The Collage on Canvas Workshop.

On Friday Georgi came to try hand at the collage on canvas workshop. Here is what she created.

Here are some of the Canvas creations we made on Monday!!!

The world cup flavour shines through on this canvas!

Here Renette used mixed media .

The Collage on Canvas Workshop

On Monday night I invited a few friends to come over and spend an evening working on a canvas of their own. The aim of this fun evening was for us to experiment with making pictures made of a variety of materials and for these creative friends to feed back to me their ideas on the whole project. And so The Collage on Canvas Workshop is launched!!



These Photos show my friends hard at work creating their collage on canvas masterpieces.



















Part of the way through the evening.

Back to school.

Today is the first day of the fourth term of school. It is the 4th of October 2010. A point in time. A day to enjoy and to remember. It has been a day full of all sorts of excitement. I use this word ' excitement' in the extreme and cynical sense. It has been a day worth forgetting except for this..... It has been a day where I have sensed the work of the evil one on many fronts. Active and alive. But then God.....

God gives us this .......
The dinner time conversation. I sit down with the boys to Woolf down the dinner set before us ( by me of course), and we begin to chat about heaven and well, hell too. I am reading them the story of David and Goliath in the childrens bible. It is a great story to tell and a great story for young, exciting minds. One thing leads to another and we get to talk about hell and Gods grace. Of course the two are linked in my thinking and so they flow one from the other. Hell - a place of God's right judgment and a place devoid of his grace. We all contemplate our call from him and all decide, unanimously, that Hell is a place we do not want to go. In fact, Samuel said, I want to keep trusting Jesus. He has grasped the very real and glorious alternative. To spend eternity with Jesus and to do so in the new earth is where we aim to be. A glorious end to an awful day.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

We are dealing at the moment with unreasonable neighbours. If you have ever had this experience, you will know how stressful it is. This is the issue at hand...

About 4 months ago we received a handwritten, anonymous, rude and threatening letter in our postbox.We chose to ignore it as it was anonymous. Several weeks latter a policeman arrived on our door step with a further complaint. He implored us to deal with the issue as he has real crimes to solve. The issue: Our dogs bark to much and too loudly just well, they bark. The accusers are a couple opposite our home. A couple I have had several conversations with over the year they have lived here. A couple who felt they would rather send a threatening letter and then a policeman than come and have a neighbourly chat about their concerns.

So we sit now with a problem. The problem is this. Their demands are unreasonable. Their tone and attitude is unreasonable and their actions have been unreasonable. Yet we need to be reasonable and try in every way to live at peace with them. So this is my mission. To silence the dogs. I'll let you know how that works out.

"being me"

I have been doing some thinking this weekend about what it means to be a person. A living , breathing, human being. Furthermore, what does it mean to be a woman. After all, that is what I am. A humans being, woman. What is that all about? What is it to be fully human and fully woman. I guess my thinking has been sparked by the horrendous news of woman and children being trafficked from countries like Nigeria to The Ivory Coast. These kinds of news stories always, always leave me feeling cold and lifeless. I find them so sad. What is the value of life? What is the value of human life? what on earth does that look like? Well, I know for sure it is not bound up in the buying and selling of human beings. But what is it. Do I.... Do you .... have value and what does that look like
????

In the past, I would have struggles to find good and lasting reasons that had much depth. But now that I am a Christian I find I have enormous and lasting value as a person. This is the value that God has given me because I was his design; his idea from the start and included in this is a good and lasting plan for my life. In Christ I find my value.

John 15:16
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

I have been chosen; chosen by the living God to be his. I belong to him and in him I have immense and great value. So when I stumble and the voice of the world we live draws me in; seducing me with false ideas of what it means to have value as a person. When the outer facade of the body is called upon to be the most valuable possession I have; when the fear of having failed yet again to measure up in this increasingly women dominated, women achieving world - when this fear presents itself to me and I deem myself a failure who has nothing to give; I am reminded by God's living word that I have value in him and through him and because of him. All praise be to God.