Day three saw us collect our hire car in Auckland and make our way down to Rotorua. The first photo is the view from our apartment – of a fairly grey cityscape, Auckland Harbour and bridge.
Morning tea was in a very pleasant cafe called the Town Mouse in Pukekohe – although we did earn the mild ire of one of the waitresses because we ordered from the counter before sitting down.
Here are a few photos from my phone – resized – from our wanderings around Auckland on the second day of our holiday:
Day 1 saw us flying from Sydney to Auckland. The flight, although delayed, was uneventful.
No photos to speak of for day 1. The only photos taken were of our opened luggage at the hotel in case there were subsequent disputes about ownership!
There are about five gazillion ways to study the Bible, and three gazillion ways of reading it. I know. I’ve tried them all.
“Hyperbole” – the use of obvious and intentional exaggeration.
For as long as I’ve been a Christian I’ve looked at different ways of reading the Bible, and different ways of studying it – from reading plans to meditation; from chronological to inductive; from prepared study guides to randomly opening the Bible and reading. The issue? They are all useful, but they serve different ends, are more helpful towards different purposes and they are all methods. And what do I do when I see a method? I try to understand it, to formularise it, to improve it, to determine if it is the best method such that all others can be instantly and permanently dismissed from my conscience.
I’ve been spending a little time recently looking at different Windows Managers (WM) for my linux-based notebook running the Manjaro distribution.
My usual approach had been to run some form of standard Desktop Environment (DE) such at Cinnamon, Gnome 2 or 3, XFCE or LXDE. But for some reason I was drawn to check out some different windows managers. To my non-geek mind, a desktop environment provides the whole package in terms of screen functionality and access whereas a window manager looks after the administration and placement of windows or apps on a screen. Windows managers are generally quicker and less cluttered but more difficult to configure than a desktop environment.
[Below is the text of a sermon I preached at our church on 12th August 2018.]
What is the difference between sin and failure?
Is it possible to fail without that being construed as sin?
Can sin ever be regarded as anything but some form of failure?
How do you see the distinction between sin and failure?
I think that all sin is a failure, but failure is not necessarily sinful. And so sin is a subset of failure, a part of it.
Don Carson credits his late father for saying “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text”. What that basically means is that if you don’t provide the context for a sentence or quote then you can interpret it or make it say whatever you want.
A further way of looking at that is to say that words only make sense in sentences, and sentences only have meaning in paragraphs, etc. Within biblical poetry that can be extended to include that a word or sentence only has meaning within a stanza. Without context, without an environment then a group of words can be construed or misconstrued to suit different purposes.
I had a thought this morning – not always a good thing – that if I were creating a website where the purpose was to present Biblical truth regularly, then it would be hard to go past the name “Bible Butcher: Fresh Meat Daily!”
Perhaps it is a good thing that I’m not creating such a website, otherwise biblebutcher.com may have been registered.
Further to my most recent post about board game purchases, 2018 has so far been filled with playing those games that have been acquired in the past decade. We started off in January with Killer Bunnies. Because there are so many rabbits about, we kept that going through February as well. March saw a change of pace as we went back in time to produce 7 Wonders. As Wonderful as that was, we holidayed in the French medieval city of Carcassonne for April. Having built that city, we then reverted back to the Stone Age for May. We’ve got “all aboard” in June for Ticket to Ride: Europe. July and August will be sharing the spoils of Dominion and Alhambra. September just needs to wait.
For a number of years in the 2010s I would research and then buy a board game suitable for our family for Christmas.
The game had to satisfy certain criteria:
Our purchases under this criteria have been: