There’s something about Tolkien’s Middle-earth that stokes my imagination! It’s so easy to step into the Third Age where the hassles and aggravations of the real world just slip away. I even get drawn into the extra appendices at the end! (Personally I think they’re one of the best parts of the books! Why is […]

I probably do need to apply for rare breed status…  While the phrase “Christian gamer” is no longer an oxymoron as such, for more than 20 years now I have been playing competitive-level Magic as a Christian. It never occurred to me that anyone would ask me to write about it; but, since they have, […]

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve hardly ever had trouble sleeping. More often than not, the real problem has been dragging myself out of bed in the morning. I’ve slept on a bus as we drove through mountains in Asia. I’ve slept on a fourteen-hour flight across the Atlantic. I even managed to sleep in […]

In my offline life, unlike Minecraft, I never find useful stuff on the ground that I can pick up and keep for later. I sometimes pick up litter and very occasionally a 10p piece, but never gold, usable wood or red stone. For various reasons over the last few months I’ve been looking for a nice, […]

My morning scroll of the Facebook statuses: sweeping my fingers over the phone screen, scanning for keywords, or eyecatching images: panning for social media gold. The name caught my eye. He was a young author who’s books I’d read. He was a scholar and a YouTuber. At some point in his adult life, he’d crossed […]

It started with an email and ballooned into a complicated problem within one of the communities I belong to. It was a tense few days before it settled down. While we were trying to sort it all out, one of my mentors asked me to think about what my priorities were. My answer was almost […]