Cause & Effect

Now here's an interesting take on the need for gratitude (aside from the hundreds of biblical injunctions of course). The magazine Inc. ran an article titled "Listening to Complainers Is Bad for Your Brain." Apparently neuroscientists have learned to measure brain activity when faced with various stimuli, including a long gripe session. And the news isn't good.

The article summarizes the research:

"Being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity—including viewing such material on TV—actually peels away neurons in the brain's hippocampus. That's the part of your brain you need for problem solving. Basically, it turns your brain to mush."

Possible Preaching Angle:
So, basically, too much complaining (either listening to it or dishing it out) turns your brain to mush. The article provides three practical steps to avoid that negative, brain-numbing experience of complaining, but that advice can't top the Bible's simple command: "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:18).

Anger is bad for your health in more ways than you think. Getting angry doesn’t just hurt our mental health, it’s also damaging to our hearts, brains, and gastrointestinal systems, according to doctors and research.

For instance, one study in the Journal of the American Heart Association looked at anger’s effects on the heart. It found that anger can raise the risk of heart attacks because it impairs the functioning of blood vessels.

Researchers examined the impact of three different emotions on the heart: anger, anxiety, and sadness. One participant group did a task that made them angry, another did a task that made them anxious, while a third did an exercise designed to induce sadness.

The scientists then tested the functioning of the blood vessels in each participant, using a blood pressure cuff to squeeze and release the blood flow in the arm. Those in the angry group had worse blood flow than those in the others; their blood vessels didn’t dilate as much.

The lead author of the study said, “We speculate over time if you’re getting these chronic insults to your arteries because you get angry a lot, that will leave you at risk for having heart disease.”

Many have discussed whether or not radiation from cell phones causes cancer. Author Douglas Fields writes about the fact that some people are fearful of radiation from their cell phones, but that fear indicates the lack of understanding in regard to dosage:

There is a vast difference, for example, between a microwave oven and a cell phone. Just try cooking a burger with your phone. The word “radiation” strikes fear in the heart of the average person. But radiation is a normal part of our environment, cast down on us together with the warming rays of the sun. Radiation emanates from the smoke detectors in our homes and from dishes that use uranium salts in their ceramic pigments. But all are perfectly safe because the radiation levels are low.

Still, some are skeptical and they recommend not allowing children to use cell phones except in emergencies, and to avoid carrying cell phones on the body. Fields points out:

The debate and research go on. This seems strange given the abundance of known agents and activities that do cause cancer but fail to strike the same fear in the hearts of most people. Alcohol, tobacco, sunburn, toxic organic chemicals in industrial and home products are all real but accepted risk. Yet the cell phone and invisible radiation from power lines scare many. Looked at objectively, the reason is simply fear of the unknown. Everyone understands alcohol and sunburn; few understand radiation, and so they fear it.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Christians wonder, how serious is friendship with their world? How much sin will hurt me? How can I be in the world but not of the world? Low doses of sin can be overlooked, but they can combine for a very serious effect in our spiritual lives.

In the town of Merced, which is named after the Spanish word for “mercy,” a bumbling robbery attempt was quickly brought to a merciful end. According to authorities, Stephan Stanley began breaking the glass in the jewelry department of a JC Penney store in Merced Mall. He was grabbed by two nearby men in the store, who attempted to hold him down to prevent him from getting away with any merchandise. Angered at their intervention, Stanley tried to use pepper spray against his sudden captors, but instead he sprayed himself.

Temporarily incapacitated by his own pepper spray, Stanley was easily subdued, and was eventually arrested on suspicion of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug charges. He was subsequently booked into Merced County Jail, where he is unlikely to receive much in the way of mercy.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Justice will come to those who break God’s law, some sooner than is expected. “He that digs a hole will fall into it” (Ecc. 10:8).

Author/speaker Christopher Ash asks, “What are we to make of the Bible’s passages that seem to speak quite straightforwardly of blessings following obedience and curses following apostasy?” Ash urges that a distinction be made between the general truth of such sayings and absolute “every case” truth. He offers the following illustration:

Suppose an earthquake struck a well-planned place like Manhattan, with its clear and ordered grid of streets. If I wanted to go from A to B after the earthquake, I would in general still be best advised to go by the main roads. But whereas before the earthquake that would always be the best route, now I might find both that the main road has been blocked and also that some building has collapsed to open up some unplanned route.

It is a little like this with the created order after the disruption of the fall of humankind. In general, keeping God’s commandments and living in line with the created order will bring peace and prosperity. In general, for example, if I am honest and work hard, I will do better. But not always. And the final proof that righteousness pays will not come until the final judgment, when the disruption will be put right and the creation reordered as it ought to be.

The Dutch Defense Safety Inspection Agency launched an investigation about an F-16 fighter that suffered damage from 20-millimeter cannon fire during a routine training exercise. The problem? The damage came from its own cannons.

The aircraft is equipped with a Vulcan Gatling gun, which can fire over 6,000 rounds a minute. Those rounds travel at a muzzle velocity of 3,450 feet per second. But the aircraft is capable of flying much faster. So what appears to have happened is that, after a burst of rounds were fired from the aircraft, the pilot accelerated and collided with those rounds while still in mid-air. At least one of them struck the side of the F-16’s fuselage, and parts of a round were ingested by the aircraft’s engine. The F-16’s pilot managed to land the aircraft safely at Leeuwarden Air Base.

Potential Preaching Angles: God’s Word promises that we will reap what we sow. Be careful and just in your actions, lest the consequences become your own downfall.

In a Wall Street Journal article, George Weigel gives a combination history lesson and apologetic for the Resurrection:

There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection.” They encountered one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem.

As N.T. Wright … makes clear, that first generation answered the question of why they were Christians with a straightforward answer: because Jesus was raised from the dead …. As they worked that out, their thinking about a lot of things changed profoundly.

The article mentions some of the positive secular outcomes brought to the ancient world through Christianity:

• A new dignity given to woman in contrast to the classical culture.

• A self-denying healthcare provided to plague sufferers.

• A focus on family health and growth.

• A remarkable change in worship from the Sabbath to Sunday

• A willingness to embrace death as martyrs—because they knew that death did not have the final word in the human story.

• Living as if they knew the outcome of history itself.

Weigel suggests that it's only through, what he calls the Easter Effect, that these changes make sense. The social changes that followed Good Friday occur only if they actually believed in the resurrection of Jesus.

You can find the entire article available without subscription here.

Pasquale di Filippo was horrified recently by the violence his daughter was exposed to on television—violence he was partially responsible for.

The Rai TV network had recently aired an episode of their Sicilian mob drama Il Cacciatore (The Hunter), in which a character depicted his past as a mafioso. As part of a deal Filippo made with police to become an informant, Pasquale had previously admitted to four different murders, and had previously served 10 years behind bars. Since becoming a police informant, Pasquale had since entered the witness protection program, and had built a family with a different identity.

Understandably, all of that was news to his 14-year-old daughter, who hadn’t been around during that tumultuous time. According to his interview with local news service La Republica, Pasquale’s daughter shouted him, “Dad, what have you done?!” She has since retreated to her room, leaving only to go to school.

Subsequently, Pasquale sued the network, claiming defamation. He is seeking a million euros (about $1.1 million) in damages.

Potential Preaching Angles: Ultimately, darkness will not shield us against the truth. In God’s kingdom, the truth always finds its way into the light. It’s better to be honest with our children about our mistakes than to hide them and hope our kids don’t find out. Often, kids are too smart for that strategy to work.

A hunter was hospitalized after a goose fell from midair and landed on him.

Robert Meilhammer, 51, was out hunting with three others when his party noticed a flock of Canada geese flying overhead. From a blind, one of the members of the group fired a shot that struck one of the birds. In a burst of tragic irony, the trajectory of the plummeting goose aligned perfectly with Meilhammer's location, striking him directly. The impact left injuries to his face and head, including the loss of two teeth.

It was a "really unusual, freaky accident," according to Maryland Natural Resources Police spokeswoman Candy Thomson, who said the goose was approximately the size of a small turkey. "He's lucky," she added. "Those birds weigh a lot, and falling back down to earth, they're going to pick up a lot of speed. It's gonna leave a mark."

Obviously, hunting accidents like these are no better for the hunter than they are for the goose. Sources are unclear, however, as to how good they may be for the gander.

Potential preaching angles: Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it. You reap what you sow. Those who take the sword will perish by the sword.

The New York Times reported on an interesting study in an article titled "What Happens When Parents are Rude in the Hospital." A researcher at Tel Aviv University investigated simulated crisis scenarios in a neonatal ICU. Actors, posing as parents of tiny patients, gave a variety of feedback to the medical staff. For example, one rude actor in the study played a "mother" who complained loudly enough for the medical staff to hear: "I knew we should have gone to a better hospital where they don't practice Third World medicine."

The research shows that even "such mild unpleasantness" was enough to negatively impact the performance of doctors and nurses. In fact, their ability to perform in these crisis situations was negatively affected for the rest of the day. The organizers of the study conclude that "rudeness explained more error than the levels of error that have been shown to result from sleep deprivation."

During the 2002 Soccer World Cup, Adidas introduced their Fevernova soccer ball, which featured a new design that was supposed to make the ball follow a more predicable flight pattern than the previous generation of soccer balls. However, while the Fevernova accomplished this goal, many players complained that it was too light, making it fly unpredictably.

So for the 2006 World Cup, Adidas attempted to fix those problems with their new +Teamgeist ball. This ball had 14 (rather than 32) curved panels that were bonded together rather than stitched. This goal was to make the ball uniformly round and completely waterproof. Yet for all of Adidas' efforts in solving the water problem, some players felt that the ball flew too fast. It was too easy to score goals they said, and it made goalies look slow and ineffective.

Adidas again made further improvements for the 2010 World Cup ball called the Jabulani. They further reduced the number of panels from 14 down to eight, but they also added textured grooves to the panels intended to make the ball have the same kind of aerodynamics as a traditional stitched ball. But once again, some players complained that the new grooves made the ball fly unpredictably. Undoubtedly someone at Adidas is now working furiously on soccer balls for the latest World Cup.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Technology; Progress; Change—"Every good technology comes with a trade-off of some kind. Newer tools bring us benefits, but those benefits come with a cost. For example, mobile phones allow us to call for help from almost anywhere, but they also allow everyone else to reach us no matter where we go." (2) Blame; Responsibility; Sin—After three supposedly defective soccer balls, maybe the problem is with the players. Maybe we should stop blaming others and take responsibility for our problems.

John Wainwright was the first person, not affiliated with Amazon, to purchase a book from Amazon. The book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter. Wainwright paid $27.95 for the book back on April 3, 1995. "It was not the easiest of orders for Amazon, especially for the company's very first book sale. 'That purchase is still part of my Amazon history,' Wainwright says." Now in honor of being the first person to buy a book Amazon is naming a building after Wainwright.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even Amazon began with one purchase over 25 years ago. Amazon had to start small to build itself up. It is amazing how one little act can make a big difference 25 years later.

Monarch butterflies are of one of God's most delicate and durable creatures. Every October they begin their journey from the U.S. and Canada, arriving in Mexico around the beginning of November, sometimes after flying 3,000 miles and up to 265 miles per day. Monarchs use the earth's magnetic field to guide their travels, but how the migration route stays in their collective memory remains a scientific mystery. These creatures also serve a useful purpose. Like bees, butterflies pollinate a variety of useful plants for an entire ecosystem. One scientist warned, "If we pull the monarchs out of the system, we're really pulling the rug out from under a lot of other species."

Over the past two decades 2000-2020) monarchs have declined by 90% The long-term survival of the species may be in doubt. The causes for the monarchs' decline are complex, but human lifestyle choices are behind most of the decline. Illegal logging in Mexico has reduced the monarchs' winter habitat to a vanishingly small area. "Ecotourists" spend thousands of dollars to gape at the monarchs in Mexico, but in the process they disturb and hurt the creatures they've come to see. And farmers across America have used the herbicide glyphosate to decimate milkweed plants, the monarchs' essential food.

The article in The New York Times concluded by pointing to what it called "the dilemma of human behavior." This dilemma runs much deeper than just damaging a butterfly species. It also applies to the cost of sin in general. As the article puts it, "We live in a world of unintended consequences of our own making, which can never be easily undone."

Possible Preaching Angles: Consequences; Sowing and Reaping; Sin, destructive—This is one small example from nature of a larger spiritual reality: our actions—or more specifically, our sins—can cause more damage than we ever intended. Certainly, in the spiritual realm, Christ forgives the penalty of our sin, but our "private" or "personal" sins usually have much larger public consequences "which can never easily be undone."

On an ordinary winter day in 1961, an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz ran some routine experiments and found some unusual results. Lorenz discovered that seemingly tiny and insignificant changes in his data could produce huge differences in the final result. At first, Lorenz and other scientists in the field of chaos theory called this "the sensitive dependence on initial data." Fortunately, later on Lorenz used a simpler term—"the butterfly effect." In 1972, Lorenz presented a scientific paper entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?" According to Lorenz's theory, the butterfly's wing-flapping doesn't actually cause a tornado, but it can start a chain reaction leading to giant changes in world-wide weather patterns. In others words, even tiny, insignificant movements or actions can produce huge changes that affect millions of people.

The Bible often describes a similar "butterfly effect" for the spiritual life. According to Jesus, the spiritual butterfly effect occurs when we do small things—making a meal, visiting the sick, befriending the lonely, opening our home to a guest, praying with a friend—for "insignificant" people, which makes a huge difference in God's eyes. But according to Jesus, there's also a reverse butterfly effect: consistently failing to display small acts of kindness (i.e. living an unkind lifestyle) has a profound loss of opportunity in the spiritual realm.

Frank Allegretti, 64, was a meticulous pilot with more than twenty years of experience—which makes it all the more shocking to hear that he crashed the plane he was piloting in a Iowa cornfield because it ran out of gas. He died in the crash. Interviewed for an article about the crash, Allegretti's wife, Cheryl, said, "Like everybody has told me, he was the most cautious, [safe] pilot they ever knew."

Sadly, Allegretti's story is fairly common among pilots. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials say pilots run out of gas with surprising frequency. In the past five years, fuel exhaustion was the cause or a contributing factor in 238 small plane crashes in the U.S., killing 29 people.

"It's surprising to me," said Tom Haueter, director of NTSB's Office of Aviation Safety, "that there's a group of pilots who will knowingly push it, thinking, I can make it the last couple of miles and come up short."

Wayne Cordeiro writes in “Leading on Empty”:

[Struggling with burnout], I had a poignant dream of a man and his family who ran a small farm. In this dream, people were buying various products: one bought a gallon of milk, another ripe tomatoes, then another cheese, others eggs or corn.

A lady came and asked for something they didn't have, but the farmer simply said, "Come back tomorrow, and I'll have more." The irate lady gave the farmer a sour look, but it didn't bother him. He just went back to work. That was how it was on the farm. Chickens can lay just so many eggs in a day, cows have just so much milk, and a few more tomatoes will ripen tomorrow.

Yet people still came, standing in line for the products, buying up all the products until the farmer sold out for the day. This happened every day because this particular farm offered the freshest and finest goods. And when they ran out (as they inevitably would), the farmer would say, "Come back tomorrow, and I'll have more."

I woke up from that dream with a new view of life and ministry. I don't have to tie myself to an imaginary, unrelenting cycle to produce more, make more … . I have just so much time in the day, and I want to do what I can with all of my heart involved. When the clock runs out, then I say, "Come back tomorrow, and I'll have more."

Stefania Fraccalvieri now knows that tongue piercing costs a lot more than expected. Just after she had a metal stud put through her tongue—a popular fashion trend among teenagers—Stefania began to experience sharp, stabbing pains in her face that lasted up to half a minute, 20-30 times a day. Doctors soon diagnosed her with trigeminal neuralgia, a condition more commonly known as "suicide disease" because of the intense pain it causes. The metal stud she had implanted was apparently rubbing up against a nerve that runs along the jaw and is connected to the trigeminal nerve (a large nerve in the human head).

Stefania's condition is just one of many complications due to tongue piercing. Those who opt for the extra hardware in their mouth can get a tetanus infection, heart complications, brain abscesses, chipped teeth, and receding gums.

So how did doctors cure Ms. Fraccalvieri of her condition? They first prescribed the usual array of painkillers. Then they moved on to stronger medications. Finally, they tried the solution that was seemingly most obvious: they removed the metal stud from the girl's tongue, and in a matter of a few days, all was well again.

Thelma and Victor Hayes struck it rich. In August of 2005, the Canadian couple won more than $7 million (Canadian) in the lottery.

There are a few additional facts that make the story interesting. According to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Commission, Thelma and Victor are one of the oldest couples ever to win such a large jackpot. At the time they won, the Hayes' had been married 63 years, and both of them were 89-years-old.

During a televised interview, Thelma and Victor were asked the typical question, "What are you going to do with the money?" The couple responded that, at this stage in life, they were unlikely to become "giddy high spenders." In fact, they intended to remain in the retirement home where they lived.

While her husband planned on buying a Lincoln Town Car, Thelma's personal shopping list contained only one item. She told reporters, "I'm getting a new pair of nylons."

Thelma's response was widely reported as at least comical, if not foolish. How could someone win a fortune and change nothing but her nylons? In the same way, how can those who have won the spiritual grand prize not live in a way that is consistent with being a new creation in Christ?

Chuck Yeager, the famed test pilot, was flying an F-86 Sabre over a lake in the Sierras when he decided to buzz a friend's house near the edge of the lake. During a slow roll, he suddenly felt his aileron lock. Says Yeager, "It was a hairy moment, flying about 150 feet off the ground and upside down."

A lesser pilot might have panicked with fatal results, but Yeager let off on the G's, pushed up the nose, and sure enough, the aileron unlocked. Climbing to 15,000 feet, where it was safer, Yeager tried the maneuver again. Every time that he rolled, the problem reoccurred.

Yeager knew three or four pilots had died under similar circumstances, but to date, investigators were puzzled as to the source of the Sabre's fatal flaw. Yeager went to his superior with a report, and the inspectors went to work. They found that a bolt on the aileron cylinder was installed upside down.

Eventually, the culprit was found in a North American plant. He was an older man on the assembly line who ignored instructions about how to insert that bolt, because, by golly, he knew that bolts were supposed to be placed head up, not head down. In a sad commentary, Yeager says that nobody ever told the man how many pilots he had killed."

Text: "A wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands a foolish one tears hers down" (Proverbs 14:1).

Principle: Wise and foolish choices build up or tear down your life.

Objects: 54 pieces of 2 x 4 lumber, 10½ inches long; two tables.

Purpose: To help people see the impact of small choices.

Action: Start with the pile of wood on one table, and block by block start building a tower on the other table that has 3 blocks to a layer. Add layer on layer (each layer lying perpendicular to the one beneath it), talking about how wisdom builds a house. Once the house is built, start taking blocks out towards the bottom and casting them on the floor. Talk about how foolish choices make our life precarious and vulnerable to falling. After several blocks have been removed, pull one out that makes it all crash down.