In the old days of blogging, I used to come home and blog about my day because I thought it was interesting. Usually it went something like this although sometimes I got overly enthusiastic like this.

These days I tend not to talk about my day because, no one reads my blog to find out about it. But in honour of the past, just once, I'm gonna do it. This was Thursday 9th February 2012.

I woke up this morning to the sounds of Adagio for Tron, which is my wake up music. Thank you Sleep Cycle App. It's nice to wake up to if a little sad (the music not the app). I read my Bible in bed, which was bad because I kept drifting off and dreaming about Jeremiah. I guess dreaming about Jeremiah isn't too bad, but sometimes it can be hard to figure out if Jeremiah really was at your primary school with you or if you just dreamt it.

I took my time this morning because to today was late arrival day at work. I went in at around 10. The traffic was pretty nice, but I had to park a long way from the office. I had two green bags full of commentaries on the books of Mark and John to carry with me too. I felt like a biblically literate homeless person. It was difficult holding the bags safely while standing on the median strip in middle of our local busy road. I was worried a car might clip one of my bags and drag me down the street grazing my knees, ruining my shirt and dashing my brains on the road surface. It would probably be the first time someone had ever been killed by a Bible commentary. If you get killed by a Bible commentary can you call it martyrdom? It is getting killed in the cause for Christ kinda.

I arrived at work a little before 10 just in time for Bible study. It was good.

Then I spent the day working. It was solid. I sent emails, did a little talk prep, made phone calls, booked visits, printed invoices, went to the post office. Boy, it was amazing. And I didn't get distracted by Facebook or SMH once. Maybe more than once, but certainly not once.

On my way back from the post office I bought myself lunch. It was a chicken and salad roll from the Vietnamese hot bread shop. There are rumours that the pâté from the shop will make you poo excessively. I thought about trying it to see if the rumours are correct, but felt if I discovered the truth it might ruin the mystique of the shop, so I said "No pâté, thanks."

During my lunch break I read a book on church planting for my church planting tripastorate (the three pastors) meeting tonight. I also sent some non-work emails.

At 6:15 it was almost time to go home. I broke one of my rules and did a work poo. I don't really like pooing in my work place but there were very few people left in the office to smell my present's presence so I relaxed the no-work-poo embargo. I also got changed while I was there out of my business clothes into my casual clothes.

At just past 6:30pm I left work. I walked all 13km back to the car and crossed at the lights seeing as I thought trying my luck with my voluptuous commentary carrying twice in one day was a little too much.

I drove to Pastor Scott's* house via Caltex to pick up some over-priced soft drink. Just after leaving the petrol station a lady almost drove into me while turning right at some lights. She was coming from the other direction as I drove through the lights, she didn't see me and almost smashed right into my side. After that I turned the invisibility switch on my car off because it's too dangerous. Suburu's do have a lot of neat gadgets though.

I arrived at Scott's just after 7, Pastor Kaye* was already there. Scott was cooking us a barbie. He's a real man. We ate then spent three and a half hours talking about Gotham City Church (the working title for our church). It was very exciting. Tonight we talked a lot about church government and how we want the church to function. We also spent a while discussing humour in our church, which I think others thought was a bit of a tangent, I felt it was a core theological issue. I think we decided some good things; racist jokes are out, poo jokes are probably still up for debate.

Still talking concretely about what we want the church to be like (everything from theology, to people we reach, to ministries we run, to how we run a service) was very exciting. It's good to finally be getting really concrete. And it turns out we all agree on most things.

We finished our discussions and prayed then I drove home. I sent an email to some youth group parents for tomorrow and now I'm blogging.

That's my day.

Don't expect another one for these for 8 years, but at least now you know what I did today. You can finally stop wondering.


*We don't call each other Pastor, but it'll help you know who they are.

As many of you would have noticed, my blog is a bit borked at the moment. I have been trying hard to get it fixed and make alternative blog arrangements. This is coming along, slowly.

However, what has been interesting is the amount of stress this has caused me. I have been feeling quite agitated about the state of my blog and it's mainly because the comments look ugly now and stuff up the formatting. I didn't have the most beautiful blog in the world, but now it looks like Geocities deformed cousin. I kinda feel like I would if I woke up in the morning with poo on my face but I couldn't get it off, and no one else was helping me do it.

It's pretty amazing to me how concerned I am with the image I portray on my blog. Why should I really care if my blog formatting is stuffed up and comments are a bit (lot) broken? This blog provides about 20 seconds of interest a day to about 30 people, it's not really a big deal. Most of the people who read this blog read it because they know me and no one reads it because it's got great design.

I worry with the comments being stuffed that people are going to stop reading my blog. Why would that stress me? I don't use this blog to bring people to Christ, nor do I use it to raise awareness of important issues, I don't advocate for the poor and I don't train people to be better leaders, lovers or friends. I talk about a few small thoughts, post a few videos, say a few silly things. It's not a big deal, but I stress anyway, because I want to be liked. How much value do I put into being able to broadcast my small thoughts to a small audience?

In fact not only have I stressed that my blog looks bad, blogging everyday has been making me worry that I don't have enough interesting things to blog about. And I don't. So I worry people might stop reading. Small thoughts, small worries, big deal.

On the other hand, tonight in church we looked at Revelation 4. About the great creatures standing in the throne room of heaven. Of the 24 elders, representing all the people of faith in the history of salvation, who lay down their crowns before God. The creatures and the elders who cry out:

“‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty,'
who was, and is, and is to come.”

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being.”

God sits in heaven receiving all glory, honour and praise, and he deserves it. He made the universe, he is eternally good, he saved the world through the greatest act of grace in eternity. He is worthy. On the other hand I sit on earth and hope my comments will work so I can be thought of a little bit better by people who don't judge me on the state of my comments or the interestingness of my posts.

I'm not saying that my love of my blog stops me from worshipping God. I am struck however that my eyes are on my blog. And when I spend all this time thinking about my blog and how to fix it, I elevate myself and the importance of my blog. Were I to lift my eyes more, and consider my blog in the context of the glory of God, it may not be such a big issue.

How do you worship God with a blog?

You blog well, you blog to add value to people's lives, and you blog knowing that your blog isn't a big deal in other people's lives, it isn't a big deal in the world, and it isn't a big deal in God's big plans, so it shouldn't be a big deal to you. I want to lay this small blogging crown at God's worthy feet.

I guess it's similar to how we can live. We live well, we live to add value to people's lives, we live to lay our small crowns at the feet of God. The big things to us often aren't really the big things. It helps to lift our eyes sometimes.

God may care about the comments formatting on my blog, but if does he probably doesn't care much. It'd be helpful for me to remember that.

If you want to fix my blog with a temporary fix while I try and sort out a perminent one, go to
http://runnoft.blogspot.com/ncr.

I'm gonna try and make it work better.

For some reason the comments on my blog aren't working. At least they aren't for me. Are they working for you?

This is encouraging me to leave the blogger land and finally go join a blogging platform that's good.

Not that it's blogger's fault the comments don't work but comments are one of the main reason I hang around blogger.

Anyway, we'll see what happens.

On 20th February 2011 I posted this blog post saying that by 31st December 2011 I wanted to have $1000 in a savings account and a tidy room.

I'm happy to say that while I had many things on my list of things to achieve which I did not achieve (sit-ups and push-ups anyone?), I did achieve those two. I probably posted them because I thought they were the most achievable, but I partly think I achieved them because I knew I'd blogged about them. Blog accountability. Or maybe the magical power of blogging things into existence.

In light of the great success I have with blogging my goals, while I haven't really made any goals for 2012 (don't get a gender realignment will probably be on the list though), I will say that by 31st December 2012, I hope to have $32 million in a savings account and a tidy room in my holiday house in Gosford.

Now we're talking.

Happy New Year and all that.

I made a resolution to blog everyday in 2012. It's 3am on the 2nd January. I haven't gone to bed yet. I hope this still counts or I failed at the starting line.

Just while I'm here, we invented a new fashion tonight. They're shorts and pants. Very sexy and good for all seasons. If I achieve nothing else this year, after doing this, I would say it's been a successful year.

Here they are, they're called 'Shants'.

"If I'm honest, life seems to be an ever widening circle of acquaintances and take-them-or-leave-them friendships, and an ever shrinking circle of the those friends who you know are your family.

The mountains don't judge us."


I just found this post in my blog folder on my computer. I don't think I wrote it. Did you? Did I copy and paste your blog post?

Whatever the case, I quite like the post.


Photo by AleGranholm.

We had a talk today at work about how we should use social media to promote work. So I decided today to have another week of blogging. This actually has nothing to do with work and doesn't promote it at all. But I was reminded that I have some social media to attend to. I'm terribly bad these days. I think it's partly because I've been spending a lot of time working in the office which doesn't give much food for blogging. I do still watch a lot of YouTube and my new friends, Vimeo. But I don't want to just post videos all the time. Anyway, I promise to blog every day this week.

I won't give you anything if I don't. You can give me grief.

Tomorrow I have nothing on my work agenda except a meeting about a database. I pretty sure it'll be awesome and I'll want to blog about it. I may even promote my workplace. "Let us minister to you, we're getting a database that's so awesome we'll know more about you than Facebook, Google and spam mailers put together!"

But just before I go, while I am blogging about blogging and videos and stuff, this video is pretty rockin'. Violent, but rockin'.

I'm aware that my blogging efforts of late have been rather poor. I have reasonable excuses. But my promise to you is this. I will blog every day between now and next Monday. If I don't, I will take you all out to dinner. A dinner of rice. And you may only get a few grains, but it'll be rice none the less.

Tonight I probably won't say anymore I have stuff to do.

But while we're waiting, on a question that came up at Bible study tonight, do you believe in the physical resurrection of Christ? Why or why not?

The talk I blogged about writing, is now up. You can go here to read about it or you can just listen to it here. Alternatively you can go search for Tom French in iTunes and subscribe to the podcast. Or you could do nothing at all. The options are yours people.

I was just going through my old blog posts and making them more template friendly, and I found this post which I never posted. I wrote it during the time when we'd just lost our senior minister at my old church where I was the Youth Minister. So if you want to see a post that till now has been hidden, go click on the link. To save you the time though, it's just me musing on church law and the significance of paid staff so I can't imagine many of you would be that interested.

I just found a website that will turn my blog into a book. This is a narcissistic dream come true. I've always had secret hopes that people would come across my blog and say "Wow, that's amazing, that should be a book." And then some dedicated editor would go through all 3700 posts and pick the best ones, then make it into a freakin' epic. It'd be awesome. Well, now for a low, low price of $169.65 for the first volume (Dec 2002-Mar 2004) I can have my blog book, with no editing necessary. It's only 460 pages long. Woo!

To tell you the truth, I can't really be bothered making a book of my blog. But feel free to head over to the site and make your own book of my blog. Or in fact, you could just print it all out at home and get it bound at Kinkos. I promise, I'd sign it for you if you did. I mean, it'd be a dream come true.

I stuck up a new talk on the preaching podcast/blog. It's one I did at a school last month. I recorded it on my phone because I thought it might be good to post.

Things have been very quiet on the podcast this year. This isn't for lack of preaching, but lack of access to recordings. But between now and August I should have about seven new talks and sermons to post. So things should speed up a little.

Anyway, if you want to listen, you can go listen to the new one here.

So I've just set up for Amazon Associates. I think it means that I can link to products that I talk about and then you all can click on them and buy them and I get 15% of something.

I got it mainly because I want pretty links. But I figured I might make the most of the pretty links and see if I can make a dime. I've never made a cent off this blog. In fact I'm pretty sure it's cost me at least $20 over the past 9 years or however long I've been blogging. It's hard to keep a slick operation like this going.

I've always refused to stick ads on my blog because they're ugly and I'm not a blog pimp. But I figure this is just letting you buy the stuff that I'm talking about. All I'm doing is encouraging consumerism, not making my blog look ugly. Anyway so let me see what this looks like by showing you a little of my life:

What I'm Reading:

So currently I'm working through a thousand books. But here are the more prominent ones:



Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

Tim Keller this was going to be one of the most important books of our generation for New Testament scholarship. Or something like that. Or maybe he just said I should read it. I'm not sure.

Anyway, it's good. It's a nice look at some of the ideas about the historical Jesus that are out there from a more conservative standpoint.





Planting Missional Churches

This is meant to be the book to read on church planting. And it's pretty darn nice. If only he wrote an Australian edition, it's all very North American-centric.





Tomorrow When the War Began

I'm reading this again because the movie is coming out and I'm reliving my childhood. It's fun but the action is pretty dull compared to almost every other war book I've read.



So there you go. There's my chance to make some money. And now that I look at it, it's a rather ugly way to make money and I feel like a dirty blog pimp. So unless I find a way to make it more pretty, I probably won't do that again.

Update: Actually I've fiddled with it and it's not very intrusive at all any more. It's kinda like the sort of linkage I would do back in the old days when I didn't worship money. So maybe I'll let it stay. But except every blog post from now on to be about a product you can buy. Probably an expensive one.

If you try and comment you'll notice there's a whole new format for comments. It lets you add photos, link to your Google account or whatever, embed YouTube and all sorts of other stuff. It's a whole new era for interactivity that seems a bit overly engineered to me. It's Facebook/Twitterising my comments. I would have rather kept them old and boring, but Haloscan forced me to upgrade or get lost. So as you can see, I upgraded.

Still I do think it looks a little nicer.

Over the past few days I've decided to make more use of my Google Reader. I have started to follow people and the blog posts they share, and I've started sharing blog posts that I like.

I think I like it because I read peoples blogs and think "Gosh, I wish I blogged that." Now with Google Reader I kinda can. Google tells me I have 5 people following my shared, but I wouldn't be surprised if I actually have none.

I'm slowly putting in you folk from Blog Feed so I can share your posts if I like them with all five of my avid followers.

Feel free to follow me if you want. I'm here or you can just search for thomaswench. That'll work too.

Now wasn't that exciting?

If you look to the left you'll notice that this is post 250 of 2009. That's 9 more posts than were done in the whole of 2008. This will be the first full year of blogging where my number of posts has increased from the year before. That's what's underemployment will do for you I say.

I'm back on Blogfeed! Woo!

To celebrate I'm giving everyone free access to my blog! Even to my archives! It's a big day here at runnoft.blogspot.com.

I was in the video store in Enmore with Mil and Jem tonight and a man came up to me and said "Tom French?"

I replied "Yes". I had no idea who the man was.

"I read your blog sometimes."

Wow. Recognised in a video store.

Turns out he is a friend of Lesley's and he reads her blog. We didn't have much more of a conversation than that. He didn't ask me to sign anything. And I didn't find out his name. Oh well.

Hello Man in the Video Store.

Next time I meet a random off the street who recognises me from one of my many fame creating activities, I hope they get a photo with me and tell me they named their first child after me. That'd be pretty cool.

We ended up getting Fever Pitch, the 1997 one, not the Adam Sandler one. It wasn't very good. Colin Firth's character was an idiot who I spent the whole movie hoping the girl would break up with him and leave him for good. It doesn't say much for a romantic comedy when that happens. The Adam Sandler one, dare I say it, was actually much better.

And then Ryan, Martin and I watched Once Upon a Time in China which was cool. Rather silly in the silly Kung Fu movie kinda way, but much more enjoyable then the other one.

That was quite a post.