New Photos

I uploaded some new photos on my Flickr account. I can't be bothered crfeating individual links for them all in here. If you want to see them, go to my Flickr page. Photos include Shocking numbers of empty bottles a new year (not mine), The Cave and Lego Hair.

Now I'm off to finish reading The Silver Chair.

xxxchurch.com

I've discovered an amazing Christian website. It's called xxxchurch.com. I know many of you are already freaking out about the name because it has the "xxx" prefix. Allow me to explain, though.

The two guys who run the website have a vision for reaching people in the porn industry. They're pretty radical in their approach as well. While many Christians would just greet such people with the attitude of "you're sick, you need to stop that", their attitude is to show them God's love. After all, that's what Jesus did. He loved the people society turned their back on.

One of the radical things that Craig and Mike do is to go to porn exhibitions and set up a booth with the message "Jesus loves Porn Stars". They get all kinds of reactions but the message they're spreading is that Jesus loves everyone, whether that be pastors, nice Christians or even people in the porn industry. They write about their experiences on their blog.

At one such event they met a girl called Trinity who really wanted to get out of the porn industry but didn't have the money to do anything else. They launched an appeal for her on their website and raised enough money for her to go to college. Now she's moved to a different state, away from her old life. She's now studying cosmetology, which is what she had wanted to do all along. She has a blog where you can follow her progress in her new life.

As well as reaching out to people in the porn industry, Mike and Craig do a lot for churches to help people overcome addiction to porn. Let's face it, it's everywhere and being in the church doesn't make you immune. They do presentations at churches, talking about this issue. They also have a prayer wall on their website which is a forum where people can request prayer and discuss their struggles. They also have free accountability software which sends a list of everywhere you've been on the internet to an accountability partner every couple of weeks. I installed it on my computer. It's really simple and doesn't slow anything down.

I'm just so impressed with this ministry. They've got a really bold approach to the problem and I love it. I know it's going to bear a lot of fruit.

Ice Climbing!

On Saturday (the last day of 2005) I had the amazing opportunity to go ice climbing. We went to a place called The Ice Factor. They have the biggest indoor ice climbing facility in the world! They have all kinds of technology that keeps the room like a giant fridge with lots of real ice on the walls!

It's quite strange after doing rock climbing. The things that hold you to the wall are the ice axes and the crampons. (sharp pointy bits on your boots) At first it feels quite clumsy, swinging these big pointy axes around but it started to feel a bit more natural after a while. I found that as I got more tired, it got harder and harder to actually lift an axe and swing it at the wall. My left arm got so tired that sometimes I'd swing and it'd deflect off the surface because I was unable to hold it straight. Other times it was tricky to get it OUT of the wall when I wanted to climb higher.

The funnest moment was when I was about a third of the way up the wall. I had one axe free because I was about to reach higher to stick it in there. Just as I moved a bit, though, the other axe slipped out of the crack in the ice that it was lodged into. Slowly, I started to rotate backwards, my feet still gripping the ice with the crampons. Instinctively, I swung at the wall with my right axe and it stuck in, immediately stopping the fall. It was a pretty cool moment, kinda like something out of a cheezy film.

It's all good fun, really. Doing something like that indoors is so much safer than out there in the REAL world. Man, it's a crazy sport, I tell you! We had the ropes anchored to metal girders which made up part of the structure of the ice room. (If you click on the picture you can see this more clearly in the big version.) When people ice climb "for real" they put big screws into the ice. Yes, THE ICE! The only thing holding them up is water. OK, frozen water but still. Man, it's water! I know that it was only ice I was gripping on my way up the wall as well. The difference is that when I did slip, the rope was attached to something more reliable.

Having said all that, it was a great experience and hopefully I'll get a chance to do it again some time. Now, if I can just find somewhere I can go snowboarding to try out my new bindings...