Not gone yet :)

I’m sure some of my longtime visitors think I’ve fallen off the edge of the planet or been raptured (I wish!) but no, I’m still here ok.   I just had a rather rough year last year and really haven’t had my head in gear to write anything of any value (& perhaps still not fully).

I developed some minor health problems last March where I lost a stone of weight which I then couldn’t regain for anything.  The problem didn’t impact me overly until November when I then had my 1st ever interaction with the infamous Norovirus (more fondly known as the “winter vomiting bug”).   Because of my compromised poor health state (I was only 98 pounds in weight – roughly 7 st) I landed in hospital for a week getting treatment & fluids, but inevitably dropped my weight further down to 6-1/2 st.   I recovered fairly well and was just starting to really pick up when 3 weeks later, I succumbed yet again to a 2nd bout of it (apparently highly unusual to do so in such a short space of time).   Another week in hospital with another weight drop, but again I managed to recover quite well and am thankfully now once again improving steadily.

But the Lord graciously always brings good out of bad, and while I was lying in abject misery on a hard A&E trolley for 12 hours the first time around, I knew He’d do so in this situation, & sure enough, I got the one thing I’d been begging for, for the previous 5 months without success – to see the GI docs to try and get some investigations into why I couldn’t gain the weight.  So that process has now literally just begun on Friday (they had to wait until I’d fully recovered from the virus).

So as I struggle to regain the weight and cope with the difficulties presented currently, my writings here may be very sporadic or perhaps even nonexistent for a while.   But trust me, as soon as I have energy and opinions enough to share, I’ll be quick getting them up for you, so trust you can hold on & be patient a while longer

Christmas cards for 2012….

Given my circumstances of late, I’ve not had much time or indeed inclination to write on any really important topic, but hope to kick off again soon, so please stick with me if you’re one of my loyal followers as I truly appreciate your support.

But for now, I figure at least firing up some of my current stock of cards for this year will suffice to keep some of you at least interested enough to read on.

As ever, the season started early & it was again so strange to be making C. cards in the height of summer back in mid July.  But I got into it easier this year than ever, and have been hard at it ever since, apart from some time out after losing my mum in August.

So here’s a little sample of my work for this year.

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Difficult days…

Apologies to all who follow my blog for the lack of writing of late. No excuse available for much of the time away, but now am in that awful place we all have to cope with having just lost my wonderful dearest mother to heaven on Monday past (20th August 2012).

She was 85-1/2 and had suffered with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)after having smoked heavily for 30+ years of her life.   While we knew her time was getting shorter with every passing day, we somehow still felt she would be here many years ahead yet, as she was in superb form right up until getting her final chest infection just over a fortnight ago.

She unfortunately didn’t complain of the right symptoms, so we were unaware of how seriously ill she actually was, & thus time was wasted getitng her into hospital, and once in, she deteriorated very rapidly despite all the treatment she was getitng.  We were told last Thursday that she was unlikely to recover and on Friday preparations were started for her impending demise.

Having never prayed with her at any point in her life, I thankfully had opportunity during her last 2 days to do so, & to read lots of scripture to her.  She had made a statement of faith in her youth but never progressed from that point, yet I have to believe that it was enough.  Certain portions of scripture give the impression that really nothing more is needed:

“Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”  Act 16:30-31

Forward to the past……

Sometimes you just have to marvel at how mankind truly never does learn anything from history, but especially remote history, and more especially again, history which it seems to not even accept as ever happening (because the Bible says it’s so). But more and more recently, I really have come to the conclusion that scripture ever more reveals just how true it is, as the world races to embrace so many concepts and ideologies that were held by a distant civilisation and one not even that remote from our own – and that’s that of ancient Rome & later Greece. Although if truth be told I think mankind is actually trying to model itself on even earlier cultures which have been even more detailed through scripture such as those who lived in Sodom & Gomorrah.

Science again playing God – Pt 2

On a similar yet slightly different note to my last post, medicine is forging ahead rapidly too with many advances it deems to be wonderful in the hope of curing many diseases.  Genetic tampering will know few bounds in the future as more and more genes are being considered for removal prior to birth to prevent all manner of things from Down’s syndrome right through to the entire concept of evil – yep, you heard that right – apparently scientists consider they’ve now located a gene that can predispose someone to evil intent be it becoming a psychopath or just a shoplifter, someday you can have a baby scanned for it, & have it removed (Horizon, BBC 2011-2012   link may not be sustained).

This made me think of how much further God will allow science to progress in the future, and I’m expecting quite a long way indeed.  A verse in Revelation used to have me wondering how it could really come to pass and I’m now beginning I think to see some of what the future my hold. The verse in question is:

And in those days men will seek death and will not find it. And they will long to die, and death will flee from them.  Rev 9:6

Science once again openly “playing God”….Pt 1

Adam Rutherford, left, and Randy Lewis milk Freckles, the silk-producing goat. Photograph: BBC

Watching the BBC program “Horizon:  Playing God” recently had me both transfixed and horrified at the depths to which scientists are prepared to go to get ahead of others in their field, & to be the ones to provide the next new world-changing concept.

Having a strong interest in science myself, I can honestly understand where scientists are coming from on one level, in constantly wanting to break new ground, & find new things, or improve on old ideas etc, but at some point there has to be some sanity within the discipline that recognises that some things truly aren’t meant to be tampered with, & while they may feel that need outweighs any possible detriment in the short term, one has to wonder what the long term repercussions will be.   Science now is already well into blurring the boundaries on all levels as we’re continually indoctrinated, by the multitude of natural history TV programs. into believing that we’ve “evolved” from the animal kingdom anyway, so we should be quite comfotrtable about mixing ourselves back into it again.

2012 – it’s not the Mayan calendar you need to worry about…(Pt 2)

**Please see my earlier post on the same topic from last year.**

For the past 2 years or more, the world has been somewhat fixated on 2012,  as they’ve presumed the ending of the Mayan calendar means the end of the world.   However, many historians have proven how the Mayan calendar only ends in 2012 because the Mayans figured it was as far a date into the future they needed to concern themselves with in the presumption that others after them would continue on the calendar (which of course never happened).  It’s a bit like the early computers which only had dates pre-2000 & which everyone figured equally somehow meant a similar fate to the world when they rolled over into the New Year.