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
Command!
Last year, a biker riding without a helmet hit his brakes for some reason, lost control of his vehicle, went over the handlebars, hit his head on the pavement, and was taken to Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, NY, where he was pronounced dead.
Philip A. Contos, 55, of Parish, north of Syracuse, would have survived, State Troopers said, if he had been wearing a Department of Transportation (DOT) approved helmet.
The irony of it all was that Contos was maneuvering
Good?
I’ve seen creepy worms in wounds. In a bad—really bad!—case of leprosy, many years ago, on a farmer who did nothing about his disease. Open wounds with gruesome maggots! Straight out of some horror movie. Very high Yuck! factor, indeed!
But, apparently, they can do you good.
In a recent issue of one of the major journals of my discipline, The Archives of Dermatology, researchers in Caen and Lyon, France, studied 119 patients with a non-healing, sloughy wound
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.