Friday, July 09, 2010

Mountain resources

Well, I have returned from my weeklong mountain top annual retreat with my dear friends. We walk up mountains, we pray, we share the story of the last year of our lives and we laugh and we cry. This is our ninth year of gathering and we intend to do it until we die. Gordon MacDonald in his wonderful book speaks of 'the happy few' as being those you run the race with to the end and my six friends are just such men. I am so grateful to God for them and their encouragement.

One of my jobs of the week is to collate all the resources that have impacted our years and to share them here-so here goes.

1. Technology:  Things is a Mac interpretation of the GTD system and my pal says that it has revolutionised his life. He also loves Doodle and Google translate.  He managed to have quite a meaningful chat with a Latvian man on the vicarage doorstep using it. Stumbleupon is apparently very good for those downtime moments. I bigged up the Kindle app on the iPhone.

2. Books: I like to survey the meaningful reads. This book is apparently the most incredible help on communicating with children and a must-read. The Full Circle is a great read suggesting our times have  become Greek. If you want an excellent read about Hamas this is recommended. One friend spends his life in airports and enjoyed the Flip side. If you enjoy reading about science Bad science is good. One of our number recommended this on understanding the British. The Dawkins Letters  by David Robertson is a great apologetic. Crazy Love was discussed a bit too and I recommended Mere Churchianity to give to someone who had recently converted to atheism in one of our churches (in an otherwise very encouraging year for this Vicar:)

3. Films: Up was the favourite watch of the year of the assembled. We discussed a few more and some recommended Hidden, Babettes Feast, Son of Man,  Four Months Three Weeks and Two Days (we have two doctors in our number who spoke of this- it is not a family film) and L'Amants de Pont-Neuf 

4. Music: I enjoyed listening to Sara Groves and heard the story of Jesus Blood never failed me yet which was new to me.

I have a few more musings but these will become posts in time I suspect.

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Saturday blog-sweep

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