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!
Refuge!
This current COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t treated Mexico well (or most other countries, for that matter). The 85,000 deaths in that nation is the world’s fourth-highest coronavirus toll. Many have lost a relative, friend, loved one, or neighbor. And, in response, some of Mexico’s citizens have resorted to paying homage to a strange deity.
Santa Muerte (“Saint Death”)!. She, a female folk deity that personifies death, is paradoxically associated with healing and protection
Surrounded!
During these days of COVID-19, I’ve had to hold televisits with patients who did not want to come in to the office. And in those visits from afar, I’ve found my patients inside the house, outside it, in their cars (parked on the side of the road, thankfully), and so on. One couple even had a quarrel while I was online with them!
But it’s hard to beat the experience of Gregory A. Hood, MD, an internist in Lexington, Kentucky, as he reported in MedScape the other day:
I
Nap!
Yup, ye olde Beetle Bailey had it right all along!
Mort Walker’s creation (created in 1950), Private Carl James “Beetle” Bailey, was an indolent soldier who loved to nap most of the time, thus incurring the wrath of his superior officer Sergeant 1st Class Orville P. Snorkel. In fact, Bailey appeared to be perpetually in dreamland, even when awake, for he was always portrayed with his cap or helmet over his eyes! For the most part (in his seven decade existence, still
Heart!
Researchers from Michigan State University have done something unique. As reported in “Generation of Heart Organoids Modeling Early Human Cardiac Development Under Defined Conditions,” appearing in bioRχiv, they describe the creation, for the first time, of a miniature human heart model in the laboratory. It has all the different heart cells, a functioning set of chambers, and blood vessels supplying its own needs!
With heart disease the No. 1 cause of death in the
Eavesdropping?
There you are, sitting down, calm and collected, minding your own business, watching TV, troubling no one, when out of nowhere a voice pipes up:
The distance to the moon is 238,900 miles.”
You jump out of your La-Z-Boy. Spill your iced tea on your jeans, on the TV remote, and on the carpet. Chaos ensues.
Who was that?
Apple’s Siri. Or Amazon’s Alexa. Or your favorite Google Home person, “OK Google.”
No one likes it when a stranger interrupts our activities. Particularly
Stripes?
In 1901, Rudyard Kipling , in How the Leopard Got His Spots, observed in jest:
[The animals] came to a great forest, ‘sclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows, and there they hid: and after another long time, what with standing half in the shade and half out of it, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy.”
OK, but why? What advantage do those stripes
Supporting!
Did you know that supporting family increases your lifespan?
So said Tobias Vogt of the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and co-researchers, the other day, in “Intergenerational Resource Sharing and Mortality in a Global Perspective” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Giving money or resources to your children or to your parents can make you live longer. The paper demonstrated a linear relationship between amount and frequency of such
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. 