This week, Kensington Temple (a large Elim church in London) is running an initiative called ‘Hear the Word’, with the whole Bible being read out loud from cover to cover over the course of this week. Readings will be going on throughout the day and night and there are facilities to take part online as well as in person.
I’m due to read Numbers 9, in theory sometime from midday although they seem to be quite well ahead so I’m going to log on to the assigned Zoom chat room sooner rather than later. You can dip in at any point during the week via their livestream (also Facebook but the YouTube one is easiest to embed below):
While I was cooking yesterday evening, I was listening to a video from Mike Winger (included at the end of this post). I count him as a pretty good guide to thinking through theology, including the fact that he is willing to recognise and acknowledge when he slips up.
The particular thing that caught my ear was the mention that the NIV now renders Philippians 4:13 as “I can do all this through him who gives me strength”. If you go to the BibleGateway site, you can ask it to show the verse in all English translations. Most stick closely to the wording used in the King James Version: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” and the idea of being able to do all things through Christ is a popular topic for sermons and inspirational messages. Indeed, that is the wording I find if I pull one of my print edition NIV Bibles off the shelf : “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” is what my 1984 edition says.
Why the change and is it a good one? I’ve looked at the online Greek Bible and the traditional translation does seem to fit, as far as I can tell. However, I know that the verse is often pulled out of context and people happily apply it as if it means Christians can happily succeed in anything they fancy doing, glossing over the many times when we experience difficulties and failure. What the new NIV rendering does is to keep the verse focused on the context, which is Paul explaining that he has learned to be content in all the circumstances he has experienced.
Given that the original was written as a coherent letter and not a series of chocolate box promises, I think this is a good decision. The best messages I have heard on the passage make this very clear, encouraging us to trust Jesus as he leads us through life rather than claiming that he can let us have what we want. I know that other major modern translations, such as the ESV, regular check and revise details and I won’t be unhappy if, in a few years time, we see more versions choosing to recast their wording in a way that forces the reader to look at the context rather than jumping on a potentially incomplete and selfish meaning.
The video below should start about 9 minutes in, which is when Mike discusses this topic.
For the last couple of days, Jane and I have been dog-sitting again, providing a bit of respite for someone who went into hospital for a major operation. Dogs normally have sensitive hearing but not this one. My evidence for that is that I went ahead with my regular Friday morning banjo session yesterday and she didn’t bat an eyelid. She let out a couple of low moans while she was dreaming but raised not a whimper about the loud, enthusiastic and not always fully masterful banjo playing that was going on! As a hearing test, I’d say that was pretty conclusive.
Jane and I have recently taken on custodianship of the training band’s Christmas library. We’ve been given a box of paper copies and a collection of files containing scanned images but the two don’t entirely match up. I’ve been working on the question of how to create scans of what we only have in paper form so that I can email people in the various sections of the band to show them what we will be looking at after half term.
My current technology set up allows me to scan to image files but the composite PDFs I could generate were on the large size. I looked at some online programs to compress them but all the ‘free’ options turned out to require a subscription to download anything… so not what I would define as free! After some fiddling around, I’ve discovered that the best tool I’ve got for compiling images to PDFs is my old MacBook and then I can shrink them down on command line back in Windows (using Ghostscript under the Linux subsystem). The first piece took ages but I’m hoping the second will be much quicker and the band will find the pieces of suitable quality to play from.
I was off down to the woods this morning for another Green Gym session. Today’s tasks were based around woodland management. One was looking out for trees with extensive ivy build up.
Ivy is not a problem in itself. It uses the tree as a scaffold to climb up but isn’t stealing nutrients or constricting its host. However, it can be a problem in wind prone areas, such as a stand of trees next to a more open area. Deciduous trees shed their leaves during the colder, wetter part of the year and so the wind whistles through them but doesn’t rock them too much on the softer ground. Ivy, though, is evergreen and it is understood that large build-ups can create a sail effect, increasing the chances of trees being significantly damaged or even brought down by high winds.
We weren’t eradicating the ivy but ringing out sections lower down on the trees. It will grow back over that but it will take a while and, in the meanwhile, the parts higher up will die back and are more likely to be blown off than cause their host to blow over. That’s the theory at least – I’ll have to go for a midwinter walk and see how it is working out.
I missed taking a picture for September but I wanted to make sure I got a shot of October’s autumn colours. There are more changes to come but the Virginia Creeper by the back gate will be gone in a few days and we’ve already lost almost all the leaves off the Hamamelis by the polytunnel.
I’m not entirely convinced about the theology of praying for a parking space. What if the car park is pretty full and several Christians arrive, all praying for a space? I normally look in advance for several parking options and I’m willing to walk a little way and embrace the opportunities that will bring.
However, today I was giving a couple from our new church a lift to a hospital appointment in Mansfield. I’d scoped out some places I could go and wait but they wanted some assistance going in and I wasn’t going to tell them not to pray for a space. As we moved into the car park, someone passing by gestured and, when I wound down my window, he told me he was just about to go. However, I’m not sure he was legally parked (not in a bay) so I was still feeling a bit dubious and there was also a car ahead. As it turned out, that car parked in a spot out of a bay and so we were able to drive into a slot another car had just vacated. The icing on the cake though was to get inside and discover that parking was free that afternoon as there was a problem with the machines used to operate the gates.
I’m still not sure that I’m going to start praying for parking spaces but I will continue to walk into the provision that showers down upon me and count my blessings each day.
No sing around session for me yesterday as Jane and I were visiting her mum. There was a bit of DIY work for me to, fitting some shelving in the porch. In many ways it was a very straightforward job but not having access to my own set of tools and materials meant it took longer and needed a bit more figuring out than it would have done at home.
The shelving was the type with brackets that fit into slotted rails, so the first task was to get the rails on the wall. That wasn’t too hard, as I had the essential tools of a spirit level and pencil to mark things up and a hammer-action drill to make the holes. Fortunately there were just enough suitable Rawl plugs to help the screws grip the masonry and the resulting fix feels nice and strong.
A little more challenging was the shelves themselves. In the shed at home I’ve got several planks that would have been ideal but we only had strips of wood. It was a decent pine that had been nicely aged for a long time where it was originally installed but I needed to figure out how to fit three pieces together without my normal array of tools and fixings, including clamps to hold things together and a workbench as a sawing station.
In the end, it all got done though and I’m pleased with the result, which I think will serve well.
Now that we’ve trimmed back the tomatoes in the polytunnel (still producing but air movement is vital as the weather gets colder) I’ve been able to roll the side window (blind?) down on the polytunnel. That will help keep the heat in. In theory this could regularly be rolled up and down to cope with temperature but the foliage of the tomatoes has made that hard.
Next year, I probably need to allow a bit more space at the back of the beds to reduce the issue and then I can more actively manage temperature during the autumn.
I got the Loco Beer bottled this afternoon. It ended up at a gravity of about 1.008 so the calculated ABV is 4.46% – a little higher than the original but not completely out of the ball park. The initial tastings were encouraging but it is going to need a few weeks in the bottle with the little bit of extra sugar to kick off the final carbonation and conditioning.
It will be interesting to see how it does turn out as I tweaked my bottling regime to make it less onerous. Firstly, I transferred the beer back into the plastic jerry can that I put the wort into to cool down after the initial mash and boil (fully sanitised, of course). I let it dribble out into a plastic jug, through a plastic strainer, and put each jug full into the jerry can, which let me catch most of the trub and murky beer from the bottom. The jerry can has markings on the side so I could estimate the volume and I poured a solution made from a calculated amount of sugar and most of the sample tube back into the cleaned fermenter before returning the beer.
That runs the risk of picking up an infection from air exposure but it also gets more air in to encourage the remaining yeast to get to work on the very small amount of sugar. That may push the actual ABV up a little higher but is mainly in order to create carbon dioxide in the sealed environment of the bottle, which prevents it being flat and may have an additional preservative effect. In addition, it means the bottled beer should be clearer, with less chance of gushing when opened and not so much sediment to stir up if it does.
If it works, I’ll definitely adopt this method going forward as it reduces the pain of bottling day, my least favourite part of the whole process!
