Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

Bible Stories for Boys: Ehud the Left Handed

For the next three Sundays at Willows Presbyterian the “kids spot” is going to be filled with my favourite stories from the Bible.

I’m kicking it off with Ehud and the Moabites. Ehud is cool because he’s disabled (left handed) and a ninja. I’m going to use Brick Testament pictures.

In the Bible there’s a book called Judges.

It’s about some people God uses to save his people from their enemies.

They’re not special people – most of them are normal people, just like us.

In fact – some of them weren’t even normal – one of them was left handed – are any of you left handed?

His name was Ehud. Being left handed wasn’t much fun. He was different to the other soldiers in Israel’s army.

When Ehud was a young man Israel was being treated very, very badly by a very, very, very fat king called Eglon. Eglon demanded that the Israelites pay him lots of money so that he wouldn’t do nasty things to them.

Ehud and the Israelites didn’t want to serve this king – they wanted God as their king – so Ehud came up with a plan.

He made a short sword and put it on his right thigh under his cloak – because in those days guards didn’t expect to see many left handed people they only really looked on the right.

He marched in to see fat king Eglon with the payment from the Israelites…

…and he told him that he had a secret for his ears only.

The bad King Eglon sent his people out of the room.

And Ehud took out the sword – and buried it in his tummy.

King Eglon was so fat that the sword disappeared.

And Ehud snuck away. Like a ninja.

The guards thought the king was in the toilet – so they didn’t disturb him.

Ehud got back to the Israelites and they attacked the fat dead king Eglon’s army and killed them all. They were free from the bad king Eglon and free to serve God – their king.

Ehud had saved God’s people – even though he was left handed.

The Jesus bit

We are a bit like Israel – we need God’s “judge” to save us from a bad king that’s ruling our lives. We are being ruled by our sin. We want to push God to the side and treat sin as the fat ugly king of our lives.

We need to get rid of this fat ugly king just like Ehud did. And you know what – we have a ninja savior too. Jesus is a bit like a ninja. He dealt with sin in a sneaky way. People were expecting a strong and powerful saviour who would come and kill sin.

Do you know how Jesus got rid of our sin?

This was something a ninja would do. It was sneaky – because people weren’t expecting it. And it was effective.

We need to stab sin in the heart. In fact, the Bible says that if we want to follow God we should cut the sinful parts out. It doesn’t mean
with a sword.

We need our own saviour to cut that sin out – we need Jesus.

Chewing the fat

KFC pulled its “racist” ad this week. And apologised. Dumb.

American cultural imperialism is perhaps the most annoying thing about our buddies in the coalition of the willing. Especially when they are ascribing flaws in their own character to the rest of the world. Nobody else thinks fried chicken is “black people’s food”. We all kind of missed that.

What I’d like to see KFC do is produce a follow up ad. A man standing in a crowd of angry fat Americans. A crowd he calms by the power of fried chicken.

That is all.

Oops, I did it again…

Yesterday’s quest to comment on 100 different blogs had an unexpected side effect. I became embroiled in a “discussion” on a post on the Friendly Atheist. One where a contributor suggested that the heinous acts God allegedly commits in the Old Testament should be rewritten as a Mafia drama.

Here are some of the things the “friendly” atheists at that site had to say about me during the discussion…

“The man’s an ass. A potentially dangerous ass who seems to admire Hitler.”

“Your view is just asinine.”

“I was gonna feed the troll but thought the better of it, especially since he’s shown his psychopathic nature. Besides there were some beautiful arguments put forth here that he ducks instead of addressing so I don’t see much point. Instead, he’s rather like Linus clinging to his blanket but not as benignly.”

“Nathan your arguments have been nothing but equivocating, never answering the questions you were asked, and when you do (and attempt to explain something) you shovel out contradictions one after another.”

“As I said Nathan is hopeless. lol, this only makes me laugh now. sigh.”

Reading back through the thread there were plenty of things that I said that I probably wouldn’t in hindsight. The stuff about Hitler was dumb. And I probably strayed off message a little too much.

I find atheists who get in a huff about how a God they don’t believe in did evil things to be one of the oddest inconsistencies. They’re so passionate about the actions of a being they don’t believe exists. If they’re right, and God is a delusion, then shouldn’t the people who committed the actions be the ones they’re angry at?

I wonder if atheists would take their position on the actions of the deluded (or those thinking they are doing God’s bidding) to the natural conclusion and move to remove the defence of insanity from all criminal proceedings.

My five favourite posts about branding and PR from 2009

My five favourite posts about living in web 2.0 land in 2009

Web 2.0 stuff occupies my thoughts both professionally and personally. Here are six posts (or series) from this year that I thought were vaguely useful for understanding the world of social media…

  1. My top five tips for blogging (all the posts in full)
  2. My “essay” on where you should put stuff online
  3. A list of “new rules” for the web
  4. Some posts about behaviour around the web – how to lose friends and alienate bloggers, how not to lose friends and alienate bloggers, an exploration of the nature of blogging
  5. A look at the “five types of bloggers“.
  6. A look at oversharing in your status updates – for Christians and for everybody

My five favourite “how to” posts from 2009

I like finding tips around the web – and I like making up my own tips and posting them as lists. Here are five that I particularly liked from 2009.

  1. My “Recipe for Sizzler’s Cheese Toast
  2. My “five non essential skills”
  3. My “Tips for writing complaint letters
  4. My “Tips for finding a good cafe
  5. My “How to make scrambled eggs with a coffee machine

My six favourite arguments from 2009

The little post that stirred up a hornets net of atheists and caused a shift in service providers was almost worth the effort of blogging for a year all by itself. Here are my six favourite debates from 2009…

  1. Five things that would make atheists seem nicer
  2. The one where I admit to not enjoying U2 and then suggest some alternatives
  3. The one where I suggest it’s ok to treat subjective issues objectively.
  4. The one about an “open source” approach to producing ministry resources (music especially) that sprung out of this amazing discussion at Simone’s blog.
  5. The one where a pastor I don’t know took my doctrine of creation to task – and I didn’t like that very much – and my apology for being rude about it.
  6. The one where I dared to suggest parents shouldn’t overshare on Facebook.

Thank you to those of you who commented here throughout the year – I do enjoy a good verbal stoush.

Spreading the love

Everybody loves getting comments.

I’m aiming to comment on 100 other people’s blogs today. So far I’m at 62. Have I been to yours?

Do you feel less special knowing that you are part of a mammoth social 2.0 experiment?

Super Mario Mac

Mac decals are fun. I’m not sure if I’d ever deface my beautiful computer. But this one’s a cracker.

From Etsy.

Mario in the raw

Inside every Italian plumber there’s a rounded bald man trying to escape.

From here.

Wholesome fun

Would your youth group go to the beach if it wasn’t for issues of purity? Perhaps you should purchase a swag of wholesomewear swim suits for the ladies…

Because encouraging the wearing of board shorts and a sun shirt is just too much hassle.

If Picasso drew comics…

I’m not surprised that Picasso style comics haven’t taken off. You can’t cheer for a guy who looks like this…

…or this.

From this gallery here.

If you did want to try your hand at creating Picasso-esque comic characters you could do worse than use the “Mr Picasso Head” webapp… I’ll post my Picasso picture when it gets added to the gallery.

Avatar = plot avarice

Turns out that not only did James Cameron rip off Fern Gully, but Pocahontas as well. Perhaps there are only six unique plots in the world after all…

At the core of each of these stories is a greedy person trying to rip off the naive and innocent.

Here’s a reworking of a Pocahontas synopsis or script or something for the purpose of making the point.

Via boingboing.

Bacteria future

This little picture of Mario might look like any old picture of an old time game character…

But looks, as we know, can be deceiving.

This little Mario is made from bacteria.

My top five posts about ninjas

You probably didn’t see these first time around. But ninjas are sneaky – so that’s understandable.

The black parade

Shirt of the Day: Ninja Code

For people who know CSS and like ninjas… Buy it here.

Ninjitsuit

My first thought when reading about this new, controversial “Burquini” the Islamic bikini invented by an Australian and banned in France (two things that make something more likely to be awesome) was that it looks pretty much like a ninja suit.

Am I right? Yeah. Which got me thinking further – firstly, I didn’t know what a ninja suit was actually called – which was a bit of a gap in my ninja arsenal. For the record it’s a shinobi shozoko. But it’s always dangerous to put a ninja in a box.

Ninjafy your car

After you’ve got things in the kitchen to a dangerously ninjafied status it’s time to turn your car into a lean, mean, killing machine (figuratively not literally).

Pirates v Ninjas: Black and white issue

First there was ninja v ninja checkers – and now a chance to settle the age old question – pirates v ninjas.