Following a heated discussion on a Mandarin Chinese Teacher’s forum about a TV programme: Two thoughts based on this discussion (I have nothing to add on the programme itself): The way our students feel/think about Chinese people (and themselves) as a result of our lessons is of infinitely greater value than the amount of Chinese language they learn from us The…
How Chinese New Year joy can help us to keep our business and community healthy The traditional way of counting the years in China reminds us of the cyclical nature of time. In the West, we tend to emphasise linear progression: getting one year older with each birthday, compiling annual reports, completing tax returns etc. Chinese New…
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. The Son is the image of the invisible God. [He] is the…
You’ll presumably come into the city at 1 from the south. The church steeple is the highest point in the city. It’s a Catholic Church, built in the Victorian era but intended to look older, by someone who made their fortune selling glass eyes for dolls! (If you go left, you’ll go past the Scott…
Allowing ourselves to be interrupted “I try never to be too busy to be interrupted, because it seems the most interesting things happen during interruptions” (Tony Morling at Host 2017) So many of Jesus’ interactions that are recorded in the gospels did not happen because they were planned but as interruptions to what was already going…
“The grace of God is awful to us, because the proper response to evil is to fear it and desire its destruction not to love it and desire its redemption.” This is my review of David Benjamin Blower’s book “Sympathy for Jonah: Reflections on Humiliation, Terror and the Politics of Enemy-Love,” which has a set of sea-shanty…
We face profound challenges to the way of life we are used to – as a result of globalisation and technology in particular. And we are reacting the way human-beings always react in this kind of situation: by trying to hold on to what we have got. With valiant determination, we retreat, batten down the…
I found this podcast from Rob Bell really helpful. Here’s my summary: Psalm 8:4-5 “what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them? Yet you made them only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honour.” You are crammed full of greatness so don’t be surprised…
The Bible is the most read book in human history by far. It (at least parts of it) is considered “sacred” by Christianity, Islam and Judaism – the 3 religions that trace their human origins back to Abraham, and are humanity’s most popular religions – to which nearly 50% of people today ascribe, even if…