Captain Carrot: “In a few months they say we’ll be able to send messages all the way from Ankh-Morpork to Genua in less than a day!”

Sam Vimes: “Yes indeed. I wonder if by then we’ll have anything sensible to say to each other.” – Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

It's little comments like this that make me really appreciate Pratchett's books.

I just want to tell you all that the book of Isaiah is amazing.

Yes, the whole Bible is amazing, but I've never read Isaiah before, so I'm just focussing on it. And why not? Chapters 25-26 are full of things like salvation by faith, God's grace, resurrection of the dead, the proud made humble, the fact that what we accomplish is done for us by God, God planning things aaaages ago. No wonder its quoted in the NT so much. Also, comparing 25:8 with 1 Corinthian 15:54 and Rev 21:4 - they're the same. I didn't know Rev 21:4 was actually quoting Isaiah!

And that is what I've been thinking about.

A Snippet

"Don't let the world shape you so that the Bible looks boring. God Almighty has spoken. It can't be boring. It can't be boring - we're the problem. He's a Vesuvius of joy and energy and power and wisdom and strength and love and grace and justice and truth. He can't be boring. The world is boring! Avatar is boring!"

I laughed quite hard at the last part of this, but also, excellent point John Piper.

This is delightfully excellent. A portable bookshelf AND exercise wheel.

That awkward moment when both persons are trying to decide if the other recognises them, before one dives in with a tentative wave.

Just happened.

Love it.

It's funny how I had no posts between July and the 4th November last year . . .

Just thought I'd share that passing thought with you.

Which is another funny thing. I think something along those lines and then think, hmm I want to tell someone that. But of course, no one really cares, so the best place to put it is my blog where if a post looks boring, people don't have to read it.

Quite like this one, in fact.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

- Robert Graves

Angular Momentum

It's funny too, because I'm meant to *really* get this comic as I studied angular momentum last week. Unfortunately I didn't take anything in, but the cartoon is still more than moderately amusing.

Wow, wow, wow. John Stott the other night showed me a completely new and edifying way to look at the passages about Jesus, Pilate and Barabas. Basically, we are Barabas - the murderous theif who fully deserved death, and yet Jesus died in his place. "Imagine the look on Barabas' face when his cell was opened and told he could go free." Imagine him finding out that Pilate had said he found Jesus guilty of no crime. Imagine his astonishment.

That should be ours, multiplied by a factor of a thousand because our minds are just too small to comprehend the greatness of God and his grace.

My Dip into Politics

So I've started reading up on the cause for East Timor's independence. I (ignorantly) thought that Australia had simply always supported East Timorese independence. But on the first page of my reading I found that, far from that, our government had actually supported (morally and materially) the Indonesian government for twenty years in its brutal occupation of East Timor. I was a little shocked, and quite dismayed that the government considered good relations with Indonesia more important than human rights violations in East Timor.