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!
Crooked!
Last week, in Southern California for a preaching conference, a colleague and I went out to eat in a restaurant in Newport Bay (on our way to experience the thrills of a moonlight kayaking experience—but more about that another time).
Well, we went out to eat. And one of us decided to check out the bathrooms of the restaurant to perform a pre-kayak maneuver. Said person returned laughing, with this photo on his phone.
I’m sure there is a story behind the tortuous shape
Persuasion!
I’ve often wondered about this whole café atmosphere in modern-day churches.
A third of Americans under 30 are not affiliated with any religion, though most of these apparently believe in God and pray at least once a month. This spiritual-but-not-religious category is the target of many churches. And so we have Sunday “meetings” in movie theaters, schools, warehouses, etc. Even coffee shops. To draw more traffic.
Once has to be “cool,” you know. Mark Batterson,
Rock!
A few weeks ago, I had a most unfortunate episode.
A stone. In the kidney. Well, in the ureter actually, the pipe connecting kidney to bladder.
Any pain, you ask?
Let’s just put it this way: It was B.R.U.T.A.L.
I’ll spare you all the gory (yup, G.O.R.Y.) details of the workings (or the non-workings) of my innards.
I’ll just quote a medical textbook:
Acute renal colic is probably the most excruciatingly painful event a person can endure. Striking without warning, the pain
Clothes!
Did you know that if you wear a white coat your ability to pay attention goes up pretty sharply—but only if you believe it belongs to a doctor. If you thought it belonged to a painter, nope, no luck.
So concluded Prof. Adam Galinsky and his team at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology recently.
A bunch of undergrads were randomly assigned to white-coat or street-clothes groups and tested for attention. The white-coated
Saved!
A few years ago, the Saghin family was getting ready to go to church when 2-year-old Brooke slipped out a back door, fell into a pool, and began to drown.
When Brooke’s mother, Kim, pulled her out, she wasn’t breathing. But the lassie’s 9-year-old brother, Tristan, yelled to his grandmother to call 911 and then—if you can believe it—proceeded to perform CPR on his sister.
(Apparently, watching Black Hawk Down, in a scene of which a character does CPR on
Like!
If you are a Facebook user who posts stuff, you know the feeling.
That rush of whatever in your brain, when you get a “Like!” Someone likes your post, your picture, your current activity, your accomplishment, your dog, your house, your phone, your good looks, your smarts, your car, your toothpaste, ….
TIME reported on a study recently that had unraveled what lies at the bottom of that zing that you get with a “Like!”
Apparently, it’s the reward center in your
Lost?
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.”
So wrote Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Rings.
We’ve often thought that those who wander in their minds are definitely lost. Those absent-minded types that walk into lampposts or fall into potholes. Those eccentric folks who forget who they are and what they are doing. Those oddballs who aren’t where everyone else is, and are seemingly headed in the wrong direction. Lost.
A few years ago, researchers
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.