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Just thinking…Do you feel like we’ve been here before?! How are you feeling as a result? Super-excited about the prospect of another lockdown (of uncertain duration)? Depressed? Frustrated? Peaceful? I’m not quite sure what I feel about it, but it is certainly more familiar ground than the first time we passed this way. It reminds…

Just thinking…I am loving being involved in the SHAPE course. There are around 20 of us on a six-week journey of self-discovery, which is really the discovery of the divine artistry and design that our Creator has fashioned in each one of us. Each week, we sit in the weirdly wonderful place of simultaneously exploring God’s handiwork…

Just thinking…Here’s an insightful little story from a man called Arthur Gordon. One raw, cold day last winter I found myself having lunch at the seaside cottage of some friends, an attractive young couple in their twenties. The only other guest was a retired college professor, a marvellous old gentleman, still straight as a lance after…

Just thinking…It has been a wild week in Aotearoa, and not just in terms of the weather. The seedy side of political life has been exposed. The underbelly has been laid bare, and it ain’t pretty. Affairs, scandals, inappropriate behaviour have been in the spotlight and talkback radio has been running hot on the issue….

Just thinking…It has been called many things by many people. The “curious record of the visions of a drug addict” (George Bernard Shaw); “the most rabid outburst of vindictiveness in all recorded history” (Friedrich Nietzsche); a “misogynist male fantasy at the end of time” (feminist New Testament scholar, Tina Pippin). It is the one book of the…

Just thinking…Do you know that one of the jobs you could choose to aspire to in life is as a hand model? Yes, they do exist! You’ve probably heard of runway models, fashion models and the like. Well, there are also people who never have any part of themselves photographed … except their perfectly toned…

Just thinking…Lament. It’s not a word we use much. It’s also not something we do much. It is the act of coming to God not just when things are going well, but when things aren’t. It is the freedom to come to God with raw honesty rather than with a disguising veneer of composure. Maybe…

Just thinking…I recently read this great piece from another NZ Baptist church about Psalm 122:3-4. Look at what the psalm says about Jerusalem. “A well-built city, built as a place of worship! The city to which the tribes ascend, all God’s tribes go up to worship.” In this psalm, as throughout much of the Hebrew bible,…

Just thinking…Early one morning, a man stood on a beach looking out on the lake at a fishing vessel returning to shore after what had been an unsuccessful nocturnal fishing expedition. The man was waiting to see the fishermen because they had been friends. In particular, he wanted to see one of them, whose name…

Just thinking…There is a poem made popular by Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch woman who, along with her family helped Jews escape the Nazis in World War by hiding them in her home, and who was later sent to a Nazi concentration camp. It is a poem about the enormous contrast between the upper and…