Somehow it seems like no-one on the planet missed the fact that it was my birthday last Sunday.

I was so blessed to spend what felt like the entire day going through all of the online birthday wishes I received.

Thank you all so much!

My birthday has left me with a bit of a problem though – a nice problem, but one which is causing me no small amount of stress.

I was given money for my birthday by a variety of people and have a total of a little over $200 to spend.

My wife is insisting that I spend the money on myself and really wants me to spend it on something I will get excited about.

I’m at a complete loss as to what to get though, so I’m asking you for help.

What should I buy?

I have no hobbies, no particular interests… so what can I get that I’ll be suitably excited about.

HELP!

I read a fascinating article this weekend on why devices like the iPad may just about spell the end for printed books. The article (read it here) was written by Craig Mod and shared on twitter by Michael Hyatt.

Craig’s article is well written and well thought through, not to mention insightful and forward-thinking. However, it misses one very serious point in my opinion:

There are limitations to where I can take an iPad.

Sure, new tablet/slate/pad devices open up wonderful new possibilities for publishing and can help us redefine how we read and consume content. There are times though, when I just want to sit (or lay) and let my mind run rampant with the imagery in a good book – and many of those times I’m in places a $500 piece of hardware simply can’t go.

• I’m not going to risk dropping an iPad in the bath the way I would a book.
• I’m not going to lay on an inflatable in the swimming pool reading on an iPad.
• I’m not going to read from my iPad on the beach when at any moment my kids could drag me into a game or into the ocean for a swim.

The cost is simply too prohibitive.

If I put my $5 book down on my towel while I let my kids try to bury me in the sand and someone steals it then it will be annoying but no great loss.

If I were to put my iPad down on my towel while going off to play with the kids though, I’m just inviting someone to run off with a device that it would have taken me years to save up for – and there’s no way I’d take that thing anywhere near water.

I’m excited about the possibilities that the iPad and it’s competitors bring and I’m excited about the future of such devices but the future where a device can store and display my books and yet be cheap enough to risk losing at the beach or dropping in the bath seems a very long way away.

One day I will probably look back on this post and laugh at my lack of vision but today a starting price of $499 for the iPad plus $30 a month for a 3g data plan makes me think that it will be decades at least before I even consider not buying printed books any more!

As part of that, I had to write an explanation of what this word ‘hosting’ that we geeks throw around so much actually means and I thought I’d share it with you today, seeing as it’s Tech Tuesday after all.

So what is hosting, what does it involve and why do you need it?

Imagine you wanted to open a store selling some kind of product, let’s say toothbrushes.

• First thing you need is a business plan.
• Then you need a name for your business.
• Next, you need to find somewhere to locate your store.
• When you’ve found the perfect location, you need to rent a building
• The building needs to be decorated to your taste
• Then you put your sign on the front and open for business
• To get customers coming through the door, you need to advertise.
• Finally, you need to keep everything fresh. New products, new displays, and constant restocking.

Your blog or website may not be set up to sell anything but having a one means you need to follow those same basic rules:

1. Have a plan. Why are you blogging, what will you blog about, how often will you blog?
2. Think up a name for your blog that fits with what you will be blogging about. This will then be the Domain Name you want to purchase.
3. Next, you need to find somewhere to locate your blog. That’s the Web Host.
4. You rent some web space from your chosen host with what’s called a Hosting Plan.
5. Once you’ve rented the space, you need to decide what blogging software to use. We recommend Wordpress.
6. You install your blogging software into your web space and then you have to decorate it. If you’re not comfortable doing the decoration yourself, you can get a web designer to do it for you.
7. Once the design is all done, you need to start blogging. Writing new posts on a regular basis is important!
8. You can advertise your blog in a whole host of ways. Some of the most popular are: by leaving comments on other people’s blogs, joining twitter and facebook and telling all your friends about it.
9. Keep writing new posts to keep your blog fresh and interesting – and tinker with the design every so often to give it a fresh feel.

I hope this has helped you understand a little better what hosting is, if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

That’s not up for debate, it’s a fact.

At the moment, I do almost nothing at all to help other people in terms of time, resources, finance or even prayer.

Oh, I can justify everything I do and I can justify where all my money goes. Sure I can.

When it comes down to it though, if I need to try to justify what I do do and what I spend, I’m probably not doing the right things and spending my money the right way.

1 John 3: 16-24

¹⁶This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. ¹⁷If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? ¹⁸Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. ¹⁹This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence ²⁰whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

²¹Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God ²²and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. ²³And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. ²⁴Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

This week’s carnival is on Kindness – something I didn’t think I knew how to write about but I have been shown extraordinary kindness over the past few months and feel that I know at least a little about it now.

A couple of months ago, everything started getting too much for me and I had to draw back from pretty much everything.

I was stressed beyond anything I had experienced before, tired, grouchy and unable to cope with anything. I stopped blogging, stopped tweeting, stopped answering emails, stopped reading blog posts, stopped everything really.

I just couldn’t do it.

That was back in December and I’ve been that way ever since.

Most days, simply answering an email was too stressful for me. I slipped into depression and have been taking medication to try to get me back on track.

What has truly amazed me is the loving kindness shown to me by people I barely even know and most of whom I have never met in person.

It seems that barely a day goes by where I don’t receive an email or tweet from someone somewhere in the world checking up on me and telling me that they’re praying for me.

I’ve broken nearly all the rules of social media by barely blogging and doing poorly written posts when I do, not engaging on facebook or twitter and not connecting with online friends.

Yet for no earthly reason, so many people have stuck by me. It’s amazing.

I don’t add anything to this community, I haven’t been bringing anything of any value to people’s lives and yet there they are, telling me they miss me, praying for me, thinking about me. It’s beyond my comprehension.

The phrase I used just now is probably the key though: “no earthly reason”. You see, in human terms there’s no reason why people I’ve never met would still be praying for me months down the line. In human terms the kindness I’ve been shown is extravagant to say the least.

But many, if not most of the people I’m talking about do not do things on human terms. There is no earthly reason, but there is a heavenly reason.

God shows us his unfailing, unending loving kindness and we cannot help but do the same to each other. What I’ve been experiencing is the Church BEING the Church. Not tearing me down for my failures but lifting me up, not forgetting me and leaving me behind but carrying me through.

I am on the road to recovery. I’ve been able to do some simple things like reply to emails in the last week or so that I haven’t been able to do for a while but it’s a rocky road and sometimes I feel like I take one step forward only to take two BIG steps back.

By the grace of God I’m getting there and I truly appreciate the love, kindness and support shown to me by so many people over the last couple of months.

Thank you all for your kindness.

I mean it.

We started to talk about what we could do as a family to help others and decided to start saving the money to pay for a well in a third world country.

As we were researching what organizations provide clean water to villages in the third world, we saw that World Vision are partnering with Proctor and Gamble to provide PUR water purification packets to people in Haiti.

Each PUR packet can clean bacteria, dirt and other pollutants out of ten liters of water (about 20 bottles) meaning each packet can clean enough water for a family for a whole day – and each packet costs just twenty cents so a $20 donation will give a family clean water for 100 days.

We wondered if we had enough change laying around the house to make a $20 donation so we went around searching through drawers, emptying out piggy banks and rifling through wallets and purses to see what we could come up with.

Between the five of us we found $28.59 – and are giving it all to World Vision.

After all, what use is there in having money lying around the house while people are suffering and even dying from not having something as basic as clean water?

We’re not stopping there though, we’re going to keep collecting money from wherever we can find it.

I’d like to challenge you today to join us in giving Change for Clean Water.

Everyone has money lying around doing nothing, maybe waiting for a ‘rainy day’. Well it’s a rainy day today for thousands of people and YOU can help them.

Would you join us by giving your spare change to help people in Haiti?

You can either donate the money directly to World Vision or send it to us through PayPal and we’ll add it to the rest of the money we collect and send it to World Vision all together.

If you want to send us money through paypal, just go to paypal.com and click on the ‘Send Money’ link. Please send the money to peter@godserve.co.uk

Any amount will do, whether it’s a dollar or a hundred thousand dollars. Let your spare change help World Vision save lives today.

You’ve mowed the lawn and are sitting inside having lunch and some refreshing lemonade with your family.

Suddenly, everything begins to shake violently, cracks start appearing in the walls, bits of plaster are falling all around you and things are crashing to the floor from shelves all around. The kids are screaming and you jump up and drag them outside as quickly as possible.

Moments later, the house crashes down behind you, leaving a pile of sticks and rubble looking something like this:

You look down the street and see total devastation:

You realize you left your wallet, phone and everything else inside the house – including your car keys, which wouldn’t matter anyway because your car looks a little like this:

You hear a baby crying underneath the rubble of one of the houses down the street and run over to help. The house is almost completely destroyed except for a couple of walls in one corner which just happens to be the baby’s room. as you start to pick your way across the rubble to the room, you see the mangled and bloodied bodies of the baby’s parents lying lifeless under the boards you’re standing on.

Reaching the baby, you life her from her crib which was miraculously untouched by the devastation.

What do you do now? Seriously, what would you do?

You left your wallet inside the house, if you try to go to the bank, that won’t help because it looks like this:

You have no money, no transport, no food, no water, nowhere to shelter, no clean clothes, no diapers for the baby, no sanitary supplies, NOTHING.

What would you do?

Where would you even go to the bathroom?

Think about it for a moment. what would you do? How would you feed your family? How would you even give your kids a drink when they were thirsty?

You might find a little money in your pockets but even if you can get to the store, it probably looks like this:

Then there’s the immediate problems to deal with. You can hear screams and cries for help coming from the collapsed buildings all around you. How do you get people out? More importantly, what do you do for those you can’t get out right away? How do you comfort them? How do you stop the screams?

What about your friends and other family? Are they safe? Did the building they were in survive? How do you find out with no phone and no car?

Do you sit and wait for the authorities to help? Are they even coming? If so, When will they get to you?

Think about it. What would you DO?

This is the situation that hundreds of thousands of people around the world are suddenly faced with every year as natural disasters strike around the globe. It’s the situation faced by those affected by hurricane Katrina, it was the situation faced by people in Indonesia after the tsunami hit and it’s the situation faced by the survivors of the earthquake in Haiti.

Put yourself in their position for a moment. What would you have done that first day? How would you have survived and kept your family alive? How would you have coped with the cries from your children as their hungry bodies begged them for food and water?

Would you have been there alongside the people looting stores, desperate for food and supplies after not eating for days?

How about now, weeks after the event when there seems to be no hope for recovery?

Thousands are still living in tents, totally dependent on handouts for food and water. There’s little or no prospect for jobs. No way to produce their own food, no security at night, no privacy, no heating or air conditioning – and a rainy season on its way.

Put yourselves in their situation today – and then consider what you have done and are doing to help.

Luke 6:31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

I’m not big on celebrating ever commercial rip-off day that the greetings card companies come up with but February 14th is about romance and love and commitment and I AM big on those things.

My amazing wife is working all weekend so we’ll hardly see each other on the day itself so we’ve decided to celebrate it a few days early – after all, it’s not the date that matters but the feelings and sentiment.

My beautiful wife, Debbie

Today, in honor of my wife and this celebration of love, I am dedicating this blog to her. Those of you who have visited before may have noticed that I’ve swapped out the tree on the right-hand side for a picture of us and have changed the banner at the top of the front page.

I can’t say enough about how much I love my wife and how amazing she is. I am so honored and proud to be her husband and I marvel daily as to why she would ever have chosen me.

After God made Debbie, he broke the mold because he decided that the world wasn’t big enough for more than one person as incredibly beautiful, intelligent, loving, caring and wonderful as she is.

We’ve been married for twelve and a half years now and my one wish is that we had met earlier so that we could already have spent more time together.

To me, marriage is the ultimate public declaration of love, commitment, friendship and devotion. To say I’m married to my wife is to show that she, above all other women on the planet has my heart, my loyalty and my passion.

God alone comes before my wife, and she would want it no other way. Besides the inestimable gift of my salvation by Jesus Christ, meeting and marrying Debbie is by far the greatest thing to have ever happened to me.

In case I’m not being clear:

I LOVE MY WIFE – SHE’S TOTALLY AWESOME!!!

I just thought you should know!

Here’s my offering:

Today’s carnival topic is: Patience.

I could tell you lots of stories about patience that my wife has told me. She’s a nurse, so she sees patience all the time.

Oh, wait, that’s patienTS not patienCE…..

That’s harder then….

They say patience is a virtue. By that reckoning I’m not very virtuous.

I’m pretty good at being patient with people outside of my immediate family, but with my wife and kids, I think my patience ran out a day or so after my first daughter was born – and has never returned!

That’s something I am incredibly ashamed about.

I’m sure God has me at home looking after my kids all day as a way of teaching me patience but I’m obviously a VERY slow learner!

One day I may actually know something about patience and so I’ll write about it from a position of understanding.

Right now though, I know I have patience away from my family but not WITH them – so I can’t profess to know or understand anything about the subject.

I wish I did. For my family’s sake and mine.

Patience is DEFINITELY something I need to learn!

If I hadn’t heard all of the uproar and controversy before the game (like this, this and even this), I would have thought it was OK but the pre-game anger and objections made it absolutely WONDERFUL!

Where was the controversy? Where was the heavily right-leaning advocacy?

Nowhere in site, that’s where!

Instead, all we saw was a loving Mom telling us that she cares for her son.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all.

I loved it. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

I wasn’t laughing because I thought that somehow the right had pulled one over on the left, I wasn’t laughing maliciously at all. If the tables had been turned, the conservatives would have been just as quick to judge and condemn.

I was laughing at human nature, that innate capacity we have of making judgments based on the most tenuous evidence.

We’ve all done it and we all do it.

Whether it’s a person who makes a bad first impression on us, someone we work with that we’ve never taken the time to get to know yet have formed an opinion about or that televangelist whose forty-plus years of ministry we dismiss because of a five minute snippet of them we once saw, we all make rash, uninformed, incorrect assumptions and judgments about people and situations.

The Focus on the Family Super Bowl Ad has reminded me to stop and take a breath before I pass judgement and make sure I make decisions based on actual facts, not my own imagination.

How about you? Have you ever got upset or indignant about something only to find you didn’t have your facts straight?