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!
Woods!
The woods. Bliss. Birds chirping, streams gurgling, and leaves rustling. Even replicated on white-noise machines to bring rest to rushing minds. All is calm. All is bright.
But not at night. ‘Cos it ain’t no “Silent Night.” Woods are “lovely,” yes, but they are “dark and deep” as quoth ye olde poet.
And confessed Eric Larsen, a polar explorer, outdoor educator, and self-described “professional camper” who has spent years of his life sleeping outside and
Head!
There have been, of late, anecdotal reports about a universal rise in head lice cases, reported Lindsey Bever in The Washington Post recently. These critters are itch-generating parasites that live on the scalp, and are typically spread through direct head-to-head contact, mostly among children.
And one reason for the increasing number of cases? Selfies! Yup. Group selfies, in particular, which often involve two or more heads together to fit into a cellphone frame. And
Old?
What is “old”?
You’re never 36 and a half, but you’re 4 and a half going on 5!
Then you get into your teens, now they can’t hold you back. You hop, skip, and jump to the next number. How old are you? “I’m gonna be 16.” You could be 12, but you’re gonna be 16.
And then the greatest day of your life happens—you become 21. Even the words ceremonial—you become 21! Yesssssss!!!!
But then you turn 30. Uh, oh! What happened there? Makes you sound
Gone!
Well, even if it isn’t gone entirely, it is going …, and going …. Soon to be gone!
I’m talking about the internet. It is disappearing.
So saith a study from the Pew Center published recently, “When Online Content Disappears.”
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes
Giddy-up!
A strange thing happened the other day in London. All the King’s horses ran amok! (And in reaction, so did all the King’s men!)
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, several of the animals (and some subordinates) of King Charles III caused chaos on the streets of ye olde capital city, when members of the Household Cavalry lost their mounts, allowing the animals to gallop through rush-hour traffic, careening into cabs and double-decker buses while being pursued
Sight?
In a recent issue of Conversation, Andrew Herbert, Professor of Psychology, Visual Perception, Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote about the epidemic of nearsightedness. And it begins in childhood, apparently.
Nearsightedness is when a somewhat elongated eyeball causes the lens to focus light at a point slightly in front of the retina than on it. Optometry researchers estimate that about half of the global population will need corrective lenses to offset myopia by
Treat?
An orangutan named Rakus had a tough time in 2022. So claimed reserarchers from Germany and Indonesia, in “Active Self Treatment of a Facial Wound with a Biologically Active Plant by a Male Sumatran Orangutan,” published in Nature: Scientific Reports, recently.
Two of these primates, both male, had a fight in the treetops of a rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia. Rakus, one of the belligerents, was spotted the next day sporting a pink wound below his right eyelid, with
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. 