Guess who’s running out of titles for these letters?

Hello!

This is the latest I’ve done this letter yet, but my excuse is it’s still Christmas Day! I’m currently sitting in my living room watching Murder on the Orient Express with Joanne, my girlfriend and being very glad that I’m not going out this evening!

I thought I’d pick out a few highlights of the year, in no particular order, but categorised together rather than chronological order, to try and vaguely mask the fact that some parts of the year have already faded into obscurity.

Having a car has meant I have undertaken some insane journeys. I headed over to Spring Harvest in Minehead in April, taking the short route in one direction (444 miles Belfast-Moira-Dublin-Holyhead-A55-M6-M5-A39) and the long route in the other (555 miles Minehead-A39-M5-M4-Reading-M40-Rowley Regis-Much Wenlock-A5-Amlwch-Holyhead-Dublin-Belfast) – this was because I was travelling in the company of my good friend Grace Park from Moira to Reading. It was Grace’s first trip to Spring Harvest, and hopefully she is now hooked! I hope to do week 1 in Minehead in 2011, but I might be more conventional this year and fly over. Much Wenlock is a pretty town in Shropshire, which I visited on the recommendation of Sharon and Ian Pearson, and Amlwch was the chance to mop up the north side of Anglesey, which I had not had a chance to visit when I was in North Wales with Libby and Lee Hawkness-Smith in September 2009.

September saw me drive 1250 miles around Scotland, starting by nearly missing the HSS to Stranraer with Holly McGuigan’s piano in the boot of my car due to a security alert on the Westlink. During the week, I visited Glasgow, Loch Lomond, Rothesay (completing a full circuit of Bute while waiting for the ferry), Stirling, Forth Bridge, Kirkcaldy, Cupar, Monifeith, Dundee, Kookaburra’s restaurant in Forfar, Loch Ness, Cannich (where the midges were waiting for me!), the Moray Firth, Nairn, the Forth Bridges, Edinburgh, Dumfries, Moffat, Kirkcudbright, and Wigtown before hitting the road home. I saw an awful lot in a very short period of time, and got to catch up with a few old friends and family.

Summer Madness was made easier by having someone else to write Total Recall (thank you Dave!), which took a lot of pressure off me – I still produced the content and coordinated site photography, considerably honing skills which I had already practised at Spring Harvest, where I had spent spare time during my night shifts post-producing my back catalogue of photographs.

The results are quite interesting – I think that I have now used some photographs which I would previously have overlooked. I am also not alone in noticing how my photography has developed over the last number of years – alas, I still need to catch up on a lot of photos I have taken in recent months!

I have already mentioned that I have a new girlfriend! Joanne Robinson is 41, from Ballyclare but living off the Cregagh Road, and an Art Therapist for the Ulster Cancer Foundation. We met in August, shortly before I went on holiday, and we’ve just been enjoying the journey together, sharing our appreciation of different bits of the arts, introducing her to U105, bringing her along to Strand Presbyterian (more on that in a minute), meeting family and friends, and generally hanging out.

I’m still playing weekly at Strand Presbyterian Church in East Belfast, still using the gifts God has given me to try and bring people along with me as I worship him. We had our traditional Carol Service two weeks ago, tracing the story of salvation in seven of the traditional readings from the Fall in Eden to the visit of the Magi, and St John’s reflection on the identity of Jesus, with all the traditional hymns plus some less traditional items. I had the privilege of reading Matthew 2:1-12, telling of Herod’s words to the Wise men.

Herod wanted to destroy Jesus to eliminate the threat to his throne, but the Wise Men, almost certainly astrologers, travelled many miles to bow down before thenew King, the King not of the human kingdom of Judea, but of the world, higher than all human kings, and to whom all kings must bow.

The biggest thing in 2010 has been learning more and more about the man that God has made me – my true identity as a child of God, and realising what that truly means. I have learned more of God’s amazing grace in my life and in that of my friends, and I grow more in wonder every day.

This Christmas, and throughout 2011, may you know that amazing wonder and grace, that God should love us exactly as we are, regardless of his dreams for what we will become, and that he sent Jesus to die so his creations who had chosen disobedience could be treated as pure so we could be admitted to his awesome presence. Best of all, he always wants our total honesty – part of wanting our all, because he knows us intimately. I am awed by how he loves me and all of us, despite knowing exactly what I’m like.

God bless you all!


Andy

Iris Robinson - in search of an appropriate response

To summarise from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8447383.stm etc:

Iris Robinson, Democratic Unionist Party councillor on Castlereagh Borough Council, MLA and MP for Strangford, got involved with a young man Kirk McCambley, who was the only successful bidder to take on the Lockkeeper's Inn beside the Lockkeeper's cottage on the Lagan towpath. She obtained funding from property developers, failed to declare her business interest in the Inn when the Council was considering Kirk's bid, and had an affair with Kirk.

Some months after they broke up, Iris attempted suicide and told her husband Peter Robinson, also a Castlereagh Borough councillor, but also First Minister, and MLA and MP for East Belfast. Even when he knew about Iris's failure to disclose her business interests, he didn't pass the information on to the appropriate authorities. He went to work as usual as First Minister the morning after Iris attempted suicide instead of excusing himself to be with Iris.

This was disclosed in the NI Current Affairs programme, Spotlight, and was based on a piece of whistle-blowing by Dr Selwyn Black, advisor to Mrs Robinson until very recently.

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The whole business is political dynamite. Iris's reputation as a politician has been totally destroyed, and even if she had not decided to stand down just before Christmas, this would have finished her. Peter, her husband, has at best been tainted by association, and his own alleged (and denied) failure to comply with laws regarding disclosure of financial interests in any of his three political posts (he and Iris are among the DUP's triple-jobbers) may mean he has to resign as First Minister.

In turn, after the disclosure that DUP members will continue to serve as both MLAs and local councillors or MPs or all three, the DUP has been revealed as a band of opportunistic double-jobbing money-grabbers - consider how they opposed power-sharing with Sinn Fein until they had caused the political near-annihilation of the Ulster Unionist Party and it became to their advantage to enter power-sharing, and consider how they have excluded new people from involvement in NI politics by electing the same people to as many different roles at once as humanly possible. Chickens are now coming home to roost, and the consequences for the DUP could be ruinous, going the same way as the UUP.

So what will replace them? Hardliners will gravitate towards Jim Allister's Traditional Unionist Voice, which pretends that the abolition of power sharing will be in the interests of Northern Ireland, despite the fact that throughout the 37 years (less two days) of my life, any period where NI has been governed by Direct Rule ministers has led to NI MPs being irrelevant and NI being governed on the same basis as England by English ministers with no love for and no responsibility to NI people. Transport, health and education have all been underfunded, where the Assembly has been able to rectify some of the deficit, and local representatives have been utterly powerless to make any difference in Westminster due to sheer lack of numbers.

Moderates wishing to abandon the DUP will not have an easy choice either. Left-wingers will not wish to be associated with the Conservative Party, so the Ulster Unionist Party will be ruled out, now it is almost inextricably interlinked with the Tories. The Progressive Unionist Party, much as it has moved on since the days when it was quite so closely linked with the UVF, is very small, and may be a step too far.

Personally, I suspect that Alliance may need a new slogan, as it attracts those who come to realise that tribal politics is getting nowhere, and we need a dose of proper politics, politics based on something other than the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and certainly something other than the negative politics of not being the other side. Tiocfaidh ár lá, anyone?

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So much for the politics. It is very easy to sit and crow over the downfall of the Robinsons, especially after Iris's remarks recorded in Hansard about homosexuality being worse than child sexual abuse (see http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmgeneral/nigc/080617/80617s02.htm at 5.38pm) - even when you haven't had two reasonably close friends come out to you in the last year, this was always an idiotic statement which suggested that acting on homosexual urges was somehow worse than any other possible sin. It doesn't get any harder when you realise that two apparently clean-cut politicians who wouldn't do anything wrong have been knocked off their pedastals by hypocrisy, and that at least Iris is as human as the rest of us.

And that is the key thing for Christians. Iris Robinson in that sense is every(wo)man. The woman who maybe thought she'd never have an affair, she'd always be faithful to her husband, and got in deeper than she could handle because she wasn't prepared for the possibility that she might be tempted. The person in a position of power to use money who got tempted to use it for her own benefit because she would never be found out.

Iris needs our prayers. She needs to know that God forgives her. She needs grace stronger than Peter showed her in http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8444422.stm where he could have supported her more strongly (sorry, but that's how I feel). She needs to know that while she could never return to politics even if her health permits her, God's forgiveness is absolute, he is with her, and her life is not over. Where there is God, no matter how badly you mess up in life, as long as you are alive, God has something worthwhile for you to do that will reflect the talents and abilities he gives you.

And our response is not just to pray for Iris. We need to ask God to remind us that we are no better than Iris, because that is where humility begins. No matter what we do, no matter whom we sleep with, no matter what we are involved with, we are no better than anyone else. The key difference is we are forgiven sinners, and our response is therefore threefold:

1. To pray for Iris as above;
2. To pray to God that we will have the strength to fight temptation when it comes our way, as it will; and
3. To show the same grace to other sinners when they do wrong that God showed us, that regardless of the earthly consequences of their wrongdoing, we will stand with them, support them, and help them back onto the same wagon that we keep falling off ourselves.

I think I would add a fourth one after all: Pray for the ability to abandon hypocrisy, and live as forgiven children of God without fear of being judged for our imperfections. That may be a real challenge in Northern Ireland, where Christians are expected to fit a certain mould of "holiness" that only a very few have the grace to achieve without looking down on anyone else, and for everyone else is pure hypocrisy, pretending to be something they cannot and do not want to live up to but they they think they need to so as not to be rejected. Never mind proper politics, proper christianity and following Jesus, anyone?

... and it's 2.5 years since I actually blogged. This is scary, but life has been rather crazy.

So this year I'm going to make a little more of an effort, so I'm starting here. The blog will change a little over the next while, because I'm going to move it to my own website, and try and persuade both blogspot and livejournal to pick it up via RSS. I'll still be retaining a blog here for things I don't necessarily want the entire world to know, but I need to get off my chest.

Last night I had the pleasure of heading to an old schoolfriend's for New Year's Eve. I hadn't seen Judith since we left school, and she was the only person I knew, but she has some cool friends. It was also warmer in Orlock than it was in Belfast - no ice to scrape off the windscreens.

Tomorrow I have the Railtons floating in at some stage, and I kinda need to figure out when...

The Madness of 2009

Note to the reader: My main blog is at andyboal.livejournal.com, but I'm going to duplicate for a bit...

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. “

I had the privilege of reading the above words at Strand Presbyterian Church’s Carol Service on Sunday night, and it’s a timely reminder of what God has done through Jesus, his Son, Emmanuel, God with us, who came to live as a man among us.

2009 has been a story of God’s grace in my life, as I have discovered more of how much he loves me and longs for me to know him and that love more and more, and how much he loves other people, as I’ve gone through the special events in this year.

What should have been the worst event of the year was when Karen and I broke up in July. Not only did God make it possible for us to remain friends, but I found myself surrounded by the love of my friends, and I did not fall apart emotionally as I have done after breakups in the past. I have learned to trust God an awful lot more in my relationships as a result, and the knowledge that he is with me is passing from my heart to my head.

I hit more chest infection troubles this autumn, and the generosity of Civil Service Personnel knows no bounds as I received a written Sickness warning after taking a week’s sick leave less than a year after my two weeks off last year. As the Civil Servants among you will know, the warning tells you that it’s completely unacceptable that you should take sickness absence, and ignores the effect on the other people in the office of coughing, sneezing, passing on infections and distractions, let alone the likelihood of attending work while sick leading to recovery taking longer. It gets to me because the policy is a blunt instrument which is being used to effectively penalise those who have genuine reasons for being off sick, but not necessarily catching those who took advantage of the older, less strict policies. One wonders how many people take annual leave when sick to avoid warnings, which of course massages the sick absence levels in the Civil Service.

It is likely to affect when I will be appointed as a second Computer Support Officer for our building – a sideways move which I successfully applied for in the autumn, and which has been renamed to First Line Service Manager, to the disgust of the existing CSO. It will be my first foray into working in IT, a prospect I find exciting.

There were however quite a few highlights!

In February, Karen and I went to Dachshund of the Year in Coventry, which allowed us to visit Cadburyworld and my old friends, the Landers in Dunchurch.

In March, I found myself back in Birmingham Airport and heading towards Cheltenham for the wedding of Lee Hawkness-Smith and Libby Holderness. They had asked me to play piano, and I found myself sitting at a rather nice smallish Grand Piano, and surprising myself with how loudly I started The Splendour of the King…!

Having started driving lessons with Jonny Gibson (www.jonnygsdrivingschool.co.uk) at the end of February, I passed my test in June – the roads will never be the same, but on the bright side for everyone else, I’ve been doing a lot less cycling (not least due to the health issues I’ve already mentioned!). I’m looking forward to taking the R plates down on 19^th June 2010…

July was Summer Madness time again, which is taking up more and more of my time as I have been taking time off work during the year to volunteer in the office, and I also now coordinate photography on site (as well as covering what events I can during the year). I’m already building a team for 2010. I also wrote and produced Total Recall, the compilation DVD of audio recordings of all the seminars and mainstage talks for a second year.

Summer Madness staffers Sarah Kennedy and Mark Railton asked me to do photography for their wedding in August – the service was in CORE Church, Dublin, and the reception was at the Summerhill House Hotel, Enniskerry. As I had never shot a wedding before, they asked Peter Neill (www.peterneill.eu) to work with me – in the end, Peter took the lead and I took the slightly off-line pics while watching what Peter did. Having got my dad’s 307 a week earlier, I was able to get myself around the venues and to and from the B&B.

The first week of September was spent staying with Lee and Libby Hawkness-Smith in Llangefni, and exploring North Wales by car. I think it will suffice to say that I was glad to collapse into my cabin on the boat from Holyhead to Dublin – but a great week was had, and I also had the chance to stay with Mark and Sarah for the night before drving to the ferry.

More generally, I have continued with singing lessons when my voice has allowed, and we hope that I will be doing Grade 5 in the Spring. There is an irony in the fact that while I have given theory lessons in the past, I will now have to do Grade 5 theory myself if I want to progress beyond Grade 5 in singing!

I got back into Beautiful Feet (www.beautifulfeetbelfast.org) again this year, which got a mention in a broadcast radio service from Whitehouse Presbyterian Church. Numbers have varied from two to twelve or more, and as well as our existing links with Homeplus, I have been in touch with PSNI City Centre Beat.

We welcomed Danny Rankin to Strand Presbyterian in January, and Danny and I are developing a good working relationship. As a congregation, we are praying that plans to demolish and replace the church will come to fruition in 2010 – meantime I brought my dad in to play the organ for Harvest and Christmas Day to make the most of the opportunity to sing traditional hymns to the sound of the organ while we still have it.

Anything can happen in 2010, but I know that God is with me throughout. I’m working on redeveloping my website www.andyboal.co.uk to highlight my skills as a photographer, musician and writer, and I hope to get a new site up in the new year.

May you know all the blessings of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit this Christmas, and throughout 2010.

Some strange evening...

Trying this one now, maybe keep my livejournal one going, who knows?

Check the website - http://cgi.xtremeevents.org