The saddening loss of my iPod headphones pales into insignificance next to the breaking of my £100 Bang & Olufsen earphone set a few weeks previous (forcing me to re-experience a less enjoyable quality of audio; aka iPod earphones).
Anyway blah blah blah, my earphones broke and my friend gave me a spare iPod set of his. And these earphones have this hella cool gadget on the wire which has just revolutionized the way I change my volume, pause and fast forward my music. Seriously, it’s like making the cross-over from the grill to the toaster.
And so I really want to share my constant stream of discoveries regarding this little gadget with you all so you can share in my joy and excitement.
I’m a giver.
You’re welcome.
Get comfortable.

So this is what it does (you’ve seen the picture up top right?…I get it, you’re Jack’s complete lack of enthusiasm over all of this…flip me I am RINSING the pop culture references today…ANYWAY…common Chris, get it together. We’re pressing on). Here’s what that bad-lad up there in the picture can do:
#! It has a mic for your iPhone if you have one…I don’t but I like to pretend to talk into it so people think I do…
#” You can adjust your volume (up AND down) via 2 separate buttons. Don’t we flippin’ love technology. It gets better.
#£ One click of the centre button pauses your music (standard)
#$ Two clicks of the centre button forward you to the next track (so we’re working with only three buttons – Vol. up, down and centre)
#% Three clicks takes you back to the beginning of your track (nifty? Yes!)
#^ Ok, now this is the thing that excited me because (1) I discovered it today and by accident (2) my excitement over the device was at first slightly diluted by the lack of a function that would skip me back one track. Skipping forward is fantastic but if you’re one of those people that wants to listen to a track more than once (and doesn’t like the ‘Repeat One’ function because you don’t want to listen to the track THAT much) then you would want a function that would do that…

So get this (are you excited? Heck yes you are!) you rewind to the beginning of the track (three clicks, right) then if you do three clicks again within 1 second of the start of the song, it totally takes you back to the beginning of the previous track!

BAM.

I apologise for this blog. I really just wanted to write something.
I hope you read it fast because I can’t refund those last few minutes to you.

…yeah bye.

I bought the Band of Brothers DVD set the other week and I’ve been watching through it. Apart from the fact that it is simply amazing and fulfills the gap that was left after Saving Private Ryan it kind of got me thinking about the Second World War. Like, it really only happened about 50 years before I was born. Had I been born 65 or 70 years earlier I could well have been drafted into the army and served in combat.
60-70 years sounds like a lot but looking at times like those in the Old Testament, hundreds of years can pass and it is an insignificant amount of time. compared to some timelines 60-70 years is no time at all.

Looking at it in this respect, I can’t get my head round the fact that 50 years on I can watch a fantastic film production of a bunch of guys fighting a horrific war that really didn’t happen all that long ago.
In that war there was probably a guy (or perhaps many guys) not unlike myself; in age, personality, belief, disposition, courage who found himself in Europe, a long way from home with no combat experience fighting a war so that in 50 years time a guy not unlike himself (me) could live a life of freedom.

It’s amazing.

Ok, The Book of Eli, this is absolutely my favourite film at the moment. If I come away from a film and can think about nothing else but reading my Bible then it hits the top-list. This is actually the first film that has made me do that but it’s fantastically inspiring start to finish. Very raw, very gritty, very kick-ass. Love it.

Right; Facebook.
My Facebook account has gone absolutely renegade this week and I can’t figure out how on earth to fix it. This is baso what’s wrong: whatever I action I make; status update, wall post, change profile information, accept or ignore a group invite or whatever – it saves, but then reverts straight back to how it was before. So every time I check it, it has gone back in time to a previous days setting.
It’s weird as. I swear, I feel like Bill Murray waking up in Groundhog day every time I log in to check my messages.

But this pales into insignificance next to some of the stuff that God has been doing this week.
Aight, so it’s freshers week here in Sheffield…well, in the UK I guess. thousands of new students flooding in from all over. So we’ve been out on the street quite a bit recently “Lovin’ Freshers” and welcoming them to Sheffield. There’s a couple of well cool testimonies of how things that God has been doing this week but I really wanna talk about something that happened last night.
A few of us made our way down to West Street – for those outside of Sheffield, that’s kind of the street in our city where all the bars and clubs are and all students pile down there in the thousands with the sole (soul?) intention of having a good time, meeting people and breaking commandments. So we went down to get some food and a couple of us ended up standing on the street just praying for the street as we saw people getting absolutely hammered. Quickly we resolved to spend the night out in Sheffield city center to just be led by God and see if there is anyone He wants us to talk to. So we went back up to Crookes to eat, grab some warm clothing and a couple of Bibles to give away and we headed straight back down town.

Lesson #1 – in a city center full of a few thousand people; 2 Bibles is nowhere near enough.

The three of us (myself, Rick and Ben) prayed like mad on the way down and ended up staying for about 3 hours and met some incredible people. Not really knowing where we were being led we ended up buying a few creates of water to carry round and give to people as they stumbled about the streets. The 2 Bibles we had went  very quickly and I was able to scribble some contact details in the cover of one of them (praying the dude will phone…or at least that he reads the Bible when he wakes up and finds it in his back pocket).
The whole of last night is a feature length blog and I could talk forever about different things that happened, the people we met and some of the places fairly dark places we found ourselves in; which, thinking back a couple or three years were perhaps strangely familiar to some of our previous lives (if you want to hear about it, let’s do coffee next week, for reals).

But really, the amazing thing about last night was that we ended up down there because we felt prompted. The slightly more amazing thing is that we ended up down there and hadn’t a clue why we were there or what we were going to do. The more amazing thing still is that God guided our steps and just when it looked like it pointless for us to be there, things started to happen.

The Bible says:

Your word is a lamp to my feet,
and a light to my path

- Psalm 119:105

The amazing thing about this verse, or rather the thing that I always missed about this verse is the fact that sometimes the lamp to our feet means we really only see the next step – like going down into town with nothing. But you follow anyway and He guides the next step and you follow that.
God knows the whole path and He’s got it all under control. It just requires us to be willing enough for Him to lead us and we’re willing enough to give ourselves completely over to His will, He will use us.
As Christians we have the most incredible honour of being chosen to be part of God’s plan and getting to play a role in that.

ok, it’s very late and I’m too tired to read this back to see if it makes sense.

What?
You’re changing your training routine AGAIN?
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise!

So yeah, this is what the hour of power is basically about:
3 sessions a week
roughly an hour long
forget Push Pull Legs
forget sacking off cardio for bodyweights
this routine is flippin’ nails.

This is how it works, using a 2kg weight in each hand (yeah I can’t wait for someone to ask me how much I lift so I can tell them how hardcore I am lifting a grand total of only 2kg, anyway…) you start running, and (after a warm up that will destroy your legs) start rep’ing you way through about 6 different lifts working out each muscle set in your upper body. So you are working your cardio as hard as your core strength.
After the upper body and legs are done you move on to a set of absolutely solid ab exercises, and they. are. solid.

So that is what the training sched is looking like at the moment. It is so far the best routine I’ve done but the results are slower. To be honest though that is fine since before I was only concentrating on upper body and neglecting both leg muscle and cardio all together so it’s all pretty balanced now.

BAM!

Pen Yr Ole Wen; Ogwen Valley; Snowdonia; Jan 2010

]]> http://lifeblogchris.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/adventures/feed/ 0 lifeblogchris Snowdonia http://lifeblogchris.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/facebook/ http://lifeblogchris.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/facebook/#comments Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:05:05 +0000 lifeblogchris http://lifeblogchris.wordpress.com/?p=472 ]]>

I tapped into Google “time spent on facebook”. I was looking for stats but instead here are just some of the top headlines that my search came up with:

2.6 million minutes spent on Facebook each day – we are wasting our lives!

Facebook Is The Webs Ultimate Timesink

Total US Time Spent On Facebook Up 700% in the Last Year

Here are some more:

Total time spent on Facebook went up from 1.7 billion in April 2008 to 13.9 billion this April.
The average user will spend around 7 hours on Facebook each month.
Facebook will apparently cost the Australian economy around $6 billion this year alone due to wasted productivity.

One of my own friends tracked his own Facebook usage over a year and it totalled 1166 hours, which I think is something like 47 days total use.

Francis Chan quoted one of John Piper’s Twitter posts in a sermon saying (ironically I’m about to go to my Facebook page to find the quote):

One of the great uses of facebook and twitter will be to prove on the last day that prayerlessness was not due to lack of time

How are we using our time?

After experiencing some of the following things in the past few years – seeing the poverty stricken streets of Romania, visiting a house of over 50 recovering heroin addicts and worshiping with them and more at their church in Birmingham, playing with gypsy kids in the street as we pick litter in one of the more run down corners of Sheffield and after standing in a freezing car park and walking round the city centre on cold Saturday nights in the winter to give food and warm clothing to Sheffield’s homeless, alcoholics and addicts (and often times not feeling particularly warm of heart but rather wanting to be somewhere else) I’ve learned a million lessons and yet just one big, central, earth shattering, life changing lesson that sums them all up in one; it’s all about Jesus.

period.

So for 5 days I have been working as an usher in a team of 4. Though I was a little hazy as to my actual duties even up to the last day I have basically been policing 8,000 young people in the largest tent in Europe which has been both mental, fun and just amazing to be part of. When 8,000 thousand people get together to worship the living God no wonder things begin to happen, and no wonder the life and vision  and passion that I had only a few years ago come flooding back larger and clearer, washing the mundane and mediocre of life right out.

I’ve been massively challenged by the Soul Action movement so will getting on board with that this year and will hopefully encourage others to get involved too. Soul Action are doing loads of amazing things to help fight all types of poverty round the world. To see some of the amazing things you can get plugged in to, to help out this broken world check out their website here. (Deffo have a look at the I’m Not For Sale campaign).

I think in our western culture we can live so separated from a lot of things in our world. And we do genuinely have challenges that we face every day, especially for a lot of guys my age (not too many years ago there was no such thing as graduate unemployment, but now so many of us can’t get a job) but in all of this we do have an abundance of things to be thankful for. I so often forget that. I think sometimes it is good to look at our lives compared with the suffering, homeless and the starving in the world (not to feel guilty that we don’t do or give enough, and not to be guilted into giving, but more to be aware). Here’s a few stats about wealth and life; they’re really quite incredible:

-If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world’s population.

- If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish somewhere, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.

- If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed that the million who will not survive the week.

- If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

- If you hold up your head with a smile on your face and are truly thankful, you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.

How amazing are some of those? It kinda makes me think What was I worried about again?!?

So generally this past week or so has been amazing, here are some things I’m pretty thankful for and have enjoyed:

• Every Big Top meeting
• Getting to Usher at Soul Survivor
• Reading books in the Soul Action Café
• Spending some quality time in prayer and in God’s Word
• The Furnace prayer room
• Crookes people
• FORM Woodbridge
• Banter with Dan and Andy
• Going on a ‘free-stuff’ raid with BT in the Tool Shed
• Looking and not buying in the Tool Shed
• Chocolate Mountains
• The £40,000 raised in the Momentum offering
• The 1000 people that gave their lives to Jesus for the first time over the Soul Survivor and Momentum festivals

(to and of my friends who aren’t Christians and reading this and you’re thinking; what is this “Soul Survivor?”; This is whacked!; You’ve brainwashed a 1000 people who now think they’re “saved”, that’s not cool; you’re all deceiving yourselves;haven’t you read any Dawkins?; there is no God; Jesus was just a dude and not the Son of God; you’re all bound and restricted and not free from anything; How have you fallen for this “Jesus Loves You” crutch; it’s a cult etc…please please please, let’s have that conversation! for reals, we’ll do it, you have my number).

aight, I need to catch up on some sleep.
I’ll update again soon.
Peace Out.

(cool picture; click it to be linked up tho these dude’s website)

During the Summer I bring my bouldering to a halt and start conditioning/ parkour again. I boulder during the winter because it is inside and training in the snow is no fun – I know some dudes do but I’m not that militant a trainer.

What I’ve got going this summer is a start from scratch routine. Instead of doing long sessions I’m doing high-intensity short routines which are proving to be much more unforgiving but much more beneficial and practically, it means I have time for it. If I’m packing two core focuses into a 20 minute timed session, I actually do it every day. If I say I’m going to train for an hour or two hours a day and can’t fit it in, I’ll sack it off and probably won’t do it the next day either.

So here’s what’s cooking. Each session consists of 2 core body exercises, usually opposites (like push and pull exercises back to back).
Train to fail
High variety of variations on each exercise to focus on each muscle in the group of the section I’m focusing on.

As has always been with me I hate lifting weights and I hate going to the gym, it bores me to death, I can’t do it so I’m doing everything body weights. If I have to lift I just won’t do it so I train body weights and smash the internet research for new body weight routines to add into the exercise.
I’m still using techniques and disciplines from Shaolin monks and Kung-Fu for core strength training but less so at the moment. I use that stuff more for endurance but that isn’t my primary focus at the moment.

So, so far I’ve kept it up
As always I have slacked off the leg exercises but I’ll get on that – running and various Shaolin stances.

“parkour is 80% conditioning”
My good friend James reminded me today of 1 Tim 4:8:

…train yourself for godliness; ⁸for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

Oh yeah, also check this: