Blog Ugly - a Lent Challenge

Thanks to Mike from our church for capturing my 40th birthday in all it's glory. That's the last time I'm wearing that shirt.

Here's a challenge for fellow bloggers, just in time for Lent - post the worst picture you have of yourself on your blog. It is the season of humility and self-whatsit after all.

By the way the thing at the back is a giant '40' made out of photos of me at various stages, made with love, care and great secrecy by my Dearly Beloved. The annoying thing is that I'm younger in all of them. And yes, that's me with two bowls of pudding. I'd hidden the other 3.

Advent Resources

A few helpful places to go for ideas for Advent and preparation for Christmas:

Celebrating Advent in the Home: lovely simple leaflet with daily advent readings, and a liturgy for candle lighting. Also some good resources on a Jesse tree and Advent Wreaths. Excellent.

Christmas Wrapped Up and More Christmas Wrapped Up: a couple of volumes of resources produced by Scripture Union, with dramas, readings, word searches, craft activities, and a whole host of other things. Almost impossible not to find something useful.

Barnabas in Churches Ideas Page: a great selection of resources on the Chrisitan year, as well as a host of other themes, posted by a collection of folk around the country.

A Holy Christmas positively heaving with links to advent and Christmas resources, some links now out of date, but an incredible collection.

Advent Wreath prayers from the CofE liturgical commission.

Childrens colouring pages & wordsearches. Quite remarkable to find a US site which was offering this stuff for free. Seriously.

ReJesus have some online meditations.

The Churches Advertising network has a couple of good radio ads to go with the excellent nativity cartoon they created.

Visuals
Silent Night by John Birch, available to download from Proost
Advent Meditation, discovered via Bishop Alans sidebar.
Video and photo resources from Reelworship. Simple but good quality.
Big collection of sites doing graphics for worship (plus a whole lot else) here, but most of them will charge you. See comment above!
Dave Walker Christmas themed cartoons.

or for something completely different, go to Creative Prayer, which has bags of ideas for interactive prayer stations. Couldn't find much that was directly to do with advent, but that's not going to stop me recommending it.

Finally previous advent resources posts, there's a bit of overlap between them.

lunar eclipse

Lots of pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/eclipse/

birds eye view

The Cartoon Blog has a link to this site today

http://local.live.com/

offering aerial views, in stunning detail, of all sorts of places. I centred on Yeovil, and discovered that their photo predated the building of our house, it's quite strange to look at our estate and see pretty much fields everywhere.

It strikes me that this site is the ideal solution for people like me who like to find somewhere high up to pray for places, so that you can look out over the community/area you're praying for. Now you can do it without leaving your computer, as long as you don't mind praying for events in 1998.