stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before

Now 2 very fine recodings exist with the above title and to be perfectly honest I am not sure which one I prefer. When I first heard the Mark Ronson cover of the Smiths classic I hated it, now I can’t seem to hear it enough.

My reason for using it this week is because we are looking at remembering things in BCLC. What do we remember and why. This is a fairly short tompic for me because I just don’t remember stuff at all.  In order to improve that we had the best laugh we have had in ages trying to improve our memorising numbers by converting them to letters and making little meaningful words out of those that will remind us of the number we are trying to memorise.

For instance: there are 39 books in the old testament. The letter for 3 is ‘m’ and the letter for 9 is ‘p’ so we get ‘mp’. If we slip a vowel in to make a word we could get ‘map’. If we then picture a map of the broad region where the old testament books were set we can bring to mind the map, convert the letters and come up with the number 39 whenever we are asked how many books there are in the OT.

Sounds good until you try it with any other number and the whole thing seems to come unstuck. We did, however, have a large laugh trying and will probably never ever forget how many book are in the old testament with or without the map visualisation.

Last night we were questioned about publicity for BCLC and why we don’t do any. Well we have tried but I am not sure how easily we could convey all that you can read here into a sentence or a paragraph that would entice someone to not attend to their usual Sunday morning activity and join us instead.

Perhaps I should try though. Any suggestions gratefully received….

Is she really going out with him?

The start to possibly the first punk single, New Rose by the Damned. Also a Joe Jackson single I owned.

On Sunday, like a lot of people in churches, BCLC looked at the depistion of Jesus’ resurrection in John’s gospel. We went outside for an easter egg hunt to start then we acted out the story and tried to get a idea of how it all would have felt to those that saw the empty tomb and even Jesus himself.

This was a good session and raised a lot of thoughts in my head about this story. I have never really got Easter. I know what ‘happened’ but I never really understood the significance of it. This year I feel I am getting somewhere with it. If you look at my last post you will see why I believe I haven’t got it so far, basically that the wrong message has been peddled over the centuries by the churches. On hearing the story of how Mary didn’t recognise Jesus and thought he was the gardener I am beginning to get a handle on what we are meant to understand by the resurrection.

I simply cannot accept that Jesus physically died and came back to life.  So it must be a metaphor. Mary didn’t recognise Jesus because he looked like the gardener but in that meeting with the gardener Mary encountered Jesus. We can encounter Jesus every day in the people we meet and we do.

So get out of your churches and start finding Jesus, he’s out there, you only have to look.

I’m a political man

and I practice what I preach. I would like to think I did but maybe including that line was stretching the point a little.

Easter and once again we are bombarded with the message that eating chocolate till you explode (in spots) is ok and that Jesus was crucified for our sins and what’s more he rose from the dead and as long as we behave ourselves then the ‘gift’ of everlasting life can be ours too.

This message annoys the hell out of me (the Jesus bit not the chocolate). It is peddled by the established church who play up Easter Sunday bit so that we will forget the Good Friday bit. In my Bible Jesus was killed by the established church of the day because he refused to behave himself. How has that been so distorted into this ‘fairytale’ of personal salvation from dreaded sin?

Jesus was a political man. He was removed in the way that people who upset the status quo in an attempt to unsettle the people in power and prevent them from abusing their position generally are.

Do we get any of this from any of our church leaders? Not in this country we don’t. We get told that the message of Easter is that a little over indulgence in chocolate is ok as long as we behave ourselves and live good moral lives.

That is an insult to Jesus and the message he died trying to deliver.

Carry on Nurse

It has just struck me that the NHS is a bit like your sex life.

You can be told how often you’ve done it and how many time you plan to do it in the future but ultimately if you don’t feel satisfied by it then it isn’t right.