blogging

meme-fishing

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I find it interesting that some combinations of words simply float past our eyes and vanish again, while others resonate with us so much that we want to remember them, share them, retweet them or otherwise let other people know how profound we found them.

The internet is awash with many things but seems to exist (at least the nice parts) in order for people to share cute pictures / videos of kittens and for people to share what have become known as memes. And while many of the memes are disposable, lol-worthy (or at least we lol in our head, if that’s not an oxymoron) others stop and make you think.

The main reason I do this is that it gives me a space in which to reflect and process some of the thoughts that are bouncing around inside my skull. It is first and foremost a personal act which I share with those who choose to muse. If others find help, humour, inspiration, encouragement and blessing in what I create then it blesses me too.

But as I have dug deeper into my limited self-awareness I have found that there’s a part of me that would rather like to be the source for one of these memes. Perhaps I am meme-fishing in the vast waters of cyberspace hoping to get a bite. Beneath the main reason that I write these bloggages, post pictures of Minillennium Falcon and share the musings of Mr QR Grenville-Stubbs and his ‘view from my pew’ maybe subconsciously I am also hoping that the brighter side of the internet will become excited about something I have created and it will go viral.

fishboat

We all like recognition. We like acknowledgement. We like affirmation. And maybe one of the reasons why I (and the myriad of other bloggists out there) release our thoughts into the wild and untamed world wide web is because the occasional ‘like’, ‘retweet’ and ‘share’ provides us with some of that.

And if those of us who have the time, inclination and desire to share some of the more palatable stuff that’s inside our minds with others via blogs, social media and the like do it partly to receive recognition, acknowledgement and affirmation I suspect that it’s something that everyone else would quite like too. So today I am going to look out for more opportunities to recognise, affirm and acknowledge what blesses me about others, and I am going to tell them – regardless of whether it goes viral.

Be blessed, be a blessing.

just so you know

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I am going to be away for a week receiving training in transforming conflict  – mediation and conciliation. This means that I won’t necessarily be lobbing bloggages in your direction this week. I have scheduled a couple that I have prepared earlier just in case you feel too bereft of my bloggerel and pray you’ll have a wonderful week

Be blessed, be a blessing

Random Bloggage Chooser

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Pair Of DiceOver the years I have been blogging I have generated an awful lot of text. (Or should that be a lot of awful text?) Anyway, in lieu of today’s bloggage being a fresh one I have a challenge for you, but it will mean that you have to (b)log on to my blog on WordPress in order to do it.

Are you there?

Good.

If you scroll down the page a bit you will see on the left hand side a heading ‘past bloggerel’ – it’s the archive of the stuff I have generated. Think of a month, any month. Now think of any year between 2015 going back to 2010. Put the two together and you will have a month in which I have blogged (unless you choose dates after January 2015 or before February 2010). Now scroll down the drop down menu under ‘past bloggerel’ until you find that month. Next to the month will be a number, which represents the number of bloggages in that month. Choose a random number up to and including the number of bloggages in that month and click on the month.

Once the blog has taken you to that month, scroll down the number of headings that equal the number you just thought of.

Click on that title and, if the magic trick has worked, you will find a bloggage written by me! How do I do it? (Why do I do it?).

You can repeat this as many times as you like and you will find that it’s always a bloggage what I wrote.

This is a lazy way of me generating a bloggage for today, but also a way of suggesting that you might like to explore the archive. After all, if nobody looks at it it’s just taking up cyberspace!

Be blessed, be a blessing

For anyone who’s interested, here is a review of my blog in 2014

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

count me in

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MeterIt seems that this is my 900th bloggage. That’s 900 separate posts – probably the best part of 500,000 words with 526 different subject categories and 814 tags spread over just 10 pages. Amazingly I have only used 10% of my space allocation on WordPress. There have been 319 approved comments and I have been protected from 11,717 spam comments.

There have been over 44,000 views of my blog on WordPress (plus 23,000 from when it was hosted elsewhere) and that doesn’t include the people who receive bloggages directly through email. The most views on one day is 375. The largest number of visitors are from Britain (almost half of all visits), followed in order by USA, India, Canada, Australia, Germany and the Philippines. I have had visits on the site from people in 160+ different countries across the globe, which is the vast majority of nation states!

Of course not everyone came to the bloggage to read my bloggerel. Some will have come by mistake – looking for other items through search engines that have somehow linked them to me. The most popular search term that lands people here is… Some of you may recall my joy when the most popular search term was ‘Elmer Fudd’. Indeed I almost made it onto Google’s first page when you searched for ‘Elmer Fudd’ at the height of that silliness! But Elmer Fudd is only 1/3 as popular as the most popular search term that lands people here. What do you think it is?

Jesus?

God?

Christian?

Nope.

It’s ‘Bugatti Veyron’! Which is very interesting because this blog is nowhere near the top of the list of suggestions on the most popular search engine mentioned (but not necessarily endorsed) above.

What does all this tell you? If you only read this information what do you find out about me and this blog? Other than that I am a bit of a statgeek you don’t know much about it. Sadly a lot of people have the same approach about the Christian faith. They know about it (from RE or visits for ‘hatch, match and despatch’ services). They hear about it in the media (often negative). But all they know is about it.

If you want to get to understand my blog and get to know me a bit more (unless you live locally) the best way is to read the bloggages. I’m not suggesting that you have to read them: I would much rather you spent your time trying to find out more about the person who motivates and inspires me – the carpenter from Nazareth who has transformed the world and transcends history. But if it helps you to catch of glimpse of him through me and this bloggage it will have been worth it.

Thank you for visiting: be blessed, be a blessing.

 

statistically speaking again

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blog visits

I have noticed a trend with the visits you are making to my blog. When someone else advertises a bloggage lots more of you visit than on the other occasions. That’s what the chart above reveals. The significant peaks in views and visits coincide with the occasions when one of my bloggages was featured on the Baptist Times Daily News Sweep. This encourages those who are not normally bloggists on my site to have a look and see what sort of bloggerel I have generated on that day.

That is interesting in itself but what I also find interesting is that on the subsequent days the number of views and visits drops back to whatever is considered normal. Clearly those visitors did not feel sufficiently inspired to make return visits. Actually (and by way of making myself feel better) these statistics are slightly misleading because (bless you) over 130 of you receive my bloggages each day by e-mail and those stats would show up in the visitor stats because technically you have not visited.

Several reflections occurred to me as I considered the rollercoaster nature of the graph above.

  • word-of-mouth and recommendation are much better ways of advertising than simply being there and waiting to be found.
  • funny headlines and discussing relevant topics may well encourage people to take a look. However…
  • …unless you develop a relationship with your visitors they may well not stay.
  • in the pursuit of increasing the number of regular visitors it is easy to forget those who are already regular visitors and receiving from you.

Perhaps churches ought to learn these lessons too. And if we are unsure perhaps we should contrast it with how Jesus went about things.

Be blessed, be a blessing

Statistics joke:

Aunt Bessie loved to visit her nieces and nephews. However, she had relatives all over the country. The problem was that no matter how much she enjoyed seeing them, she hated flying. No matter how safe people told her it was, she was always worried that someone would have a bomb on the plane.

She read books about how safe it was and listened to the stewardess demonstrate all the safety features. But she still worried herself silly every time a visit was coming up.

Finally, the family decided that maybe if she saw the statistics she’d be convinced. So they sent her to a friend of the family who was an actuary. 

“Tell me,” she said suspiciously, “what are the chances that someone will have a bomb on a plane?” 

The actuary looked through his tables and said, “A very small chance. Maybe one in five hundred thousand.” 

She nodded, then thought for a moment. “So what are the odds of two people having a bomb on the same plane?” 

Again he went through his tables. 

“Extremely remote,” he said. “About one in a billion.” 

Aunt Bessie nodded and left his office. 

And from that day on, every time she flew, she took a bomb with her.

bloggage forecast

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Barometer gone haywireFor the first three days of this week I will be attending the Eastern Baptist Association’s Ministers’ Conference. I always find it a blessing when I attend these conferences – sometimes as much for the conversations between sessions as for the sessions themselves. This time we have some people I am very much looking forward to hearing God through – Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, and ‘freelance community theologian’ Ann Morisy.

The reason I am telling you this, my dear bloggists, is not to make you jealous or to thumb my nose at you (metaphorically or literally). It is to alert you to the possibility that this week’s bloggerel supply may be different to whatever counts for normal. I don’t intend to be sitting in these sessions blogging away about what is being said. And I don’t know whether there will be opportunities for me to reflect to you what I have received during the course of the conference. Equally it is possible that there may be more opportunities than normal and I may serve you a series of bloggettes on which to snack during the day rather than the larger bloggages that I usually dispense.

This seems like a good moment to restate why it is that I spend time writing this bloggerel and posting it on t’internet. Initially I blogged for entirely selfish reasons: first and foremost because the discipline helps me to reflect on my life and faith. I find that God speaks to me as I write, or that writing down what he has already said to me helps me to understand it more. I also enjoy a laugh, chuckle or occasionally a groan and the bloggages give me an excuse to look for a joke that may be relevant, or to think humorously about something. And, if I am honest, I also find the gentle increase in the numbers of visitors to this blog simultaneously secretly gratifying and slightly bad for my ego in the same way that cream cakes are for the waistline.

All but the last could be carried out in private, of course, through a journal. But I am a man of the 21st century and the cyber world beckoned to me irresistibly. So I started posting online and heard from some of you that occasionally some of my bloggerel has been helpful to you too. For me that’s an added bonus, a blessing, a joy. So I now add to the reasons a more altruistic thought that God may bless someone through what I write, just as he spoke through inanimate objects like a burning bush and spoke through an apparently stubborn and disobedient donkey.

My prayer as I write is that this will not simply be a place where you visit and receive some blessing occasionally, but that it may inspire you to reflect on your own faith and life. You need not post it on a blog, but if you find that my ramblings have inspired you to think about your own relationship with God, or encouraged you to continue to try to be a good free sample of Jesus, then that thought blesses me more than anything.

So thank you for blessing me with your visit.

Be blessed, be a blessing.

How many Baptist Ministers does it take to change a lightbulb? Change?

How many Baptist Church Meetings does it take to change a lightbulb? Six – mostly dedicated to talking about how good the old one had been.

How many Youth Ministers does it take to change a lightbulb? Who cares, anyone fancy pizza?

How many young people does it take to change a lightbulb? It wasn’t us, we didn’t break the old one.

migration

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Computers can do this to you

I am in the process of transferring my life from a slow computer to a whizzy one. I would like to think that it would be relatively simple and painless. Of course anyone familiar with computers will know that ‘simple’ and ‘painless’ are not words usually associated with them. I may have resembled this man occasionally during the process.

Programs which worked fine on the old computer don’t work well on this one. Tech support people suggest I should tinker with some of the settings in order to make it happen, but that does not seem right. Why should I have to change the internal settings within the operating system of a computer that is running the same software as the old computer?

And then there’s the simple(?) process of transferring my email accounts over. I got it working. Then I got it to stop working. I think I have got it working again. However, if I either send two replies to your email, or send none, please don’t hold a grudge, just politely respond to my error and I will blame the computer (for once I will be right).

Thankfully, because it is stored online, the blog has migrated simply and successfully. I have posted 630 bloggages since I launched this on an unsuspecting world, and over 40,000 of you have at least visited these pages. These are rough figures but it means that on average each bloggage is seen by 63 people! Really? Thank you, especially if you got here by accident and stayed to read!

I wonder if people who become Christians have a similar experience. There will be compatibility problems with old lifestyles and habits. There will be transition problems as they try to bring contact lists and friends with them. They may wonder about some of the things that don’t seem right any more. I think our role as church is to help them make the transition as smoothly as possible without imposing anything on them that is not about Jesus. Simply choosing to follow Jesus is a massive step in itself and I would not want to put anything in anyone’s way. Of course he may want to deal with some things in their life, but he’s doing that with us too, right? When I look at Jesus in the New Testament he seems to go out of his way to make it easy for people to follow him. He uses language and concepts that they understand. He invites, encourages, draws, attracts…

The only people he has a go at and makes it difficult for are the self-righteous, who think they are ok.

Hmmm.

Be blessed, be a blessing.

recapturing an attitude of gratitude

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We live in a world that is moving at breakneck speed. I don’t just mean the speed with which we are hurtling in our orbit around the sun, or the speed at which our planet is spinning. The pace of life itself seems to be accelerating,  enabled by advances in technology, innovations in organisational techniques, and even pressures to perform well and outperform others.

and if you are anything like me you get rather frustrated when things do not move as fast as you think they should. Right now I am experiencing ‘techno-angst’ caused by my computer running a necessary and important backup process while I am trying to do other things with it. My computer is definitely a bloke because it struggles with multitasking and everything is running slowly this morning as a result. Tasks which it could normally manage almost instantaneously are now preceded by animated cursors indicating that the computer is thinking about doing something. I have not bothered measuring how long these delays are, nor how much more slowly my work is being produced, but I would not be surprised if, over the course of the year, there were significant numbers of days being lost to employers and home life that are being accompanied by these animated icons.

We have assimilated technology and the instantaneous nature of communication to such an extent that we now get frustrated when it doesn’t operate at the expected speed. When our broadband connection runs slowly we grind of teeth in frustration. When our computer fails to multitask as well as we hope we experience steam coming out of our ears. When traffic does not flow at top speed we rant at it (either internally or verbally). When change does not take place as quickly as we would like we sigh and roll our eyes.

We forget that it was not so many years ago that all of this was the stuff of science fiction. I was commenting to someone yesterday that when Star Trek: the Next Generation first appeared on our TV screens and they were controlling computers with touchscreens I thought that this was somewhat fanciful. I now use a tablet computer in my daily life and even use it to preach from instead of pieces of paper! (There is always the frisson of excitement with the thought that the tablet might freeze or crash in the middle of the sermon and I will not have a backup plan. Living on the edge!) science-fiction films were computers were controlled by voice were considered to be at best visionary or even somewhat unlikely just a couple of years ago and now we talk to our mobile phones to discover information and I am dictating to my computer right now.

In the hymn Abide with Me there is a line: “change and decay in all around I see”. Many people still associate change with the K: it is seen as a bad thing. We would much rather not have to change so that we can carry on within our comfortable lives. Change is disturbing, disruptive and disorientating. At least it is if we view it negatively. Change for a hungry person that brings food is welcomed. Change for the homeless that brings accommodation is embraced. Change for those who are shackled by guilt that brings liberation is celebrated.

I have commented before in a bloggage that most of the world does not have access to the technology with which you are reading this. Many of them would not even dream of it because it is so far beyond their daily experience. So before I start ranting about the speed of my computer I should bear in mind that the majority of the people in this world do not even have access to a pocket calculator. Before I complain about being stuck in a traffic jam I should remember that billions of people travel by foot, all would never be able to save enough money to own their own vehicle. When I I’m frustrated that I have not got a signal on my mobile phone I should remember that even though there are probably more mobile phones in the world that people, most people in the world do not have access to them, or even a landline.

It’s all about recapturing that attitude of gratitude. I think it’s a lovely phrase because it strips off the tongue, but it’s an even better phrase because it reflects how God would have us live: grateful to him for all that we have, grateful for all the blessings that we experience, grateful for the people around us who stand beside us even in the worst of circumstances, grateful for Jesus.

and… Relax. Breathe. Smile.

Be blessed, be a blessing. Make it so (for ST:TNG fans you will understand that reference)

 

ITILTOE – toilet is out of order (see previous two days for context)

One of the worst things about atheism is that ultimately there is no one to be grateful to.