Some snowboarding, some recovery, some melting snow, some reading – this week has been something of a down week after a busy stretch and now it’s time to get back up to speed with some travels and conferences in the weeks ahead.

You Should Read These

1. Aslan Is On the Move. Whether or not there is a larger trend this is full of encouraging stories!
2. Questioning Keller’s 200 Terrible Sermons. Liam Thatcher with some hope and encouragement for preachers.
3. ‘In here we have only one leader, Jesus Christ’. An encouraging story of Russian & Ukrainian Orthodox Christians worshipping together. Plus a fantastic anecdote at the end about the Cadbury Family.
4. Defining Healthy Masculinity
5. Douthat on belief. Is Christianity a religion? might have been a better title.
6. Africa’s young “generation hustle” hits the big time. As I’ve said the future is African.
7. Waste tyres – a progress update. Tyres are a problem.

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You Should Look At This

Striking Winners of the 2024 Nature inFocus Photography Competition for more amazing and sometimes moving photos. The ones of the elephants in Sri Lanka are particularly sad.

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You Should Listen To This

A very spiritual song from Mumford

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You Should Watch This

I enjoy listening to someone really think & talk about Jesus

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This Week’s Postings

Nuffink. Again.

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From The Archives

Life on earth needs the right ingredients and those are, it seems, much rarer than many think. We need a star just like our Sun, and we need to be in the goldilocks zone. Neither too close and too hot like Venus nor too far away and cold like Mars. We also need a large planet just like Jupiter far enough away to protect us from meteors and comets. Our planet needs a satellite to stabilise seasons, orbits and tides. Our planet needs to have a molten core ‘with highly radioactive minerals like uranium and thorium with half-lives of billions of years’¹ and our planet needs to be large enough to hold its magnetic field in place for there to be an atmosphere.

These are not the only things necessary for life to be successful on a planet but already we’re generating quite the list. And the more ingredients you need, the more likely it seems that the correct conclusion is that this is a rare earth indeed.

Perhaps we should not be so quick to put volcanoes or earthquakes in the ‘evil’ category for without them we wouldn’t be here. God it seems, knew exactly what he was doing when he made them.

Thank God for volcanoes and earthquakes

I hope you enjoy your weekend. Do let me know if there’s something here you appreciated or if you see something you think would be worth sharing, let me know!