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

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!)