade, with simply ‘how much should I give’?

It is not good for a man to be alone

 

Husbands and Wives (song) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On behalf of all men everywhere can I admit: men need help.

Now I’ve cleared the air, Rick Thomas, a trained counsellor, has written a great article basically assessing the fact that men act like they can do fine on their own (because they’re men) but they really need help from their wives.

What do you think?

70 year-old meets her mum for the first time

There’s quite an extraordinary story over here to get your emotions going a bit. I won’t add much except to say that it’s a pretty nice story about a lady who met her daughter after not having seen her for 70 years. Pretty incredible, and a powerful reminder that God has the ability to redeem the results of sin.

The importance of patience

Image via Wikipedia

A study was done in which a bunch of kids were put in a room, and given a marshmallow.

They were told that they were allowed to eat the marshmallow, but that if they waited for the adult to leave and return after a secret amount of time, they would be given two marshmallows.

Some of the kids couldn’t even wait until the adult had left the room before scoffing it down; most waited an average of about three minutes before giving in. A select few were able to last the full fifteen minutes before the adult returned, and were rewarded with two marshmallows.

Those kids were all visited over a decade later when they were in their teens. The few who had shown patience at that early age proved to be more successful academically, socially, health-wise…pretty much in every area.

Patience, it would seem, is an uncommon yet vital ingredient to an individual’s success in life. So, now we know…what can we do about it?

Here’s a well-written article about the original experiment, and here’s a fun video of a reperformance of it:

Visual stimulation

Infographics about porn seem to be all the rage right now – I thought this one was pretty illuminating:

There was one I saw a couple of weeks ago which had a pretty disturbing statistic:

Eighty per cent of women fantasize regularly about sexual encounters with people who are not their partner.

…

Ninety-eight per cent of men do.

Let us pray.

Women and missions

I like Thabiti Anyabwile’s blog, and he’s recently been going through a series around the whole complementarian thing. I thought his most recent post was good, and challenging. Here’s a quote from it, but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing:

Younger women are steered toward home and domestic life rather than service on the mission field.  Single women are often counseled to build their lives around an anticipated husband by delaying commitment to the mission field “until they find a spouse.”  We sometimes encourage sisters to wait on the Lord for missions in order to actively seek a spouse and family.  It seems we should reverse this: we should encourage the sisters to wait on the Lord for spouse and family while actively seeking to be on mission.

Pornography blocker ‘opt in’

Erm…right…so I read this article in my RSS feed the other day…I agree with the idea behind it, but ‘opt-in’? Why not ‘opt-out’?!

Has our country actually come down to the fact now that parents have to actively choose for their children not to illegally watch porn?

Wow. God save us.

Posh & Becks

There were some photos this morning in the paper that Posh & Becks had done of them kissing. Bit of a blatant publicity stunt but fair enough, their commodity is fame and they’ve not been in the papers for a while so good for them.

But it got me thinking: I like Posh and Becks. There are a couple of reasons why:

• Their kids’ names aren’t that ridiculous. Slightly quirky, but not as bad as plenty of others. Audio Science.
• They waited until they were married before they had kids. Good for them.
• They’re obviously very happy to make sacrifices for one another. Let’s be honest, David joining L.A. Galaxy wasn’t the smartest career move but I bet he knew it would make his wife happy. Good boy.
• They didn’t allow rumours to affect them. David was accused of doing something similar than Wayne Rooney has been but at the end of the day Victoria’s response was pretty much: ‘I don’t think he did it.’ Compare that to the reaction of the whole world to Rooney’s allegations.

Phil Brown said that we shouldn’t go spreading rumours because on this occasion it looks like the whole family is being pulled apart. True, but it’s not just about that. Posh and Becks have proven themselves willing and able to stand firm in the face of attack, and I like that.