The Sliver of Perception
In the grand scheme of things, we’re all pretty much blind and deaf.
Goodbye 2011
All my friends back home in Spain are already celebrating the needle having ticked over to 2012 and as I ready myself for the evenings festivities I feel a slight bit of emotion saying goodbye to a year filled with ups, downs, twists and turns, challenges and growth. I raced up and down mountains, I risked myself emotionally, I faced the past and problems therein, I got help from others, and made some great friends. God has been faithful, it’s been a good year. My only resolution for the next is to not forgot the year that brought me to it’s doorstep. Goodbye 2011, and to the rest of you, Happy New Year!
Let's put 'Christ'-mas in its place
So instead of engaging in a battle to reclaim Christmas, I propose an alternative. Let’s take Christ out of Christmas.
I know what you’re thinking: What about “the reason for the season”? But that’s precisely my point. Do Christians really want to think of the son of God as the reason for reduced-price waffle-makers and winter wonderland scenes at the local mall? That sounds like Ricky Bobby’s baby Jesus from the movie Talladega Nights, not the babe whose arrival is heralded in the Gospel of Luke. The battle for the soul of Christmas ended a long time ago, and cultural forces won. That’s clear when Christmas trees fill homes and apartments in Japan, a country where 2% of the population is Christian.
I had heard long ago that the festivities currently called ‘Christmas’ was an originally pagan celebration that the Christians tried to hijack.
Anti-Santy Ranty (by HourOfRevival)
Milk and Cookies Math
Did you ever want to know how many calories santa would consume eating two cookies and a glass of milk per child in the US? WolframAlfa can help.
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
— Christopher Hitchens, self described antitheist and champion of the ‘New Atheist’ movement.
And what evidence validates such an assertion?
I was speaking with a Dutch friend a few weeks back and she told me that according to Dutch Christmas tradition all the bad little boys and girls are kidnapped by Santa and hauled down to his peppernut factories in Spain where they slave away producing Dutch Christmas treats all year.
Did you know?
Pen in GI tract for 25 years, still writes.
…she was standing on her stairs using an uncapped pen to poke a spot on her tonsils. She was also holding a hand mirror to guide the pen to the exact spot. Somehow, while doing this, she lost her balance and stumbled. The fall managed to push the pen down her throat. It glided down her gullet and found a home in her tummy.
She told her husband and her doctor what had happened, but they were skeptical of the story.
Reblogged from Dr. Cranquis' Mumbled Gripes
The faith that many of us have in progress is quite unique and strange. Degeneracy, as an historical notion, has been much more common than that of progress
Motlalepula
While visiting a friend and her family in Lesotho, I met a child she was temporarily taking care of, the uncle of one of her adopted daughters. His name is Motlelapula, which in basotho means ‘let the rains come’. This sickly child had been spending the last two months recovering from tuberculosis and in the time I was with him he spent the days napping and vomiting. None the less, through quality care, one could see in the week and a half he was there that the smile on his was growing and he was gaining weight.
Then came time to take him home. I had heard the conditions he had come from but nothing prepared me to see his mother dying on a decrepit, old steel frame and putrid mattress in the small, barely furnished ‘home’ in which the family lived.
I don’t know how he’s doing now, I was told that his mother died less than a week after I last saw him. Is he being cared for? His older sister doesn’t have a great track record and I don’t think anyone knows where his dad is.
Which brings up the question of orphans in Africa, it’s a lot deeper of an issue than kids without parents. This a country where AIDS affects one in three adults and children without a long-term adult caregiver grow up to be jaded and distrusting, naturally.
It was truly an eye-opening trip. There will be more photos from it, but this set was my favourite.
