Bunker’s Bogglers

Twenty Questions of Wrestling, Music, History and Christianity

1. Who is the only person to win the Money in the Bank Briefcase and not cash it in?
2. What is the name of Raven’s finishing move?
3. Peter Gruner is better known as?
4. David Flair’s and Crowbar’s valet in WCW was?
5. Who were the founder members of the Varsity Club?

1. Who released the album ‘Dare’ in October 1981?
2. Who released the song ‘In your eyes’ in 2002?
3. What is the first name of the singer Sting?
4. What group did Peter Gabriel front before Phil Collins?
5. Finish this Manfred Mann’s Earth Band song title ‘Blinded by the …..’

1. Who was the first king of the House of Tudor?
2. Perkin Warbeck pretended to be who?
3. In what century was William Shakespeare born?
4. In which present day country is the Battlefield of Waterloo?
5. What relation was James II of England to William III of England Prince of Orange?

1. What is the third book of the Old Testament? (in the NIV bible)
2. Who was the first person Jesus called to be a disciple?
3. What is the full name of the Book of Acts?
4. Who were the sons of thunder?
5. Why does God give Jacob the name Israel?

Decade of Dreaming

When I was growing up I watched a lot of sci-fi and I genuinely thought that by the time I was 16 I would be fighting the machines that had conquered the earth.  That however was not the case; I finished school and went to college.  At college I got to study what I liked and so I studied History, Geology, Biology and Chemistry.  Dropping Chemistry at AS level I went on to study the rest through to A level.

At this point I dreamed of being an archaeologist and travelling the world finding treasures.  So naturally after finishing college I went on to study a degree in Heritage, History and Archaeology at University.  Although I did what was required of me to pass the course with a 2.2 I could never have been accused of studying too hard.  I was too busy having a good time with my friends, dreaming about girls, drinking in pubs and dancing in clubs.  I didn’t dare think about the future or plan for what happened after I left university trusting that I would be able to get a job in my chosen field.

The dream though didn’t become a reality, I left university came back home and here I have stayed for the past five years.  I didn’t get a job in my chosen field; in fact I now work in a call centre answering calls for many different businesses.  This isn’t a cautionary tale or even the end of the story because sometimes the things we dream about in our wildest fantasies do come true.

When I said I dreamt of being an archaeologist that wasn’t all I dreamt of being.  I also dreamt of being an actor, a singer, a writer and a painter.  When I came back from University I also went back to my local church and that was the start of something special.  The church was putting on a performance at the local primary school.  They needed male singers and I qualified because I was male not that I could sing or so I thought.  I had been told several times before that I couldn’t sing and every time I did I was told to shut up.  So it then came as a bit of a shock when not only did they want me in the choir but to do a solo.  The last time I had sung in public was actually in the same primary school when I attended it over 11 years previously and I was very nervous.  However after numerous practices I produced a competent performance.  In the process I fulfilled one of my dreams to sing in a musical.  The circuit then put on a performance of the passion play in a market place and I played the role of St Peter, I also played the part of Joseph in the Nativity Play in the same market place, both fulfilling another dream of mine to act in a play.  In the years that followed I appeared in other performances and choirs, gradually increasing my confidence in my abilities.

Now I also write regularly posting to my blog and producing articles for the local church magazine.  I also produce pictures on my computer which I share with the rest of the world via Facebook and my Blog.  I have also taken part in a few archaeological excavations and surveys. To some extent you could say that I am a dreamer who is actually living out his dreams.  I’m not professional working in any of the things I wanted to do, but I do them whenever I like and I enjoy myself when doing them.  For me that is the best dream of all.

The Soundtrack to My Life, Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell By Meatloaf

That might sound a bit odd coming from a Christian, but it’s true there is no other album I love listening to more than Back into Hell.  It brings back memories of my childhood and I must have listened to it more than a 100 times to date.  I know the words to the songs and they speak to me in my life.  I would like to share some of the lyrics and what they mean to me.

“I’d do anything for love (but I won’t do that)” is the first track on the album and for me it speaks about a person who is desperate to find love but can’t move on.  There lyric that speaks especially to me is “maybe I’m lonely and that’s all I’m qualified to be”, because I am lonely but seen as I have never had a girlfriend that is all I am qualified to be.

“Life is a lemon and I want my money back” I love to play this song when I am angry with the world. This song is all about injustice and a true lament about life.  What I love is the imagery where the backing singers go through a list of the good things in life and one by one Meatloaf shoots them down with appropriate phrases to do with modern living for instance “What about love? It’s defective; it’s always breaking in half”.

“Rock and Roll Dreams come through” if anyone can tell me what a Rock and Roll dream is I would be grateful.  As much as I love this song it sometimes sends me to sleep with its melodic beat.  My favourite line is “You’re never alone cause you can put on the phones and let the drummer tell your heart what to do” because it speaks of hope for people who are lonely.

“It just won’t quit” is a song which I adore because it describes how I feel most of the time.  Not quite knowing why you feel a certain way but unable to get rid of the feeling anyway.  The opening lines describe it perfectly as you seem to come in half way through a conversation.  “And I never really sleep anymore and I always get those dangerous dreams and I never get a minute of peace and I gotta wonder what it means”.

“Out of the frying pan (And into the fire)” is a well known metaphor for going from a hard situation to a worse one.  In the song I like to think it means that he wants to the person on an adventure.  My favourite line from the song is “I’ve never been this hot and I’ve never been so bored and breathing is just no fun anymore, and then I saw you like a summer dream and you’re the answer to every prayer that I ever said” because I know how feels to have that woman who sets your world on fire when you just see them.

While there are many other fine songs on the album it would take forever to write about each one and most would be pretty much the same reasons why I like them. So last two tracks I would like to mention are “Wasted Youth” and “Everything Louder than Everything Else” because they are my favourite tracks off the album.  For a long time I thought that they were actually the same song, but realised after a while that “Wasted Youth” was the spoken monologue by Jim Steinman, which is bursting with raw energy.  It goes straight into “Everything Louder than Everything Else” which has a fantastic middle section which ends with a marching beat and the lines “A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age” If there ever was an anthem for my life this would be it, for me it says enjoy yourself and don’t worry about the future, which is what I try to do.

The Medialit course project

last week I was on a media literacy course, check out our project on youtube

What God has done for me lately?

As a child, and growing up, I heard a buzz phrase all the time on the TV, in the paper and on the Radio that “you could never go back” and it affected me deeply.  I believed that this meant that no matter how much you try when something was over you could never have it again, but recently with God I have found this not to be true.

God gives great opportunities to live and grow in faith but every once in a while I have been given an extraordinary chance to go back into my own childhood and see it with fresh eyes.  Sometimes I am amazed and other times I am dismayed when things are either exactly as I remember them or completely different.  I would like to give you three examples of what I mean.

Just under a year ago there was a ceremony in the United Mission Church of St Andrew, Kirton in Lindsey where the new Scout troop flag was dedicated to God, but the amazing thing wasn’t the flag but the people.  I used be a Scout in that troop and I happened to be in church that Sunday, but I was amazed at who else was there.  To me the Scout Movement is a family and I was a part of that family for the majority of my childhood.  At this service I was seeing people who I remember with great fondness and I was accepted as one of the old gang, we even had our photo taken with the new flag.  That is when it struck me that I had figuratively managed to turn back the hands of time, because in that service it was like it was 1999 again.  I felt uplifted, revived and healed by the experience which gave me the chance to lay some of my childhood issues to rest.

For my 23^rd birthday I decided to repeat the school holiday trips I took as I child, but instead of staying at Bamburgh I stayed in Berwick on Tweed.  This time I visited some of the same places as before, but it wasn’t the same and not entirely what I had envisioned for the trip.  The problem was that there were just too many differences.  I was older and not with the same people, or staying in the same place etc.  I was looking for that childhood wonderment I had first experienced when I had gone before.  I remembered going to Bamburgh Castle and seeing a hallway, walking down it with the ghost of a girl, she held your hand as her other hand brushed against the tapestry on the wall.  Obviously this was a trick, but when I went back the whole thing was gone.  I couldn’t find the hallway let alone the tapestry.  Also through my jaded eyes all I saw was the same things I see from any other historic landmark; however I understood them better and could appreciate the buildings’ beauty more than when I was a child.  The trip wasn’t wasted, I thoroughly enjoyed everything we did that week, but it just wasn’t what I was looking for when I planned it.

Now, as I am writing, I am in a hotel room in Durham, another city I visited on a school trip when I was a lot younger.  This time I didn’t come seeking the past and childhood wonderment, but came so I could find out about how I could change the future, that however is another story.  While I wasn’t seeking the past, walking down the same streets made me remember it and instead of being filled with childhood wonderment I was filled with a sense of mild amusement about the events of the past and how some things lurk in your memory just waiting to be prompted by seeing them again.  I wonder if it is possible “to go back”. The voice inside me says no, but God gives the opportunity to go forward and along the way revisit some of the places and people that hold a special place in your heart.

Ask yourself What Would Jesus Do?

This is my first proper blog post and I wanted to ask one of the most fundamental questions, if Jesus wrote a blog what would he do? The simple answer would be I don’t know he didn’t have the internet in Galilee.  Never the less I want my blog to reflect some of the values that I hold dear due to my faith in Jesus Christ.

So the first thing I would like to do is to explain what Jesus has done in my life.  It would be hard to list everything as I believe that he has done so much for me and I know that not everybody reading this believes in Jesus Christ, but here is just example of his grace and mercy.

Five years ago I left university to move back home after finishing my degree.  A couple of months later I still didn’t have a job and was basically vegetating on the sofa all day every day.  One day the Church in my local town, to which my mother was a member, was holding a renvisioning day where they were looking at how the church might move forward.  For reasons I still can’t explain I decided to go along and take a look, to my amazement they didn’t treat me like a total stranger.   They welcomed me into their discussions and the next Sunday I went to the church for morning worship.  As soon as I stepped through the doors I was welcomed with open arms, like the prodigal son returning home.  My mother sat me with a few people she knew and went off to sing in the choir.  It was awkward at first because there were very few people who I recognised in the congregation, but eventually I felt comfortable.  My motives for going to church went exactly pure; I was actually looking for a girlfriend and to maybe increase my standing in the community.  Not really interested in their theology or what it was I actually believed.  That was until a few weeks later the local church started running an Alpha Course.  For the first time I really got it, I knew what it truly meant to be a Christian, to be a follower of Christ.  I had been a Christian all my life and so in that sense I couldn’t claim to be a born again Christian, but I would say that I gave my life to Christ on that course.  It was at that point in my life when I really wanted to study the scriptures and follow the example of Christ.  I still wanted a girlfriend but it didn’t consume me, and I stopped caring about social status I was simply happy to love and serve the lord.

So what would Jesus do? For me looking back it is very clear what he did.  He saw a very frightened, broken boy scared of moving into the real world of work.  He took me and remoulded me into a man who wants nothing than to sing the praises of the living God.  I am sure that Jesus saw in me, some small glimmer of talent that he could use, which to today has flourished into anyone of hundreds of activities that I have been involved in.   All thanks to that one simple welcoming gesture when I needed it most.

Coming Soon!

Hi, this is my new blog I have just started but hope to have everything running properly as soon as I can