Stumbling Blocks

Despite the presence of several acclaimed breweries, restaurants, and the last remaining Blockbuster video rental store in America, the town of Bend, Oregon features another illustrious tourist attraction garnering local attention – a giant rock.

The large rock, which locals refer to as the Big, Obvious Boulder (or BOB for short), is roughly three feet tall and three feet wide. It sits near the entrance to a parking lot, and gets attention when oblivious drivers collide with it and their vehicles require rescuing. Bob’s claim to fame is that it is a magnet for cars, which end up high-centered on the boulder and need to be rescued.

Not only is Bob itself often affixed with stickers and signs warning drivers, but it’s become something of a local phenomenon, with its own Facebook group. Former Bend resident Terry Heiser, claims to have had the first run-in with Bob back in 2002. He said:

It was about 9 p.m. on a weekday and I was heading downtown to meet some friends. I decided to stop in at 7-11 and I took the turn into the parking lot as I had done dozens of times. I wasn’t driving crazy or fast. It was just an innocuous turn and next thing you know chaos happens and my truck ended up on its side.

I had to climb out of the passenger window to get out. I immediately called my buddies and they came down with an even bigger truck to help get me off of Bob. It was such a stupid but hilarious accident that I haven’t lived down to this day.

You can view the famous boulder here.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Christ, life of; Stumbling; Stumbling blocks - In his lowly life and death, the person of Jesus Christ was also a stumbling stone. People overlooked his significance and stumbled to their harm. 2) Attention; Carelessness - As we go through the routine activities of life, it is important to stay focused on what lies directly before us. When we become distracted by more trivial affairs, we are more likely to experience trouble, misfortune, and/or heartbreak.

With hundreds of things to see in Berlin, few tourists pay attention to what lies under their feet. The four inch by four inch blocks of brass embedded in the pavement are easy to miss. But once you know they exist, you begin to come across them with surprising frequency.

Each stone is engraved with the name and fate of an individual who has suffered under the Nazi regime. They are known as Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” There are over eight thousand of them in the German capital, and tens of thousands of them are spread across European countries, making it the largest decentralized monument in the world.

The idea was first conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 to commemorate individual victims of the Holocaust. Each block, which begins with “Here lived,” is placed at exactly the last place where the person lived freely before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror and was deported to an extermination camp. Unlike other holocaust memorials that focus only on Jews, the Stolpersteine honor all victims of the Nazi regime, including Jews, the disabled, the dissident, and the gays.

Although not everyone supports the drive, Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, the craftsman who makes each Stolperstein, spoke in support of the project. “I can’t think of a better form of remembrance,” he says. “If you want to read the stone, you must bow before the victim.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In his lowly life and death, the person of Jesus Christ can also be a stumbling stone, or the stone that was rejected by men that is precious to God.

It's like a scene out of an action movie: one moment, the city street seems calm and ordinary, and in the next moment, the asphalt and concrete crumble away, revealing a giant, gaping hole.

Unfortunately, it's not a scene from a movie—it was an event that unfolded in Beihai, a city in China. And a scooter rider got to experience the sudden sinkhole up close and personal.

"When he did arrive at the fresh abyss, he appears to have been staring at his cellphone," reports NPR's The Two-Way. Soon he was staring at the inside of the collapsed road.

The bad news? The cause of the collapse hasn't yet been determined. The good news? "Shortly after [the scooter driver's] plunge, he climbed back to the surface under his own power, apparently unharmed."

Potential Preaching Angles: Hopefully not too many of us have to worry about driving into sinkholes in our day-to-day lives—but "black holes" can appear in many shapes and sizes and forms. Thankfully, the apostle Peter has some advice on staying alert against the wiles of the Enemy: "Resist him, standing firm in the faith" (1 Pet. 5:9).

For 45 years, Pat Summerall's voice and face spelled football. He anchored CBS and FOX's NFL telecasts (often alongside John Madden) and broadcast 16 Super Bowls (and served as a CBS Radio analyst or pregame reporter for 10 more). This is the part of Pat Summerall's story that most people know. In the Christian sports magazine Sports Spectrum, reporter Art Stricklin tells the rest of Pat's story:

Pat was an only child whose parents divorced before he was born, leaving him feeling empty and alone. He became an alcoholic, living from drink to drink as his body broke down. During the 1994 Masters tournament—[Summerall also did voiceover work for high-profile golf tournaments]—he faced up: "I'd been getting sick a lot, throwing up blood—and I got sick again at 4 a.m. I looked in the mirror, saw what a terrible sight I was, and said to myself, This isn't how I want to live."

Pat spent 33 days in the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California. This helped alleviate his alcohol problems but didn't address his spiritual vacuum. Then he bumped into [Tom Landry, his old football coach from his days as a star kicker]. [Landry] explained about [Pat's] spiritual need and connected him with Dallas Cowboy's chaplain John Weber. Pat's life was transformed, and he was baptized at age 69.

Art Stricklin closes his article with a few words chaplain John Weber offered to sum up Summerall's journey: "[Pat] was once the life of every party with a drink in his hand. Now he gets his power from another source."

In his book The Unexpected Journey, Thom Rainer shares the story of Kathi, a woman who left behind a life of witchcraft and Wiccan paganism to become a follower of Jesus Christ. Immediately after her decision to become a Christian, she describes to Thom how God delivered her from the powers of evil in her life, as well as her physical deafness (Kathi had been suffering progressive hearing loss for years).

That next day [after I accepted Christ], we left on our family vacation, camping on the beach. I found a small … church for us to attend. Most of the time when I lip read, I am able to follow less than half of what someone is saying. But I was able to understand every word of the preacher at this church.

When the service was over, I spoke to him and asked him how he was able to speak so well for lip readers. He was puzzled, as he had done nothing special. I explained to him my condition of deafness, and he asked to pray for me. No one had ever done that before, but he did pray for my hearing to be restored.

After Kathi and her family returned to their camp site, Kathi fell violently ill. She was confined to the camp site's bathhouse for hours, vomiting to the point of dehydration. "It was at that point that I sensed God was speaking to me again," she says. "He told me that the other gods I had been worshiping had to go. Up to that point, I had seen my conversion as a lateral move. I still had my other gods. I wasn't convinced they were evil or that paganism was wrong. But now God said they had to go. I hesitated at first because I had become so comfortable with these other gods. They had been with me for many years."

Thom writes an account of what happened next for Kathi:

Kathi soon obeyed. She started calling each of the gods by the Egyptian names she knew and telling them in Jesus' name they had to go. There were many of them, because the ancient Egyptians had a deity to represent every facet of life. Kathi also told anything she had worshiped as a Wiccan and anything she had remembered from the folklore of her childhood that it had to go, too. "They resisted at first," she said. "But once they heard the name of Jesus, they left. As each god left, I saw them as they were, no lovely masks anymore. Instead, they had horrible, evil faces. It scared me witless. I knew then that these were no gods at all, but demons."

Immediately after they were gone, Kathi felt better. She left the bathhouse and went to her family and began to tell her husband what had happened. When he responded, she heard every word he said—but she did not have her hearing aids in her ears. She was able to hear everything—the ocean, the birds, and her children's voices. Kathi has never stopped thanking God for what he did for her.

When she returned to the doctor who had initially treated her, he said he had never seen a condition like this reverse itself. Kathi simply said, "God did it." The doctor expressed his doubts. But Kathi knew. God did it.

Luis Palau, the Argentine-born international evangelist, describes his conversion to Christ as a young man:

I met a young Jewish Christian from England, about 20, by the name of Charlie Cohen. He led me to Jesus Christ at a summer camp. For the next year or so, while at boarding school, I went to really good Bible studies at Cohen's house. But I began to drift away—stupid teenager, me. I lost my Bible on a street car. It became a two-year "empty moment." I had friends who were not Christians, and I wanted to accommodate them. …

We had made plans to go to carnival—a week of debauchery and drinking before the holy season. I began to feel if I went to this, it would wreck my life. It would be a turning point.

I had not prayed for many months, although I went to church under the duress of my grandpa and grandma mostly. The night before we were to leave, I just felt compelled to pray. I did not have the strength to just say no to my friends, but I knew it would be a huge mistake to go with them. I prayed, "Lord, if you get me out of this, I will break with the world, and I will serve you."

A most amazing thing happened: I woke up the next morning, and my mouth was swollen to the size of a tennis ball, which I took as a rather dramatic answer to prayer. I called one of the other guys and was able to tell him that I was not going to go. That morning was a new beginning. I bought a new Bible and left Buenos Aires to move to Córdoba, where my mom and four sisters were living. … The next few years brought a remarkable time of spiritual growth.

In his book River out of Eden, renowned scientist and leading atheist Richard Dawkins recalls a bus crash in England that claimed the lives of several children. A London newspaper asked a priest to explain why God would allow such a thing to happen. The priest replied, "The simple answer is that we do not know why there should be a God who lets these awful things happen. But the horror of the crash, to a Christian, confirms the fact that we live in a world of real values: positive and negative. If the universe was just electrons, there would be no problem of evil or suffering." When Dawkins read those words, he scoffed. He writes:

On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes…blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

After years of street violence, drug use, and thievery, Fernando "Fernie" Aranda was sent to prison to a serve a 25-years-to-life sentence. But prison didn't change Fernie. His life behind bars matched the life he had lived on the streets. At one point he was even a suspect in the deaths of three fellow inmates. But Fernie's defiance ended when his 70-year-old mother came to visit him in prison. She broke down in tears and said, "I don't want to die seeing you in this condition." Fernie was broken. He offered a simple prayer to God that day: "O God, if you'll get me out of this hellhole, I promise I'll serve you for the rest of my life." One year later, after serving only thirteen years of his sentence, Fernie was given an unexpected surprise: he was released from prison.

As is the case with most former inmates, sadly, Fernie fell right back into his old lifestyle. The wrong crowd awaited him when he returned home, and it wasn't long before he was doing drugs again. But when he and a friend were out looking to score more drugs after a three-day celebratory binge, Fernie's friend noticed that the Drug Task Force was out on the streets. If Fernie was caught with drugs in his system, he faced a return to prison. Fernie had only one option: run. He noticed a crowd of people in a nearby park, and he made his way over to them to seek cover. Once there, something unexpected happened—something that would forever change his life. Jim Cymbala writes about the moment in his book You Were Made for More:

Soon a man came up to [Fernie] and said, with no introduction, "Hey, guess what? Jesus loves you."

Fernie was repulsed. He immediately turned to leave. But as he did, he glimpsed the police coming toward him. He decided his best option was to dive back into the crowd—which was actually a street rally sponsored by a group called Victory Outreach Ministries.

What happened next defies prediction. As Fernie tells it:

"I'd never seen any of these people in my life. But a young man named Louie approached me next. He looked sort of like the Marlboro Man—big muscles, big mustache. He walked up to me and boldly said, 'Hey bro—don't you remember the day you prayed in your prison cell, that if God would release you from that hellhole, you'd serve him the rest of your life?'

"I couldn't believe it! I was stunned. How could this man know anything about my prayer…?

"I suddenly felt I was no longer hearing the voice of man. It was the voice of God."

Before Fernie could reply, the man pointed a finger right between his eyes and said, "And you know what you have to do."

This was enough to make Fernando Aranda crumple to his knees there on the grass. He began to weep. "God, I'm sorry! Forgive me all my sins." The power of God was driving this tough criminal to the point of full surrender.

That day Fernie was placed in one of the homes provided by Victory Outreach Ministries, where he could be discipled alongside other men with similar problems. Cymbala closes out Fernie's story with one final note: "Fernie's mother eventually came to see him there. Her prior glimpse of his in prison shackles turned out not to be her final view after all."

Millions have seen Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (pronounced "fuke"). On June 8, 1972, a napalm bomb was dropped on her village. Phuc, who was just nine-years-old at the time, ran crying from her hiding place in the village temple in Vietnam. Ut's picture shows Phuc's arms outstretched in terror and pain, skin flapping from her legs as she cried, "Nong qua! Nong qua!" ("Too hot! Too hot!").

Doctors said Kim would not survive, but after 14 months in the hospital—and 17 surgeries—she returned to her family. Despite the miraculous recovery, however, Kim was seldom free from pain and nightmares—and anger.

"The anger inside me was like a hatred high as a mountain," said Kim, "and my bitterness was black as old coffee. I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal, because I was not normal. I wanted to die many times. Doctors helped heal my wounds, but they couldn't heal my heart."

While spending time in a library, Kim found a Bible and began reading the New Testament.

"The more I read, the more I felt confused," said Kim. "I wondered which was true—my religion or the Bible."

Kim's brother-in-law had a friend who was a Christian, so she arranged to see him with her list of questions. After they talked, the friend invited Kim to visit his church for a Christmas service. The end of the service was a turning point in Kim's life. "I could not wait to trust the Lord," Kim said. "[Jesus] helped me learn to forgive my enemies, and I finally had some peace in my heart. Now when I look at my scars or suffer pain, I'm thankful the Lord put his mark on my body to remind me that he is with me all the time."

In his book Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, William Lane Craig observes how difficult it is for an atheist to live with the logical conclusions of his or her beliefs:

Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the product of blind chance, atheists sometimes begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves… For example, the brilliant Russian physicists Zeldovich and Novikov, in contemplating the properties of the universe, ask, why did "Nature" choose to create this sort of universe instead of another? "Nature" has obviously become a sort of God-substitute, filling the role and function of God. Francis Crick, halfway through his book The Origin of the Genetic Code, begins to spell nature with a capital N and elsewhere speaks of natural selection as being "clever" and as "thinking" what it will do. Sir Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. For Carl Sagan the "Cosmos," which he always spelled with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute. Though these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the chance result of impersonal forces.

In his book Being the Body, Charles Colson writes about meeting a businessman whom he calls Mr. Abercrombie. Mr. Abercrombie had invited Colson to speak at a Bible study he hosted. Nineteen other movers and shakers of the business world were in attendance. Colson writes about what transpired:

Mr. Abercrombie had asked me to speak at the luncheon and then allow time for questions. Somewhere in my talk I referred to our sinful nature. Actually, "total depravity" was the phrase I used. I noticed at the time that a few individuals shifted uncomfortably in their leather chairs, and, sure enough, it must have hit the mark. Because after I finished, the first question was on sin.

"You don't really believe we are sinners, do you? I mean, you're too sophisticated to be one of those hellfire-and-brimstone fellows," one older gentleman said, eyeing my dark blue pinstripe suit just like his. "Intelligent people don't go for that back-country preacher stuff," he added.

"Yes, sir," I replied. "I believe we are desperately sinful. What's inside of each of us is really pretty ugly. In fact we deserve hell and would get it, but for the sacrifice of Christ for our sins."

Mr. Abercrombie himself looked distressed by now. "Well, I don't know about that," he said. "I'm a good person and have been all my life. I go to church, and I get exhausted spending all my time doing good works."

The room seemed particularly quiet, and twenty pairs of eyes were trained on me.

"If you believe that, Mr. Abercrombie—and I hate to say this, for you certainly won't invite me back—you are, for all of your good works, further away from the kingdom than the people I work with in prison who are aware of their own sins." Someone at the other end of the table coughed. Another rattled his coffee cup. And a flush quickly worked its way up from beneath Mr. Abercrombie's starched white collar.

"In fact, gentlemen," I added, drawing on a favorite R. C. Sproul shocker, "If you think about it, we are all really more like Adolf Hitler than like Jesus Christ."

Now there was stony silence…until someone eased the pain and changed the subject.

When lunch ended and I was preparing to leave, Mr. Abercrombie took my arm. "Didn't you say you wanted to make a phone call when we were finished?"

I started to say it wasn't necessary, then realized he wanted to get me alone.

"Yes, thank you," I said.

He led me down the corridor to an empty office. As soon as we were inside, he said bluntly, "I don't have what you have."

"I know," I replied, "but you can. God is touching your heart right now."

"No, no," he took a step back. "Maybe sometime."

I pressed a bit more, however, and moments later we were both on our knees. Mr. Abercrombie asked forgiveness of his sins and turned his life over to Christ.

Colson concludes: "Martin Luther was right. 'The ultimate proof of the sinner is that he doesn't know his own sin. Our job is to make him see it.'"

While attending Magdalen, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, C. S. Lewis converted to theism in the spring of 1929, thus setting the stage for his eventual conversion to the Christian faith in 1931. He describes his conversion in his book, Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him of whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 [May 22] I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? … The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compassion is our liberation.

In a Best Life magazine article entitled "My Argument With God," Ricky Gervais, creator of the TV show The Office, wrote about his personal journey "from Jesus-loving Christian to fun-loving infidel in one afternoon."

When Ricky was about 8-years-old, he was drawing the Crucifixion as part of his Bible-studies homework. His 19-year-old brother and personal hero, Bob, came over to him and asked why Ricky still believed in God. As soon as the question was asked, Ricky's mom panicked. She said Bob's name in such a tone as to hush him.

Ricky writes:

Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong, it didn't matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

He goes on to conclude:

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my newfound atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. Not a world by design, but one by chance.

Anyone who watched the New York Giants defeat the New England Patriots in 2008's Super Bowl remembers the catch made by David Tyree, a receiver for the Giants. Eli Manning, quarterback for the Giants, threw what looked like a desperate pass. Tyree somehow jumped high above defensive coverage, picked the ball out of the air, pinned it to his helmet, and fell to the ground for a completion. The Giants went on to win the game, 17–14.

In the wake of his new fame, Tyree has talked openly about a troubled past. Tyree started drinking when he was in junior high. By his junior year in high school, he was regularly consuming 40 ounces of malt liquor and a half a pint of Jack Daniel's. It was not uncommon for him to smoke marijuana in the same sitting. The habits continued throughout his college career.

After Tyree was arrested for selling drugs to pay off a fine he had incurred during his rookie season with the Giants, his pregnant girlfriend threatened to leave him. "I had no peace," the player says. "My life was obviously in disarray." When he picked up a Bible and read its message of redemption, he knew things would turn around. He decided to never drink again and started attending church for the first time in a long time. Tyree is now sober, married, and a Super Bowl hero. Looking back on his life thus far, Tyree says, "It's more than just a feel-good story. It's about destiny and purpose."

Children will play with virtually anything they get their hands on. It's no surprise, then, that when Dutch children in the town of Barneveld uncovered an unexploded World War II artillery shell, they played with it. In fact, they had games with it for several months.

That shell was still live and contained high explosives. Thankfully, the deadly plaything did not explode in the Barneveld playground as the children tossed it about. Eventually the authorities learned about the shell, confiscated it, and exploded it in a safe place.

Those who are not yet mature often fail to recognize the danger of what they are doing. For children, the world is a playground, and bombs make great toys.

Alongside traffic, feuding kids in the backseat, and the occasional rude motorist, add elephants to the list of things that make driving difficult. Sources in India say an especially stubborn elephant has been causing all sorts of havoc along the eastern highways, refusing to let people pass until they offer up a little food. He's even been known to stick his trunk through an open window and sniff around for any hidden treasure! One local resident went so far as to call the actions an old-fashioned hold-up. Authorities in India are considering microchipping elephants to keep track of their whereabouts—and keep them in line!

Andrew Klavan is a popular writer of mysteries—some of which have been made into movies (1999's True Crime and 2001's Don't Say a Word). He was interviewed in World magazine about how his writing interacts with his Christian faith. In the process, he described his conversion to being a follower of Christ:

"My life has been more like one of those Outward Bound programs where they drop you far from home and you have to make your way back with a piece of string and a matchbook. I was born and raised a Jew and came up in that wonderful secular intellectual tradition that teaches you to analyze everything. God kept coming into my life, and I kept disproving him—I was very good at it!

Fortunately, I could also disprove the foundations of my disproof. Eventually I saw that the pillars of the secular consensus—scientism, materialism, rationalism—were all made of sand. Whereas the deeper I went into the experience of God, the more I found…life in abundance."

A man who robbed a bank 10 years ago and was sentenced to 70 months in a federal penitentiary decided he liked prison life so much that he committed another crime, just so he could return! Danny Villegas walked inside a Federal Credit Union in Florida and told the teller he was robbing her, adding, "You might as well call the police right now."

Villegas then sat down on a couch in the lobby and waited for police to arrive. "He said he wanted to rob a federal bank because he wanted to go back to a federal penitentiary," said Lt. Ron Wright of the South Daytona Police Department. Villegas had worked in construction in Texas for five years, but had grown tired of the work. "Apparently," added Wright, "he robbed a bank in Fresno, California, 10 years ago, was sentenced to 70 months in a federal penitentiary in Phoenix, and enjoyed his time there."