Episode 78 - Milkshake!

Last week I had the most amazing milkshake I have ever drunk in my life. It was a butter shortbread milkshake. The amazing thing was that it tasted of shortbread. Not like shortbread. Not like how every piece of exotic meat you’ve ever tasted, tasted like chicken, no. Not like shortbread. Of shortbread. It tasted exactly the same as shortbread. It was unmistakably shortbread. Except somehow creamy and smooth and well, liquid. This blew my mind. How was this possible!? The answer to this was of course painfully simple. It was made of shortbread. Lots of it. All crumbled up so that it could take on its new form and mix with the other ingredients. Simple. And delicious.

Just to prove that I'm not making this stuff up...

This of course got me thinking. There are many things in life that I want to be, and that I want to be good at. A good friend. A good son. A good engineer. A good drummer. But there is one thing I want more than anything else – something which actually makes all these other things happen too. I want to be a good person. Actually, I want to be the best person I can be – the best me I can be. Fortunately God wants this too and is always ready to lend a helping hand. He even made a blueprint for me to look to – Jesus – who actually lived a perfect life. And so what I want to be, is to be like Jesus. Or do I? Perhaps I can learn something from the milkshake. Perhaps I should focus a little less of my time on copying Him and a little more time on letting Him into my heart. So from this point forward I will endeavour to be a milkshake – made with only the finest ingredients, after all, you are what you eat!

Episode 77 - Independence!

Just a short one this week to say... Happy Independence day Papua New Guinea!

Saturday marked 42 years of independence! Here is a link to an article about some independence day preparations, I'll add more about the celebrations themselves as they get published...

Episode 76 - Acheivement

This week (after months of working on it) I finally submitted my tax return. This is a huge achievement and something that felt very satisfying. Normally of course this wouldn’t be the case. However with being able to do less your goals become less too. The curious thing is that the sense of achievement remains the same. On one hand, this seems quite logical; whilst the task is smaller the difficulty is greater and so the same amount of work needs to be done – it makes sense. But when you look into this further it has a strange implication; the satisfaction gained from accomplishing something is dependent upon how difficult it is to achieve. Whilst I seem bound by these rules, I don’t understand why. It’s incredibly difficult to balance three balls on your nose, yet relatively simple to help out at a soup kitchen once a week – surely I should gain more satisfaction from the later than the former, and yet in truth, would I? Honestly I don’t know. The only conclusion I can draw is that subconsciously I’ve been looking at achievement all wrong and so from now on I’ll try to stop looking at how hard what I do is to achieve and look at how much what I do achieves instead.

Episode 75 - Sori Not Sorry

The English use their own language in ways that no one else does in ways that it was never intended to be used. We are famed for not saying what we mean and meaning what we do not say. Of all the words that we English misuse one probably stands out above them all – sorry. Whether it’s to make something mean sound nicer (such as; I’m sorry to disagree with you but you’re wrong), as a replacement for “please could you repeat that I didn’t hear you”, or anything in between, I have probably used them all. But there is one particularly way that I use the word that often seems to cause confusion in the recipient of my remark – that is when I use it to show sympathy. When somebody shares sad news with me I will often express my sympathy by saying I am sorry, to which I often receive the response; “why are you sorry, it’s not your fault… is it?” It’s as though to say sorry is not just a show of compassion or sorrow, but also an act of taking responsibility for a wrong you have committed, like feeling sorry is an obligation of wrongdoing and nothing else. But this response would not be elicited in Papua New Guinea.

In Tok Pisin the word “sori” from the English “sorry” means sorrow. It is the word that is used to apologise, but it is also the same word that is used to express that one is sad. To use this expression to convey your compassion for another’s misfortune would not be considered unusual at all. In fact, in a world where it is normal to ask someone how they are and not only want them to answer truthfully but to also be interested in their answer, it is also totally normal not only to express empathy, but to actually share in the feelings of that person. Upon reflection of this I found it strange that compassion and empathy could be a product of culture, one that seemed missing in my own, replaced instead by stoicism and reliance upon self. I even worried that we Brits must seem cold and uncaring to the rest of the world, and even considered that perhaps we were. However then I realised that we were just as capable of compassion and empathy as anyone, we just don’t say it. At least not with words, and certainly not with the words you might expect. Still having been embraced by such open compassion and now knowing how good it feels, I will try to let my own compassion out a little bit more.