The weekend! I’m just back from a week at Cyprus (not a holiday & more on that this week) and it is unsurprisingly a fair bit colder here. But the sun is still shining and God is still good. Anyway on with the links

You Should Read These

Seven articles that might be worth you bookmarking, reading & thinking about

1. ‘No’ to Trans, ‘Yes’ to Gay Marriage: Will This Be the New Normal? I think Glen is right & people are no longer rejecting the question out of hand. And this was a great line: “When leisure activities go wrong, we give one-star reviews. When sex goes wrong, we call the police.”
2. Top Tips for Teenagers & for Top Tips for Parents – some good stuff from Andrew Bunt here
3. 30 People in the New Testament Confirmed (by Archaeology)
4. We are reading the scrolls! There could be some big discoveries in the next few years
5. Gaudí’s Unfinished Masterpiece ‘La Sagrada Família‘ Is Nearing Completion – maybe by 2026 it will be a finished masterpiece.
6. How MagRail could upgrade the railways – this is the way
7. The Six Stages of Having Too Many Books – what is this ‘too many’ it speaks of?

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You Should Look At This

Funny Finalists of the 2023 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

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You Should Listen To This

I know it was over played in adverts for a while but it is still a beautiful piece of music

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You Should Watch This

4K Video of Norway’s Stunningly Beautiful Fjords

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This Week’s Postings

None at all. My apologies, so here’s another video, I don’t like caravans but this quirky one is quite cool

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From The Archives

What I quickly noticed was that many of the homeless could be seen walking the streets of Stockholm gathering thrown away bottles and then recycling them and reclaiming the deposit. This has a number of benefits, it increases recycling, it provides a small amount of income to those who glean and they have to do something in order to gain a benefit. I’ve no idea whether it’s better than begging but I think I see the difference.

There are some differences, this is a product of our waste and not our work, it from our leisure and not our livelihood but we’ve begun to give our recycling to our local gleaners. Of course, if giving our plastic bottles and tin cans was the sum of our giving to the poor then that would be a poor showing indeed, but that isn’t what it’s about for us. We could keep the money, reclaim the deposit, walk past the gleaners. We could be more ruthless. Instead we’re trying to build habits into our ways of living that remember the poor.

Gleaning