This is a useful Twitter widget - repeats everything everyone else has said.

I’ve never been one for associating with the ‘in crowd’.  I’ve never been particularly interested in trends, fashions, fads or crazes.  Well, I say never… I do remember a time when I was at primary school when Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle action figures were the big thing, and I saw everyone else playing with them, and I pestered my Mum to buy me one, and she did, and the day I brought mine into school was the day they went out of fashion.  It’s scarred me for life.  Not that I’m bitter.

Fast forward a decade or so and I’m still in a similar mindset, though it has evolved slightly.  My approach now is to observe the trend from a distance, and then when it’s established itself and the hype has died down, then I jump on the bandwagon, and hope to goodness that I haven’t left it too late.  As a result, I have never bought a brand new Mac, I still haven’t got an iPhone, I joined Facebook to find most of my friends already there, and I gave SecondLife a spin a year or so too late.  And now it’s happened again.  I’m on Twitter.

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About a year ago I bought a new car.  Well, not new exactly.  Considerably second hand, to be exact.  Still, it looked to be in very good condition, despite the mileage, and I couldn’t fault it for the price.  £850 for a small family saloon.  Bargain.

Following that purchase the Escort became our daily runner, and the Mini was sold prior to us moving house – the sale of the Mini paid for the removals van and some of the white goods we bought when we moved in.  And the Escort has continued to drive beautifully without problems, and we have certainly appreciated the air conditioning a few times too.

However, it did come as a considerable worry when I checked the car over the day before we went to camp (which I still have yet to write about – sorry!).  The oil level was fine, if a bit dirty, and everything else in the engine bay looked fine, but I was aware that the exhaust had been rattling.  Closer inspection showed that it was just loose, and securing it properly would fix that no problem.  What I hadn’t expected to see was a large amount of rust on the rear subframe.  Not good.

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I love music.  It brightens my working day, it inspires my leisure time, it gives me an outlet for my passion and creativity.  No surprise, then, that I have a fair amount of music.  Not on the scale of some people, admittedly, but that’s probably because as a university student I was probably a little more honest than most and thus didn’t end up with a secondary hard disk filled with torrents and downloads.

When we were at camp just over a week ago my wife gave one of the talks, which was loosely based around the story of King Ahab and the vineyard – Ahab wanted it, the owner refused to sell it, Ahab sulked, his wife had the owner murdered and Ahab claimed the vineyard.  The point of the talk was that sin by association is still sin; God still condemned Ahab for his actions, even though it was Jezebel actually doing the deed.  He didn’t object to the sin, and benefited from it, so was held culpable by God.  Ellie used the illustration that “sharing” music is effectively the same thing – sure, someone else has ripped the music off the CD, but we’ve still accepted the MP3 files and are therefore benefiting from it.  So in God’s eyes, as well as the law’s, we are guilty.

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Here is a downloadable score for ‘Come holy fire’, a song I wrote fairly recently.  It was used for the first time at a Christian youth camp I was at last week (more on that later), and seemed to go down well, so I’m making it available for people to use at their home churches.  At the moment I hold the copyright and everything, and it’s likely to stay that way until a music publisher comes my way!

It’s a gathering song, speaking of our unity in Christ, so would go well at the beginning of a service.  I particularly like the end of the second verse, which says “trusting not in our own strength but in your power, saved by grace and not by what we’ve done”.  It helps us recognise how awesome God’s grace is, how he allows us into his presence despite our many failings, and the chorus invites God to “set our hearts ablaze with passion” to do his work.

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