I rarely look at a Bible these days. I can read it in its original languages, or I could; I am fairly rusty on it now—especially the Aramaic passages of Ezra and Daniel. I used to preach sometimes. People would often come up to me afterwards and talk to me about the content of my sermon. Sometimes they would ask for a copy of it, and I would usually hand them the copy I had in my hand.

Given this, I think it is understandable that I was convinced that God was calling me to ministry, but the course of life I followed as a result proved worse than disastrous. There are probably people out there who have had as useless a life as mine has been, but I don't know any of them. While I still call myself a Christian, I can no longer see myself as a member of the body of Christ, or a child of God—certainly not a servant of God. If I had to describe my relationship with God, I would call myself his subject. How I came to this position is explained in the letter of resignation I wrote to my church about 18 months after I stopped attending services.

I last preached in 2010—probably about April or May. For a while I attended Catholic Mass. Since May 2013 I have been to church just three times—when my wife was received into fellowship at our local Baptist church, just before Christmas 2016, then the pastor Roly Swain’s last service and his farewell service in (April?) 2019.

[xkcd cartoon on full-width justification, departing abruptly from the previous thread of conversation] 

Me: Okay. I love the way these conversations drift naturally from one topic to the next

Friend: Well, some of it was me listing my day's activities, but the XKCD was pretty random.

Me:  Got it

I'm quite obsessive about full-width justification. 

Friend: what are your views? Mine is not to bother with it. ugly

Me: For essays, article, stories, etc, I use it with prose, if I can. Never used it with sermon scripts though, back in the days when I sermonised
 

Friend: Sir Mon
 

Me: I actually did quite weird things with insets for sermons, the idea being to make it easy to keep my place on the page
 

Friend: You could blog sermonise...
The sermon on the Monitor
 

Me: Not sure who I'd target