Time for a Coffee Break! On this day in history: In 452, Italy was invaded by Attila the Hun. In 1861, Tennessee voted to secede from the Union and joined the Confederacy. And in 1904, U.S. Marines landed in Tangiers, Morocco, to protect U.S. citizens.
Today Is Best Friends Day! Celebrate by honoring that friend that knows you too well!
How Many US Cities Can You Name? – This was an intriguing time waster. But it revealed just what I know, and don’t know, about US geography.
WWII Missing Pilot Mystery – Stories like this warm the soul. In this particular case, a missing bomber pilot and his crew were located off of Papua New Guinea. But there are more missing service people to find, and time is of the essence.
The Moon In 4K – Our nearest neighbor in our solar system, the moon is a fascinating place. This is an informative overview of the lunar surface, but you’ll have to overlook the old age comments it contains.
Man was never meant to be a god, but he is forever trying to deify himself.
Someone once told me that we live in an age of “dumbing down.” I think he specifically called it the “dumbing down of America.” I suspect there is some truth to that statement, at least to a degree. It’s not that people are dumb; but it’s more of a situation where we have forgotten how to think for ourselves.
This happens at all levels, form the most common of conversations on social media to the halls of academia. I vividly remember a conversation with one of my professors in college. He told me that he wasn’t concerned with originality in our work for his classes as much as he was with the ability to repeat what he had taught us. What I took from that conversation was that if I could regurgitate his notes in my work, I’d get a good grade. And I did. Along with so many others, I was obediently interested in what he told me we wanted me to learn, and not much else.
I get it. He was teaching a specific topic, and we needed to learn that subject matter. But I think I could have learned it better if thinking and exploring were more encouraged than just repeating what he said in class.
A further problem is that when we don’t think and reason about things, we substitute emotion and feelings. This is why so much is said on social media that we might never say in a physical, vocal conversation. Instead of objective conversation, we turn to subjective feelings, and we let them drive our speech.
So what do we do about it? Maybe, just maybe, we need to relearn how to think. We need to learn how to use our cognitive reasoning abilities to assess our lives and circumstances. It will be hard, because these thinking muscles haven’t been used in a while for most of us. And it will take time. But I think it might help us avoid so many of the problems that we face as a culture, and lead us out of the chaos.
If you are interested in reading How To Think, by Alan Jacobs, you can pick up a copy on Amazon.
After Satan leaves Jesus, Matthew turns to the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry. In this passage, we see his journey to Galilee, and the calling of his first disciples.
Matthew 4:12 tells us that Jesus heads to the region of Galilee. The reason for this destination is that his cousin, John the Baptist, had been thrown into prison. This likely weighed heavily on Jesus’ heart for two reasons, first, they were related, and second, John was the forerunner of Jesus, preparing the way for his ministry.
If we only had the Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark and Luke — we would know very little about this event, and in fact, this entire period of time. The Synoptics skip a whole year of Jesus’ life and ministry, moving from the temptations to this trip to Galilee. Thankfully, we have John’s account to fill in some of the blanks. He covers this period in John 1:19-3:36. From the lack of information in the Synoptic three, we can assume that John may have been in prison for a year or more, and that Jesus’ ministry begins in earnest after his death.
Have you ever had an epiphany? One of those moments when a light bulb goes on in your mind, in a major way? I had one of those a few days ago when I made some changes to the way I read and study the biblical text in my Logos software.
I was reading through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and I turned off all the extraneous stuff that you find in most printed Bibles: the verse and chapter markers, the subheadings, the cross references. I was reading the letter in much the same way that the Ephesian people would have experienced it. And I noticed something significant in the context and flow of the letter in what we view as chapters 5 and 6.
There are two famous passages in those chapters, one on marriage, and the other on spiritual warfare. With the headings removed, the context of the letter allowed those two passages to be seen in a completely different relationship. All of a sudden, I saw that marriage might be one of the most intense areas of spiritual warfare that we experience.
About Random Ramblings:
Random Ramblings are just that: they are random, and I’ll probably ramble. It’s an opportunity to share a little about what’s going on in my mind. From resources, to things I’m thinking about or studying from Scripture, to fun stuff, I hope these ramblings can be a fun part of your day. These brief videos will be shared here and on my YouTube channel. You can jump over there to subscribe for only video updates, or subscribe here to be notified of posts of all kinds.
