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Background to the nativity story. A Christmas meditation.

There is a river flowing along in a gentle slope toward the sea. A boatman is upon it. His vessel is here, then it is there, and soon it will be at the river’s mouth. Only that part of the river upon which he is sailing is present to him. But up yonder, on a lofty mountain, stands a traveler. As he looks…

When the Portuguese captain first went by the Cape of Storms it was a venturous voyage, and he called it the Cape of Good Hope when he had rounded it. When Columbus first went in search of the New World, his was a brave spirit that dared cross the unnavigated Atlantic. But there are tens of thousands…

When I was visiting one of our sick friends he uttered a sentence that stuck to me. He said, “I have had some education for heaven in attending the Metropolitan Tabernacle.” “How is that?” “Because I have been used to worship with a great company of godly people, used to join in the songs of great multitudes,…

I like the remark of the people who were requested to accept a Universalist as a minister. They said, “You have come to tell us that there is no hell. If your doctrine is true, we certainly do not need you; and if it is not true, we do not want you. Either way, we can do without you.” It is a most dreadful…

In some of the houses not far from here, I noticed some linnets in cages, in which there were tufts of grass or small branches of trees as perches for the poor prisoners; yet they were singing away right merrily. I suppose that grass and those fragments of trees were meant to remind them, in this great,…

A “richly supplied” entrance has sometimes been illustrated in this way. You see yonder ship. After a long voyage, it has neared the haven, but is much injured; the sails are rent to ribbons, and it is in such a forlorn condition that it cannot come up to the harbor: a steam-tug is pulling it in with…

At present, it is with us as it is with the world during the winter. If you had not seen the miracle wrought again and again, you would not guess, when you look upon those black beds in the garden, or when you walk over that snowy and frosty covering, crisp and hard beneath your feet, that the earth…

There were two brothers, one of whom had been diligently attentive to his worldly business, to the neglect of true religion. He succeeded in accumulating considerable wealth. The other brother was diligent in the service of the Master, and had learned both to distribute to the poor and for conscience’s…

In the first eight months of 2016, 73 people around the world have died while taking “extreme selfies.” The new activity of seeing how you can take pictures of yourself with a smart phone has proved dangerous to many. Most deaths came from people who fell from buildings or mountains while attempting…

The California legislature has passed, and the governor has signed an “End of life Act” legalizing assisted suicide. On the same day it was signed the Southern Medical Journal published a study connecting physician-assisted suicide with an increase in overall suicide rates. Since assisted suicide became…

New Orleans pastor, Kenneth Green was preaching at his church, Greater Saint Mary Baptist Church in the Algiers community. In his Sunday morning sermon Pastor Green declared “If the Lord called me now I’m ready to go.” According to a congregant present at the time, he then wiped his face, took a swallow…

Kanye West is among those who want to be frozen after death so he can be thawed in the future when regenerative advances will allow him to live again. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona will keep his corpse on ice for $233,000 dollars. The interesting thing here is his stated…

A German undertaker received the shock of his life when a coffin lid at his funeral parlor slid open and the supposedly dead woman inside asked, “Where am I?” The man passed out in shock. The 92-year-old woman had been pronounced dead just hours earlier after staff at her retirement home found her unresponsive,…

A Russian man who was declared dead after he drank too much vodka at a party woke up to find himself in a morgue. A police spokesman said the man screamed when he regained consciousness in the mortuary freezer attracting the attention of staff. After he was released he quickly returned to the party,…

In an attempt to make their neighborhood a safer place to live, Bradley and Penny Mason purchased a vacant house adjacent to their home because they feared it was a fire hazard. As it turns out, they were right. As they were at the county courthouse signing the deed, the house caught fire. A neighbor…

It just looked like a mutt wandering the streets. Further research found that it was a rare South African Mastiff stolen from his yard in Beaverdam, Virginia. What looked like a lonely mutt was actually a pure bred dog worth over $10,000. His owner was ecstatic to get him back. —Jim L. Wilson and Rodger…

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.…

Though the audience was limited due to pandemic restrictions, hundreds gathered at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt to hear the organ change chords on September 5, 2020. The organ in playing an experimental piece of music called Organ/ASLSP written by John Cage in the 1980s. The organ had been playing…

A death simulator called Xinglai is open in China. When you “die,” you lay down on a conveyer belt through a dark tunnel that simulates cremation and then being “reborn” out the other side through a latex womb. The experience “gives you the chance to calm down, give in to some deeper thoughts, and think…

Cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease as the No. 1 cause of death. Heart disease and cancer are primarily diseases of aging. As we continue to make progress on treating heart disease the reason for death has shifted. Fewer people succumbing to heart disease means more people living long…

The makers of the board game Monopoly have created a new version of the game that promises to make the seemingly endless game even longer. The new board has an outer track and an inner track containing 96 spaces, compared to 40 on the original. There are 66 properties, 12 railroads and six utilities.…

When a person dies, their loved ones who are left behind want to find ways to remember them. In Cleveland, Ohio a Father-son duo, Michael and Kyle Sherwood have started a company to help. Their company, Save My Ink Forever, proposes to skin the tattoos off the corpses and turn them into framed artwork.…