Teaching

Michael Hoffen is a new author, and like him, the central character of his book is a teenager. But there’s quite an age gap between them—about 4,000 years. That’s because Hoffen translated an ancient papyrus from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom and brought to life the true story of a young Egyptian from ancient times named Pepi. In the papyrus, Pepi’s father, Khety, is intent on getting his son a job in the royal court.

Young Pepi wonders what career path he should choose, an important matter still contemplated today by millions of teenagers forty centuries later. His father Khety takes him on a long journey up the Nile to enroll him in a school far away from home. Along the way, Khety explains 18 other terrible jobs Pepi could end up having to work at if he is not hired as a scribe.

Hoffen, who has been translating ancient texts since middle school, became fascinated by a 4,000-year-old or so piece of literature from ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom known as The Instruction of Khety.

Under the guidance and collaboration of his two co-authors, Egyptologists Christian Casey and Jen Thum, Hoffen spent three-and-a-half years translating hieroglyphics into modern-day prose and gathering images to tell the story of Kheti and Pepi.

He then published a book called “Be A Scribe! Working for a Better Life in Ancient Egypt.” In the book he describes just how little the human condition has changed in thousands of years and shows readers that working for a living has never been easy!

Possible Preaching Angle:

Parents still want the best for their children, and teenagers face important decisions as they set out on their career paths. This story shows how little parenting has changed across thousands of years. The record of an Egyptian father giving life advice to his son mirrors the same instructions that Solomon gave to his sons in Proverbs, “Listen, my sons, to a father’s instruction; pay attention and gain understanding. For I give you sound teaching…” (Prov. 4:1)

If you’re on the operating table, you don’t want your surgeon to say to a nurse, “Hand me one of them sharp thingamajigs.” You want him to have a specific name for a specific tool to perform a specific job.

Words matter. The medical field has distinctive terminology by which it carefully defines diseases, medicines, instruments, and the like. When it comes to our bodies, we have very high expectations of our doctors. They better know what they’re talking about.

We should expect no less—indeed, far more—when it comes to pastors, priests, and teachers of the Word of God. They handle the word of truth. They minister to body, soul, and mind. They better know what they’re talking about. We don’t want to hear from them, “Now that divine power is doing some religious stuff in you.” Precision in language is necessary. We want God’s Word unapologetically, lovingly, and carefully proclaimed to us.

A father’s influence on their sons is profound. As young men, we look first to our fathers to help lay the foundation for our own future growth. They help us distinguish between right and wrong. They encourage our strengths and nurture our struggles to prepare us for the future.

But fathers aren’t perfect. Sometimes opportunities to teach life lessons or impart simple skills get lost in the chaos of life. And it’s easy to look back with longing and regret at those moments.

The point is to not dwell on mistakes. Rather, it is to learn about what you might want to prioritize as a father. So, what do their kids wish their dads taught them when they were still young. Here are five things they said:

1. How To Be Present

“I wish I had learned from my father the importance of experiencing life, moments, and relationships over working for the dollar. Make your living but be present. Cherish family because time is the one thing you can't get back.”

2. How To Know My Worth

“My father never taught me to be confident in myself. He was abusive and manipulative and I would doubt whether any actions or decisions were the right ones. One thing stands out in my mind is that I must cherish my own children and never make them feel inferior.”

3. How To Fix Things

“My dad was one of those guys who was very mechanically inclined. If I could go back in time to being a kid again, I would have asked my dad to take time to bring me in on some of his repair jobs. It would have given me much needed confidence when working with my hands, which happens a lot as a dad.”

4. How To Care

“My dad wasn't very present during my childhood. He was a traveling businessman and was gone 2-3 weeks of every month. The biggest thing he never showed me was how to care for the people I love.”

5. How To Problem Solve

“My dad was very much a ‘Let me do it’ kind of guy. He wanted to fix the problem rather than help us learn about it. I appreciate what he was trying to do, but I think it hindered my ability to think for myself while I was growing up.”

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.

In the dead of night at the heart of the Colombian jungle, army radios crackled to life with the message the nation had been praying for: "Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle." The military code revealed that four children missing in the jungle for 40 days had all been found--alive.

The youngsters, all members of the indigenous Huitoto people, had been missing since the light plane they were travelling in crashed into the Amazon on May 1, 2023. The tragedy killed their mother and the two pilots and left the children--aged 13, nine, four, and one--stranded alone in an area teeming with snakes, jaguars, and mosquitos.

Rescuers initially feared the worst, but footprints, partially eaten wild fruit and other clues soon gave them hope that the children might be alive after they left the crash site looking for help. Over the next six weeks, the children battled the elements in what Colombia's President Gustavo Petro called "an example of total survival which will remain in history."

If there were ever children well-prepared to tackle such an ordeal, the Mucutuy family were the ones. Huitoto people learn hunting, fishing, and gathering from an early age, and their grandfather told reporters that the eldest children were well acquainted with the jungle.

Speaking to Colombian media, the children's aunt said the family would regularly play a “survival game” together growing up. She recalled, “When we played, we set up little camps. Thirteen-year-old Lesly knew what fruits she can't eat, because there are many poisonous fruits in the forest. And she knew how to take care of a baby.”

After the crash, Lesly built makeshift shelters from branches held together with her hair ties. She also recovered fariña, a type of cassava flour, from the wreckage of the Cessna plane they had been travelling in. The children survived on the flour until it ran out and then they ate seeds. The fruit from the avichure tree, also known as milk tree, is rich in sugar and its seeds can be chewed like chewing gum.

But they still faced significant challenges surviving in the inhospitable environment. Indigenous expert Alex Rufino said the children were in “a very dark, very dense jungle, where the largest trees in the region are.” In addition to avoiding predators, the children also endured intense rainstorms.

John Moreno, leader of the Guanano group in the south-eastern part of Colombia where the children were brought up, said they had been "raised by their grandmother," a widely respected indigenous elder. He said, “They used what they learned in the community, relied on their ancestral knowledge in order to survive.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is the duty of parents and the church community to train up children to survive and thrive in the hostile environment of the world. It is literally “a jungle out there” for our children and they must be prepared when they are young.

When children have questions about their heavenly Father, their first instinct is to ask their mothers. Christian women tend to be more devout than men, and they’re often tasked with the bulk of parenting duties. But findings from Barna Research detail the gap between moms and dads when it comes to many aspects of faith formation:

Practicing Christians were asked, “Whose faith influenced you?”

Mother – 68%

Father – 46%

Practicing Christian teens were asked, “Which parent offers spiritual guidance?”

Prayer together: Mother 63%, Father 53%

Discussing God: Mother 70%, Father 56%

Discussing the Bible: Mother 71%, Father 50%

Responding to faith questions: Mother 72%, Father 56%

Encouraging church attendance: Mother 79%, Father 64%

For more than forty years a lighthouse stood on a large peninsula jutting into the Tasman Sea in southern Australia. It stood at a place where it shouldn’t have, luring ignorant ships into the very rocks they were trying to avoid.

The cliffs around Cape St George just south of Jervis Bay were notorious for shipwrecks. So it was decided that a lighthouse was needed for the safe navigation of coastal shipping. In 1857, the Colonial Architect Alexander Dawson began looking for a site suitable for a lighthouse on Cape St George. Unfortunately, Dawson was more interested in the ease of construction rather than providing an efficient navigation aid.

When the Pilots Board went to verify the location Dawson chose they found that the site was not visible from the required approaches. They also found Dawson’s map suffered from “discrepan­cies so grave that it is impossible to decide whether position(s) marked on the map really exist.” The board also suspected that Dawson chose the site solely because it was situated closer to a quarry he planned to obtain stones from.

Despite the glaring deficiencies and disagreement by a majority of the board, for reasons not known, the chairman of board authorized the construction of the lighthouse. For the next four decades the ill-sited lighthouse was responsible for some two dozen shipwrecks. Eventually in 1899, the lighthouse was replaced by the Point Perpendicular Lighthouse in a much more suitable location on this part of the coast.

Even after decommissioning, the lighthouse continued to cause navigational problems especially on moonlit nights when the golden sandstone tower glowed in the dark. So near the turn of the century, the tower was reduced to rubble to prevent any further disaster.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Carelessness; Effort; Laziness; Motives – When there is a lack of diligence in studying of God’s Word many can be misled (2 Timothy 2:15); 2) False doctrine; False Teachers; Pharisees; Hypocrites – Scripture warns that in the last days there will be false teachers who will mislead many people into tragedy. All teaching must be carefully checked against Scripture to discern true from false.

The musician, poet, songwriter Leonard Cohen used the following image for the creative process of writing (for teachers, artists, preachers, etc.):

[The creative process is] like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.

Possible Preaching Angles: 1)Teachers; Pastors; All who teach and preach Scripture know the labor of studying the Word and the delight of discovering its sweetness to present it to others; 2) Arts; Creativity; Vision; The creative process can be a fire in the bones that combines agony with a drive to complete the vision.

It's the sound no relay runner wants to hear: Ping. Ping. Ping. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the United States men's and women's 4x100-meter relay teams dropped batons—and heard the pings of them hitting the track—during a disastrous performance that prompted the chief executive of USA Track & Field to promise a "comprehensive review" of the entire relay program. Four years earlier in Athens, shoddy baton passing by the American men had allowed a British relay team to pull off an upset, while the United States women were disqualified after a botched exchange. There have been similar troubles at the world championships.

On the surface, relay batons do not seem hard. They are about 12 inches long, smoothly cylindrical, free from adornments, and they go by a simple nickname: the Stick. Yet every runner fears the ping that can make years of hope come tumbling down the track. One sprinter compared the challenge of the baton exchange to a harried traveler's trying to catch up to (and hold hands with) his wife as he maneuvered on a moving walkway in a crowded airport.

But if you want to win, you have to pass the baton. Before the 2012 London Olympics, one of the men on the USA's relay team said, "We've got the history, and we've got the talent right now. No one can deny that. We just need to get the stick around. That's it. We just need to get the stick all the way around and win."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Legacy; Leaders; Leadership; Mentors—are you passing the baton on to others behind you? (2) Parenting; Children; Youth ministry—are we passing the baton to the next generation"