Debut Sermon

Those of you that follow me on twitter will know that I preached my first ever sermon last weekend. I preached at my small home church, the Kaniva Church of Christ. I preached on the subject of 'Money'. I selected this subject because it was topical for me, having recently lead a series of studies on it (see earlier posts!) & because I'm interested in it. As I think we all are!

It was an interesting and enjoyable experience. I'd always wanted to give preaching a go, to see if I could do it. While it's hard for me to say how it went, it seemed to go well and I recieved a lot of positive feedback. Hopefully not too much of it was politeness. I was quite nervous at first, but managed to relax a bit more as I got into it.

It took a long time to prepare, several hours for a 10-15 minute talk. But I'd definitely do it again. Hopefully God used and spoke through what I said, and hopefully he'll do it again.

It was quite a family service, with my talented wife Tiarnee doing the bible readings and kids talk, my dad leading communion, my mum playing piano/ organ & my sister running the data projector. For all you comedians out there, no we werent the only ones there....

I'll post the notes that I spoke from in the next day or two. Maybe someone else out there will find it encouraging.

Mud Soccer

I went along with the Kaniva Youth Group to Mud Soccer on Friday night. It was a really top night with 20-25 youth coming along and getting dirty. The field (or 'pitch') was 15m wide by 25m long and was 20-30cm deep in mud all over. It was made on a mates farm with the use of bore water & lots of it.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about the whole night for me was that over 20 youth showed up. There is only approx 100 school age teens in Kaniva and so somthing like 20% of the youth in town went to Youth Group on a Friday night. I think churches in Melbourne or even Adelaide would be overwhelmed if 20% of the 12 - 18 year old age bracket showed up on any given Friday night.

Reverse Seachange Learnings - #1

I'm currently moving from my home at Kaniva to Adelaide. So you might say I'm moving from one 'backwater' to another. 'Backwater' it maybe, but I'm still moving from a town populated by 800 people, to a town populated by over 1,000,000 people. So over the next few weeks I'll be blogging about observations that I've made about life in the 'big smoke'. (Although, again Adelaide barely qualifies)

Observation #1 - Jonnys principle of 'safe turning'

While in Adelaide last week I noticed a strange phenomena while driving in and around the city. I observed a pattern of traffic behavior not written about in any driving manuals or tests. I observed that the safe distance required to turn a corner at any given intersection increases/decreases directly in proportion to the distance from your nearest CBD. I also believe that this relationship could be modeled mathematically, if I was that way inclined.

Basically while a 50 meter gap in traffic is ample in Adelaide, to pull out in front of someone that close at Kaniva is rude and would be considered dangerous.

Stay tuned for more observations....