Fish!
Leave a CommentI did a training course this week called “Succeeding in Supervision”.
One of the things which stuck in my mind most was a 15 minute DVD they showed which was about the importance of having fun in your job. It’s about Pike’s Place Fish Market in Seattle and how much fun it is to work there. The boss there has generated a great working atmosphere of fun among staff and customers, and people flock there just to see them throwing fish around and joking with the crowds.
Obama Victory
Leave a CommentI just watched Obama’s victory speech on YouTube.
I don’t know enough about him or his politics to make a judgement about whether or not he will make a good president. I’m not really qualified to comment on that – especially since I’m not an American.
But I have been in management long enough to know an inspirational leader when I see one!
Discovered GodTube
Leave a Comment
I discovered GodTube a couple of weeks ago.
We got tickets for a Casting Crowns concert in the Odyssey Arena in Belfast, and I checked out their web site
http://www.castingcrowns.com/in_index.html
and I saw a mention of GODTube on Mark Hall’s blog.
There’s a lot of good music videos on there including of course Casting Crowns – here’s an example:
http://godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=9fad456d209b6f5ee932
of course most of this stuff is already available on YouTube
The Bible and Islam
Here are a number of articles from Boundless on the contrasts between Islam and Christianity:
Money, Money, Money.
The “Credit Crunch” and recession are officially here.
I dread to think what sort of battering my pension funds have taken (I daren’t look).
I am just so thankful to God that I came to be working for such a stable company. So far it looks as if there is unlikely to be any redundancies where I work. I’ve already been made redundant twice in my career, it would be a lot harder this time, with the economic climate and my age now.
I came across a series of articles in Boundless this week on the subject of Money:
Coping with Harassment
Coping with Harassment (from www.Licc.org.uk)
A Christian Manifesto
I’m currently reading “A Christian Manifesto” by Francis Schaeffer. I had to buy it second-hand from Amazon, as his books are hard to get in the UK (he was an American and he died in 1984). Here is a bit about him in Wikipedia.
The blurb from the cover of the book says:
“It happened so subtly that few people noticed at first. Little by little, morality and freedom started to crumble. It came first in government, in education, in media – and finally it began to shake our familes and our own lives. something fundamental has changed. Law and government no longer provide a foundation of Justice and morality but have become the means of licensing moral perversions of all kinds. Education has become the enemy of religious truths and values and the media have provided the means for propagating the change. In this explosive book, Dr Schaeffer shows why this has happened. First he shows how we have failed to understand the problem – to see that the whole foundation for society has shifted radically from it’s original Judeo-Christian basis to a humanistic basis. As the humanistic view takes over, it necessarily destroys the whole way of life built upon Judeo-Christian heritage.
A Christian Manifesto is literally a call for Christians to change the course of history – by returning to biblical Truth and by allowing Christ to be Lord in all of life. To do this , Schaeffer says, will involve a head-on confrontation with the false view that material or energy, shaped by chance is the final reality. Schaeffer’s provocative conclusion is that when the state directly defies the absolute law of God, it’s authority becomes illegitimate. In this case, the Christian is bound to resist the state by whatever means necessary – through direct legal and political action, and possibly through massive demonstrations of civil disobedience.”
Personally, I’m not at all comfortable with the call to civil disobedience, since in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 we are told to obey the powers which God has established and permitted (unless the governmental law is in direct contradiction to God’s law). But the first part of the book certainly does a good job of pointing up how western society (although Schaeffer is focused on American society) has become secularised, and the impact that this has had.
A couple of quotes from the book will help to summarise the main issue discussed:
“I propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for 2 reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the ‘higher law’; second, because, that being so, secularism tends towards decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the ‘higher’ criteria of a constitution.”
“The media and especially television have indeed changed the perception of not only current events, but also of the political process. We must realize that things can easily be presented on television so that the perception of a thing may be quite different from fact itself. Television not only reports political happenings, it enters actively into the political process. That is, wither because of bias or for a good story, television so reports the political process that it influences and becomes a crucial part of the political process itself. In the midst of all this Christians must certainly not uncriticaly accept what they read, and especially what they see on television, as objective. This is especially the case when the subject under consideration is one we know to be different from that which their world view normally causes them to champion.”
“What is to be done when the state does that which violates it’s legitimate function. Why were the Christians in the Roman empire thrown to the lions? The Roman State did not care what anybody believed religiously; you could believe anything, or you could be an atheist. But you had to worship Caesar as a sign of your loyalty to the state. The Christians said they would not worship Caesar, anybody or anything, but the living God. Thus to the Roman Empire they were rebels, and it was civil disobedience. That is why they were thrown to the lions. Through the ages Christians have taken the same position as did the early church in disobeying the state when it commanded what was contrary to God’s law.”
Google Chrome
Just installed the new Google Chrome browser. I think I’ll make it my default (even though it’s only a beta). It is so simple and uncluttered, and seems to perform faster than Firefox or IE7.
I tried IE8 Beta for a while, but it caused major problems with my McAfee Security Centre software – so I had to uninstall it.
