August 31st, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Christianity, Just For Fun
I’m a regular reader of Postsecret.com and here is one of this weeks….
I thought I’d share this as a reminder that you never know the impact a kind gesture will have, you never know how your one word to a stranger, the hug you give to a friend or the encouragement you give to someone will effect them.
(I should be packing for Peterborough!)
August 28th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Just For Fun
I’m not gonna be blogging the next few days because they’re so manic! This weekend I’m in Peterborough/Wolverhampton for Stuart and Steph’s wedding, helping Joel and Vicki move house then travelling back to Yarmouth to back my stuff up to drive back to Peterborough for the new term on monday.
It’s gonna be a strange year…I only have ten months at Park Road Baptist so it’s gonna be weird doing things knowing they’re my lasts….it’ll be sad too.
At the same time today I do what’ll probably be my last ever shift at Haven which’ll be quite sad, I’ve been there since I was 16 so it’s the end of 5 years work so here’s a photo of the Wonderbar where I’ve spent many-a-shift serving pop corn, candy floss and slush to the masses!
This year is going to be full of lasts, this time next year I’ll have a completed degree and hopefully a job doing full time youth work somewhere…it’s a unknown though which is exciting yet scary!
Anyway blog readers I shall come back to you on tuesday or wednesday with some new blogging thoughts, musings and things that make me giggle!
August 26th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Articles, Current Affairs
On Sunday night we went out into Great Yarmouth (and finally found somewhere in Yarmouth with no cheese!), on our way back to our cars at midnight we noticed a guy passed out outside KFC and a female friend trying to help him…we thought we’d step in and help out this guy who’d had way too much to drink, so Dave went off with his female friend to find his other friends, we managed to get him to drink some water and sit up.
Dave appears back with this guys friends, one of whom then states ‘Oh he’s laying down facing the ground, I came out of there for nothing, let’s go back get hammered’.
I think I finally understand how Jeremy kyle feels when he yells at his guests who just don’t get it. Why do we have a society that cares more about going back to get wasted than a friend who needs to be looked after, not left in a doorway of a KFC.
On BBC News yesterday Jamie Oliver suggested that people in the UK care more about getting drunk than eating well (Link) and I think he’s right but not just about food, I think people in this country have a very immature attitude towards alcohol, the amount of people who get paid on a friday then get hammered that evening in this country is so high that certain supermarkets are giving staff warnings if they don’t come in the day after a pay day.
When did someone wake up and say ‘I know what’ll be a great night out, I’ll go out, drink a lot, wake up the next morning in my own vomit and not have a clue what I did the night before or who I did it with?’
It just makes no sense…to top it off this girl who stated she had wasted her time coming out to see her semi-unconscious friend stated that she still had £70 to spend drinking…is it just me or is that a waste?
The drinking culture in this country scares me, the way we encourage drinking (particually to young people) is dangerous….the price of drinks at universities is ridiculously low, a couple of months ago it announced that it was cheaper to buy beer in Tesco than water…it’s a crazy world.
If you’re reading this blog I want to hear your opinion of our drinking culture, and your opinion of alcohol, if you like waking up in your own vomit what do you like about it? If you’re sensible and actually enjoy the alcohol for it’s taste rather than effect comment….any comments are good!
Rant over!
August 19th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Articles, Christianity, Church, Youth Work
What started as a post exploring the topic of sex before marriage and whether it’s acceptable to expect Christian young people today to wait until marriage seems to be becoming a series.
Ben, Steve and Carl have all made interesting comments on the sex before marriage post and this post (hopefully) takes the next step forward from the sex before marriage post and explores the topic Carl bought up in his comment of how churches except (or usually fail to) people in who practicing sex before marriage (by which I mean doing it…not literally practicing…though practice does make perfect!….)
Finding the balance been excepting a person and not their sin is something only Jesus seems to have managed, those churches/Christians who are accepting get accused of being liberal and those churches/Christians are condemn the sin usually end up being way too conservative.
Now the problem is this….how do we accept someone and welcome someone into a church yet at the same time acknowledge that what they’re doing is wrong?
If we look at the character of Jesus then we see how he did it. If we take the woman at the well he first offered her love, he accepted her, he welcomed her…then eventually he moved onto tackle the sin.
This approach of acceptance and welcoming and then tackling the sin seems to be a good approach, however finding the right time zone between accepting them and tackling the sin is something which is difficult and varied because of the individuality of people.
I’ve come across many people in the past who think they cant be part of a church because they’ve got problems and issues and everytime I hear people express that opinion it drives me crazy…since when was church meant to be a place of perfect people?
The early church was made up of people with plenty of problems, Jesus didn’t preach to the perfect but the imperfect, in the Old Testament God didn’t choose the sorted people but the murderers and prostitutes.
I think this outlines the first point I want to make and that is we need to allow imperfect people into our churches, we need to be accepting and welcoming to everyone.
At the same time we need to accept that once in sinning doesn’t stop, people continue making mistakes. I guess this is one thing you accept with youth work. In an ideal world all the young people in your youth group would grow up following the bible, having amazing Christian experiences and never straying…however it’s not soul survivor everyday and young people make mistakes…they fool around with the opposite sex, they smoke things they shouldn’t and drink too much but this doesn’t mean we reject them…quite the opposite, it means we help to teach them acceptance.
It’s here the church needs to learn a lesson especially with sex, we shouldn’t turn away those involved in any kind of sin whether it’s lying or perhaps more taboo topics such as sex or homosexuality, we should accept them, show them God’s love, welcome them and then in time find a place to challenge them on their actions.
No family sees a family member with a problem, tells them about it then ignores it until it goes away, a family stands by that person, acknowledges that they need extra help at the time and supports them, helping them deal with things at their speed.
August 19th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Current Affairs, Joanna
I’ve just been camping for a couple of days in Wells with Jo, it was lovely to get away and dispite the rain had a brilliant couple of days….Now I’ve been camping I feel like it’s summer….shame about the rain…got some good photos though so here’s a few (see photo page for all of them!)
Wells Harbour
Jo Blowing Bubbles
Feet on the beach!
August 12th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Just For Fun
August 12th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Just For Fun
So I’m currently in an annoying inbetween time between shifts at Haven, I finished at 3ish and I’m back at just gone 7 tonight….thus leaving me a gap in the middle big enough to get tea but to not do a lot else…so in boredom I am installing windows 98 ‘virtually’ in my mac….It means I can run some of my older games on my apple mac without poising my mac with a unvirtual windows installation!
My summer goal of recording 14ish songs seems to have expanded to 17 tracks which have almost everything except some drums and vocals recorded…although 3 of those tracks are complete and mixed…when they’re all done i’ll add a download to the ‘My music’ page and maybe even the option of buying the recordings…might as well make some money for my efforts!
It’s been fun yet challenging recording that many tracks, trying to write new guitar parts, thrasing out the songs to decide if they’re good enough to record and tweaking odd lyrics have been part of the process along with finally finding a guitar sound I like when recorded…I’ll keep you posted on the songs tho, i need to do some vocal sessions next week….and then perhaps spend the following week mixing!
I now have less than 3 weeks until I return to Peterborough, summer seems to have shot by so fast I don’t know where it’s gone!
August 8th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Just For Fun
…you wait ages for one then two come along at once!
This weekend just gone was Esther’s wedding in Norwich which was good because 1 - weddings are fun, 2 - lots of people from uni came down…and so on the sunday Gareth, Ian and Sara stuck around for a day of fun in Yarmouth….we did it tourist style!
Here’s a couple of photos Gareth took…
Eating Chips (it’s the Yarmouth thing to do!)
Playing Adventure Golf!
Playing On The Games Machines
All in all a fun weekend!
August 7th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Articles, Christianity, Church, Youth Work
A while ago I started writing a blog on sex before marriage following a comment I head from someone (Christian) who suggested that it is ridiculous to encourage young people to abstain from sex until marriage in today’s society…this was in the week leading up to a Doodles on ‘Sex and relationships’ which never happened and so as a result this blog joined the list of ‘Draft Posts’ on my blog.
The problem is that sex before marriage is a massive topic…and I’m not sure many Christians would argue the biblical basis for waiting for sex until your married and if I’m honest I think God does say to us that waiting to have sex before marriage is the best idea and I think perhaps humans have proved that when we look at the amount of problems people have because of being sexually promiscuous.
One thing I’ve become more aware of recently, particually in younger Christians (or rather my age) is that the things society seems to say is definately okay Christians seem to have bought into, the idea that it’s okay to get drunk (particually on birthdays), the idea that perhaps fooling around with the opposite sex is fine and perhaps even swearing becomes something compromised…I don’t know!
The problem with this is that we begin to separate Christianity and the importance of the bible, if we believe that the bible is God’s word and that God never changes his mind then surely sex before marriage doesn’t need to be questioned?
The thing is that we interpret this is different ways, and the problem with sexually related ‘naughties’ is that often it’s easy to twist our interpretation to fit what we want, so I believe that when we form our views on ‘how far is too far?’ or have that ‘boundaries’ conversation we need to be thinking if we genuinely believe what we’re saying or if we think we’re fiddling God’s word to suit ourselves.
I’ve often heard people say ‘it’s okay to have sex…we’re gonna get married’, the problem with this is that it’s naive, you never know what could happen in a relationship whether you’re close and everything’s cool or not and also if sex is meant to be a wedding gift from God as I’ve often heard preached then surely it’s the same as a child opening all his gifts on Christmas eve?
I’ve also heard people say that in God’s eyes once you’ve had sex you’re married…the problem with this is that it misses several points. Firstly if (as Christians) we’re meant to respect the laws of our country then whether we think sex = marriage or not the fact is we’re not married in the eyes of our country.
The second problem with that view is that actually in the bible we read ‘for this reason a man will leave his Father and Mother and be united as one with his wife’…in the sex = marriage situation I’m not convinced that there’s any leaving of mum’s and dad’s 9 times out of 10. The other problem is that actually this is (in my opinion) the wrong interpretation of marriage in the bible.
Often in biblical times before a man could marry his fiance he would have to build an extension on his parents house for them to live in (this is similar to what Jesus talks about when he discusses there being many rooms in his Father house), in other biblical times the marriage was official after sex but there was ceremonies before that (often followed by the bridge and groom going into a tent to ‘do it’ with their guests waiting outside).
Finally I think the ’sex = marriage’ approach loses value of marriage, I do not believe that God intends sex to be the only significant different in marriage, I believe that God intends marriage to be 2 people giving themselves completely to each other, two people committing to love each other through the good and the bad times and the easy and the hard times.
However we clearly live in a society that says sex is okay, a society that pressures us to lose virginity (perhaps the film American Pie sums this view up) so is it realistic of us to expect young people to save themselves for their future missus (or mister)?
Perhaps there are more pressures around today to have sex than there has ever been but I think there are two things we need to make clear to young people on the matter of ’sex before marriage’
Firstly we need to make it clear that it is entirely possible with God’s help - We need to help young people realise that it’s not a daunting, impossible target but something you can manage with God’s help, by being mature about boundaries with boyfriends/girlfriends and also (much life with alcohol) knowing your limits…if after kissing a girl you have an undesirable urge to have sex with her (and probably will then is that a good idea? The same goes for everything up to sex from ‘hand sex’ to ‘oral sex’.
Secondly we need to make clear the idea of God’s forgivenesss, too often young people feel guilt when they’ve made mistakes in the sexual area, and often I think the church causes that guilt without meaning too, we need to remember (particually youth workers) that we are there to not just show young people that God can help them save themselves but at the same time help young people realise that ultimately they have a loving God who will forgive them not a God who’ll turn his back on them for a mistake.
i believe that today our message of waiting for sex until marriage is no different regardless of what society says, and I believe that we need to help young people realise that, that we need to challenge societies views at the same time showing the world a loving, forgiving God.
August 7th, 2008 by Mark Tiddy Posted in Just For Fun
It seems that all my intentions of serious blogging has gone out the window…I’m trying to work on a ’sex before marriage’ blog which will hopefully appear this evening….who knows!
I’m also sorting out all my music videos on my mac and itunes!
