Curiosity

In what might be Ohio's most bizarre drug bust this year, law enforcement officials doing a traffic stop were surprised to discover a raccoon named Chewy sitting in the driver's seat, casually holding a meth pipe to its mouth.

Police detained motorist Victoria Vidal after a records search showed her license was suspended, and she had an active warrant for arrest. Their traffic stop uncovered a veritable drug buffet - crack cocaine, meth, and three used meth pipes - but the real star was the furry suspect. “Thankfully, Chewy the raccoon was unharmed,” police confirmed, adding they even checked if the owner had “the proper paperwork and documentation to own the raccoon.”

“While our officers are trained to expect the unexpected, finding a raccoon holding a meth pipe is a first,” a department rep quipped. Vidal faces multiple drug charges and a citation for driving with a suspended license, but Chewy walked away without so much as a warning, proving that in Ohio's criminal justice system, raccoons remain Ohio's most wanted—and least prosecuted—outlaws.

In the meantime, let’s hope that Chewy gets the help it needs – or failing that, that it finds a better human role model to emulate.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Creation; Responsibility; Stewardship - The Bible teaches that humans are given dominion over animals, but this comes with a responsibility for their well-being. This story reminds us that our actions can influence those around us, even animals who are keen observers, and they often replicate both positive and negative actions they observe in their environment.

Many zoos are facing a new dilemma: gorillas and screen time. Great apes have become interested in watching videos of themselves on the phones of visitors.

For instance, in San Diego, four hulking male gorillas roamed their zoo enclosure, sitting pensively on rocks overlooking a waterfall and climbing a wooden structure. Suddenly, an 18-year-old western lowland gorilla named Ekuba bounded up to the glass. The 380-pound animal looked expectantly at a man wearing a shirt bearing the gorilla’s image as he pulled out his phone. Ekuba stood on all fours and began watching videos—of himself and other gorillas.

Ekuba isn’t the only gorilla enthralled with devices. Across North America, zoos have grappled with, and sometimes embraced, primates taking an interest in screen time. In Louisville, Ky., a 27-year-old gorilla named Jelani has been enamored with phones for years, flicking his finger or tapping the glass when he’s ready for a visitor to swipe to the next shot. At the Toronto Zoo, keepers have hung signs to dissuade showing screens to gorillas, citing disruption to their family dynamic.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Creation; Responsibility; Stewardship - The Bible teaches that humans are given dominion over animals, but this comes with a responsibility for their well-being. This story can serve as an example of the proverb “Monkey see, monkey do" which reminds us that our actions can influence those around us, even animals who are keen observers, and they often replicate both positive and negative actions they observe in their environment.

The billionaire Elon Musk has recently been invoking Christianity as he discusses core beliefs. Raised Anglican in South Africa, young Musk got an early taste of differing religious views attending a Jewish preschool. “I was just singing ‘Hava Nagila’ one day and `Jesus, I Love You’ the next,” he jokes.

As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.

“The answer is the easy part,” Musk said during a public event. “The question is the hard part.”

Recent tweets have included: “Jesus taught love, kindness, and forgiveness. I used to think that turning the other cheek was weak & foolish, but I was the fool for not appreciating its profound wisdom.”

And: “While I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise.”

Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”

I’ve noticed along the way of life that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators.

Diminishers … make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times—so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.

Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him [gave you] a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.

Brian Grazer, Hollywood producer of such movies as Apollo 13, Splash, and A Beautiful Mind, writes:

More than intelligence, or persistence or connections, curiosity has allowed me to live the life I wanted. And yet for all the value that curiosity has brought to my life and work, when I look around, I don’t see people talking about it, writing about it, encouraging it, and using it nearly as widely as they could.

Curiosity seems so simple. Innocent even. Labrador retrievers are charmingly curious. Porpoises are playfully, mischievously curious. A two-year-old going through the kitchen cabinets is exuberantly curious—and delighted at the noisy entertainment value of her curiosity. Every person who types a query into Google’s search engine and presses ENTER is curious about something—and that happens 6 million times a minute, every minute of every day.

Possible Preaching Angle

Brian Grazer writes about curiosity in a way that might remind us of how Jesus habitually piqued curiosity in others, whether it was the woman at the well or the disciples imagining a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle. Curiosity can be what enables the searcher to find the life they are looking for in Jesus Christ.

Do you have something to hide? A new survey finds that 82% of people admit to snooping through someone else’s devices. Moreover, the most likely Americans to go snooping is a person’s romantic partner or their ex.

According to a poll of more than 1,000 people, those who go snooping around may have a reason to always be so suspicious. A shocking 53% claim they’ve found something incriminating or concerning while going through someone else’s device. The most common thing people find is evidence that their significant other is cheating or flirting with other people. In fact, 70% say they’ve discovered evidence of digital flirting or in-person cheating after going through someone’s device.

Nearly nine in 10 snoopers go straight to their target’s messages, e-mails, or social media direct messages. Nearly half (44%) check out a person’s photos while snooping and 38% read through their target’s browser history. Interestingly, more than one in three have no regrets about snooping on another person.

Even though 82% of Americans admit to snooping through another person’s device, most are apparently expert digital spies. 81% claim they’ve never been caught while snooping through someone’s device.

Women are more likely to say they snoop (88%) in comparison to men (77%). Moreover, women were also less likely to regret snooping through someone’s device. Only one in 10 respondents say they’ve never looked through someone else’s device. For everyone else, 25% say they find “something significant most or every time” they go snooping around.

Every parent has to keep an eye on their children, but some children are more determined than others to get into mischief. Still, Brazilian mom Daniele Marques had to be in disbelief after having been informed of her son’s latest exploit.

Danielle said, “I woke up at 5:30 a.m., went to his room, and saw that he was sleeping normally. Then I fiddled with my mobile phone a little and got up again, at 7:30 a.m., and that’s when I realized he was no longer in his bedroom and I started to panic.”

After Googling “how to get onto a plane unnoticed,” that’s exactly what nine-year-old Emanuel Marques de Oliveira did. He snuck out of the house, into a nearby airport, got past security, and onto a Latam Airlines flight bound for the São Paulo region of Brazil. Employees say the plane had traveled about 1,700 miles before they noticed him on the plane.

After authorities investigated the security breach, they sent him back to his rightful home. They noted that Emanuel didn’t try to escape because of any negativity at home, but because he had family around São Paulo with whom he wanted to spend time.

Sounds like young Emanuel has a future in testing security systems. Or perhaps Apple might want to pluck him for their next iPhone commercial. The ad copy “FaceTime with your family, so your kid doesn’t try to sneak onto a plane.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Children are inquisitive and can take risks that are dangerous. Wise parents should be diligent to harness that curiosity into safe channels without stifling their spirit.

In an interview with NPR, musician/singer Paul Simon was asked about the great mysteries of life:

We don't have the capacity to understand the great mysteries of life and God or no God or infinity, we just can't get it. It's beyond us, but that's fine. We're not meant to get that. But the pursuit is so interesting. That, I think, is life sustaining and I think when you lose the interest in that pursuit you're finished.

The human brain weighs three pounds. It is the size of a softball, and yet with it we have the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next three hundred million years. God has created us with an unlimited capacity to learn. What that tells me is that we ought to keep learning until the day we die.

Leonardo da Vinci once observed that the average human "looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking." But not da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance man called the five senses the ministers of the soul. Perhaps no one in history stewarded them better than he did. Famous for his paintings The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, da Vinci trained himself in curiosity. He never went anywhere without his notebooks, in which he recorded ideas and observations in mirror-image cursive. His journals contain the genesis of some of his most ingenious ideas—a helicopter-like contraption he called an orinthopter, a diving suit, and a robotic knight. While on his own deathbed, he meticulously noted his own symptoms in his journal. That's devotion to learning. Seven thousand pages of da Vinci's journals have been preserved. Bill Gates purchased eighteen pages for $30.8 million a few decades ago.

Writer Ralph B. Smith once made an observation that children ask roughly 125 questions per day and adults ask about six questions per day, so somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we lose 119 questions per day. A child's innate curiosity about life is instilled in them at birth by the One who longs to be discovered. The more questions they ask, the more they discover about the world around them. The more they discover about the world around them, the more they discover about the One who made them.

Possible Preaching Angle: Disciple; Discipleship; Sanctification—Disciples are called to be lifelong learners about the way of following and knowing Jesus, being conformed to his image.

"As a reporter, I pride myself on being able to get to the bottom of things," says Maryanne Firth, a writer for Ontario, Canada's Welland Tribune. "I like a good mystery and I like it even more when I can solve it before anyone else. But for once, I'm glad the secret was kept."

Firth's curiosity was piqued when mysterious pink hearts began appearing around her city. Soon, new signs appeared to accompany them, with the name of a local park, a date, and a time. Unable to resist the mystery, Firth took her camera and went sniffing for a story. And a story there was. She found a small crowd in the park on a rainy afternoon, surrounding a man in a suit, wearing a box on his head. He was handing flowers to the onlookers, and gave one to Firth—then his entire bouquet. The mask came off, and he dropped to one knee. "This was the man who I've loved for the past eight years. Who I've built a life with," Firth said. "This was all for me." She said yes.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes the "clues" of our lives don't all make sense. They seem more mystery than meaning. But what if, for those of us who choose to follow them, there was the love of our lives—God—waiting for us at the end? His pursuit of us may be strange sometimes, but like the story of an investigative reporter who uncovered her own proposal, it will not be boring.

We want a kind of knowledge that eliminates mystery and puts us in charge of [the] world. Above all, we want to avoid a knowledge that calls for our own conversion. …

The sin, the error, is not our hunger for knowledge—and the way back to Paradise is not via intentional ignorance (despite some latter-day Christian claims). Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden because of the kind of knowledge they reached for—a knowledge that distrusted and excluded God. Their drive to know arose not from love but from curiosity and control, from the desire to possess powers belonging to God alone. They failed to honor the fact that God knew them first, knew them in their limits as well as their potentials. In their refusal to know as they were known, they reached for a kind of knowledge that always leads to death.

It's true that in blundering about, we struck gold, but the fact remains we were looking for gold—asking the right questions.

—Francis Crick, on his Nobel Prize winning discovery of the DNA's double helix with James Watson.

"I've been exposed to no religion whatsoever. I'm probably one of the few people that was raised as a true atheist, which, of course, makes me terribly interested in everything religious."

—Actress Jodie Foster

In For the Time Being, Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard writes:

In Highland New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once told of an incident that seemed insignificant at the time, but had a profound influence on the rest of his life. The winter he was 9, he went walking across a snow-covered field with his reserved, no-nonsense uncle. As the two of them reached the far end of the field, his uncle stopped him. He pointed out his own tracks in the snow, straight and true as an arrow's flight, and then young Frank's tracks meandering all over the field. "Notice how your tracks wander aimlessly from the fence to the cattle to the woods and back again," his uncle said. "And see how my tracks aim directly to my goal. There is an important lesson in that."

Years later the world-famous architect liked to tell how this experience had greatly contributed to his philosophy in life. "I determined right then," he'd say with a twinkle in his eye, "not to miss most things in life, as my uncle had."

If you do not wish to become angry, do not be curious. If you ask what is being said about yourself and uncover unpleasant words (even though these words were said privately), you only make yourself unhappy.

Those who are wise overlook many wrongs and often do not take them as such, for either they do not know about them or, if they do, they make fun of them and turn them into jokes. To pay no attention to injuries is a mark of magnanimity. The really great and noble soul listens to wrongs as securely as the larger wild animals hear the barking of small dogs.

Modern mankind can go anywhere, do everything and be completely curious about the universe. But only a rare person now and then is curious enough to want to know God.