A new issue of the weekly community group newsletter is online.
I try and publish it each Monday — running a little late this week. (of course it’s naturally geared more towards encounter peeps – but hope it’s useful for you as well.
Steven Delopoulos on Noisetrade.com
Steven Delopoulos (Burlap to Cashmere) is back with a new album and Noisetrade.com has a great collection of exclusive downloads.
Of course like all of Noisetrade’s music – you can tell 5 friends about the music and download it for free — or pay what you’d like for the music. Fair trade music! Love it!
For Young Men Only – a guy’s guide to the alien gender
Well I just finished reading “For Young Men Only – a guy’s guide to the alien gender.” Probably not something I would have picked up and read for myself (being 29 years of age) but a surprisingly good read none the less.
The authors, Jeff Feildhahn and Eric Rice do a great job in covering many of the boyhood (and often manhood) misconceptions of “the alien gender.”
While I enjoyed reading both For Men Only and For Women Only, I honestly expected this book (which is naturally geared more towards high schoolers — and the fourth in the “Only” series) to be either way too informative or on the cheesy side of entertaining – but the book does a great job of avoiding both extremes. Throughout the book, both Eric and Jeff share spot-on illustrations from their own lives and interjected relevant ideas and situations for high-schoolers that kept me interested and believing what they had to tell me.
However, don’t expect this book to be a “how-to” or DIY type of dating book. Like the other books in the series, it’s really about debunking the common misconceptions guys (including myself) have about that “mysterious other sex.”
Including ::
- Girls only go for the good looking Abercrombie guys
- Girls only like bad boys
- Girls never make sense (still not sure this is really a misconception ;-))
- Girls go from “love” to “get lost” in seconds flat
- and others…
Perhaps if my friends and I had this book many moons ago, we would have had a completely different understanding of young women and written a lot less goofy stories, poems and songs about misunderstanding them — along with saving us a lot of heartache along the way.
If nothing else, the book will be a great resource to start a discussion between you and the young men in your life.
Two years ago…
Mike Blythe shared his latest KMZ file of Jos, Nigeria yesterday.
Going back and looking at the sites make me start thinking about my trip to Nigeria.
I went back and looked at my blog posts and realized two years ago exactly I was nearing the end of my two week stay there.
Thought this was also interesting…
Nearly two years ago today (on a Monday afternoon — Oct. 9th) I was enjoying church with a group of people who didn’t speak my language and met in a warehouse with dirt floors and wooden benches.
Yesterday we did shopping in the morning and then went to a church at the Motorpark.
The Motorpark is basically a large field where people bring their cars and wait for riders to take trips across the country.
You can probably find a ride to any part of the country if you’re willing to wait for enough other riders to make it profitable for the car owner and driver.
The church at the Motorpark meets in a large building with wooden benches and dirt floors. Their numbers are few, but they’ve doubled in size since last year.
The church was large in size years ago before fighting broke out between the Muslims and Christians. The church dispersed after that but everyday a group of women would continue to meet in the afternoon and pray for God to work.
Now their numbers have at least tripled and they are excited and on fire for God.
My enemies are men like me
I read this great thought and quote this morning while reflecting on Brian’s message yesterday about forgiveness.
Someone has written that hatred is like drinking a cup of poison and waiting for the person you hate to die. It doesn’t harm the person you hate, or at least not in any way like the havoc it wreaks on you. In fact, hatred has the exact opposite effect of what you would hope for; a wise man in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Cities of the Plain explains that “Our enemies . . . seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.â€
But God help us, forgiveness can be a really hard thing to do.
…not dealing with emotional and spiritual cancer like internalized rage is a disaster. It’s like ignoring physical cancer and hoping it will go away.
Perhaps my enemies are much more like us than we’d ever want to admit and as Brian mentioned yesterday, forgiving them is the only thing that can really set us free.
A prayer of benediction
Now, wherever we are, and in every place, and at every hour, throughout each time of each day, may all of us honestly and humbly believe, holding in our hearts to love, honor, adore, serve, praise, bless, glorify, exalt, magnify, and give thanks to the Most High and Eternal God, Trinity and Unity.