Blackdog's Blog

New Bluetree site

2008-12-01T21:37:00.002Z

Been working on this over the last few days, coming together (links and stuff aren't active it's just a glorified css arrangement)

http://test.bluetreeonline.co.uk/

Having a Gander

2008-10-10T11:14:00.002+01:00

So we're in Gander, Newfoundland, Canada. Just got up, it's 07.49am by our clock here but our bodies are still on home time which is 11.15am.

First impressions - the people are class! Everyone we've met so far has been so friendly, so much so that we would all be happy enough to live here.

Tonight is our first gig of the 'Life Tour' with Vicky Beeching and Phil Cann, so we've been to the venue which is an ice hockey rink, think there will be around 3500 people there roughly so it's going to be raucous. Hopefully everyone will think we're nice crazy, yesterday was hyper and I don't think that's going to change (ever), all good fun!

Off to Canada

2008-10-08T09:41:00.003+01:00

Just a quick one because I need to go get organised. So tomorrow we're off to Canada, really looking forward to it. Please pray all goes well, gear arrives and is in tact ok, everyone stays well, but most of all that God is lifted up!

Had a great insight in to Job the other day from Yancy's book, 'where is God when it hurts', it's started to change my perspective on worship. More to come on that one.

We'll be blogging while we're away, so keep an eye on the website.

The Ragman

2008-09-28T09:16:00.004+01:00

The late great Mike Yaconelli quoted this story in his book 'Yak Yak Yak' in response to the lack of tenderness in the church. How often we respond in a way which is ungracious, but if we really truly get this fundamental truth of what Christ did for you, it will change the way you respond to the hurt and the broken.

(PS the hurt and the broken are probably in your church, in fact they may even be the leaders of your church).

The Ragman by Walter Wangerin. Jr.

Early before dawn one Friday morning, I noticed a young man handsome and strong walking down the alleys of our city.

He was pulling a cart filled with clothes bright and new, calling in a clear voice, “Rags! Rags! New rags for old! I’ll take your tired rags!” This was a wonder. The man stood six feet four, arms like tree trunks, hard and muscular, and his eyes flashed intelligence. Could he find no better job than this, a ragman in the inner city?

I followed him. My curiosity drove me. I wasn’t disappointed. Soon the ragman saw a young women sitting on her back door step. She was sobbing into a handkerchief, sighing and shedding a thousand tears. Her shoulders shook. Her heart was breaking. The ragman stopped his cart.

Quietly, he walked to the woman, stepping around the tin cans, dead toys and rubbish. “Give me your rag” he said so gently, “and I’ll give you another” He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes. She looked up and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and new that it shone. She blinked from the gift to the giver.

Then as he began to pull the cart again, the Ragman did a strange thing. He put her stained handkerchief to his own face and then he began to weep, to sob as grievously as she had done, his shoulders shaking. Yet she was left without a tear.

This is a wonder, I breathed to myself, and I followed the sobbing Ragman like a child who cannot turn away from mystery. “Rags! Rags! New rags for old!”

In a little while, as the evening drew in, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was wrapped in a bandage, who eyes were empty. Blood soaked her bandage. A single line of blood ran down her cheek. Now the Ragman looked upon the child with pity, and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.

“Give me your rags,” he said, tracing his own line on her cheek, “and I’ll give you mine.” The child could only gaze at him, while he loosened the bandage, removed it, and tied it on his own head. The bonnet he set on hers. And I gasped at what I saw.

For with the bandage, went the wound! Against his brow ran a darker, more substantial blood, his own!

"Rags! Rags! I take old rags!” cried the sobbing, bleeding, strong intelligent Ragman.

The Ragman seemed more and more now to hurry. “Are you going to work?” he asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole. The man shook his head. The Ragman pressed him. “Do you have a job?” “Are you crazy?” sneered the other.

He pulled away from the pole, revealing the right sleeve of his jacket – flat, the cuff stuffed into his pocket. He had no arm.

“So,” said the Ragman, “give me your jacket, and I’ll give you mine.” Such quiet authority in his voice. The one armed man took off his jacket. So did the Ragman – and I trembled at what I saw: for the Ragman’s arm stayed in the sleeve, and when the other put it on, he had two good arms, strong as tree trunks, but the Ragman had only one.

“Go to work”, he said. After that he found a drunk, lying unconscious, beneath an army blanket, an old man, hunched and wizened and sick. He took the blanket and wrapped it round himself, but for the drunk he left new clothes.

And now I had to run to keep up with the Ragman, though he was weeping uncontrollably and bleeding freely at the forehead, pulling his cart with one arm and stumbling for drunkenness, falling again and again, exhausted, old and sick – yet he went with terrible speed.

On spider’s legs he skittered through the alleys of the city, this mile and the next, until he came to its limits and then he rushed beyond. I wept to see the change in this man. I hurt to see his sorrow. And yet I needed to see where he was going in such haste, perhaps even to discover what drove him so.

The little old Ragman – he finally came to a landfill. He came to the garbage pits. And then I wanted to help him in what he did, but I hung back, hiding. He climbed a hill. With tormented labour, he cleared a little space on that hill. Then he sighed. He lay down. He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket. He covered his bones with an army jacket. And then he died.

Oh, how I cried to witness that death! I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope, because I had come to love the Ragman. I sobbed myself to sleep. I did not know – how could I know? – that I slept through Friday night and Saturday and its night too. But then on Sunday I was wakened by a violent light.

Light – pure, hard, demanding light – slammed against my sleeping face and I blinked and I looked and I saw the last and first wonder of all. There was the Ragman folding the blanket most carefully, a scar on his forehead but alive! And besides that, so healthy! There was no sign of sorrow, or of age and all the rags he had shined for cleanliness.

Well I lowered my head and trembling for all that I had seen. I myself got out of the junk car and walked to the Ragman. I told him my name with shame, for I was a sorry figure next to him. Then I stripped myself of everything and I said to him with yearning in my voice,

“Dress me. Make me new again!” He dressed me; my Lord! He put new rags on me and I am a wonder beside him.

The Ragman! The Ragman! The Christ!

What do you reckon?

2008-09-20T21:14:00.004+01:00

MacSnob

2008-09-19T17:00:00.003+01:00

I'm not talking big mac here, I'm talking apple mac, let's clear that up from the start.

Someone accused me of being an Apple Mac snob the other day, and on reflection they were probably right. My day job is working as a techie for a few companies, dealing with problems 99% of the time on windows PC's. So my snobbery is well founded and I'll stick by it. Mac's are better and if you think otherwise then you haven't used one for any length of time.

Ladies and gentlemen in the know

2008-09-11T17:05:00.005+01:00

A few marvellous things to share with you, in no particular order:

1 - The new iTunes v8.0, in particular the genius facility which generates playlists from your library based on one song. If (like me) you have a library which is large enough not to know where to start listening, this is a good thing. It is indeed, genius.

2 - google maps street view, this is magic. It is what it says, a map which can take you down to street view. Now I know it's been out there for a little while. I wonder if it's possible to track down the cars responsible for taking the pictures and appear on it on more than one occasion. I'd like that.

3 - cern. If you like science (and I do) but aren't a scientist (and I'm not) then this is fascinating. Particular the bits on string theory/viewing other dimensions/anti-matter/dark matter.

4 - Ultimate ears - our band have each got a set of Ulimate Ears, UE7 customs. They're meant for stage use as in ear monitors, but they're also rather nice as normal headphones. You go to the little hearing aid place in town and have impressions made of your ear canal, send them off and they're made in to ear phones just for you.

5 - this is probably of no consequence to 99.9% of you, but if you're self employed then OFFICETIME is absolutely magic. It tracks your time with clients, creates invoices, reports your money due, sticks it all in your calendar, and all without very much intervention! I love it!! Yes that's two exclamation marks of love right there in your face.

That's all for now.

Feeling small

2008-09-07T23:29:00.004+01:00

Here's something to make you feel small, but not in a bad way. Consider these things and think how much greater and more complex God is than these things:

There are approximately 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in your body.
In the world today there are approx 6,602,224,175 (6.6 billion) people
Our planet revolves around one sun, a star. That sun is one of approx 100,000,000,000 (100 billion) stars in the milky way
The current estimate as to the number of galaxies in the universe is approximately 125,000,000,000 (125 billion)

Make me a Christian!

2008-08-19T12:45:00.003+01:00

I've been watching a documentary here in the UK called 'Make me a Christian'. The basic premise is that a group of unlikely volunteers are put through a two week programme entailing church like Christian activities. The volunteers are all expected to tow a line, and leave their normal lives aside for the duration. The group are comprised of homosexual, gothic, ladies men, a pregnant & living together couple, an Islamic Muslim - to name a few. You get the idea.

Anyway, I watched the show with my head in my hands, totally embarrassed. Why? Not that I particularly disagreed necessarily with the beliefs of the mentors, God bless them (although I did on some issues). What made me cringe was their idea of being a good Christian was singing songs led by two acoustic guitars on a mountain, washing peoples feet in public, retreating to a forest and trying to make nettle soup in the rain... etc.

Now I know the intentions are good, and I'm probably a bad man for being a critic, but please, this isn't hard. How can people relate to Christianity, when it's presented in ways that are quite frankly, weird and irrelevant? Oh but Jesus washed peoples feet - yes I know, He did it because they wore sandals and walked around dusty roads. What would have been a cultural modern day equivalent would be washing someone's shop windows, handing out free tea & coffee. The only part of the documentary the volunteers seemed to respond to was working in a soup kitchen, cooking food and showing someone that they cared about them - magic.

I've blogged before about wanting to get my hands dirty, but whatever that looks like has to be relevant and practical. It's not hard to show God's love to a world in practical need. It's simple as if they're hungry, feed them, thirsty, give them a drink etc. Sorry to be negative about this, but I was half hoping that I'd watch that show and see some new relevant examples of practical modern day Christianity. All I saw was dogmatic, judgemental and irrelevant. If it were presented to me in that way, I'd run a mile as well!! Fortunately I know that Jesus is alive today, and He's not safe, He's dangerous.

To bring it home, I suppose what we're working out in this band is how can we make our music relevant. Does it stand up against commercial standards? It needs to, in fact it needs to be better. We (the church) need to be paving the way, setting the standard. It's time to put what we know in to practice in real ways, practical ways. Let's not sit back and beg God to change the world, we are the answer, we can make a difference through our Christ purchased appointment, and only with Gods help.

New Website

2008-06-21T23:38:00.004+01:00

So I'm working on a new Bluetree website, I've never really been able to devote much time to this site, it's always a little bit here a little bit there, but the new site is going to be proper bo.

We've a few idea's that we hope people will like: a members area where you can interact, be the first to get news, special downloads, sheet music, secret gig info, etc.

Have to say I'm not much of a fan of these blogs, but there will be something "blog like" in place of these. You may ask 'why not get a nice flash website'. And the answer is, we want as many people as possible to be able to access the site - people in schools, hospitals, work places - more often than not these days, saavy tech departments are locking out flash content. So the flash will be kept to a minimum. But anyway, if you don't know what flash is then forget about what I just said.

If you're a technobod, then the site is being written in PHP and pure CSS, with a minimal bit of decorative flash.

My question is this - what bits of the site do you hit and what are you interested in seeing that isn't here...? Comments on an email to webmaster@bluetreeonline.co.uk

Rick like's to...

2008-06-04T20:56:00.002+01:00

Ok, here's the rules:

Go to Google and type in quotation marks your name and then "likes to" (eg. "Rick likes to"). Type in the first ten things that come up and repost in your own note. Here's mine:

Rick likes to keep Delaney Forest Products on jobs within a 150-mile radius
Rick likes to Dance on Thursdays
Rick likes to go to southern California to do shows with BIGFOOT
Rick likes to spend any spare time that he has with his young daughter
Rick likes to stay at Casa Balam
Rick likes to call his programs "scrapbook documentaries," incorporating lots of old films, home movies, postcards, old photos and memorabilia of all sorts.
Rick likes to eat out, but he noticed that drinking quickly boosts the bill. Drinks are now limited to once a month with a two-glass limit.
Rick likes to spend time with his wife and children and is an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox
Rick likes to write code, mentor, teach and consult.
Rick likes to focus his can-do attitude where it can help the most.
Rick likes to think of his work as 'that foreign guy at a party, who you don't completely get his jokes, but you laugh anyway

Ok that's eleven I know but the last one was funny so I posted it anyway

I love you even though your socks smell

2008-05-28T16:25:00.004+01:00

Relationship is one of the things we're put on earth to do (and I'm not really talking marriage here), and as we get closer in to each others lives it can get tricky, even painful, as you go through a process of discovering the less appealing parts of each others personalities. We've all got smelly socks (or something like that) which we do our best to hide, but as you let people in to your life, sometimes the smelly things have to be talked about.

You've probably heard the stories of the man who's wife divorced him because he left the lid off the toothpaste all the time. Sometimes it can feel like the lid is the biggest problem in the world, but when you step back a little you'll see it's really trivial. There's a good song that I'll not name, but it has one line in it that I detest strongly, and although I detest it, it's true, and it says that the enemy wants to make mountains out of mole hills in your life.

Personally I'm seeing a few things in my own situation that have somehow been blown way out of proportion, and I'm feeling good now I realise I can just stand on them and move on to a place of blessing. Also, I'll do better at keeping a lid on things.

Apathy

2008-04-15T20:27:00.003+01:00

There's a degree of irony in the subject of this blog and the fact that I was far too chicken to get up and give the word to Mannafest on Saturday about apathy. So second best, I guess I'll blog about it. Sorry folks, I'm a total turkey when it comes to speaking in to microphones.

Boydo and Jordy were singing rescuer by Johnny Parks (great song), and part of my reaction was 'what do I need rescued from, I'm fine, my relationship with God is progressing, I'm not affected by sin issues in my life' - then came the small voice of God reminding me of my need to be rescued from apathy, from my nonchalant, probably arrogant attitude to my relationship with God.

The truth is, we all need to press in and fervently follow our father. It's not OK to think, I'm alright Jack - because I know Jack and he told me it's not alright. What does that look like - prayer and the word mainly. I need to read my bible more, it's the source of inspiration, insight, security, wisdom and revelation (this list goes on and on).

Spending time praying is vital as well. Sorry it's so obvious that sometimes it's easy to miss. You can't have a relationship with someone unless you converse with them. Mother Teresa was asked by a reporter what she talks to God about when
she prays, her answer was that she says nothing, she listens. The reporter thought a moment and asked, 'well what does God say'? She replied, 'nothing, He listens as well'. There's a great truth in that, we need to get ourselves in to a place where we hear the heart beat of God, and spending time in His presence is enough.

Blogging

2008-04-04T19:16:00.005+01:00

So I guess I'm not convinced blogs are the way forward. Good news is that there is a new website slowly working it's way to fruition, got some cool new features like the backstage area, so watch this space.

The mighty Mills

2008-01-30T00:21:00.000Z

Hey, the mighty Paul Mills, who produced our album Greater Things (available in our online store now folks, check it out, also on iTunes!) is over to visit this week. It's so good to get some time with him. I've never met anyone so humble - he's even more humble than ME!! Seriously - I didn't think that was possible after I won my humility award.

Really looking forward to this Sunday, we're going to be recording the Sunday service, almost as a test of what can be achieved in church. Can't wait to see what happens, I have a feeling God is cooking something special up.

Anyway, onwards to bed. Mia is crying a river, hopefully she'll sleep... all the fun of fatherhood :)

Dirty hands and a clean heart

2008-01-24T00:05:00.000Z

This phrase has been on mind lately. I've been thinking a lot about people who aren't yet involved in a relationship with God. Looking from the outside in, it must be easy to feel inadequate, and until you've righted yourself sufficiently, you can't darken the door of church.

Actually, I'd love it if church started becoming the complete opposite of this. I'd love it if church started being more proactive, people getting their hands dirty. I'd love to have more opportunity to get my hands dirty. Still not sure what that looks like, if you know, do tell.

The song God of this City was written in a bar in Pattaya, Thailand. We went there as part of a missions trip to Thailand. Our expectations were none, we hadn't done this sort of thing before - I'd personally never been to Asia before that time. Did we have some 'heart' for Thailand prior to the trip? Not particularly! Sorry, no offence Thailand! We just hadn't experienced it.

The truth is, when you worship in a place, you start to see God's heart for a place. One of the most revelationary moments of my life to date has been playing a worship set in a strip club and hearing God say "I'm the God of this city". These people are oppressed and exploited, they're sold and forced to do the most derogatory acts - and in the midst of them God says 'I love these people'.

We look with our eyes and we see the wrong, but when we look beyond the situation and we see the true beauty and value in someone's existence, we see what God loves without condition. The things I've seen, I've been helpless to change - that's the truth, I am totally powerless to change anything by my own strength. In spite of all this - God, give me the opportunity to be part of the change, to resound your voice that says 'I love you, without clause or condition'. To renounce condemnation of the world and say that despite the dirt, despite your history, there is a new way - there is a banquet and you are invited.

That's my God.

Orchestra shots

2008-01-13T00:31:00.001Z

Thought some photos always make a blog look good to start off with, here's some shots by Josh Galbraith of the Christmas Special, New Irish Orchestra & choir gig at CFC Strandtown...

New blogs

2008-01-12T18:41:00.000Z

Oook, here's them, blog!? Here's me, aye alright then.

The other boys are setting theirs up now so that's going to be interesting, whereas this post...is not. But the next one will be better.