For some reason this evening, I was thinking about my drift away from regular church attendance. Hindsight can be a wonderful thing…

Some of you may remember an in-depth email discussion I had with the former host of the bible study I used to go to. I shared a lot of it here, a fact he would probably be quite mortified about. But the fact…[Read more]

Maybe I’m tired and more than a little worn out. Or maybe I’m re-learning how to own the emotions of caring.

I live alone in a two-bedroom apartment in the outer suburbs of Sydney. I like living alone. I’ve always enjoyed my own company after all. But I did miss my cat who has to live with my parents, as she is a cat not only used to the…[Read more]

The church I called home for more than a decade held a celebration service tonight for its 50th anniversary. Since, unlike a lot of TLSers, I haven’t been kicked out, and there are still people there I wanted to see, I went.

I’ve been involved with an anniversary before at this church (the 45th), so I was already familiar with the stories from…[Read more]

Something has been bothering me about the last two churches I visited and I’ve finally figured out what it was. In both cases, the senior pastor has said they were (religiously) conservative. They owned that. They want to stay that way.

But I’m not. I’ve identified with the term progressive. To me, this means a world-view based not on the…[Read more]

IF you haven’t heard of it, The Bible Code is the result of a journalist and a mathematician applying extreme pattern analysis to the Jewish text, specifically the Torah. This oddly, works because Ancient Hebrew is exclusively consonants and tends to be written in a standard grid with little or no punctuation.

Or it does for the purposes of this…[Read more]

Some of you will remember me posting on the Facebook group about a young lady I knew on Twitter who lived in a small rural town and was trying to escape from an abusive father. Well, I remembered that I haven’t told more of her story since that last post.

After some encouragement from me and several other people, she got in contact with the…[Read more]

I’ve realized my journey into manhood has come further than I thought.

http://thelefthandofbelief.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/a-maturity-retrospective/

Wade.

A friend of a friend  posted this on his blog. It was about getting mildly lost on a bushwalk recently and how he reacted to sort it out.

http://www.seaoftroubles.net/blog/2013/08/26/on-being-lost/

During this time, something interesting and strange was going on in my head. My instincts were screaming the textbook answer: go back to the known …

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I may have rabbited on rather  a bit longer than I should’ve. :-/ Am considering editing it down before I send it.

I’m troubled by the paragraph about works the church deeply misunderstands, so that’ll likely come out. He’ll likely try to guess which I don’t want to give him any ideas about.

Wade.

Hi Erem,

I apologise for taking so …

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Quite a lengthy one, too. The condescension is a bit lessened, perhaps because he’s discovered that people keep things from him for that. I dunno. I’d like to think so, though.

He truly doesn’t understand where I am. He quite simply does not grasp that I’ve found spiritual paths outside of the church he attends, outside of the religion is…[Read more]

I’ve drafted a response to my church friend who asked why I’ve stopped coming to bible study. (ECC is the abbreviation of our church. And I know this is a private forum, but I also elided his email address.) I haven’t sent this yet. I left the original email in there, too.

Hi Erem.

This is a little difficult to reply to. Let me start by…

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Got an email today from a friend at church. He has noticed my dwindling presence at church and bible study, particularly after last night (bible study night) where I was tweeting about the TV show I was watching. The message hasn’t come across as nasty, rather puzzled and worried. However, it is still condescending, which he probably doesn’t…[Read more]

A friend I see irregularly (for which it turns out there’s a good reason, but that’s a story for another time) is trying to convince me to join a business/franchise/marketing scheme. (I’ll post about who it is in a later post.) They have a program that anyone can do which should theoretically get you earning on average $3k/mo on sales commission.…[Read more]

I bought this a few months ago when I was in Manuka, Canberra. Not my usual stomping grounds but the bookstore was large and interesting.

Finally started reading it. OMG… Such a concise, potted description of Christianity! And it looks beyond the mainstream beliefs and practices to search for all the things out on the…[Read more]

Due to where my spiritual journey is going, I am extremely careful of who I tell. I realized the other day that my own parents are going to be two of the last people I tell. If ever.

The way it happened is that I was out for lunch with my sister, her boyfriend and our parents. We were talking about tabletop games including card games. For some…[Read more]

One problem I am finding when you go on your own spiritual journey is that it is sometimes a little too easy to get lazy because there is no-one around you to follow or at least watch who is on more-or-less the same journey. Clearly some belief systems are more individual and less populous than others. The Internet helps, of course.

I got…[Read more]

I let myself be persuaded to go back on the music roster again at church, although truth be told it wasn’t that hard to do. I did have the courage to drop down to once-a-month, instead of the previous “as much as you’ll have me” which in practice meant roughly one week in two. And in an unusual level of organisation for me, I sorted out my sheet…[Read more]

I think I goofed this morning. I tried to turn up during the last song so that I was there only for morning tea. Not sure what happened, but I was way early – got there just as the sermon started. :-/ So I think more than a few people are now aware of what I’m up to.

We’re in the middle of a small series about church discipline, which basically…[Read more]