I don’t know anything about the source of this article http://mondediplo.com/2011/08/02iceland on Iceland but it shows in microcosm what is actually going on in the world economy. Collapse is inevitable and has been for some time and the story in Iceland is typical of HOW the white-anting has occurred.

It may well be that we get a rise in the stock market before a much bigger drop – (a friend of mine who has a wave theory of market psychology has been predicting that – but he didn’t expect this drop to be as big as it has been) -  but up and down or just down we can still expect much bigger drops to come. The general economy (jobs, houses etc) will start to really feel the heat probably about 6 months after that. I don’t know anything about the ‘physics’ of crowd psychology but we all know about the physics of gravity, and Wiley coyote ran off the cliff quite some time ago.

The bigger question in my mind is what do we do about the social problems that will follow. The ‘arab spring’ has been largely a result of economic problems impacting the middle class. How do we make the best of what happens? I’m asking myself that question as a member of a Christian community / mission order as well as dad / family member / individual. We can’t all shout “We’ll all be rooned!” and head for the hills.

This is not a double-dip recession – it is a continuation of what started in 2007 and has been held off temporarily by making things very much worse by sending governments (tax payers) broke by bailing out banks that deserved to fail. Ordinary savings in those banks could have been safe-guarded for a very much lower cost.

At another level this is a continuation of what first showed itself in 1987 and would / should have been able to run its course back then with less damage than will now occur if the general public hadn’t been encouraged to take on so much debt to keep the bubble growing in the years since then. The things that we have been encouraged to put our hope in – housing and super – will now show themselves to be debt-fueled rather than savings based.

You could say you don’t get something for nothing – but that plays to the lower side of human nature and perversely avoids the core moral issues.

I think a more sensible way to say it is that if you are not actively doing something good then bad things will happen: and if you do good things and bad things still happen – at least you still got to do good. Another way I like to think about is this: Never under-estimate the power and value of being a servant – God is the servant of his entire creation.

(This is a slightly edited version of something I wrote over a couple of posts to a private e-mail list a few days ago.  It is edited just enough for it to make sense outside of the list context – nothing material is changed.)

Last weekend I gave a talk about Christian Community in urban environments at ‘mini-muster‘. A topic like that could be mere talk-fest material except that it wasn’t – because it was happening in the context of community of people who genuinely want to be like Christ and have been working at that together for quite a long time. That it also happened in an urban environment was a bonus and especially nice for me, because Newcastle is one of those places that has been home to me several times over. In the past I would take friends with me from Newcastle to some other place for muster: this time it was the other way around.

Along the way to preparing for the talk I realised there was something I wanted to talk about a lot more than Christian community in urban environments. But in the end … well you’ll have to listen to find out more.

Download here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It occurred to me a few months back that …

faith*, hope and love are like a colour-space of personhood. That is if you were painting a personality you could do it in colours composed from faith, hope and love.

Or we could think of them as another three dimensions (along with space and time) that people occupy in a way that ‘things’ (aside from their personal use) don’t.

They are essentially personal in nature: they make no sense outside of person-hood; and the experience and exercise of them are fundamental to the experience and exercise of person-hood.

Every story that is a story rather than just the bare recounting of facts has in it dimensions of  faith, hope and love. A story with little of  these elements is a flat story.

Conversely personal life always takes place within the context of story. Every life tells a story. There are multiple levels of story. Ultimately they are all within the context of God’s story. We exercise authority as we act as authors of the stories (our own and others) it is given to us to take part in. There is even one who is the ultimate author and has ultimate authority.

Matt 28:18-20
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

leadership and authorship …

We are all authors in the lives of others. A leader is deliberate about playing a role of authorship in other stories than his own direct personal story. Leadership is about building stories together into bigger stories.

A story is good and true and beautiful to the extent that what it does with faith, hope and love is good and true and beautiful.

Imagination, reason and will are some of the ‘muscles’ or soul ‘body-parts’ we have available as persons to do things in the universe of faith, hope and love. These are some of the muscles we use to grab hold of the raw stuff of the personal universe, build the stories, and navigate our way through them.

* If the word ‘faith’ sticks in your throat try substituting the word ‘courage’ and you’ll probably still get a big chunk of what I’m getting at. Someone told me that C.S. Lewis once said something like ‘Courage is fear that has said its prayers’.

Honestly, hasn’t it has been soooo good to hear some truth in the news these last few days?

The truth to spin ratio on the news has been that little bit higher. Just this afternoon as I was listening to news on the radio I found myself really appreciating that. Really enjoying it. If that doesn’t make WikiLeaks a news organisation then what does?

News media in general has failed miserably in the last few years. The downhill drift is obvious. I’m not convinced that citizen journalism etc is the solution to that problem and I don’t pretend to know what the solutions are, but truth matters. Journalists interviewing journalists is bullshit. Writing opinion and passing it off as (or confusing it with) analysis is bullshit. (Are you listening ABC Drum? Probably not.) Spin is bullshit. Sensationalism for its own sake is bullshit. Truth matters.

What WikiLeaks is doing is not espionage. It is not treason. It is not terrorism. It is not illegal any more than sunshine in a dirty room is illegal. It is just pissing a lot of people off.

WikiLeaks is doing a good thing. Thank God they are doing it. I mean that literally.

Sunlight on curtain.
Early morning, nearly spring.
My love will wake soon.

as midnight bell sounds
a single wave washes clean
scent of further shore

At this time of year it is not safe to ride without at least one WMD – or ‘Weapon of Magpie Distraction’ for the uninitiated. I find magpies particularly distracting while I’m riding, so I’d really like to return the favour by making a few of them feel really distracted. On many days lately when I have been distracted by magpies I have felt very very strongly that my magpie distractor of choice would be a bazooka. A bazooka is probably not the ideal choice however – and I haven’t used one so far – for at least the following reasons:

• While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
• There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the  impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

This time 40 years ago I was nine years old, discovering Jazz at night on the old valve radio my parents had given me (and yet to discover or have any particular interest in popular music) and breakfast cereal boxes had charts and pictures and cards and models of rockets and lunar modules. I remember Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ playing on TV so many times during – or in between bits of – broadcasts of moon mission stuff. We all had the day off school. That is my Monday morning recollection of my part in that slice of history.

Much closer to the actual events is this – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html – an amazing resource – a real treasure.

From the foreward:

Hour upon hour of the astronauts’ conversations with each other and with Mission Control in Houston, as well as television scenes taken during their lunar expeditions, were recorded as they occurred from July 1969 to December 1972. For all the years since then, these recordings were available but, for the most part, remained “on the shelf” to collect dust. Now, through the dedication and hard work of historian Eric Jones and the lunar astronauts, the aural and visual history of the Apollo lunar expeditions is being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and presented in a way which everyone can understand and enjoy. Besides cleaning up the voice transcripts, Eric is conducting exhaustive interviews with the lunar astronauts and inserting their recollections of the events which took place more than twenty years ago.

There were two surprises to come out of the announcement of the national broadband network this week. The first was that the government got it right. I’d been hoping and praying for the last few months that they would have the balls and the vision and they have exceeded my expectations on both counts. Real leadership – who’d have thought! The second surprise has been the petty mindedness and utter lack of vision on the part of the opposition and some ‘analysts’. This also has exceeded my expectations. The implications of affordable high speed internet access across Australia are enormous. This is not about downloading movies – it is about what will be produced. It is about what will be possible. It is about unlocking potential. If there is a digital divide it is between those who can only see what now is and those who are ready to make what will be.

(writing this as we drive into Canberra for the weekend.)

People who mainly talk about themselves are hard to be around. Anything that tries to exist just for its own benefit gets to be pretty pointless after a while. It is one of the basic facts of the universe that things are most useful, most significant, most themselves when they point outside of themselves.

It is true of people and it is true on the web. The more you give the more you get. The more you send people away the more they come back. Imagine if google had links only to google. The more facebook points outside of facebook – the more it makes other things useful to me – the more likely I am to use facebook.