Holiday Monday & "Are Christians being persecuted?"

Such is the once Christian nature of our country that we have a Public Holiday after Easter Sunday, in recognition of the resurrection.  Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  We had the usual greeting at church:
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed Alleluia
Christ is Risen!
He is risen indeed Alleluia
Christ is Risen!
He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

So the service got going.
I have not been 100% healthy over this holiday.  I've had some sort of virus.  So Easter has passed be by a bit.  I missed the Agape meal at church on Thursday, the walk of witness on Friday, and would have missed the sunrise service on Sunday, had I identified one to attend.  It has been different. Even the Easter Day service seemed different from my less than 100% perspective.  Yes, I've recovered, but I'm still tired.  I have though had some really good appreciative feed back from the Good Friday service. The services I lead often seem to go better when I'm not 100% - God works through me better when I'm less able to get in the way?
Warner spoke on the resurrection, and showed the clip from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe where the stone table breaks and Aslan appears with the Sun behind him.  He spoke about our faith and even our dead faith being resurrected by God.  One of the high lights of the service was the music.  The younger, but no longer young (sorry, guys and girls!)  people did a marvellous job and provided some very uplifting music.  I must especially mention Mandy, whose singing and worship was tremendous. 

Today was also the day we started to use the new laptop (with Windows 7) and Easislides.  I had spent a long time evaluating various pieces of Freeware.  Jo and I had spent a long time the previous week getting the songs into the Easislides system.  It offers a range of imports, but our old system (SongPro3) doesn't export and the Songs of Fellowship CD words for books 1-3 are very poorly formatted.  We arrived at 9am to set up the new system and to transfer the notices in to Impress.  By 9:55 we were ready to go.  Just in time.  Easislides has a good user interface, but when I was asked to take over briefly - I got it wrong!  Overall though it was a success.  Now I just have to train the other operators, and make sure that the song counts work for the end of year copyright reporting.

Then home to wait for Karen, and watch the Malaysian GP.

One piece of Easter Entertainment - Jonathan Creek - The Judas Tree - didn't disappoint.  I wasn't expecting anything else and was just about to go to bed when I saw "Are Christians being persecuted?".  It was presented by Nicky Campbell - so I wasn't expecting good things.  The last couple of things I've seen him in have missed the real issues and spent too long on people experiences.  So I was pleasantly surprised.  Various religious leaders were interviewed and allowed to say what they needed to say.  We (the program stated as fact) live in a Liberal Democracy.  The danger for the Liberal democracy is that when it has no belief it will find something - almost anything - to believe in.  It was also recognised that secular humanism is as much a religion as Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and the rest.  There was a reasonable discussion on the difficulties involved in granting 'rights' to people that will inevitably conflict.  Liberty, perhaps had a greater share of airtime than you might expect given the conclusion of the program.  Some of the 'famous' recent cases of discrimination were also covered.  Most notably the case of a Check In desk woman sacked for wearing a cross. There was also coverage of the Human Rights bill, which consolidates the various anti-discrimination legislation (equal pay, gender discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination).  The danger with this is that in reality it behaves like a piece of Orwelian 'thought' legislation.
The program's conclusion:
No - Christians are not being tortured and murdered like they are in many countries,
and
Yes - In a Liberal democracy (so by our standards) the deliberate shunning of one religion feels like persecution.

Yet Another Snowy day and some communication glitches

I opened the curtains to another dull morning. I had a dehydration headache.  I didn't want to get out of bed.  Snow was falling like rain. The road was turning white. I thought seriously about going back under the covers and having a morning in bed.  Jo brought me a cup of tea.  Slowly the headache drained away.  I remembered that John Carr was coming to church, so there is a guaranteed good sermon - one that will give me something new to think about.  Over breakfast there was more snow.  We decided to walk to church.  I found my walking boots - still muddy from last weeks walk and banged them together to get the mud off - too late by now to clean them properly.  We set out in the snow-rain to a very lightly populated High Street even for a Sunday morning.  Arriving at church in plenty of time for Jo's duties, I helped get the Laptop set up and the projection software loaded.
Then I was asked if I was serving at communion.  My name was on the rota in pen - not printed like all the others.  I'm still not sure if I'd received that notice - but OK, it's not something that I have to prepare for.  With 10 minutes to go there was still no bread for communion.  The lady who provides it had checked the rota and seen it was 'by extension', so ready blessed bread would be brought by someone else.  Except it wasn't 'by extension'.  The Bishop's new rules mean that we readers are no longer allowed to deliver communion by extension without some extra training and special permissions for each occurrence.  We had therefore asked Revd John Carr to come and he had agreed.  The message had not got through to the rest of the system.  In talking to various people it seems to have fallen at each possible hurdle. I could have been in the communication chain, but I didn't think I needed to be. Bread was found and communion went ahead.  No-one would know anything was different - except the bread was different, so they may have wondered.  They will know if they read this of course.

John spoke to us on Colossians and the need for rules.  Without rules we would live in Chaos.  He gave the example of a taxi in Malta taking him and his wife the wrong way down a one-way street.  He survived that journey, but he didn't enjoy it.   That's precisely how I felt about the start of the service.  God, of course, wants us to enjoy our lives - so he has set some rules in place.

This afternoon I was working on my program (in VB express 2008) to convert the Songs of Fellowship text words into a form that EasiSlides will import.  In programming the rules are VERY strict.  If you don't follow them nothing works.  It is still possible though to follow all the rules but program badly and make the program work.  God's rules are not that specific e.g. Colossians 4:6 "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."  So they are much harder to follow - but when you get them right things just work so well.

Christ Church and a 60th

Christ Church
Colossians 3:18-4:1 includes the command "Wives submit to your husbands" and various other commands on family life.  I'd swapped for today, and at the time hadn't even thought to check what the reading might be.  Anyway I should, in theory, be able to preach on any passage in the Bible.  Its just a matter of prayer and preparation.  Isn't it?  Well some passages are more difficult than others.  I researched my topic carefully - as I always do - and the result is here, should you want to read it.
As it was a fifth Sunday the young people provided the music.  Having them rota'd  like this means they can fit it in between revision and school work and clubs and ... (why do we teach our children to have such busy lives?).  I don't know how the rehearsals went, but the music was very good!  And I should note that Liz sang very well - and that she was the only singer.
We are still learning how to make the best of the new projector and teaching people to switch it off and on. It's a long time since I've used slides, and had forgotten  that to make open office presentations transportable you have to embed the pictures, not link to them.  There are ways of doing it.  The easiest is to paste the pictures, rather than attach them - so some of my pictures were missing.  
I'm currently working on evaluating the software for the new laptop - to see which is best for projecting songs and other things.

60th Birthday
After lunch we walked across town (30+ minutes each way) to a friends 60th Birthday celebration.  He had an 'open house' for the afternoon.  Very many friends had come to wish him well from his old workplace and from the church. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours chatting to various people. 

At Little Burstead and the Advent Carol service

This morning I was running the service at St. Mary the Virgin, Little Burstead.  My sermon is here.  Many of the regulars had decided not to attend, so that they could go to Emmanuel, where one of their number was renewing his Baptism vows (by immersion).  As an aside, why is it now 'full immersion', you are either immersed, or you aren't.  Still, there were enough to make a worthwhile congregation, and it allowed me to be a little more interactive than usual. So, the text (if you read it) will be what I intended to say, which is a good approximation of what I actually said. I still find preaching uses a lot more energy than I think it should, and was asleep in front of the TV minutes after lunch!

Which made me later at Christ Church than I should have been.  I walked to church and was quite wet on arrival.  This afternoon I upgraded the 3 PCs in the church office to AVG 9, and I'm pleased to report that it was a straight forward, simple process.  The firewall also works on the default settings — which is a relief.  The 8.5 version had to be switched off to allow just one person to use the main printer!

The upgrade finished JUST in time for me to get to the carol service.  I entered the church from the foyer one minute before the service started.  It was not as packed as last year, but it was well attended.  The service looked mainly at the events before the birth and was centred around 'three visits of an angel'.  Various groups contributed decorations to our giant Christmas tree, there was a school choir singing Little Donkey, and the dance group performed.  Then it was into the hall for mulled Chilean fair-trade black currant juice - but it wasn't the mouthful that description might make it sound. 

Then back home to check on the progress of the weekend's work (at work) and to blog.

Epson SX200, Windows Vista & InkSaver 2 stops printing

Inksaver used to be a marvellous product.  I had it installed in Windows/XP on my HP PSC2110 and it worked a treat.  Today, in desperation at the rate of cartridge use I downloaded and installed the free trial version of Inksaver 2.0 - which it claims works with Vista and Epson. 

IT DOESN'T.

The printer clicks and whirs, but no paper is fed and the job disappears from the print queue.  The Inksaver test page works, but that is all.

With Inksaver disabled my printing capability returns.

Worse still - there is nowhere to report the problem on the web site. 

Time to uninstall.

Shame - it was one of my favourites.

Sunday 19 September @ Christ Church

Being a third Sunday, there is usually breakfast served between the 8am service and the 10am service. The lady who organises breakfast was on holiday, but her stand-ins did a marvellous job. Jo went to the 8am, we met for breakfast with a number of others, and I stayed for the 10am.

Just as well. Paul Carr from Emmanuel was preaching, he had a PowerPoint with some embedded video. Paul is not used to our limited technology. I did get it working - sort of. We have OpenOffice, and I couldn't work out how to get the video re-sized, so it remained rather small.

Paul asked the Children to draw God. The result was that one boy drew God as an alien. That was the cue for the others to say their drawings were also of aliens. He also used a battery to demonstrate the invisible power of God, by putting first a flat one and the a live one in a remote control car. It was a very good talk. It will be posted here soon. The talk spoke of Jesus as the image of the invisible God.

More exercises & something to drive me to do them

After a few goes at the exercising the towel exercise is now easily the most painful. I have LOST considerable movement on this exercise already. Still, I will not be too discouraged, this is supposed to be the movement that returns last.

Meanwhile I have found something that will drive me from my computer to do anything. This I found via Cramner. The BBC have funded someone to write "Made in England" (Its a real player link, or if you prefer use Media Player Classic, then the Real Player won't be able to mess with your machine.

Anyway back to the song. Did I hear you say "Must we?", that means you've listened already.

Dear BBC, I WANT MY MONEY BACK,
Yours
Pete

It is awful, everything that a National Anthem shouldn't be, perhaps we could use it for our Eurovision entry.

A national anthem doesn't have to mention the country it comes from as every third word, it should instead speak of the values, not the food stuff. Some would like Jerusalem, but that is a rather fanciful song, with a rather 'Dan Brown' quality to it. I do like 'Land of Hope and Glory' though - that would be a good choice for an English National Anthem.

Go on, follow the link, turn up the volume - you know you want to!
- BBC version of Land of Hope and Glory from 2008 Proms.

Vista, Firefox3 crash, Real Player and the BBC

I think that the issue may not be related to Vista alone. How do you do listen again from the BBC? Why does iPlayer work just fine, but an attempt to listen to local radio cause the browser to crash? It seem that real player gold (11) does not get on with Firefox. In my case it all works just fine with IE, but Internet Explorer has so many other problems that I don't want to go into here.

The solution appears to be 'Real Alternative' , which provides the Classic Media Player. It's available in various places, but Free-Codecs came up first on Google. The good people at Secunia will warn you that this is end-of-life, but sometimes that is the price you have to pay to make things work.