If you’re like me and haven’t managed to get a chocolate-filled advent calendar yet, how about trying out Paperless Christmas? It’s a visual advent calendar, with movie clips & sounds every day until Dec 24. It’s a lot of fun!
Visit the website here: http://paperlesschristmas.org.
I got the opportunity to attend the inaugural Magnus Magnusson lecture on Monday, at Glasgow Caledonian university, which was given by Professor Muhammad Yunus.
Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and dubbed “Banker to the Poor”, is recognised as one of the world’s greatest social entrepreneurs. He was awarded a Nobel Peace prize in 2006 for his efforts to create a world free of poverty by developing the concept of micro-credit, which supports entrepreneurs who are too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. By providing small loans on suitable terms Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that with the right support even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own social and economic advancement.
His lecture on Monday was titled “Alleviating Poverty: Microcredit & Social Business”. I made a minimal amount of notes, but here they are all the same…
“Peel off the layers of fear…”
Grameen Bank works with 97% women.
Looked at how conventional banks did it, then did the exact opposite.
Poverty is created by the systems that we built.
Bonsai tree example – stays small because it’s planted in a pot, fills the space its given to grow in.
Charity money has only one life – investing in social business has many lives.
Poverty belongs in the museums.The time is now.
The greatest crisis is the greatest opportunity.
Integrated crises – we can’t ignore the current food crisis just because it isn’t affecting us while the financial crisis is.
I’m tracking along with Mars Hill Advent Bible Readings this year… and I’m so excited about them. I need a little structure to help me along the way, and this seems like a good thing for me. It all comes back to faith, hope and love…
These daily readings were chosen to help capture four main Advent themes: hope, peace, joy, and love. Be encouraged as you read, knowing many others in our community are reading and reflecting on these themes with you.
WEEK 1 – HOPE
Nov 30 – Isaiah 40v1-5
Dec 1 – Psalm 42
Dec 2 – Romans 8v18-27
Dec 3 – Isaiah 11v1-10
Dec 4 – Hebrews 6v13-20
Dec 5 – Psalm 33
Dec 6 – Isaiah 35WEEK 2 – PEACE
Dec 7 – Isaiah 40v9-11
Dec 8 – Philippians 4v4-7
Dec 9 – Jeremiah 33v7-16
Dec 10 – Isaiah 42v1-9
Dec 11 – Zechariah 9v9-17
Dec 12 – 2 Corinthians 1v2-5
Dec 13 – Isaiah 52v7-10WEEK 3 – JOY
Dec 14 – Habakkuk 3
Dec 15 – John 16v5-28
Dec 16 – Isaiah 55v9-13
Dec 17 – Psalm 66
Dec 18 – 1 Peter 1v3-9
Dec 19 – Psalm 96
Dec 20 – Isaiah 12WEEK 4 – LOVE
Dec 21 – Zephaniah 3v14-20
Dec 22 – Psalm 89v1-4
Dec 23 – Ephesians 2v1-10
Dec 24 – Isaiah 9v6-7
Slightly late I know, but advent has begun! Welcome to the season of festivities…
If you’re looking for an alternative to the credit crunch and the busy yuletide shopping season, how about signing up to Christian Aid’s Advent-inspired email? The handy hints, which will be emailed daily from the 1st December until Christmas Eve, are designed to help you save cash, cut carbon emissions and have some Yuletide fun. You can sign up for them here.
I came across this stunning piece of liturgy a couple days ago on Stewart’s blog, written by Roddy Hamilton…
let us go out
with quiet boldness,
tender daring,
simmering anger,
impatient justice.let us go out with provocative peacemaking
into advent,
enough to crack open the moribund and dry faith of the world
in it’s spent and necrotic cravings.let us go out with a message
that disturbs the world with restless whispers
about god and incarnation,
goosebumps and justice.let us go out
and muffle our laughter
behind an unnerving truth
heaven-shaped
sharp-edged
waiting to crack it all open
and let the glory through
with a living word:
jesus
Beautiful… may we come to know the God of goosebumps and justice more this Advent season…
I’m hosting a gig tomorrow night to mark the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day. It’s in Bloc (Bath St, Glasgow) from 9pm, costs £4, and features music from the delightful Yvonne Lyon, Ben TD, and the Potential Strangers. How’s that for your money’s worth! Come along, bring yer mates, and lets raise some funds for Christian Aids vital work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic!
Any Glasgow-ish bloggers wanna re-post the flyer on their site for me?! Thanks!
The past three weeks since I returned from the DRC have quite possibly been the busiest three weeks of my life! Work has been hectic (my own fault tho – learning time management skills!), and has pretty much been my life.
Thought I’d give you a glimpse of my last two weeks…
I’ve spent a lot of time on trains… In fact, Wednesday was spent entirely on trains, with a brief 2 hours in between to get changed & pick up stuff from the office, before getting on another one. It’s been great – I really love my job – but it’s so tiring. I ended up taking yesterday off and having a PJ day, was totally wiped.
Just over 2 weeks ago I was in the DR Congo with the rest of the Christian Aid gap year volunteers, visiting some of our partners there. We got to meet a lot of incredibly inspiring people, people who do an awful lot of good with limited resources. One of those partners we meet was Vorsi Congo, a community organization that works through the church to combat AIDS.
They travel across the whole country, training religious leaders, who in turn get their religious communities talking about the issues, often for the first time. Rodger, the technical director, estimated that across the 11 provinces of the DRC, their message has reached about 8million people. They try to break down the stigma surrounding HIV using mediums such as song & drama.
“Before, if you were HIV positive, no-one wanted to sit in the same pew as you at church. Now people are more happy to sit with them & even take communion with them.”
[Rodger]
I meet Nadine when we visited Vorsi Congo. She is the pastor of a church, and also is a woman living with HIV.
At one point as she shared her story with us, she said, “If I hadn’t have worked with Vorsi Congo, I’d be buried.” It really is a matter of life and death for people. The level of stigma surrounding HIV is still massive, and though Nadine is doing well, there are many people who have been shunned by their families and their churches when they find out they are HIV+.
We use this phrase a lot at Christian Aid, about ‘living positively with HIV’, and it’s only after meeting Nadine that I’m starting to understand what that really means. Nadine doesn’t sit around feeling sorry for herself, but instead she’s throwing herself into being a part of the solution. She’s using her story and her position in the church to help educate people.
To find out more about the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS, visit our website here.
To support our DR Congo crisis appeal , click here.
It would appear that I’m starting to make the rounds in regional media, about my trip to the DRC with Christian Aid…
There’s an article on Scottish Christian here, and I’ve just finished an interview with the Ballymena Times.
I promise I’ll start sharing some stories here soon…!
We were moving everything around in the office today, rearranging the layout of the place, and someone had the ingenious idea of making a time lapse of it… Unfortunately we had already moved the desks before we started it, but here’s the rest of our morning…
“There’s nothing large in our lives.”
[Douglas Coupland]
There is a beauty in the wide open sky that feels somehow symbolic of the space I need in my life. As all the colours mix into one, I am reminded of all the things in my life that have made me the person I am today. I’m reminded of the need to stop and simply drink in the beauty.
The vast expanse holds endless possibilities.
Which one to choose?
Which path to journey?
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