I'm a Christian, a physicist, a worshipper, a gamer, a husband and a father.
Deeper thoughts and musings
This is probably only interesting to Christians. Sorry about that. My physics work is all classified at the moment so I can’t write about that…
I was thinking about the different churches I’ve been to, and particularly the Sunday services, normally called worship services.
In general, in the UK and maybe in the wider Western world, there seem to be two main approaches.
As I lay on the bench in the park just praying and listening to God today, I was thinking about the blog I wrote yesterday, about individualism in the West and how we make it a kind of god or idol. I was thinking about what it means to meet with God in prayer, in silence and solitude, about how important the individual is to God. And how amazingly revealing that is to us, that God loves each individual too. Maybe our sense of individualism in the West, in our religion as well as in our culture, has partly come from a good understanding of how God loves us. I think I’m reacting now to what I find distasteful in my own culture, but not really appreciating the richness of our spiritual heritage.
I heard part of a sermon on a podcast today where the preacher changed all the words “we” in the Bible passage to the word “you”. He said he was doing this to make it more “immediate” to those listening.
I’m sure he had good intentions, but I think this is really bad. Here in our comfortable consumer “Western” world we are so obsessed by our individual rights, needs and desires that we almost worship ourselves. In the church this has crept into our worship songs as we seek our own individual “experience” of God in worship, all about our personal relationship with Him. A number of worship leaders around the Western world have started writing about this, calling for a return to real corporate worship.
Yesterday I wrote about my quest to find good ways of reading the articles and other content I need for my research, and talked about the two tools Flipboard and Pocket that can make this a bit easier.
The next thing I’m looking for is a way to discover the papers and articles that I should be reading but just don’t know about. At the moment I do this manually by subscribing to journals and news services that I then flip through with Flipboard to find something interesting.
One of the things I find hardest about being a scientist is keeping up-to-date with all the latest research. A number of times I’ve worked on some problem for days, weeks and even months before finding out that someone else has already solved the problem!
I’ve started looking to internet tools to help me keep up to date. My favourite two at the moment are Flipboard and Pocket.
So this week has been an interesting one! Some of you may remember that when Zachariah was born, he had seizures. We thought until now that this was because of complications in his birth. But then this week Nathanael started having seizures too. It turns out they both have something called Benign Neonatal Convulsions which can run in families. They don’t cause any long-term damage and they don’t lead to epilepsy. But they are still very scary to watch! Nathanael was in hospital from Monday afternoon until Friday morning. They looked after him really well and he seems perfectly fine now, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong earlier in the week! We’re happy to be home with Nathan and Zach together again.
I had a very interesting discussion with my friend the other day, about what she should write for her MA dissertation. On thinking through what we talked about, I realised it highlighted the pressures of any research situation—the battle to balance three key criteria:
For my friend, the title of her dissertation at the start of her MA year was very much what she is interested in, it’s a question she really wants to find an answer for and is passionate about. It perfectly fulfils the first criteria.
I’ve learnt so much on this course, but nothing has been so surprising as learning that so much of what we take for granted is culture-specific.
We’re looking at causes of cross-cultural conflict within teams at the moment, and it’s been a real wake-up call for my future working in China. Systems that we take for the granted in the West are actually not very transferrable into other cultures.
One of the things we’ve been doing here at All Nations is looking at personality types and patterns of reaction. We’ve done a Myers–Briggs session and, although I hate the idea of defining people by four letters, or even 16 letters, I’ve found it has given me a lot of insight into my personality that I hadn’t thought of before. I also met someone who has the same four letters as me, and listening to her story has helped me realise stuff about my own lif
So, we’ve had the first two weeks of our course at All Nations now, and we’re starting to get a feel for how this year might go.
The thing that’s a little overwhelming for me personally is the sheer amount of opportunities for all kinds of things.
There’s the academic study, the basis of the course. I can see already that we will only scratch the surface of so many fascinating and important subjects. This is part of the aim of the course, to open up our eyes to what a wonderful God we have and a wonderful world and people that he has created. I could easily fill up all my non-lecture time with reading theology books and discussing big, important themes with some of the amazing people studying here.