Blog Has Moved

Hi Everyone,

We've moved the blog to www.reubenland.com - please update your bookmarks/resubscribe to feeds etc.!


There is a fair bit of random stuff collected at reubenland - you'll probably want to head to "reuben and jodie's blog" in the right hand column.

Cheers!

Baby Zoe

For those of you who know Phil and Michelle Codrington, we caught up with them yesterday and had a lovely afternoon tea.

We saw Zoe (their new bub) at the hospital and now she's a month old! still with a crazy wad of hair!

Not sure if she was behaving especially well for us, but she's ultra-placid and can almost pull a smile!

Well deserved holidays

Still enjoying the student lifestyle - after 8 long, hard weeks Jodie and I have just had 2 weeks holiday. I don't know how we could have survived for much longer without them :-) ...actually Jodie had two weeks, because she got her essay done a week early. I spent the first week writing mine.

Anyway we managed to get away for a few nights in the Hunter Valley this week just gone - was really nice, aside from the torrential rain that persisted for the whole time! (hence no photos!). It certainly isn't as scenic as the Barossa, but still found some nice wines and enjoyed the large number of boutique businesses in the area. I reckon we'll visit again when they have one of their festival things on.

Also got a real taste of Sydney traffic heading up there - we headed over the bridge then were stuck in absolute gridlock for 40km (it took us 4 hours to cover them!! ugh!) apparently a truck had spilled diesel for 11km along the freeway we needed to get onto.

Prophecy: bargain to be had in 2009

Stumbled across this: 2008 God's Final Witness

haven't come across a good doomsday prophet for a while (maybe not been looking hard enough?!?) but this book would have to be my tip for best bargain in the post Christmas sales of 2009 :-)

Excuse me while I go and finish stocking our bomb shelter with baked beans...

Mission at Earlwood

Jodie and I have just finished up a week of mission at Earlwood Anglican Church. From what i can tell, it went really well...

The deal is that as part of study at Moore, each year you get placed in a team with people across the years and do mission with various churches. Most are around sydney, some in rural NSW, one in the NT and one in South Africa! Ours was 2 suburbs away...just down the road.

The church has been in steady decline for the last little while, recently a new rector has started there and has been working with the congregation to grow the church. I think the church was glad to have us there and I hope that we've given them a boost and encouragement to keep at evangelism and community engagement in the future.

There we're lots of events:

- "God on the ropes" - a panel answering people's questions at the local pub
- a high tea for the seniors
- school scripture
- kids club
- craft with mums
- pilates
- Greek coffee and dessert night
- carnival + jazz in the park
- kids club spectacular
- youth event with a live band and insane water games.
- Indoor soccer comp for the men

There were around 350 ppl at the jazz in the park event and over half of them were not from the church. It was a huge amount of work to put on, but seemed worth it for that. We also saw about 20 new people at church on the 2nd sunday who had come to the events through the week. A number of those indicated that they had "prayed the prayer" after an evangelistic talk.

Was great to have been a part of something that was clearly very significant for a local church and to have seen God at work through his people there. Also, it was great getting to know some of the people we're studying with better and in a different context, seeing them preach, do magic tricks, make coffee, paint faces, and so on.

Thai Potong

I realised looking back through posts that I had promised pictures of our night out on king street, but not delivered. Well here they are.

We ended up at "Thai Potong" quite an impressive place! the restaurant was so big, for example, that it had it's own gift shop!!! There was some system of earning tokens to use in the shop with the meals that you bought, but we couldn't work it out...

Jodie got an incredible flaming seafood hot pot creation. The slightly embarrassing thing was that the waiter couldn't make the flames go out! Chef was a bit trigger happy with the alcohol evidently!

I ordered snapper, which came out whole covered with tasty Thai goodness. and teeth...

All in all, it was a great night out - thanks Jill (Jodie's mum) for shouting us dinner!

Fight Club

Church has been unexpectedly enjoyable... that might sound strange (or may be not!) let me explain.

Looking through the job description in deciding to work at St. John's, I was keen on the sermon preaching, keen on the occasional service leading, being around to meet and greet at sunday service and so on...I was a little less enthusiastic about 'Fight Club', which is what they call their sunday school for y3-6 boys.

so yes, the name sounds cool, but it is still a group of hyperactive boys around 10 years old who have an extreme reaction to the suggestion that they have a girlfriend.

I've never done kids church, i dont particuarly have any skills in dealing with (read: controlling) kids, and on a whole I just dont like them that much! (sorry to be so brutally honest, but they pick their nose, can scream at ultrasonic pitches, and have the attention span of a goldfish)

But that has been the surprise - Fight Club has been a real highlight of Sunday for me! The other two guy leaders are sensational and have made it very easy for me with all my inability to slot in. They are fantastic with the kids and I've been really impressed with the work they done at making kids church work for this particular demographic.

The background is that Fight Club was created to try to address the problem of guys in this age group almost without fail leaving Sunday school because the program missed the mark. mostly it was too much about making craft and felt pretty girly.

So they came up with a format which seems to work really well: We start by kicking a soccer ball around for 15min (=run them into the ground and wear them out early) followed by one of the leaders reading a small chunk of the Bible. We're working through Colossians at the moment...this gets followed with a really short talk about the passage, a few questions then praying. This takes around 10min of the program...which just about works given aforementioned goldfish-esq attention span.

following the talk we've been praying around the world: someone gets to spin the oversized globe of the world and pick a country, they then have the job of researching that country during the week to pray for it next time.

Then we've been doing what every young Sydneysider should: build a replica of the harbour bridge out of paddle pop sticks.

I think what works is that it is realistic about what interests guys that age, chasing a ball constructing stuff. and realistic about how much space they have to engage with information and Christian stuff. I think they like the name and like having a group of their own with no girls too. It has been exciting to see these young guys really engage with the Bible though. It was brilliant to hear them questioning and throwing around what it mean for Jesus to be the image of the invisible God for example last Sunday.

Good stuff. Fight Club, by the way was chosen in reference to 1 Timothy 6:12:

"Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses."

We use it as a memory verse for them each week.