Life, Testing

That old cell phone? Dead laptop? Gaming console from 14 years back? Britain’s Royal Mint is turning tech trash into treasure. A cellphone's motherboard, for example, contains gold, because it needs to conduct electricity well. Seventeen and a half cell phones yield enough gold to produce a wedding band.

Eshe Nelson writes in a NewYork Times article: "The mint expects to process about 4,500 tons of e-waste, which includes circuit boards from televisions, computers and medical equipment, each year." The process is arduous: "the gold is leached from the circuit boards in a patented solution, which oxidizes the gold to make it soluble. The solution, saturated with gold, goes through another chemical process to make the gold solid again. It looks surprisingly like ground coffee, but 100 grams is worth about $8,405. That powder is refined till it is 99.9 percent pure, formed into long rods, then heated and cooled to make it malleable. The result in the hands of an artist: a pair of 9-karat gold hoop earrings worth $1,000.

Possible Preaching Angle:
The intense work to refine gold is nothing compared to the refining process that God uses to refine the faith of believers.

As a young adult, writer Andrew Leland was diagnosed with a rare disorder that caused him to become blind. In a New Yorker article, he notes that throughout history people have either bullied or coddled visually impaired people. But he gives an example of one school that empowers the blind by challenging them to achieve new heights of independence. Leland writes:

In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people.

The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear”—ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, our heavenly Father will stretch us by “dropping” us into challenging situations.

Vivian Prodan was born in Communist Romania under the brutal totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceauescu (“Chow-sches-coo”). A place where questioning a government directive could lead to imprisonment, physical torture, and death. The best way to avoid trouble was to remain silent and try to blend in. But Vivian became obsessed with finding the truth. After graduation, she went to law school and became an attorney. Vivian writes:

One evening a client came in to discuss some paperwork. He radiated joy and peace and without thinking, I confessed, “I wish I had your sense of peace and happiness.” He asked, “Do you go to church?” “Yes,” I replied. “On Christmas and Easter. Why?” He said, “Would you like to come with me to my church this Sunday?”

The next Sunday I visited his church. The pastor read John 14:6 “I am the way and the truth and the life.” I could not believe what I heard. Someone was claiming to be the truth? I felt as though the verses he shared were written specifically for me. For the first time in my life, everything made sense. I accepted the pastor’s invitation to trust in Christ as Lord and Savior. From that moment on, I would dedicate my life to pursuing and speaking the truth, no matter the cost.

Vivian began defending fellow Christians facing imprisonment for transporting Bibles across the Romanian border, sharing their faith, or worshiping privately in their own homes. This quickly made her a target. Many days her tires were slashed. She was kidnapped, bullied, pushed into moving traffic, and beaten by the secret police. However, the greatest test was yet to come.

Late at night my legal assistant peeked into my doorway: “A big man in the waiting room says he wants to discuss a case. That’s all he will tell me.” I was taken aback at how enormous he was. As he sat down in front of my desk, a sneer formed at the corner of his mouth. Slowly, he reached into a shoulder holster, drawing a gun.

He aimed his gun at me and said, “You have failed to heed the warnings you’ve been given. I’ve come here to finish the matter once and for all.” I heard a distinctive click. “I am here to kill you.”

I was alone with my killer. And yet, I was not. I began silent, fervent prayers, recalling God’s promises. His Spirit breathed peace into my panicked heart. Then I sensed his message: “Share the gospel.” I knew that behind those hate-filled eyes he had an immortal soul, and he needed to know about the love God has shown in Jesus Christ. At once emboldened, “Have you ever asked yourself: Why do I exist? or What is the meaning of my life?”

He slid his gun back into the holster. Vivian leaned forward. “You are here because God put you here, and he has put you to a test. Will you abide in God or in the will of a man—President Ceauescu?” His eyes softened.

Hebrews 9:27 says, “People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.” But the good news is that God has prepared a way out for every one of us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

As she continued to talk with him, he appeared more peaceful. Finally, he said, “You are right. The people who sent me here are crazy. I do need Christ.” He promised, “I will come to your church as a secret brother in Christ. I will worship your powerful God.”

And with that, my killer walked away saved—a brother in Christ. He went on to enroll in seminary, and we have even kept in touch. He, like me, had found the Truth. And neither of us will be afraid to speak it ever again.

The popular Pursuit of Wonder's video considers whether everything happens for a reason. In a fictional piece, a young man contends he has led a good and decent life, but in an instant an earthquake collapses his home and he is hospitalized with serious injuries. He is at a loss as to why.

"I wonder, as I lie here dying in this seemingly reasonless way, what this means. If, I’ve never done anything deserving of such a tragedy, how then could there be any good reason for this event occurring onto me?" He admits his prior beliefs were wrong:

That every time I said, “Everything happens for a reason.” Every time I heard it and believed it. Every time I seemingly found a reason for why something happened to me … I meant that it happened for a good reason. A just reason. I meant that there was some considerate order to the universe, and everything in my story was placed there to allow me to become the winner of it. But how foolish was I to think this? That I was somehow special. Somehow important. And that somehow the universe agreed and gave me immunity from the fact that no one wins this thing.

In spite of life's chaos and tragedies, the narrator still chooses to believe everything in his life happens for a reason. However, one day the reasons will dry up. "And when this moment comes, there will be no ink left to write a reason for running out of ink. And so, until then, I say I will lie here writing in this hospital bed, revolting against the hopelessness, creating every last reason I can."

You can watch the video here (3 mi. 13 sec. - 6 min. 16 sec.).

Possible Preaching Angle:

The universe can be a frustratingly random place where “accidents happen.” Like Job, people struggle to find meaning in evil events. However, only the Christian has a Father in heaven who “causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. (Rom. 8:28)”

Mariam Aly, an assistant professor at Columbia University, has tried everything to keep her students from cheating. In her cognitive neuroscience class, she gives her students a week to complete an open-book exam. And, as part of that exam, the nearly 180 students in the class have to sign an honor code.

But they're still cheating. And dealing with student misconduct is the worst part of her job. Aly says, "It's just awkward and painful for everybody involved. And it's really hard to blame them for it. You do feel disappointed and frustrated. Students are facing unprecedented levels of stress and uncertainty.”

As college moved online in the COVID-19 crisis, many universities are reporting increases, sometimes dramatic ones, in academic misconduct. At Virginia Commonwealth University, reports of academic misconduct soared during the 2020-21 school year, to 1,077--more than three times the previous year's number. At the Ohio State University, reported incidents of cheating were up more than 50% over the year before.

Annie Stearns will be a sophomore this fall at St. Mary's College of California, where misconduct reports doubled last fall over the previous year. During the pandemic, the challenges of learning online were entwined with social isolation and additional family responsibilities. On top of that, tutoring services and academic resources scaled back or moved online. Some students, facing Zoom burnout, stopped asking for help altogether. Stearns explains, “If you're in class, and then you have to go to office hours, that's another Zoom meeting. And if you have to go to the writing center, that's another Zoom meeting. People would get too overwhelmed with being on video calls and just opt out.”

The story goes on to say, “We're going through such an unprecedented time that (cheating is) bound to happen. They prefer to take the shortcut and risk getting caught than have an email conversation with their professor because they're too ashamed to be like, 'I need assistance.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We are living in unique and extremely stressful times. Each of us will be tested in various ways, whether in academic honesty, sexual purity, substance abuse, apathy, depression, or anger issues. We must keep trusting God and lean on his strength and his Spirit to “pass the test.”

Devin Kelly looks forward every year to meeting his running friends at Farmdaze. Every February at a farm in Brooklet, Georgia, a 24-hour ultra-marathon event is run. Along with the pig roasts and folk music, some runners cover up to 100 miles in a single day, others a fraction of that. Farmdaze is a place of grace:

… a place that calls itself a race but is really everything that a race isn’t. (It is) an event that lets people give up if they want, that doesn’t shame them for it. (It) lets them become present in the story that is, simply all of us trying to love all of us …

Originally, Kelly ran competitively for personal pride and for his father, who would travel long distances to see him and his brother run. He loved running because it always meant something.

During his most recent race Kelly was gruelingly pushing himself to reach the 100 miles. He said he found himself alone, “under a field of stars, soaking wet, skin steaming. I tried to see the stars but my headlamp’s glare made it impossible. So, I turned it off and offered myself to the dark. What is the point of all of this, I asked myself, what is the … point?”

Suddenly, almost like a bolt of lightning, Kelly

… felt partly empty, without purpose. ... The truth is: I wanted to feel more. ... There was so much distance between what I felt and what I was supposed to feel. It made me sad … I had believed in what society told me would happen: that I would push through a challenge and emerge, new and strong, where love was. But I was left instead with the deep, profound emptiness knowing entirely for certain that what you were told by society was wrong. ... What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?

Author Elizabeth L. Silver wrote the very personal memoir The Tincture of Time. It is about her then baby daughter’s stroke at six weeks and the trauma and uncertainty for a full year before she recovered.

Silver spoke to many people about the pandemic crisis and found their biggest concern was fear--not of illness, financial loss ,or death, but living with uncertainty. She also interviewed many people living with various diseases--living with medical uncertainty.

She learned that:

How we approach uncertainty in our health is a litmus test for how we approach life. Uncertainty is living outside of life and within it. It is the baseline of experience, of joy, of energy, of possibility, of fear. And uncertainty—especially in a pandemic—reflects how we as a society and we as individuals are.

Silver contrasts how most people deal with a medical crisis compared to doctors and nurses. Talking to non-medical people she “asked each person for the first word that came to mind when they hear the phrase ‘uncertainty in medicine.’ The overwhelming response was ‘fear’ or ‘blindness’ or ‘powerlessness.’”

Yet when she asked scientists and health care professionals the same question, their first response was “challenge” or “reality.” The difference was that they understood and expected this uncertainty; it is part of their professional worldview, and it is no different now. Health professionals and experts know that we don’t know much about this novel coronavirus. “The difficulty now lies in convincing the rest of us that uncertainty is something we can and must live with.”

The "marshmallow test" is a classic research project that illustrates our lack of self-control and delayed gratification. For the study, the researcher would give a child a marshmallow, and tell them that they could eat the marshmallow OR they could wait until the researcher would return several minutes later, at which time they would get a second marshmallow. Videos abound on YouTube featuring kids, in successive versions of the original experiment, waiting, playing with, and sometimes eating the first marshmallow, forgoing their chances of a second marshmallow.

In January 2020, the results of a new version of the experiment were released. In this new version, kids were paired up, played a game together, and then were sent to a room and given a cookie with the promise of another if they could wait for it by not eating the first cookie. However, some of the kids were put in what researches called an "interdependent" situation in which they were told they would only get the second cookie if both they and their partner could wait and refrain from eating. The results showed that the kids who were depending on each other waited for the second cookie significantly more often.

According to researcher Rebecca Koomen, "In this study, children may have been motivated to delay gratification because they felt they shouldn't let their partner down, and that if they did, their partner would have had the right to hold them accountable."

Possible Preaching Angle:

This research suggests that indeed we are better together than we are in isolation.

At the end of 1901, the Wright brothers were frustrated by the flight-tests of their 1900-1901 gliders. The aircraft were flown frequently up to 300 feet in a single glide. But neither aircraft performed as well as predicted using the design methods available to the brothers. But when they flew their airplane in 1903, they knew it would take off. How did they know?

After building and testing a small wind tunnel, the Wright brothers completed a larger, more sophisticated one in October 1901. The wind tunnel consisted of a simple wooden box with a square glass window on top for viewing the interior during testing. A fan belted to a one-horsepower engine, which ran the machinery in their bicycle shop, provided an airflow of about 30 miles per hour. They used the wind tunnel extensively to carry out aerodynamic research that proved essential in designing their 1903 airplane.

Writing specifically about the Book of Proverbs, Ray Ortlund offers some words of wisdom that apply to the entire Bible: "This is what the Book of Proverbs [and the entire Bible] are for. We can explore a real-life situation within the virtual reality of a proverb [or the Bible]. We can know in advance what is going to fly and what is going to crash. Biblical wisdom [or the revelation in the Word of God] tells us what life is really life."

Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk.

I have never thought that Christians would be free of suffering. For our Lord suffered. And I have come to believe that He suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For He knew that there is no life without suffering.