Permanence

In a southern Illinois town, an unfortunate incident resulted in a public park complex being indefinitely closed to the public. Unlike in many other areas in the United States, the crisis was not a brutal heat wave, but something more immediately dangerous: a giant 100-foot sinkhole that swallowed a good chunk of the soccer field.

Authorities said the initial investigation indicated the sinkhole at Gordon Moore Park happened as a result of an active limestone mine deep underground. Alton Mayor David Goins said, “No one was on the field at the time, and no one was hurt, and that’s the most important thing.”

The next step in remediation is a stage of investigative drilling. Mayor Goins said, "Ensuring the safety of our residents and restoring Gordon Moore Park to its full capacity are my top priorities. We will continue to work diligently with all involved parties to achieve this goal."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sinkholes remind us of three things: 1) Something can look good on the outside, when underneath major problems have been going on for years, and disaster’s about to happen. 2) Our lives are affected by little choices, which have cumulative effects that can result in either moral strength or moral disaster. 3) As Jesus taught, a life needs to be built on a solid foundation (Matt 7:24-27). Many people have deep voids in their lives caused by ignoring what type of foundation they are building their lives on. But when the foundations are shaken, only believers will be secure (Ps 46:1-2).

A business professor quoted in the Wall Street Journal noted how Gen Z is craving stability in the midst of anxiety.

Not long ago, a friend who teaches a communications course at a Midwestern business school asked me to speak to her class. Her instructions were invitingly wide: “Just tell them about your career.” And so I did, trying to hit all the points that might be relevant to students about to enter the job market.

When I was done, my friend opened the floor to questions and, much to my excitement, a line formed at the mic. Then came the first question: “You’ve had such a long career,” the student said. “Could you please tell us how you’ve avoided burnout? Like, what do you do for self-care?” As the student sat down, so did about half of the other students in the queue, signaling their question had been taken.

I’ll spare you my answer, but perhaps you can guess it. I am of the generation that thought work was what you did, even when it was hard. You pushed through. Burnout wasn’t an option. Self-care is what you did when you retired.

She goes on to quote a survey which asked 1,800 new graduates what they wanted most from their future employers. The overwhelming majority—85%—answered “stability.” High pay and benefits also ranked high. The desire for “a fast-growing company,” on the other hand, garnered only 29% of the vote.

In his new book, Jeff Meyers writes:

Human institutions are impor­tant, but they don't last forever. Human institutions, not just our individual lives, are more frag­ile than we realize. Even the most powerful human institutions can falter and die.

Of the 500 largest companies in 1955, only sixty remained on the Fortune 500 list in 2017. Have you heard of American Motors, Brown Shoe, Studebaker, Collins Radio, or Zenith Electronics lately? In 1955, they were among America's most popular brands. They no longer exist.

Now the most well-known companies are Tesla, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Netflix. Only one of the founders of these six companies was even alive in 1955 (Bill Gates of Microsoft was born in October of that year). Someday we'll likely look back on these massive brands with nostalgia. I imagine my children someday pulling their children close and saying, "When I was a kid, we had this thing called Facebook.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

How do we find meaning in a fleeting life? We must not look to human institutions. Only in God do we find what is lasting and secure. Second Corinthians 4:18 says, "We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." What we see is not all there is.

The city of Berezniki, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, is slowly sinking into the earth. The city of more than 150,000 individuals was built directly on top of a potash mine, which was standard practice during Soviet times. After nearly a century of extraction, deep voids were left underneath the city. The ceilings of these huge underground caverns are supported only by walls and pillars of soluble salt. In 2006, when a freshwater spring began flowing into the mine some 720 to 1,500 feet below the surface, it dissolved the supporting pillars and the city came crashing down.

A significant part of the residential districts and enterprises of the city are affected by the sinkholes. The largest of them nicknamed “The Grandfather,” is nearly 1,300 feet across and more than 650 feet deep. It threatens to engulf the only rail line which leads from the potash mines. Berezniki produces around ten percent of the world’s potash, and the mines are the city’s biggest employer. Closure of the mines would be damaging to the local economy.

Officials are debating whether to relocate the entire city to the opposite bank of the Kama River, where the bedrock is solid. About 12,000 residents have already left Berezniki for stable grounds, but the rest who’ve decided to stay put will have to keep close watch.

Possible Preaching Angles:

As Jesus taught, a life needs to be built on a solid foundation (Matt 7:24-27). Many people have deep voids in their lives caused by ignoring what type of foundation they are building their lives on. But when the foundations are shaken, only believers will be secure (Ps 46:1-2).

How long can most famous people expect to be remembered after they die? Between five and 30 years. That's according to Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab. Hidalgo is among the premier data miners of the world’s collective history. With his MIT colleagues, he developed a dataset that ranks historical figures by popularity. So, for instance, who is the most famous tennis player of all time? Frenchman Rene Lacoste, born in 1904 (Roger Federer places 20th.).

Last month Hidalgo and colleagues published a paper that put his data-mining talents to work on another question: How do people and products drift out of the cultural picture? They traced the fade-out of songs, movies, sports stars, patents, and scientific publications. They drew on data from sources such as Billboard, Spotify, IMDB, Wikipedia, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the American Physical Society.

Hidalgo’s team then designed mathematical models to calculate the rate of decline of the songs, people, and scientific papers. They found that "The universal decay of collective memory and attention concludes that people and things are kept alive through ‘oral communication’ from about five to 30 years.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

In other words, the Bible is very accurate when it says that we are dust and to dust we shall return and our lives are a mist. Our only hope is in the permanence of a new kind of life given to us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Mary Kidd and her colleagues meet every week in a loft in New York City with a clear mission—to digitize and preserve old VHS tapes. The loft has racks of tape decks, oscilloscopes, vector scopes and wave-form monitors that help ensure a quality transfer from analog to digital.

Kidd and the others are archivists and preservationists for XFR Collective (pronounced Transfer Collective). And while the mood is light, there is a sense of a deadline. That's because VHS tapes probably can't survive beyond 15 to 20 years. Some call this the "magnetic media crisis" and archivists, preservationists, and librarians like the ones in the XFR Collective are trying to reverse it.

Sounds and images are magnetized onto strips of tape, but over time the tape slowly loses its magnetic properties. Most tapes were recorded in the 1980s and '90s, when video cameras first became widely available. That means even the best-kept tapes will eventually be unwatchable. The thing is, many people don't realize their tapes are degrading.

And some who do know —like Mary Kidd — haven't even gotten around to their own tapes. "Sometimes I do fall asleep at night thinking to myself, 'Oh my gosh, is this tape in the storage space that I own slowly turning into goo?'" So the volunteers devote themselves to this work because if they don't save these intimate, personal histories, it's possible no one will.

Possible Preaching Angle: Protection, Divine; Rewards; Memories; What we store with God is safe for eternity without loss, decay, or fading. As Paul told Timothy, "I … am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day." (2 Timothy 1:12)

For many artists, part of the joy of creating beautiful artwork is that others can continue to experience it for years to come. However, this could not be further from the truth for Calvin Seibert, a New York artist who makes art out of a rather "impermanent" material-sand.

Although the materials with which he works may be commonplace, the artist's finished works of grand, majestically intricate sandcastles are far from ordinary. Seibert has been crafting his sandcastle masterpieces since he was a child, but for some reason doesn't seem to mind their short lifespans. "It could collapse right now," he told journalists. "You gotta be [okay with it]." He doesn't even do anything to try to make money from them. "I want to do something all the time and be creative," he said. "And if nobody ever knew about it, I'd still be building a sandcastle."

Potential Preaching Angles: We may often be reminded of how small and fragile our earthly bodies are in this life, but God promises that each one of us has been "fearfully and wonderfully made." Furthermore, the "impermanence" of our earthly flesh will one day be replaced with eternal bodies from which the Creator's original beauty will not fade.

The ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz are among the most iconic movie costume pieces of all time. But today, nearly 80 years after the film was made, they're looking a little worse for wear—and the Smithsonian is looking to do something about it.

The slippers have been featured at the National Museum of American History since 1979; they were originally created to be a "vivid red … to take advantage of Technicolor," but now, "the shoes are fragile and actively deteriorating … the color has faded and the slippers appear dull and washed-out." To help preserve the shoes, a Kickstarter campaign is underway to raise $300,000 for "preservation work, research, and a new display case." According to the museum's head of conservation, "the case would probably need to contain a gas other than oxygen and have controls for barometric pressure."

If you donate to the campaign, a whole host of Oz-related merchandise could become available to you, ranging from totes and shirts to your very own replica pair of the slippers: that is, if you donate $7,000 or more.

Potential Preaching Angles: Even if you're a huge Wizard of Oz fan, the slippers' decay and the extreme efforts to save them may recall a select passage from the Book of Matthew on "stor[ing] up for yourselves treasures on earth" (6:19).

In his book Rust: The Longest War, Jonathan Waldman takes us chapter by chapter into the world of oxidation and the problem of rust. He tells the story of how America almost lost the Statue of Liberty to corrosion, the constant struggle needed to maintain oil pipe lines, the development of stainless steel and rust resistant paint, how aluminum cans are treated to deter oxidation, and of the enormous cost and effort needed to beat back rust in the military—especially the navy's ships.

Rust isn't just annoying; it's expensive and dangerous. But rust happens and we can't stop it. For instance, on August 1, 2007, a bridge spanning the Mississippi in Minnesota suddenly collapsed during the evening rush hour. The bridge, identified as Bridge 9340 in official records, was rated as the second busiest in the entire state, with 140,000 vehicles crossing it every day. One hundred eleven vehicles rode the surface of the bridge down as much as 115 feet to the surface of the water and riverbank, with 13 people killed and 145 injured. A school bus with 63 children returning from a field trip ended up resting on a guardrail at the bottom.

The collapsed bridge over Mississippi had one cause: oxidation. Iron (in the soil and the bridge gussets) reacted chemically with oxygen and the result is a reddish product that eats and destroys that we call rust.

Possible Preaching Angles: Jesus told us that the same thing would happen to our possessions—as beautiful as they look now, everything we own will be subject to the power of rust.

Country music icon Merle Haggard (1937-2016), had 38 of his albums appear on Billboard's country-music top 10 charts (more than a dozen made it to Number One). He also had 38 Number One singles. Haggard also had five wives and spent time in San Quentin Prison. Haggard had said, "There is a restlessness in my soul that I've never conquered, not with motion, marriages or meaning ... It's still there to a degree. And it will be till the day I die."

What will enough ever be "enough"?

Comedian Jim Carrey presented a similar struggle at the 2016 Golden Globes ceremony. Before announcing the nominees for Best Motion Picture in Comedy, he said to Hollywood's elite:

I am two-time Golden Globe Winner, Jim Carrey. You know, when I go to sleep at night, I'm not just a guy going to sleep. I'm two-time Golden Globe winner, Jim Carrey, going to get some well-needed shut-eye. And when I dream, I don't just dream any old dream. No sir. I dream about being three-time Golden Globe winning actor, Jim Carrey. Because then I would be enough. It would finally be true. And I could stop this terrible search for what I know ultimately won't fulfill me.

The actors, dressed to perfection in designer gowns and tuxedos, doubled over in laughter. But as the camera panned their faces, it seemed that his words rang truer than any of Hollywood (or we) are comfortable admitting.

If a Golden Globe (or three) will not satisfy us, what will?

Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times:

Mr. Jobs made a lot of money over the years, for himself and for Apple shareholders. But money never seemed to be his principal motivation. One day in the late 1990s, Mr. Jobs and I were walking near his home in Palo Alto. Internet stocks were getting bubbly at the time, and Mr. Jobs spoke of the proliferation of start-ups, with so many young entrepreneurs focused on an "exit strategy," selling their companies for a quick and hefty profit.

"It's such a small ambition and sad really," Mr. Jobs said. "They should want to build something, something that lasts."

The Hibernia oil platform in the North Atlantic is 189 miles (315 kilometers) east-southeast of St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. The total structure, from the ocean floor to the top of the derrick, is 738 feet high and cost over $6 billion to build.

Unlike the fated Ocean Ranger, a platform that sank in 1982 with all 84 men aboard lost at sea, the Hibernia's design incorporates a GBS (gravity based structure) which anchors it to the seabed. It is fastened to the ocean floor in 265 feet of water.

The structure does not move. It is stationary because it sits in the middle of "iceberg alley," where icebergs can be as large as ocean liners. Sixteen huge concrete teeth surround the Hibernia. These teeth were an expensive addition, designed to distribute the force of an iceberg over the entire structure and into the seabed, should one ever get close.

Hibernia's owners take no chances. Radio operators plot and monitor all icebergs within 27 miles (45 kilometers). Any that come close are "lassoed" and towed away from the platform by powerful supply ships. Smaller ones are simply diverted using the ship's high-pressure water cannons or with propeller wash. As rugged and as strong as this platform is, and as prepared as it is for icebergs to strike it, the owners have no intention of allowing an iceberg to even come close.

But the big one will come, and Hibernia is designed accordingly. It is built to withstand a million ton iceberg, with designers claiming it can actually withstand a 6 million ton iceberg with reparable damage.

What's amazing is that a million-ton iceberg is expected only once every 500 years. One as large as 6-million-tons comes around once every 10,000 years.

That's what I call preparation and vigilance.

Tombstones are getting updated, at least in Hollywood. At Hollywood Forever, a 64-acre cemetery next to Paramount Studios, they produce multimedia narratives that can be viewed on the cemetary’s website. The narratives feature still-photographs of the deceased, interviews with friends, and film clips. A visitor can see the mini-biographies of Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, and 1,500 others buried there. The owners want to begin producing these multimedia narratives not just for Hollywood stars, but for anyone buried there.

A visit to any cemetery shows how desperate we are to be remembered after our deaths. But the memorials we can leave in this life are nothing compared to the glory that awaits Christians in the next.

David Lawrence--one of my favorite people; he's in heaven now--was the only non-senator who was a member of the Senate prayer breakfast. He never missed and often was asked to speak. He was the founder, and at the time he wrote this, editor, of U.S. News and World Report, This editorial was written May 5, 1956. David Lawrence wrote, "It is a temporary answer to the threat of world disturbance that we face. The North Atlantic Treaty is temporary. The United Nations is temporary. All our alliances are temporary. Basically there is only one permanence we can all accept. It is the permanence of a God-governed world, for the power of God alone is permanent. Obedience to his laws is the only road to lasting solutions to man's problems."

I want to tell you something that may surprise you. If you're making a trip to San Francisco and you want the safest place to go, you go to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. That will withstand probably 9.0 on the Richter Scale. It's a magnificent structure. It will not fall, for two reasons. One, it's flexible. That sway. But I'll tell you another reason it stands: That bridge is a marvel of cantilever and suspension in construction.

Every bit of concrete, and all the macadam and that pavement, and every bit of steel in that entire bridge--all of it relates one piece to another. Every piece of metal in that bridge finally relates to two giant cables, that finally come up to two great piers that go down into bedrock, and two anchors out on each side. That's the genius of a suspension bridge--every single piece of metal, every single piece of concrete, is preoccupied with its foundation. And it's satisfied with the foundation. You don't see big, huge cables going from the top of the bridge over the Trans-America Tower, or over to redwood trees over Marin County; you don't have that. They decide to trust the pure living rock that those great piers go into.

And that's what the parable of the wise and foolish builders is all about. This parable is about finding a foundation to build your life on.

When our church organized a work team for a short-term missions trip to Spain, they wanted "skilled" workers, but were willing to take a few non-handy guys like me. (You'll never see my face on "Home Improvement"!)

Fortunately, we had enough "Tim Taylor" types for the trip--including Art, who knew just about everything there was to know about pouring concrete. We were building new teepees at a Christian camp for kids, and the teepees were to be built on concrete foundations.

Another church team had worked at the site the week before we arrived, building a few teepees. Unfortunately, the foundations they'd poured were already beginning to crumble at the edges.

But Art knew how to do it exactly right, using forms around the edges and reinforcing rods underneath to hold things together--for a long time. Jesus tells us to take the same care with our spiritual foundations, to build our "house upon the rock."

How do we do that? Through a Promise Keeper's first promise--honoring Christ through worship, prayer and obedience to God's Word.