Taking the TRX plunge

Having searched the internet for TRX offers and alternatives, I decided to make my own. This, I thought, would give me a feel for suspension training and whether the hype was true. So I bought some luggage straps (Halfords, around £20 a pair), two carabiners and a figure eight climbing thing (must have a proper name, together they were about another £15-20 I think from Decathalon).

I trimmed the luggage straps to a more useable length and used some plastic tubing to fashion the handles. Each strap went through the ring and the excess strap became the anchor point, using the carabiners to connect everything up. It worked rather well, and although a bit tricky to adjust was a good place to start.

The only issue, and I'm sure I could resolve it, was the overall adjustment to the length of the straps. It wasn't very much and that limited it's use.

So putting aside all good sense and practical thinking, I took the plunge and bought myself a TRX. Now I might have gone for the less expensive versions, but there's something about the original that is just appealing. Perhaps it's the the ease of adjusting the straps to equal lengths because of the small amount of play in them, perhaps it's just the TRX logo and the black and yellow combination!

Having unpacked it and checked everything was in order, I set out for the local park to try it out.

My anchor point was a basketball hoop-not the hoop but the upright. It was just the right sort of height for me at least, and I had no problem wrapping the securing webbing around a fixed point and attaching the TRX straps.

I chose to do a series of fairly simple exercises. No point falling over trying to do a handstand press up first time around. My chosen routine wasn't scientifically planned, but included some simple bicep curls, chest presses, flyes, rows, squats and a core exercise that was very entertaining to try! Once you're feet are in the stirrups you discover quite how strong, or weak, your core muscles actually are on this thing.

If you want a go-anywhere, gym-in-a-bag solution then you have to try TRX or something similar.

Functional discipleship

I bet someone else has used this phrases somewhere else before I have, but it's a term I'm beginning to think about using to describe a pattern of discipleship that prepares us to function within the setting of our everyday lives. I know that all discipleship should do this, but too often our programmes are actually geared to making us better at being followers of Christ in church rather than in the world. Or so it sometimes seems.

From an exercise point of view, we talk about functional fitness to describe exercise that in some way mimics daily tasks and helps us develop appropriate fitness for those tasks. When you go into a gym you might see people using free weights (barbells and dumbbells) or resistance machines to isolate particular muscles. But very few of our daily movements isolate muscles. More often than not they are compound movements involving groups of muscles. Having big biceps and well defined pectoral muscles might look good in the mirror, but it won't help you get out of your chair!

A second principle of exercise that might be helpful when thinking about discipleship is about the core. Our core provides the foundation for all pour movements. A strong core means efficient and smooth movements. A weak core leads to poor posture and inefficient movement that typically involves compensation by recruiting other muscles to help with tasks done by muscles that have grown weak.

So how would this apply to being a follower of Jesus Christ?

First of all we would need to think about what constitutes our core. What drives every movement of the disciple? Are they simply the core disciplines of prayer, bible reading, fellowship and witness, or are there more things that are core, or maybe fewer things or even just different things.

Secondly we need to think about what is needed to help us function properly as followers of Jesus partnering with him in his mission.

I haven't got a prescription for this as yet, maybe you have some thoughts. I guess the thing that floats around the back of my mind is this idea that maybe we don't necessarily need lots of theological teaching in the church in order to ensure we're picking the correct doctrines, we just need to figure out how to live for the gospel. After all, we will have an eternity to discover how wrong our theology is, there are thousands of people around us who don't have that option.

On becoming a PT and leaves of absence

As you all probably know, PT is an abbreviation for Personal Trainer. I mention that because I know that all too often we get used to using language specific to certain environments and cultures that doesn't translate easily for people outside that community. Hmmm. Remind you of any particular community like the church for example?

Anyway, I finessed my level 3 PT course yesterday and am emerging back into the normal world of not getting up at 5:30 and not spending my whole day in a gym. It's been an interesting experience to say the least.

Now just to be absolutely clear again, this is not a career change. I have not left the ministry as many seem to think. What I am doing is exploring pathways that will allow me to be self-supporting while serving the mission of God. If someone came along and offered to cover the costs of a basic stipend I wouldn't say no, but I think I'd do it on the understanding that I would continue to pursue my studies while seeking to learn how to be missional in my community. Not because I like to be awkward, but because I think there is a need to find new ways of expressing leadership without having to add more and more paid staff to an organisation. I do not believe that the mission of God is a business that needs to be managed. It is an adventure that needs to be explored.

Because I am no longer in pastoral charge of a church or in some other form of denominationally recognised ministry, I have to take a leave of absence. I understand this, but it rankles with me. For the last four weeks I've spent my day with a great bunch of people who wouldn't normally cross my path or me theirs. We've sat together, learnt together, exercised and stretched together. We've laughed and shared stories, measured each others body fat, and debated the use of supplements (generally speaking, don't waste you money, just buy better quality food!)

Throughout all that time I've tried as best I can to not be overzealous and preach but rather simply be there amongst them answering whatever questions someone has for me, and there have been a few. I feel more engaged in real ministry even though I feel totally inadequate for the task. If that's what leaving the ministry means, then I'm glad I've left, although of course I haven't!

Time to leave that one alone I think. I must write to the ministry department in the next week or so and share my thoughts with them. I'm sure they understand more than we credit them, but the no-man's land feeling doesn't help.

Back to PT-ing. I'll write another blog post about how learning about exercise has helped me reflect on discipleship. Perhaps Paul was onto a good illustration when he talked about athletes preparing themselves. Perhaps we need functional discipleship in the same way we need functional fitness!

Suspension Training

One of the guys in the PT course was telling me about suspension training with a thing called a TRX. I'd never heard of it before, so I looked it up and it certainly looks interesting! Mind you at the price of a kit (£150+) it ought to be exciting.

A search for an alternative threw up some possibilities. So far the Rip 60 looks good value, but I just found a UK alternative called Flexstrap which looks rather inviting.

Short of poping to Halfords for some luggage straps and the Ellis Brigham for a Caribiner or two, these look good value at £60. I shall have to put them on my wish list!

Evangeliguilt

These past few weeks have been interesting to say the least. The learning curve has been quite steep, and if it were not for my previous experience and study of anatomy, physiology and nutrition, I don't think I could have passed the exams. It's not that they were particularly difficult, just that the time I've spent travelling to and from the gym hasn't left me much time for home study.
So what must it be like for those folk in our churches who commute everyday and upon whose shoulder we place the burden of Bible study? I say burden not because it's a tiresome weight to carry, although I wouldn't be surprised to hear it described that way, but because of the pressure it applies. It's hard enough to to get through and ordinary day without some sense of guilt over something, let alone adding a sense of failure because we're not reading our
Bibles and interrogating the text on a daily basis.
It's made me wonder again about how we can make the Bible accessible and engaging and yet avoid the extremes of either bit-sizing it to fit a busy lifestyle or making it unmanageable. It's a tough challenge and maybe it's a challenge that reflects on the role of preaching too.
I'm sure I'm repeating myself when I say that I think preaching should be inspirational all of the time. There is a place for teaching, no doubt about that, but our preaching should inspire people to go out and solve problems, address issues and live differently rather than look for alterations and keywords in texts. Perhaps our goal if we preach on a Sunday morning ought to be to give everyone one thought to ponder through the week. Something they can carry with them to turn over in their minds and figure out how to apply in their lives.
After my current course finishes, which should be Tuesday if I pass everything, I hope to take a little time to look at the principles of personal training and see what they have to say to the concept of discipleship. There are some interesting principles and parallels to be explored. Maybe I need to write a programme for getting spiritually healthy and spiritual fit while I write programmes for physical health and fitness.
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There's not really a lot to reflect on this week. It's just been another week of getting up at 5:30 to go to the gym to learn more stuff. We did have a good day on Monday at the tennis club Jubilee party. Like churches, clubs rely upon a few enthusiasts to get things organised and clearly the enthusiasts had done a great job. Now we're not "in a church", as people like to point out to me (I'll moan about that in a minute or two!), we had the chance to not be at a church-based celebration. Probably the first time for 20 plus years that we've been able to do this. In some ways it was remarkably similar to a church event, and in others clearly not. Somewhere there has to be a balance between organising a church-based event and inventing people to that, and on the other hand encouraging folk to attend non-church events where they can interact with friends and fellow human beings. Perhaps if we did more of the latter we'd realise that the missing are not as unhappy as we think they should be.

The PT course is now underway. The downside of doing a Personal Trainer course is that you think you know about exercise! I'm supposed to be a professional, but I feel like an amateur in comparison to some. As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of the gym. It's great to get on the treadmill and walk and run, and to pick up a few weights and put some of those hidden muscles to work, but overall the gym is not an exciting environment for me. Hopefully I'll be able to do some creative, non-gym based things in the community for people who don't want to be athletes but would like to not get out of breath walking to the shops!

Designing exercise programmes is quite a complicated job. There are lots of things to take into consideration. Repeating the same routine over and over again is not only monotonous bordering on boring, but in the end once you've adapted to the routine you won't see any changes because your body won't be asked to do more. So you need to keep upping the intensity or frequency or type or time spent exercising. Then there's this thing I've been reading about called periodisation with micro cycles, mesocycles and macrocylces. It might as well have a unicycle in for brain to get on and ride around in a state of confusion!

I have 7 more days to get my head around it all and then the rest of my life to build the experience to do it as well as I can. Maybe I'll enlist the help of few friends to practice on. At least if they injure themselves I can offer remedial massage!

Before I go, let me point you to a short post by Simon Jones. Simon and I were at college together and he often writes thougthful stuff on his blog. His most recent post raises a pertinent point about what we focus upon as churches.

Still on the planet!

Time certainly flies around here, and you don't even need to be having fun for it to happen! For the last two weeks Ive been getting up at 5:30, catching the 6:58 train and spending all day in the gym. Monday to Friday commuting just like I remember it. Ah, the joy!! The reason for all this resides in my brilliant idea to add a personal trainer qualification to my portfolio. So far I've passed the gym instructors part of the course and the next two weeks is the PT bit. To be honest, I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not the "in your face" sort of person that seems to be the industry standard for PT's. Ah well, as long as I get through the course I can then stamp my own personality of the world of personal training.

The point of all this is not to become some sort of gym-bore. I'd like to work with people where they are, in the park etc., and not be stuck in the gym environment surrounded by people lifting weights that are too heavy for them and the thing they are trying to do. Hopefully the PT qualification will integrate nicely with the sports massage and will open a few doors to a few clients so I can earn some money. But I also hope that it will help me get to know the community a little better. I have these idealised pictures of me and a small group of people getting fitter as we have fun in the local park and walking around the village. I told you it was rather idealised.

Away from the rigours of PT qualification, I've learnt a lot just by travelling daily on the train and tube. I've remembered just how draining it can be and how little you want to do when you get home at the end of a long day. I've realised again how important it is for those of us in church leadership (I may not be in  a church, but I don't see myself as having left church leadership just yet) to remember that and not prioritise church over family or even friendship. It's a tough balance to hold, but I think I'd rather sway towards the priority of family and friends than church meetings and even dare one say Bible studies. For me, I'd rather get to heaven having known a lot of people, sought to share my faith with them, sought to help them reconnect with the God who misses them, rather than be able to answer obscure questions about abstruse passages of the Bible. I'm not sure I'm going to get tested on my theology on that great and final day.

In the end this al comes down to one simple truth. We all have a fixed amount of time in any given day or week or month. How we use that time is largely up to us. Yes we have the demands of our jobs if we are fortunate to be in employment. and work is where we spend most of our waking time. If we are part of a family, this too takes up a fair amount of our time. The rest is up for grabs. This is Oldenburg's Third Place, and this is where the church must find it's place. If it can't find it's place here, then it will have to take time and resources away from the other two, and if it absorbs all of the third place time, then it will exclude connecting with those who are missing from the kingdom.

Working out the balance is the challenge we face. Perhaps I can figure that out on the train tomorrow morning between reviewing all the muscle origins, insertions and actions I'm trying to learn!

A Busy Week

In a moment of sheer madness I decided that adding a Personal Trainer qualification to my Sports Massage would be a good idea and might open a door to some potential income while I continue my trying as a therapist. So I signed up for a 4-week intensive course which began this week.

At the time of signing up I didn't realise how much online reading there was going to be. I knew there was some, but it turns out to be more than I imagined. So now I'm trying to learn Pt and Sports Massage and my brain hurts. It hurts a lot.

What this leaves me with is the thought that if only I'd behaved myself and been a a good little minister, then none of this would have happened. I could have continued to think that one day I might do something in the area of sports and bodywork and/or fitness, but never actually needing to apply myself to it. Dreams are easy things with which to live as long as you don't try to realise them.

I, of course, am mad. Completely and utterly mad. No one in their right mind would toss everything in the air at 54 and start over. At 54 you should be planning how you're going to spend your retirement.

So here I sit, after a long and draining week of learning to be a gym instructor (you have to do that first) and then a full day doing MET (that's a massage thing) and I feel like giving it all up as my brain slowly melts as I try and remember my ischial tuberosity from my anterior, inferior iliac spine.

Madness. Sheer madness.

Change-city, an uncomfortable place to visit

I was at a conference a long time ago in the US and the speaker kept referring to Scare-city during his talk. I thought this was some sort of colloquialism that all the Americans understood and I would eventually discover a context as I listened that would make it all clear. Well it did become clear when I realised that he was talking about scarcity not some mythical place called Scare City. The joy of a common language!

On the other hand, Change City is no error in wither pronunciation or hearing, but the place in which I seem to have tank up residence these last few months, and it's far from a comfortable residency I can tell you. Change is always hard, even good change. On Monday I start the intensive four-week part of a personal trainer's qualification. In my crazy, idea overloaded mind, it made good sense a month or so ago. Personal training seemed to fit nicely alongside the massage course and the nutritional stuff. Now I wonder if I've made an error of judgment and taken on too much. Why didn't I just get a job stacking shelves at Tesco or working nights at a hotel. Well because there weren't any for one thing. Add to that the sense of being unemployable, and you get the picture. It's a painful place to be.

Of course, in a year's time when I'm looking for premises for my new clinic and wondering how I'm going to fit all these new clients into my already busy schedule it will all be different. But that's a dream, not even a vision, at the moment and there is no promise of reality.

Somehow I have to find a way of living with the sense of failure and the fear of future failure that surround me in this oddly named city in which I've taken up residence. I need to get to know the neighbours. The one thing all the inhabitants of change have in common is the insecurity of what bough them here. Some are fearless in their pursuit of a new outcome, others are more tentative, hurt by their past and paralysed by their present, they can't see very far into the future. But you can't settle down in a place of change, you can only adjust to the pace of change. Change will go on around you, whether you want it to or not.

I want the change. I want to explore this confused and incomplete idea that church can be more than just a gathering of equally disappointed people who think the world is a dangerous place and needs to adapt to us before we adapt to it. But I'm not a good adapter.

Well it's time to stop rambling and at the very least help this bee that can't adapt to glass and is stuck in our new dining room tiring itself out in a win attempt to fly through the invisible barrier that confronts it.

Makes me wonder what my invisible barrier is. The existence of which would at least explain the headache!

It's not as bad you think it is!

On the way home last night I caught a little bit of a Radio Four programme about society. In a nutshell the discussion centred around the theme that society is getting worse and we're destined to destruction. There were arguments for, and there were arguments against. 

What was interesting was that there was also some discussion about how we are programmed to pay attention to negative stimuli. For example, if you're wandering around the African pain and someone shouts, "Lion!" you take notice. If they said, "It's been four days and I haven't seen a lion," you'll probably ignore that and go about your foraging.

Setting aside arguments about evolution, I think this has profound implications for being good news people. If we too are predisposed to hear the negative above the positive, then we will look at the world around us and conclude that it's getting worse, but we'll take another step. We will add a layer of Biblical interpretation to that perspective and conclude that this is the way it will be and there' little to be done about it expect wait for the inevitable day of judgement.

But even that is not all we do. We assume that everyone else sees the same inevitable decline all them and has a similar sense of despair. We offer hope against this interpretive background, but what if it's not true? What if things are actually better than they once were? What shape our hope then? 

Now I'm fully aware of what the Bible says about the future and how we can understand that. I know that judgement is coming, but our anecdotal evidence for a worsening society and a theology predicated upon that may not hold up to inspection. 

Here's another thought. John Kramp in his book Out of their faces and into their shoes makes an interesting point when he suggests that the so-called lost (I prefer Jim Henderson's "missing" to lost) are in fact quite happy. In other words, people who do not share our faith position are not as miserable as we think they should be!

Because we are predisposed to react to the negative more than the positive, we more easily reinterpret things within that negative context. We may not mean to do it, but do it we do. 

So here's my question: How would our mission look if we took a more positive view of the people around us? If we all, and I mean all, carry the image of God, then how do we celebrate that in the people we meet? 

Maybe, after the celebration, we'll find a way of pointing them to a fuller expression of that image in Christ, rather than offer him as a get out jail free card.

First prayer adventure

Yesterday, Sunday, Anne and I ventured out into our new community to walk around and to pray a little. We're going to take as much time as it takes to figure out what to do next before we begin anything church-like. We have no fixed model to apply and no fixed agenda to follow. We do have a vision, but aren't making plans beyond taking a few simple steps.

The first thing we are doing is to settle down into life in the new house and new community. We'll try to get to know the neighbours and seek out people of peace with whom we can build relationships. How do we do this? We have no idea! All we know is that we are not looking for a place to hold a Sunday morning worship event.

There's already a sense of home about the place. Even the cats seem remarkably settled to the new house. Once the carpets are down and the boxes unpacked, it will feel so much different.

Without all the trapping of legacy church life, it's quite a challenge to think about how you go about being the presence of Christ in a community. To be honest, the traditional pattern of church probably gives us a false sense of security about our profile in a place. Asking yourself what church might look like for this community is probably a good place to start, but so easily confused with what we think from an insiders perspective.

Our dream, our vision, is to see a group of people, gathered in community, doing life and faith together, engaged in the mission of God. It really is that simple. How hard can it be?!

Fixed heating

I'm tempted to claim that I fixed the heating, but I didn't do anything other than poke around in the wiring centre to see what was going on. Having had no pump running and no apparent reason for said lack of action, I left the programmer running and yesterday morning I suddenly realised I could hear the pump running! We've had a few noises in the system this boring, but it seems to be firing up and working after a fashion.

Curtains are up in the bedroom, so we can sleep in the dark now! My next job is to get on with some studying for my courses, but practically speaking, I need to sort out a damaged stair riser and start planning how to level the floor in the kitchen diner. Plywood and self-levelling compound are the order of the day. Getting the cooker out of its rather tight gap will be a challenge. If I had the time and inclination, I'd adjust the gap, but it's only a matter of 2 millimetres and I don''t think it's quite worth the effort.

After that, it's tiling and retouching the paintwork that got damaged during the moving process. Sad to say we have yet to encounter a removal company that actually take as much care of our possessions as they say they will. Maybe we just get assigned to the fact that things will get damaged, but it's frustrating to not be told and to discover it for your self. Does an apology really cost that much?

As if there were't enough jobs to do!

The chaos of moving is slowly giving way to the chaos of settling in. We're waiting to hear form the capet company about when they are coming to door the floor coverings, so we're not unpacking too many boxes at the moment. We have also begun to think abut a plan for moving stuff around while they fit the carpets and vinyls too! Yes, it would have been easier to have the carpets fitted before we moved in, but that wasn't possible.

We spent yesterday boring hauling boxes into the loft. literally hauling them. I rigged up a hoist with some rope a over a beam and lifted the boxes while Anne was in the loft on the receiving end. She did a grand job with some heavy boxes.

Today the builders finished, so we can now set about the jobs that are down to me to do. I ned to level the kitchen floor before the vinyl arrives and fix a damaged stair riser when I find my wood glue (or buy some more!)

I think the next photo's will be of completed jobs and the carpets down.

And the unwanted job? Well that's the heating system. I got it working at the weekend, but when I put it on the other day it didn't work. I think I've traced the fault to the 3-way value, which looks unpromising for a quick fix. Some valves have replacement heads, but this one looks like a whole value job, which in turn might  means raining the whole system down. Might be a job for a plumber, I'll see how I feel.

Moving Day

Everything is in a box somewhere, and if it's not in a box yet, it will be in the next few hours! It's just before 6:00am and moving day has finally arrived. In 32 years of being married, this will be our 9th move, and for me it will be number 13 overall if you don't count university, 15 if you do! That's an average of just less than 4 years between moves.

I don't like moving!

This time I hope we will be settled for a reasonable length of time, but how long is that? 4, 5 10 years? Who knows! The problem with moving is all the hassle of finding a new home and organising everything. It's quite exciting to go and explore a new place, but the pain of packing up and unpacking can far outweigh the excitement of what's new.

So, in a few hours we will be in our new, not quite finished home a few miles away. Not quite the cross-country move that has been the feature of our lives as we've criss-crossed the Eastern half of Southern and Middle England over these past 32 years. There's still much to do at the house, but it's certainly liveable and the builders should be finished by the end of the week, maybe next week.

Time now for a shower and breakfast, then it's dismantle the book case and wardrobes, take down the network and internet and get over to the new house to clean and prepare for the arrival of the furniture later this afternoon.

How long does a promise take?

For example, there was God’s promise to Abraham. Since there was no one greater to swear by, God took an oath in his own name, saying: “I will certainly bless you, and I will multiply your descendants beyond number.” Then Abraham waited patiently, and he received what God had promised.

Now when people take an oath, they call on someone greater than themselves to hold them to it. And without any question that oath is binding. God also bound himself with an oath, so that those who received the promise could be perfectly sure that he would never change his mind. So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary. Jesus has already gone in there for us. He has become our eternal High Priest in the order of Melchizedek.

Heb. 6:13-20

Read this passage yesterday. In the previous section, there was the great promise from God that he does not forget what I have done. It seems that this promise is reaffirmed as God speaks about blessing Abraham. Now I know that these are the words of the writer of the letter, and not God speaking directly and personally. On the other hand, God uses his word, the Bible, to speak directly, so I have no issue with reflecting upon the personal application of these words.

But the key is not the promise of God so much as the patience of Abraham. I know the story, I know how impatient Abraham actually was at the time. It must have been quite an internal struggle.

"Lord, how long do I have to be patient?" I ask this question a lot. Abraham waited a lifetime to see the ultimate expression of God's promise fulfilled. Am I willing to wait that long?



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Just in time

There are moments when a simple act or word of encouragement comes at just the right time. None more so than when God speaks through the Bible as one reads through it. Here was my "just in time" moment from yesterday:

God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. (Heb. 6:10)

Now you may not think it means too much, but to me it was a very important moment, and one I would have missed had I not slowed down long enough to read or been rushed into the busyness of the day to have though I could always read it later.

It's not so much the daily discipline of reading that's key, at least not for me, but the systematic reading that's important. I may spend several days pondering this verse, I may read something new. If there's one thing I've learned over the last 30+ years, it's that we don't really dwell in God's word as much as we ought. We move on to today's note, driven by some sort of evangelical legalism designed to prove we are spiritual. In truth, all it actually does is demonstrate how shallow our spirituality has become as we strive to add another star to our loyalty badge.

And I'm no different. My spiritual life is shallow too. I take my encouragement where I can find it.

I'm glad that today I can remind myself that God does not forget what I've spent my life doing for the last 20 years and more, even if it's been less than effective for some.

Lazy or busy?

Do you sometimes find it hard to distinguish busyness from laziness? No. Well that's good. But I'm not sure I can be so certain. Let me explain.

Most of us experience the situation where the job we have to do expands to fit the time we have available. I'm a deadline sort of person and it takes enormous effort to discipline myself to do things before the deadline looms. The thing that helps me is knowing how inefficient working to a deadline can be. The pressure focuses the mind, but you make a lot of mistakes that you would normally catch if you had the time to review and rewrite what you've produced. My solution is usually to set an earlier dealing and even a series of mini-deadlines. To complete a course I was once doing, I set up deadlines for assignments in my diary that went from blue to green to red as they went from coming up to imminent to missed. The objective was to complete the assignment before it went red and if I managed it before it went green then I got a day off!

How does this help distinguish between being lazy and being busy? Well, when you work from home with only yourself to check your output, it's easy to assume either extreme is the case. Because there is always something to do, you think you are busy, but in fact you might just be avoiding things and lacking the discipline and motivation to organise yourself properly. Believe I know how that feels.

On the other hand, it's so easy to presume that you are being lazy because you aren't getting everything done, when the truth is that you simply have too many things to do and you're not focussing on anything for any length of time.

In my experience both of these things looks remarkably the same.

In the end I can't seem to get away from the need to practice good habits of self-disciple and honest reflection without self-recriminations. Learning to apologise to yourself and then getting on with what needs to be done is just part of the process.

Over the years I've had to learn how to work with my internal wiring without allowing it to become an excuse for failing to make changes that will help me achieve more. Asking good personal questions is important too. For example, ask yourself how you can do it more efficiently rather than why you are no good at being organised enough in the first place.

Now, talking of self-disciple and getting things done, I'm off to play tennis for a while and then it's back to sort out some paperwork that I've been avoiding, and do some coursework reading and preparation for the weekend. That and decorate the new house, refit the radiators, commission the heating system, choose floor coverings, go to the tip, get Anne's birthday present.....

A Kitchen Begins to Take Shape

The plastering is complete and is drying out slowly. It's really frustrating not being able to paint, but the slower the better when it comes to drying out plaster. But the good news is that the units have arrived and some have been set in place.

It actually is beginning to look like a kitchen now, and the lights are nice too.

I busied myself giving the bathroom another coat of paint on the walls and ceiling. The shower is in, but not wired up.

We went for an electric shower because having a mixer tap shower over the bath would have required raising the height of the tank in the loft. A job too far when an electric shower will do the job nicely and without the need to fire up the immersion heater or the boiler.

Jobs left to do in the bathroom include the floor, the skirting-board, the light, the woodwork, the bath panel, and sealing around the bath, washbasin and anywhere else that needs a squirt of silicone!

So it can't be declared the one room finished yet.

I also put a coat of paint on the ceiling in the study. Mixed some PVA into the paint to get it to stick to the new plaster. Quicker than mixing it with water, applying it with a brush and getting it all down my sleeve while doing it.

I also wasted some time painting a wall that I forgot I was going to paper. Maybe one day someone will buy the house, strip the paper and wonder why only half of it is painted.

I'll probably do some more painting, or maybe even get some wallpaper up tomorrow, but I have to go off in the afternoon for something, so it will probably be a morning and some part of the evening. Friday is a busy day with two funerals to do and then the weekend is a college weekend, so it looks like next week will be when more gets done.

Questions we should ask, and question we maybe shouldn't ask

My friend Rich Shorter, a church planter (everyone needs a label :)) has got a seat in the audience for an upcoming mayoral edition of Question Time. He has had to prepare a question or two, and he asked for help via Facebook.

As a Christian leader, involved in a local community, this is the question Rich has chosen to ask:

"Several of the candidates accept responsibility for the Olympics, who wants to accept responsibility for changing the fact 1 of 4 children live in poverty in London?"

This is a great question, and it's the kind of question christians ought to be asking their elected, and for matter any unelected, representatives. Too often our "Christian" concerns focus on the hard time we are having. We ask, "Why can't a Christian wear a cross or a fish badge?" rather than, "What's happening about justice for the poor and the marginalised?"

While we continue to ask self-centred questions, we will remain rooted in a selfish, dare one say middle-class, expression of the gospel. An expression that I'm not sure Jesus would recognise as authentic. It's not that some of the questions we have aren't valid, it's more that they might just not be the most important questions to ask.

Read Rich's blog post to hear his reasons for wanting to ask his question, and then think about the questions you might ask and why you might ask them.

And, if you want to get yourself thinking about the relationship of the gospel to the big questions, try reading Everything Must Change or Irresistible Revolution.

Style in the bathroom!

How's this for a stylish towel rail in our new bathroom!

The tiling is done and grouted, just one repair needed around the shower. Sadly a tile has been damaged as a result of the shower going in, but that's repairable and will hardly be noticeable when it's done.

We've started painting and the toilet and washbasin have been fitted, so once I rehang the door and the electrics have been done, the bathroom will just need the floor covering done.

One room almost finished, eight more to go!!

The good news is that the kitchen has arrived, the new radiators are on the walls and the plumber is coming back today to work on those things.

The new plaster is drying out nice and slowly, although that's a bit frustrating because we want to get painting, but it simply won't stick to wet plaster. Some areas are dry, so we can set to work on some of the ceilings. The main bedroom is ready to be lined and painted, as is the spare room when I think about it. The landing, stairs and hall need sanding down, lining and then painting.

Plenty for me to get on with over the next couple of weeks before we move.