We ate apples and oranges for breakfast four days a week
19 June 2008 Jeff Gill
My mother believed in eating healthful food. When I was a boy I fantasized about having my tonsils removed because they gave you ice cream after the operation.
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Insomnia
13 May 2008 Christine Gill
Sometimes, when I was 14, I would tell my mother that I was going to sleep at Shiree’s house that night. And Shiree would tell her mother that she was going to sleep at my house. And we would wander the streets of our little village for hours when everyone else was sleeping and sometimes we’d try and get some sleep in the stairway in the flats (but it smelled like pee in there) and sometimes we’d wrap ourselves in my coat (she didn’t have one) and try and get warm and to sleep in the doorway of the community centre. And finally, 5 am would come, and daylight, and we’d wander around the streets again, waiting for the milkman to come and leave us some milk (and sometimes, if we were lucky, yogurt!) on someone’s doorstep. And we’d drink our milk and continue to wander and wonder why we decided to stay out all night anyway, and let’s not do it again, is it?
But we did.
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The good Samaritan goes home
20 April 2008 Jeff Gill
Inspired by this sketch I wrote a sketch which avoids the wife-hating and features a ninja:
Joanna: Where is he? He should have been home ages ago. She gasps. What if he was the one they attacked! No, they said he was a Jew. But Nathan looks like a Jew sometimes when the light is low…
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tags: drama,
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That's well neighbourly! - updated
20 April 2008 Jeff Gill
This weekend our church is looking at the story of the good Samaritan. I want to rewrite it for my class of 10-13 year-olds and set it in high school. (For those of you outside the UK secondary education starts at age 11 here.) I found some interesting retellings laying around the internet: here (scroll down), here and here, but none of them are really what I need. How do you think I should update the cast?
Who are the attackers?
Who is the victim?
The priest?
The levite?
The Samaritan?
The innkeeper?
If all goes well, I shall put a working draft story online in a day or two for your further comments and sugestions.
Thanks!
UPDATE
I ended up not rewriting the story beforehand. Instead, I did it live as a mad lib with my class. They loved it. And they heard the story three times, once proper and twice silly. AND they all asked for a copy of their own. Here is their story with a little help from the TNIV:
Once a footballer slide tackled Jesus to test him. ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit fantastic life?’
‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’
He answered, ‘‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’‘
‘You have answered Jeffly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’
But he wanted to sit himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’
In reply Jesus said: ‘Conor was going down from Tesco to i61, when he fell into the hands of terrorists. They stripped him of his table, karate chopped him and went away, leaving him half hairy. A referee happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side of the Aston Martin. So too, a fit, sporty girl when she came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side of the elephant. But a nerd, as he read, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on 7up and lemon juice Then he put the man on his own ferret, brought him to Jamaica and took care of him. The next day he took out two dollars and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will paint you for any extra expense you may have.’
‘Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the terrorists?’
The footballer replied, ‘The one who had mercy on him.’
Jesus told him, ‘Go and do likewise.’
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tags: children,
i61,
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That Floor
23 March 2008 Christine Gill
2 years ago, Jeff was downstairs in his office graphically designing to his heart’s content. The little daughter was at playgroup and the son was at school and I was upstairs in the little daughter’s room scrubbing away at her floor which used to be shiny and white but had lately been a bit dingy and needing a new coat of paint…
So there I was, scrubbing-brush in hand, scrubbing at the floor with everything I had when… (dun-dun-dun) the phone rang (which is more of a brrrrrrrrrng than a dun-dun-dun really, though a dun-dun-dun phone would really be kinda cool dontcha think?)
Jeff is the phone answering person in our house and so Jeff answered the phone.
He paced the living room (because Jeff has a hard time praying or talking on the phone without pacing) and I kept hearing him saying “o-o-okay!” not with a nervous stammer but with his happy stammer, he doesn’t really have a stammer but it was a bit like “o-o-okay” and I have a hard time describing it any differently than that.
He was happy. We hadn’t been very happy in the past couple of weeks, our dreams of doing church in a different way, in a way that people who didn’t like church could connect with… we felt those dreams had been taken away from us… but we really felt that those dreams we had for a new way of doing it – were from God.
But Jeff sounded happy on the phone and I was dying to hear the other side of the conversation.
I went downstairs “Jeff, who is it?”, I mouthed at him, as sharply as mouthing would allow me to.
He mouthed back “Steve” and turned to pace the other way.
Steve and Gill were a couple at our church who we had always thought would be our pastors. They had connected with us as no one had before, they had shared with the church a vision that we were just so sure was from God for a way of doing church that was just not terrifying to people who were coming through those church doors for the first time. We had thought they were going to be our pastors… but some people didn’t agree that they were right for the church that we were in… The dream was… over?
Well, I wasn’t getting any hints from Jeff as to what this phone call was about (other than it was something exciting), so I went back upstairs and resumed my work of getting that floor ready for a coat of paint.
He FINALLY got off the dang phone and I swear was up those stairs in 3 strides.
“We are starting a church… in a pub”
We jumped. Up and Down. On that floor.
i61 was born a few weeks later. Our first meeting was on Easter Sunday 2006 and… It’s now Easter 2008, and that floor still hasn’t been painted. It’s been a busy 2 years. But so SO worth it.
More fun than anything. Happy Happy Easter!
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tags: i61,
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Stupid, evil credit cards 2
21 March 2008 Jeff Gill
I wrote before that our two iMacs were on a 12 MONTHS INTEREST-FREE ON BALANCE TRANSFERS credit card from MBNA. Those twelve months ended near the beginning of March. Because I am working hard on managing our money, I set a date two weeks before the 12 months ended, and I paid off the card on that date.
I was obviously not pleased then when I opened my latest statement to find that I have been charged enough interest to wipe out half the interest I earned by the smart thing I did.
When I called MBNA to ask them to clear up the obvious mistake they had made, I was informed that ‘12 months’ doesn’t actually mean 12 months. In my case it turns out that ‘12 months’ meant 11 months and two days.
I said to the call centre person, Doesn’t it seem little dishonest to offer me 12 months with no interest but only give me 11 months and two days? And they said, and I quote: Blah blah blah blah policy blah blah clearly stated blah blah blah nothing I can do blah blah get off of our free phone line, you worthless piece of lichen.
The moral of this story is that credit card companies (and, even more so, insurance companies but you knew that already) are Evil.
Always assume the headline is a lie.
Always read the fine print.
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tags: debt,
money,
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Jesus's job interview
17 March 2008 Jeff Gill
I wrote and Christine and I performed this sketch at our church on Sunday. Christine would be a brilliant HR person.
Welcome to Saviours PLC, Jesus. Is it okay for me to call you Jesus?
Yes, that’s fine.
So you would like to become a saviour?
That’s right.
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tags: drama,
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What's Your Condition?
25 February 2008 Jeff Gill
My favourite wife has despression. She’s also a happy person. She’s also a brilliant speaker. She told the story of her journey into happiness at our church on Sunday. It is a story worth hearing. I promise I’m not saying that just because I am married to her. Have a listen (23 minutes)
Also, you might enjoy checking out Christine’s related project on Flickr, Room 37
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tags: church,
depression,
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Frantic five minutes
22 February 2008 Christine Gill
I had to leave. It was time to go. The daughter would be getting out of school in less than 15 minutes and I couldn’t find the stupid car keys. Where were they?
Where were they?
There weren’t in there and they weren’t under there and they weren’t behind there and they were completely gone and had ceased to exist and I was gonna have to get a taxi or something and I’d be so so incredibly late and the teacher would give me that look again. And I’d feel ashamed. I am a rotten mother because I do not put my keys away properly in a place where I can find them and my children suffer because of it. There she would be, the 4 year old daughter, standing in the cold and not knowing if I would ever come. A stiff wind would blow to dry the tears that fell…
I said to God, “Father!”, I said, “Help me find the keys, please, I need to know where they are or there will be much suffering” (this is the extended version of what I said)
And in desperation I raised my hand to my head like a damsel in one of those old, silent movies… and the keys were in my hand.
Now. What have we learned today ?
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tags: parenting,
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Hooray for fables
20 January 2008 Jeff Gill
Here is another poem that I wrote. It is a riff on Æsop’s Tortoise and the Hare. Christine and I read it this morning at our church. Today’s theme was Run to Win, the third in a new year series called Born to Run. If you can stand a lot of rhyming couplets, read on.
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tags: poems,
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