Lectures to Myself

As Bron mentioned, my back is letting the team down. There was no straw, I am no camel, the last year of study has just taken its toll. I'm going to need to learn to look after my back much better than I have been doing.

The timing is both terrible and perfect. Terrible because I'm unable to go on mission. My team left yesterday for Gunnedah, about 5-6 hours drive North-West. Mission was a highlight of last year, so I'm disappointed to miss out. Also I was looking forward to seeing a part of country Australia and having the chance to preach again. It's perfect though because at least this way I get the chance to recover. Part of the reason my back got as bad as it did was because I couldn't just drop everything and rest. I had a book review of Original Sin to write, a sermon for mission to prepare plus the regular college work which stops for no man. So at least now I can take things easily for a bit.

Last week I read the intro to Lectures to My Students by C.H. Spurgeon. He wrote a letter about the Pastors' College and part of it has stuck in my head ever since:

The College aims at training preachers rather than scholars. To develop the faculty of ready speech, to help them understand the word of God, and to foster the spirit of consecration, courage, and confidence in God, are objects so important that we put all other matters into a secondary position. If a student should learn a thousand things, and yet fail to preach the gospel acceptably, his College course will have missed its true design. Should the pursuit of literary prizes and the ambition for classical honours so occupy his mind as to divert his attention from his life work, they are perilous rather than beneficial. To be wise to win souls is the wisdom ministers should possess.

Remembering that would solve quite a few of my problems.


Y'remember Spurgeon.

Thanks everyone for your encouraging comments and great post ideas.

This week has mostly been concerned with getting ready for next week. This weekend is our Church weekend away, and next week is college mission. So we've been having a quieter week in anticipation of the busy times ahead.

Unfortunately though Nick has had a very sore back/neck for the last week or so. Over the Easter weekend it got really bad. I took him to the chiropractor today who said that hopefully he should get better soon, or we will have to pay him another visit. So we're hoping and praying that it will get better enough for him to be able to go to the mission next week.

Over the last few days Nick has read me Stardust by Neil Gaiman. It's pretty cool (and a good 'reading out loud' book). It was kinda weird though because we had only just seen the movie. Which was also good, but in different ways!

The Blog-Warming

To celebrate the return of our blog we're having a blog warming party. Leave a comment, say hi, introduce yourself if you're new or have been lurking. Let us know what you'd like to see more of on the blog 2.0 And most of all, welcome!

This year we'll hopefully keep you up to date on life in Sydney, life at college and well, just life in general! Sometimes you might get intense theological reflections. Sometimes you might get a picture of our dinner. We hope that this blog is a good way to generally keep in touch with what we've been doing, thinking, feeling. We hope that we'll encourage you, and be able to share some of the things we've been learning. And we hope that you'll encourage us just by dropping by every now and then and saying hi.

If in Doubt, Re-Brand

We are so totally back. Not back like Kid Rock mind you, back like.... Oh I dunno!

I feel all self conscious again. It's like I lost my voice. My blog voice that is.

Anyway, we thought that seeing as we've had such a break from blogging, now that we're back online we may as well change things around a bit. Don't worry - it'll still be the same old blog with news and other random stuff about our life in Sydney including what we're eating, what Nick's reading and whatever else we've been enthusing about lately.

Yay!

Our modem arrived and Nick got everything working! (well, almost everything - we still don't have a phone because they haven't sent us the VOIP stuff, but hopefully that will come soon)

ii-idiot

Seems our internet has been put on, but our voip modem has gone astray. So we are without phone and net at the moment! I'm writing this from work, where I've been on the phone to our service provider for the last hour only to find that yes the hardware will be sent, but it will take a few days and the email telling me that was sent to our new email account (with them) along with the welcome email with our username and password (despite me asking for it to go to my normal email). And yes, it is normal procedure to send the welcome email with your log-in details to the account that you can't get into until you get the welcome email!!!!!!!!!!! No wonder they have a 30+ minute wait on the phone!

Anyway, quick update: We're both ok. I'm sick (bronchitis again) and Nick is going well at college. I went to my cousin's wedding (lol, gotta be careful about the apostrophe when writing that one hey!) on the weekend and it was lovely. Nick stayed home and perhaps was a little bit bored because when I got back he had been preserving, marinating and baking!

The Blog is Back (almost!)

We get the internet at home tomorrow - yay! So stay tuned for the return of our blog very soon.

Lovely Weekend

We had a really nice weekend in our new house. This was the first day off we've had there and it was really nice to feel like we're enjoying being there, settling in to the area etc. I don't think I'll feel fully settled in until we've got the internet on, but that's coming soon.

The kitchen boxes aren't fully unpacked, and Nick still needs a haircut, but at least we had a relaxing weekend. I think we needed it too - I'm fighting off a cold/flu thing which threatens to turn into bronchitis and Nick has a lot of college work bearing down too. It was nice to just take a break and relax though.