Ok, so I have figured out that there are several things in this universe that don't mix well: children and powertools; cats and waterbeds; petrol fires and water; and hard surfaces and bones.

I had a wee fall a couple of weeks back after plummeting downhill on a skateboard (I know, not my finest idea but it was fun before the fall). I thought at first that I was going to end up with just a few bumps and scrapes but a short ambulance ride and a couple x-rays later and the breaks were confirmed: one smashed hip and a broken radial head.

The arm set in plaster and an orthopaedic surgeon in wait I was rushed via a slightly uncomfortable ambulance ride to Rotorua hospital for hip surgery. A few hours later and I now have my own personal collection of titanium secretly stashed away ready to alert airport authorities should the need arise.

All this said I am now typing this with the one good hand I have and it is taking a little longer than normal (with more typo's than normal too) and I am left wondering if it was all worth it. I mean, the ride downhill was awesome, until I fell off, and it has been a bit of an adventure but is all the pain and inconvenience worth it?

Short answer: yes.

We are a product of our experiences and all that we go through makes us who we are. I mean, if we don't face difficulty, how will we ever learn to enjoy the good times or, for that matter, push through trials to develop character.

Now, don't for a moment think that I don't regret falling off: I do. It hurt... lots, and I don't want to repeat that anytime soon. But I have learned some important things from this experience. I have learned that I have an amazing group of friends that would do just about anything for me and my family; I have a family that loves me and is concerned for my wellbeing; that God, even when I'm being a little foolish, still loves and protects (yes, protects) and provides for my family and me; and that I have an amazing wife who is patient, kind and must love me because she stayed with me despite realising that I'm not that bright :)

I love you babe.

Peace out rabbit.

The most misused verse in the Bible

I cannot claim ownership or authorship of the following. I just thought it was so good I had to "borrow" it. The real author is Chris Blumhofer and the article was published in Relevant magazine.

Why do we twist God's promises—and how can we stop doing so?

“Jeremiah 29:11 is one of the most misused promises in the whole Bible!” a teacher of mine once proclaimed. I nodded in agreement when I first heard my teacher say that, but to be honest I couldn’t tell you what he meant. “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11, ESV). What’s wrong with applying that to our lives?

Here’s how I learned the hard way: I first had the promise of Jeremiah 29 offered to me in a greeting card at my college graduation. Two “Precious Moments”-type figures prayed on the front of a card, and on the inside was God’s promise to give me a future and a hope. Naturally, I knew exactly what God’s future and hope meant for a person in my situation: a job. I had already begun looking for work, and the verse from Jeremiah was a boost to my confidence.

I spent most of the next year trying to find work. I sent hundreds of emails, revised dozens of resumes and cover letters. I perfected the “just checking to see if you received my application and would like to set up a time to talk” phone call. I had a few good interviews but no offers.

In this rather pitiful way, my job-seeking failures evoked a crisis. What was God waiting for? I asked. Where was my future and my hope? And why was God not providing for me? As I waited for answers to these questions, I learned how to read Jeremiah 29 differently and, even more importantly, how to recognize the subtle ways that my view of God had been twisted out of shape.

The real story

Learning to re-read Jeremiah 29 required me to back up and understand the story of Jeremiah, especially chapter 28. That earlier chapter records a confrontation between the prophet Jeremiah and another prophet named Hananiah. They are standing in the Jerusalem temple—which is empty because the Babylonians had ransacked the city—when Hananiah makes a bold promise: God is going to restore Israel in two years. (Two years!) All the things that were stolen, all the people forced into slavery, everything will be better in two short years. The tens of thousands of people living in exile will be coming home soon.

Jeremiah recognized exactly what kind of promise this was. It sounded good in the short term and would make Hananiah and his supporters very popular. Hananiah may even have believed the promise himself. But it wasn’t true. God had no plans to make everything better in two years. Speaking through Jeremiah, God says to Hananiah, “You have made these people trust in a lie.”

Then comes Jeremiah 29. Against the backdrop of false promises about prosperity—about God’s wonderful plan to set everything right in the near future—Jeremiah sends a letter to Babylon that says, more-or-less: "All of you people are going to be in exile for 70 years. You’re going to die in Babylon. Your children are going to die in Babylon. Settle in."

We often read Jeremiah 29 like it is good news, plain and simple. But to the first people who heard those words, they were a tremendous disappointment. God’s people had suffered terribly. They had lost their land, their throne, their temple. Before Jerusalem fell in battle, the people had given in to cannibalism. They were then force-marched 800 miles and paraded (literally) through a pagan city in which they were now considered as the living symbols of the power of that city’s god.

It was into this kind of despair that Jeremiah offered God’s promise: “I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for your harm, to give you a future and a hope.” They were not easy words to hear. Jeremiah promised that God had a plan that was certain and inevitable. But it would not unfold on Israel’s timetable. It would not simply undo Israel’s hardship. Yet the promise stood: God would fully restore His people and bring them out of their desperate situation, but He would not do it in the way any of them would have planned it.

All along I had heard Jeremiah 29 like I was listening to Hananiah—as if God would work out everything for my benefit in the near future and in ways that made sense to me. This is what my teacher meant about misusing God’s promise: we take Jeremiah 29 out of its context and hear in it the promises we want to receive.

God the vending machine

When we realize our interpretation of Jeremiah (or any passage) has given in to such a misreading, we should step back and consider how we arrived in a place where God more closely resembled a vending machine than our creator and savior. It was Martin Luther who quipped, “What the heathen had in their wood, we have in our opinions.” He meant by that saying to remind us idolatry still exists. The form of it changes in every generation, but the tendency for us to exchange the truth of God for a lie continually confronts each person. We have a startling capacity for self-deception.

With that in mind, it's noteworthy that God speaks in Jeremiah 29:13–14 and says, “You will find me, if you seek me with all your heart … and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you.” The blessing (the restoration) is directly tied to being in right relationship with God. And being in right relationship flows from seeking “with all your heart.”

There are many ways to keep in check our subtle tendencies to twist God’s promises and plans into caricatures of what they really are. We can read the Bible with a greater sensitivity to context. We can open our thoughts about God and Scripture to others. Perhaps the most important way, however, is it to recommit ourselves to seeking God. Seeking God will not always result in fixes for life’s problems. Instead, it will cause us to realize we live within a much bigger story—one in which God resolves the disappointments of life in ways that far exceed our shortened sight.

Chris Blumhofer is a freelance writer and lives in Durham, NC, and is pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church. He has written for Out of Ur, Leadership and Faith & Leadership.

Am I alive?

Okay, so I'm one week into my second term of teaching and feeling like I have missed about a week of sleep.  Actually, come to think of it, I can't really remember much of how it came to be Saturday anyway!  I hear some of you snigger...
I am sitting alone at my school, furiously making resources for the upcoming weeks and thinking to myself: "Am I actually living or simply alive?"  The difference I hear you ask...  Well the difference is this: to be alive one simply needs to respire (that's breathing and all that goes with it) and take up space but in order to live we need to do more than take up space and consume air.  Living, TRUE living, is about knowing our identity, being certain of the ability of our God and challenging the space we exist in, pushing out our boundaries and becoming extraordinary people.  Jesus told us that one of His missions was to give us life, but not just ordinary, boring old life: no no no, ABUNDANT life (John 10:10).  When we receive Him we receive ALL that He is inside of us!!  That means that ALL of His character, ALL of His nature, ALL of His ability resides in latent form inside of us.  More than that though, all of this resides in ME and YOU specifically.  Not just Peter or James or John, or Pastor what-his-name, or even the worship leader... you and I.  The bible tells us that WE have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16), were created in His image (Gen 1:27), and are his sons and daughters given all of the inheritance of the first-born Son Jesus Christ himself (Rom 8)!!
So, I don't know about you, but alive is not what I want to be and existing is not what I want to be doing.  If you're like me, and sick of normality, tired of status-quo living and want more, the seek God with me and ask for all that he has for us.

Perspective

After recent events in the life of the church, God has been speaking to me about our perspective. 
Put simply, perspective is how big or how little an object appears depending upon where we are looking at it from.  In film perspective is created by the position of the camera.  If the camera is placed low to the ground, looking up at an object, that object appears larger - this is called a low perspective shot.  If the camera is placed high above the ground looking down at an object, that object appears diminished - obviously this is called a high perspective shot.
Sometimes in our lives we develop a low the perspective of the things that are in our lives: circumstances, finance, relationship with God.  This means that these things appear larger and more dominant than they are meant to be because of our position in relation to them.  The problem with this is that we were never meant to have a low perspective but often do because of what we believe about ourselves.  Often, because of our past experiences, beliefs about ourselves, family history etc... we undervalue ourselves and take on a perspective that God never meant us to have.  We need to remind ourselves of who we are in Christ.
God says that we are a 'royal priesthood', 'joint hiers with Christ', children of God', 'the head and not the tail': and these are just a small example of what God has called us to be.
The problem is that when we view things from our perspective instead of from God's, the things we are looking at come to dominate our perspective.  We need a change of viewpoint.
What Christ achieved on the cross was the ability for us to change our viewpoint in relation to our circumstances.  Through relationship with God we are elevated above our circumstances (the things we are looking at) and are able to take on a perspective that enables us to see our circumstances as they truly are.  What this means is that our renewed perspective makes those things that once seemed to dominate our lives diminish when we view them through the perspective of the cross.  Our position within those circumstances may not change, but our ability to see them as God sees them changes our relationship to them.  It's not that we become the head and they the tail, it's that we see that we always were the head.
We were never meant to have a diminished perspective, we were meant to see the circumstances of our lives diminish because of our perspective.
So... where is your perspective today?

First post

Ok, so every new blogger has to make a start somewhere and will inevitably end up writing a message somewhat resembling this one. Hi, hello there blah, blah, blah. Well I am now no longer a blog virgin and hopefully by now, neither are you. Welcome.
Keep it clean in here. No cussing, dissing (unless they deserve it), blasphemy or other heinous crimes against humanity.
Have fun, read often and write frequently too.
Cam