Mark Tiddy’s Blog & Website - Thoughts of a Christian Youth Worker & Musician

So…my essay is finished and printed, sundays service is planned and sermon outlined…just need to edit a lot of video and finish planning the sermon…I’m in London tomorrow and thursday and have house group tomorrow evening so I guess I’m left with thursday evening and train journey’s to plan! Fun!

However thursday evening I’m out for an hour as we present the vision for the future of Park Road Youth Work when I leave…this is quite exciting though, I have one year left (and a couple of months) and would like to see someone do my job when I’m done.

More blogginess soon folks…

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I was talking to Jo the other day and she needed a description of what she did at Spring Harvest on the 11-14’s team…I wrote a job description;

‘Your role will primarily be to lead and facilitate discussion in a designated small group (20) of young people who will have you assigned as their group leader. Alongside this role you will need to use the other time you have to develop and build effective, professional relationships with them, enabling your small group discussion and informal education with the young people to develop further as the short placement progresses. During your placement you should continue to develop and implement a variety of informal activities to aid you in your relationship building ‘

I’m quite proud of it really…shows I can talk rubbish quite easily!

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and I’m sure most of use suffer from this one… (taken from postsecret.com)

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but there’s too much of it to do and too little time so I shall merely state…

‘Feel my annoyance…grrr Oasis…’

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I’m sure some of you already know this but this article on the BBC News Site is brilliant! Basically Tesco have planning permission to build a store and to do this they need to demolish some houses, one of the ladies however who owns a house there has now applied for planning permission to build a community garden, to do this the home of Tesco Chief Exec Sir Terry Leahy would need to be demolished! I love it! Link here

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The title says it all…or rather quotes the poster currently in our display board which sits outside of church, as I walk home from the station I tend to glance to see what posters we have (I keep meaning to add some that actually advertise church events!) and one of the posters currently reads in big, bold letters

‘JESUS Loves You Passionately’.

Now don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t agree with the poster more, His death on the cross echoes his passionate love for us amazingly and in my reading of ‘God on Mute’ by Pete Greig (which I’m rapidly getting through and will with no doubt share more thoughts on it once complete) the emphasis on Jesus’ ‘take this cup of suffering away from me, yet not my will but yours be done’ prayer is a core part of the book, reminding us that Jesus submitted to God’s will. The passionate love Jesus had in that situation meant obedience to God, it meant submitting to what was about to happen to Him because he knew it was for the greater good and was God’s will.

However what does ‘Jesus loves you passionately’ actually mean for the people passing our church?

What does it mean for the alcoholic who sits on our doorstep?

What does it mean for the prostitutes?

What does it mean for the daughter mourning the loss of her father?

What does it mean for the young person running away from home?

What does it mean for the broken hearted?

My point is that love itself is unconditional (or should be), God’s love for us doesn’t get more or less depending what we do, it is impossible for God to love us more, however I suspect that the people listed above would merely answer the poster with ’so what?’ or ‘he’s got a funny way of showing it’. Perhaps this is where we need to be not just stating that Jesus loves you passionately but be passionately showing that love.

We need to be getting alongside the alcoholic, talking to him, helping him, praying for him.

We need to be finding ways to help the prostitute

We need to be crying alongside the daughter…and so on…

I am reminded of a greeting card I got sent a few years ago, on it was a man, desperately clinging to his car in a flood, he resorts to praying and asks God for help. Soon after a man in a boat passes and offers him help but the man replies ‘No, the Lord will save me’, soon after the same happens again, once again the man replies ‘no the Lord will save me’, eventually a helicopter passes over and asks the man if he needs help, the man replies again ‘No, the Lord will save me’…the man drowns.

In heaven  the man asks God why he didn’t save him, God replies ‘well I tried, I sent you 2 boats and a helicopter’.

The point of my rather silly story is that 9 times out of 10 we see God in people’s actions and the poster ‘Jesus loves you passionately’ is absolutely true however I wonder if people can see that, because if they cannot see that love then surely it’s no good to them? As a church we need to show that love, we need to show the world, through our actions that Jesus loves them passionately!

Anyway thoughts over, I’m off to house group soon.

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Continuing with my desparate hunt for evidence for my portfolio I asked the young people at my youth group last night to write nice things about me…or rather write things.

I’ve just read through them now and some are really lovely…my favourite comment so far however is;

‘he almost has a sense of humour’

Other comments have included comments on my fashion sense!!!

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I apreciate no readers with the exception of Gareth will truly apreciate this, but using a little programme called ‘VirtualBox’ which is a freebie I now have the ability to run Windows XP within my OS X on my Mac. This means that if I have the urge to play a windows game it can quite simply be done by booting windows within my mac…and the best bit is that because it’s a virtual operating system it means windows can’t break my computer!

Screenshot

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Tonight I led worship at church on acoustic guitar…usually I lead on electric, infact this is only the 3rd time I’ve used acoustic, and I don’t think God likes it and here’s why

The first time I played acoustic at church the strap snapped

The second time I played acoustic at church the strap also snapped (another new strap broken!)

The third time, for no reason at all, 25 minutes into the sermon my guitar randomly falls off it’s stand.

Conclusion…divine forces are in action, thus suggesting that the Lord God Almighty actually dislikes my acoustic guitar…I shall therefore only be playing electric in churches from now on.

If anyone has an alternative meaning to my acoustic guitar issue feel free to comment, alternatively I’d be interested to experiment when using a different acoustic guitar so if someone wishes to buy me a Takemine or nice Yamaha electro-acoustic so I can find out feel free too!

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I’m having a bit of an Oasis portfolio day today and a day of work wouldn’t be complete without background music! Most readers will know for a few months now I’ve been listening to my itunes A to Z, it’s been a crazy adventure so far…I’ve had the chance to listen to some awesome music I’d completely forgotten about, rediscovered some bands and realised the the occasional band actually only have one good song!

However as I portfolio my day away I am on L and L is for Less than Jake…who are the most awesome Ska-punk band ever…Five iron frenzy are great as are Reel Big Fish, the O.C. Supertones are okay but none of them have the rawness that Less Than Jake…it’s such happy music…everyone head over to www.myspace.com/lessthanjake

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Hopefully this post will represent the end of Mark the silent blogger and be the start of me blogging a bit more regually…It’s been a manic few weeks with so much going on, I’ve been all over country including Peterborough, Minehead, Sheffield and Great Yarmouth (a couple of times!) so life’s been a bit crazy.

Unfortunately I cannot promise more blogs because the next six weeks are set to become the busiest of the entire Oasis course, I basically have 2 essays to do (which aren’t the nicest essays ever) and also a big-ass portfolio which will basically be me proving I can do youth work (ie ticking little government boxes) with evidence from my last 2 years work…it’s so much to do but I’m hoping to make a real start/progress tomorrow…so expect to find me somewhere covered in paper tomorrow!

Before I’m 30…

In the last week I heard of someone else’s list of things to do before 30 which included ‘have sex 1000 times…999 to go’ (or something like that’), in turn that reminded me of Benvolio’s list from a while ago which included ‘have sex whilst playing goldeneye’ (why do most male’s ‘before I’m 30′ list include sex?)…however I’m now pondering if I should make a list…and if so what should be on it…so as I ponder feel free to comment with suggestions

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Readers of my blog will know that from the 5th until the 10th April I served on the ‘Base Team’ at Spring Harvest Minehead, originally I envisioned writing blogs during the week…then found there was no internet at Springy (or free internet anyway), I then thought I’d write upon my return however because of having to write an essay on Springy and proof read two, alongside catching up on thousands of e-mails (exaggeration!) the Spring Harvest blog is happening now…six days after the event and midway into the final week of Spring Harvest for ‘08.

The Base team was all about heading out around and about Butlin’s and finding young people who were disengaged with the main youth sessions at Springy (iScape & Distinctive), we would chat to the young people, befriend them, perhaps encourage them on their faith or just talk about whatever they want to discuss about.

The second part of the Base Team role was to organise late night events which (to an extent) threw us into ‘Red Coat’ kinda positions, we organised Open Mic Nights, Drop-ins and x-factor’s which all went really well…we unofficially overfilled the venue a couple of evenings (officially numbers were spot on!!!).

Having never been to Springy before I was intrigued to compare it a bit with Soul Survivor which I attended in the summer and I think that at Springy the Youth Work provided for young people seemed to be much more hyped up than the events at Soul Survivor…obviously this is based on the few sessions at Springy I attended in both iScape and Distinctive, however I thought that perhaps the teaching at Spring Harvest was more in depth than Soul Survivor (which I liked).

At the end of the day though most Christian events in their own way tend to be hyped up…I don’t mean this as a bad thing but they seem to produce their following, some groups rave about their yearly trip to SS others about their trip to Springy or Green Belt and I think this excitement and hype can be a good thing, many people will feel so re-energised in their faith because of it, others of course may find it discouraging and unhelpful.

So there are a few little thoughts on Springy, I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Base team, laughed a lot, thought it was of great value to Spring Harvest (as often it’s disengaged young people we forget!) and will hopefully get to do it again next year!

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I saw this sign outside a nightclub in Sheffield, is this the politically correct way of saying ‘no chavs allowed’? you decide

I shall do a Spring Harvest blog as soon as I finish my essay which is due wednesday…I’m feeling quite overloaded…but back on track with my itunes A to Z tour!

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Hello,

Just a very quick blog to say I got back from Spring Harvest today, it was awesome, I loved every minute of it…I shall include some photos, thoughts, musings etc next week…blogland is going to be quiet this weekend I’m afraid as I’m still busy on my break…currently in Sheffield…normality resumes next week.

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