Found

I know pretty much no one ready my blog, but for what its worth, to whoever stumbles here:

When I was a teenager, I used to grapple with the idea of God. If he was out there, it made no sense: the world was cruel and hard and painful, how could God be out there, and let things be as they are? But then the thought of there being no God was even worse, it felt like if there was no God then nothing whatsoever made any sense at all, everything seemed pointless.

I guess I was a bit of a smart-alec (to use an Americanism!), I used to think I was pretty smart and I used to tease my Christian friends about their illogical beliefs.

Then one day one of those Christian friends invited me along to their youth group. I went along just for the hang-out. But I came home curious. I picked up a bible to investigate this thing that seemed to make such an impact on people. Paging through the stories of Jesus, I realised that they were true. And I remember thinking "why has nobody told me about this before??

The thing I discovered in that moment was what Christians would call the gospel (it means the 'good news'). That the God who created us and loves us, and who we have pretty much ignored, he saw our sorry state and how we are slaves to ourselves and our desires and how we destroy each other, and instead of the punishment we deserved he sent his son to die to to pay the price for our sin, and to set us free.

So God himself paid the price to fix the broken relationship between him and us, even though he wasn't the one who broke it. Through Jesus, he forgives our sin and sets us free from all the rubbish that we have gotten ourselves tangled in in this life.

And all we can do is respond with grateful hearts, and receive what he as done for us already.

In the Bible, Jesus once told us that he came to seek and save what is lost (Luke 19:10). Lets be found by him.

Mazibuko-Trollip coverage

I had the most trippy experience a couple of days ago. I read a Daily Dispatch online (DD) article about the Mazibuko-Trollip contest for the DA caucus leader position. The DD told me that of the seven Eastern Cape DA MPs, one supports Mazibuko, five support Trollip, and one could not be reached for comment but was believed to also support Trollip. A nice little article with quotes from the various people involved, titled Home support for DA's Trollip:



The trippiness occurred later in the day when I went to the TimesLive website, and saw and article entitled DA Eastern Cape backs Mazibuko:



At first I thought perhaps the TimesLive article had more recent information, but looking at it, it doesn't. It just quotes the single EC DA MP that supports Mazibuko and presents it as if the EC supports Mazibuko... ???

The conspiracy theorist in me says "media bias!!" or would maybe insinuate that Mazibuko is favoured by the press, or perhaps just that the press likes drama and DA support for Mazibuko in Trollip's home province (the EC) is drama.

But the TimesLive article is from sapa, so I suppose this may be more indicative of people not checking things properly before publishing them. More a problem of time pressure than bias, perhaps. Especially for online news.

Either way, it is certainly another reason not to believe everything you read :)
And I've long said the DD is a great paper, kudos to them.

I emailed the TimesLive people to point the problem with their article out, no response though.