Still!
Everyone used to tell me to sit still. I was always a fidgeter. Twisting, turning, drumming, tapping, fretting, fuming, stamping, shuffling, itching, raring, chafing, champing, ….
Now I can tell them all: Fidgeting is good for my health.
So think twice before you admonish your kids to quit fidgeting: It is good for health.
At least, that’s what studies from the University of Leeds and the University College, London, suggest. “Sitting Time, Fidgeting, and All-Cause Mortality
Vision!
“What could be more full of meaning?—
for the pulpit is ever
this earth’s foremost part;
all the rest comes in its rear;
the pulpit leads the world. …
Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out,
and not a voyage complete;
and the pulpit is its prow.”
So wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick a century ago.
I agree. With the pulpit for a prow, humanity is led by preaching into a unique world, an ideal world, God’s world, where it may dwell with him. That makes
Pity?
Feeling sad? Somerville, in ye olde state of Massachusetts, is the place you need to head to.
Why? They had a “Pity Party” last week! (I’m not kidding.) In Union Square. MA 02143. Two miles northwest of Boston.
(Only in Mass.! Maybe they’ve a lot to be sad about?)
Local artist Greg Cook had the bright idea. People who are sad, he declared, should be together. So the Somerville Arts Council decided to sponsor the shindig.
On the event’s Facebook site:
A pity party
Solo?
Botchi-zoku, they call it. It’s the latest media buzzword in Japan. Botchi-zoku. Betchyu-dunno what botchi-zoku means.
Nope, it’s not a variety of sushi, sumo, or sake, not that I care for any of those (but since DTS has broadened its alcohol policy …). And it’s got nothing to do with botching things up. Nope, that’s not it.
Botchi comes from the Japanese hitoribotchi = lonely/solitary. Zoku = family/close-knit social group.
Together, botchi-zoku is an
Genesis 22:1−19
Fear of God trumps every other allegiance and manifests in self-sacrificial obedience.
The account of Genesis 22 begins with a time-stamp: “Now it came about after these things, that God tested Abraham” (22:1). What “things”?
Throughout the saga of Abraham, he is shown clumsily stumbling along in his faith. In Genesis 12, he leaves his homeland, obeying God’s call, and goes to Canaan. But the next instant he is in Egypt because of a famine. The first sign of trouble,
Remembering!
Well, folks, here it is: RaMbLeS installment #524. Magic number. Ten years of rambling thoughts on random Scripture. Dispatches from Plano, Dallas, Paris, Aberdeen, London, Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Rome, Florence, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Jerusalem, Madrid, New Delhi, …. A long ramble, indeed.
It all began when I was heading out to ye olde city of Aberdeen in 2005 for doctoral work. Intended as a platform to update well-wishers of my academic antics
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.