Missionary Gas

Not been a good week. It started off bad with a reader of the last email expressing forcefully his unhappiness about its lack of spirituality. And then my virtual course, on becoming a virtual teacher, has been frustrating because the female tutor in a distant Colombian city has been making demands for things that couldn´t be done. It´s convinced me of the inherent weakness of the internet as a teaching medium. Then on Monday there was the students' service with Olwen and I doing a double act. I quite like the double act thing: it´s a lot easier in preparation and is usually good fun. It turned out to be all this and more. We dealt with the faithfulness of God in the context of marriage, sex and money. Olwen now has more women who want to talk to her, and I have more men who just laugh when they see me. We break for Easter on Thursday. Twenty-eight essays to mark, but the great news is that for the first time since starting to lecture 9 years ago, all the work has been handed in on

I was keen for Olwen to get hold of Don Carson for an official opening of the sewing room. I could just see emblazoned on the door, Donald A. Carson Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Sewing Room and we could use the acronym DATED SEWER. Although we´d need to be careful how people pronounced "sewer". Olwen wasn´t having any of it. So we went to the pictures and saw a film which had been popular in the UK and has just arrived here, "The Queen". Watching a film in English with Spanish subtitles makes you realize how significant things can be lost in translation. "Move over cabbage" says Prince Philip to the Queen as he gets into bed, but that translated into Spanish becomes nonsense, so the subtitle simply read "Move over darling". It´s not quite the same, try it husbands. Prof. Carson´s subject for the week is the theology of Hebrews. He´s speaking through a translator and that´s not easy. Fantastic anecdotes in the mother tongue can not quite hi

You get great cheap steaks in South America and I was savouring a triad of them each cooked in a different sauce, when the army arrived. We were seated in a restaurant frequented by missionaries. First, armed soldiers on motor bikes came and were stationed around the building. Then two silver long-wheel based Range Rovers with tinted glass parked (tinted glass is prohibited unless you happen to be very important) One contained military body guards, and the occupants of the other went straight to the vacant upstairs floor of the restaurant. Now this was the day President Bush was visiting the capital, Bogotá, and it was reported that 27,000 were involved in the security operation. Medellín is the country's second city and has a history of awful violence. So I guessed it was a meeting of security chiefs held in the kind of place the guerrillas wouldn't have targeted. The waitress simply divulged that these were important people. But it was while we were drinking coffee that I cha

The sewing machine´s broken down ... groan, groan.

Hi folks, I´ve just updated the Blog´s sidebars, so there are more pictures to look at, reviews to read and things to investigate.

Although I´ve been studying complex hermeneutical developments and am anticipating the imminent visit of Prof. Don Carson to the Seminary, this past week has led me into an area of expertise beyond my comprehension: Olwen´s public sewing room. Inappropriately, I had guessed it would be the kind of place that Jane Austin would have written about: the genteelist of ladies sitting in rocking chairs with needle and thread. Certainly the rocking chair is there and so are needles and threads. But the ability to twist an arm and even know when it will break, is something Olwen learned in childhood. It was little wonder then that the sewing machine shop owner bemoaned about the superdiscounted price at which he was forced to sell his machine to her. The next innocent was a young student, Luz-Mary, who for some unknown reason volunteered to be Olwen's personal assistant during this semester: "You don't know what you're letting yourself in for" I said under my breath while