As Threatened...

I mentioned in my last blog entry that I'd tell you some of the consequences of the Screen Fast here at Canowindra, but before that I'd like to plug another blog. My pal and bosom buddy Terry Wright has finally joined the digital age of "BY THE SEVEN HELLS, I'M GOING TO RANT AND YOU WILL LISTEN TO ME!" and started blogging. His blog has inspired me a little, and helped me to see how it should be done. You can find his musings here -

http://aardvarkconundrum.blogspot.com/

I've really enjoyed reading his reminiscences and thoughts on stuff, even though he has all the literary panache of a sloth who has somehow got his claws on a box of child's crayons.

Anyway, on with the show. As you may have noted from a previous post, for a month I challenged myself to remove 'unproductive screen time' from my life. Without wishing to argue what counts as 'productive' or not, this meant that I resolved to cease from purposeless Internet surfing, playing video games and watching movies or television. As well as increasing the amount of work that I got through, this left me with some free time to fill. I decided to fill it with things that contributed to something - in other words, I tried to make my free time productive rather than simply amusing. It's a bit like the story that one of the guys here told me recently - two men can be making bricks, but if you ask them what they are doing one will tell you that he's making bricks and the other will tell you that he's building a cathedral. I wanted to make sure that even with my 'free' time I was building a cathedral. Not literally, of course. That would be missing the point of the metaphor. No, what I wanted was to do things that I considered fun/relaxing but would also contribute to the Kingdom of God in some way.

For me, one of my current outlets is board games. I like to play board games. In fact, I made a conscious decision last year to make that my primary hobby rather than video games, simply because it forced me to mix with people and build up relationships. But playing board games depends on having willing victims to play with. So what else could I do with my alone time?

A couple of years ago, one of the Cornerstone guys (Pete Volkofsky - who the spell-checker tells me should be called Pete Volkswagon) was talking about how we can frustrate God through what we do with out time. His point was that maybe we have gifts or opportunities that God has given us, but by not using them we are frustrating what God wants to do through us. Before anyone starts deconstructing the theology behind statements like this, I'll jump in and say that it really challenged me. I knew that there were opportunities that I had that I was not taking full advantage of, and that it was disobedient of me to not do so.

As a result of Pete's challenge I went out and finished a piece of Interactive Fiction that I was writing called A Fine Day for Reaping. It placed fairly respectably in the annual IF Comp, but more importantly it actually won an XYZZY award for 'Best Story'. I've been deliberately vague there, so if you don't have a clue what I'm talking about then Google is your friend.

Anyway, that went off the boil again until the Screen Fast, which I took as another challenge from God to make sure that I was making my time count and using the gifts that He has given me. I've begun exploring my Interactive Fiction projects again, with the aim of trying to tell stories that are worth telling. I'm not sure how well I'll go with that, but we'll see.

The point of this post really is to challenge those of you who are reading to think about how you spend your 'free' time. The temptation we face is to compartmentalise our lives into various sections that don't interact with each other. Our work doesn't touch our home lives which doesn't touch our social lives which doesn't touch our free time which doesn't touch our work lives and so on. The real danger is that those of us who are Christians can divorce God from an aspect of our life. In fact, it would be wrong to even think of God as just a part of our lives - He should be the meta narrative which shapes everything in our lives. So we shouldn't just be looking at how our work and spiritual lives can interact (for example) but rather we should be submitting our work life to our spiritual life. This also goes for our spare time. It's not a part of life that is exempt from God's influence because it's my time. Rather, it's an opportunity to be free to do the things that we enjoy doing for God's glory. Maybe for you that simply means that you stop doing your hobby by yourself, but you actually get out and meet like-minded people with the aim of being the presence of Christ in their lives. Maybe - like me - the thing that you actually enjoy doing is something that you can blatantly subvert for God's purposes. If so, then do it! No-one said that you couldn't seek first the Kingdom and have fun at the same time.

Here's a quote from Frederick Buechner, which - if you let it - could change the way that you think about God's plan for you.

"The place that God calls you to is the place where your deepest gladness and the world's deepest hunger will meet."

So what does that place look like for you? Where do you find joy, but also see a deep need? Answer that question, and then you'll know what you should be doing with your free time.

Life after Death

So we're in the post-Easter period now (both in terms of 2009 and human history in general) and I think that we're also entering a difficult period in the life of a community. At least, that's what it seems like to me. The honeymoon period is over and the realities of work, study and life together are really beginning to sink their pointy teeth into the shoulder-region of our collective expectations and experiences.

That was a rather pretentious way of saying that everyone seems to be feeling a bit tired and jaded at the moment.

Ruth and I have our own reasons for feeling this way. Baby number four will be slithering into the world sometime in the next four weeks (God willing) and I'm beginning to get the old "What Are We Doing?" jitters. Having a new child around tends to irrecoverably change your life again, after having just about got used to child number three. What's more, we're still in Bridging Visa limbo - and probably will be until we've had the new baby and managed to get a passport and medical for him/her - and I'm still learning and finding my feet in this whole teaching and discipleship thing. In other words, I feel very much like I'm in a state of flux at the moment and I'm not really very good at handling that kind of thing. In fact, you might say that I'm not a flux capacitor. What I will say, however, is that I'm a whole lot better than I used to be. I think this is a result of actually beginning to learn from the experiences that God has inflicted on us. I have this sneaking suspicion that He might actually be able to be trusted with everything. Not bad, considering that this July/August will mark the 16th anniversary of me starting my serious attempt to follow Jesus. From those months onwards, I will officially be able to claim that I have been a Christian for most of my life. It's about time that I learned something.

I think that next time that I write, I might share with you some of the changes that have resulted from the screen fast that we shared in over Lent. It was a really helpful time for me. Now, I'm off to watch Je Souhaite from The X-Files season seven. Sounds French.

Easter is Coming...

Well, we're just about a week away from Good Friday so I suppose that I'd better get my Easter hat on. I believe that it's actually called an Easter bonnet.

It's pretty scary to think that the baby is well on its way now. There will soon be six of us milling around trying to get on with our lives. It's hard enough with five, let alone an extra one. Still, it'll bring some much needed balance to the household as we will be able to form two factions of three each - rather than three versus two. If we have another daughter than there will be the further balance of three blokes and three girls. Otherwise, the battle of the sexes will tip even further in my favour.

Calvin is in a play that's been written and produced by the locals. It's for the children to perform, but it's become something of a big production over the years. It runs four performances from Thursday to Sunday, and they get fair crowds at each show. They had their first production today, and Calvin has a speaking part. He's memorised this very complex poem that he has to recite - he's pretty gifted in that regard. Apparently he was due to go on but was nowhere to be seen so they had to go ahead and miss out his poem. It turns out that he had been struck by an attack of the nerves and had to go to the toilet just before he went on. Consequently he missed it. Poor boy. He was a bit upset, but hopefully he'll feel better tomorrow as he will hopefully get his first performance under his belt.

Things are still going well for us here. We're enjoying things in the Aussie country and the community here at Canowindra are great people to share life with. I'm really enjoying the teaching still and benefiting from the interaction with the guys in the classroom. I think that God has been gracious to me really, and He seems to have spoken through me a few times - despite me being new at this. I suppose I'd better make sure that I don't get 'not new' at this, as that's probably when I'll stop trusting in God to make up for my failings. Still, He wouldn't have put me here if He didn't think I was up to it. I guess it's all possible due to Easter anyway, so I hope that all of you who are reading this have a good one!