Little notes from Heather and Martin

This is a follow-up from Heather's twoposts about retirement savings:  should we prudently save for our retirement or generously give to today's needs and trust God to look after us down the road.

Giving away our retirement savings would be a bold statement, but requires little faith for the present day.  How can it grow on experiences of God's provision when we have arranged not to need His help until we turn 65?

I was struck by this question a few weeks back, as we yet again tossed around our questions.

I can't remember if it was before or after the 150th anniversary celebrations for my parents' mission organisation, whose founder's belief that "God's work... will not lack God's supply" was affirmed by stories of those still present as well as from history books.  Those stories were of people daring to act as God led them, facing pressing need, and being encouraged by timely provision of those needs.

So I think that we'll keep putting t…

I'm too tired to write much, but here's some pics from Neighbours Day yesterday.

In what is becoming an annual tradition, yesterday Anna came over for the day and we made Easter eggs :-)  We do this because we love Easter eggs, but don't want to get them at the expense of the children who get beaten up on cocoa plantations and the adults who are also enslaved there.  No one in New Zealand makes fair trade Easter eggs (except plain hollow chocolate ones), so we make our own.  We do milk chocolate marshmallow eggs, milk chocolate 'creme eggs' and dark chocolate peppermint 'creme eggs'.

In 2003, when I first got sick, I was at the beginning of a PhD in Green Chemistry at Carnegie Melon University in the US.  As part of this, I had to write an essay responding to a book arguing that humanity needed new ethics to deal with the new challenges posed by modern scientific developments.  I had long regretted that I didn't have a copy of this essay, so I was delighted to find it when we were clearing out our upstairs desk a few weeks ago.  I've reproduced it below, followed by a few comments.


Celebrating the goodness of God’s bounty: A Christian vision for the use of technology in the modern world

Les grandes personnes... ne vous questionnent jamais sur l’essentiel.

Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In the opening chapter of The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age Hans Jonas presents a case for the need to develop new ethics in order to deal with the new challenges presented by recent advances in technological capabili…

This is a follow-up to a previous post, in which I was wondering whether we should give away the money we had intended to save for our retirement, rather than keep it.
The more I have been thinking about whether we should give our money away, rather than save for our retirement, the more Biblical passages come to mind in support of the idea.

I think about the man who built bigger barns and then died before he could use the produce in them (Luke 12:13-21): are we, like him, storing up treasure for ourselves rather than being rich towards God?

Then last week I came across Proverbs 30:7-9:
Two things I ask of you;
do not deny them to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that I need,
or I shall be full, and deny you,
and say, “Who is the Lord?”
or I shall be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God. I felt convicted by it as I know that our wealth makes our need to depend on God less obvious …