DISQUS

I like your blog too, although I must confess I don't read your footy posts either. Nothing wrong with brackets, colons (semi or otherwise) and the like... keep it coming Geoff.

if you don't go over the top with a mortgage it can really work for you - you could still go to deepest darkest Africa and pop someone else into your house to pay the mortgage for you... I am not sure if God often leads us in straight lines unfortunately...

And you can get pretty maps of the world indicating your global readership...

I love The Living End - I saw them at the grand venue of the Mitcham oval at the "rockin the east" festival. The double bass is amazing. I mainly like the old ones - Prisoner of Society, Second Solution etc... and their great cover of an oldy from my youth - tainted love... suddenly feeling nostalgic.

There is something about blogging and an insatiable desire to see who has hit your site, how they got there, where they come from... Sitemeter is ok, but google seems brighter and better at everything. I'll be signing up! Just for monitoring purposes of course.

Thanks for that Geoff, yet another thing we have in common! I must confess to still experiencing the occasional thought in German even after many years since studying the language. I learned a German poem too - it was about suicide, and I fortunately can't remember a single word. I do remember a terrible song about monkeys running :durch dem Wald" in search of a coconut... Tried saying yours out loud - pretty cool, even though I don't know what I said...

der Kommissar!

I know what you mean... These questions frustrate me, and not being able to resolve them bugs me even more

You are asking some great questions here Geoff, and ones that I wrestle with too. I don't really understand why God asked the Israelites to purge the land by killing and destroying etc. I see some of it as a way of the Israelites being a "set apart" people. I thought that part of it was to help them at having a bash at purity - less temptation and modelling of ungodly lifestyles. The interesting thing about this is that it never stopped them from falling into sin, false gods etcetera. This little bit of it may be useful for us - shunning things outside of us that we call "of the world, or worldly" may not really help us in our personal purity all that much. Of course throwing out CDs, only watching G rated things, not going to parties etc is somewhat less radical than genocide, but maybe the motivation underneath is similar. And perhaps the relative fruitfulness is similarly ineffective. Holiness is much more about internal than external postures and places. Maybe I am just ranting.

Happy reading Geoff! I'll look forward to your thoughts on this one, as it is a book I have thought of reading but have not really got around to it.