Thursday, 6 May 2010

Anatidaephobia


Anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you! It is a real phobia and is slowly becoming a global crisis. 198,807 facebook users suffer with this phobia and it is slowly spreading throughout the whole world. There is a facebook group dedicated to helping the sufferers of this horrific phobia, on the page you can hear stories and eye witness testimony's of how ducks are slowly taking over the world and how they are becoming a real danger to our national security.

This fear is real in my life and all started when I was aged 5 and my family decided to go on a nice walk through Dinton Pastures. My loving father gave me the job of bread carrier and I was excited to be given such responsibility at such a young age. I was excited that I would be a part of helping young ducklings grow into healthy strong ducks. I approached the waters edge and throw large amounts of bread into the water hoping that the ducks would see me as a generous giver, after a few minutes of feeding a beautiful range of birds I tied up my bag with the remaining bread still inside and turn around expecting to see my family standing there smiling at the amazing job I had done, I was surprised to find a family of ducks instead. I told the ducks that I had finished my bread giving for that section of the lake and if they wanted some they would have to go further up the lake but they refused to listen and began quacking uncontrollable at me! the force at which they quacked horrified me to my very core the ducks began to circle me and some started attacking my bread bag. I began to fear for my very life "GO AWAY" I yelled at the top of my lungs but this only made things worse as they began to jab me with their rock solid beaks, the jabs forced me to take step after step backwards until I took a step and realised that there was no longer any floor underneath my feet instead their was just water! I began to fall, I throw my arms around in the air hoping to restore some balance which would keep me on the ground and just as gave up hope and accepted my fate of getting wet my heroic father grab my arm and pulled me to safety. My father pick me up and carried me back towards the rest of the family and as my head lay on his shoulder my eyes full of tears I heard a loud and final "QUACK" which let me know that this war was not over in fact it had only just begun!.

Since then I have had some dramatic encounters with ducks. One was at my school where a group of them gathered outside the art block waiting for me to finish my lesson they stood there with pure anger in their eyes, their wings were flapping as they tried to show me how manly they are, luckily they were stopped when a group of older kids throw cans at them and chased them out of school. Another time was when a suicide duck threw itself at me when I was having a peaceful picnic with my friends in the park. This unprovoked attack was ended when a friend of mine throw an American football at the suicide duck which then ran away like a little girl duckling!

This war is serious and so far we have been winning the battles but I fear that the ducks are building a mass army which will some day be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world. Be scared and be prepared!

Monday, 3 May 2010

Bringing Worship to LIFE

Worship = The basic meaning of the word for 'worship' is to express, by words or by bowing down, profound and submissive respect or adoration.
LIFE = A Friday night youth event at Kerith Community Church where 300+ young people gather to have a laugh, meet some friends and whether they like it or not, hear about Jesus.

I want to bring these two things together. I want the young people to have such a burning desire to worship this Jesus they hear so much about. The question comes up though, How do we get to that place?

On Friday we made a fantastic start! We had a worship band play at LIFE and invited young people to worship God however we didn't really start here, to be honest we started all the way back in September. You see in September we decided as a team to always preach about Jesus every week at LIFE no matter what and this is where it all started because we can't expect people to worship God if they know nothing about him so in September we began to introduce people to Jesus.

We have been doing all we can to introduce people to Jesus for the past 7 months and on the 30th of April we gave everyone an opportunity to worship God. The band was made up of young people between the ages of 15-21 and they poured their heart into the worship, they were passionate, professional, inspiring, talented, bold, creative and they allowed the Holy Spirit to flow through them like the river Thames flows through London!

Because of the bands hard work and the grace of God I witnessed about 100 young people worshipping God that night. You might think this is a failure because there is 300 people at the event and only 100 were worshipping but I want to remind you that these are young people, the world would tell us that on a Friday night young people would be on the streets getting drunk and causing trouble, however last Friday I witnessed 100 of those young people decided they are going to worship God instead!