A Visual Interpretation of Scripture

Can a morning quiet time be legitimate if it’s focussed around a single line of scripture, a sketch pad (or in this case, Post-It Note) and a Luxar Micropoint drawing pen?

A three pack of coloured condoms

My wife purchased a three pack of coloured condoms this morning, and then proceeded to visit me at lunchtime to show me. Not satisfied with showing me, she had to open the packet and put one on. It was a little hard getting the condom on the firm hardware, but she managed in the end.

After that exhausting experience, we had lunch, where by my wife discovered that she wasn’t happy with just my company. She wanted Frank.

To lie and insult.

I was a little tired at church last night (due to my wife insisting we watch the remaining episodes of Carnivale S2 in one hit, and not getting to bed until 3am) but was soon snapped back to alertness when Frank was being confirmed as a minister and was called to ‘lie and insult’.

Hold on just a second I thought, that can’t be right. To lie and insult might be a good motto for talk back radio, but surely I must have misheard it in relation to being a minister… maybe Frank was actually being called to be the light and the salt….

What Colour Are You?

Bono would like you to be RED.

Another "What I've done" meme

Only because Violet did it… (Obviously I follow trends instead of starting them!)

Filled in with an x:

( ) Smoked a joint
( ) Done cocaine
(X) Been in love
( ) Had a threesome
(X) Been dumped
(X) Shoplifted
(X) Had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back
( ) Been arrested
( ) Made out with a stranger
( ) Gone on a blind date
(X) Had a crush on a teacher
(X) Been to Europe
( ) Been to Canada
( ) Been to Mexico
(X) Seen someone die
( ) Thrown up in a bar
(X) Met a celebrity
(X) Met someone from the internet in person
(X) Been moshing at a concert
(X) Gone backstage at a concert
(X) Lain outside in the grass and watched cloud shapes go by
( ) Made a snow angel
(X) Flown a kite
(X) Cheated while playing a game
(X) Been lonely
(X) Fallen asleep at work
( ) Fallen asleep at school
( ) Used a fake ID
( ) Been kicked out of a bar
(X) Felt an earthquake (well, duh - I live in New Zealand)
(x) Touched a snake
(X) Slept beneath the stars
(x) Been robbed
(X) Won a contest
(X) Run a red light (but stooped halfway through the intersection in a cloud of blue smoke)
( ) Been suspended from school
( ) Had braces (and have the teeth to prove it)
(X) Felt like an outcast
(X) Eaten a whole pint of ice cream in one night
(X) Had deja vu
(X) Totaled a car (well, not quite but came close last night)
( ) Stolen a car
(x) Hated the way you look
(X) Witnessed a crime
( ) Been to a strip club
(X) Been to the opposite side of the world
(X) Swum in the ocean
(X) Felt like dying
( ) Cried yourself to sleep
(x) Sung karaoke (SingStar)
(X) Paid for a meal with only coins (at McDonalds)
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t
(X) Made prank phone calls
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(X) Had a bonfire on the beach
(x) Crashed a party
( ) Seen a tornado
(X) Had a wish come true
( ) Gone bungee jumping
(X) Screamed in public
( ) Told a complete stranger you loved them
( ) Had a one night stand
(X) Kissed a mirror
(X) Had a dream that you married someone (and I did!)
( ) Gotten your fingers stuck together with super glue
( ) Been a cheerleader
(x) Sat on a roof top
(X) Talked on the phone for more than 6 hours straight (probably, if not came close)
(X) Stayed up all night
(X) Not taken a shower for three days (at least once a year)
( ) Made contact with a ghost while playing a Ouija board
( ) Had more than 30 pairs of shoes at a time
( ) Gone streaking
(X) Been skinny dipping
(X) Been pushed into a pool/lake with all your clothes on
(x) Had sex in a public or semi-public place
( ) Been kissed by a complete stranger
(X) Broken a bone
(X) Caught a butterfly
( ) Mooned/flashed someone
( ) Had someone moon/flash you
(X) Cheated on a test
(X) Forgotten someone’s name
(X) Slept naked

One point five hour commute

I set a new personal record tonight on the way home. It took me approximately one and a half hours to drive home.

Of course half of that time I wasn’t even in my car.

You see I was driving along the back motorway, moving onto the Puhinui Bridge when a car decides to make a sudden lane change, in the wet, in a 100km zone.

Luckily I was preparing to slow down as I was approaching backed up traffic. Needless to say that my foot depressed the brake peddle a lot faster and harder than I was aiming to, locking up my wheels on the wet surface and making myself a passenger in the car I was driving.

I slammed into the side of the fairly new Daihatsu Pyzar and bounced off into the concrete barrier where I came to a stop. The Daihatsu however seemed to be keen to just continue on. Fortunately he had second thoughts and pulled over, and backed up towards me.

It was about now that I realised I was going to have to breath in to get out of my door, as it didn’t want to open as far as it had just 20 minutes ago. The passenger door wasn’t an option, what with the car being hard up against a concrete barrier.

I wrote down the details of the Daihatsu and then approached the driver, asking for his driver’s license. He seemed hesitant, but returned to his car, only to come back to me and apologise, but his son had thrown it out the window when he picked him up from school.

Oooookaaaay.

He then seemed distracted when I asked him for his name, after some pestering his partner emerged from the car and told him to spell it out for me, which he then did.

After the exchange they went on their merry way whilst I surveyed the damage.

Thankfully the car was still drivable. Unfortunately the wheel had taken most of the impact. The wheel cover was spread all over the left hand lane of the motorway and the tire had a nice puncture wound in the side where the metal lip of the wheel had been bent back into the tire.

I was going to have to get dirty whilst I changed a tire on the side of a busy motorway. Lucky for me I had managed to ‘park’ the car right against the barrier so had a fairly safe amount of room.

Of course by the time I got going again, I was stuck in the middle of rush hour. Still, I managed to set a new personal record…

UPDATE: I decide to check out my sitemeter stats after making this post and discovered that the last two visitors had come from a web page I had set up a while ago, but long since forgot, and on that web page, if you scroll down is a timely quote…

For Sale | Chazown

The first three Chazown DVDs, Relationship With God, Relationships With People and Financial Life. $30 for all three. Let me know if you're interested.

Samuel L. Jackson is God!

The Bible Experience arrived today, so I decided to have a listen to it. As per usual it is way over hyped, but not a bad product, even if it is TNIV.

The best part so far (I’m listening to Matthew) is Matthew 3:16 where Samuel L. Jackson proclaims; "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."

Of course, I’d have preferred Jackson played John the Baptist, then he would have had the chance to take on his famous Jules Winnfield character and scream; “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

Now THAT would have been worth paying for…

Christian Nazis

So we hate homosexuals. They are the scourges of humanity. Evil incarnate.

At least that’s the impression you get from some Christians, and it’s standard media fare that that’s what we Christians all believe.

The sad truth is, that apart from some PC mumbo jumbo, homosexuals are pretty much maligned in society. Even history it seems has a dislike of homosexuals, with German law keeping them interned in Hitler’s camps until after a law change in 1969.

So what should our attitude be towards homosexual men and women? Should we treat them as sub human? Or should we love them?

And if we’re called to love homosexuals, should we stop bashing Helen Clark, and keep our lesbian theories to ourselves, or should our democratically elected leader be a fair target for Christians to sling sexual innuendos at?

Kingdom Come: The Final Victory

Just when you though it was safe to go back to your local Christian bookstore, they’ve gone and done another one…

Christians around the world had been rejoicing when the last of the Left Behind prequels The Rapture was released, rejoicing because this indicated that the scourge of the Left Behind phenomenon had come to a grinding halt.

But no, LaHaye and Jenkins have come up with another money-spinner, er I mean Spiritual Novel in Kingdom Come:

The horrors of the Tribulation are over, and Jesus Christ has set up his perfect kingdom on earth. Believers all around the world enjoy a newly perfected relationship with their Lord, and the earth itself is transformed. Yet evil still lurks in the hearts of the unbelieving. As the Millennium draws to a close, the final generation of the unrepentant prepares to mount a new offensive against the Lord Himself--sparking the final and ultimate conflict from which only one side will emerge the eternal victor.

Does this sound like a one book deal, or are we in for years of torment? And if Jesus Christ has set up his perfect kingdom on earth, would there be room for evil? Is evil part of God’s perfect plan? Will Frank Ritchie finally succumb to temptation and start reading Left Behind?

Only time will tell.

Powerful Women and the Homosexual Jesus

Frank had another entertaining and interesting Greenroom last night, with the main points of discussion being the role of women and homosexuals in church leadership.

My wife had to hold me back a few times and bar me from phoning up, in a totally submissive way of course, seeing as I am the head of the house and what I say goes.

Of course the fact that I have been called to act unto my wife along the lines that Jesus did for the Church would make me partially submissive to my wife, especially seeing that the Good Lord set the ultimate sacrifice for me to follow – that I should lay down my life for the benefit of my wife.

The interesting thing with women in church leadership is that the Bible totally supports it. And so does history. There are scores of churches that if it were not for women in leadership roles, would not exist today, as there were not the men willing to take the positions themselves.

Many of our great church leaders of today probably would not be such great leaders if women hadn’t taken a leadership role in their church. Not just any leadership role though, only leadership of Sunday School classes, because our male dominated church society deems that this lowly position is ok for women to lead, after all, they are only influencing the future of the church.

Now there’s an interesting thought – whilst all these insecure male orientated churches, have their men preaching and leading them, they’ve missed out on something huge. They’ve left the future of their dear church in the control of the womenfolk. You see the preacher up front is only concerned with guiding his already committed flock, but the women out the back are installing the truth of the Gospel to the next generation of the church. Who really has the power in these male dominated churches?

It’s the women who are secretly changing the world, whilst flashy males with big egos preach from the pulpit, I’m glad that the children have the love and support of Godly women to help them make sense of the world around them!

And then there’s the homosexual – one caller professed her desire to see all of them crucified and then promptly hung up.

Cowardly? Yes. Misguided? Yes. Uninformed? Yes.

You see the homosexual debate is an interesting one. We group of people who call ourselves Christians profess such because we claim to follow Jesus right? Well, if we profess to follow Jesus then maybe we should listen to what he had to say, and what he didn’t say. In his book, Adventures In Missing The Point, Tony Campolo contends that Jesus never condemned homosexuals. In fact he never even mentions them. It’s just not part of his top ten list of sins. Number one on his list however is judgemental religious people who look for sin in other peoples lives and not their own, and then there’s his fairly strong views on divorced people getting re-married.

And as Frank pointed out even the inclusion of the word homosexual in other parts of the Bible may be wrongly translated.

But it would be safe ground to say that homosexuality is a worse sin than another because it affects the body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Oh, wait, so does gluttony, over eating, under eating, living a sedate lifestyle, even harbouring un-forgiveness will put a strain on your mental health, which in turn will effect your physical health.

So IF homosexuality is a sin, then so is gluttony, and even speeding. So that makes me unsuitable for any leadership position in a church, better hope no one nominates me for any official positions in my local church, cause my foot is too heavy and my eyes are too big.

And what’s homosexuality anyway? Guys loving guys? Didn’t Jesus call us to love on another?