the parable of the whirligig

Once a man put up a whirligig in his back garden. He watched to see which part of the garden got the most sun exposure, and duly inserted the whirligig spike into the garden as directed. All went well for a few months. Then he noticed the whirligig was leaning rather too much to one side. On further investigation, this was due to the hole the spike had made becoming larger. So he did a temporary repair by putting a small bit of wood in the hole. This worked until a few rainfalls later, when the hole enlarged again. After several such temporary fixes, he decided something more definite was needed, as despite all the bits of wood, the whirligig was still leaning rather badly. So off he went to the local superstore to get some magic concretey-stuff to cement the spike into place. "That'll fix it" he thought. Unfortunately, the next time he hung the washing out, it was rather windy. And it got even windier. The next time he looked out of the window, not only was it raining, but the whole whirligig had parted company with the earth, a perfect block of concrete still around the spike...

I'm sure there's a parable in here somewhere ;-)
MrPM has now reconcreted our whirligig. Hopefully it won't come out of the ground again.

PS a whirligig is an outdoor rotary clothes line

back again

Things got quite busy for a while, what with having visitors and two Guide camps on successive weekends (don't think I will make that mistake again!), so no blogging.
Now it's back to more usual life, so I am busy doing some more apologetics - next essay is about proof for the resurrection. I though it wouldn't be too difficult, after all, it's why I became a Christian in the first place: I couldn't come up with a more convincing alternative explanation of what had happened to Jesus' body; therefore I had to believe the resurrection had happened; therefore I had to take Jesus seriously; therefore I had to believe in God....
At present I am plowing through The Resurrection of the Son of God by NT Wright. I suspect the information I really need is near the end of the book, but it's only going to make sense if I read the rest first. I've made it to page 360, which is about halfway :-( I'm finding it very interesting, but it does take a bit of wading through. It's much less entertaining for mrPM though - with some of the other books I've read, there have been regular explosions of 'Rubbish!' (no, that's not the actual word I used - any readers who know me in the flesh will know exactly which word it replaces) from the settee. It's going to be quite difficult to write an essay taking some of these views seriously...