Over the last year I’ve found that I’m a lot less anxious to buy new equipment and it’s not just because our normal three-bedroom terraced house is surprisingly full.

I think it’s partly because I have pieces of equipment that I either don’t use, or don’t use to anything like their capacity. My iPhone 3G is probably the one thing that I really use to something approaching it’s functional abilities!

So, my decision, my new year resolution if you will, is to use the stuff I have in a more efficient way. and to get rid of things that I can’t or won’t use. I need to include the whole house including the loft and the garage.

I have too many computers, too many audio systems, too many printers, too many books and too many magazines. And that’s just the stuff that I know I have!

The plan is to rationalise, to work out what I want to achieve in our home, and then configure the equipment that I have to make it happen. The rest of the stuff will be disappearing, hopefully not into landfill but somewhere where someone else can make use of it.

If you know that you can use some of my stuff for a useful purpose, please contact me here. Write and let me know what you would use the thing(s) for, how much you can afford to pay and I’ll send the goods to you. Any proceeds are going to Andy’s Angels, so please try to at least cover the cost of mailing.

To kick things off I have a blue and white Mac G3 tower with a built-in ZIP drive, and an HP Laserjet 4L printer with some spare cartridges. I’ll work out a better way of posting items up for grabs in the near future!

I’d also like to share with the readers of this blog where the stuff went and how it’s being used now, if that’s OK with the recipients.

It’ll be interesting to see where all my excess stuff ends up and what it ends up doing.

What does a really ordinary guy do to understand his value within the world?

A man, I think, generally wants (or needs) to feel that he provides something worthwhile to the people around him. It’s a feeling gained by some innate sense of worth or value – that life would be worse for others if you weren’t around.

I’ve met a few people this fortnight who have exceptional talents – an ultra-distance runner who will be representing his country later this year, a magician who works in schools and churches and who kept my children amazed for a good 30 minutes over lunch, a man who has spent most of his adult life writing children’s songs that are very well known – and suddenly felt incredibly worthless.

Note that it’s not because any of these men went out of their way to make me feel small. That all came from inside. Everyone has talents but some seem to be more highly valued or ’special’.

People like me need to be making a difference.

So I turned to God last night, asking “why am I here? I’m an ordinary guy – why do I exist?” God answered through 1 Peter 2 v 5.

“And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple.” (NLT)

About twenty years ago I worked for a summer at an outdoor centre in Scotland and one of the many tasks that I turned my hand to was building a stone wall. I had to pick stones from around the grounds and somehow make them fit into a wall shape using mortar to bond them together.

The stones were all differently shaped, differently sized, almost like people…

But twenty years later that wall is still standing, still retaining the hillside that we’d cut into to create a car park. And if you took one of the stones out, that part of the wall would be severely weakened if it didn’t actually fall down.

So I’m going to continue to be an odd-shaped, odd-sized stone. And hopefully try to make a difference in the world around me.