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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…

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…

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.…

Since rumors of a fountain of youth surfaced centuries ago, humans have been looking for a way to live forever. A new high-tech attempt is linking your brain to a computer, creating a digital replica, and uploading it to the computer. You enter a booth, scan and upload your mind to a server, then download…

NASA has plans for private citizens to spend up to 30 days in the International Space Station. It might be a little expensive for most of us, $35,000 per night. And that doesn’t include the trip to get there. That will add another $52 million dollars to the trip. That is quite the fee just to get out…

The Camp Fire reduced Paradise, CA to ashes. Jeff McClenahan, a 53-year-old college professor, returned to his home in Paradise and “found it destroyed, burned to the foundation.” As he stared in disbelief, he dropped to his knees and sobbed, “Its stuff. But it’s a lot of history. Everything, our whole…

While 47 years is not eternity, there are times it may feel like it. One toddler got possession of his mom’s cell phone. He repeatedly entered the wrong passcode. He did it so many times that when mom got home she discovered the phone’s security protection had disabled the phone for 25 million minutes.…

An investor who put $10,000 in Amazon’s initial public offering in 1997 would have nearly $5 million today. Amazon’s valuation of $464 billion is now twice that of Wal-Mart. Putting some perspective on Amazon’s dominance, just 12 percent of the companies on the 1955 Fortune 500 list are still on the…

Orlando was an 11-year-old Arizona boy who had spent years in a Mexican orphanage before winding up in foster care in Phoenix, AZ. When he joined Jodi Kacz’s reading intervention class the teacher took a shine to Orlando. Kacz had a heart problem that kept her from having her own children but when she…

A 33-year-old British man, claiming it was the culmination of too many drinks in the pub, legally changed his name to Bacon Double Cheeseburger.” The risen Christ promised us a new name for those who overcome. It will be more meaningful than the name of our favorite food. –--Jim L. Wilson and Rodger…

What are your goals for eternity? Ron Hopper’s final wish was for his fishing buddies to mix his ashes with their bait on their long-planned fishing trip to Thailand. Hopper, 64, was dying of cancer when he made the request. His friends mixed his ashes with the bait and they caught a record-breaking…

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…

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…

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,…