La vie décousue

I real­ise that my site has been very quiet recently. I’ve star­ted a new job, and haven’t had much time or energy for record­ing. I’m hop­ing to really get back into soon, so things should pick up around here again in the new year. Please be patient with me!

Look­ing for­wards to 2010, I think I will be focus­ing more on record­ing the bible. I will still be record­ing other pro­jects here and there, but will prob­ably stick to smal­ler things such as short stor­ies and poetry. To get the ball rolling, I’d like to intro­duce my latest pro­ject, Poems of Pas­sion by Ella Wheeler Wil­cox. This is a won­der­ful col­lec­tion of poems all about love, which I’m sure you will enjoy.

Kiva is a non-profit organ­isa­tion that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a spe­cific low-income entre­pren­eur across the globe.

You choose who to lend to — whether a baker in Afgh­anistan, a goat her­der in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a res­taur­at­eur in Cam­bodia, or a tailor in Iraq — and as they repay their loan, you get your money back. It’s a power­ful and sus­tain­able way to empower someone right now to lift them­selves out of poverty.

I have con­trib­uted to the entre­pren­eur fea­tured to the left in the side­bar. Please con­sider get­ting involved. A small con­tri­bu­tion from you could make an huge impact in another person’s life.

Record­ing has finally star­ted again. Tomor­row and the next day I will be at the Global Lead­er­ship Sum­mit here in Sydney, so I prob­ably won’t be post­ing any new record­ings until next week. For those of you who have not heard of the sum­mit, it is a fant­astic inter­na­tional con­fer­ence held every year by Wil­low Creek. This year’s speak­ers include Tony Blair and Bono. I highly recom­mend attend­ing it next year if you can.

Now, the bad news is that I have only raised $25 so far for the Heart Found­a­tion (NSW). That’s $1 per km that I will be walk­ing, and though it’s bet­ter than noth­ing, I’m sure we can do bet­ter! Please donate by click­ing on the link in the left side bar. They estim­ate that the whole walk will take about 5 hours. The walk is this Sunday, so don’t delay with your spon­sor­ship For all you Aus­sies out there, all dona­tions over $2 are tax deduct­ible, so don’t hold back!

Well, it’s still too windy here for me to record. There’s some­thing hor­rible about windy weather; it really messes with my mind and makes me feel awful. Any­way, on a brighter note, Lib­rivox has released it’s first hymn col­lec­tion. I have sung two hymns for this col­lec­tion, so please hop over there and have a listen. Please keep in mind, we are all ama­teurs, so don’t expect pro­fes­sional level sing­ers!  If you enjoy the record­ings, please leave your response on the Inter­net Archive page. It would be great if this first col­lec­tion does not remain the only col­lec­tion

Heart dis­ease is the lead­ing cause of death in Aus­tralia. It

• kills one Aus­tralian nearly every 10 minutes
• affects more than 3.7 mil­lion Australians
• pre­vents 1.4 mil­lion people from liv­ing a full life because of dis­ab­il­ity caused by the disease
• affects one in five Aus­trali­ans, and affects two out of three families
• claimed the lives of almost 46,000 Aus­trali­ans (34% of all deaths) in 2006 — deaths that are largely preventable.

The Heart Found­a­tion saves lives and improves health through fund­ing world-class car­di­ovas­cu­lar research, guidelines for health pro­fes­sion­als, inform­ing the pub­lic and assist­ing people with car­di­ovas­cu­lar disease.

On 25th Octo­ber 2009, I will be tak­ing part in the 7 Bridges Walk, a 25km walk around Sydney Har­bour.  I will be using this as an oppor­tun­ity to raise money for the Heart Found­a­tion. You can donate at http://www.everydayhero.com.au/joy_chan . Please ser­i­ously con­sider sup­port­ing me in this; I don’t know if I’ll have the forti­tude to fin­ish the whole course if I don’t raise any money! You can see a run­ning total of dona­tions on the left

From huge dust storms, to hot sum­mer heat fol­lowed by thun­der­storms and hail, we’ve been hav­ing crazy weather here in Sydney. For the past week, it has been windy. Really windy. I haven’t been able to do any record­ing, because the sound of the wind is simply too loud. I don’t know how long it will be before I can record again, but hope­fully it will be soon. We’ll just have to sit tight and wait. In the mean­time, why not check out some of the other offer­ings over at Lib­rivox?

I had an inter­view today at my dream com­pany. I’ve wanted to work for this com­pany for the last year and a half, but there were no pos­i­tions avail­able until now. When I was informed of the open­ing, I was really excited, but then imme­di­ately tried not to get my hopes up in case I don’t get the job. Then I read Romans 8:24:

²⁴ For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? (Romans 8:24, New King James Ver­sion)

I’ve taken it com­pletely out of con­text here, but it reminded that we can only hope for what we do not have. I have heard people say so many times, “Try not to get your hopes up,” in regards to any num­ber of situ­ations. Why shouldn’t we hope? Why are we so con­cerned with pro­tect­ing our hearts? Isn’t it worse to never achieve our dreams, than to be hurt when our hopes are dashed? Through­out the bible I see examples of God telling people to be pas­sion­ate and not tepid. So I’ve decided to go ahead and be excited and hope as much as I want, trust­ing God to look after my heart if I am hurt. It’s not my job to pro­tect myself. It’s my job to trust, believe and hope passionately.

It never ceases to sur­prise me how few people (espe­cially Chris­ti­ans) have read the bible in its entirety. For some reason, many see this as a dif­fuc­ult, if not impossible, task. I have no idea why. True, it’s a fairly large book, but then, so are many oth­ers. I have read the bible through in many dif­fer­ent ver­sions since child­hood, and am often asked how I’ve accom­plished this.

First of all, I don’t see read­ing the bible as an “accom­plish­ment” any more than com­plet­ing all the other books I have read. Most people start read­ing books with the inten­tion of fin­ish­ing them. If you have been strug­gling with read­ing the whole bible, I sug­gest you start with get­ting rid of any pre-conceived notions that it should be dif­fi­cult. Next, pick an easy ver­sion. Read­ing doesn’t have to be dif­fi­cult. Why not start with a para­phrase ver­sion such as The Mes­sage, the Good News Bible, or the New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion. To freshen things up, try a ver­sion you have never read before. The Con­tem­por­ary Eng­lish Ver­sion or Eng­lish Stand­ard Ver­sion use simple, easy to under­stand lan­guage. I am not endors­ing any ver­sion over any other in regards to accur­acy; my aim is to make sug­ges­tions that will help you to read.

Of course, the bible is more than just a book, and to reap the bene­fits of it, one should spend time med­it­at­ing upon it and study­ing it. How­ever, there is noth­ing wrong with “just read­ing” it. Why look for deeper mean­ings, when you don’t even know the sur­face story? Many have told me that there is no bene­fit to read­ing the bible without study­ing it more deeply. I dis­agree. Surely there is more bene­fit to spend­ing 30 mins read­ing God’s Word, than spend­ing that same amount of time read­ing the news or magazines, or catch­ing up on blogs? Even without con­scious effort, our world view is shaped by the things we take in. This is not to say a light read­ing of the bible can replace tak­ing the time to really med­it­ate on it; I think we should do both. If you are not in the mood for a “deep” read­ing, a “shal­low” read­ing is bet­ter than no reading.

As a Chris­tian, I obvi­ously believe that there is spir­itual bene­fit to know­ing the bible. How­ever there are still many reas­ons for non-Christians to read it, not least of which is lit­er­ary. If you love Eng­lish lit­er­at­ure, you need to read the bible. So many of the clas­sics allude to scrip­ture and use say­ings taken from it. If your greatest interest in read­ing the bible is to increase your cul­tural and lit­er­ary know­ledge, the King James Ver­sion is prob­ably your best bet. It’s got a bad repu­ta­tion because of it’s archaic lan­guage, but that’s the ver­sion the clas­sic authors would have known and quoted from. As you should know if you fol­low my site, I am cur­rently record­ing it, so down­load it and have a listen If the lan­guage is deter­ring you, start with one of the ver­sions I men­tioned previously.

I hope this has given you some tips and encour­age­ment to get out there and start read­ing the bible (in its entirety). Happy reading!

I hope you enjoyed Cutler’s Stor­ies of King Arthur and His Knights. I do love those Arthur­ian legends…

I recently dis­covered the Urban Fantasy genre, and have got­ten hooked. In the last month, I have read all of Char­laine Har­ris’ South­ern Vam­pire series, Patri­cia Briggs’ Mer­cedes Thompson and Alpha and Omega series, Lynn Viehl’s Darkyn series, Alyson Noel’s Immor­tals series (not recom­men­ded), and Lori Han­deland’s Phoenix Chron­icles (not recom­men­ded). If you haven’t figured it out, I read fast (when I’m not read­ing aloud). I think I’ve been aver­aging around 2 or 3 books a day (I’ve also been tak­ing a break from work). Any­way, in keep­ing with this theme, I will be record­ing Théo­phile Gau­tier’s Clar­i­monde, aka La Morte Amoureuse. The links con­tain major spoil­ers, so if you haven’t heard or read the story before, I sug­gest wait­ing

Record­ings of the KJV bible con­tinue. I am sure that I am mis-pronouncing many of the names, so please for­give me for that. If any­one can point me to a web page with pro­noun­ci­ations of Bib­lical names and places, that would be fant­astic. Just a reminder for those of you who like to keep the record­ings — I highly recom­mend down­load­ing them from Lib­rivox cata­logue. The record­ings I provide on this site are my first drafts, provided for those of you who can’t wait. Once each book is com­pleted, they are checked and any errors are fixed before Lib­rivox cata­logues them.

I haven’t decided yet what I will do after Clar­i­monde. It’s prob­ably time to do some­thing reli­gious, but I’m not sure whether I should do some­thing easy to read like an Andrew Mur­ray work, or some­thing meatier.

Well, I’ve returned from Manila, and as you’ve prob­ably noticed, I wasn’t able to do any blog­ging whilst away. I actu­ally had inter­net access, but I just didn’t have the words to express what was going on over there. It was an amaz­ing, amaz­ing, amaz­ing trip, and it’s a bit of a downer hav­ing to return to nor­mal daily life again At any rate, pod­cast­ing should resume shortly.