I had a great day catching up with YFC friends Simon in Swindon and Paul in Cheltenham today. Two very different characters, 2 totally different sorts of backgrounds, but two identical outlooks – to see their communities transformed, and 2 sacrificial lifestyles – both could earn a lot more in the ‘real world’, but choose the life of mission and the ‘salary’ that comes with it.

Yet again, I am struck by the privilege I have on occassions to just sit with great people and not only hear about their great dreams but also see that great things are happening with their dreams too as they become reality.

As I said earlier in the week – we all need dreams. Without dreams I think our lives become desperate at worst, and become bored at best. Without dreams we have no hope! My faith is based entirely on hope. I think it was Desmond Tutu that said as Christians we are slaves to the hope that we have … or something like that!

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.
For the last few days I have been working from home on admin and planning tasks. They are important things, like training modules, mission proposals, good practice ideas. They are documents and things that I hope will help other people both within and outside the YFC family.

But …

There is nothing quite like meeting with people!
Tomorrow I’m visiting Cheltenham YFC and Swindon YFC – it’ll be a very early start – but sure beats sitting in front of this laptop for a bit longer!

I guess when I thought “Jesus died for everyone” I was unconsciously picturing the balding heads in the pews around me. Certainly not the sick twisted people who would exploit an innocent child. Jesus’ sacrifice took on new meaning for me. He died for Hitler? Marilyn Manson? Wow. Then once that had sunk in, it hit me like a load of bricks. Not only did Jesus pay the price for what these people had done, in the eyes of God he became these people. The great I AM became the filth of the earth. Jesus the paradox.

I found this fantastic thought from Sarah Brown, a high school student, via Mark yesterday. The art work is both challenging and inspirational and Sarah presents a whole new image to the ‘I am’ of God.

A talented young prophet emerging city says – maybe …

If this is genuine, someone has a great sense of humour!

We had a great time at Eurodisney. It really is a special place for both children and adults. For me, I never realised how much of a traditionalist I was until I remembered I enjoy far more the traditional Mickey character, such as in Steamboat Willie, along with his friends from those early cartoons. Tradition and me are not usually two things I consider together. There is, however, still a special place for the traditional Mickey Mouse in my life!

I noticed an interesting thing while at Disney this time. My children had a big thing about collecting the autographs of the characters. At times throughout the day, children can queue or ‘bundle’ with others to collect the autographs of characters that are wandering around in Main Street. My children entered into this enthusiastically.

It’s one of those weird occasions when our children got very excited and ran to collect autographs, sometimes waiting ages for characters such as Baloo, or Donald, or Mary Poppins despite knowing that these characters were only people dressed in costumes!

On the way home one evening I was chatting with Joe who said something like ‘Dad, that must be the best job in the world …. working here and dressing up as a Disney character’.

It struck me that adults get all hung up about children not being able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. There is concern over Harry Potter novels, the Narnia Chronicles and other great pieces because, it is said, children cannot see where reality ends and fantasy starts. It confuses them, puts them at risk and blurs their image of the world.

I have always thought that that view is flawed. As a child I remember enjoying fantasy but realising it was fantasy. I remember walking into a wardrobe and hoping, but knowing that it was just a wardrobe and I would not get very far!

Certainly these last few days have shown that my youngest child can see the difference too. Rather than a fear over this, it’s great to see the beauty. The beauty of seeing children readily enter into this fantasy land of make believe while being able to maintain a grip on reality for themselves. It shows a great ability to dream, to imagine, to create and maybe even to hope.

That’s such a great ability of children – to hope, dream and see things for what they are. Quite often when I have been dealing with a tricky issue, it has been the comment of one of my children or some other young person that has caused the spark of a thought process that has eventually arrived at a good solution. Maybe dreaming in this child-like way could be a method of changing reality.

I wonder if, as adults, if we entered into this world more, the divinely ordained creative power of our minds would see achievable and realistic solutions to the issues of our world. Maybe we should all dream and hope that little bit more.

Off to Eurodisney tomorrow.
I hope I get Mickey’s autograph!

Chris put me on to Picasa, a photo editor.

I used this a long time ago but got frustrated with it. They seem to have improved it a lot, and for a free bit of software it’s excellent for both managing and playing with photos – some of the effects are quite cool.

Cheers Chris – and welcome back to blogging!

A picture record of the most common words used on this blog created here.
No real surprises, but a good analysis tool maybe!
Cheers Phil for the link.

I have had a lot of interesting conversations with people recently. Most of them men and usually in the gym or sauna.

The conversations have been interesting for a number of reasons. For many years I have always felt I am not great at the smalltalk stuff that you need to chat generally. I still think that is the case, but I have been surprised to see that just a question, or one word, can often lead into a long, and quite general, conversation.

Some people I have been talking to for quite a while are clearly running away from a god of sorts. They are running away from the image of a god that they have been presented with. A image that, more often than not, is an inaccurate image presented by an organisation, a group of people, an individual or a church.

God has been presented as a god that demands the unreasonable, or as a god that wants everything to believe and act exactly the same, or as a god that looks in disgust at the mess we have got ourselves into, or as a god that disapproves of our lifestyle, or as a god that hates women, or as a god that hates homosexuals, or as a god that judges us for how we speak, or how we dress, or how we sound, or by the political party we vote for.

So many wrong images of God that people quite clearly are running from – and who could blame them? I would not wish to follow a God like that. Those images don’t think with the image of the God welcoming back the prodigal child.

My question which I find myself pondering on:

as these people run away from the wrong image of God, does that take them further away or closer to the true God?

I found image bank recently thanks to a friend.

It’s a fantastic store of images on the web which are searchable by theme or concept – the two here were found under searchs for natural beauty and pressure.

I’ll be using this site a lot!