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5 Ways to Read The Bible

To some, the Bible is an ancient text. To me, it’s the living word of God. It’s a story about the love of God. It taught me who God is.   It tells of how God created us, and saved us, in-spite of (and because of) all of our flaws, again and again, right until the Saviour came down once and for all, to die for us because he loves us (he comes back though). Parts of it are literal and parts of it are metaphors, sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. So, before getting into it, pray. A quick breakdown. The Old Testament: Stories we can learn from about ancient heroes of the faith (fully flawed people). There’s also poems, songs, laws, prophecies…never have I read anything that has so many different forms of literature in one place. The New Testament: The story of Jesus, life as a Christian and Revelations, about the end times (it has dragons). Here’s a few ways to start: 1. Start at 3 different points in time (easy and usual way). Expect to read 3 chapters a day, one from each sectio
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RUOK day: One Call Away

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R U OK? I hope we haven’t forgotten to ask you when you need it the most. R U OK day is an initiative that was started to encourage us to ask simple questions to combat the silent lethality of suicide.  At the end we have ideas that are just One Call Away, to stay connected during these socially distanced times. We hope this finds you well, but most importantly we hope it reaches you early, when your sad days are few and far in between. It is most likely coming to you when sadness is all you’ve known for a little while yet. I suppose you may be finding yourself slowly reaching that point where the switch flips from despair to searing numbness, its getting closer and you don’t quite know how to stop. Let me tell you friend, hope is just around the corner, or if we’re being covid-safe, just one call away. I can imagine it would be hard to suffer in silence , using all your energy to always be putting on a smile for those who have the pleasure of your acquaintance. Life seems to keep thr
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Getting your P's: Perseverance

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Some things take effort. Things like finishing a degree, getting fit, eating healthy, your spiritual life. You add to them every day little by little and not so suddenly, after some time you realise you’re closer to where you want to be. It’s called perseverance.  I struggle with perseverance. I always have an excuse. Right now, I’m supposed to be studying for my exams but I’m writing this. When I’m not, I’m watching Brooklyn 99 and even if watching tv shows usually helps me study, 95% of the time that’s just my excuse to procrastinate even more. It’s tough stuff to persevere sometimes, especially after 6 years of uni, but that’s just another excuse because this started well before uni :P. Honestly sometimes it feels like I’m swallowing a bowl of nails when it comes to persevering.  My personal relationship with God has definitely been the area of my life where I’ve persevered the least in the past. Only recently its come to my attention that it doesn’t need a million gran
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Choosing God's Authority (4): Obeying God even when you don't want to.

Sometimes there’s things you don’t want to do even when you know it is the right thing to do. Your heart just doesn’t want to. If we spent our lives following what our heart wants we’d end up in a deceptively wicked place because the way of the heart is deceptively wicked. We’d be swaying back and forth and wouldn’t go forward in our journey. I used to argue with my mum about doing the right thing. I had the epitome of the classic rebellious teenager attitude. I argued that I didn’t want to be fake so I should be behaving on the outside as I feel on the inside. She said I should behave correctly on the outside even if I didn’t want to on the inside, because atleast half of me was doing what was right. I thought it was ridiculous! The hypocrisy! But as I grew up I realised that sometimes you just have to do the right thing even when there’s nothing in you that wants to. That’s what they called obedience. (Disclaimer: obviously there are exceptions to this and we need to be c
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Choosing God's Authority (3): Obedience.

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Obedience in the Bible means to have a hearing heart that is intent on doing whatever God asks from us. Most importantly, a hearing heart that is rooted in love. I must admit that obedience was once the word I hated most in the bible. The word I ran from when I was a flighty little kid. The word I rolled my eyes at when I was an emotional teenager that already knew what was best, clearly. The word I skimmed over and ignored when I moved out of home and started uni. I mean what harm could come from a little bit here and a little bit there? Surely this was a flexible thing.  "It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1).
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"Whatcha gon do with that dessert?"

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According to the Royal Children’s Hospital’s guidelines on pain management in infants, small amounts of sweet solutions may be used to reduce pain and distress during minor procedures in infants (1). This is because the taste is pleasant on the tongue. I’m going to apply this, not based on any evidence based research, to us, now, today, on RUOK day. Since we were all babies once, I’m sure that there’s a baby in all of us that could use some sweetness to numb the pain. The theme this year will be, "Whatcha gon do with that dessert?” (Recommendations at the end!) Suicide has the onion effect.  In the wake of RUOK day more suicides have been occurring around me than any other time of year. A friend of a friend, a mother or father of a friend, a friend. When a person is affected, all the layers of social contacts around them are shaken too. Suicide creates confusion.  Like most unexpected death you wonder but by far the most common question related to sui
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Choosing God's authority (2): our motivation

When our motivation is GOD and just not OUR self improvement the whole plot changes. Its no longer a drive to become a better version of yourself, which will eventually drain everything from you. You don't go to God to make yourself better for this world, to be more successful or more likeable. You go to God for who God is. In this you find a drive to become God’s version of yourself because you believe God is good and knows all things.  It happened several times that even going to God was about making MYSELF better, more likeable, more agreeable. Go to God again and again and again until going to him is for him, not for you.  This automatically means you are striving for the best version of yourself that can ever exist, and you know as soon as you reach this truth that at this moment God has worked a perfect work in you; all your quirks, all your weaknesses and failures, he knows them and he knows you. Every dark corner you hide from the world, he knows it. And he loves a
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