I love typography and layout design. I'm not a complete type nerd, but I do know that there is a difference between a typeface and a font, and what that difference is. I was the editor and creator of a state-level church magazine for over a decade, so I also have practical experience to back up my theory. There are many important principles to understand when laying out a document, newsletter or magazine. These principles can be treated as the "rules" of design. They can be followed or broken by the designer, but unless the designer does so with a full understanding of the balance between all of the principles, the end result is likely to look messy and unprofessional. (This is why you pay the big bucks for a good designer, otherwise it looks like you're cheap.)

I don't think it's too controversial to say that the design principle, or "rule", that should be "broken" the least often is the generous application of whitespace. Whitespace is literally the space that you leave around the design elements on your page. Most paper backgrounds used in serious design are white (or really close to white), to ensure optimum contrast with the type, so the name and concept are easy to understand. What is not easy is to get designers to apply the concept. There is a horrific tendency in the design world to cram everything in. Leaving ample space around text and other design elements is seen as wasteful. It's as if the customer has said "I've paid for the whole page, so fill it up!" Yet, too little whitespace will leave a page looking cramped and make it hard to take everything in. Just like cooking with spices, design always benefits from the less is more approach. The space on the page allows the text to be read more easily, the message to be more clearly conveyed to the reader. It allows the eye to be able to concentrate on the flow of your page without being distracted by other overly close elements. Good use of whitespace in your design makes understanding your material easier for your reader.

Our lives are very much like a page upon which we wish to layout a design. There is such a strong urge to fill your life with many cool and awesome things, but then you face the same problem that the designers I spoke of have. The designer after they have handed off their design to the customer, and got paid, has the advantage here, they no longer have to live with the design. If it's cramped and difficult to read because of a lack of whitespace, they are unaffected, only the customer has to deal with it. In our own lives we are generally our own designers, so if we create a life that is messy and has too little whitespace in it, we have to live with it. A life with whitespace in its design will be more comfortable to live in.

Back when I was a young and carefree fellow, I was an enthusiastic member of the canoe and kayak club at Plymouth University. Plymouth, with it's deepwater port and Royal Navy dockyard had a breakwater, but a decent amount of swell for kayak surfing got through and if we wanted even more, we could go outside of the breakwater and find plenty of wave action. All of that was true except for when it wasn't, because the sea is almost completely unpredictable. If the conditions were right, then there was "all you can eat" surfing conditions, otherwise the water would be flat and totally unsuitable for surfing.

Plymouth (the one in England, not the roughly 30 Plymouths in the United States named after it) is in the county of Devon. Right next door is the county of Cornwall, where I am from. Cornwall is easy to find on a map of England as it's the pointy bit down in the bottom left corner. Cornwall extends out into the Atlantic Ocean and to the south is where the English Channel meets the Atlantic Ocean. This gives plentiful opportunities for good surf conditions. Some of the waves rolling in from the ocean are big enough that Cornwall is a world renowned surf location.

With the unpredictability of the surf conditions around the coast, the local radio stations have surf reports, where they announce where the waves are around the coast. For the dedicated surfers in the area, they listen to the report and then drive quickly to where the waves are. Because if there's one thing that all surfers know (even us humble kayak surfers), you need waves to surf on, so they will drive to wherever the waves are. This is a fundamental rule of surfing. No matter how much you may wish otherwise, an absence of waves means that you are not surfing. If you want to surf, you go where the waves are. Don't bother complaining, go where the waves are.

I thought that I'd written about this before, but upon checking my notes, I see that I'd put this in the "to be written" folder. Now seems like a good time to pull it out, dust off the idea and actually write it.

I've written before that as a former pastor, a significant amount of the advice you offer to people is non-spiritual general purpose life principles. Often these come from observing other people with the benefit of the detachment that accompanies being slightly distant from the situation. This one I first noticed in myself and then observed that it was a more general life principle as I saw others do the same thing.

We humans, absolutely including me, have a tendency to start doing things that are good for us, but then stop. Sometimes we stop slowly, sometimes it's suddenly, but it’s almost certainly a case of when we’re going to stop rather than if. It's hard to put an exact reason on why this is. Things that are good, do often require more effort, so perhaps it's that we begrudge the work necessary to do well? This is especially likely with exercise where the payoff for the effort seems to take an interminable amount of time to start showing.

Not only is Peter my favourite apostle, but he was also an important figure during both the ministry of Jesus and the early days of the church. There are many interesting things that can be written about Peter, but this time I want to talk about that time he received the keys of the kingdom of heaven and what he did with them subsequently.

To set the context (Matthew 16:13-14), Jesus and his disciples had arrived in Caesarea Philippi and Jesus asked them who the people thought that he was. We are not given any reason behind the asking of this question. I believe that Jesus knew exactly what the people were thinking about him. This was likely one of those questions that Jesus would ask to cause people to think carefully on a matter. The disciples started sharing answers that they had heard while helping with crowd management at any of the events where Jesus ministered.

Having gotten their minds focused on the matter of the identity of Jesus, he drew them into the next level of consideration and asked (Matthew 16:15) who they thought he was. I don't know how close any of the other disciples were to answering this question, but it seems that Peter answered first. Peter's advantage of having no filter on what he would say, worked in his favour this time and he immediately declared (Matthew 16:16) that Jesus was the Christ, the New Testament term for the Messiah.

Think about how many things you "just know" because you've heard them presented as true multiple times in your life. After 30 years of listening to sermons, I have a massive list of biblical nuggets that I have heard multiple preachers teach. The vast majority of them are true or at least based upon reasonable inferences from multiple scriptures (in the mouth of two or three witnesses – 2 Corinthians 13:1). Every so often, someone will repeat something that they've heard and haven't confirmed. This is something that particularly bothers me, because the Word of God is truth and doesn't need us, even accidentally or without malice, passing on incorrect teachings. I like the principle that former U.S. president Ronald Reagan used: "trust, but verify". It behooves those of us who preach and teach to take this principle to heart, so that we do no harm to our listeners theological condition.

This came up for me today as I sat in my favourite coffee shop researching for my commentary on the book of the acts of the apostles, or just "Acts" to its friends. I'm still early in the process - working on chapter three and verse eight: the lame man at the gate Beautiful has been healed and enters the temple. I have heard multiple preachers claim that because of his physical condition the lame and the broken could not enter the temple, so this would have been his first time being able to enter the temple. This sounds so reasonable when backed up with scriptures like Leviticus 21:18. My preaching style, and especially my writing style, is that I back up my statements with scripture. Yes, I have been told before that I use too much scripture, but that person went off of the theological rails and sadly is now not doing well, so I'll stick to using "too much" scripture. I went looking for scripture to properly clarify the point and that's when it got interesting.

The Lord has always held called men and women of God to a higher standard than the regular believers. (Obligatory media reference – "with great power, comes great responsibility".) When the Lord established the priesthood to care for and run the tabernacle (and subsequent temple) processes, he added a requirement (Leviticus 21:16-21) that no priest could be lame or broken and still serve in the tabernacle. They were not denied entry, nor were they excluded from the provision that all Levites received from the offerings, but they were ineligible to serve as priests in the temple making offerings to the Lord. These instructions do not apply to non-priests in any way, so we cannot use them to back any assertion that the lame man was not allowed into the temple.