vague

Today I left home slightly late and missed the train by roughly 20 seconds. This meant that I'd be late to my Bible study group and I hunted around for my mobile phone to contact a co leader and sms an apology. The mobile didn't seem to be in my bag so I went to the public phone to call my husband and ask him to hunt for it at home.

Soon after he answered I realised that there was one last pocket to check in the bag and located the mobile. After the mobile phone issue was sorted he had the presence of mind to ask me why I was catching the train. I usually drive on Mondays. It had completely slid my mind!! Had I driven I would have arrived on time.

The cherry on the cake was realising later that I'd left my Bible at home.

Hopefully I've packed at least a few weeks of vagueness into the one day, and I will be a model of organisation for a while.

gender stereotyping?

I can hear a most unusual noise emanating from my living room as I sit in the study and type. There is the sound of a footy game on the TV, the noise of the commentators and crowd in the background, with the additional sounds of young fellas making comments along with the odd cheer or two.

These are most unusual sounds, because I have been blessed with a husband who rarely tunes in to the footy. He's doing a Paul (1 Cor 9:20) and watching the footy with a bunch of blokes from our church youth group. It's "boys' afternoon" which means that I am hiding out in my study, a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Next week will be "girls' afternoon" and we'll be getting together to cook food and learn about God's invitation to his heavenly banquet (Luke 14:15-24). We're encouraging the girls to bring along friends - for those who pray, please shoot up a few for this event.

When we organise and run events like this I sometimes get nervous about gender stereotyping - I did study humanities at uni in the 1990s after all - and when the boys watch footy and the girls cook together I wonder if we're just perpetuating unhelpful stereotypes. After all, there's nothing in the Bible about football being exclusively for boys, or cooking being exclusively for girls. If anything we have at least one precedent for the blokes cooking and eating together (John 21:9-14).

However, what is evident is that split gender events work well and are often a highlight in the church calendar. We're not choosing the activity sections of the afternoons with a particular agenda, we're tapping in to what the kids are already interested in. There is something of a buzz among the younger teenage girls around baking together and I'm already a little nervous as to what they might do in and to our kitchen!

So we're sticking with occasional split gender events and I'm shelving my concerns about stereotypes - after all stereotypes are usually true, and I'd much rather eat cake than watch footy!!

Pilgrim Penguin goes live

The Pilgrim Penguin has been quietly hiding out on the internet, having only given her husband the internet address of her blog. Today that is changing. She has worked out that if she continues in hiding the temptation not to write, or to write exclusively about my vegetable patch (a worthy topic nonetheless) will be strong, perhaps even overpowering.

So here goes... Welcome to those reading this for the first time.

mousy mousy

We are dealing with an unpleasant infestation. It all began a few weeks ago when we heard a rustling in our rubbish bin as we ate our breakfast cereal. A mouse had managed to push out the steel wool I'd used to stuff the holes in the back of the cupboard where the bin resides, and had fallen into the bin.

I felt sorry for it on a number of counts:


Firstly the mouse couldn't get out of the bin and had been unsuccessfully trying to climb out, potentially for an entire night.

Further, it hadn't benefited from its efforts in the slightest. The bin had nothing in it save one empty packet of chocolate teddy bear biscuits.

Finally, mousy met a sticky end at the hands of my husband. We have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy concerning the destruction of pests around the house so I know none of the details. I can only presume that it was swift and painless.


We are now seeking to kill the mouse population with "talon" poison. We've stuck a little cube of it in the cupboard with the bin, and one in a hard to reach (humanly speaking) corner of the pantry. Thankfully the one in the pantry hasn't been touched. However the one near the bin has been nibbled and moved around a lot. The poison can take up to two weeks to knock them off, so we'll need to be a bit patient.

We will also need to find ways to reassure visitors who hear strange banging noises coming from our kitchen cupboards. Last night at a Bible study we were hosting, a soon to be dead mouse decided that it was going to noisily play with the cube of talon during a moment of quiet discussion about the application of a potentially sensitive passage from the Bible (Col 3:18-4:1). We had split the group down gender lines for this time and I think that the lack of male voices in the room meant that mousy felt emboldened to have a play.

After 10-15 minutes of hoping it would settle down, I fessed up to the girls about the noise. Thankfully no one was too grossed out and one of them reassuringly told a story about mice that can scale the outer wall of ten story apartment blocks in the country that she originally comes from. It puts a few little ones in the under sink cupboard into perspective.

the moral perfection of Jesus

Yesterday I listened to Peter Singer, a well known ethicist, make some comments about the flaws he perceives in Jesus' morality. He mentioned three difficulties that he has:

1) Jesus curses a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25)

2) Jesus sends evil spirits into a herd of pigs and sends them over the edge of a cliff (Mark 5:1-20)

3) Jesus' ethic of not resisting evil isn't workable in today's society because people will simply take advantage of each other (Matt 5:38-42).

He had misunderstood the import of the first two passages that he used. The cursing of the fig tree was not a childish outburst of anger, but an enacted parable against God's people who were not bearing fruit as they ought. In sending the pigs over the cliff Jesus showed his authority over all creation, including evil spirits and animals that were considered unclean. For the Christian who believes that Jesus is co-author of creation, it is not a huge problem to see that he has absolute authority over all of it, including pigs. The tender-hearted among us may feel temporarily a little sorry for the pigs (after all I am the owner of two fluffy pet rabbits) but I can't see that drowning them is morally wrong. Not to mention that, unlike Singer, I eat bacon!

Finally, upholding an ethical standard that doesn't work because people don't or can't keep it is not a sign of moral imperfection. Just because I can't stick to a particular standard, doesn't mean that the standard is wrong. Also, in telling us to love our enemies, Jesus is not condoning their behaviour. God hates exploitation and demands love for him and for others (Matt 22:36-40, or see the book of Amos for an extended examination of God's views about people exploiting one another).

It's encouraging that Singer, with his formidable intellect, was not able to find flaws in Jesus that I thought had any substance.

my vegie patch

There's clover in my vegie patch and I'm having trouble getting rid of it. While many deliberately planted seeds fail to thrive, the clover is running amok. Yesterday I spent over an hour plucking it out by hand, only to find today that it has sprung up again, albeit in smaller amounts. I put its presence down to having used soiled hay from the bunnies' hutch as compost - some seeds must have snuck in.




On a happier note, following a friend's advice I planted the white section of supermarket bought spring onions in some dirt out the back. It's worked a treat. I popped them in only a few days ago, and they're sprouting up nicely now.

getting started

I've spent all evening getting this blog up and running, am writing now so that I have a little something to show for all my work. More soon...