I've just written a letter of complaint to Channel Nine's Programming Department, because they were making fun of a Big Issue vendor who I'm friends with on The Footy Show last night. They have a segment where they talk to people in the main street of a town or suburb, and they usually target people who are elderly and/or mentally handicapped, so they can make fun of them
A few weeks back the Nike store closed down. I took some pictures of Tomsy mourning at the site where the store once was:
Apparently they didn't actually make any profit from the store's sales - but the shop was mostly for advertising.
Marcus has a friend, Katie, visiting from Cornwall (Marcus is obsessed with being Cornish, and Cornwall not being part of England), so after church last night Marcus and Katie and Cara and Talitha and me went and had dumplings for tea at this Chinese restaurant in Tattersalls Lane. Marcus decided to leave some scrunched up 'Dead Man Rising' fliers, cause he thought it'd look cool.
This Easter we're setting up an art installation called 'Dead Man Rising'. It's going to be open in Footscray on Easter Sunday (April 8), and in Bendigo on Easter Monday (April 9).
Today I've been doing a bit of experimenting for the installation, projecting archaic anatomical diagrams onto a wet 'shroud'. (Thinking about the resurrection of the body.)
So, I ended up finishing that picture, and it's currently stuck on my wall, next to a rough drawing I've been working on:
Showed it to Tomsy this afternoon, and he said he wanted to put it in the exhibition he's running, even though it's opening Thursday night:
I was just coming back from the grocers before, with stuff for tea, and as I came into the laneway there were two guys coming out, one who I recognised from hanging out with at Flinders Street steps a few nights ago, and another guy who I didn't recognise.
As I passed them, the guy who I didn't recognise yelled out, 'OI!' I stopped and turned around to look at them, and he yelled, 'DON'T DROP!'
I said, 'What?'
He said, 'DON'T O.D.!'
So he must've thought I was there to inject heroin, and that I was going to do it on my own - which is a really bad idea, because then there's no-one to get help if you overdose.
Samantha Louise left this comment this morning:
All too often I apologise for things that i really dont' need to apologise for. It was only highlighted to me THIS YEAR that i can be like that, and i don't stick up for myself. The past few weeks i've been challenged by God to not be like that, and to not let peopel walk on me, and to take more of a stand.I said:
I think we often get the impression when we read about Jesus' teachings that he was saying that his followers should let others walk all over them, becuase he said to turn the other cheek, et cetera.I just finished a series of posts for Advoc8 about what Walter Wink reckons Jesus meant when he said to 'turn the other cheek'.
Resisting evil: part 1 | part 2 | part 3
Today I've been working on a drawing that I started on Wednesday at Pain in the Arts.
It's an idea I came up with for an exhibition that one of my friends invited me to contribute to, but it's a fair bit past the deadline now, and I don't know if it still fits within the theme very well. Anyway, I'm enjoying doing it.
We've started having cooking meals on Fridays that are really easy to cook, so that we can spend more of the day doing stuff as a community, rather than just cooking and cleaning up.
Yesterday we had hamburgers (except me and Ray had tofu burgers). Damo got there late because he'd had class, and there was only one piece of bread left, so he had a piece of bread between two burgers, instead of the other way 'round.
Yesterday we spent most of the day doing maintenance and improvement work in Credo - basically working together to look after Credo so that Credo can keep looking after us. We could get professionals to come in and do everything, but we believe that it's good us to do it ourselves, and know that we've done some good work together.
We got a lot of cleaning done, put up some rails for drying teatowels, and took the door off the pantry so that it's easier to get in and out of. I spent most of the day painting the flu.
This morning I went into the 7-Eleven near our place, and the middle-aged lady who works there was on her hands and knees, trying to get something out from under the counter. This guy ina business suit was yelling at her because he'd dropped some money, and it'd gone under the counter, and she couldn't get it out. It made me really angry, because whenever I go there she always seems really nervous, and is always apologising for things when she hasn't done anything wrong and stuff. So I didn't even really think about what I was doing, and I said to him, 'Don't be rude!' So he started yelling at me as well, and I asked him how much money he'd dropped, and he said it was two dollars, so I got two dollars out of my wallet and offered it to him, and he wouldn't take it because he wanted the lady who worked there to give him two dollars. He eventually went outside, and started yelling from outside for a little while, and then I got what I wnated and went and sat on the bench outside. When the guy had gone, the lady came out and started apologising to me for what had happened! (And I said she didn't need to apologise for anything.)
We've just been down to the Land of the Dragon King (Mentone) to get another Eastern Water Dragon. This is what Mentone is like:
And this is what our lizards are like:
The girl one (she's bigger) is called Grendelyn. The boy one doesn't have a name yet.
We've just been at Ding Dong for Winterpark's album launch. I was delighted to see that they had a whole heap of old TVs set up!
Most of today I've been at Forge's national summit, at The Factory in Mitcham (outer eastern suburbs/Bible belt).
This afternoon I went to listen to Dave and Ange Andrews from the Waiters Union (a Christian community in Brisbane's West End) talking about stuff to do with living in community, which was pretty good, particularly stuff to do with making sure you look after your boundaries, and the fact that you can't really be best friends with absolutely everyone in your community.
Cookie (currently in Aotearoa/New Zealand)'s done a post on his blog at The Age about how the Kingdom (or economy) of God differs from our globalised economy:
Whenever church clergy in Australia speak up on issues of politics or economics, the standard response from the likes of Prime Minister John Howard is that religious leaders should stay out of politics and get back into the realm of the spiritual where they belong.Read the whole thing here.
Often the message from politicians is that Christian faith is only relevant to the realm of the personal and is separate from all other aspects of society - leave politics and economics to the "experts" who understand such things.
It's a reflection of a culture that has individualised and commodified spirituality, separating the "sacred" from the "secular" and ignoring the implications of Christian faith for all of human life, particularly economics.
On Saturday I caught the train up to Bendigo, to talk to the Christian Union group (the Christian club at the university) there, at their training weekend. I was talking about how our society is very fragmented, and about some of the implications that has for Christians.
The first aspect of fragmentation I talked about was the fact that there are a lot of divsions between different social groups, and Christians in particular can end up isolating themselves from the rest of society. I explained a bit about how we try to respond to social divisions in Credo (inviting streeties and corporates to share a meal at the same table), and then about how I moved onto res when I was at uni, after realising that just about all of my social networks were with Christians.
The second aspect of fragmentation I talked about was the way that we tend to see different areas of our lives as independant from each other and completely unrelated. We see our faith as being unrelated to politics, economics, ecology, education and other areas of life. This can effect the way Christians understand and share the gospel, leading to it only being about getting to go to heaven when one dies, and forgetting the stuff about the restoration of God's kingdom on Earth. In other words, we can become completely focused on Christ's death and resurrection, and foget how he lived. One thing that I suggested was praying and reading the scriptures in contexts that we generally don't consider to be spiritual - like at uni, or on the bus or train, after football training, et cetera. Also, when we see how everything is related to our spirituality, it's a lot easier (possibly even unavoidable) to share our spirituality with others.
I also mentioned a couple of things about how we've ended up alienated from the rest of God's creation. Although God's original purpose for human beings in Genesis was to look after the Earth (2:15), we tend to see the Earth as something seperate from ourselves, which is ours to exploit. Also, because we've allowed ourselves to become distanced from the rest of creation, we have less opportunity for God's creation to remind us of God, and it's more difficult to believe in his goodness, or even existence.
Yesterday I went up to Bendigo again (three times so far this year) to hear Paul Dyson talk about nuclear power, uranium mining and nuclear weapons. I took this 15-second exposure of the moon on the way back:
We don't get to see the heavens very clearly here in Melbourne because of the light pollution.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
(Psalm 8:3-4)
Article from today's Age:
A GROWING number of low-income Australians are enduring living standards typical of the Third World — with many forgoing basic necessities including food and health care — in order to meet the increasing cost of rents and mortgages.Read the rest here.
Yesterday I worked at Green Collect for the first time. Green Collect is a recycling company that shares part of the church building with us, and where a number of people who come to lunch at Credo work. Started off getting cork, aluminium and steel that had been sorted out of the store room, and loading it into the metal onto the trailer to be taken to be recycled. Someone going to come to us to pick up the cork. I also organised all the stuff that was still in the store room (mostly plastics), and then spent the rest of the day sorting different kinds of plastic and answering phone calls.
Don't know how regularly I'm going to be working at Green Collect yet, or what I'll normally be doing, so I'll still be doing my cleaning job out in the suburbs, at least for a while. I'm only getting about four and a half hours a week of cleaning now though, compared to about seven hours a week when I started at the end of 2005.
There's been some stuff in the news recently about some people who reckon they've found the tomb and coffins of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and a child they're rumored to have had together. A few years back there was someone who reckoned they'd found the coffin of Jesus' brother James, and that turned out to be a forgery. It seems almost like a resurgence of the medieval obsession with holy artifacts - pieces of the One True Cross, bones of saints, et cetera.
