Category: Nature

Don’t Let All The Conspiracies Be Evil

The headlines are usually bad. Nations conspiring against nations, scandals and corruption in governments, corruption and abuse in charities, organised crime, businesses cheating the system, people cheating each other, and so on. It seems there are a lot of people in this world working hard to devise evil plans and then working together to carry them out. Which is nothing new. Isaiah wrote about the same thing hundreds of years before the first Christmas:

“…the schemes of the schemer are evil;
He devises wicked plans
To destroy the poor with lying words,
Even when the needy speaks justice.” – Isaiah 32:7 (NKJV)

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Finding A Bigger Story

This is a guest post written by my friend, Isabel Quinlan. She shared her story with our local Bible study group last week, and I asked her to write it up for you as well. Isabel writes a blog at https://isabelquinlanblog.wordpress.com

“Ruairí wants to go in there” my 2 year old said excitedly, prodding the picture of a farm in the board book i was reading him. I had a jolt of realisation, struck by the profound nature of stories. My 2 year old doesn’t yet know that this little farm is fictitious, but he instinctively knows that stories contain little worlds. Little imaginary offshoots of our own world.

I grew up with a Christian worldview. A view of our world as the creation of a being outside it, a 3D offshoot of his imagination. Through my teens my view changed. Like many other young people in Ireland at the time, I shed the narrative of a creator and dove into atheism, and began to view our world not as an imaginative creation spoken into physical existence, but rather as a collection of matter, governed by laws of physics.

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He Didn’t Have To Promise

What do we have that God didn’t give us?

Our bodies are the work of his hands. Our hearts beat with his gift of life. Our lungs fill with his air. Our minds are aware with his gift of consciousness. Our strength and abilities come from him. Even the abilities we work hard to develop ourselves come from him, because what are we developing except his gifts, using the strength and life he gave us?

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How Satellites Changed How I See The World

I grew up on the edge of a new world. I was the first of my friend group to own a mobile phone—an indestructible Nokia that could call and text, but I didn’t use it to text because that was expensive and who would I text anyway? No internet. No satellite navigation system. 

I was 16. My parents gave me the phone because we lived in the country and I had just gotten plastic proof of my adulthood: a full driver’s licence. I drove our little Toyota pickup truck with a tape deck that was so old the tapes would play faster or slower according to the engine rpms—so the tempo of the music changed every time I changed gears. It was hilarious. And really annoying. That truck was mostly reliable, but only mostly. I remember it breaking down on top of a mountain and how thankful I was that I could just barely coast into the driveway of the first house after miles of forest. I didn’t know the people there, but they helped me. I couldn’t always depend on the car, or the phone signal, so I had to depend on strangers. Gradually, as the cellular towers sprang up and the satellite networks became more reliable, our family breakdown stories changed. Helpful strangers began to feature less often in them.

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After The Flood

When the children went to school last Wednesday, it was raining. This is Ireland. We’re used to rain. Met Éireann gave an orange weather warning, but that almost always just means a bit of gusty wind or extra rain. I barely noticed. It wasn’t until the afternoon that I realised that this time it was not just a little bit extra—it was a month’s worth of rain, in 24 hours. The ground, so green and lush and well-watered, refused to take any more. The rivers carried away what they could, but they couldn’t carry it fast enough. Their banks broke. The green fields quickly became brown lakes. Then the lakes came into the streets, and the streets became rivers. And rivers don’t knock before they come inside.

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Already Unique

I saw an article recently that focused on how three different men had each created their own unique fashion styles. All of them looked quite different from each other, and all of them had managed to combine their clothes in ways that really did stand out from most of the styles on the street. The point of the article was to explore how these men had been able to craft styles that were actually unique, and how you and I could do the same.

Because that’s what we’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Western culture encourages us to stand out from the crowd and be different, to express our individuality and make sure everyone knows how unique we are. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The three men in the article are not the only ones trying to be unique these days. There are unique styles all over the place—or there would be, if there weren’t so many other people trying to be unique in the same sorts of ways. It’s getting harder and harder to stand out from the crowd with so many in the crowd working so hard to stand out as well. I guess I could wear a scarf in the summer, or put on a cowboy hat in Ireland, and that would certainly stand out, but is it really unique? Garth Brooks already wore a cowboy hat here, and he looked better in it. Do I need to invent my own hat? Wouldn’t that be crossing the line from unique to just plain weird, like Lady Gaga wearing her dress made of meat? Is that what it takes to be truly unique these days?

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