Passion

In the fall of 1937, Ed Keefer was a senior in the school of engineering at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Tall, slender, and bespectacled, Keefer was the president of the calculus club, the vice-president of the engineering club, and a member of the school’s exclusive all-male honor society. He also invented the Cupidoscope.

The electrical device could not have been more perfectly designed to bring campus-wide fame to its creators, Keefer and his less sociable classmate John Hawley. It promised to reveal, with scientific precision, if a couple was truly in love. As the inventors explained to a United Press reporter as news of their innovation spread, the Cupidoscope delivered on its promise “in terms called ‘amorcycles,’ the affection that the college girl has for her boyfriend.”

Built in the school’s physics laboratory, the Cupidoscope was fashioned from an old radio cabinet, a motor spark coil, and an electrical resistor. To test their bond, a man and a woman would grip electrodes on either side of the Cupidoscope and move them toward one another until the woman felt a spark—not of attraction, but of electricity. The higher her tolerance for this mild current, the more of a love signal the meter registered. A needle decorated with hearts purported to show her devotion on a scale that ranged from “No hope” to “See preacher!”

It all sounds like a slightly painful party game—but the Cupidoscope was one experiment in a serious, decades-long quest to quantify love. This undertaking garnered the attention of leading scientists across the United States and in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, and it is memorialized most prominently in the penny arcade mainstay known as the Love Tester.

Possible Preaching Angle:

“How do you measure love?” The Bible gives an answer to this important question: It is measured by the self-sacrifice of the Cross—“By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16); “Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:17-19).

One hundred years ago (1922), a Minnesota man named Ralph Samuelson went to a local lumberyard. Most people would have said that Samuelson found two ordinary eight-foot-long pine boards. But Samuelson had a more creative idea. He saw two water skis. Here’s the backstory on his invention of waterskiing.

Samuelson lived in Minnesota and wondered if you could ski on water the way you could on snow. At 18, he made his own skis and had his brother pull him behind his boat. He unsuccessfully tried snow skis and barrel staves before realizing that he needed something that covered more surface area on the water. That’s when Samuelson spotted two eight-foot-long, nine-inch-wide pine boards.

Using his mother’s wash boiler, he softened one end of each board, then clamped the tips with vises so they would curve upwards. He affixed leather straps to hold his feet in place and acquired 100 feet of window sash cord to use as a tow rope. Finally, he hired a blacksmith to make a small iron ring to serve as the rope’s handle.

Samuelson tried several different approaches. In most of his attempts, he started with his skis level with or below the water line; but by the time his brother got the boat going, Samuelson was sinking.

Finally, he tried raising the tips of the skis out of the water while he leaned back—and it worked. As his brother steered the boat, Samuelson cruised along behind him. To this day, this is still the position that water skiers assume. Samuelson began performing tricks on his skis and crowds as large as 1,000 came out to watch him.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Creativity; Persistence; Vision – Those who are truly successful often start with a dream and persist despite setbacks. Just because it has never been tried before, doesn’t mean it can’t work. 2) Skill; Spiritual Gifts; Talent – God gives different gifts to his people to use for the common good. Don’t neglect your gift, but use it to glorify God and to serve his people.

Falling in love can be exhilarating, but it isn’t the secret to marital happiness. “Passionate love”—the period of falling in love—often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause elation or the depths of despair. But, according to researcher Arthur Brooks (writing in The Atlantic), the secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love. Brooks writes:

This does not mean just sticking together legally: Research shows that being married only accounts for 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life. The important thing for well-being is relationship satisfaction, and that depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on [friendship], stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.

Passionate love, which relies on attraction, does not typically last beyond the novelty of the relationship … As one researcher bluntly summarizes the evidence in the Journal of Happiness Studies, “The well-being benefits of marriage are much greater for those who also regard their spouse as their best friend.”

All of us have odds to overcome, but those odds are not the enemy. ... By his own admission, Elon Musk had a difficult childhood. He was bullied during high school, spending time in the hospital after getting pushed down the stairs and beaten until he blacked out. His home life wasn't much better. He described his childhood as "nonstop horrible."

One day, when he was ten years old, he saw a computer at an elec­tronics store in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was love at first sight. That Commodore VIC-20 had five kilobytes of mem­ory and came with a workbook on the BASIC programming language. That language was supposed to take six months to acquire, but Musk learned it after three sleepless nights.

Could Elon Musk have learned to code without a challenging child­hood? You bet. But he might not have pursued coding with the same kind of passion. Everything we experience is a two-sided coin. It can make us or break us, and that's up to us. You can get frustrated with the fact that you're right-handed or left-handed, or you can cultivate ambi­dexterity. You don't get to choose how your story starts, but the ending is up to you.

Every sport involves some level of risk. But the greatest risk must be faced by those in motorsports. In an interview with Sports History Weekly, Mario Andretti was asked the following question, “What makes a talented race car driver?” Is it fearlessness, reaction, judgment, or strategy? As the only race car driver to win the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500, and the Formula One World Championship, fearlessness, reaction, judgment, and strategy are all talents that Andretti has in abundance. So, which one is the most important? He said, “All of the above.”

But then he added this, “. . . plus burning desire and confidence. I say burning desire because of the risk involved. If you want something so badly, you have a burning desire to do it, then you aren’t distracted by fear or risk or anything else.”

The Bookseller magazine runs a competition to find the book with the oddest title of the year. Competition rules stipulate that the work had to be of serious intent and non-fiction. One year, the winner was “Highlights in the History of Concrete.” Runners up included “The Illustrated History of Metal Lunchboxes,” and “The Development of Brain and Behavior in the Chicken.” Special mention was given to “Soviet Bus Stops,” and “Butchering Livestock at Home.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is amazing what interests people enough to spend the time and energy to write a book! Why should people be passionate about metal lunchboxes? As Christians, we should be passionate about what God has done for us. Are we passionate enough to pass it on to others? The Apostle Peter says, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15)

Contrary to popular opinion, married couples statistically don't have worse sex than singles, but better. In their groundbreaking study, The Case for Marriage, Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher point out that 40 percent of married people have sex twice a week, compared to 20 percent of single and cohabitating men and women. Over 40 percent of married women said their sex life was emotionally and physically satisfying, compared to about 30 percent of single women. Fifty percent of married men are physically and emotionally content versus 38 percent of cohabitating men.

A survey of sexuality conducted jointly by researchers at State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of Chicago—called the "most authoritative ever" by U.S. News & World Report—found that of all sexually active people the most physically pleased and emotionally satisfied were married couples. The myth of our culture is that the single life is a life of great sex and the height of pleasure, but this is a lie.

Waite and Gallagher conclude: "Promoting marriage ... will make for a lot more happy men and women. Sex in America reported that married sex beats all else.”

Americans love to say things like "follow your passion," "pursue your dreams," or "do what you love and love what you do." But do these mantras truly represent the path to vocational clarity, personal fulfillment, and human flourishing?

Not according to a study by researchers from Stanford University and Yale-NUS College, which found that "following your passion" is likely to lead to overly limited pursuits, inflated expectations (career, economic, or otherwise), and early or eventual burnout.

The study's authors concluded:

People are often told to find their passion as though passions and interests are pre-formed and must simply be discovered. This idea, however, has hidden motivational implications … Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.

Although our culture tells us to "look within," assuming a fixed set of passions to guide us on our way, researchers found more positive results among those who allow room for interests and intelligence to develop over time. The study encourages us to ask: Are we still looking only to the self or are we looking outward and upward as well? As David Brooks once wrote: "Most successful young people don't look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a [need or God's call], which summons their life."

Possible Preaching Angles: Surely it is better to say "develop your passion" than "find your passion," as the study concludes. But as we do so, let's remember to follow the voice of God and consider the needs of our neighbors and then align our hearts and hands accordingly.

When the Minneapolis Department of Health received a complaint about an unlicensed vendor selling hot dogs, they chose to view him not as a shady lawbreaker, but as a potential entrepreneur. Thirteen-year-old Jaequan Faulkner initially started selling hot dogs as a way to earn money for clothes and shoes, borrowing the hot dog roaster from his uncle Jerome. But after a while, he began to develop a passion for it.

"It's the cooking and the people," says Faulkner. "I see someone go by with a frown on their face. I'm there with a smile, then I see a smile on their face. I just made a smile on somebody's face by selling them a hot dog."

That infectious enthusiasm attracted enough attention and business that someone in the community reported his unauthorized setup to the city. But when city officials talked to Faulkner, they were so impressed with his positive attitude, they wanted to help out. Health inspectors pitched in to help Faulkner get all the training, materials, and equipment he would need to comply with city health regulations.

They even connected him to a local nonprofit designed to assist underserved entrepreneurs. Ann Fix, program manager for the Northside Food Business Incubator, had nothing but raves for Faulkner's attitude. "This young man is so full of gratitude," Fix said. "He is absolutely terrific to work with."

Potential Preaching Angles: Instead of seeing people as problems to be eliminated, gospel-centered people see others as potential vehicles for grace and redemption. We are blessed to be a blessing, and as we bear one other's burdens, we create common good.

In an interview with Esquire Magazine, former Beatles star Paul McCartney, now aged 82 (his birthday is June 1942), was asked if he felt that he still had something to prove. McCartney responded:

Yeah, all the time. And it is a silly feeling. And I do actually sometimes talk to myself and say, "Wait a minute: look at this little mountain of achievements. There's an awful lot of them. Isn't that enough?" But maybe I could do it a bit better. Maybe I could write something that's just more relevant or new. And that always drags you forward. I mean, I never felt like, "Oh, I did good." Nobody does. Even at the height of the Beatles. I prefer to think there's something I'm not doing quite right, so I'm constantly working on it. I always was, we always were. I mean, look at John [Lennon], a mass of paranoia and worries about whether he's doing it right. You only have to listen to his lyrics. I think that's just artists in general.