Policeman
Segway
I saw a policeman on a Segway today, and I near killed myself laughing!
Windy City Day One
It feels great to be back in Chicago! I don’t know why particularly, but it feels like a home from home. Great place.
I was up for a solid 24 hours yesterday, and it was totally worth it. Bumped into Stewart on board a Glasgow to Luton flight, and kept each other marginally more awake than normal. Spent the entirety of an 8 hour transatlantic flight veering between two thoughts: “the guy in front of me is really cute” and “that kid is 3 and playing with an iPhone – I feel old”.
The journey from O Hare to my friends apartment is fairly straightforward, and was going fine until I had to switch from the metro to the bus. I made a mental note last year when I was here of which side to get the bus on (after riding it in the wrong direction for 40 minutes), yet still got totally confused by it again. Ha. I really don’t do buses.
Got soaked on the walk from the bus stop to Hannah’s place – it’s been raining off and on, but today wasn’t too bad. Took a trip to Navy Pier and wandered around Michigan Avenue again.
Being inspired and encouraged by Don Miller’s new book, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, which I read in London yesterday – more on that later.
Skye’s the Limit
Photographs from my Skye trip last month are finally online!
Rob Bell :: In Conversation
I was at a couple of Rob Bell’s events at Greenbelt, ‘Drops Like Stars’ and ‘In Conversation’. Despite the huge queues for Drops Like Stars, it was worth it. I knew roughly what he would say, having read the book, but I like watching how he presents things. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy his books so much: he writes the way he speaks.
The ‘In Conversation’ piece was really interesting… I’m interested in what happens when it’s unscripted, when you’re put on the spot and it’s just a dialogue between people rather than a full-on presentation. A couple of things he said stood out for me.
“The point of the church is to break our bodies and pour ourselves out for the healing of the world.”
I’ve heard him speak about this before, but it gets me every time. I wonder what it would look like if we really started to live that out? In so many churches I fear we’ve turned communion back into this religious ritual, rather than it being an everyday occurrence. Wasn’t that the point initially? It’s bread and wine.. it’s whatever you’ve got to hand, that everyone has access to, and it’s not kept just for the religious people. If the Eucharist truly is the Good Gift, what does it mean for us to be a Good Gift to our communities? We become the body, that was broken, and we become the blood, that was poured out. We break ourselves & we pour ourselves out… on their behalf.
“Every little bit of hope you stumble across is real.”
This phrase just grabbed me. Hope is real. Hope is not a myth.
Anyone else there? What did you think?
Decelerate
One of the best things I did at Greennbelt was attend an evening worship event run by Church on the Corner. Decelerate: New Ways of Inhabiting the City was a reflection on the hectic, fast-paced rat race we are surrounded by living in the city.
It’s something I think about regularly. I love living in the city: I love all the hustle and bustle, the interaction, the diversity. Yet I need to slow down regularly. And maybe that’s where Sabbath comes back in again. But it was fantastic to sit down, slow down, and be reminded that I am not a slave, that nobody cares what I do for a living, that the world keeps on spinning when I stop for a minute.
[See more demotivational posters from Church on the Corner on flickr]
And as we were reminded during the worship, it doesn’t matter if you win the rat race, at the end you’re still a rat.
Of All The People In All The World
One of the cool things that was happening in the Christian Aid tent at Greenbelt over the weekend was an innovative rice show (trust me… you’ll want to read on) called ‘Of All The People In All The World’. Essentially, the show uses grains of rice to visualise world statistics, which each grain of rice representing one person. It’s a powerful way of comparing myself, one person, with all the people who aren’t me. Such as…
Caption on the left reads: Refugees in the world.
Caption on the right reads: Millionaires in the world.
You can find out a bit more about it on the Stan’s Cafe website.
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