August 20, 2011 – 11:09 am
I woke up one morning this week with these words on my mind:
Even in the darkest night
we walk through fields of blazing lights.
There is nothing hidden
that will not be revealed.
and I felt like it was the light which had penetrated my dreams and woken me up.
There are many of those blazing lights. They are all around us. My wife is one of them. It is good to be near her, beside her. Truth and love blaze within her, wake me up, make me warm, keep me real. The light that leaks out of her reminds me that the best part of truth is lived out in flesh and blood. I’m deeply grateful that she is who she is.
August 20, 2011 – 9:09 am
It’s time to put my blogging hat on. (T)hats the one that keeps the sun out of my eyes while I’m sitting on our beautiful eastward facing veranda in the morning with my netbook on my knee. (The eastward facing is beautiful – not necessarily the veranda.) My blogging hat is also my walking hat and gardening hat, sometimes my climbing on the roof hat, sometimes my having a cup of tea and reading a book hat, at the moment my talking about my hat hat, but never my bike riding hat. And definitely not my driving hat – at least not yet – and I hope never. I’m not old enough for that yet – and anyway the hat doesn’t have a broad enough brim. Now my wife or one of the kids will say that I sometimes forget to take it off while I’m driving. I guess that’s how hats become driving hats – but I don’t want that to happen yet. If the hat fits, wear it. This one doesn’t quite – because like most hats its a little too small – but it does have a nice penguin on it and the words linux.conf.au Wellington 2010.
Pretty soon – if not already – it will be time to put spikey bits on my bike hat and get cranky at magpies again. Hopefully I’ll get a ride in later today and find out where the season is really hat.
August 11, 2011 – 11:41 am
Sorry - I can’t resist this.
From an ABC news article:
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-10/society-role-in-london-riots/2833168)
But Ms Batmanghelidjh says many British youths have lived with that feeling of fear for their entire lives.
“This happened to the public for a few days. But many of these children are chronically frightened – they get attacked in their own homes, they get attacked on the estates,” she said.
“[To them] it feels like at that point civil society doesn’t step in to, for example, create a robust child protection structure to protect these children, or to protect them from attacks at street level.
What a good idea! It’s called family.
“So from a young people’s perspective, their conditions of fright have been chronically ignored.”
She says the way to counter the problem is to create communities which engage and support disadvantaged youth.
Yup. It’s called family.
“Sort out the civil structures around these young people, provide for them adults who are caring; who can provide a healthy counter culture to the perverse street culture that they are exposed to,” she said.
Yup! It was invented a long time ago. It’s called family.
“Then you have the beginnings of the making of a genuine community that includes these young people. And then you can legitimately hold them accountable.”
Absolutely! It’s called family.
The things that corrode family corrode society. Maggie thatcher was wrong – there IS such a thing as society. But the lefties and libertarians and free-love loonies are also wrong – society starts at home.
Remember all that rhetoric about the fabric of society? We’re all either letting it rip or making a stitch in time – or maybe nine. There isn’t any neutral ground.