what a pleasant weekend.

Friday night after work I went to a farewell for Peter at The Feathers. Peter's off to Dunedin for the rest of the year. (Rewards are fun. Teehehehe...)

After that, I went to see my parents, who had come down from Auckland. We played cards with my brother for the evening. Saturday morning I got up absurdly early to catch a train to Petone, where David and the Humber picked me up to go to a 'MAD' (Mentors and Disciples) breakfast in Upper Hutt. David's father did a great talk on his life history and the value of honouring thy parents.

In the afternoon I saw my parents again. When we weren't eating dinner at Chicago we were playing cards. O, and I took Ben H to the airport. Which reminds me. The 10-minute trip to Jono's house in Ben's car, after leaving Mum & Dad's motel, took 55 mins, because 10 were proceeded by 45 trying to get the key to turn in the ignition. Eventually I hit upon the answer. Literally.

After breakfast Sunday morning, Tim and Jono and I went with young Master Oostabaan to the Waikanae Africaans congregation, where we spoke to their youth about supporting them and building up their youth group. This experience sparked some good reflection & planning on our part afterward. Hopefully our efforts will bear fruit. Tim & I are also very keen to work hard on the planned (Christians in) Business Seminar to be held by his Dad.

This afternoon I saw my parents. We played cards, then took them to the airport. Matt & I have subsequently spent the evening (after a nice Kebab) walking around Wellington talking 'bout various things. Some highlights that I recall right now were

- a review of exciting events, directions or changes within our local church;

- the coalescence of various threads of thought regarding 'intellectual vertigo': the personal process of going through a sudden paradigm shift akin to the theory of scientific revolutions proposed by Thomas Kuhn. The buildup to such events is likely to be both gradual and relatively unnoticed;

- the dynamics of our bible study group, & options for development;

- the divestment of individual owner responsibility inherent in public company structures (and the evils thereof);

- a recognition that principles of stewardship, when properly internalised, are likely to reduce advocacy for strict private property boundaries;

- wondering if right-wing responses to Marx have addressed his worry about the alienation of the worker from his labour (and the note that communism alienated the worker even more!);

- a tentative conclusion that the way we use 'capitalism' is to mean 'the unfettered-by-State-power allocation of capital': leaving the issue of other allocation criteria open;

- the limitations of words, their tendency to promote false ideas of stasis, and their proper function as pointers away from themselves;

- the mystery and infinitude that is present everywhere, including within people (we raised but did not synthesize the observation that people are also patterned in thought & behaviour);

- a recognition that the dualism which cares nothing for this world (especially as found in dispensational premillenialism - 'polishing brass on a sinking ship'), which is rightly criticised by the Reformed tradition, often burgles the house through the back door anyway: disguised as a concern that if we focus too much on the things of this world (environmental care, social justice), we will mistake where our treasure and 'the truth' really lies.

- a polemical conclusion from the above that to reduce the gospel to either a form of words or an after/other-wordly heaven is to fail to preach it at all;

- a recognition that certain selfless purposes and tasks are better builders of relationship and unity than almost anything else, including intellectual discourse (and we weren't unaware of the irony).

Blessings saturate the night.