How do you feel when the alarm clock rings on Monday morning? Do you jump out of bed eager to start another working week? Not likely! Many of us spend 40, 50, 60+ hours a week at work. I am thinking of both paid and unpaid work, work at home and away from home. That’s about half of our waking hours especially if you have travel time. Work is sometimes enjoyable and sometimes satisfying. But sometimes it’s dead boring, sometimes it’s difficult, frustrating and stressful—definitely a health hazard!—and other times it’s so mundane, so insignificant. When I left school I was employed as a ‘gofer’ (a person who ‘goes for’ things) on a building site. My main job was to test concrete. After each pour I placed a sample in a steel cylinder. I had to fill it in 3 layers and prod each layer 25 times with a steel bar. It was so boring. It seemed so mundane. I thought I was going to go crazy! I was glad it only lasted 2 months.
The rags of time
Life, Sola Panel
No, there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do…
Jim Croce must have had me in mind when he wrote Time in a Bottle. It’s the story of my life—ideas to chase through, books to read, people to see, and letters to reply to. And some day, I promise myself, I’ll learn how to chip and putt. I even have an ‘ideas’ book in which I jot down all the things that I want to do. Reading back through it is a depressing experience. It is a catalogue of unfinished schemes and dreams.
Work: the big picture unfolds
Life, Sola Panel
The story so far
At the end our last article (Briefing #180), the picture regarding work was still fairly grim. Adam’s sin had lead to mankind’s loss of dominion in the world, with the result that work—which was an expression of his dominion—had become painful, difficult and frustrated. It was toil. (more…)
The balancing act
Life
One of the biggest struggles for many Christians is balancing the demands of work, family and ministry. It can seem impossible to balance the pressures of all three. The common and tempting solution is to simply neglect, or at least accept mediocrity, in one or even two of these areas of our lives.
Work: the big picture
Life
When we come to the Bible with questions about life we can do so in two ways. Firstly, we can look up all the words in the Bible that relate to our query, and try to collate the results. In this case, we could look up ‘work’, ‘toil’, ‘labour’, and so on—but this is by no means as easy as it sounds.
Factotum #10: Christian modelling
Everyday Ministry
One of the graduates of MTS was a male model before training for the ministry. As far as I know, this experience has not contributed greatly to his training. But modelling is an important feature of Christian ministry in the New Testament.
Prayer, praise and singing in church
Everyday Ministry, Sola Panel
Our series of articles on prayer and praise stimulated a number of responses, the majority of them being short notes and calls about how helpful the material had been.
Bunyan’s computer
Pastoral Ministry
John Bunyan’s name is familiar to most Christians. Some months ago, I came across one of his short books: The Acceptable Sacrifice. It was originally a sermon based on Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. It was his last book.
Factotum #9: Ministry apprentices
Pastoral Ministry
Apprenticeships are a familiar part of our community life. It is a well-established model of education and training where the master craftsman passes on his knowledge and skills to the trainee. Before our more formal educational institutions arose, apprenticing was the way craft and knowledge were handed down.
Worship and the didgeridoo
Life
As a proud didgeridoo player, I am keenly aware of the attraction of pagan worship forms.
There is nothing quite like sitting peacefully in the bush blowing intensly down a long hollowed log. The earthy sound of the didg, combined with the backup vocals of the kookuburras, and the hyperventilation of circular breathing, creates a kind of spiritual experience in a matter of minutes. It is no wonder Aborigines traditionally believe that the didgeridoo is a religious instrument; that it rouses the spirit world.
Confessions of a teenage praise junkie
Life, Sola Panel
The scene remains vivid in my memory, though it is nearly 20 years ago now.
I am sitting in my bedroom at the side of our big old farmhouse, a teenager, listless at that time of the evening when anything is better than homework. It is a warm summer night and the cicadas are belting out their chorus like an army of protesters with whistles. Into my little Sanyo cassette player I insert a tape borrowed from a friend. The latest Christian singer-songwriter—well, ‘latest’ as far as Lismore was concerned anyway— Keith Green.
Peretti: What’s the story?
Review
Walking out of the lounge room on Wednesday nights last year, I always performed a ritual of huge significance: the issuing of instructions to record the latest escapades of Mulder and Scully as they probe the unknown in The X-Files. As for many Australians, this show, with its extra-terrestrials, UFOs, supernatural occurrences, stories of the mysterious, the psychic and the bizarre has become required watching for me. Even though I have no time for the conspiracy theories and stories portrayed and implied, I’m addicted. There is something about this genre which captivates me.
Seven Principles of Prayer
Life
Prayer is a universal phenomenon amongst mankind. Men and women have always prayed everywhere. It is a natural consequence of believing in God. Humanity, by nature, believes in the existence of deity, that is, in a super-human, powerful, eternal being or beings with whom we are related and on whom, in some way, we depend. It is a concept congruous with our knowledge of ourselves and of the world. And so prayer is a natural activity. It springs out of our sense of need and of God’s relationship to us and his ability to help.
Judging by its title
Review
Disciplines of a Godly Man.
R. Kent Hughes.
Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991.
Some people collect commentaries, some people collect Christian biographies, some collect rare Bible editions. I collect books on men and men’s ministry. The reason may be quite primal and subconscious: it may be that I am searching for identity, confused in the switch from baby-boomer society to post-feminism. Maybe it’s a reaction to the kind of feminists who are throwing stones at Helen Garner. Or it maybe I’m still searching for a ‘real man’s’ Christian book.