Coolest baby in the world

My niece is the greatest!

How cool could Bon Jovi become?

Every now and again the mystical revolving doors of popular culture turn full circle on us and unexpectedly drop someone back in the foyer of the cool. It's happened with 80's fashion, Cider and recently even with mullets. (As I understand it, top physicists and fashion gurus are still working round the clock to find out how that last one happened, in a frantic effort to protect the public against future outbreaks along similar lines.)

But what about Bon Jovi? Many would fear even to speak his name at any gathering of trendy culture vultures, knowing that ridicule awaits them, and I have to confess that I've distanced myself from Bon Jovi enthusiasts over the years stylistically, artistically, ideologically and even cullinarily. But then my brother popped up with a piece of work that stopped me in my tracks. Have a listen and tell me what you think. You can rate it out of 10, you can offer a critical analysis, or you can opt for a wildly irrational rant about Bon Jovi. If you follow the link below though, you should be able to hear "Blaze of Glory" as you've never heard it before. Oh, and listen out for the vocal skills of Mr Otavie Warmann, he features in the verses.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=60091851

I've had a baby...

...said my sister-in-law on Friday morning. Out she came at 5.30, Abigail Catherine. And here she is, with Luke and Jo, her very tired but very excited Mum and Dad. I can't believe my big brother is a Dad!!! Well, I can in the sense that he'll be an amazing father, and I know Jo will be a fantastic Mum too, but it just takes a while to re-adjust and see your older sibling surrounded by the glow of paternal bliss.

I'm going to see Abigail with Auntie Mel on Friday. More photos might follow if you're lucky!

Ambivalence

Ever felt like you don't quite know what you think?

Ever been unsure what you really want?

Ever felt like you want two opposite things at the same time?

I was having a little look at a book called "Motivational Interviewing" the other day, which has been very influential among counselling professionals and support workers of all kinds, and they described something in there that I think is a real key to understanding our times, and the way a lot of people feel/think these days.

Apparently, most people who walk through the door at a professional counselling service, a weight loss clinic, a GP practice, a probation office, or anywhere else where they might be looking for help or advice that will hinge on a change of lifestyle, arrive in a state of mind known as "ambivalence." They want help, and they don't want it. They want to change, and they would like things to stay as they are. They believe things can be different, and they are hopeless that any change can occur. Does that make any sense?

What I found really interesting about the particular book I was looking at was what they said about how ambivalent people usually react to advice or instructions designed to help them. The authors argued that when a person is aware of both sides of a conundrum of opposites in their own mind, focussing on one end of the spectrum will provoke them to explain the counter-balancing side, which in many cases will seem on the surface like resistance and will probably lead to conflict.

So, you might be talking to an addict who wants to quit but is also really attached to his drug-taking friends and doesn't want to distance himself from them by getting clean. You give him a load of advice about quitting and he starts to think "hang on a minute, you're ignoring the other side of my dilemma here - what about my mates?" He either goes silent, or tries to voice his inner turmoil, probably leading to an argument. Apparently, the typical professional response to that kind of behaviour is to treat it as apathy or hostility and write the client off as 'not ready' to change. But that is missing something important; that person does want to change, he just has some other, conflicting desires that are causing him some conflict. So how do you deal with that? How can you help a person to change when part of them doesn't want to?

Bringing it closer to home, I come across ambivalence in myself in my relationship with God quite often. Sometimes when I'm reading a really inspiring book or part of the Bible, or just listening to a really powerful message, part of me starts to react against it. Its not that I don't want the things that are being described - I do, very much so - I think I just start to feel like I'm swinging the other way sometimes. "Yes, but..." Know what I mean?

Its passion that drives people away sometimes, I think. There are days when you just don't feel like you can stand by the fire, it's too intense, and part of your heart is pulling you away, even though another part doesn't want to. You can deal with almost any external obstacle I think. There's not much that can stand in the way of a fiercely determined human being. But what happens when the obstacles are inside? How can you get the part of you that wants to change to overrule the part that doesn't?

I think Paul gets this spot on in Romans:

"For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want...I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good"

Then in the depths of despair, he says this:

"Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

And that's that. As far as Paul is concerned, problem solved. I really want to get what he's saying there, but I don't quite see it. Any thoughts?

Japanese letters, Jewish texts and English Paragraphs

Time for my monthly entry...

I was chatting to some friends this week who used to live in Japan, and found what they told me pretty fascinating. Apparently, the Chinese alphabet, which was taken over to Japan in the 5th Century and later spread to Korea too, contains many of the secrets of Genesis. For example, the symbol for "temptation" is a snake, a woman and a tree. The symbol for "create" is a picture of taking dust, breathing into it and the dust walking. The symbol for "boat" is apparently a vessel with eight mouths (Noah + seven other family members were supposed to have been on the ark, or so the story goes.) The symbol for "no," which is still used on public signs a lot (no parking, no littering...) is two trees. Ring any bells?

This got me thinking about something I hear Roger Forster has done some research into. I remember hearing on one of his Genesis lectures about the similarities between the early Genesis narrative and early Greek mythology. He mentioned a few things that crop up that seem more than coincidental, and was speculating that perhaps mankind at one time had a common world-story, based on one God, that was later developed by different cultures in different ways. Another interesting thing to note about Japan is that in pre-Shinto days (Shinto is the ancient pre-Buddhist national Japanese polytheistic religion that is still quite widely practiced today, wrongly thought by many to be the 'original' Japanese religion) there are records of Japanese people worshipping a three-in-one God, whose name means "the Glorious God who is in the centre of Heaven." Apparently Buddhist scholars and well-informed Japanese historians will have heard about this ancient pre-Shinto god, but not many normal Japanese folks, since knowledge about the god and how it was worshipped has all but passed out of circulation.

Does anybody find that interesting? Doesn't it make you think differently about the Biblical narrative, and the role of Jews, and later Jesus-followers, in world history?

For example, do you wonder what event the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 10 is supposed to represent? It tells of some time at which the different ethnicities divided and split up, ceasing to communicate freely. The next thing that shows up in the narrative is God speaking to Abraham, the archetypal Gentile-Jew and father figure to so many later people groups, and sending him away to start a new nation who would be a blessing to all the others. So when the Jews preserved their versions of all the 'original' tales in what became their oral tradition and their sacred text, were they fulfilling a part of what they had been commissioned to do on the earth, while all the other cultures elaborated and distorted the character of God out of recognizable proportions? Were they given a special anointing with special help to preserve the most accurate version on earth of God's actual story, later clarified by Jesus, and ultimately by the Holy Spirit in co-operation with the church? I think of one of the ways Paul describes the Apostles' commission later on in the story; he says that the Apostles are to be the "stewards of the mysteries of God."

Rewinding a little, I just suddenly remembered a conversation I had with a South African/British guy when I was living in Barcelona, who told me about a book called "Eternity in their Hearts" (from that Scripture 'God has set eternity in the heart of man...') which records some research a guy called Don Richardson did into messages about God that have sprung up 'out of context' as it were, not from the mouths or pens of Judeo-Christians. He could only remember the details of one particular chapter on the subject of that altar in Athens that Paul preaches about in Acts 17, the altar to the unknown God. Apparently, if you look at the history of how that altar came to be built, you find that some years before there was an impending disaster, some kind of war or epidemic or something that was about to hit Athens in a big way, so the people prayed to all their gods and made sacrifices and so on, but to no avail. They all decided that they needed to call on the help of a more powerful god, but nobody knew of any more powerful gods on the scene, so they built this altar to an unknown god. It was kind of a way of saying 'I don't know who you are, but if you're out there please help.' Anyway, the history records that some miraculous event turned the tide and the city was saved after they prayed at this altar, so they left it standing and carried on worshipping the unknown god up until the days of Paul. So when Paul shows up and says "I see that you are very religious...What you worship as unknown I now proclaim to you..." his message is loaded with significance. The flipside is that it makes it seem like God was witnessing to those people before the gospel arrived, speaking in a way that they could understand and beginning to point them in the right direction.

Alongside all this, my lack of paragraph punctuation has come in for criticism of late, so I'm trying to adjust my style to make it easier to read. Hope it works. Any comments?

Is knowing that it is God a part of knowing God?

I mentioned in my first entry that I wanted to write about knowing God, about what that means and how I can get to grips with knowing God or learn to know Him more. Well, I've been praying and asking for insight and I stumbled across a couple of scriptures that really raised new questions in my mind. I thought I'd open a couple of these up for comment.

Firstly, I asked God directly the other day to teach me about knowing Him, and I thought He told me to look up 2 Kings 1 v 3-5. The first few times I read it, nothing clicked and I didn't know why He would guide me to it, but then a few days later I really started to realize some important issues that the story raises. It all happens when the King of Israel has an accident and gets ill. He wants to know if he will recover, but unlike Hezekiah in Isaiah 38, he doesn't ask Yahweh. Instead, he sends messengers to another god, Baal-zebub, to find out whether he will live or die. At this point, Yahweh sends an angel to Elijah, His prophet, to command him to take a message to the king, which is as follows; "Is it because there is no God in Israel that you are going to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron? Now therefore thus says the LORD, 'You shall not come down from the bed where you have gone up, but you shall surely die.'" So, Yahweh is drawing attention to Himself, to demonstrate that He is present in Israel and that the Israelites needn't consult other gods. Here's what struck me as odd; he sends an angel to Elijah, who presumably is already convinced, but to the king's messengers, the ones who really need to know, he sends Elijah, a man, who after all could have been making it up.

Elijah knows what they are up to, which they might have taken as a prophetic insight, but that's hardly convincing proof. Maybe he had heard it on the grapevine, or maybe he just figured it out. It almost seems that Yahweh doesn't feel the need to prove Himself, even when He is trying to draw attention to His presence. Its like one of those situations when two people are discussing something that clearly involves the third person in the room but seem to be ignoring him/her. Yahweh's word seems to me like the third person saying "Hello! I'm standing right here you know!" Why not just send an angel to the king if that's what He's trying to do?

This reminds me of the gospel. Jesus, God's ultimate self-revelation, comes to earth and people don't realise. As John puts it, "He came to that which was His own, but His own did not recognize Him." That's a serious problem if you're God and you're trying to show people who you are. So, at His baptism the Father speaks in an audible voice and the Spirit descends like a dove. But who sees it? It seems like only John the Baptist notices. Later on He is transfigured, and it seems that anyone who sees Him in His altered state will be thoroughly convinced. So who does He allow to be present? This time its His 3 closest disciples, who have already made up their minds. Finally, in one ultimate sign to show that He was telling the truth all along, He rises from the dead. Surely such a display of power will convince the world. But who does He appear to? Once again, a crowd of disciples are the only eye-witnesses. Does anyone ever wonder why He keeps doing that?

All this makes me wonder about God's invisible work in the world. Does He do a lot that He never gets the credit for? Does that bother Him? Is He constantly active in shaping the destinies of nations and individuals, working in ways that get put down to fortuitous coincidence or even don't get noticed at all? This raises a question; when God does something in a person's life, does it matter whether that person knows that it was God? Is 'recognizing' God a part of knowing God? How much conscious, direct awareness of Himself does God want us to have?

On this note, I found something in a book the other day that sounded like it might be a big clue;

"There is no doubt that God longs for intimacy with His children, and delights in it when it occurs. The full restoration of humanity to this level of relationship is one of His most cherished goals, a prospect He exults in! Throughout the Scriptures, analogies of Father and Son, bride and groom emphasize this dimension of God's plan...The Fall and the subsequent hardening of men's hearts have no doubt dulled our capacity to receive God's revelation, but I also suspect that it's out of His mercy, recognizing our weakness, that God has made Himself invisible to us, and graciously lowered His voice to a whisper. This is why most people, especially those who are not Christians, are only dimly aware of him."

I have much more to say on this, but I'd like to invite your comments, so maybe I should leave it there for now and add more later. Any thoughts?

Sorry its been so long

Hi there everyone. I realise I haven't really come up with the goods when it comes to this blog so far. To tell you the truth, it has been a combination of factors; I've had some techno problems, some time management problems and probably some other problems too. But you don't want to know the dull details. Anyway, I'm back, and I know how to get in and write entries now, so watch this space.
I'm still at the Children's Hospital. In fact, I watched some live surgery yesterday. It was a facial re-animation operation on a kid who couldn't use one side of his face. Get this, they opened up his ckeek and his inner thigh, took a muscle from the thigh and put it in his face. It was pretty amazing. Later today I should be watching a skull re-modelling too, so I'll see a brain up close.
I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things, but none of it is that near the forefront of my mind today, and I'm at work, so I'll have to save that stuff for another time. I'll be checking all your pages out and maybe chipping in some comments over the coming days though.