Judging...

You have to watch this video, unfortunately I can't embed it, so here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk

What a reaction!! Lisa Schwarzbaum, writer for US celebrity magazine Entertainment Weekly, said the performance was a powerful reality check.

She wrote: "In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging - the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts - the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace.

"She pierced my defences. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective."

I know that one of my character flaws is appearance. I don't pride myself on my appearance, but, for example, Susan Boyle would not be my first, or indeed 50th choice (by looking at her) for say an evangelistic outreach. I tend to go with the Hillsong philosophy of keep the good looking people at the front.

However, that video, and those words from Lisa Schwarzbaum have reminded me of God's grace, he made us all, he loves us all and he chose us all. We shouldn't dismiss people because of anything, and I more than most need to remember that.

Lost in Wonder...

Most Christians at some point will have seen or at least heard of Louis Giglio, and his amazing way of showing God's glory through images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

However I just saw this and it blew me away:

Please ignore the crap music. The crew was made up of 3 men; Frank F. Borman, James A. Lovell and William A. Anders. Now, back in 1968, it was commonplace for Americans to be in regular attendance to a church, indeed it was almost socially unacceptable to be successful and not be in church on a Sunday.

However, I like to think that on that Christmas eve, they were so blown away by it, that the only words they could use were those words of God's creation. NASA gave the crew just one instruction for their Christmas Eve broadcast that they knew would be broadcast across the world: "Say something appropriate".

In his autobiography, Countdown, Frank Borman later wrote, "There was one more impression we wanted to transmit: our feeling of closeness to the Creator of all things. This was Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968, and I handed Jim and Bill their lines from the Holy Scriptures."

I can't find much about the other 2 guys, other than William (Bill) gave up organised religion after his missions, but as I understand it, his perspective was changed so vastly that he felt organised religion was wrong and maintained a faith with God.

Atheists mounted a legal battle about the Apollo 8 reading, and as such, Buzz Aldrin was banned from reading from the bible on the Apollo 11 mission. Madalyn Murray-O'Hair was the person behind the lawsuit and a self-proclaimed atheist leader. Although she had much Christian hate-mail, it was ironically an Atheist follower who chopped her up and spread her body parts over a Texan Ranch.

So anyway, if you can't find the words to worship, get lost in the wonder of the world. If you can't, then jump on a space shuttle and see the glory in orbit.