one of my favourite pics ever! some friends of mine ran a worship camp in the middle of a farm in Namibia and i was part of helping put the thing together - one of the best aspects was being out of cellphone contact and apart from some electricity for instruments it was amazing to be almost completely 'unplugged' for the four days of camping [knowing that hot water could be boiled on the fire [...]
Wow, this is a great little psalm - just a delightful praise-filled mantra, but there were one or two lines which really jumped out at me: verse 9 reads, 'Within your temple, O God, we meditate on your unfailing love.' if you read the second half of the Bible carefully, you quickly find out that God's temple is us - the Holy Spirit of Jesus resides in us, guiding and nudging and pointing us back towards God... [...]
In Mark 4 verse 1 to 20 Jesus tells the parable of the sower and the seed that confuses His disciples so much that He has to sit with them later and explain it a little more clearly to them - and even today it seems we have different ideas of what He was saying or what He could be meaning so i guess it makes sense to wrestle with it and see what makes [...]
my cousin Laura died two days ago. she was 30. recently married. then cancer reared its ugly head. absolute tragedy. just before she went into hospital i did get to send her an email and let her know that i loved her and was praying for her and her family and hoping for a miracle from God [which sadly never happened, not how i was hoping anyways] so it was really sad, but there was [...]
In Mark 3 verse 31 to 35 we see a very interesting dialogue take place as Jesus is informed that His family is waiting outside for Him... what does this mean for us? check it out here. to move to the next story of the sower and the seed, click here.
okay, so that title doesn't apply AT ALL here, in fact it the opposite of applies, but it was likely to draw a lot more readers than 'i like my friends' and look, there you are so hi! arrived back home after a good 32 hours or so of travelling [if you exclude the New Jersey/New York trip we took with airforce Jon to get to the airport] from JFK to Dubai for eight hour [...]
Wow! 19 months flew by, just like... well 570 days, really. June last year, after about four months of weekly Skype calls with our present and to be future bossman Darin Petersen, the beautiful Val [tbV] and i arrived in Kensington, Philadelphia, Americaland to live and work at the Simple Way non-profit as part of the first batch of an internship program [which was later upgraded to a residency program when they saw our skills, [...]
so probably close to 15 years ago i wrote a challenging email to a couple of friends of mine about some aspect of following Jesus... a week later i did the same... at some point i told someone about it and they asked to be added and so i added them... pretty soon i started spam-inviting people from the typical cheesy group Christian emails that used to hit my inbox and some of them decided [...]
As we look at Mark chapter 3 verse 20-27 i take a bit of a reverse glimpse of it by looking at denominations vs denominationalism [or as i sometimes refer to them in talks as demonisations which is what we make of denominations when we start worshipping them or who they are] and encourage each of us, whether we belong to a denomination or not [don't get me started on "non-denominational"], to be keeping the [...]
next up, we see Jesus select the 12 who He designates as apostles and makes some very interesting choices... so take a look at Mark 3 verse 13 to 19 to see the next post on unity, not denominationalism go here.