Future Me

A wee while ago I found a site called FutureMe.org which allows you to write an email to yourself and choose when it will be sent. I’d kind of forgotten about it but clearly on May 16th I thought the below was worth sending to the future me.

Dear FutureMe,

Don’t forget:

You and I don’t do many significant things in our lives. We only make 3-4 major decisions. Most of us will not be written up in history books. Sorry, it’s true. For most of us, several decades after we die, the people we leave behind will struggle to remember the events of our lives. You live in the utterly mundane. You live in little moments. And if God doesn’t rule your little moments He doesn’t rule you because that is where you live. I think one of the big problems we make in our marriages is when we name little moments as “little moments” and say they are not important. If the character of a life is not set by four or five big moments but is set by 10,000 little moments, every little moment of your life is important. That’s where your life is formed and that’s where your relationships are built and formed. We cannot back away from the little moments because that happens to be where we live. And our God is a God of the little moments. He enters those little moments with his
truth and wisdom and grace.”
- Paul David Tripp

Live for God in each and every little moment because he’s there in all of them

Good luck at uni

Happy Blog Birthday!!

Today my blog is 1 year old! Isn’t that nice!!

I can’t believe it’s been a year and I can’t believe how much has happened in that year!

I’ve been reading through some of the posts . . . I’m not sure why you bother . . . but it has been great for me to remember all the ups and downs and to know God’s faithfulness throughout it all. Reading the posts is probably more interesting for me than you, especially the more cryptic ones where you surely haven’t a clue what’s going on!

Some stats for you:

410 posts

225 tags

136 comments

77 posts on God

60 on the Bible

I think my favourite posts were the ones about holidays, such as Rome and Skye.

Oh, and I have recieved 9063 hits!! Not too shabby!!

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep you posted on the trials and tribulations of student life in Edinburgh, bore you with theology stuff from lectures and keep the random videos, comments and links coming your way.

Happy 1st Blog Birthday!!

The Next Level of Prayer: Social Media

The Next Level of Prayer: Social Media – ChurchCrunch .

This would be like combining two of my favourite things!

The power of social media in prayer is that it brings your prayer event to the online community, which knows no geographical boundaries. My people here from a relatively small church in the country of Ohio were exhilarated by praying for people in far away places who are doing great things for God.

Twitter and Facebook took our prayer vigil to the next level by connecting us to the global Body of Christ.

Follow the link for the full story.

Blog Images

Good news on the Google Blog today:

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify.

No more worrying about whether or not you’re technically stealing the pictures you use. Yay!! And you get to find pretty things like this:

Google strikes again!

Blogging

Well, after my week off I have returned to Facebook and Twitter. I have not, however, reinstalled them on my iPod and am far better at just not going on them on my laptop. I discovered in my week off that they are not as vital as i thought, twitter in particular. I mainly follow people on twitter who I don’t know and whilst their tweets are interesting they do not particularly influence or affect me. Facebook is useful for keeping in touch with people but not vital for survival! I’m updating far less now (which I’m sure folk can only be grateful for, as inane facts about my life no longer dominate their homepages) and the whole thing is stressing me out much less.

I have had further food for thought though becuase the danger last week was that checking my blog stats or email replaced checking facebook and today I learned that one of the blogs I read YSMarko is shutting down because he feels that the blog is one of the things that “consistently eclipse the relationships and values that are actually most important to [him]“.

I’ve been asked a number of times in just the past few days why I blog. I can give you two answers. Both are true, it’s just that one is more true than the other.

• Blogging gives me time. Time to think. Time to process. Time to remember. Time to study. Time to write. When I need somewhere to write down what’s going on my head it’s right here. When there’s something I need to tell the world I have the space in which to do that. Blogging alows me to digest the world around me and then communicate it again. I was always told, the best way to learn something is to have to teach it to someone else. 

• Blogging allows me to indulge the attention seeking four year old that still resides within me. I get to believe for a little while that people care what I think and that what I say has an impact. I get to be queen of my own little universe. I watch those blog stats very closely – there’s a part of me that needs to know people are paying me some attention.

I’ll let you decide which is the more true one.

My blog, though it once did, no longer dominates my day. If I don’t post, I get over it pretty quickly. If the stats drop suddenly or decline steadily for a period, I get over it . . . eventually. Could I shut it down though? I’m honestly not sure. Then I’d have to return to good old fashioned paper and pen journaling and where’s the fun in that?! Then my witty and sarcastic comments only make me laugh. My inspiring tales never get to change lives and my rants never get to change the world! (Or not . . you know . . . whatever . . .)

So here are my questions:

1. Why do you blog? 
2. If you don’t blog, why do you read blogs? Particularly ones like mine which are really just autobiographies of randoms? 
3. Do you think your life is better or worse thanks to blogs/ blogging?

And don’t just not bother commenting, I really want to know!!

Obsession

If you haven’t already noticed I am completely, totally and utterly obsessed with facebook and twitter. And it’s gotten a heck of a lot worse in the past month. It’s got to the point where the very last thing I do at night and the very first thing I do in the morning, from the comfort of my bed, is check my facebook and twitter accounts. It’s so bad now that I think in terms of status updates – if something, anything, happens my first reaction is to turn it into a 140 character phrase that I could post. 

It’s pretty obvious to me and everyone I know that I spend a lot of time on these things but I haven’t particularly thought of it as dangerous until now. Anne Jackson has been posting some challenging stuff about our use (and abuse) of facebook/ twitter/ blogs and the restrictions she has decided to implement in her own “online” life. When I woke up this morning, whilst still in bed and having already checked facebook and twitter, I read her post “Are you an addict?”. It hit home, to say the least.

I don’t want my life to revolve around facebook and twitter. I don’t want these to be my first and last thoughts of the day. I don’t want to measure my life in status updates! I want God to be the thing that all else revolves around. I want Him to be to be the thing that my thoughts are consistantly directed towards. I want to be eager to spend time with Him and not checking what my friends are thinking. 

So, this morning I deleted the facebook and twitter apps from my iPod. In five minutes I will post a link to this post in my facebook status and that will be the last time I log in until next Monday. Also until then, no more tweeting for me, except prayers for Holiday Club. Email and blogs will still be on the go, for now at least. Then on Monday I will revisit the situation, decide if my head is any clearer, my heart in a better place, and if I need to put some on-going boundaries in place.

This actually makes me anxious.

I’m going to have to make the effort to speak to people by other means for a weak, instead of assuming I know how they are. Ensuring people are alive is going to take more effort than just seeing if they’ve done anything on facebook in the past couple of days. Instead of wasting hours a day, essentially doing nothing, on facebook I get to read and study.

This may all sound ridiculous and over-exaggerated but you’re just going to have to trust me that it’s as serious as I say.

Here we go . . .

Pray for your blog

I was reading John Saddington’s article on his blog Church Crunch and was a little taken aback by his last point: pray for your blog.

I might rant about prayer all the time but I had never ever thought about this. 

It does make sense though: if I want this blog to honour God, I ought to be praying about it.

Do you about your blog and what you post?

Up and coming

Going to try and do a couple of things over the next few weeks.

On Tuesdays at Kidsplus we’re looking at the Lord’s prayer. So we’re going to do the same here. Every Tuesday I’ll be posting about one line, what it means in general and what it means to me.

At assemblies in the primary schools at the minute we’re doing the ten commandments – two at a time – so I’ll be posting about those on Fridays.

I could go one further and post about James which the discipleship group at school is studying though I think I might make those more sporadic.

Things are getting serious – now we’re having mini-series!! I wonder what’ll come next . . .

You need a feed reader

One of the joys of WordPress is that I can see the links people have followed to ge to my blog and also the links they follow from my blog to other places. It’s quite interesting to see the patterns people clearly follow as they visit four or five blogs in succession, each day.

So here’s my advice. Get yourself a feed reader.

I use Google Reader. It’s great. All the posts, from all the blogs I read, in one place. I can “star” or “keep unread” anything I want to reread later. I can scan quickly through stuff I’m not so bothered about. I never have to miss a thing and don’t spend ages clicking through lots of different pages.

There’s plenty of other readers out there. I just don’t really know what they are. I’m a Google fan.

Only down side is that it means you don’t actually visit my blog which means I don’t get as many hits. Not that I’m paranoid about checking them or anything. Maybe it would be good for me for there to be a major slump. Just promise me you’ll check in again once in a while