Going backwards

Faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is... the most written about, examined, felt, etc. Over advent I have found myself going back through these three (mostly the first two)first I looked at hope, spurred on by Danny's posts and my own reading and thoughts.

Hope, when you're economically inactive seems such a temporal entity, it rises and falls like the tide as a new job prospect looms it rises, then as time takes it's toll it wains. Yet that is not hope just expectation, I think hope is something anchored in God which does not vary, He has a plan for me (despite my seeming failures) and is working it out. I need to follow it through, a lot of it involves waiting, which I am not good at, and work at what has been given to me which I procrastinate on.

Picture - Wrabness "going backwards into the wind" 28/12/08

Prudence

Today I was in town, for a meeting and found myself an hour early (well who expects the trains to run to time!), so as I was in the Trafalgar Square vicinity, I wandered into the National Gallery in search of enlightenment and a double espresso (not necessarily in that order).

The main exhibition du jour was Titian (Renaissance Venetian artist) where they were exhibiting "Diana and Actaeon" which they hope to purchase/save for the princely sum of £50m, yes it was big and beautiful but £50m.... If they don't manage to raise the funds it will be a loss to our nation.... How much would £50m save in people's lives, homes, health, etc. I like art but there must be reason, I'd rather look at a Banksy (free) and use the money as his art suggests...

[Rant on]

Ironically just around the corner from "Diana and Actaeon" is another much smaller painting by Titian called "An allegory on Prudence" with the motto;

EX PRAETERITO PRAESENS PRUDENTER AGIT NE FUTURA ACTIONẼ DETURPET

translated as;

"From [the experience of] the past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future actions".

Oh that they take the artists own advice, perhaps we all should, rather than bailing out a failed economy with methods that got us into this mess in the first place. Why do we persist in borrowing from our children's future only to feed our own greed and leaving it to them to clear it up?

[Rant off]

Picture (top) the Allegory on Prudence by Titian.

Picture (bottom) There is always hope by Banksy.

Hope....

Three days of interviews and a broken resolution this week. The resolution was on my 40th birthday I promised myself I'd never have to wear a tie again, as my view on ties from early in life, was they were only good for restricting the flow of blood to the brain. So good for industries like banking (we can see the results all around us) but not good for knowledge based industries.

Anyway rant over, the interviews were all very different, the first with a head hunter, not so much of the Amazonian Jivaro tribe (maybe they used ties to shrink their victims heads?) but more of the Londonian Starbucko tribe, who will suck your life out of you over a Grande Latte, with the vague hope that they'll remember you when they look at future job openings.

The second, was by far the worst conducted interview I've been in (from either side). First the "tell us about yourself" question which loosely translated means we haven't even bothered reading your CV. Then they proceeded to move the definition of the job description through at least three different roles (often contradictory) as they spoke, a clear indication they had no idea what they wanted. So that left no hope.

The third was a series of back to back interviews which went on for 5 hours, each interviewer had clearly been briefed prior to each session to look for particular aspects. From that one I took away some hope, because I knew they had achieved to gain a reasonable understanding of who I was and what I could offer professionally. So even if it doesn't go any further it wasn't because they didn't have a clear picture.

Now I'm in the waiting game to see if the last one want to take it further and so I hope...

Yet this hope is transient, and dependant on so many factors I have no control over. Yet when I read of hope in the Bible it is hope in God who does have control, so I conclude, for me at least, that the hope God offers is not here today and gone tomorrow but a surety of what he has planned for me. I just wish I could understand those plans better, as I don't take rejection well...

Picture the risen Christ at Sagrada Família (Barcelona) by Subirachs.

5 Things...

Since Danny tagged me, here are the 5 things I've always wanted to do;

1. Circumnavigate the world, under sail on a tall ship (with a year's supply of ginger).

2. Take a camping skiff down the Thames, with 2 companions and a dog, preferably named J, George and Montmorency (it comes with the territory).

3. Be able to take decent photographs i.e. get up early enough to catch the "good" light.

4. Be talented... at something, anything really.

5. Take a degree in philosophy, the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

As I'm new to this and I don't have any other blogger's to visit this upon, then the first 5 bloggers (could take sometime!) to leave a comment on this post consider yourself tagged...

Picture : Tall ship in Sydney harbour 2006

"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes."

Winston Churchill

Does that mean there's hope for me yet? Well if my newly found old friend is an example then yes :-) (except they're clearly no one's fool). For insight and wisdom look for Rumours of Angels.

Decisions, decisions...

Remembrance... the problem is I don't remember, even my parents were children during the WWII and although my grand parents saw service they are no longer with us to remember. As the years go by I appreciate more what those generations went through but still there is a basic disconnect as I live in a generation with no "real" experience of war.

What we do see is spoon fed to us by the media and as Aeschylus (525BC) put it "In war, truth is the first casualty" and apart from those in our armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is very hard for us to comprehend.

The closest I've been to anything like this was last Christmas (and I'm not referring to the extended family fight over the Turkey), we were out visiting friends in Kenya when the post election violence began.


I could make our experience sound very dramatic, running a road block with armed guards, flying into the international airport in a light aeroplane over the burning buildings in Nairobi, being interviewed by the BBC on our return, etc. But for the fact I doubt we were realistically in any real danger (unlike a lot of the local people). However what I did find was that suddenly the choices I was having to make to get the family home safely, had an extra dimension where the wrong decision had (at least in my mind) the potential to be disastrous.

So I begin to appreciate the importance of the choices made by people in these conflicts and I pray for them in the taking of those decisions, where peoples lives depend on them. Plus I thank God for those people in the past that took those difficult decisions, which has given us an essentially free society we have today.

Picture top : Landing at Jomokenyatta Airport.

Picture middle : Church burning near Kibera in Nairobi.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost (1923)

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Picture : Woods near Bagshot on 7th Nov 2008

Of elephant and men

Plans never seem to go to plan, or is it just me? More to the point I often get from A to B as planned but usually not in the way I planned.

For example I've always wanted to see an elephant in the wild and a few years ago a good friend ended up teaching in East Africa, so we took up the invite to go out. On our second day we were with a friend of our friend on a game drive in the middle of the night in an open top 4WD, we swung round a corner to discover 4 grey trees in the middle of the track. It became clear that these were connected to 2 large ears a large trunk set between 2 very large tusks, my first wild elephant, well furious actually.

At this point our friend killed the engine and the lights of the 4WD and the girls hid under the blanket (well known method of protection from 6 ton enraged pachyderm), he explained that we should all stay very still and after a while the elephant obviously decided that pulling branches off trees was more interesting than stamping on the rather smelly primates who'd disturbed its nocturnal ramblings.

So I got to see a "wild" elephant, quiet literally, but not as planned (which would have involved a good view from the end of a long zoom lens).

I'd been planning for some time to (a) find a new job and (b) spend more time with the family (I was traveling up to 70%) but as ever had been too busy/lazy (delete as appropriate) to do anything about it. So when I was laid off in August and there was serious illness in the family meant that option (b) came to pass (still working towards option (a)). I think it was God's intent that I should work on achieving these options (amongst others), but got fed up with my procrastination. I guess a rather dim shadow of how Paul's intent was always to visit the Church in Rome on the way to Costa del Sol, but didn't quite envisage to do so in chains at the whim a psychotic all powerful emperor.

Still we live and we learn (some of the time).

Picture : Elephant in the Samburu (Kenya).

Always take foresight over hindsight

Hindsight as they say is a wonderful thing, but foresight will always out-weigh it, because it allows us to shape the future.

Today (to me) the world has been given a ray of hope, in the shape of a leader with all the appearance of intelligence, wisdom, creativity, empathy and courage. I dearly hope he is given the tools to make our world a better place and protected from physical, spiritual and moral harm that can come with the reigns of power. But most of all foresight so that in 8 years time we like Paul to the Church in Rome can commend him and his administration.

"Looking back over what has been accomplished and what I have observed, I must say I am most pleased—in the context of Jesus" Romans 15v17

Picture from sunset in the Masai Mara, Kenya.

Cold & Wet

This weekend has seen the onset of the UK winter as we progressed from the warmish and damp to the cold and wet and walking the dog becomes a more solitary affair, as the prodigeny take a greater interest in homework.

Sunday morning and time for church, no matter how early we set the alarm we're always late. We're attending a charismatic and evangelic C 0f E, now there's a combination for you.

The first half hour is entirely worship, which consists of mainly short, repitive choruses, sung to easy listening tunes. Is it just me but even before the end of the first stanza my mind is bored and off to realms not always envisaged by the worship leader... why is root of -1 imaginary and the duck billed platypus a reality...

Ooops time to wake up for the "Message"...

"Pray constantly that you will have the strength and wits to make it through everything that's coming and end up on your feet before the Son of Man." Luke 21v36 (The Message)

How to start?

Not really sure how you start at this blogging game... I have little of interest to say in an otherwise ordinary life. Who I am might be a good place to start...

Born in the northern wilds of England.
Raised in the suburbs of Edinburgh.
Educated in life and academia in and around Edinburgh.
Working life spent in the deep south of England, a little to close to London for comfort.
A technologist by trade (i.e. playing with gadgets and persuading others to do so as well).
Married to a long suffering partner, beautiful inside and out.
Father to two children a teenage boy and soon to be teenage girl.

A Christian of sorts, meaning an angst ridden ball of doubt still clutching to the core tenants of belief, I'm not sure I can abandon fully because it provides me someone to shout and swear at, when I screw up (often).

I guess that's as good a way as any to start.

Almost forgot a key family member Shim, a black lab/retriever cross and ex-guide dog, who by virtue of being the most sensible in the family, rules the den with an iron paw. Only occasionally diverted by pesky squirrels sent to torment his otherwise idyllic life.