Evening all. Not much to report tonight for you. I suppose I will just ramble on a bit and see what comes out.

First thing coming to mind is that as I have scrolled through the blog from time to time I have read some of your comments and I wanted to give a big shout out to Fin the Skin all the way over there in Sydney. Good to know you are reading the blog Sir and be it known that I am also missing your friendship myself. The other comment from a long lost friend is that of Miss Pam Algie, children's ministry extrordinaire from Knock in east Belfast. Pam, I hope you are following you calling and your dreams and its good to know you are reading about and admiring my daughter. She is cool!!

This week has been one of those weird weeks. I just got back from Tennessee on Friday night after completing the first of two summer mission trips with the youth. The second trip leaves this Friday night for Mississippi. After returning from TN, my mind was buzzing with things that had to be done this week in preparation for the second trip and here I am now in the middle of that week and for some reason I feel like it is all done and I am ready. It is a weird feeling and I am actually sure that on Friday I shall remember a number of things that need done and will find myself running around like a headless chicken getting things in order.

One of the things I have had to do this week is our midweek youth sessions for groups meeting tonight and tomorrow night. Tonights group went pretty well. They are the ones that have just returned from mission trip and so we started out with me strapping on my guitar and all of us singing some of our favourite songs from last week. It was a lot of fun and it seemed to get them going. The title of the teaching for the evening was "The Battle". I said in a recent post that my heart for these kids is that they will hear from God - I believe with all my heart and experience that God is not a silent saviour and that in fact he is speaking to us all the time. He is speaking all the time, but we have gotten so good at pretending to listen that we actually believe we are listening when we are not and then we wonder why we cannot hear him. There is so much shit in this world that is vying for our attention and it is so loud that we cannot hear the whisper of God. Tonight this is what I called "the Battle", it is the scrap going on over the attention of our hearts.

I don't know why I told you all that, maybe one of you needs to read something like that at the minute. Basically I was calling our kids to something bigger than a faith of just better behaviour.

We sang a song called Breathe tonight. Most readers of this will know the song but for those of you that don't I will type the lyrics for you...

This is the air I breathe
This is the air I breathe
Your holy presence living in me

This is my daily bread
This is my daily bread
Your very word spoken to me

And I I'm desperate for you
And I I'm lost without you

You see singing this song tonight spoke so much to me about what my desire is for myself and for every person I know - including the youth. To sing these words tonight was to sing to God and say that we need him like we need oxygen and food; it was to sing to him and say that we are lost and directionless without him, but as I sang tonight I wondered if this is the case with me. My best mate in the world told me once that Christians don't tell lies they sing them and tonight I was burdened with the fact that I was lying to God. My desire is to be in relationship with God and to depend on him like I depend on oxygen and food for my body everyday. As I look at my life and the lives of many Christians around me, I see us all using God a bit, only calling on him when we really, really need him but other than that, just coasting along. Tonight it pissed me off that we sing these words so much and yet they mean nothing. My feeling is that it is time to stop playing games with God. The reason we are not hearing from him is that we are letting the noise of other stuff distract us - image, possessions, finances, relationships, addiction, computer games, music, movies, travel, sheer selfishness, me, me, me and so much more - we are letting stuff like this become our oxygen and our sustinence, it is no wonder we are such a depressed and hungry generation. The only answer here (did I ask a question??? I think I might have but it is just really well hidden!!!) is to realise that stuff will never give us what we need (identity, security, unconditional love) and thus it will never really serve us as oxygen and bread. Only God can do that and we can only really experience him like that when we lay all the other stuff down. I know tonight that I was forced into thinking about how much stuff I have put before God, for me it is time to lay it down and to let him be the air I breathe and the bread I munch on.

Wow, another rant from nowhere.

Eva is huge. Did I mention that she grew from 9lbs 11ozs to 12lbs 2ozs in four weeks? It is amazing to have a healthy growing baby - we could not ask for more. She is also sleeping through the night recently. Since I got home from mission trip she has been sleeping from 11/11.30pm through to 7.30am. She just seems perfect in every way and she seems happy and content also. All I long for her to know is that she is loved and because she is loved she can do anything in this world and can take on anything this world throws her way.

I have a couple of pictures to post for your viewing pleasure. I will call it quits before I get going again.

Blessings