RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Value?
The Wall Street Journal reported recently about thieves who are after cattle gallstones—those hard substances formed inside the gall bladder from precipitated components of the gland’s secretion, bile. Most humans try hard to stay away from gallstones. Not these days.
You see, these things are some of the most prized ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM—a $60 billion-per-year industry), so much so, that traders in cattle gallstones are willing to pay as
Heat!
You feeling the heat? You should be. Especially if you are moving into the grandparenting phase of life. (No, this is nothing to do with grandkids, more to do with the phase of life, or, to put it bluntly, as you get old.)
“Home Ambient Temperature and Self-reported Attention in Community-Dwelling Older Adults” published recently in the Journal of Gerontology by scientists from the Marcus Institute for Aging Research affiliated with Harvard Medical School,
Stressed?
Stress! That’s what we don’t need at all. It is hazardous. Besides the waste of adrenaline, the rise of blood pressure, the agony of emotions, etc., it turns out that stress also affects your memory!
So claimed researchers from Toronto, Amsterdam, and Seattle, in “Stress Disrupts Engram Ensembles in Lateral Amygdala to Generalize Threat Memory in Mice,” published in Cell.
[An engram, BTW, is a unit of cognitive information that is imprinted in a physical substance—parts
Simple!
Life is complicated. The world is, of course, complicated, with all its politics, insecurities, uncertainties, and fogginess overall. But so are our own lives: feeble, beset with frailty, and with sinful foibles. Life is, indeed, complicated. And messy.
And always, when facing a particular complex issue or problem, we want a simple solution, not a convoluted one that only multiplies the complexities and messinesses of life. That this is always the case with us
Giving!
Research has consistently found that acts of altruism, such as donating money, volunteering or giving blood, benefit both the receiver and the giver—even when the giver does not expect anything in return.
In the influential 2008 article, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness,” published in the highly reputed journal, Science, by psychologists from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and from Harvard University, they reported:
Although much research
Tree!
There are, as you no doubt know, many ways to die. Diseases, accidents, just old age, etc., can take your life.
But this was a new one to me: death by Christmas tree.
Storm Pia hit Europe in December of last year, impacting the United Kingdom, southern Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium and northern Germany, causing major disruptions in holiday travel, with many cancelled ferries, trains and flights, closed bridges and roads that had to be cleared, turned over trucks,
Cheese!
London’s Metropolitan Police Service said a couple of months ago:
We received a report of the theft of a large quantity of cheese from a manufacturer based in the London borough of Southwark.”
Not a slice of cheese or two, or a cheese-stick or a couple. No $400,000 worth of the good stuff.
Said the cheese purveyor, Neal’s Yard (no not Kraft or some such supermarket type, but a fancy, high-powered, elite store):
Neal’s Yard Dairy, a leading distributor and retailer
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.