Forgettable Influence

An annoying thing I've spotted is that the times you are most likely to deeply influence someone are also ones that you are likely to forget.

I'm talking about the times that you give a piece of advice, teach someone something that you know, demonstrate something. The person you do this for, or in front of, feels that this is a huge revelation and they remember that moment for years. But if they speak to you about it years later, talking about "the time that you taught me..." whatever, you have no recollection of that moment, because for you it was a fairly ordinary one.

I've had this happen to me, and I've done it to others too.

I think the reason this happens is because the forgetful (or ordinary) moments are the ones most likely to have that big impact in the first place. If you are consciously trying to impart some deep wisdom, people pick up on the fact that you are trying. They know that it's coming from your head, not your heart. But if you say something succinct or take an extreme action with actually thinking about it too hard, then a person listening to or watching you will realize that this is something you genuinely believe, that it shapes your behaviour. That enables the feeling of big impact they get. They realize that this isn't just some pretty words, it's something you can live your life by.

Not Saying Amen

I was trying to do some morning devotions the other week. Just setting my alarm a little bit earlier, so that I could get out of bed earlier in the morning and spend some time reading the Bible and praying to God as a positive start to my day.

I'm not a 'morning person' so it was a bit difficult, but I managed it for several days. But I realised that it wasn't helpful for me to end my prayers with the word "Amen" when I did this.

This was because I was struggling to stay focused on the task (due to still being quite sleepy) and saying "Amen" when I finished praying was starting to feel like I was finished with the 'talking to God time' in my day and moving on to everything else.

This was obviously not the right way to think of life. God is with me all the time, and I generally aim to pray as soon as I feel like I have something to pray about. Jesus made it clear that we don't need special places or times to talk to Him.

But while the word "Amen" is a useful indicator for finishing a prayer when you are praying with a group of people, it turned out to be unhelpful when I prayed in private. It was like me saying "Goodbye!" to somebody I wasn't actually leaving. So I stopped using it.

Swearing

I wouldn't claim to have the cleanest sense of humour, but I do have cleaner-than-average language. I try to avoid swearing whenever possible, and generally succeed. The reason for this when I was a child used to be simply "because I am a Christian" but this isn't actually a very clear reason so as an adult I eventually had a think about my choices with the language I use.

When I gave it some thought, I realised that the question of "Is it OK to swear?" isn't going to have a single answer because there are two different types of swearing, and I need to answer this question for each of them separately.

Social Media and Intimacy

Talking with people face-to-face is a rarity today. As more of our friendships and relationships are maintained online, there are understandable questions about whether being "friends" means what it used to mean only a generation ago.

One of the interesting phenomenon that our culture became aware of quite quickly in social media was the apparent contradiction that a person with hundreds of "friends" online could feel extremely lonely. This has generally been explained by saying that our friendships on the internet are more superficial, or shallower, and that a person who only invests themselves in online friendships will miss the depth of those found in real life.

Knowing How the Story Ends

I think that it isn't such a bad thing to know how a story goes before you read or watch it.

This goes against one of the main methods Hollywood uses to keep making money, because one of the most common reasons people choose to watch a film is that they want to know the story. What happens? How does it end? This is particularly true of sequels where the audience has already been emotionally hooked to one or more characters.

Music, Memory and Marketing

When you sing a song, you are combining the sound of a melody with the meaning of words. The words by themselves, without a tune, would just be a quote. This shows that our minds are born tuned to remember things associated with a musical tune, because we all remember far more song lyrics than we do other quotes.

This is a powerful combination, and many parts of culture have already used this to their advantage. You have been influenced by the songs you know.

By songs, I'm not even beginning by thinking of the pop music industry. No, the time that this was recently brought to my attention was when watching scenes of celebration for the royal family on television.

God and Small Talk

A few years ago I started putting a question into conversations with friends who I knew were Christians. I was interested in both their response and their answers. The question was, “So how are things between you and God?” or, if they didn’t understand this, I would add “What has God done for you lately?”

I ask people this question for two reasons. First, I am passionate about God, and since I know I get excited by what He does in my own life, I know I would get equally excited by the things He is doing in my friend’s lives. It’s like being nosey, but in a good way. The second reason is to make a point, and hopefully to help some Christians to try and fight what I am trying to fight- the unspoken taboo that is our relationships with God.

Evangelism - Part 1

The following is adapted from the first half of a talk I gave at WYnet Summer Camp 2011. The theme for the week was Discipleship, and I spoke towards the end of the event about mission-ship, or evangelism.

I introduced the talk by saying that I knew they (the teens) had, or could get, advice on how to be "nice people" very easily, and therefore I wanted to cut straight to stuff about evangelism that could be applied in their lives at school and college.

What

During my time at the University of Chester, I heard what I think is the best definition of evangelism I have ever heard. It went,

"Evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where he can get free food."

Stories, Maths, Politics and Board Games

Stories and numbers seem intertwined in a confusing way. That one should come from another seems odd, but they do have some things in common. Stories involve change, and our earliest lessons in maths teach us how to change numbers. Politicians, game designers, and many other workers in the world require some skill at translation from one to the other, yet I wouldn't know where any of us learned how to do this.

Short Story: The Shriggs

In the year five million and one,

a space monk travelled to Pum.

A planet of green,

he hoped he would meet

some nice aliens he could take home.

His space vessel landed on soil,

and his first impressions were royal,

for the beings called Shriggs

were polite little things

with nice food and big homes and green smiles.

But the monk found his learning was slow,

unable to let the Shriggs know,

that a vow to be silent

actually meant

he could only converse with a show.

Emotions Apart

How many people on the far side of planet earth are you close friends with? In the age of the internet, where conversation cares nothing for physical distance, how many people do you know really well that have never been geographically close to you?

What if Emotions are like Distance?

Our emotions, both big and small, appear to define a part of our relationships with other people. Namely, how close or far we feel from each of them.

How, after a social activity, do you measure if you have spent good quality time with another person? It is possible to do the same activity, and do it together, but not feel that you have really "connected" with your friend?

Art vs. Self Expression

It seems like everyone has an opinion on art, but that most discussions on the subject end in the fashionable question "what is art?" and then the politically correct statement that "anything can be art", which is the same as saying that nothing is. If I invent a new adjective, and say that everything can be described with this word, then I have invented a useless word that doesn't actually mean anything helpful.

My own idea is that Art should be made a separate category from Self Expression. I would suggest that real Art does not need a blurb, but is self-explanatory to most observers, and recognisable for what it is meant to portray. This also means that creating good Art becomes a task of physical skill again, instead of a mental task of weirding your audience out with bodily fluids and scrap.

2 Reasons to Trust Authors

There are lots of non-fiction books by religious and spiritual people. They often contain views and explanations about life. They often disagree. How do you sort through the masses of material for something worth some of your time?

If you trust the writings of a person, you must trust the authority of that person. I have found that when I look for books to add to my One-day-I-will-read-this list, I am more likely to decide that I trust an author if the following 2 reasons are true.

Fake Fun

It seems that people can claim they have experienced fun in one of two ways- past and present.

The people who say they are having fun in the present are aware that they are enjoying their current experience. It sounds simple, but a surprising amount of "fun" things don't fit into this category!

The people who say they have Had Fun- past tense- have sometimes decided that "fun" is the acceptable label for whatever torment they just went through. I think that this post-trauma-override thing is a bit of self-deceipt mixed in with a knowledge of culturally accepted "fun" activities.

Know, Really!

You know a lot of stuff, don't you? In your head, I mean. You do a lot of stuff with your hands, too. You've got quite a lot of skills if you think about it. But would you admit, with me, that what we have in our head often contradicts what we are doing with our bodies?

Many times a day, I say "I know," when a friend or family member tells me something, but within moments I act as if I didn't know anything at all. "Careful! That oven tray is hot," my wife might call to me in the kitchen, and I reply "I know," as I reach for it with bare hands...

Small mistakes resulting in burnt fingers, and other consequences, happen every day, and it's not something to be too bothered about, is it? But 'being human' never limited us to only making small mistakes. Big ones happen too...

Trust and Power

- An action hero, before an explosive scene in a movie
- A parent, teaching their child to ride a bike
- Every politician, when the elections come around again
- Jesus, in the Bible
- Your friend, passing a suspicious drink to you
- A woman trying to convince a man to buy something
- A man trying to convince a woman to loose something
- A spiritual medium, who needs to pay the bills
- The leader of an army, before taking them into war
- A con man, assuring you of a secure investment
- A doctor, calming your nerves before an operation
- A blog writer, telling you what your life is missing...

These are all examples of people who say, in one form or another: "Trust me."

Human Rights

I don't believe in human rights. Hold your fire! What do I mean by that? Well the word I'm really focusing on is 'Rights'.

Our 'rights' state that one thing is true, because of another: We deserve shelter, water, food, clothes, etc., because... We were born.

Do you see the same cracks in this assumption that I do? We 'deserve' things because of... birth?

It makes sense to give a gold medal to a man who comes first place in a marathon against hundreds: he has worked hard, and the gold medal is our way of saying we recognize your work and reward your achievement. But it started with his choice to work hard and aim for a good position in that race.

The Character of God the Father - Part 2

The following is the second half of a talk I gave at the WYnet Passion conference 2010/11. (See my previous post for part 1). The theme for the week was Character, and I opened the event with this to say about God the Father, with the character of Jesus and the Holy Spirit being expanded on in later evenings.

In the first half, I have mentioned that our ideas of our Heavenly Father are not to be founded on our experiences of our earthly ones. I have also said that God Creates and Judges, and that judgment in the sense I used is the natural result after creation.

Loves

“God Loves you, He Loves me, He Loves everyone!” This side of God is probably so loudly proclaimed and tightly held onto by Christians recently that you can start to glaze over it, or forget that the Love of God is going to be more extreme than our own flimsy ideas about an emotion.

4 Definitions of Church

The word "Church" has had four different meanings to me so far. These definitions have been a mixture of nouns (names) and verbs (actions), and the latest two replace, for me, the earliest two... Sort of...

These different views on one word seem to stem from what you believe about spirituality, people, and what you believe the Bible says.

Noun 1: Church the Building

This is what most non-believers probably think of. A church is a building, a physical construction, a piece of architecture, maybe even just a historic artefact that is badly in need of repair. This view, of course, misses the fact that the christian church existed before buildings to contain it existed. So the shell has been mistaken for the organism. An easy, and understandable, mistake.

I Believe Science

I trust science, but I don't trust scientists. I believe in all verified findings, but not necesserily the conclusions drawn from them.

If a man holds a rock in your face and says "This rock keeps albino polar bears away, because the rock is here and albino polar bears are not," would you believe him? He has drawn a cause-effect relationship, after all.

Yes, it's a silly and extreme example. But in real life, the possibile conclusions that can be made from a new finding are often very similarly, but subtly, woven into the discovery, as if the fact and opinion are both a single fact.