A Stolen Thing

A poem made from a book,

An idea from a website.

A first attempt (a bit morbid)

Dance The Way I Feel

A thought:

An innate part of being a Christian is caring about what people think of you.

As part of being Christians one strives to reflect Christ in their life, make wise Godly choices, and treat people with love and respect. These are all good things, but the relational nature of them, and of the Christian faith as a whole means that they cannot be done independently of the opinions of others. We cannot just behave in a way that we feel is loving and respectful and not care if the rest of the population agrees with us. Our success at acting in a respecting manner is determined by how those we act around perceive our actions. Whether or not my actions were God glorifying and/or loving of those around me is not decided by how I feel about my actions, but what those witnessing those actions think.

I have always felt that it is good to not care what other people think about you, but I am coming to realise that it is important, and necessary. If I want to reflect Christ in my life, I need to behave in a way that not only I feel is loving and respectful, but also that others think is loving and respectful. So I must consider what those around me think of my actions, my intentions, and attitudes. What they think of me.

This is one of things that weighs me down the most as a Christian. I am happy to love and serve others, and to shape my actions around the ideals of love, respect and service of others, but having to consider how others want to me behave to see those things in my actions annoys me.

I have one friend, a leader in a certain Christian circle, who is always throwing the “is that the loving thing to do” line in my face. Making me do things that I don’t really want to do, or care about. I wouldn’t care if no one did them for me, but I can’t deny that other people think they are important, so they would feel loved if I did it, and most of the time I’m not doing anything important with that time otherwise. Drives me mad.

This is not to say that what other people think about you is the most important factor, and that we should shape ourselves entirely on the opinions of others. There is still the vane, image obsessed thoughts that can be involved, and are what first comes to my mind when thinking about this idea. I worked for years to not care about whether people like how I dress, looked, acted and am. And I will continue to try and not let those thoughts get all up in my headspace. The difference is in the direction. I will hold to not considering (too much) whether people like me, but I will consider if people think I love and respect them.

Photos #3

Cages On Our World

Cage the Coast

Cage the City

Cage the Play

Quote

This is a quote I heard today that reminded me of why I started this blog.

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Purpose

I had always assumed that everything has, or at least at some time had, a purpose. I just figured that sometimes the purpose that an item once had was harder to find or see as it has been long since lost and disconnected with. Sadly, this has not held up well in my quest of explanations.

The first this I looked up was why left handed people are called "South Paws". This, it turns out, is linked to baseball as the fields they played on were traditionally facing west, so when a left handed pitcher put his pitching hand out, it was pointing south. Thus, they were called south paws, and it spread from there.

From this success, I moved onto another question that has been troubling me. What is the purpose of the Neck Tie? I had it in my head that I was informed that it was once used to wipe your mouth with, and from there became apart of fashion, loosing all purpose. This didn't feel completely right, so I had hoped that there was some great lost purpose for the tie, but this was not to be. As far as I can find, it is and always has been purely an item of fashion. Wikipedia suggests that it was just an item picked up from one culture to another because of fashion and the modern Neck Tie was simply the adaption of the cravat for a modern factory world.

This Yahoo Answers page suggest it has it's origins in Rome, warn by orators to warm their vocal chords.

This is all very disappointing I feel.

The next question I have; what is, or was the purpose of the collar?

Photos #2

Some more photos.

A Wild Coke Can.

The Fire Hydrant Down My Street

Photos of Instruments

Bass and Drums in the Gazebo

Drums, Bass and Guitar - the band.

If you are loving these, you can see more of the time I have waisted with a camera here.

Productivity

Productivity is hard.

There is so much else to do.

Killing time is easy,

the more you do it,

the boarder you get,

so you the more you do it.

Even when you see what needs to be done,

not doing it is always easier.

And there are always lots of options,

until you have nothing to be doing,

then there is nothing to kill time doing.