Soccer

The great thing about soccer, like life, is that's it's totally unpredictable. You never know when you're going to have a good game or a bad game or an indifferent game. When things come good when you least expect it, it's so cool. I still think that it's the bad and indifferent games that really define us. How we react to them show much more about who we are than how we react to the good games. Everybody reacts the same to a good game. It's one of the things that's challenging me the most at the moment. I don't find it too hard to react okay to a bad game of soccer...but life, that's a different story...Even tax-collectors love those who love them! My idea of love is growing and evolving even as I type. I used to think that you find the perfect person and that you live in happiness for ever with them. I realise now that true happiness is found in Jesus and trusting in Him. If you find a person with the same happiness in their life, that is when you can find true love with somebody-you can both grow with Jesus at the centre of your lives, knowing that neither of you is perfect but that there is an honesty and a genuine forgiveness that is, I think, impossible to attain outside of knowing Jesus. How do you forgive somebody for when they hurt you really bad, if you don't understand how much Jesus has forgiven you?

I think that we should be quick to learn and slow to forget what we've learned when it comes to life. I know that I'm slow to learn and quick to forget though. I thank Jesus that more and more, He helps me to throw everything in my life on Him. His yoke truly is light around my life. I forget it so often though. I feel that many things in life come, loosely speaking, in waves-good times are followed by bad are followed by good etc. It's during the 'bad' times, when your faith is tested and you feel as if you are in a potentially life-threatening situation and you think that Jesus has fallen asleep in the boat (or wonder if He's in the boat at all!). It's during these times that we need to remember the past and where He has brought us from and realise that if we are to grow from baby Christians to mature adult Christians, we have to be weened off the mushy food. We need to be strong and unwavering in these situations so that we don't let down our guard; so that if the opportunity arises to spread the good news of the kingdom of God, that we won't deny Jesus.

We mustn't forget what He has thought us, for our own sake. And if we think that we can't remember, then ask Him to remind you. Talk to Him, relate to Him.

All praise and honour to the saviour of the world.

Post-exams post

Well, the exams are finally over. Although it didn't feel like they took all that long really, looking back on them. We only had four after all. It's a good thing the lecturers took it fairly easy on us. Usually in this situation, I feel a big void where the hours of study were. Then I'd go drinking for the evening and probably not wake up til late tomorrow morning. That was all grand but it's only a means to an end and if the end turns out to be an end that isn't the end you think it is, as in an ultimate end, then it's definitely not the best way of getting there. It's kind of hard to see the bigger picture but when it dawns, it's a beauiful thing. Anyway, throughout these exams, I've felt much calmer than usual (if that's possible). I think it was a different kind of relaxed though. I used to not worry about things because worrying doesn't help, especially in exam situations. Now though, I just feel totally....fine. It feels like there's nothing missing from my life, no reason to go doing anything crazy just cos everyone else is doing it. It's a really great feeling. I'm not chasing stuff that I think will satisfy an insatiable thirst. It is the ultimate contentment. Now all I have to do is to try and help other people to come to the same realisation and with God's help, I will move some bit towards that this evening. Three very different circles of friends to be 'juggled' for the next while. I just pray that I don't deny Jesus.

Update

This post is just to get everything in my little black book up on t'internet. My little black book is the little black book that I got as mo mhamaí. The little black book that I got as mo mhamaí is the little black book that I got as mo mhamaí for Christmas. The little black book that I got as mo mhamaí is the little black diary that I got as mo mhamaí for Christmas. The little black diary that I got as mo mhamaí for Christmas is the little black diary that I got as mo mhamaí for Christmas that I am going to write my random 'personal' stuff in...don't ask me why I'm putting it on the web...think of it as back-up I suppose, like The Boy Wonder...or maybe Alfred would be a better illustration. It just struck me how the start of this post is like something that the UL band Free Beer would sing. ('The bog in the hole, the hole in the tree, the branch in the tree.....aaaaaaaaaand the bog down in the valley-oh'. I'm not quite sure what a 'valley-oh' is. I presume it's much the same as a 'valley' but with more surprise factor...
I think I'm going to try to make this fairly random...as already stated and just saying stuff that's on my mind and in that sense, I suppose it might get fairly personal but I don't tend to stray into talking personally about other people cos I don't think that's very cool plus they might start making money off it á la Larry David's neighbour Kramer (the 'real' Kramer) who seems to run some kind of a money-making racket involving a bus and the scant celebrity status somewhat afforded him by his name-sake's appearance in Seinfeld. Anyway, that last bit was as much to remind me of what I seek to achieve (or not) much like The Declaration of Independence.
Actually I've just made a spontaneous split second decision that I'm not going to write what's in my little black diary, or at least not everything that's in there. Maybe just some nuggets of stuff. Okay, so less talk, more action...I wonder would it be feasible to convert the whole English speaking world to say "Let's talk more action" instead of "Less talk, more action". I'm gonna do my best. Also, any little black book stuff will be in a different colour I think, although I can imagine this whole LBB thing dwindling out of my blog fairly fast.
Can ants feel atoms?
Does our thought process at night become more vibrant because most of our senses are not really being used?
Maybe God made the universe so big to give us some idea of the magnitude of his love for us.
Just some follow ups. I've decided, without many proper calculations of any sort, that ANTS CANNOT IN FACT FEEL ATOMS. Now I know this may come as a shock and a surprise to many who have chewed this question over in their mind but I decided on this answer because, an ants feeler is about 10^-4 m across and the diameter of an atom is about 10^-11 m, which means that there is about 7 orders of magnitude in between the two. I suppose a better way of phrasing the question is 'If a human was the size of an ant, would it be able to feel an atom'. I can't remember which book I read it in how small a particle a human finger can sense. It was either the The Life of Pi or A Short History of Nearly Everything. Anyway, for an ant-sized human to feel an atom, considering the human finger is about 10^-2 m across, it would mean in human-sized terms, that we would have to be able to sense a particle of about 10^-9 or seven orders of magnitude smaller. Now I know there's all kinds of other factors involved like nerve endings etc. so that's all I'm going to say about it.
I think these three questions/statements are directly related-late night thinking linking them all. You know when you're lying in bed and you start imagining all kinds of crazy stuff like "Imagine if I had super-powers, what would that be like?" and many relationship-related things like "Maybe when she said that she prefers marmalade to jam, that's because that one time, three years ago, that orange three fell on her donkey when she was in Spain and she inadvertently nurtured a love for oranges because, my how she disliked the incessant braying of that quadruped" (I've learned so much language from The Simpsons including such adjectives as 'incessant' and such educational films as "Lead Paint: Delicious But Deadly," and "Here Comes the Metric System!"). Anyway, yes I have a theory that because our senses such as hearing, looking, tasting and smelling are all pretty much redundant when we're trying to get to sleep, our thinking compensates by kicking into overdrive. Maybe similar to the way blind men have really good hearing...apparently. That's just a theory but if it holds water, I coined it.
The last question I was thinking of was "Why did God make the universe so big?" I came up with a few half-satisfactory answers:
a) Because He could
b) So that it'd be really interesting for us to live in
c) So that, we might have something to compare the magnitude of His love for us with.
I think it really is impossible to understand the size of the universe...absolutely impossible. I was also trying to imagine what it would be like if the universe wasn't so huge...say if it was the size of Castletroy or Limerick, but I haven't got to the end of the packet yet.
Anyway, I think that's enough for one rambling, I better lay out my timetable for study for the next two days.