Dances with Words

One of the articles for Perpectives this week is Reconsecration to a Wartime, Not a Peacetime, Lifestyle by Ralph D. Winter. He draws attention to how people lived during the world wars: the people who stayed at home lived on rations, gave up a certain amount of money and freedom for the war effort, in effect sacrificing their lifestyle for a greater purpose. Winter says that we as Christians should have a similar mentality, living simply and sacrificing some lifestyle in order to use our money and other resources for world mission. Those that stay and send should be sacrificing just like those called to go.

But obedience to the Great Commission has more consistently been poisened by affluence than by anything else. The antidote for affluence is reconsecration. Consecration is by definition the “setting apart of things for holy use.” Affluence did not stop Borden of Yale from giving his life in Egypt. Affluence didn’t stop Francis of Assissi from moving against the tide of his time.

It goes on to talk about how much Americans (this article is originally from the US) spend on mission compared to other unarguably unnecessary things. They give one-quarter of what they spend on weight-loss programs, and one fourteenth the amount spent on tobacco. And oh, this bit is really biting:

Where does this line of reasoning lead? It means that the overall lifestyle to which Americans have acquiesced has led us to a place where we are hardening our hearts as we harden our arteries.

Great article, really got me thinking.

One of the things it got me thinking about is something that’s been troubling me for a while now. It’s to do with being at war.

I’ve heard stories of war. My grandparents were caught in the middle of Europe during wwII. Other people’s grandparents I’ve talked to were in London, getting bombed every day and night. They’d leave for work and come home not knowing if their house would still be there or their partner still alive. Scary. That’s what being at war is.

Now me. I live in a country at war. We are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. People die every day – although thankfully no Aussies yet. The Iraqis, for example, are doing it tough: power going out for days at a time, regular bombings, soldiers walking everywhere with machine guns. (Read Riverbend’s blog, for example) Yet me – nothing. A bit of newspaper coverage at the start, not much any more. Petrol is 30% more expensive than it was a couple of years ago. That’s it, really.

I think this leads to an ambivalence about war. It doesn’t seem like it matters very much. It’s easy to say Yes, we should have invaded – when it’s not our family that might be killed at any moment. It’s not our houses or schools that might be destroyed tomorrow. It’s not our lives at stake.

Lord, help us.

We had interesting articles to read at Perspectives last week, they were to do with healing and other displays of God’s power. One part of the discussion centred around an idea that when Jesus healed the sick and drove out demons, he was extending God’s kingdom in the spiritual world. An interesting idea, but when I was explaining it to Leash when I got home, she said “Thinking on a big-picture level like that takes some of the personal relationship out of God. I think he heals people because he loves them and want’s to see them be well.”

It’s been making me think all week. God is a lot of things to a lot of people, and I reckon that is one of the most important aspects of God – he’s big, and very complex. Even if I find a way that I relate to God best, he’s out there meeting other people all the time, in a million different ways. And people who say “It’s not what God does for you but what you do for God” might be right, in that God is challenging them to do more. That doesn’t stop God from meeting someone else’s needs, someone who is too weak or timid to do Mighty Things. God can have relationship with them too. In a totally different way.

God is complex.

I am so committed to the Gordon (TAFE where I work as a sessional teacher) that I just have to go the extra step for the good of the school.

First I went there as a student and did projects. Then I started teaching, so I SET projects.

Today, I BECAME a project!

I booked myself in for a haircut in the salon where they teach hairdressing, and my hair was tipped, washed, cut and styled as a final exam thingie for the girl doing it. She passed too, thank goodness. It looks great. I hate to think what the haircuts look like for the projects that fail…

Well, maybe that’s going a bit far… let’s just say I like it a lot.

At the place where I’m filling in they use CSS quite a lot for page layout. I’ve only ever really used it for font styles – no layout or anything else at all – which is like using an F19 to toddle down the street for some milk. So I’ve borrowed Eric Meyer, on CSS and HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS. So far I’ve only read a couple of chapters of the Eric Meyer book, but it’s great. Revolutionising the way I’ll create websites from now on.

Look out world.

I made a picnic table out of redgum sleepers last weekend in the carport. It weighs approximately 250kgs.

Unliftable.

We’ll therefore be having picnics in the carport and parking the car on the front lawn from now on.

…and I’ve already learned stacks. I think the main thing is the whole attitude they have to design is very serious – things have to look good. With the work I’ve done in the past, even recently, I tend to think “I’ll get it all working first then make it look good”, which is still okay in theory, but inevitably by the time I’ve finished getting it all to work there’s not much time left for design. These guys design first and get the look okayed – first by the boss and then by the client – before coding a single html tag. I guess I’ve known that’s how it should be done, but bless me if I didn’t design the best looking website front page I’ve ever done today just by concentrating on that and only that. I’ll be taking that away.

By the way, we are still going to Indonesia in case anyone was wondering if the latest bombs have put us off. They haven’t, although we will of course be very careful while we’re over there.

I started a new job yesterday, filling in for a lucky boy who’s on holidays in Europe for the month. The job’s with a small design firm in a funky little office in West Geelong. I took it for the experience – I’ve never worked in a design place with other real designers before.

And after my first day – I think it’s good. Not too stressful. But it means I’ll be Even More Busy for the next month: any time I’m not teaching I’ll be designing.

I’ve been enjoying Steely Dan lately, one of my work colleagues used to listen to them all the time, I’ve been getting back into it. It’s good work music, just keeps rolling along steadily.

Another advantage of Steely Dan is that the songs I like the most – Babylon Sister, Deacon Blues, Hey Nineteen, Do It Again, IGY – are all over 5 minutes long, so if you’re dialing them up on a jukebox in a pub you get your dollar’s worth. Something to consider.