...but not everything is beneficial 1 Cor 10:23
This weekend I just had an idea shoot in to the forefront of my mind that actually occured a while ago. It seems that those looking in on our faith are often preoccupied with the rules. Christians can't drink, can't smoke, can't have sex before marriage, can't have fun and so on.
Chatting to some of the young people in church and at some wider church events I've noticed we actually get a version of this same type of thing. 'Is it ok for us to drink? 'Can I watch 18 Certficate films?' 'What can I do with my girlfriend?' 'Can I date a non-christian?'

Hi all, just wanted to point you in the direction of something I've been involved with. A group of us have started this idea called the Foolish Network. Our first project was producing a CD by a young worship leader friend of mine called Tom Steward. I may be biased but I really think Tom is a quality writer especially in terms of creating fresh sounding worship songs. The E.P. started as just capturing the songs and arranging them but as we listened and played the songs to others the desire grew to see them released. You can listen to samples here and on Tom's myspace and if you feel the urge you can make a purchase here.

I thought I'd join in with the top ten albums post and do my own. I'm a bit of a music geek and thought this might be hard but basically I thought about albums that spend a long time in my CD player, or albums where I never feel the urge to skip a track. Most are quite recent probably cos I'm only in my early 20's and as much as I appreciate the influences of the past The Beatles, Led Zepplin and Jimi Hendrix don't need another champion, I am beginning to think that Queen were better than the Beatles, I think the Beatles were just more consistant. I think the list is fairly representative of my taste on the whole. They are in order of release, I could never pick a top album that would be crazy.

I don't think either of the drummers at my church know what a blog is, they tend to fear computers I think because they can keep in time.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Snares/

Tom's Post

So this post might be more for me than others but it's good to think back and reflect. Often in our culture we want and we long for something we don't currently have. Not only are we constantly longing, we want to achieve it now.
Some of you may have overcome this but even in relationship with Jesus I think this doesn't just disappear. This past year I have realised how much materialistic thinking has come into the church and it's something that we all battle with because it is so dominant in wider culture. By materialistic I don't mean people who enjoy having lots of stuff, though this is part of it, I think materialism affects how we assign value and also how we apply our focus.

So I haven't posted in a while, well two major reasons; I've been busy and my computer broke. Initially I hit a new sort of anti computer depression as I have had two hard disk (disco duro en castellano) failures in 11 months! Enough to drive any man to tears. Thankfully I had a plan to replace my computer and I have basically brought it 6 months foward. I am now the proud owner of 24" iMac, what a beauty!

Also quick mention of today being World Aids day which has been covered a fair bit on About Life. Just wanted to point out Apple are having a sale today (no link to AIDs day) which is nice but they only give £10 away on an iPod nano (Product) Red, to give it's full title. They make massive profits on these surely a little bit more could be contributed.

How can you not blog today?

This year I'm going to enjoy as much of Christmas as I can. I don't know why but it looks more fun than being Scrooge. My mate Tom is more of a Christmas nut and I know one lady in our church who could tell you how many days it is until Christmas at any point in the year. A few weeks ago I was reading about some of the difficulties with Christmas in the way that it is basically the hijacking of a pagan festival and we can now see it is now being hijacked by commercialism, I am sure we'll have more stories in the news about Winterfestival or the removal of Nativity scenes, but I'm in a gunhoe who cares mood, we can just get on with being so bowled over by the fact that God sent His Son!

I've decided to keep writing about films, I studied them at uni and have an interest in being involved in making them but I am quite out of practise at critiquing them.
I tend to go to the cinema in spells and I've seen Marie Antoinette, The Departed, Borat and Casino Royale all in relatively short space of time.

So my weekend began by heading to Digbeth to sleep in a car park. St Basil's a charity based in Birmingham holds an annual sleep out to raise awareness and funding for the work they do with young people, particularly those at risk of or who have already become homeless.
We arrived at the car park and it was like walking in to a ghetto of cardboard boxes, a variety of up beat pop tunes and lots of hooded people. They even had a fire going in a metal bin, though it was fenced off.