Amazed & Confused

Hunger, Borrowed CDs and Lovely People

Spot The Difference

Fresh Faced Bible

Ten years ago, give or take, as a fresh faced volunteer in the 24-7 Prayer office I killed a quiet afternoon pimping my bible.  I printed out my favourite Bible verse (“This is how we know what love is, Jesus laid down his life for us so we should lay down our live for our brothers.” 1 John 3:16) and Googled images that summed up what my faith meant to me as a 18/19 year old Christian.  I covered the front of my Bible and adorned the back with a photo of a prayer in a prayer room written by a young person who’d just given their life to Jesus.  Throughout the years that colourful but increasingly tatty Bible has travelled three continents with me, spoken truth when I needed it and been a constant companion at my side.  It’s funny, I have a greater affection for it that my more useful but cumbersome study bible that stays at home.  This little NIV has taught me a lot. 

Problem is, people now look at me like I abuse it.  The plastic that covered my creative outburst now is ripped, tattered and full of sand (??).  People assume I don’t love the word because my travelled friend looks misused, so today in a very different 24-7 Office I gave it a facelift.  The ever-inspiring Susanna Rychiger arrived at last week’s Euro meeting with her Bible covered in the words of the vision, which are really just words from the Bible. So I have followed suite... my Bible is now covered in the words that fill my conversation, ideas that occupy my thoughts.  My NIV has a facelift and looks almost new.  Wonder where we’ll go together and what it will teach me in the next decade J

Wild Goose Wanted

I am thinking about working with a Wild Goose next year... I don't mean that I'm considering taking up ornithology or building a bird coop in the back garden... I'm considering offering to take on an intern who wants to take a year to go on a unique journey of mentoring, shadowing, teaching and time within the inner workings of 24-7 Prayer.  I've been watching the fabulous Emma Nicholson shadow Phil Togwell this year and have loved to see how she's served and blossomed under Phil's gentle guidance.  Plus she's just an absolutely fabulous young woman!  I may not have gotten to see that if she weren't there alongside me in the London Office.  She's been such a massive blessing to us and I think Phil has been a big blessing to her too.  

I started thinking about my next year and how many exciting projects and trips I'm getting stuck in with and I thought... "Hmmm... I think I would enjoy shadowing me this year."  A lot of what it takes to encourage and resource a movement of prayer internationally is a lot of typing, skyping and saying big cyber 'Hi's. I can't think of anything more dull for someone following me around... but this year the faithful plod is interspersed with projects, trips, training and new ventures... plus maybe I should give out some of the invaluable mentoring I have received from so many friends and leaders in this movement.  I think I might chat to Toggers about it some more... xc

Creativity, Beauty and Prayer

I've kicked off my writing week on the 24-7 blog.  Check out this article on the fantastic creativity and colour that one group of Slovakian Christians have poured into their 24-7 Prayer Room.  It's very inspiring, I absolutely love it... reminds me of the Cathedrals we used to build to honour God or the Spirit infused craftsman that created such beauty for the Tabernacle (Ex 31).  I love it when people pour their best into time with God and reflect His creativity back at Him.  I think this Prayer Room made Him smile... xc

My first Vlog

Sooo this may be my one and only (embarrassing) attempt at a vlogging.  I have some ideas for 24-7 campaigns later in the year and thought I'd try out how easy this is... answer: the practicalities are easy, the delivery er... xc

BBQs, Housemates and Copious Amounts of Chocolate

Summer has arrived at the House of Sven!  Itzi’s home, Sun Young is settling in and we’ve just had our first BBQ of the summer!  It was fabulous J  Copious amounts of lime and mango marinated Chicken, Tesco finest Sausages and the obligatory burgers; Cous Cous, Potato and Tomato and Mozzarella salads.  Yum yum.  Craigus and Stephen were all manly with the fire pit and I went to town on the chocolate stuffed bananas that we have now dubbed Banocolattie Hotties!  It was a special evening, relaxed, full of laughter and my whole household is finally home.  Bliss.

Nerdfighters Unite!

It will come as little surprise to anyone who has known me for any length of time in either my cyber or real incarnation that I am a geek.  'No!' I hear you cry - 'say it isn't true'.  Sadly it is.  I am a card carrying, fan forum checking, encyclopedia reading, podcast listening, fanfic writing geek (actually I lie about the card but I'd be open to gaining one)...  and I am ashamed no more.  Through a fan Podcast that shall remain nameless I came across two American brothers with a unique voice and following in the Blogosphere.  Ladies and Gentlemen - meet the Vlog Brothers aka the Nerdfighters aka Hank and John Green.  After a You Tube experiment within which the brothers only communicated via video for a year (or something like that) a phenomena was born... and I love it.  Today's video made me chuckle so I thought I'd share... xc

Big Church Day Out

You might have already heard about this, but 24-7 Prayer are joining up with Delirious? and a huge list of other friends for a one-day festival on Sunday 24th May - called the Big Church Day Out - on the incredibly beautiful Wiston House Estate, West Sussex.

From 2.30pm in the afternoon until 10pm late that night, there will be a whole variety of experiences for all the family... with worship bands and speakers, fun stuff for children and activities for young people, an acoustic cafe and other food venues, and our very own 24-7prayer chapel.

Charlottie-to-Hottie Terris and her small team have been dreaming up all kinds of creative ideas to turn the 700 year-old Wiston chapel into a beautiful prayer room, based around the Lord's Prayer. It's all very exciting. Tim Jupp, from Delirious, said that the prayer room should become the focus as the day progresses... prayer for the area, and for our nation. It was great to chat with Tim at a Wedding on Monday and see the passion and enthusiasm he has for the event.  Already churches have been buying blocks of tickets and booking coaches for the day... up to 10,000 people are expected. For more information, and for tickets, you can click across to the website.  I'll see you there.

Revs Talk Now Mac Friendly!

The lovely Sarah Armstrong just popped around with a very helpful delivery.  Sarah came baring the end of the Windows Media frustration.  This blog is for those Mac users among you who couldn't download my talk on how the Church is Different to the World (1 Cor 5&6:1-11).  I gave it a couple of weeks ago at Revs but sadly the version they had online doesn't let everyone listen.  So here it is, iTunes styleee: Download Church Different to the World

Rees & Julie's Wedding

I love Weddings.  Good job really because it wasn't that long ago that Steve and I were invited to thirteen in one year.  It was a Wedding endemic and though each and every one was lovely, it's hard to get enthusiastic when you're going to so many.  This year however is quite different.  Probably because most of our friends are married.  This year we have a very conservative three Weddings - so each one is a delight!  Monday was our first and long anticipated.  Steve 'Rees' Cowley of Steve-Oversol-DeLoreans fame married the very beautiful Juli Fox... and boy did she look like a fox.  It was a simple beautiful ceremony and a lovely celebration.  After a weekend of rain the sun came out with gusto and shone upon ridiculously good looking guests.... Hurrah for Mr & Mrs Cowley.  

Absolutely Incredible!

It's times like this I wish I wasn't known as such an enthusiastic and positive person.  When people view you as often exuberant it some what diminishes when you are genuinely thrilled by something... now is such a moment.  Please forget everything you know about me.  Imagine me as the most pessimistic, grumpy person you know... fix that image in your mind and now hear me/them say... "Last night was one of the most incredible performances/experiences I have ever witnessed!"

A little over 16 hours ago I tottered through London in red stilettos to meet the rest of the Trundle clan.  Together, after a hearty meal and much complimenting of outfits, we made our way to the Royal Albert Hall to watch a screening of the new HD version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring with the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing the score live.  With the opening stroke of the violins goose bumps ran up my arm and along my spine. It sounded stunning.  The harps, the strings, the brass, the MASSIVE choir, the soloists and the fittest conductor known to London carried us through an incredible film and brought me to tears with their beautiful and sensitive performance.  To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that a score has been performed live, in it's entirety to accompany a viewing of a film and it was spectacular.  I can't emphasise how great it was too much... I better stop or I'm going to gush.  Totally worth a slightly numb bum, sore stiletto feet and a long journey home in the pouring rain... nothing could have dampened my spirits.  

Impacting Installations

On Good Friday I was inspired by the Revelation installation, a creative journey through the events of Easter Weekend.  As I explored it myself then manned the door to welcome others coming to take it in thoughts started to swirl around my mind.  The result was this blog article on the 24-7 website...

BBC Top 100 Books

I received a note on facebook this week and I have to admit I felt rather smug...  Apparently the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books on the BBC big read top 100 book list.  Below is their list of books and I've read all the ones with Xs next to them...

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - X Love!
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X Love!
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X Love!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible - X Love!
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - X Superb
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X Love!
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X Hasn't every woman in Britain?
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

From this list it's pretty obvious that I love Jan Austin and don't love Dickens and have a potentially respectful 25 out of their 100 top books so though I can stick out my toungue at Mr BBC's assumption I now have a great reading list to work through in the coming year.  How many of these have you read?

The Ten Blogging Commandments

Props to Dan Armstrong of Twitter 'Stretch' fame for pointing me to last year's article from the Evangelical Alliance.  In an effort to reflect Christian living in cyber space they've put together some tongue in cheek commandments designed to provoke discussion...

1. You shall not put your blog before your integrity.

2. You shall not make an idol of your blog.

3. You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin.

4. Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog.

5. Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes.

6. You shall not murder someone else’s honour, reputation or feelings.

7. You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.

8. You shall not steal another person’s content.

9. You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger.

10. You shall not covet your neighbour's blog ranking. Be content with your own content

Not a bad effort, I would probably add a few more of my own to that...

11. I will not check my stats to judge my popularity

12. I will not blog about someone esle's personal life

13. I will not do things just to make my blog more interesting

14. I shall not take myself too seriously.

Amusing and thought provoking... I like it :) xc

Glossing over the detail...

This morning I keep catching a view of different parts of my body and sporting daubs of gloss paint I hadn't realized I'd knelt in/ stepped in/ elbowed / ???? While Steve and all our lodgers are away I have been attacking our tired looking home armed with brushes, rollers, paint and audio books. I am absolutely loving giving the place a face lift. I was only supposed to do a few jobs but as my obsessive OCD kicked in I've been up until midnight most nights learning the art of a steady hand. I thought I might be going too far when I found myself climbing out our bathroom window (I am not as flexible as I used to be) and standing on extention's roof to attack the outside. Will post photos but right now I'm looking forward to showing Steve first :) xc

Judgement, TV and Obsessive Painting

Yesterday, after literally months of thought and preparation, I finally spoke to my lovely Church about 1 Corinthians 5 & 6:1-11.  I have never found a subject more challenging to prepare for or deliver, and though it was a great growing experience I am so relieved it's all over.  If you'd like to hear my talk on the hot potato of judgement you can stream it from the Revs site or download it as a wma here: Download Different to the World   (Sorry mac users, the recording guys seem to be anti mp3).  It was an interesting topic to explore as it's very unpopular within our culture and as I started to expand what we were going to be looking at together you could literally hear a pin drop.  I have never seen my Church so quiet or attentive.  Thankfully no one stoned me and though it wasn't perfect I think I managed to get my point across. 

Today the wonderful world of fiction has opened back up to me.  My spare time is my own again and I'm looking forward to being deliberately shallow with episodes or Ally McBeal, 24, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Lost tempting me away from all the painting and chores I've set myself for the coming week.  I'm getting a little obsessive about how the house looks.  I started painting one wall and one set of skirting boards and then a frenzy took me and I was painting until midnight.  The house is looking smarter... very satisfying.

Drum Roll Please...

Presenting the new 24-7 Prayer International website!  Doesn't it look fab?  It's much cleaner and clearer than it's older incarnation, and information can be found in logical places.  This is the fruit of over a year's hard work and I have to take my hat off to the guys at Worthers.com for the ninja web skills.  Click the image above to see the real thing.  

A Day of Industry

I find myself really looking forward to our 24-7 team mornings each month.  I get to hang out with lovely people I normally only see at gatherings or on a video call, get some inspiration from some wise minds, and hear about all the fantastic things we're up to together. Yesterday's gathering was phenomenal.  So much is happening, it was great to take some time out to pray together about it all.  As we broke at one, I rushed off to a nearby cafe to sign off on the new international website, it's super exciting keep your eyes peeled to see the change in the next few days.  Jonny and Worthers have worked so hard and our new online presence is a massive step forward :) From that meeting I rushed back to a meeting of the international leadership team and heard about very exciting happenings accross the globe as well as some significant challenges for the months ahead.  A shortish journey home (watching Entourage, which is such a bloke's program) and I was rushing home, bolting down dinner and then trying to sing at a DeLoreans rehearsal with a belly full of Chinese.  Not the easiest thing in the world.  Needless to say I slept really well last night!  This morning... well it's 11:37 and I still can't seem to think straight.  It's like my brain's still protesting about the clocks going forward.  Ah well, early nights for the rest of the week.  I need to be able to think straight on Sunday... xc

The Many Complexities of Relationships

Roger Ellis, one of the leaders of Revelation Church, gave one of the best talks I have ever heard him give on Sunday.  He was unwrapping Paul's message to the Corinthians about affairs of the heart and libido... specifically: singleness, marriage and divorce.  It was a fantastic balance of truth and the standard we strive for, and the grace and opportunity for forgiveness in Jesus.  If you want to listen to it yourself you can download it here.