Lemons... ?

When life gives you lemons...

make grape juice. Then sit back and watch the world try to figure out how you did it

so when life throws up the unexpected what do you tend to do?
make the most of it?
or dwell in the fact you've been handed lemons when in fact you wanted like grape juice??
maybe the lemon was what you did really want,but didn't know it. maybe it was the kick up the backside that you needed to move on to something better.

So when life hands you lemons do you expect lemons? or do you expect something better like grape juice?

and maybe the lemon is all you want because you don't feel good enough or strong enough to cope with having the grape juice.
or maybe having lemons is a bit of a comfort blanket and you don't feel quite like you without it.
Or maybe the lemon is something that's happened that you've built yourself upon, so to have it replaced with a grape juice you would have to start a rebuilt yourself
which is a scary prospect so would rather stay in the comfort zone of the lemon.

So when you get to the point of having the grape juice, will you tell the world how you did it? or let them wonder around clueless in the lemon world.
Or will you just make the most of having your grape juice and keeping it to yourself before your next lemon comes along.


So i wrote all of the above very late at night, and am not at 11pm the following night gonna try and make sense of it.

When life hands you difficulties(lemons)...

Be controversial face them head on with God deal with them (grape juice), and then when your a better person let the world know how you did it.

:) so let me know if this does make sence?

Beautiful

So living beautifully is something that keeps popping up in my life lately.

Its said that saying "your beautiful" to a girl is the nicest thing you can say, and also if its said to you, it means whoever is saying it really likes you.

But being beautiful doesn't rely upon someones opinion, or it shouldn't at least, and being a beautiful person isn't just about the outside.

So back in march i thought I'd created a new concept of "living Beautifully" and figured this should contain:
- The way you look after yourself and treat your body.
so eating good things, and being healthy, not to much drinking that kinda thing. But also the way you present yourself, i have quite strong opinions on how people should present themselves but I'm not going to go into that now, but think people should care about how they appear in a way of showing respect to themselves.
- The way you treat other people.
in my little plan this was generally being loving towards people, and actually that's just a nice thing to do.
- How you conduct your feelings
SO for me this meant not exploding how I feel all over face book and moaning at every single person possible about how i felt, and instead dealing with why i felt how i felt, and not taking it out on other people.
- Finally.
God time, bible prayer that kind of thing!
also decided killing everyone with kindness was a good plan!

I was quite happy in the knowledge id created this concept and told one of my friends about it... and did it for a while then let it slip...

Then as i was sat in a morning talk at Spring Harvest the speaker started talking about the marks of a beautiful life, turns out a guy called Dr Hans Rookmaaker had come up with the same thing but well, a lot better!
- Friendship
"if we could just be friendlier maybe we wouldn't need so many new activities"
- Humility
-Pace
Jesus wasn't in a hurry
- Place
He knew where he was from
- Skill
had a trade to contribute to society
- Learning
-Fun
Jesus loved life and we should actively seek Joy and fun
So his kinda made a lot more sense, and i thought about this for a while THEN

At my church weekend the topic of the weekend was....
Beautiful church...
and basically what it took a whole weekend to explain was that a beautiful church is made up of:
praise, power and love.
and have time to listen, have praise, have love


After all of this I kind of figured Beautiful living isn't something you can put in a box, or just have one way of doing it. Its possibly more a personal thing, to do with how different people see their own lives and feel about themselves.
Even as I write this it still challenges me actually what parts of my life aren't beautiful, and what can i do about them.

Okay so here goes my first ramblings...
I wanted to write something about the pictures of church.
So last week we had holiday club in St Peters church and the first job we had to do was to transform the church into the crazy fish and chip shop types place it was ment to be!
So after taking out railing, Kneelers, flowers, prayer stool things, and lots of crazy church interior things that were clearly brought in the 60's we decorated with exciting coloured stringy stuff and made it look exciting.

Then on day4 when the church was filled with 30 excited children we had some interesting visitors from the official Church directory putting together pictures of all the churches in the diocese. They said i guess it doesn't normally look like this, someone else said but what should it look like?

This made me think!!!
What do I think that church should look like... and what does it look like?
I went on this fresh expressions course a year or so ago, and basically they said the most effective way of church is to meet people where they are providing something they need.
But keeping everyone happy is trickyyyyyy!

I kind of wondered what all the churches looked like in the church directory, and then wondered why on earth we keep a record of what all the churches look like inside the building? When actually whats beautiful about the church is the people and their hearts. wouldn't it be amazing if we made a directory of what was on peoples hearts.

I find it really hard to stay on subject and started this wanting to talk about pictures of church, how would your church be pictured in the church guide? how would you like it to be pictured?
more importantly what would the pictures of your heart show? and what would you like it to show?