Just in case you use an rss reader, or bloglines or something to read this – if you happen to be vaguely interested, I’ve opened two other blogs (a little while ago now), First Phrase, Second Phrase. The Second is more for my later usage, but the first might give you something to think about.

I wrote some of this yesterday morning (and did save a draft, but it obviously didn’t save. ergh!) actually into a journal thing I’m taking to work with me for the half hour or so I have to waste before I start. I’ve been doing this at Mrs. Fields (excellent coffee) and now outside when seats out the front near the grass are free.

It’s about 8:20am, early start (sort of) this morning. I haven’t really thought too much about the Sydney riots (racially fueled) thus far. Yes I had that conversation with burkie, but the only visual, or any kind of experience (fi it even qualifies) have been very short segments of the news.

Today it is different. I am disgusted at what i heard, angry even. School kids on teh bus – they got to talking about it and began telling stories (be they true or not) of Lebanese gangs bashing up women and old ladies, following them home etcetera, armed with baseball bats.

All the blame was thrown back onto the non-anglos and emphasised the anglo’ethnicity of the ‘victims’. I was so ready to say something… what about those innocent whoevers caught in this stupid fued? What about the ‘white’ everyday Australian gangs who do comparibly the same thing at non media-hot moments. It’s not at all dependant on skin colour when people choose to do stuff like that (oh I know if it is when it is racially fueled) but we are all entirely capable of making the same descisions, mistakes and crimes.

How much media ahd those kids swallowed without having thought about things first? Australia has a definite racial vein. We celebrate differences, oh yeah? We prefer to conform to some unwritten standard.

Equality (or rather, Justice as we aren’t robots) witll happen one day. God has a hand in taht – but earth and falleness display injustice as if it were a crown. I do not know where this is all heading, I (quite obviously) don’t like it, and it is a bigger more menacing problem than I first thought.

Onesided stories, rumors, lies and misunderstandings are food for hate.

If they’d been on the bus a few more minutes, I might have found the courage to speak up. (the courage to face anti-introversion that is, because I was *this* close)

Haha, thanks Katie. I haven’t wasted this kind of time in a while – did some of the others, but here are the few you showed me (but for me and not you) plus the ‘weird’ one.

Your Blog Should Be Green

Your blog is smart and thoughtful – not a lot of fluff.
You enjoy a good discussion, especially if it involves picking apart ideas.
However, you tend to get easily annoyed by any thoughtless comments in your blog.
What Color Should Your Blog or Journal Be?

You Should Get a PhD in Liberal Arts
(like political science, literature, or philosophy)

You’re a great thinker and a true philosopher.
You’d make a talented professor or writer.
What Advanced Degree Should You Get?

Your 2005 Song Is

Since You’ve Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson

“But since you’ve been gone
I can breathe for the first time
I’m so moving on”

In 2005, you moved on.
What Hit Song of 2005 Are You?

You Are 40% Weird

Normal enough to know that you’re weird…
But too damn weird to do anything about it!
How Weird Are You?

A couple of random bits of info about my day that I think I’ll just put here before I launch of into whatever comes out of my head.

– Mum ran our car into the back of someone this morning (at the top of our road), they had a tow ball and a 4wd, we got the denting and the entirely stuffed radiator.
– The woman got out to have a look and her two boys followed, the second opened the front door and fell out of the car onto the gravel, poor kid, it was really quite funny.
– I ran into a shelf at work today, several times. The worst left a decent underskin scrape and a bruise on my forearm. Bookshops are dangerous. Try books falling you.
– My dinner (some dodgy pizza that someone at home heated up) had mould on it, I found this only on the second piece, it was quite a sad thing, despite it not being very nice as I couldn’t be bothered making anything else to eat. I had a nectarine instead (which have got to be the best fruit beside Pomello).

Now, originally I was going to blah out some interesting things that came up when I was reading Purpose #1 in 40 Days of Purpose book thing. This calls for a slight back up to last night, where I was tired, on msn and Mon started talking to me and I got really annoyed at her. I don’t like people asking me stuff like, “tell me everything” particularly when I’m not ‘in the mood’ or I don’t want to progress a friendship beyond a certain point (and no I haven’t worked out why that is that way with Mon at the moment). So I was giving short, curt one word answers and being a bit of a grumpy bum. I nearly blocked her when I got the, “Is anything wrong” deal, restrained myself – how do you explain “No, I just dont really want to talk to you right now” without a reason (or a reason that I can’t possibly word because I don’t know what it is). So anyway, I got the, “How’s God time at the moment?”. I gave her the one word answer of, “yeah”.

Said I was, ‘reading 40 days thing and that’s about it, haven’t had much time’, as I had the ?’s pressure to go deeper (a bad excuse for not spending time, but yes, was the truth).

So I did sit down tonight to somewhat redeem it maybe, guilt inspired? And the book’s going on about how we were planned for God’s pleasure, and what worship is.

“How’s God time going”

What a stupid narrow minded question.

And I’m not blaming Mon for asking it, because I ask it myself, and of course reason and context denotes, “Time focused specificially aka. a quiet time”

But it is a stupid question. Life as a Christian, right, it’s fulltime, not cordoned off to 15mins-1hr an evening or morning.

“How’s life as a Christian and your interaction with God” is perhaps a better question.

I was remembering, after reading some of the stuff on living/working for God. How I used to talk so much more to God throughout my day and how I don’t do that so much any more. Making prayer and thought synonymous. I know to an extent it is possible, because I’ve seen it happen in me before and it makes life a billion times more enjoyable.

I like sometimes to think I have a fairly strong mind, or control over where my thoughts go. It is about effort and prayer and definitely God’s hand in shaping of character. But it is still so much easier to let things slide, to have thoughts predominantly wandering elsewhere or to just simply get lazy and ignore/forget Gods part in my life.

What have I been trying to make church? Am I just fed up because I’m not getting satisfied from what it has been this past while. Thats not right. Church is a designated place for giving glory to God, be that through singing, talking, listening…

What God gets out of it, not what we get out of it.

Sure that does not remove the discouraged/dissapointed very wanting part of me for something more (socially – which is quite selfish, but still part of it) from church. But it does drop things a lot more into alignment.

“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” – 1 Cor 10:31 (NIV)

I’ve lost the piece of yellow paper I got from some youth group thing, it had the following verse on it, I used to think about it more than I’ve done latey:

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life–your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life–and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” – Rom 12:1 (MSG)

I (and we) should possibly stop complaining about our boring, tiring and dry lives.
I should most probably appoligise to Mon.
I should start being more intentional about life and the importance of God in my life.

This is not an excuse to leave off that time you set aside, just a reminder I guess that it’s not everything and if it is everything then its not really enough. This is also not to make me feel good because I haven’t been doing the specific time thing so much lately, I hope instead it pushes me to actually do more of that. Because if my day is focused differently… well your time managment shifts to putting the genuinely important stuff first.

“God’s concerns are all-embracing — not only the ‘sacred’ but the ‘secular’, not only religion but nature, not only His covenant people but all people, not only justification but social justice in every community, not only His gospel but His law. So we must not attempt to narrow down His interests. Moreover, ours must be as broad as His.” – John Stott

I felt like I was back in a YITS class this morning. The sermon was on Social Justice type issues (but drew far enough away from them to not just be another ‘campaign’ or movement). It was an extremely well done sermon.

Part of it made me think about where I stand with individualism and this became more clear when I was talking with Jess after church about, “What does chuch mean?”

Church can’t possibly just be a gathering point for believers one day a week, if so, that is entirely pathetic and frankly I don’t want to be part of something like that.

There should be consitency to life and life as part of the church which prompts it as an on-going (daily) thing.

Please don’t mention the ‘church is the people’ thing, because I know that and I’ve heard that, but we don’t go much beyond that defintion as to what the people should actualy be doing.

I am curious whether I have moved on slightly from the individualistic way I used to view Christianity. Even across this year. I know what is right and all, I know there is a massive amount of “Us” when it comes to God and to Christianity. The Trinity being a part of that, but yet I have spent a lot of this year, particularly early on working on shaping me. Letting God build/alter/change/grow/inhabit/stretch my character. Dealing with ‘issues’, challenging myself, letting others and God challenge me. Focusing in even on specifics.

I’m not saying that there is any harm in that. But in looking for a church it entirely highlights the bigger picture of what I within something can be/do. You can’t live a Christian life for yourself. You can’t possibly go the Western individualistic way, you hit walls of non-possiblity, minimal opportunity and inhibited space for growth.

You get vastly lonely.

I am wondering perhaps if God is pressing that button in me which label says, ‘external’. I don’t know exactly what that means. I do feel dry, flat and bored when I’m not learning something or other. I hate not being challenged. I haven’t particularly felt that in a while.

Thanks Sam for pointing out what you did the other day w/ my ‘crisis afternoon’ post. Where did the other person stand when I was not in complete control?

I don’t I think that I understand very well God’s bigger picture. You can talk all you like about ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ and ‘justice’, but you can’t just know it or chase it like it’s the ultimate purpose of man until something in you alters. I find it difficult to explain and I’ll probably look back on this and think, “Okay, what were you thinking Rebecca?”

I am reminded again of the phrase, ‘being follows doing’. Which is an intersting thought. We can go about doing the stuff before we ‘feel it’. Where does passion derive from?

God’s plan is not indivualistic, or he would have just made Adam.

Community is something that I was intending to find in doing YITS, and I did find it. The problem now is that I’ve lost it and I don’t have a ‘backup’ or an ‘alternative’, because I don’t have a church base, a youth group, a young adults group.

Online community has a different place in my life and I am more involved than I perhaps thought I would ever be, its something I value and find I can contribute (be part of) to. But it is not quite the same.

I would sincerly like to have a group of people around me where we could just go and do something decent for the world. Locally, globally whatever.

The previously talked about plan of starting something up next year (with Jess etc.) is still on hold, but I think it needs to happen and I have a feeling I might again play a bigger part than ever originally intended.

Shelve those Bible stuides for a while, they have their place, but there are other ways to learn about where God’s heart lies, then bring the words back to where they match your life. Parallel the two and have feet in both. Let your action match your words. Your dilligence, your passion.

At the moment, my life is: work and Gush, a bit of social life and church on Sundays. That’s far more good than what many can boast, but to be honest, aside from some of the gush stuff, it’s really not very fulfiling.