This coming Monday, I am going on an adventure with Matthew and our friend Laura. We are going to see Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly perform at the Opera House as part of the Sydney Vivid Festival. Whoo!


This image came from the Vivid website.
I hope it's OK to use here - I figure I am helping with promotion!

The music they will play is all newly commissioned and, I hear, has been inspired by planets in the solar system. Maybe even stars and things beyond the solar system!

I am incredibly excited and I'm psyching myself up even more, getting my head into a celestial space, by listening to music about space and the planets.
So far I have listened to Holst's The Planets. I need to think a little bit harder so I have more music to listen to in preparation over the weekend!
What other music should I be listening to, to evoke cosmic thoughts? Any ideas? Any style of music is good!

I have been reading 1 and 2 Kings in my bible reading and I have noticed something terrifying and fascinating.

By way of background, 1 and 2 Kings provides a sweeping history of Israel's monarchy:
- Their golden age under Kings David and Solomon
- The civil war between Solomon's dodgy heir Rehoboam and the politically savvy public servant Jeroboam
- The splitting of Israel into the Northern Kingdom, Israel, following Jeroboam and the Southern Kingdom, Judah, following Rehoboam.
- A long list of the kings and their antics in both kingdoms until their invasions by Assyria and Babylon, respectively.

People who have read this collection of books or did some thorough Old Testament work in Sunday School will know that the kings in Judah, who followed Rehoboam, were all descendents of Kings David and Solomon. God had promised to keep David's descendents on the throne and he stuck fast to his word with each generation, even when the king in question was awful. In the end Judah's monarchy was a mish-mash line of kings, all with the same genes as David but not always the same good practice. Some were great. Some were flaky. Some were pretty evil.

This time around I have paid more attention to the line of kings in the Northern Kingdom. Without exception they were all evil and manipulative. All the kings replaced the LORD with pathetic fake gods, which made it easier for them to control the population (Marx anyone? A classic example of using religion as the opiate of the masses!). Some of them engaged in the practice of child sacrifice. There are records of violent wars and attacks. And nearly every king was replaced, not by his own son, but by a crafty military man or public servant, who grabbed power after a terrifying round of assassinations or family-wide homicides. Could you imagine living in a society where your government was run like that?

However what stood out most for me was the way that the author describes every king in the North in pretty much the same way:

"He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD.
He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin."

How is it that this line of kings, where every second or third king is assassinating the prior king's family, how is it that they are so consistent with their evil behaviour? Only a handful of them were actually related to Jeroboam, yet his poor governance and evil behaviour runs through the line of kings like a genetic disease. Somehow the lineage of each king is traced back to Jeroboam, like an evil stepfather, with a consistency that screams for our attention.

Judah's kings, on the other hand, the actual family line (with the actual family connections) are the opposite. There are very few genetic hark backs. Hardly anyone exhibits the noble behaviour of their great ancestors, David and Solomon.

Maybe such awful behaviour is a family trait after all. But, sadly, it looks like the family in question isn't David's kids or Jeroboam's kids. It looks like it's the entire human family. Lame! This kind of trait is a really hard one to shake.

Postscript: The Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES) have published a helpful infographic of the kings in these books - you can see it here.

'fess up, Livejournal friends - everyone here ends up being some kind of amateur graphic designer even if you don't want to be. Even the process of picking a layout and scouting out userpics requires an eye for the visual. It doesn't take long before you want to start making your own rudimentary userpics and from there it's the slippery slide through paint into photoshop and before you know it you are doing the rounds, watching and participating in icontests and graphic communities. It's so easy, and it's such a great place to learn how to be an amateur!

My amateur design has stayed largely in the land of Liverjournal, with the odd foray out into the real world to design an advertisement or two suring my time in the USYD evangelical union. This year, however, I got a chance to pull together a "zine" for our church. I use the word "zine" in inverted commas, because I feel like the way we do it at church is a little too structured and organised to really be called a zine. It's pretty much just the regular order of service - with all the songs, prayer book excerpts and announcements - spruced up with pretty design and extra things like quotes, book reviews, poetry, etc that might relate to the content of the service. We create them for special services so that people who attend can have something to take home and keep thinking about the topic. They also provide another creative space for bringing different resources - in words and images into the service.

The service I was allocated to design for was on the relevance of Christianity. It was a pretty abstract topic! I ended up going with a kind of scrapbook theme and filled it with watercolours, texta scribbles and pictures of people and places, most of which were supplied by my lovely friend Lauren. The thought was what we think of as relevant is a very personal thing and is different for everyone. I wanted the booklet to feel personal, just like a scrapbook is full of all the personal memories that give shape to your life and show you what is important. I also chose to use more personal quotes from testimonies and interviews rather than abstract philosophical quotes about relevance. It was heaps of fun to make, and while the end result was a little bit messy and possibly bordering on too busy, I was really pleased with it.

( If you would like to see it, I have hidden it under the cut )

The cold I mentioned last Monday is still hanging around and morphing into something else so today is off as a sick day. I was wondering what to do to fill my time in the house alone and then I remembered - it's moments like these where I need to grab the opportunity to rewatch the UK version of The Office, which Matt doesn't enjoy watching like I do.

What a lovely morning it's been after all, sitting with a mug of tea, feeling incredibly thankful that my own office isn't that dysfunctional. Recently Matt and I have been rewatching later US episode of The Office so it was nice for me to trade in for the UK product for a little while, where everything is a little bit sadder and bleaker. I swapped Michael, Dwight, Jim, Pam, Roy and Kevin for David, Gareth, Tim, Dawn, Lee and Keith. The receptionist is a little more burnt out even from the beginning, the hero is a little more of a dork, the assistant (to the) regional manager is even more pathetic, the boyfriend seems a little more likely to be abusive and the boss makes me cringe in pain every time he opens his mouth. Again. Even after that many rewatches, after all those years. The US one might make me laugh more but the UK one definitely makes me feel more.

I did have a great laugh out loud moment in one of my favourite scenes. I actually had to stop watching for awhile because I laughed so hard I set off a coughing fit. Maybe I shouldn't be watching this with a cold after all!

( Tim vs Gareth - one of the best moments in The Office )

I'm very much still alive and not dead.

Since transitioning into life as a full time worker I've never felt consumed by my work. Not until the last few weeks, that is.

When the Food Insecurity study first got flagged a few years ago I imagined that the most labour intensive part would be all those interviews. It turns out I was wrong. Everyone on the team pitched in with interviewing and the burden was spread wide and very light. After the interviewing and waiting for all the surveys to return from around the country I have been plunged into intense data work - lots of verification, cleaning and exploratory analysis. It's been hectic, and if I'm not careful I'll end up with RSI but apart from that it's been fascinating so far. The data is incredibly rich. We received 590 surveys back and there is a really good representation from rural communities and indigenous communities. I keep flipping between feeling incredibly overwhelmed at the wave of work coming up and then the feeling of excitement, even the taste of adrenalin in the back of my throat. From a database! Yikes.

One of the nicest parts of the project in the last month was working offsite at the National Church Life Survey offices at the Australian Catholic University in Strathfield. They were kind enough to lend us their electronic data scanning and verifying software to cut back our data entry workload. I think we got the data entry done in half or a third of the projected time, with less error! Hooray! As well as that added bonus, I got to work in a suburb only a 15 minute drive away (wonderful sleep-ins), at a campus that is on the same bike track that runs near my house (yes!! the feeling of getting to work entirely on your own energy without paying ANY money for petrol or train tickets is exquisite), with a team that is awesome (once upon a time they used to work at Parramatta and I saw them all the time! for a week or two it was just like the old days). The data verification was incredibly tedious but it was balanced out by all those good things.


Moments at ACU: Pretending to be an academic with my ACU staff mug


FIRE! Not really, though.
Just an inconveniently timed unscheduled fire drill on my last day on campus


Celebrating the creation of the complete dataset!


Catholic art in the ACU corridors

It's not just food though - I get to do heaps of other cool things at work over the next few months too. I am running my first ever focus group with people attending our community education classes. And I get to do some work on action research. And some work on Christian evangelism and conversion. And then the census is coming out!! Yeah! Just wondering how I'm going to fit that huge amount of wonderful into the given time frame...

PART ONE

Earlier this year my doctor wrote me a letter to tell me I was Vitamin D deficient, which I guess is how it goes when you have an office job. There aren't many options to get out and soak up the sunshine.

The doctor told me to stock up on Vitamin D pills, which I wasn't too excited about - until I saw the pills. They look like this:



They are little, squishy, yellow, translucent pills of pure Vitamin D. Every morning (that I actually remember to take them) it feels like I am eating a little bit of sunshine.

------------------------------------------

PART TWO

I'm not really a fan of hip hop, however the lastest single released by the Aussie "skip hop" group, The Hilltop Hoods, is pretty much fantastic and I get excited everytime it comes on the radio. It's called Speaking in Tongues, from their latest album, Drink from the Sun.

It has horns, clever poetry and the sentiment is lovely. It's all I would ever want hip hop to be.


Listening to it again! It's so much fun!

"I am, you are, we are one
we're two sides of the same coin,
we drink from the sun!"

Has anyone out there seen Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy?

It's so absurd that don't understand it - but I can't stop laughing anyway. Maybe that's the point.

Everyone keeps telling me and now I know it's true. I need to watch The Mighty Boosh.


Yep, I just took a photo of the TV.
I think the skewed angle emphasises the surrealism.

Tonight I went back to class after two weeks of absence and two weeks of break. Somewhere in there I had missed the wrapping up of our Islam component and tonight we moved on to Buddhism.

I have a funny past with Buddhism. I have identified as a Christian in some way or another for as long as I have had memory, but there was a little moment in there, when I was in my mid teens, when I thought that it would be fair to give another religion a geniune look-in. It wasn't just a random decision. For quite a few years I had been stretching my mind a little bit, trying to come to my own ideas about who God is and what humans are and why the world is the way that it is. I'd read Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder and was empowered to think my own thoughts. Saz, Aviea, Elwin and I met together for our "Pancake Philosophy" times, when we would make pancakes and share our own musings about knowledge and spirituality. Of course, usually that just happened without the pancakes. In my Asian Studies subject in year 9 and 10 I was exposed to new Eastern philosophies and spirituality. There were excursions - to the Chinese Gardens, to a Buddhist art exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, to the Nan Tien Temple outside Wollongong. And in the middle of that, a short exchange trip to Japan. Through all of that Buddhism was the most appealing alternate way of thinking so I checked it out - seriously.


A Big Buddha we visited in Japan, somewhere outside of Tokyo

I didn't hang around there for very long though. Buddhism teaches an amazing view of the world. There is incredibly complex logic that doesn't make sense at first but becomes fascinatingly clear as you learn to adjust your thinking. However even when the clarity came, the worldview remained chillingly cold. There was no motivation for love. From my perspective, there was no motivation for anything at all. It was beautiful to look at but way too awful for me to actually incorporate into my life.


Baby Buddha, tucked away at the back of the Chinese Gardens in Sydney.
One of our Pancake Philosophy times happened sitting around this guy. I visit him whenever I go to the gardens :)

Tonight was a funny throwback to that period of my life. It was weird to revisit Buddha as an adult, now that I am much better at excercising my brain and appreciating different worldviews (thanks uni!) and also fully convinced of how much Jesus loves me (thanks uni!). Interestingly, I found Buddhism both more beautiful and more repellent than I did all those years ago. It's funny how things go like that.

A while back I post about how my church was doing a sermon series on understanding the world, including an awesome video of a poem inspired by the story of Adam and Eve and the snake. And also including a promise to put up a link to them sermons when they are available online.

They are up now! Here are the links to my two favourite sermons in the series:

- The corruption of God's world, based on Genesis 3
- God's care for his world, based on Psalm 104 and Matthew 6

Sadly the first two sermons in the series, on Genesis 1 (creation of the world) and Genesis 2 (creation of humanity) weren't recorded! But the later sermons in the series can be found at on my church's website if you are curious to see the rest of them.

EDIT: Heads up - I just downloaded them myself and they are long! I mean, if you are at church, maybe you go to a church where your sermons are that long normally, but usually at our church they are about two thirds or half the length! However they are still very good sermons to listen to if you have the time.
Also, the second talk is missing the first few seconds.

Christos Anesti!

( Pictures under the cut )

One
******** It's been a long weekend but I've had trouble sleeping in every day of it. Friday and Sunday we were up at 6:30 anyway so Matt could get away to the early church services, but the other two days - no excuse! Something has happened to my body clock!

Two
******** Dark church on Thursday night was very dark. I mean, yes, there was no light so of course it was dark. But the evening felt dark on the inside too. It was very weighty. While this was happening, Jan turned up to church after a 4 month absence in China! Even in the darkness and the weight of teaching about the Garden of Gethsemene I was ecstatic to see her again! She's only supposed to be here for a few weeks to graduate and sort out some things though. Oh well. A few weeks is better than never seeing her again.


Dark Church

Three
******** Saturday was a trip up the mountains to see the Moffitts in what is becoming something of an annual tradition. It was lovely to spend time with the family again. Since Matt has started working at church we've struggled to get a big enough chunk of time on the weekends to get up and see them. Apart from an allergy hit it was very relaxing. Mum had completed her latest sampler (it is absolutely stunning, see it here) and had been chasing up some family history so she had some cool stories to tell. Lachlan beat me nearly all of the time in Mario Kart which is unsurprising - but I actually won a couple of tracks (super surprising!). And, best of all, Matt, Lachlan and I went out for an explore around Megalong Valley, the bit under Katoomba. Oh, the beauty!






Megalong Valley

Four
******** Easter Sunday was amazing. Not just because I spent the morning cooking delicious sweet food or because we had a beautiful lunch with Angus, Nerida, Fiona and Ryan or because our entire congregation went out for dumplings after church. Nope. It was beyond the food. Jesus lives and all day it was a celebration. In the evening our church was full even though lots of people had disappeared for the long weekend. The singing at the end of the service was so loud and joyful that cavernous building felt full with sound. Our minister got up to send us out and his voice shook from trying not to cry.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?
He is not here; he has risen!
(Luke 24:5-6 NIV)

I have had a number of verses and songs flying around my head which have coincided with Palm Sunday - lots of things pointing to how Jesus comes to his people and how we will welcome him without fear. I've collected my favourite ones here.

Only one more week until Easter!


Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.

Zechariah 9:9-10 ESV



But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 ESV)



This life I live is not my own
For my redeemer paid the price
He took it to be his alone
To be his treasure and his prize
The thigs of earth I leave behind
To live in worship of the King
His is the right to rule my life
Mine is the joy to live for him
...
There is a voice that pierced the grave
A power that rolled the stone away
A sound of life - I know I'm saved
The voice of God has called my name
So I will rise, and in the air
Behold the glory of the King
I will not fear to meet him there
I know my life is hid with him

Michael Morrow (2009) This Life I Live

My Moore College course this semester is Understanding Buddhism and Islam but we are just focusing on Islam for the first half of the course. It's been a great course so far. Our lecturer has been wonderful and he has collected great textbooks and resources for us. The last few weeks of class have been especially amazing. We had a field trip to the Auburn Gallipoli mosque. We also had a guest lecturer, a young Muslim man who came in and answered a million questions from us about theology and his experience of being Muslim in Australia. This week we are cancelling class to attend a debate at Sydney Uni between a Muslim and a Christian which has been organised by the Muslim student society there. I love that we are getting so many opprtunities to get out of the classroom and actually hear from Muslim people!

The trip to the mosque was facinating. I had never been into a mosque before and it was nice to have a guide for my first visit. It was uncomfortable for most of the girls because it was one of the hottest days in March and none of us seemed to own any summery clothes that cover our arms and legs to the ankle. We were all wrapped up in trousers, cardigans and ill-fitting headscarves. Once we were inside though, no one seemed to mind. It was cool indoors, the air smelled nice and the carpet was amazingly soft under our bare feet. And the artwork! Everywhere I looked there was something beautiful to stare at! I think I spent most of the stime staring at the ceiling instead of watching the guide.



Auburn Gallipoli Mosque


Listening to the guide inside


The ceiling

There is so much to mentally process for this subject. Even just remembering facts about what Muslims believe is hard - it seems like there isn't always a consistent opinion! Between our textbooks, our tour guide and our guest lecturer I have heard quite surprising and contradictory things. I think so far this has been the the strangest thing about Islam: for such a huge global religion with a strict list of central beliefs and strict ways of expressing those beliefs there is still a lot variation in theology. And there are no central figureheads or denominational bodies to appeal to for orthodox thoughts and opinions. It feels like there is unity regarding the actions of a Muslim but disunity regarding theological ideas. I mean, all Muslims will affirm six core beliefs: one God, existence of Angels, the scriptures (i.e. the Quran), Muhammed's prophethood, God's foreknoweldge of everything and the final judgement. But there are different theological nuances underneath all these blanket statements of faith. Maybe this disunity isn't as much of a problem for Muslims as it is for me as a Christian - after all Muslims aren't trying to relate to God as one of his children, they are just trying to submit to his will. I guess then it makes sense that they would be more concerned with the actions and thoughts that express submission rather than working trying to understand God's character, and his relationship with his people and his world, and our own relationship with his people and his world.

Anyway, I'm still a noob, diving into understanding this completely foreign worldview. I think I need to talk to a lot more Muslims to really understand!