Geoff and I have had some interesting guests this week…

Thought to ponder:

When you breathe in, your tummy expands as it fills with air.

When you breathe out, the air leaves your tummy and thus it deflates.

Why is it then that when you need to squeeze past somewhere, you breathe IN ??

Holiday: Day Three – Freebie Day (Part One)

Being the huge Ginger Beer fans that we are, on Wednesday of our trip, we visited the Buderim Ginger Factory (free entry!! yeh baby!). We browsed the endless shops, took photos of the frogs, had cuddles with the gingerbread men and just generally ran a muck. There wasn’t that much to do, but we roamed about for around an hour before moving on to our next adventure…

Holiday: Day One

For those of you who aren’t aware, Geoff and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary last Monday, 10th April. We went away for 3 nights to Coolum and stayed at a place called … The Beach Retreat. It was right across the water from the beach, and just south of the main drag in Coolum. (Don’t have any photos, so below is one I took of the water across the road..)

The first day was pretty usual for us – we went to Sunshine Plaza and went SHOPPING… didn’t really buy much except for lunch and maison/chocolate 🙂 Yumm… Went for a walk on the beach, bought some cow stuff for a certain special person’s birthday.. had dinner… watched a movie.. oh, and I read 🙂

Pretty relaxing day… stay tuned for the adventures of day two…

Happy Birthday Carla !!!

Last Wednesday was my sister Carla’s 24th birthday, so tonight we had a dinner in her honour. We had vietnamese/malasian/korean springrolls (make them with rice paper sheets dipped in hot water), with a range of yummy veges and a choice of marinated pork, chicken or prawns! Yummmo!!!

After that we had dad’s (famous) caramel tarts… OOOoooohhhh…

I got a great big hug from my bro too which made my night! I love family!!!

I’ve been told recently that I need to have more protein in my diet, especially in the mornings to give me energy for the day. So I’ve been encouraged to forego my cup of tea and “toast with ______” breakfasts, to something a little more nutritious (and tasty!).

This morning, I decided to go for a scrambled egg. So I prepared the zucchini, onion, garlic, mushrooms and capsicum and fried them up. Well, I was thinking “there’s no room for the egg”… in goes the 2 eggs…

What a hearty meal it turned out to be! Yummmmm….

To live, or not to live… That is the question…

This weekend (plus Friday) I had an intensive at uni. This meant that I had lectures from 9am – 4pm each day. The subject was called “understanding humanness” and is all about investigating what it means to be human.

It was quite a deep subject, and we were encouraged to “tunnel” and keep digging deeper. We spent quite a while talking about defining human, human being, identity, self, individual and person. It was quite fascinating, and I have been challenged a lot in various ways.

Last Wednesday night at Life Group, we talked about the difference between being “committed” to something, and being a “fanatical”. We talked about what is expected of us as Christians, and whether our relationship with God would be considered fanaticism, and how we would know if we were going “too far”. We concluded that it was about being intimate with God, not going and making drastic actions for the sake of being fanatical, but about knowing God and doing what HE tells us to do, even if it may seem fanatical. Whew.. does that make sense?

And now to tie that into what I learnt at uni…

Well, they were linked in many ways, but here’s one.. We were talking about how a Human Being is the nature of human existence – who we are & how we exist in the world. A famous philosopher Martin Heidegger talked about how we can live “authentically” or “inauthentically”.

To live authentically is that one is willing to sew into the world and others and is willing to share in the suffering of the world.

To live inauthentically is to lose the self in the everydayness of human life and existence. This is to simply adopt the values of the dominant culture. Which for us is “Its all about me!”

We talked about how our western society encourages us to live what has been defined as “inauthentically” because it doesn’t want to be challenged or changed.

Yet if we live “authentically” we take on responsibility for the world and our country to make them our family and cause that we are willing to suffer for. We are thus transformational… We also talked about how this cannot be done on one’s own. It has to be done in relationship and community.

Thus, to live authentically could be seen as “radical” or “fanatical” because it is living against the stream of culture!

Conclusion… how am EYE living?

A lot of the time, I am living inauthentically. Everyday life is what surrounds us.. it is what is there in front of us as the “pressing matter” to be dealt with. But how much of a lie this is! We are not meant to be here to succumb to the pressures and values of our society, but to be in an intimate relationship with God, live how He pleases, and effect change for Him!

Philippians 2:12-13
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

So what do you guys think about this?
How do YOU live?

When one of the mum’s collected her daughter from dteam last Monday afternoon, she asked me if I had seen the latest Scripture Union QLD Newsletter. I hadn’t. She showed me this lovely article on AGMF.

I just looked at it, then it occured to me what I was actually looking at. Right in the centre.

So she gave it to me to show Geoff… (btw-Thanks!)

On closer inspection, I noticed that on the other page, there were 2 photos from Outbreak last year! They were the same photos that were on the front of some of the SU camping brochures, but they had zoomed in so they missed my head. I don’t care – my senior jersey was still in both of them !!!!! hehehe

Here you go Jonny, an Iced Volvo…