Prague, Belfast, Aberfoyle… and now Edinburgh.

 Phil and Dad in the pub.

Mom and Dad visited us in Prague before we came back to the UK for Christmas and we had a great time relaxing, going for walks, coffees and delicious meals out!

 Lovely Mom and I.

We also went to a great (although perhaps over-priced) concert in the Bethlehem Chapel, which really was fantastic and inspired me to get out my violin again and re-aquaint myself with it. They played Vivaldi, Mozart and Corelli… it was stunning.

 Phil and the wreath.

Phil and I got into the Christmassy mood with a little help from our Christmas wreath..! Life was quite eventful for this particular wreath, which was prankfully (is that a word?!) nicked by some cheeky Spanish folk, but after a visit from a fellow Spaniard (who is a student and friend of mine) from IBTS, was sheepishly returned! Result!

Phil and I then went to Belfast for Christmas, which was lovely, then to Aberfoyle to see my parents for a couple of days which was great too. We enjoyed the sauna and swimming pool immensely!

Now we are in beautiful Edinburgh, and there is a certain feeling of coming home. Its nice to feel like you know the way around somewhere. Things look familiar, and the sights of the city like the face of an old friend. Its really class. We are staying with the lovely Costleys, and we’ve enjoyed a great first day with Neil and Caz. We are staying in their spare room, and they have a loft bed in there, which is so exciting for me, I have wanted to sleep in a loft bed for years! Its like a bunk bed for adults! It probably won’t be so exciting when I need to get up in the middle of the night to go to the loo, but nevermind, its exciting now!

 Neil, John and Phil.

Its lovely hanging out with friends and enjoying good banter. I think that the 5th of January is going to come very quickly!

Hope you have a great New Year’s Eve!

Happy Christmas!

Wishing everyone a belated happy Christmas! I hope that you all enjoyed yesterday with your families and/ friends, wherever you are. It was my first ‘Belfast’ Christmas and it was really lovely. Phil’s uncle Harry cooked an amazing Christmas dinner, but I think that my Mom’s still wins..! (Its close though!)

Sunny Belfast…

Hello and greetings from lovely Belfast, where the people are warm but the weather is freezing! I thought that Prague would be colder than Belfast, but oh no. At least in Prague the grumpy bus drivers turn on the radiators on the bus, in Belfast they just let you freeze!

Anyway, enough of my moaning… it is lovely to be with Phil’s family and we’ve been having fun so far. Seeing friends and family, drinking mulled wine, listening to cheesy Christmas music and singing in a choir outside Sainsbury’s for Christian Aid… its all part of the Christmas banter!

I apologise in advance if the blog postings become even more infrequent, I will try to do a few while Phil and I are away from Prague, but I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to get onto the internet.

Aside from that, its Christmas and its all very beautiful and exciting! Hope you are enjoying this time wherever you are!

The church for the world…

 

I am reading an excellent book at the moment, which is hugely challenging and also inspiring. It is written by Charles H. Bayer, and called A Resurrected Church: Christianity after the Death of Christendom. He quotes Les Murray, an Australian philospher, poet and conservative Catholic, talking about the church:

“We’re no longer free to indulge our bad habits of boring people, bullying them and backing up respectability; we’re no longer in a position to push second-rate thinking and an outworn picture of the cosmos, where God is Up, we are in the middle and Hell is down. We’re not going to be universally accepted as a spiritual elite, so we’d better get on with being what our Founder told us to be, which is the salt of the earth, the (unromantic) baking soda in the loaf of mankind.”

What a challenge to our church today; which is increasingly trying to ‘doll up’ an culturally-ignorant, out-of-date message instead of looking at whether what we are actually saying and doing is bringing Christ in all his fullness of liberation, mercy, acceptance and love to a world yearning for his touch and his embrace.

Women… stand up!

 

A Scottish friend of mine is a part-time student at IBTS. He teaches RE at Riverside School in Prague, and also goes to Sarka Valley Community Church, where Phil and I go. He is doing an essay on Scottish Baptist ministers who are women. (Well, he’s starting his research on it anyway!) He told me last night that there are 140 Baptist ministers in Scotland, and of those…

… 7 are women. 7 out of 140! What is that about?! And he further clarified that out of the 7 women, none were in sole charge of a church, in fact, all of them were either deacons, on the ministry teams of the churches, or chaplains in hospitals. That is utterly shocking! Scottish Baptists have to wake up. Baptist women have to stand up..!

I am so angry, it feels like I may explode.

World AIDS Day

ORPHANS OF AIDS

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 27, 2006

 

FACTS ABOUT AIDS
25 million: Death toll from AIDS worldwide
24.5 million: Sub-Saharan Africans living with HIV
15% to 34%: AIDS infection rate in southern Africa
12 million: Sub-Saharan Africans orphaned by AIDS

In 1990, nine years after the AIDS virus was identified, the map showing the worldwide spread of the disease displayed most of Africa in the palest pink. The infection rate among adults was less than 1%. Since then, the colors have deepened faster here than anywhere else on Earth. Southern Africa now is colored a bloody crimson. The infection rate is more than 15%.

The statistics have been repeated so often they cease to shock, even as they soar: 25 million people have died worldwide. Forty million are living with HIV, the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and as many as 14.5 million children have been orphaned by the disease, according to UNAIDS.

The United Nations Development Program said last year that AIDS had caused the biggest reversal in human development ever recorded.

Just as African countries were beginning to make headway on improving quality of life and decreasing mortality in the 1990s, the rising pandemic started to erase many of their gains.

In fact, so sweeping are the repercussions of AIDS that some have asked whether the smaller states in southern Africa might simply collapse under the strain.

If all that is difficult to measure, the cost to families and individuals is incalculable.

Funerals have replaced weddings as the main family ceremony. People struggle to buy medicine. They borrow to pay for funerals. Breadwinners die and families plunge into poverty and hunger. Many families are made up of orphans and grandparents.

Unprotected orphans are exploited sexually or economically, often by their relatives. A myth persists in parts of Africa that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS, a factor in the upsurge of rapes of babies and girls. No one can calculate the cost. Southern Africa can only try to endure the successive waves of infection, illness and death.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-aids25th_africa-fl,0,3792277.flash

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Its World AIDS Day today, if you look at the link above, you will see and hear some stories of people whose lives have been affected tragically by HIV/AIDS. I know that in our world today, we seem to be surrounded by growing numbers of people, charities and organisations asking us for our money and support. All are valid. We have to make tough decisions about who and how we going to support different people. Today, AIDS is devastating countries and communities not just Africa, but in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, South America and even so-called ’safe’ places like Western Europe, the States and Australia. It cannot be ignored and it will not go away. If you feel that this is something that you want to give support, prayer, money to, please do. Either by buying a (RED) product www.joinred.com or giving to a reputable charity that you know is working with HIV/AIDS sufferers and their families either in your country, or somewhere else in the world. It is up to us to support those who can’t support themselves, to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves and to pray for a world that won’t or can’t pray for itself.