Well, fellow bloggers, the end of the week is nigh, as is the end of the Weekes if you know what i mean. it has been a pleasure getting to know Daniel Rolf Weekes over the past 2 yrs and, Danny boy, please come back soon! We will miss you terribly - your witty comments and your weird obsession with cycling. Most of all though we will miss stuff like 'the things that go on...' and 'smokes'. This is not the end so no tears please, just 'see ya later, you flaming galah!' (did I spell that right?).

I went to see RADIOHEAD last night. There are no words. It was unbelievable. Asian Dub Foundation were in support but they weren't perhaps as amazing... Too political and crap! But RADIOHEAD... I just can't express how good it was. You would have to have been there. They were amazing. Brilliant sound, brilliant graphics, amazing lights, amazing everything really.

Fav moments - Paranoid Android and Karma Police and when Thom Yorke got the crowd all singing 'for a minute then I lost myself'. Electric. It was brilliant. And when 4 wee men climbed up those spindly wee ladders onto the lighting rig to do the lights throughout the concert! Mental - I'd love that job!

Least fav moment - when everyone started to mosh and I thought I was going to die!!

What was also quite funny was that during The Dub (haha) this guy and his girlfriend standing in front of us were giving it dixsie with the dancing - hilarious because the rest of the crowd were standing absolutely still because they were there to see radiohead and couldn't care less about the Dub! We laughed. The guy almost crushed a few of us with his wild gyrating and moshing around and headbanging.

If you get the chance to go see RADIOHEAD do it. A quality night out and well worth every penny!

This weekend we had Kirk, Stu Neill and Dave Steele over. I don't think I have ever laughed so much in my life. Funny, funny boys and girls! It is class having people over to stay - and especially if they are into shopping. Good times, good fellowship. And not to mention the brethren-ness. Don't you hate it when people have private jokes and you don't have a clue what they are talking about?

Is anyone else reading Pete Martin's blog spot - very interesting. I don't have any say in what happens in NI any more because I am on the electoral role over here now but it is so strange that even door-to-door canvassers just stuff the stuff through your letter box and then leg it! I like Mark Durkin.

I can't wait to get home at Christmas, it has been way, way too long. I haven't been home since May (apart from 24 hrs in sept before Brazil). In May I was home for the weekend on a surprise visit which was nice. 10 whole days though - wooohoooo!! see you soon!

We had a week of 24/7 prayer a couple of weeks ago and God taught me some stuff. He kept on asking me (through persistent questioning in my mind) 'what do you see'. You know when your teacher asks you a question and you know they have one specific answer in mind but you don't know what it is? I felt like that - as if God knew what answer he wanted but I wasn't getting it.

I have been thinking about it ever since and these are my conclusions (some of them are pretty obvious!):

1. What we see will determine how we act because we are reactive.
2. God is at work in the 'world' as much if not more than he is in the 'church'.
3. I can see God more and more in the world of media - Athlete, Daniel Beddingfield, Lifehouse, Creed, Bono,blah blah - lots of Christians in music not to mention Cameron from Big Brother and all sorts of other people I can't be arsed writing down.
4. I want to see the way Jesus saw. I want to do the things I see the father doing (john 5:19) and I want to see people as he sees them - not just how I see them.


I had a picture/vision thing a while ago about all this (which doesn't happen very often to me)... I was walking down a busy high street, loads of people walking towards me. They all looked pretty normal and decent. They were hurrying to and from work and to the train or whatever - they were busy. Everything looked normal but I could hear this awful wailing noise, like people in serious anguish and pain. I didn't know where it was coming from so I asked God and as I turned around to look at the backs of these people heads I could see an awful face - you know like the scream painting - these normal looking people all had some kind of other face on the back of their heads and it was expressing deep anguish by this wailing noise. I just felt God showing me to look beyond the front that people portray to the world and deal with people and not deeds or facades.

What we see will determine how we act.

I was in my young offenders centre today. I was talking to 2 guys who are in for pretty serious crimes. One has a court hearing sometime this month and he could get life - he's 18. The other, also 18, has no family of any kind, they are either dead or in another country and don't care about him at all and he is about to be sent down for 5 yrs. They could not be more different.

The one with no family has become a Christian and he was talking to the other one about how you could make something of yourself no matter what you had done or where you had been and how there would always be someone who would give you a second chance. The other one was saying how he would never be anything or do anything with his life. No one would ever hire him to work so he couldn't break the cycle of crime because he couldn't get a job. He said he was worth nothing and had nothing to lose even if he went down for life. He hasn't seen anyone in his family the whole time he has been on remand (4mths) even though they are around and could visit.

So sad. Those are just 2 stories out of about a milllion. God makes such a difference - hope is an amazing thing that can carry a person through the hardest times ever. And despair destroys everything it touches.

I had to lead the meeting this week at church - kind of like a Bridge-the-Gap thing. I had it all set up but then on Thursday I discovered that the people I had asked to speak thought they were doing a drum solo in December, not a speaking bit in November!! (I don't have any idea where that came from) So I was a bit stuffed! I quickly tried to pull some other stuff together but it all just felt wrong.

It felt like I was just doing a meeting for the sake of doing a meeting. It was too late to ask anyone else to speak - it wouldn't be fair at such short notice - so I said that I would speak. But again, I didn't feel like God had given me anything to say specifically to the church so I was just saying something for the sake of saying something - so annoying.

Anyway, by the time it got to Sunday morning (oh, and I had a youth cell leader training day all day saturday that I was running) I was exhausted and not feeling like doing anything! It went ok in the end - nothing ground breakingly new or earth shattering and I spoke for all of 6/7mins.

It just made me think - how often do I go to church just because it is the thing to do and not out of a burning desire to worship God and how often is what I hear at church the result of there having to be a meeting? Food for thought.