Prayer request

I have a prayer request. About 2 or three months ago and friend and myself had a vision for a new web site, we did some thinking and came up with some ideas and phoned round a few people to ask for their thoughts and if they would consider writing for us. At this point it all went crazy as a result we have a meeting tomorrow morning with the Bible Society and the Evangelical Alliance about how we take it forward and possibly working with them (or whatever the outcome is tomorrow). It’s all very exciting and a little scary at the same time, we don’t really understand why God would entrust us as 2 fairly insignificant Christian people with such a huge task but at the same time feeling very honoured. Anyway it’s fairly important and we are not really sure what will happen but we are looking forward to it, please pray for us and I will update you later. Thanks.

Back in Action

Back up and running at last and now with a better specked machine after a hard drive and memory upgrade, it’s great it does now work better so that’s good and I shall have better back ups from no on although I managed to save all my files but one which was an email back up which is frustrating but hey all the baby photos were ok!

It’s all going a bit Pete Tong!

Tuesday night last week, I took the bus out to a venue we have not managed to get to for approx 6 months due to not being able to get a team together. It was good to know we were finally going to get back there, however on plugging into the electricity supply the bus trips out, after some investigation and several more trips we discover the problem lies with the downstairs lighting circuit, we have no lights, without lights we can’t run a session so the bus is back off the road again until I can get an electrician to come and sort the bus out.

Wednesday morning last week got into the office and first job was to send out an email with the news of the previous night. Plug in laptop, dead, comes up with ‘read error, press any key to reboot’ press any key gets diddly squat, a dead hard drive! I did by Friday evening manage to recover files, today I am working from home waiting for a delivery of new parts (although the web site from where I ordered them and paid extra for delivery today still haven’t shipped the whole order so will I get it all or any of it?). Anyway that is why the longish silence, I was still in the process of sorting out the laptop after a major software crash a few weeks back (maybe Dave was right when he told me all those years ago that one day the mighty pen would rule again!)
Anyway today as well as hoping to be able to start getting the laptop back up and running I am also going to try and get my email working again on this computer (a rather old desktop at home) and see what I should have done and who I should have been in touch with during my almost weeklong computer black hole existence.
I hope normal services will resume later this week (although possibly not here as I am sure there are other things I need to catch up with but I will at least try and update you in the story when I can).
God bless you all TTFN

Update: within 5 mins of publishing the above there was a knock on the door and the new hard drive is now in my possession! Not sure about the blank DVD’s or memory upgrade I ordered but at least I can now start on getting the thing up and running again!

A busy weekend

This weekend has been somewhat busy, Friday saw my parents and brother arrive, that night I was out working, Zac had a friends birthday party. Saturday saw another party at lunch time for Zac at a local play place then the late afternoon was Birthday party time for both Zac and Jonah (it was actually Jonah’s birthday, Zac’s is tomorrow). At this I was obviously parent which is quite busy enough for a childes birthday party let alone a double but I was also the entertainer, which I have to say was great fun and has got one or two people interested in future bookings so that is good. Sunday was a little quieter but in some respects has the highlight of the year as Charys made her first distinguishable noise, dada, and she does seem to be using it to refer to me as well so big smiles on my face! My brother went home yesterday, mum and dad are around for Zac’s Birthday so that is really good.
I have been talking occasionally for some time about some changes here on the blog, well just to et you know, they and others are still in the pipeline so keep a watch out!

Knock, knock, who’s there?

It’s me!
The Door is our local diocesan news paper and this month was my tern to write the ‘Youth View’ for the back page, however I’m aware that the google and yahoo etc robots that read my blog (and possibly one or two actual people occasionally) wont necessarily get the door so here is a link to the article, if you wanted to comment that can be done either on the diocesan site with the article or here!

A Sad Day

Last week (when computer was down hence posting it late) we had a sad day on Tuesday as a family, very close friends moved away back home to Ireland, I know I’m in a job where I can expect to move every few years but this can make I all that much harder to make good friends where you live especially in this role I find, we are very fortunate here in that we have made several really good friends but we will miss Peter, Nicky and Leo, the boys especially missing Leo, but we wish them every blessing and cant wait until we get over to see them hopefully some time in the new year. God bless you!

Licensed to Minister

Well last night it happened, myself and 3 others were licensed by the Bishop of Reading as Youth Ministers. We were at St Laurence’s and had a really good time, Bishop Stephen was on top form as usually with a very challenging message and the whole service was just really enjoyable. Needles to say it’s great, I have been waiting for several years to be able to do something like this so it is good to now finally be recognised in my ministry by the wider Church of England. It is great that the diocese here has such a form of licensing and although it was quite hard work to get through it was worth while. Now for the Church of England as a whole when are you going to get your act together, when is there going to be a centrally recognised form of licensing for those of us involved in youth ministry, who have worked and trained to get where we are, some form of recognition like for lay readers/licensed lay minsters. As things stand at the moment (at least to my understanding) if you don’t study at an Anglican recognised collage you can’t be licensed (at least on the basis of your qualification alone) to minister in the Church of England, but none of those collages that are recognised offer any training in youth work. Now even if this were to change I didn’t primarily specialise in youth work so I would have still needed to put in some extra work and that is fine and perfectly acceptable but there are still diocese that don’t offer any kind of recognition of Youth ministers and that is wrong, it’s time that the powers that be came up with some form of recognition throughout the denomination not just down to individual diocese.

End of rant

Thanks though to all those involved in planning and running last night!