Are their Wiccan groups around who have billboards outside their meetings reading ‘the reason for the season‘?

Use it wisely, friends.

I think it’s fantastic that as a college we’ve been setting ourselves to pray for those going out from the community at Newtown. Some are going to professional ministry positions, some to secular work, some to full-time roles in their families, some to a combination of any or all of the above. Asking for God to be at work in their lives and ministries is brilliant—and as someone who often struggles to pray regularly, a great spur and a reminder to me to ask God for his will to be done.

Something I noticed today as we were praying for some of the first years was that a good number of them were women, married to other students. What they put down in the list of prayer points as the ministry or job they were leaving college to pursue was generally along the lines of ‘Wife, Mother, Church member’.

I don’t think I saw a single bloke put down ‘Husband’ as his ministry. They were all—like my prayer points—’Assistant Minister at church X’, or ‘Chaplain to group Y’.

I think it’s fantastic that this group of women value their husbands and their children and their church family so highly that they see them as their primary ministry. But is it a failure in our thinking and our teaching on appropriate gender roles within our churches that the guys don’t express things in this way?^[2] Far too often the discussion about the roles of men and women in church is a ‘women’s issue’.

Nope. It’s an issue for all of us.

Now, most of the blokes I know who are leaving college are sorted on this front. Their wives are their first priority; they love their kids dearly. Above all else. But I fear that if we don’t talk about it, normally and naturally, it’s an easy next step to fail to put it into practice.

So, for the record, I wish to amend my exiting-student-prayer-points. The ministry I am leaving college to (continue to) do is to be a husband to Kristy, father to Elissa, and to minister to those in the church I’m in:^[3]

Sam Freney: Husband, Father, Assistant Minister.

[2] Not that I think that this is the only option for a married Christian woman, or a mother. Far from it. But if this is what she’s doing, I’m sure going to be praying for her.↩

[3] More details to come as they become available. Stay posted. ↩

I read an article this morning about some poorer examples of Twilight defence:

But the people — my God — the people who unironically love Twilight, who scour the Internet to find opportunities to defend it, who suffer weird delusions of grandeur — these people terrify me.

For what it is, it’s interesting. Both for the examples of hopeless comments (presumably made by teenage girls), but also for the counter-attacks in the comments. From both sides there’s a whole lot of “ZOMG you are so wrong you should just shut up and die!!!11!!“, only one side has slightly better grammar. And a superiority complex.

The very next random link was all about language: snarkiness, to be exact.

[Earnestness] builds a case; flippancy gets to just dance entertainingly on a case. One is the way you talk to people who get you, the other is the way you explain yourself to people who don’t. Teenagers are really amazing at one and often really poor at the other; they like being gotten, and they haven’t collected much information yet about what other people’s assumptions even are.

This kind of thing is often really important in Christian ministry—both earnestness and flippancy. The whole project is to establish sincerely and clearly the truth of the good news about Jesus. In lots of contexts, though, the key do communicating effectively is to be (at least partly) within the subculture of the group, whether it’s teenagers or retirees.

That’s where appropriate flippancy is gold. A one-liner that the 14-year-old gets (but maybe her parents don’t) goes a long way. It says ‘I understand you; I get where you’re coming from… and so you can probably get what I’m saying too’.

To pull off that one-liner, though, requires a bunch of cultural know-how. Get to know the people you’re with, what makes them tick, what they watch, listen to, love, hate, talk about, don’t know about. Not just to give you the sociological credit, but in order to really love them—it’s near impossible to love people you don’t know.

Maybe even—just maybe—watch Twilight.

I’m just about finished. The 15,000 words are written, and just need a bit of editing. I might post up a few of the interesting cases over the next few weeks, since they’re often puzzling parts of the NT (the parts where you read a bit, look up the OT reference, but they’re not the same. What the?)

So, the appropriate thing to do, I thought, would be to run my project through wordle.^[2] Here’s a representation of my work this year in 150 words:

Looks interesting, right?

Right?

[2] Previous adventures with Fish-Piper-Wordle. ↩

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Alfred Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade is chilling reading. Depicting a charge of men on horseback bearing sabres into a valley filled with their enemy armed to the teeth with firepower, it shows an act of great foolishness during the Crimean War.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Reading it in an Australian context, it sounds a lot like Gallipoli. During World War I, about one tenth of the total population enlisted in the armed forces. 15% of those men died, another 35% were gassed, injured, or captured. The charge of the ANZACS at Gallipoli is an event still imprinted on the Australian consciousness almost a century later.

Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

These soldiers, and many other men and women are remembered for their service. Anzac Day each year is an occasion of particular remembrance.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the charge they made,
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

The ANZACS died for others. (And, indeed, countless others in theatres of war throughout history.) They died for those they did not know. For a great number who they could never have met. Their deaths were in place of those they left behind.

So what makes the single death of the one man Jesus so special?

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

[Romans 5:6–8]

Unlike the ANZACS, Christ died for his enemies. Not for his friends, family, countrymen, but his enemies. But I must confess that I still, at times, struggle to see this as unique. As so completely particular to Jesus as to render every other death pale in comparison.

I think it’s because I don’t adequately feel the horror of sin.

I don’t properly see my former sinful self as so wholly separate from the holy, right, pure, good God. I was an enemy. An enemy so opposed to God that the bitterness between two men at war is no comparison.

Sin is ugly, twisted, horrific. But it comes so easily, so naturally, that I don’t feel its power. I don’t see the horror.

Even still, at just the right time, Christ died for me.

Today: why the Justinian doctrine of monogamy is a failed social experiment, and why polygyny is a form of praise to one’s first wife.

Putting skin-deep cultural analysis to one side, if this is accurately reflective of how marriage relationships are carried out more broadly within Muslim families (even without entering into polygamy), then I’m even more dismayed about how women are treated under Islam than I was before.

Which is saying something.

For me, it’s hope.

Hope is the best thing—in the strong, Christian, sense, of being assured of what lies ahead—because I know that what is around me is not the sum total of existence, and my future is in the hands of one who is infinitely greater and more in control than I am, who loves me.

And it’s the worst, in that a bunch of people that I know and love dearly don’t have that hope.