...thoughts on life, faith and culture.
It was my birthday a few weeks back and a friend sent a card with some photos on, one of which is me at the helm of a sailing boat. I’d quite forgotten about it and the memory made me smile. If you didn’t know the context, you could even look at that photo and think I knew what I was doing. What you can’t see is the storm we were sailing into – only minutes later I was wrestling the helm as the wind and rain lashed the boat and the sea reminded me of my amateur status. In...
View Article
As an avid reader one of the things I enjoyed most about decorating my new home was choosing a few books to have pride of place in the, rather minimalist, lounge. There’s my vintage Hemingways, some Shūsaku Endō, Márquez, and a couple of others, people who are amongst the greatest storytellers in the world. Something in the human condition draws us to the power of a good story. When those are stories of faith from other people, stories about the ways that God has came through for them, something special happens. This shouldn’t surprise us. Over three thousand years ago, the people of...
View Article
It’s funny, I wasn’t really surprised when it happened; I guess it had been coming for a while. Four years ago my then best friend of fifteen years cut me off cold. My sister had just died and I guess terminating the friendship was easier than having an awkward conversation around condolences. I don’t relate this in the hope of sympathy, or to air a grievance, I’ve long since forgiven, but I relate it because I know that so many people in life have, at one time or another, felt the feeling of being abandoned by someone they trusted. Don’t...
View Article
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I tend to be delighted by words. My friend Thom is probably the only person I know even more delighted by them; Thom, you see, is a linguist. I remember when I first came to church I was confused by the fact that I would sit next to him and he’d be taking notes in a different language each week just to practice. Last week we came to be having a conversation about the way that language shapes culture and he brought up a very interesting fact: There is no...
View Article
When I was two or three years old, my sister took a brick to my face. I don’t know why anyone would do that to a young boy, I just know I bled profusely from right above the eye while the perpetrator screamed a lot and tried to make the whole thing about her. Girls. I know those of you who know Rachel will struggle to believe this but it happened, maybe with slightly less intent than my recounting of it suggests, and I have a scar to prove it. I really dislike that scar, it’s almost hidden by my left...
View Article