Lucky?
Luck /lək/ (noun) ● success or failure apparently brought by chance
Did you know that houses with addresses that have lucky numbers in them sell for more? A study of a British Columbia neighborhood with a significant percentage of Chinese residents showed that house numbers ending in “8” sold at a 2.5% premium. Those ending with an unlucky “4” sold at a 2.2% discount.
(BTW, the Beijing Summer Olympics opened at 08:08:08 on the 8th day of the 8th month of 2008.)
And
Gordo!
Last weekend, my nephew, John, and I went on a BBQ hunting mission around Austin, the capital of ye olde state of Texas. More about that another time.
Saturday night, after watching the 1,500,000 Mexican free-tailed bats hightail out of Congress Ave bridge at dusk (and more about that, too, another time), we felt a hankering for something sweet. This, you must remember, after a day of engorging ourselves on brisket all day from various highly rated purveyors of the same.
Anxious?
OK, I bet it’s happened to you too. We are minding our own little businesses—sitting at our desks or standing in our kitchens or watching our TVs—with our cell phones in our pockets or purses. Suddenly we feel it, the bzzt, bzzt, bzzt of an incoming call or text or email.
We immediately check the phone out, but … nothing. No call. No text. No email. We check again. Did someone play the next move in Words With Friends? Nope. Someone loved my Instagram pics? Nope.
Growing, Pericope by Pericope
It is not often that one gets to see the fruit of one’s ministry labors. But by God’s grace, I got to taste a delicious specimen the other day, in the form of an email from one of my former students, Michael. He always kept pestering me about when my Mark commentary would be done. When it came on the market, Michael was one of the first to buy a copy, and he promptly began teaching through it in his SS class for Young Marrieds at a local church.
Here’s his email (slightly
Perfection?
Neil deGrasse Tyson had a gripe. With James Cameron, film producer, deep-sea explorer, screenwriter, visual artist, editor, etc. The Cameron of Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), and Avatar (2009) fame. But it was the Titanic (1997), that induced Tyson’s gripe.
Cameron’s been nominated for six Academy Awards and won three for Titanic. Over $2 billion grossed for that movie. Hollywood’s top earner for 2011 as nominated by Vanity Fair.
Now Tyson is no slouch himself.
The World in Front of the Text
It is by the regular weekly encounters with pericopes of Scripture that life change is addressed, so that the people of God may be aligned to the will of God. As pericopes are sequentially preached from, the resultant transformation of lives reflects a gradual and increasing alignment to the values of God’s kingdom (his ideal “world”). In other words, what is being sought in the weekly homiletical undertakings of the church is corporate and individual alignment with
Fading?
The man is an icon, the “god” of cricket. He’s broken pretty much every record there is to break. And he’s been at it for over two decades, having debuted in 1989, when most of his current teammates were toddlers!
And, yes, he’s also 39, an age when most cricketers are retired and sipping their iced drinks in a commentary circle or in a columnist’s chair or in a coach’s class.
Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, however, is still around.
But probably not for long.
After
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.