Last Post: Tears to the eyes
Today is VE day: Victory in Europe Day. 75 years ago peace broke out in Europe, and today as Europe struggles along mostly locked down with an unseen enemy laying waste to the economies and life of the countries, trumpeters and buglers are being encouraged to play the Last Post at 2.55pm from their homes. …
Covid-19 Tips from Nigeria: A second burial Ceremony
It’s hard in these coronavirus lockdown days when loved ones die and you can’t be with them at the end and when funerals can’t happen. Christians know it doesn’t really matter for the dead, but for the living. Some funerals are being live-streamed, but every attempt falls short. What can be done? It occurred to …
Job, Poetry & Coronavirus
If Leviticus is the deathbed of many a read-the-Bible-in-a-year resolutions, I reckon Job is generally just ignored or never reached, which is both a pity and quite understandable. Happening to read it in the last month or so with my 11-year old daughter Rebekah, I’ve really been struck, however, by its relevance as wisdom for …
April 16: House Move!
In Brief In Glasgow: We’re GO for completing buying our new flat moving in from tomorrow, Friday! The UK’s been in lockdown for about 3 weeks or so. We switched a little into home school mode before Easter, but having a garden would be nice. One of Julie’s elderly relatives (Ethel) is sick with Covid-19. …
Spiritual Beings
My smart friend and colleague Ben Kuwitzky quotes from Martin Luther: “If God had wanted me to die thinking I was a clever fellow, he would not have got me into the business of translating the Bible.” …and even more so when you’re working outside your own culture. I was reminded of one of my …
Mercy seat or atoning sacrifice?
One of the newest English language Bible translations has got an update. It’s not radical. About the only remarkable change they highlight is switching the translation in Romans 3:25 from the key term atoning sacrifice to mercy seat. As a committee we adopted “mercy seat” for a number of reasons, but we recognize that “propitiation” …
Extra UK stats on Coronavirus
I know it’s bad to obsess about statistics for live issues – whether election results or pandemics – but whilst recognising there are individual people and tragedies behind every number I have to admit it has been fascinating to look at stats on worldometers.info and gov.uk and Nigerian Centre for Disease Control. One thing is …
Covid-19: Coping with lockdown
Just as we were expecting to be packing up to head to Nigeria, the world went crazy with this Covid-19 Coronavirus virus and Nigeria very sensibly shut down all its international airports. We had already received advice from Wycliffe Bible Translators to stay where we were, so we’re here in the UK a bit longer. …
Obligatory Covid-19 update
Just as things were coming together for us to head back to Nigeria (about a month later than we had hoped), things have got a little lively and unpredictable with this troubling Coronavirus/Covid-19. Airlines are still flying to Nigeria, but it’s possible in a month they won’t be. So it’s looking increasingly likely we may …
