Insight

Humans have color vision because our eyes contain three types of cone cells. One cone helps us see blue, another to see green, and the third to see red. This is called trichromatic vision. The brain combines signals from these three types of cones to perceive a wide range of colors, allowing humans to distinguish millions of different colors from periwinkle to chartreuse.

There is, however, a rare breed living among us called tetrachro¬mats. They possess a fourth cone, allowing them to see a hundred mil¬lion colors that are invisible to the rest of us. For every color a trichromat sees, a tetrachromat perceives a hundred hues!

I can't help but wonder if we'll get a fifth cone in heaven, enabling us to perceive a billion colors. Or perhaps a sixth, seventh, or hun¬dredth cone! By earthly standards, we'll have extrasensory perception. Everything will smell better, taste better, sound better, feel better, and look better. With our newly glorified senses, we'll hear angel octaves.

Remember when Elisha was surrounded by the Aramean army? He said to his very confused assistant, "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Elisha prayed that the Lord would open his servant's eyes, and it's almost like God created an extra cone. "He looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha."

Possible Preaching Angle: If our spiritual eyes were opened, what would we see? We'd see what's really happening! We'd see guardian angels, as the scriptures describe them ministering to those who will inherit salvation (Heb. 1:14). We'd discern the manifest presence of God, perhaps like Moses who encountered God's glory on the mountain or Isaiah in God’s throne room (Exod. 33:18-23; Isa. 6:1-7). We'd perceive powers and principalities, those unseen forces at work in the world, as Paul warns us about (Eph. 6:12).

Boredom is a universally dreaded feeling. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t. Boredom is a different experience from the idleness of downtime or relaxation. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t, which is an uncomfortable feeling.

In one famous experiment, people were asked to sit quietly for 15 minutes in a room with nothing but their own thoughts. They also had the option to hit a button and give themselves an electric shock.

Getting physically shocked is unpleasant, but many people preferred it to the emotional discomfort of boredom. Out of 42 participants, nearly half opted to press the button at least once, even though they had experienced the shock earlier in the study and reported they would pay money to avoid experiencing it again.

Social psychologist Erin Westgate said, “Boredom is sort of an emotional dashboard light that goes off saying, like, ‘Hey, you’re not on track. It is this signal that whatever it is we’re doing either isn’t meaningful to us, or we’re not able to successfully engage with this.”

Boredom plays a valuable role in how people set and achieve goals. It acts as a catalyst by bringing together different parts of our brain — social, cognitive, emotional, or experiential memory. So, when we’re firing on all neurons, we’re at our most imaginative and making connections we otherwise never would have.

So go be bored, and encourage your kids to be bored too. Maybe you’ll find a new and creative “Eureka!” moment in your life, or imagine a great big new future for yourself or the world. Boredom is a worthwhile adventure.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Boredom can play a valuable role in how you set and achieve goals. Use it to motive you to action! 1) Meditation; Prayer - Don’t reach for your smartphone or the streaming device the next time you are forced to wait. Instead, use this time to set your mind on God: Read the Word, pray, meditate on God as revealed in nature. Destress yourself by centering your thoughts on God. 2) Help; Loving others; Service - You can also shift your focus toward others and their needs. Who can you help today?

Multiple New York Times best-selling author and documentary director Sebastian Junger had a near-death experience in June 2020. This was due to an unexpected abdominal hemorrhage, which he survived thanks to his doctors. This led him to explore the topics of death, near-death, and the afterlife in his 2024 book In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of An Afterlife. After he had escaped death, Junger, a committed atheist, had several deep moments of reflection:

But I didn't die, and it made me wonder what this new part of my life was supposed to be called. The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary. A week after I came home, I found myself sitting at a window looking at a crab apple tree in the backyard. The branches were waving in the wind, and I had the thought that they'd be waving in exactly the same way if I'd died, only I wouldn't be here to see them. The moment would be utterly beyond my reach. Eventually [my wife] Barbara asked if I felt lucky or unlucky to have almost died and I didn't know how to answer. Was I blessed by special knowledge or cursed by it? Would I ever function normally again?

Junger flipflopped daily from wondrous thankfulness to existential dread:

Barbara said she couldn't take much more of me like this and made the excellent point that I had an opportunity to experience the insights of terminal illness without - almost certainly - having to pay the price. What was I learning? What could I come away from this with? My father had continued reading history books until the last weeks of his life. Would I keep practicing music if the news were bad? Reading? Running? What would be the point - but then, what's the point anyway?

Possible Preaching Angle:

Unbelievers are given an opportunity to come to faith by God, but sadly many hedge, delay, and then go back to their old ways, ultimately untouched by their experience.

Modern life is full of common mishaps such as mistakenly sending a text to the wrong person or confusing a stranger for an acquaintance. In a survey of 2,000 adults, researchers found that frequent blunders include laundry mishaps, accidentally ordering the wrong thing in a restaurant, and putting the wrong destination into the car’s GPS.

The study, conducted by OnePoll, also found that the average adult encounters 84 mishaps a year, amounting to more than one embarrassing error per week. Additionally, 31 percent confessed to repeating the same mistake more than once.

Top Mishaps People Endure in Modern Society:

1. Sent a text to the wrong person
2. Mistook a stranger for someone you knew and greeted them
3. Washed clothes and accidentally shrunk them or turned them to a different color
4. Accidentally sat on the TV remote control and missed a key moment on live TV
5. Prepped a meal for work but forgot to take it
6. Forgot to cancel subscriptions you never use
7. Had your phone go off in a place it should have been on silent
8. Tried to unlock your car before realizing it was someone else’s vehicle
9. Forgot about plans and didn’t show up for an event
10. Bought a piece of furniture but didn’t check the dimensions and it was a lot smaller or larger than you thought

These misfortunes are a part of life, and we can all make them. The findings show it can happen to anyone and everyone can relate to making a mishap.

Despite being the butt of the joke, 45 percent laugh at their misfortunes, while 21 percent felt they had learned something from the experience. In fact, a remarkable 87 percent acknowledged that mistakes and mishaps are simply an unavoidable part of life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As James says, “We all stumble in many ways” (Jam. 3:2). If we allow ourselves to make honest mistakes, humble ourselves (and maybe even join in the laughter), we are in the best place possible to learn a lesson about humility and grow by allowing others to be imperfect also.

In his novel, This Is Happiness, Niall Williams’ elderly narrator, Noe (pronounced No), remembers when electricity and light came to their little Irish village of Faha:

I’m aware here that it may be hard to imagine the enormity of this moment, the threshold that once crossed would leave behind a world that had endured for centuries, and that this moment was only sixty years ago.

Consider this: when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling. It turned out Siney Dunne’s fine head of hair was a wig, not even close in color to the scruff of his neck, and Marian McGlynn’s healthy allure was in fact a caked make-up the color of red turf ash.

In the week following the switch-on, (store owner) Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home, and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Such is the illumination of the gospel—in a person’s heart, in a community, even in a culture. It’s no surprise, then, that John 3:19 says, “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” James 1:23-24 warns against the folly of looking in the mirror of God’s Word only to walk away without changing.

Senior Lead Pastor and author Anthony Delaney writes:

We are told this is the Knowledge Economy. The Information Age. But where is wisdom to be found?

Great question – where is wisdom to be found?

Google it.

I did.

You could do it too.

Guess what came up as the top answer?

In fact, as I type into Google, “Where is wisdom to be found?” I scroll down and just keep rolling - and every answer, the first 25 at least – come from the Bible.

From the Book of Job, chapter 28:12, that says, “But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?”

Google can’t tell you the answer, but it can tell you where to find it, in God’s Word.

Dr. Joe Carella, Sport Psychology Consultant with the NBA’s Orlando Magic addresses what to do "When you see yourself differently than your boss does."

Anyone who gets drafted in the NBA feels like they're going to be an all-star with a long career ahead of them. Perhaps you think of yourself as a primary scorer, the guy you give the ball to at the end of the game to make the bucket to win. The coach, however, sees you primarily as a defensive player. You can either fight or accept that.

I work with the players to accept their coach's vision and to develop the skills to excel in that role. If you don't take advantage of the opportunity you're given, you may regret it for a long time. Interestingly, this is much less of a problem with veteran players. When you're a rookie who might not want to recognize or accept your limitations, it's hard. Unfortunately, the guys who don't develop greater self-awareness are more likely to resist change, and their NBA careers are shorter and don't match their potential. But the players who find a way to be dependable while embracing the challenge of changing perceptions are the ones with long, fulfilling careers.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the Christian walk, our "Coach" ultimately decides what position we will play and our role on his team. His vision for our life is always the right one. Leaning into it, and not wasting our time trying to be someone else, is the best was to find true success.

Artist Wendy McNaughton was distraught about the incivility in the U.S. So, she started using a drawing technique, called “blind contour” or “look closely.”

It works like this. Two people who have never met before sit at a small table across from each other. Then they follow these rules. Rule number one: never lift your pen off the page. Use one continuous line. Rule number two: never look down at the paper you’re drawing on. Keep your eyes fixed on your partner’s face the whole time.

McNaughton encourages participants to go slow and pay attention. Draw what you see, not what you expect to see.

Nearly all the participants fretted over their artistic ability, but I insisted they just start drawing. And when they were finished, they looked down and inevitably cracked up. The drawings were always hilarious. Teeth on foreheads and scribbles where lips should be. ... But the point of this isn’t the final product. It’s the process. Seeing each other. Participants were stunned by the connection they felt with someone they hadn’t met before, even after just 60 seconds. These former strangers were now, kind of, friends.

McNaughton concludes: “Imagine what would happen in our communities, if we slow down to look at one another.”

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.

When Desirae Kelly woke at 5am, she knew something was off. Kelly felt an unsettling fluttering sensation in her right ear, but initially dismissed it, thinking it was the comforter on her bed. She only sought medical attention after being persuaded by her fiancé.

Sitting in the clinic's waiting room, Kelly felt the mysterious movement again, this time accompanied by pain near her eardrum. By this point Kelly thought it was earwax. The nurse, however, made a startling revelation. There was something in her ear, and it was moving.

The nurse treated Kelly's ear by irrigating it with water, which prompted a black object to fall onto her sweater. To her horror, it was a live spider, about the size of a nickel. Fortunately, there was no damage to her eardrum, and no medication was required to prevent infection.

Despite the reassurance that her ear was free of spider remnants or eggs, the incident left a lasting impact on Kelly. Every night since the traumatic event, she has worn earplugs, unable to shake the uneasy and violating feeling of a spider crawling out of her ear.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We need God's help to be truly aware of what's going on inside. If we're not careful about how we live, and if we're not faithful to practice a rhythm of self-examination, we might be surprised by the ugliness we find in our own selves.

Watson Thornton was already serving as a missionary in Japan when he decided to join the Japan Evangelistic Band. He decided to travel to the town where the organization’s headquarters were located and to introduce himself to its leader. But just as he was about to get on the train, he felt a tug in his spirit that he took to be the leading of the Lord telling him to wait. He was puzzled but thought he should obey.

When the next train rolled into the station, Watson started to board but again felt he should wait. When the same thing happened with the third train, Watson began to feel foolish. Finally, the last train arrived, and once more Watson felt a check. “Don’t get on the train,” it seemed to say. Watson thought he had wasted most of the day for no apparent reason. Yet as he turned to go, he heard a voice call out his name. It was the mission leader he had intended to see. He came to ask whether Watson would consider joining the Japan Evangelistic Band. If Watson had ignored the impulse and boarded the train, he would have missed the meeting.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can’t just live by our intuition, can we? We do see something like intuition at work in the lives of God’s people in the Bible. Paul tries to enter Asia and Bithynia but is “kept by the Holy Spirit” from doing so (Acts 16:6-7). We do not always get it right using either intuition or careful deliberation. God uses both to guide us. The art of being led by the Spirit is not a matter of waiting each moment for some mystical experience of divine direction. It is a matter of trusting God for the power to obey what he has already told you to do.

Claire Wineland was born with cystic fibrosis and given about 10 years to live. Despite the illness, she was always optimistic and full of life. At the age of 13 her lungs collapsed, she was in a coma, and doctors gave her a 1% chance to live. After 16 days she came out of the coma and "the near-death experience” had radically transformed her understanding of what mattered most in life.

At the age of fourteen and knowing that she had limited time, Claire started a foundation called The Clarity Project to raise money for other terminally ill children with cystic fibrosis. She then spent the rest of her teenage years giving inspirational speeches filled with insights such as:

• “The quality of your life isn’t determined by whether you're healthy or sick or rich or poor. It’s determined by what you make out of your experience as a human being.”
• “The moment you realize it’s not about avoiding suffering, it’s about making something from your suffering, you’re incredibly free.”

When you listen to Claire deliver these insights, it’s hard to believe that she was just a teenager at the time she said them. Although Claire only lived to the age of 21, so many would say that her awareness of her mortality combined with the near-death experience accelerated her understanding of who she was and what she wanted to do in the world.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While many of us spend our entire lives without any sense of meaning, faced with her own mortality, Claire was able to live meaningfully with the knowledge that she might not have as much time as everyone else. As Christians, adversities and calamities can happen, but our meaning and mission come from Christ. Even when life is good, the calling remains.

Smartphones have changed the way we inhabit public space and more specifically, how we fill our time while waiting. Consequently, day-dreaming, thinking, speculating, observing, and people-watching are diminishing arts. So, what happens when you put down your phone, look up and start noticing?

Though hotly contested, the social, physical, and cognitive effects of our slavish devotion to the smartphone are said to include symptoms and risk factors such as neck problems, limited attention span, interrupted sleep, anti-social behavior, accidents, and other health risks.

Rarely mentioned in this litany of side effects is how phone use has changed the way we inhabit public space and, more specifically, how we fill our time while waiting. Every moment of potential boredom can now be ameliorated or avoided by all manner of tasks, modes of entertainment or other distractions conveniently provided courtesy of our minicomputer.

Some years back, in response to my own smartphone symptoms, I decided to look up from my screen and look around. We constantly use electronic devices to distract ourselves from the tedium associated with waiting. Instead, we could see boredom as an invitation to look up and then look around, to people watch, daydream, or take the time to observe and develop our own [observation of the beauty of the world] beyond hyperlinks and tags.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Make a New Year’s resolution: Don’t reach for your smartphone the next time you are forced to wait. Instead, use this time to set your mind on God: Read the Word, pray, meditate on God as revealed in nature, destress yourself by centering your thoughts on God.

Author Todd Rose makes the point that our tendency to make false assumptions, or fall into collective illusions, can result in mistrust, discouragement, and error. He writes,

If I asked how you personally define a successful life, which of these answers would you choose?

A. A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.

B. A person is successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.

Now which one do you think most people would choose? If you chose option A for yourself but thought that most people would choose option B, you are living under a collective illusion. This question came from a 2019 study of more than fifty-two hundred people conducted on the ways the American public defines success.

The result was that 97 percent chose A for themselves, but 92 percent thought that most others would choose B.

Rose concluded, “We learned that a large majority of people felt that the most important attributes for success in their own lives were qualities such as character, good relationships, and education. But those same people believed that most others prioritized comparative attributes such as wealth, status, and power.”

Residents of McFarland, a small town in California’s central valley, are upset over potential plans to replace the town’s only library with a police station. The Clara Jackson Branch Library is only open Thursdays and Fridays from noon to six, because that’s how much the county can afford to run it. Still, librarian Frank Cervantes said that demand was so high when it reopened after an extended pandemic-related closure that “as soon as I unlocked the doors, so many people came in that they nearly knocked me down.”

Many express their disapproval of the plan. 11-year-old, Analuz Hernandez said, “We’re surrounded by a bunch of land! They can’t build something new on all that land?”

City Manager Kenny Williams also serves as Police Chief. He says the need for a library is eclipsed by other public safety needs. “It does provide some service, but sometimes you have to judge what’s most important. When it comes to the library and public safety and comparing the use of the library building, [residents] recognize we have an issue with crime. We would use that building 24/7.”

Adult resident Angie Maldonado says the library has been a staple in the community since its opening back in 1994. “We have nothing else here for kids. We have no theater. You take this out, kids either stay home bored or go out on the streets.”

Local pastor Phil Corr agrees. “It’s an injustice to go after a vulnerable place. It’s logically and morally wrong. The police do need a larger place, and this building is ideally located. But it’s also ideally located for kids.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It's important to keep the community safe, but we can't let the fear of evildoers prevent us from promoting communal flourishing. In uncertain times, communities should turn back to the old ways of trusting God for wisdom and guidance in decision making.

Administrators for the 911 response bureau in Buffalo, New York, announced that they have terminated the employment of a dispatcher who mishandled a call during the shooting at the Tops grocery store that claimed the lives of ten people.

During one of the many 911 calls during the shooting incident, Tops employee Latisha Rogers was inside the store, and was whispering so as not to give her position. Apparently, that displeased the dispatcher.

Rogers said, “She was yelling at me, saying, ‘Why are you whispering? You don’t have to whisper. And I was telling her, ‘Ma’am, he’s still in the store. He’s shooting. I’m scared for my life. I don’t want him to hear me. Can you please send help?’ She got mad at me, hung up in my face.”

Local news identified the dispatcher as Sheila Ayers, an eight-year 911 veteran of the Police Services Department. Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said her actions were “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” According to Poloncarz, dispatchers are trained to recognize whispering as a likely sign of imminent danger.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Walking in wisdom with a servant’s heart prepares a person to respond appropriately in stressful situations. It will prevent a person from jumping to conclusions that are harmful.

Google has published its most searched-for terms of 2021:

For the UK, the five most frequently asked “When” questions were:

1. When will lockdown end?

2. When will I get the vaccine?

3. When does Love Island finish?

4. When does lockdown start?

5. When does Love Island start?

For the US, the five most frequently asked “How to Be” questions were:

1) How to be eligible for stimulus check

2) How to be more attractive

3) How to be happy alone

4) How to be a baddie

5) How to be a good boyfriend

Possible Preaching Angle:

“Therefore, since you have been raised with Christ, strive for the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Col. 3:1-2).

It's significant that in Scripture, wisdom is often associated with a path. Are you going in the right direction? Are you veering off the path? Do you know where you are on the map? What's your compass? At the end of the day, wisdom is less about information than orienta­tion. All the geographic data points in the world are useless if we have no sense of north.

All of us wander in whichever nomadic direction our hearts choose, until we submit to the authority of God's good compass. He alone illuminates the path of wisdom. The fool says in his heart, "There is no God" (Ps. 14:1), and thus wanders aimlessly through the desert. The wise man, by contrast, lives a radically God-centered life.

Tozer puts it this way:

As the sailor locates his position on the sea by "shooting" the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There is much to look at in life. Our eyes flutter back and forth faster than they can properly process. Wisdom is focusing our gaze on God: looking to him, praying to him, zealously seeking after him. The Psalms constantly reinforce this: “My eyes are ever on the Lord” (Ps. 25:15. Ps. 141:8).

In his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr calls the Internet "a technology of forgetfulness" and describes how, thanks to the plasticity of our neural pathways, our brains are literally, being rewired by digital distraction:

The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be dis­tracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we're away from our comput­ers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering.

We are reading a ton on our devices and screens—we ac­tually read a novel's worth of words every day. (But) it is not the sort of continuous, sustained, concentrated reading conducive to reflective thinking. Maryanne Wolf argues: “There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests.”

Our rapid-fire toggling between spectacles—an episode of a Hulu show here, a Spotify album there, and scanning a friend's blog post—works against wisdom in the moment, by eliminating any time for reflection or synthesis before the next thing beckons. But it also works against wisdom in the long term, as brain research is showing. Our overstimulated brains are becoming weaker, less critical, and more gullible at a time in history when we need them to be sharper than ever.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Wisdom is not about getting to answers as fast as possible. It's more often about the journey, the bigger picture, the questions and complications along the way. There is great value in a slower intake of information with time for meditation and retention.

When Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, he named the inhabitants "Indians." He thought he had reached what Europeans of the time referred to as "the Indies" (China, Japan, and India). In fact, he was nowhere close to South or East Asia. In his path were vast regions of land, unexplored and uncharted, of which Columbus knew nothing. He assumed the world was smaller than it was.

Have we made a similar mistake with regard to Jesus Christ? Are there vast tracts of who he is, according to biblical revelation, that are unexplored? Have we unintentionally reduced him to manageable, predictable proportions? Have we been looking at a junior varsity, decaffeinated, one-dimensional Jesus of our own making, thinking we're looking at the real Jesus? Have we snorkeled in the shallows, thinking we've now hit bottom on the Pacific?