Virtual Methodist

Today President Obama takes his second inaugural oath for the second time, due to the vagaries of the 20th January falling on a Sunday. This is an event of immense importance for me, even though I am an insignificant blogger bashing away on his keyboard in the backwoods of Belfast, Northern Ireland, and could have no part in the election of this man. But there is no doubt that his decisions ultimately make as much, if not more, difference to my life as do those of the politicians I am able to elect who sit in the big white house on the hill little over a mile from where I am writing, or the contentious clowns we have managed to elect to the council that sits in Belfast City Hall down the road... There has been some controversy over who will lead in public prayer during the inauguration, but I was encouraged this morning by this prayer by Scot McKnight for the President, and perhaps I could do with using a variation on it as I pray for my political representatives at a loc...

A number of my friends and colleagues have decided to opt out of facebook over Lent... a highly laudable discipline on their part, but while I admire and will miss them over the next 46 days I will not be joining them... I hope I won't be on facebook so much, but that will not be because I'm giving it up, but because I intend doing more positive things... Including more physical exercise, more reading and giving more attention to this much neglected blog... So, throughout Lent I plan to blog daily again, but, for the most part to offer positive reflections and resources for other's reflection and worship, rather than my all-too frequent vituperative rants. One of the consistently most popular posts on the blog over the past couple of years was a brief post at the beginning of Lent 2010 entitled "It's not just biscuits" . I was always slightly puzzled by this as it was a relatively flimsy piece... For some time I thought it was because people were looking fo...

OK... so, for the entertainment of all three of you sad people who are reading blogs or are trawling through facebook during the Christmas break, here are the VM Awards for things out there in the real world... Starting with some of the stuff that appears in the sidebar of the blog... Best Read of the Year: This may have changed since Christmas, depending on whether I get any of the books on my wishlist from Santa, but I've vowed not to go near the computer for a week (a sort of pre-New Year resolution), so I've written this before the big day... Whilst it wasn't written or published this year, I was a bit slow in reading Stieg Larsson's " Girl with a Dragon Tattoo " but until recently it would have been my favourite read of the year, despite it's unremitting grimness... However, it was toppled at the last minute by C.J. Sansom's " Heartstone ", which was published this year, the latest in his Shardlake series which I reviewed a couple of da...

Thirty years ago this very day, I made one of the key decisions of my life. At the last night of the "Alan Walker Crusade to the 80's" in the Grosvenor Hall, Belfast I made the conscious decision to follow Jesus... I was born again... converted... saved... whatever term you want to use for it... It wasn't particularly dramatic (certainly not on a par with that of St. Paul, as depicted here by Michaelangelo, or with many of those who do the circuit of churches and conferences telling the story of their conversions) and actually it was only one waypoint on the routemap of my journey of faith... The issue of what direction I should go had been bubbling within me for almost a year, and was based upon years of attending church... and it was followed by a number of key decisions and changes of direction... But I have no doubt that it was probably the most significant life-changing decision of my life... Whilst I was probably not as reluctant a convert as C.S. Lewis claims t...