1306

05 Mar 2007

TACKLES was good. We started a new unit looking at telling people about Jesus. Kids don’t have inhibitions like adults do. This is exciting. One of my kids hit another in the face and tears were shed. This was less good, but they were pretty much all on task for the next fifteen minutes… God works in strange ways! (I am not seriously advocating violence, it was a curious effect… they were, of course, good friends twenty minutes later)

We had our first programmer applicant today. He is working at a large open source project that is highly relevant to what we’re trying to do and would be excellent to have on board. I’ve seen people poached from this particular organisation in the past with not too great a degree of success, but the motivation and skill sets required seem sufficiently different here that I am not generally afraid. Background checks out great. Praise God! I must investigate this tomorrow afternoon.

Certain sexuality issues have arisen following last night’s promotion of same-sex relationships that are perplexing me. Please pray for wisdom and discretion (this is discreet by its vagueness, please ask in similarly vague terms if you must do so). And love. For the record, I am not tempted/attracted by either the concept of homosexuality (& associated lifestyle, etc.), nor any male person.

We need a multicultural ministry at our church. We are somewhat racially homogenous, but so is the community around us, so that is an unintended side-effect of location. God brought a Taiwanese man who had been in the country for two days to our church this evening, perhaps only because he saw our sign had children’s classes on it and there were a few people standing around outside whom he could go up to and ask questions of. This was after the service had finished but he was looking for (free) English classes, so some very hurried phone calls and networking was done and Karl came up with a few options for him in other churches in the area. He is living less than five minutes walk from Matthias’ church building in Paddington. This is amazing and exciting and yet simultaneously frustrating because we do not have the resources/programmes in place. He spoke pretty good English and understood what people were saying without any difficulty so if he came back that would be wonderful. I have forgotten his name already :(Â I am terrible with names.

People can behave in startlingly immature and irresponsible ways. One part of me wants to accept their immediate defenses, but another cries out against the utter selfishness of such behaviours. This is a thought applied to a particular situation.

I start uni tomorrow. Err, today. I feel immensely tired and have said/done some things that are probably no more or less embarrassing than usual, but a lack of sleep renders them dramatically cast shadows in my mind. This effect will have probably faded by morning.

I can get a quite reasonable amount of sleep and should not be tired for tomorrow morning if I go to bed and sleep now. I just realised I only have 1 hour of uni tomorrow because tutorials haven’t yet commenced. It will be raining and miserable and I will probably not want to get out of bed, much less get out of bed and actually go somewhere. I will console myself by further celebrating our one-prospective-employee catch and writing a nice email explaining in as much detail as possible about the project, with an interview date soon.

I need to write some materials for my seminar for next Saturday sometime, too, so I might try and get a sizeable chunk of that done. I can stand up and talk about websites for any length of time without much preparation, but good resource sheets don’t write themselves. I will possibly publish this on CYIADA, though it’s not really being produced under that brand.

I am craving suitably bite-sized creative work and being blessed in seeing various stuff that Matthias are doing and being able to improve/create materials for that. Some of it is probably rubbish but no-one has complained yet. I think we are at the point where something is better than nothing. Pray that we could go beyond that and that other people might become involved in creating things to support the gospel work we’re doing, whether those things exist in the real world or in the murky realm of digital media! (Though real world things are more fun!)