The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 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 41,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 15 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I received the following letter from Jeni, which has blessed me a lot during my recent struggle with pneumonia (firstly misdiagnosed as bronchitis) – I have just emerged from a four day hospital stay with a large bag of different types of pills and I don’t feel fantastic – I have been given another estimate of two weeks before it all goes away, but it’s nothing like what it was. If you haven’t had a bout of pneumonia, you don’t want it. By the way, since the lovely WordPress interface lets me do this, lets just take a check at this point of those of you who had pneumonia already and who didn’t have it yet, that would be quite interesting.
Anyhow, the letter from Jeni which cheered me up a lot is in the comments to one of the trilogy of anti-Watchtower films on this channel. In order to give more prominence to the interesting issues I wanted to give my answer instead as a main article, and thanks to Jeni for waiting patiently for me to get a bit better. I’m not really well enough to be writing about this, but if Calvin can write letters all over Europe when he had about 200 illnesses going on, then who am I to not write a blog post while recovering from Pneumonia? Even if I come up with more than the usual levels of fallibility, surely the Lord will add his blessing, which is the only important thing.
Here’s Jeni’s letter:
Hi Viktor,
I’m writing you because I watched all 3 You Tube videos on the Jehovah’s Witnesses back to back. I have been “studying” with a JW for a year now in my home and am trying to expose her to scriptures that will open her eyes. It’s a slow process. I think you and your theology is spot on and I wish you were my Sunday school teacher. Basically I just need your prayers as well as the woman with whom I’ve been studying. Please pray for her. I would love to have a house church or other ministry full of ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses from my area and disciple them.
Side note, what do you think about the scripture in 2 Timothy where Paul says he doesn’t permit a woman to teach a man? I’ve listened to a little bit from both sides of the argument and I tend to lean toward the conservative view. However I’m a woman and so this is disappointing because I so want to pour out what I believe God tells me in the scriptures to others and there is no avenue for that presently at my church. All the women’s classes have plenty of teachers. Please tell me your view so that I can more fully examine my own.
Love in Christ,
-J-
First of all, many thanks to your compliments and desires that I could be your Sunday school teacher. I have in fact never been a Sunday school teacher and am afraid and greatly tremble at the idea of having that or any other position of “power” in an organised Church. It says in James 3.1 “My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation“. A higher level is applied to those who have had the rule in the Church. In particular there are big condemnations awaiting people who have had carnal kickbacks from being rulers in the Church, and by “Carnal kickbacks” I refer to everything from taking advantage of the monetary gifts of the faithful, using the position to gain more tempral influence like improving your CV for a temporal role, and also the utility a person’s pride has from the receipt of a title – Elder This, Deacon That (the Mormons love to leverage that one!) and also the influence over others – the joy of exercising power, and how in many cases we see little popes appear in Churches all over Protestantism – people who rightly reject the Papal claims to be able to tell people what to do in Roman Catholicism above and beyond scripture, or to be the uniques interpreters of scripture to their flock, and in the end they are even more papal in the way they treat their flocks than the very Pope in Rome that they abhor. The worst case of power abuse in the Church and the ultimate “carnal kickback” of leadership of course is the sexual abuse that thrives wherever leadership is put on some unnecessary pedestal. That again we hear of mostly in the media related to Roman Catholicism, but never fear, I am sure that Protestantism contains cases that can absolutely run rings around the worst of them, so let us be humble and circumspect. Continue reading “The difficult area of women’s gifts in the Church.”
Hi, gentle reader,
You possibly noticed a couple of changes going on around here today, so, since I rarely do anything without appending several paragraphs of justification in true Calvinist fashion, I thought I’d give you the lowdown on what is going on and why, just in case you’re remotely interested.
First off, I got a bit tired of using Quoracy Blue as the background to this blog. I couldn’t get any of the tag colour schemes in WordPress‘s “Mystique” template (which is what I’ve been using for nearly a year now and like it a lot) to work with it, it certainly clashed with many of the header images and on top of that it kind of distracted the eye from the main content. So I decided to exchange it for another of the colours I bought from the Unicef site www.ownacolour.com, namely my wife’s Christmas present (she didn’t use the malaria tablets and water the purchase funded personally, by the way, I believe they went to a village in India) which I called Elena James’ Dark Silver . At the same time I put my tabs to grey, which is one of the six colour options, and unsurprisingly they don’t clash, and even the way most of the header pics look doesn’t clash and also it is a more discrete and elegant colour all round, rather like the woman it is named for.
Anyway, since my wife owns, under the full rigour of international law that an august institution like Unicef represents, the colour with the hex code #505050, I hope people will respect that and not use the colour themselves without remembering to pray to God for her relief from her condition Multiple Sclerosis, and the additional disadvantages of having two autistic children, another child who is pathologically lazy and a fat eccentric workaholic husband who spends too much time goldlisting or messing around on the internet and whose sentences structures are far too long.
Second off, I changed the fonts again today. This one’s called Eigerdals or something. I had FF Dax before. I put both Quoracy.com and Huliganov.TV on the same look just for simplicity and a kind of commonality, as it were, but in the end that’s pretty boring and whilst FF Dax is OK, I think that this is a bit more original looking. Probably it will have difficulties with some of the foreign diacritics and I’ll have to improvise. I hope everyone can read it ok, as one size up from this looks less good – the dot on the i runs into the stalk and makes it look like the hard i in Turkish. Your feedback more than welcome.
Third off, as you can see I’ve been doing a post a day for the last ten days or so. That is made easier now by the use of scheduling, so I have started using this feature to spread out the content more evenly, so that subscribers don’t get indundated with posts on a productive day and then nothing for weeks when I’m busy with other things. I would be adding unscheduled ones like this one is on top anyway, and also I’ll be monitoring and answering comments in the same way as I was doing before.
That’s basically it. Hope you enjoy these changes.
OK, this one’s hot off the press, as I am writing about something that happened about ten minutes ago, and I’m writing this from one of the machines in the lounge at Prague airport.
A few days ago I gave a lecture about cross-cultural management to students of Susquehanna University in Prague. At the end of the lecture I was given a bottle of fine Moravian wine.
I forgot that I had this bottle in my briefcase, but naturally the detectors as I passed from streetside to airside at Prague found it.
Now clearly they all recognise me as having been through there eighty or so times before, so there’s no terrorism alarm bells ringing, and you can see how they’re in two minds about whether or not just to let me get on with it. But in the end the three of them say no, they have to do things by the book, which mean that the wine is thrown away.
I’m there saying to them, just take it and drink it yourselves, it’s a sin to throw it away. And of course as they know that I’m a regular, they also know that there’s no risk I’m trying to poison them, give them an exploding oesophagus, or anything like that.
It’s not the loss I’m bothered about. I could make that up just by drinking the free wine that’s flowing like milk and honey (there’s milk and honey too, in the fridge) here in the Lounge. It’s a bit early in the day for me, though, and I’m actually not a big fan of alcohol despite what readers of my blogs and viewers of my vlogs may think.
It is a bit sad that it happened to a present. But most of all it’s pity to see something like that just thrown into a bin and not enjoyed by anybody. When anyone can see there’s no real risk there. It’s just the over-zealous application of a rule book.
That’s the real shock. That’s what’s really saddened me and sent me running to the production corridors of WordPress to get it off my chest.
Today has very nearly been the day I broke my postaday2011 challenge – after all, it’s coming up to the time when the VAT and the books for the year end have to be done and there are audits and accounts to be done left, right and centre, so this can’t be a long post. I have barely been able to follow the news, which is a good source normally for things to write about, and although I said I would soon write about these animal die-offs, this isn’t the time for that either as it needs a bit longer.
So what can I do with this post? Maybe a few photos just to check out the gallery possibilities on here…
Now where do you think that is? Do you recognise it? Any guesses? Answers in the comments, please!