What to do when the sermon sucks like a vacuum cleaner

I subscribe to more than 70 blogs while pointedly avoiding some, but Ying, missing yours was an honest-to-goodness mistake.

(By the way, for those of you who are curious enough to reconstruct which blogs I read, click through to my blog and check out ‘Gordon’s shared items’. They are a tip of the bloggy iceberg, so don’t be offended if yours isn’t there, because I read and enjoy a lot more than I let on.

Anyhoo, it’s funny when you think you are subscribing to a friend’s blog, and then you check out another blog, think “Hmm, that looks interesting”, and then click through to discover the blog you thought you were subscribing to. This has happened to me more than once, and the most recent oversight was Ying’s blog. Ying told me when we were at university together that the way to grow a beard fast was to rub your face with salt, then go without water for a few days. Then, when you pick up a glass of water and hold it to your lips, the beard hairs would come out looking for a drink. So you quickly tie knots in the hairs to stop them from retreating back into your face.

From looking at Ying’s blog briefly, it looks like his vivid descriptive style remains untouched by the fog of years. (Not that he’s old, of course, because he is only a bit older than me):

The other day, I gave what I believed was a pretty ordinary sermon. I’ve given some good ones before, and I’ve given some—well I guess you could say, sermons where you felt like you wanted to crawl into a cave and commit Spiritual Hara Kari ie taking my bible and using it to slice my bowels open.

It’s a terrific post. Read the rest of it, taking especial note of the first suggestion—particularly if the sermon you hear happens to be preached by me!