To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here During the First World War, a young Bible college teacher named Oswald Chambers became chaplain for the British army in Cairo, Egypt. At first, not everyone appreciated his presence. “I can’t stand religious people,” said one soldier, getting into his face. “Neither can I,” replied Chambers. Within a year he had won over the vast… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here On Super Bowl Sunday 1999, a start-up company rolled the dice on a 30-second commercial. Monster.com, an internet site dedicated to connecting job-seekers with new jobs, hadn’t yet run a single advertisement. Those 30 seconds cost a whopping $1.6 million (which nevertheless sounds like a bargain compared to this Sunday’s half-minute price tag… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Want to know how to escape from quicksand? Or survive a volcanic eruption? Or jump from the roof of one tall building to another? Then you need Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht’s one-of-a-kind book, The Complete Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. Back in 1999, the authors, having conjured up as many outrageous situations as they could… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Author Brett Kays points out that in Hollywood’s cinematic portrayal of reality, certain things are almost always true: The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any room in Paris. The ventilation system of every building, amazingly, turns out to be the perfect hiding place. Any lock can be picked by a credit card or a… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here It’s Groundhog Day again. The eyes of the winter-weary world turn today to Punxatawney, Pennsylvania, where an annual ritual preserves the strange idea that what a groundhog sees at the break of day has some kind of meteorological implications. February 2 has also come to mean that the eyes of movie buffs turn toward… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Major League Baseball no-hitters are exceedingly rare. The league’s most storied franchise, the New York Yankees, have played more than 18,000 games since 1903. Yet they’ve only managed to pull off 13 of them. One of the most memorable happened on September 4, 1993, when Jim Abbott took the mound against the Cleveland Indians. … Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here In the 1986 film The Mission, Robert De Niro plays Rodrigo Mendoza – a mercenary, slave trader, and murderer in 1750 South America. Mendoza has brutalized the Guarani people who live high above the waterfalls that border Argentina and Paraguay. They have long wanted to get their hands on him. Suddenly they get the opportunity. In… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here No one who had a church leadership role on September 16, 2001, will ever forget that day. It was the first Sunday after the 9/11 terror attacks. For five days, America had been reeling. The shock and horror of what happened in New York City, Washington D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania plunged the… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here In 1842, French philosopher Auguste Comte probably thought he was on safe ground when he predicted that humanity would never learn anything of significance about the stars. Those twinkling lights in the night sky were simply too far away – far beyond our capacity ever to see and appreciate “up close.” But all that… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here What language did Jesus speak? For Bible scholars, that’s always been an interesting question. We know that Judea in the first century was a tri-lingual culture. Hebrew was the “official” language of Israel – the mother-tongue that would be heard in the synagogue and in the prayers of God’s… Read more »
