Ramdom Blog Thoughts

I sat down here with nothing really in mind to write about, but wanting to sit and see what thoughts are processing in my head at the moment.

This past week has been a bit trying... I started it off by heading to Rockhampton on a business trip. To be honest I'm a little over travelling round the place, but I've always liked Rockhampton. I got to stay a night in Yeppoon as well - it's a quiet little place, I almost felt like I was staying in a retirement village :-P. The highlight of the trip was definitely sitting down to dinner and having a lady singing Mariah Carey covers to a CD all night. All the grannies seemed to like it though.

Being away from home is a good change, but after a while it just becomes problematic. It's funny how accustomed we come to the way we do things, and living out of a suitcase, having a different bed, in a different room, with a different feel just becomes unbearable after a while.

I got home really late on Wednesday night - Wednesday was the Ekka Show holiday here in Brisbane, but since I wasn't in Brisbane everywhere was open so I was still working. I'll get to take a day off sometime, but it's strange to be working when you know everyone else is having a day off!

We're rolling out new computers here at RACQ and I'm heading up the project. It's always a busy time, but with the travelling I've been doing it's made it slightly manic. So I spent Thursday and Friday installing software, testing, installing more software and testing some more. There's some pretty fiddly and complex software in this rollout and some software applications took 3 hours to install. It's amazing how much that can drain you, it's mind numbing and by the time I'd get home I was just ready to fall into bed.

Youth Group Friday night was interesting. We watched a video called "Facing the Giants" (I think), it's a film based in a Christian school with a pretty terrible football (Gridiron) team. The coach is all messed up and his life pretty well sucks. He finds out he can't have children, his car dies and he's about to loose his job cause the football team is so bad.

He consults God and decides that whatever happens he's still gonna love him. That he can't do it on his own and he needs to give everything to Jesus (very 'modern evangelical' lingo used).

He talks to his football team with a new passion. How not just in football but their life they have to give everything to God, that win, loose or draw they need to praise God. Then very next day the football team leads a revival at the school - groups of kids everywhere praying.

The next football training session there's a marked improvement in their skills, and determination - all the credit given to God.

They win their next 6 games straight!

One of the players makes up with his Dad, and the Dad is so thankful he buys the coach a new car.... the football team make the play offs and loose their first game, BUT, the other team is disqualified the next day due to playing some college aged footballers.

All the credit is given to God.

The football team then win their next 3 play off games and make the state final... the game goes bad in the first half until there's a big 'God-talk' at half time by the coach and they come back to almost win near the end... in the last play they back the new 'kicker' (who's a soccer player but trying out at football) and God performs a miracle and allows the kicker to kick a 51 yard field goal to win the match!

The same day the coaches wife finds out she's pregnant!

Now can God do all this??? Yes I think he can! But does God usually give people everything they want once they turn to him? Not usually… praying to God to perform a miracle 51 yard field goal sort of finished off a bad taste in my mouth about the whole film.

I showed it to my youth group boys because it was recommended as a good ‘life issues’ story. Even the boys thought it was all to good to be true, and didn’t reflect what God had done in any of their lives.

We discussed it a bit, me asking them how some of the missionaries I lived with in The Gambia would feel watching this movie, considering they’d been working 15 years in a village and only seen 2 converts?

Do we expect God to meet all our needs? What makes us think we know what our needs are? Do we expect God to hand us a State Championship just because we follow him? Do we expect him to let us kick 51 yards when we’ve only ever been able to kick 35 before that?

Or do we look at what we can do for others in our community and ask God to give us what we need to accomplish their needs?

I think I ask for the field goal too often, and forget my life is not about me, but about being Jesus to the world.