On Monday the 26th of April, I proposed to Sarah (many of you have already had the pleasure of meeting her). There you go.

A bit more detail is in order I suppose. First – the proposal (I’ll write about more details later):

It was an ordinary sunny day in Dublin. I arranged to meet Sarah for lunch because she had a half day that day. We decided to have a picnic in the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin. If you’ve never been to the Iveagh Gardens I highly recommend it – it’s a secret garden in the middle of Dublin many people walk right past it without even noticing. We picked a spot in a quiet area to sit down. I deliberately tried to find a quiet area because I knew what was coming up next, I wanted to give us some privacy so Sarah would feel free to decline my proposal if she wanted – as certain as I was that I should ask, I know that Sarah is very much her own woman and would say no if she felt the timing wasn’t right.

Here’s Sarah pointing at the very ordinary looking spot of grass where we had our picnic and I proposed. The picture was taken the following Sunday when we went back to the park for another picnic after I preached at a nearby church:

The spot where I proposed to Sarah.

So it was an ordinary spot on an ordinary day, the reason for this is because I was very much focused on surprising Sarah. I tend to give the game away when it comes to surprising Sarah – excitement or uncertainty will often lead me to announce a potential surprise, or ask Sarah if she would like something before I get it for her. So this time I was determined to surprise Sarah. And I did. The poor girl. Although Sarah said yes (when she caught her breath) the first time, she made me ask her again (thankfully saying yes again) because the first time was such a blur. I know now that there is a pressure point on a man’s knee that empties his head of all prepared speeches as soon as pressure is applied there when he goes down on one knee (or up as it was in my case since we were having a picnic on the grass) to propose.

Since then we’ve been overwhelmed by the joy and enthusiasm of our friends and family as they celebrate with us. We’ve been making plans for the big day and looking forward to our future together with a greater sense of commitment and We’ve been reading a lot of marriage preparation material. Sarah is having her ring ‘ooh-ed’ and ‘ahh-ed’ over. I think she’s enjoying that.

Also the series “Doing Live Vs Doing Sunday” will continue on (DV). I have it planned as a four-part series.

So, now you know.
I’ll be back.
John.

Paperback copies of individual gospels are often distributed for outreach and evangelism. The first gospel I read was Marks’s gospel, it was recommended to me because it is short and sweet – my friend says it can be read in an hour, but I’ve never timed myself. That said, a gospel that can be read in one hour makes for nice manageable reading for even the busiest of people when they break it up to read one chapter a day. Another gospel often recommended to new believers or non-Christians is John’s gospel. John is very philosophical and was written for people who might already be familiar with the rough story of Jesus but have not grasped the deeper significance. As you can see from this picture it appears that Mark and John are the most popular. Which gospel would you recommend for new believers or those curious about Christianity?

Hi Future-John, this is yourself contacting you from the past. Just letting you know the IPC costs €135. I hope the sermon went well.

The point was to remind me to collect a cheque to pay for the Irish Preacher’s Conference. I could have used the reminder function on my phone but this seemed like more fun. It worked. I think the sermon went well too.

There is this duality to life where we try to get ourselves to follow up on the good intentions or good ideas that we have, sometimes this does not go so smoothly. Following through on good ideas that don’t really cost us is easy  but what about the times when we have to remind ourselves to die to our old habits and sins? Following through on the intention to pick up a cheque was easy for me, following through on the intentions to die to my old self and live out my new identity is not so easy?

The thing is I’m selfish and the old me was very happy to just go along being selfish, the centre of his own universe, either pursuing self-pleasure or indulging in self-pity. But I like the new me much more, my eyes have been opened to what is good. I can see the changes Christ has already made in me, dramatic changes. I am far from the person I was five years ago, but there is always a challenge to die to old habits and sins and always the struggle within myself to do what I know is good and what I know I really want in my heart.

St. Paul put it like the struggle like this:

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
(Romans 7:15-24 – ESV)

He answers his own question in the next sentence:

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:25a – ESV)

With Christ I have not just been shown where I am going wrong, laden with guilt and told to pull my socks up, but have been given a Rescuer. God doesn’t just call me to be a better man, he makes me into a new creation. He does the work, my job is to stick by Him, and even that I wouldn’t do if he didn’t open my eyes.

So here are some good intentions I have at the moment, springing from convictions I believe God has given me; you can pray for me if you like and I will lean on God to do the hard work:

I want blog here more. It’s a good discipline to have, it gets me to think and I know people are praying for me and often go for far too long without receiving any updates so I kind of owe it to them. The problem with this, and a reason my blogging is so infrequent, is I often feel like I don’t have anything to say and to simply post up what I’m doing feels a little vain. However I’ve been told a few times (one time told in a “shouty” manner, accompanied by a punch) that people actually do care about me and have an interest in me and by always keeping myself to myself and being such a loner I rob them of the opportunity to get to know me better. The blogging is really part of a bigger plan for me to stop being so distant and mechanical in my interactions with other people. I look at Jesus and I know that he really loved people and the hard truth is that I don’t see that love in myself so that’s going to change.

Are you reading this Adam? [I've recruited Adam to hold me accountable with the blogging discipline] Kick my arse if I go for a month without blogging and don’t have a good excuse

I have more but I’ll save it for another post, I have to pace myself – I’m not used to this.

P is one of my closest friends, I’ve known him since I was eight years old. P and I were friends in primary and secondary school. P taught me to be true to my beliefs and not go along with the crowd.

Class and school prayer was common in both my primary and secondary schools. Each morning in my secondary school we would all gather in the assembly hall. The principal would stand at the front on a box made of MDF sheets nailed together and painted over and speak into a microphone. Mr. Moroney would stand on his box and announce some news, denounce some recent bad behaviour and then lead us in some group prayer; the “Our Father” if I remember correctly. We would say the prayer along with him and all bless ourselves together at the end.

I think we were about 15 when P and I both agreed we were atheists and that we didn’t believe in all of this religion. You can’t really blame us, all we were given was dry religious acts and an atmosphere that discouraged questioning. The hypocrisy didn’t help either. My school was an ugly place. I would physically wretch with nerves on the cold mornings as I walked to school from my sister’s house. The place was horrible, nothing beautiful could thrive there.

Everything had originally been set up nice, we had seen videos of the school after it first opened – the science lab was fully equipped, every desk with a gas supply for the Bunsen burners and a sink, the language room was set up so students could plug in headphones at their desks to help them learn, the metalwork and woodwork rooms with their large workbenches. By the time my generation got to the place it was broken to pieces, doors and desks vandalised. The gas and water supply was cut off from the desks in science lab, they were just desks with weird useless appendages now. The language room was now just more desks, painted with layer upon layer of an ugly maroon paint, with weird hollow metal boxes at the top where the school had removed the electronics. The worktops in the woodwork and metalwork rooms had been hacked at with chisels so much that there wasn’t a smooth surface left on them. The whole place seemed dirty and broken.

I was never seriously bullied but it seemed like attacks could come from anywhere – random abuse from people who didn’t even know my name. I was walking back to school after lunch one day when an older boy cycled in front of me, turned, spat in my face and laughed. He never even got off his bike, just kept cycling on up to the school. I didn’t know who he was, he didn’t know who I was but that was how things were. Many of the students just seemed to hate other students and they didn’t need a good reason for that. People would just throw things at strangers “for the laugh”.

Where was I? Hypocrisy, yes. Anyway, all us students would line up each morning – the bullied and the bullies, the vandals, the boy that spit in my face, P and I and we would all recite “Our Father, who art in heaven…”, like we were all brothers and sisters or something, like we were all following God. So P and I decided we’d had enough. And here is what P taught me: one morning I kept silent as usual during prayer, my own little rebellious protest, but at the end I went to bless myself like everyone else. P was behind me and he nudged me, “What are you blessing yourself for?” he said. I was blessing myself because it was easier to see someone refuse to bless themselves than it was to see that their lips weren’t moving. I was blessing myself to fit in.

P taught me to live out my beliefs and not simply go along with the crowd. It’s ironic, but this step into atheism helped to lead me to God. I rejected crowd-following dry religious acts and would not be satisfied with a mindless religion. I could not be satisfied by anything less than a living God. Who knows how things would have turned out if I had been happy to just go along with the crowd keeping my “real life” in one box and my little god in another? When I catch myself settling for dry heartless religion I think of P giving me a nudge in the back.

The last time I saw P he told me he was lost. He has so many questions and I only hope that I can help him somehow. I hope I can show him not to care what the crowd thinks and to seek God with all his heart.

John.

Actually, come to think of it it was my second favorite Bible anyway. My favorite would br the wide-margin version I use for my daily reading. The wide margins are good for writing notes and I’ve “hacked” it (in the most basic sense of the word hack) by crudely sticking a few ribbon markers in it with superglue.

Still, I will miss the little one.

Anyway, happy 2009! New years resolutions this year:

I will be starting the new Bible-in-a-year reading plan I got with my ESV Study Bible (PDF file here). I also plan on going through the Heidelberg Catechism, which is written in a very devotional style and rather nicely arranged into 52 sections called Lord’s Day 1, Lord’s Day 2, and so on; so I can cover a short section every Sunday. Also I find one of my biggest, most persistent and most disgusting sins is my own pride so I’m going to combat this by asking more questions of people. My normal practice when I don’t know something is to go away and quietly research it until I have found my answer, this is a good thing but if you’re like me and that is often all you do it can create the illusion of self-sufficiency and that does nothing for cultivating humility, which is something I badly need. So I plan on being honest and upfront about my ignorance and humbly asking for help and information.