'09 - Oh, yeah!!

Thanks to Learning from Sophie for the challenge of having a structured blog. I hope to do that this year and, certainly, to be more regular with my blogs in 09 than I was in 08. Here are some ideas for themes:

• Travel blog of destinations from last year's trips: Transylvania, Maramures, Budapest, Bremen
  

• Book reviews:The Kite Runner, The Shack, The Gift, I am Legend and any more I may well have forgotten about

• Jesus' authority in a world without it

• Sport comments

• Choices

• Coffee...and cafe musings and ratings
  

• Biblical character sketches - not majorly theological but things that have excited and stretched me as I have thought about them
  

• Random thoughts

At the turn of the year I made some of my usual resolutions to be more disciplined in 2009, to exercise more, to eat less, and so on - but I have been doing more thinking these last few weeks about what it means to me to make and break resolutions over and over. Check out Rob Waller's challenging article, from Jan 1st, on resolutions and his thoughts on transformation - Romans 12:2 style. It's a useful exercise to make resolutions but how often does it become another performance treadmill for us? There is a thought provoking sermon at the MBC web-site (Growing in Faith, from Jan 4th). How often do resolutions, taken in the wrong attitude, make us step outside the realm of God's abundant grace? I am going to endeavour to keep my resolutions this year but, more than that, I want my mind to be transformed by the Holy Spirit and, from that, my behaviour to be changed into something beautiful and more like the pattern of Jesus.