I don’t think I’ve done this before. If so then um, happy second time round:

Four jobs that I’ve had
1. Something I vaguely remember to do with emails, and people sending and needing them in villages and putting them on disks and posting them out etc.

2. Kitchen work/serving up at ADANAC campsite, got to live onsite for two weeks away from home was brilliant.

3. Managed Business Outcomes, I did admin and reception there last year

4. Dymocks, this is current. Bookshop

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Amelie
2. Little Women 😛
3. Pride and Prejudice
4. um… Gattaca

Four places I have lived
1. Victoria
2. Papua New Guinea
3. Auki – Malaita, Solomon Islands
4. Honiara – Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

Four TV shows I like to watch
1. The Amazing Race
2. Survivor (sometimes)
3. The News (sometimes)
4. Any good movie that happens to be on

Four foods that I like
1. Mum’s stew
2. Chicken schnitzel (drenched in lemon juice)
3. Chicken and Broccli casserole
4. Dutch croquets

Four websites I visit daily
1. Gush
2. Bloglines (which means ALL the blogs I follow – I’m up to about 50, should I be concerned?)
3. Blogger Dashboard (how else do you get these posts!)
4. Bible Gateway/Dictonary/Deakin email

Four things I want to do before I die
1. Get married and probably do the family thing
2. Travel to Europe
3. Go back to the Solomons
4. Maybe write something that gets published (beyond just online)

General

I think this makes number 2 post for tonight, and yeah there will be a number three but a ‘boring’ filler – which I sometimes amuse myself with and it’s one floating around at the moment.

First though, today (as all you strange readers seem to not mind them). I’ll endeavor to make it interesting.

Drove myself and Emily to church, while Mum took Laura to work and eventually made it back with Hannah who was with her. Church was alright. The sermon was on prayer and 95% was okay but there was something that sent critical spasms into my mind – just the way they went about things. Sometimes I would like to smash my head repeatedly and so kill off the offending cells.

Before church actually started. I wandered over to where Bec and Jerome (Dan’s friends who are new to YVV) were standing looking rather lost. I got talking to Bec and it turns out she is at Deakin and IN MY FLIPPING PHOTOGRAPHY TUTE! I can’t believe that I didn’t realise, I have met her once before. This is brilliant. A) she’s an extravert which makes things REALLY easy for me. B) she’s a Christian, which although is not crucial to uni survival or friendships, is still rather nice and C)I have other contact with her outside of uni which means a better kind of freindship. Bec is also in Jess and Isobelle’s drama class and one of Jess’ screen practice lectures. Funny world.

The young adults did their every second week social thing. We ended up having lunch all together down at the local pub. I’ve never been there before – wasn’t too bad. Food was alright. Company was better though. Poor Laura missed out, that’ll teach her for working on Sundays. Jess, Dan (bongos), Dan (YITS), Bec and maybe Jerome and I are off to see a movie on Tuesday night. No idea what we’ll see but should be good.

I drove back to Jess’s to pick up my camera and my thongs. Drove home. Drove – I like that word now that I can use it within the context of my own name 😀

New blog design should be up soon. John is being superbly nice and giving me some pointers on the coding side of things (unless I can just hoodwink him in to doing it all). The current one I’ve decided is horrible. Tell me, how have you put up with it for so long?!

General

An odd introduction to a band back sometime last year. I might not have noticed them or decided I like them otherwise, something was played in class, I scrawled the artist name in my notebook and remembered it months later. David Crowder Band. Their stuff’s a bit unusual. Some of it I actually don’t like too much, but the majority of it grows on you and becomes excellent to the point of, “I’m insanely curious to hear more of it”.

There is a song title at the end of the Beautiful Collision CD that refers to a poem by George Meredith, below is a shortened version, you can click here for the full.

A Lark Ascending

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

“There’s sky and there’s ground and somewhere in between we live.” – David Crowder

There is an explanation I found about the secondary title of the CD, (3+4=7):

“You see, when these two symbols, 3 and 4, are inserted into a mathematical proposition of addition, the sum of them is 7. This numerical representation has the obvious implications of quantity or amount or measure but it also is a signifier of perfection. It, as a symbol, is symbolic of ‘numerical value’ but also of ‘good.’ It has biblical signification, one of my favorites being 7 days to create the earth, the seventh day for rest. We have culturally set aside the seventh day of the week for our corporate worship. The number 3 holds similar significance, it being symbolic of the divine; the three in one, while 4 has often been figurative of humanity. It is the collision of the two, divinity and depravity, that meet in the number 7. I believe art aspires to this. When it happens it is a moment of the divine stepping into our human experience. It is our ascending. It is his descending. It is a collision of the earthly with the heavenly. It is what often happens in moments of the corporate worship experience that in some mysterious way seems to transcend our common everyday experience. It is the divine and the depraved interacting and it seems our feet lift from the ground for a second. We rise from our condition. When our depravity meets his divinity it is a beautiful collision.’ – David Crowder

The lark is an interesting picture of who it is to be born of God and that brilliantly sharp point of living worship or if you’d like to call it such, living life.

I sincerely doubt we live up to this reaching, this focus upon God. Here’s where the ‘depravity’ part fits in. It is something I am far too familiar with. It invites disappointment despite it being fudamentally easier. It is far simpler to just go about daily tasks, be they study, social, work or even church. None of it has to mean anything. We slide beautifully into autopilot. God is there but God does not mean a whole lot. We talk at God, but not with God. We talk about all manner of things theological and entirely miss the God behind it. We find relationships as crucial and love as the centre of life and sideline the creator, the instigator and the model of perfection in this area. It is what counts. The trinitarian God I think really wants us in the centre of this threefold paradox.

Love. They say, “Love from the centre of your being.”

Taking the lesson from Meredith’s lark;

His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear.

We could all use a little renewal sometimes. A little shove, a reminder on who God is and who we are and just how amazed we should be that he even bothered with us in the first place and in this amazement make a priority shift back to the Creator.

General