Suicide While Shopping
Here’s a new one: Commit suicide while shopping. A man and his girlfriend in eastern China where shopping for five hours at a mall. He’d had enough and wanted to go home. She wanted to go into one more store that had a sale on shoes. An eyewitness said, “He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes tha[n] she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying more. She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument.” The man dropped the bags and jumped…
Nelson Mandela: What’s Inside a Person?
What’s inside a person? Nelson Mandela is born and raised in a country village, becomes a lawyer against all odds, sacrifices everything in a fight for political freedom, becomes the leader of that fight, goes to prison for life in lieu of the death penalty for attempting to overthrow the government, gets released after 27 years, and forgives all the people who oppressed him and his people, then becomes president of the same nation and one of the most significant people of our generation. He wasn’t perfect and had a less-successful private life–divorced twice–yet he himself was the first to…
Paul Crouch Achieved His Vision
Paul Crouch, who built a Charismatic Christian television network empire, has died at 79. Loved by some, ridiculed by others; a great blessing to some, a superficial showman to others. Whatever you may think of the man is okay with me. But one thing about him deeply convicted me and is to all of us inescapable. In the mid 1970s, on the ceiling of a room in his house, he saw a vision. A map of North America appeared. From it pencil-thin lines streaked in all directions. Crouch asked, “Lord, what does this mean?” God responded with just one word:…
If I Could Play God
Time Magazine gave the world an article titled, “The 25 Best Inventions of the Year.” If I could play God, I would be one of those inventors. A Olympic-size swimming pool that floats in a dirty body of water and cleans the dirty water flowing into it from its surrounding. A procedure to change a person’s memory–like in the science fiction films. That, in the right hands, would be used to help people suffering from things like PTSD. A light generated by a weight on a very slow-motion pulley that would replace dangerous and polluting kerosene lanterns all across the…
Meeting God after Disaster
In the aftermath of disaster, people worship. It’s happened in the Philippines after the great Typhoon. And we see it wherever there are believers. We’d like to think that when disasters strike, churches would be miraculously exempt from damage. After all, they’re God’s houses. But if they were, I wonder what effect it would have. Would it really make a positive difference? Somehow I think not. I suspect we would start to lean toward a magical take on our beliefs rather than living them out by faith. We would focus on what happened or didn’t happen versus meeting God in…