Vigilance

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced an investigation into a traffic incident involving a Tesla striking a pedestrian. Local authorities say the driver of a 2022 Tesla Model Y failed to stop for a school bus while it was dropping off students, and one of the students was struck after having just exited the bus. The NHTSA investigation was triggered because it was believed that the driver of the Tesla was using a partially automated driving system at the time of the crash.

Since 2016, NHTSA investigators have probed extensively into at least 30 different auto accidents involving Teslas using driver-assist technology. These premium options are marketed under terms like “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving.” Critics call these options misleading, since Tesla insists that drivers using them must keep their hands on the wheel and maintain vehicular awareness at all times.

Michael Brooks is the executive director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington. He believes that Tesla has a unique responsibility in addressing these safety concerns.

Brooks said, “I’ve been saying probably for a couple of years now, they need to figure out why these vehicles aren’t recognizing flashing lights for a big starter. NHTSA needs to step in and get them to do a recall because that’s a serious safety issue.”

In February, NHTSA pressure resulted in Tesla recalling more than 300,000 vehicles because their driver assist software was violating traffic laws. Tesla said the problem was corrected via an over-the-air software update, similar to how smartphones receive updates. This action followed a request by the U.S. Department of Justice for Tesla to turn over internal documents related to its “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” features.

Possible Preaching Angle:

When people put too much trust in technology, there can be dangerous consequences. Tech companies must put public safety over profits and innovation.

During the late-Medieval period, London had a strange law on the books—each entry gate into the city had to keep a musician on duty. This could be a dangerous job—city gates were where attackers and other threatening outsiders first appeared. It’s like border patrol nowadays, but they gave the job to musicians.

As strange as it sounds, musicians took charge of many essential services back then. These hired municipal minstrels started showing up everywhere in Europe around the year 1370. They typically played wind instruments—including trumpets, trombones, fifes, bagpipes, and recorders—as well as percussion.

To the modern mind, musical skills and police responsibilities have little in common, but in an earlier age the two roles often overlapped. Musicians not only helped defend the city gate but might also be required to patrol streets at night. In Norwich in 1440 a tax was instituted to pay the waits for their watch—and these musicians were required to take an oath of office. In Germany, a minstrel was expected “to acquit himself well as a swordsman.”

Why musicians? The most obvious answer is that musicians were ideal first responders because they could sound the alarm in case of a major disturbance. Certainly, a loud horn or drum helps in that regard. This signaling capacity of musical instruments also explains their longstanding use in military operations.

Possible Preaching Angles:

In the same way, every follower of Jesus is called to stay awake, to stay at our post, to guard and protect, and pray for the “city gate” where the Lord has posted us.

Jon Krakauer cleared the ice from his oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and straddled the summit of Mount Everest. It was 1:17 PM on May 10th, 1996. Krakauer, an accomplished climber and journalist, had not slept in 57 hours. He had not eaten much more than a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's in three days. Still, he had reached the top of the Earth's tallest peak—29,028 feet. In his oxygen deprived stupor, he had no way of knowing that storm clouds forming below would turn into a vicious blizzard that would claim the lives of five fellow climbers. Yet he knew his adventure was hardly finished.

In his book Into Thin Air, Krakauer describes what he felt:

Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against long odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I'd coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt towards self-congratulation was extinguished by the overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead.

Each year about four dozen athletes gather in Minnesota for the St. Croix 40 Winter Ultra. Runners spend good money to embark on a 40-mile ultra-marathon, at night, in January, in Minnesota, while pulling a sled packed with 30-plus pounds of supplies. In this environment, you can literally die from standing still for too long.

Over 25% of the runners will not finish the race. Most of these will drop out at a very interesting point. Participants reach mile marker 24 (aka Checkpoint 24) between 10 pm and midnight. If a runner plans to take on the last 16 miles, he/she must prove they have the skills to stay alive in the case of an emergency. They must stop, set up their bivy sack (a body-shaped tent that envelops their sleeping bag), climb into the makeshift bed, wait around 30 seconds, then pack it all up before leaving.

Personally, that sounds like the easiest part of the race. But when the temperature nears zero, and you're covered in sweat, coming out of a very brief respite in a sleeping bag the temptation to quit is strong. The most dangerous thing a runner can do in a race like this is stop.

There once was a time people were awakened, not by a cell phone or even an alarm clock, but by a “knocker-upper.” For many workers in early 20th century Britain, the daily alarm clock was a service worker. Known as the “knocker-upper” these predawn risers would pass by working-class buildings, rapping on the windows of those who need to get up.

Rural laborers, used to keeping time with the seasons, had relocated to manufacturing cities. They not only had to adjust to dangerous, fast-paced industrial work, but to new schedules. There were alarm clocks at the time, but they were expensive and unreliable.

Some workers might only find out they’d been called in for a shift from the knocker-upper that morning. Conditions could be cutthroat. Author Paul Middleton writes, “Life for the employed was forever balanced on a knife edge. Being late for work could mean instant dismissal and a speedy spiral for those workers and their families into poverty, homelessness and destitution.”

The job went obsolete around a hundred years after it was invented, as alarm clocks became more affordable and reliable and working conditions improved.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Employee; Work & Career – We should value the members of our church who work hard to earn a living. It is easy to demand too much of them as volunteers if we do not understand their labor. 2) End Times; Second Coming – As we near the end of the age, there is even a greater need for people to be awakened before it is too late (Rom. 13:11; Eph. 5:14)

As a piece entitled “Google Maps Hacks,” German performance artist Simon Weckert borrowed 99 smartphones and pulled them, in a child’s wagon, down an otherwise empty roadway. In doing so, he was able to fool the Google Maps application, which shaded the roadway a deep red to indicate an instance of actual gridlock.

He said the stunt was designed to illustrate the pervasive effects of technology. “People are trying to think about … what does it mean to use those services in everyday life? And how they shape our everyday life and how, more generally, they shape our everyday society.”

Google spokesperson Ivy Hunt issued a cheerful response. “We’ve launched the ability to distinguish between cars and motorcycles in several countries … though we haven’t quite cracked traveling by wagon. We appreciate seeing creative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work better over time.”

On his website, Weckert said that apps like Google Maps have “fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is, how we interact with maps, their technological limitations and how they look aesthetically … (they) make virtual changes to the real city.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God allows us to use technology, but we must be vigilant to trust God more than our devices; otherwise, we run the risk of being seduced by their promises and deceived by their limitations.

The writer David McCullough tacked a plaque above his desk that reads: “Look at your Fish.” It’s a story about the value of seeing.

In an interview from The Paris Review McCullough shared the story behind that short statement. It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard scientist, gave every new student. He would take a smelly, old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, “Look at your fish.” Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the students what they’d seen. “Not very much,” they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: “Look at your fish.”

This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. One student, who later became a famous scientist, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, “I see how little I saw before.” Then the student had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: “Paired organs, the same on both sides.” “Of course! Of course!” Agassiz said, very pleased.

When the student asked what he should do next, Agassiz said, “Look at your fish.” Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.

Researchers have now identified some of the common mental processes that mark out elite athletes. And one of the most intriguing aspects appears to be a phenomenon known as the “quiet eye.” It is a kind of enhanced visual perception that allows the athlete to eliminate any distractions as they plan their next move.

Intriguingly, “quiet eye” appears to be particularly important at times of stress, preventing the athlete from “choking” at moments of high pressure. It may even lead to the mysterious “flow state.” The same laser-sharp focus can help doctors maintain their focus as they perform surgery, and it is of increasing interest to the military.

Kinesiologist Dr. Joan Vickers began to suspect the secret of extraordinary performance lay in the way that elite athletes see the world. She hooked a group of professional golfers up to a device that precisely monitored their eye movements as they putted. She found an intriguing correlation: the better the player, the longer and steadier their gaze on the ball just before, and then during, their strike. Novices, by contrast, tended to shift their focus between different areas of the scene for shorter periods of time.

The general idea that you should “keep your eye on the ball” is well-known, of course. But this suggested something more intricate, with the precise duration of the gaze correlating with an objective measure of sporting success.

Researchers caution that we should be wary of assigning too much importance to the quiet eye; many other factors will contribute to sporting genius. But it would certainly seem to be a key component of the extreme focus of athletes.

Possible Preaching Angles:

It is important for believers to have a “quiet eye” that is fixed on Jesus waiting for us at the finish line. We must guard against anything that would take our focus off of “winning the prize” (Philippians 3:13-14)

In his book Whisper, Mark Batterson writes that on December 26, 2004, the third-largest earthquake ever recorded by seismograph occurred deep beneath the Indian Ocean. It registered 9.1-magnitude on the Richter scale, and the shock waves produced tsunami waves more than one hundred feet in height, traveling five hundred miles per hour and reaching a radius of three thousand miles. This deadliest tsunami in history claimed 227,898 lives, but one people group living right in its path miraculously survived without a single casualty.

The Moken are an Austronesian ethnic group that live on the open seas from birth to death. Their handcrafted wooden boats, called kabang, function as houseboats for these sea gypsies. Moken children learn to swim before they learn to walk. They can see twice as clearly underwater as landlubbers. And if there were an underwater breath-holding contest, it would be no contest. But it wasn't any of these skills that saved them from the tsunami. What saved them was their intimacy with the ocean. The Moken know its moods and messages better than any oceanographer, reading ocean waves the way we read street signs.

On the day of the earthquake, an amateur photographer from Bangkok was taking pictures of the Moken when she became concerned by what she saw. As the sea started to recede, many of the Moken were crying. They knew what was about to happen. They recognized that the birds had stopped chirping, the cicadas had gone silent, the elephants were headed toward higher ground, and the dolphins were swimming farther out to sea.

Fishermen in the same vicinity as the Moken were blindsided by the tsunami and had no survivors. "They were collecting squid," said one Moken survivor. "They don't know how to look." The waves and birds and cicadas and elephants and dolphins were speaking to those Burmese fishermen, but sadly they didn't know how to listen.

A local anthropologist who speaks Moken said, "The water receded very fast and one wave, one small wave, came so they recognized that this is not ordinary."

Possible Preaching Angles: Listening to God; Attention; Prayer—Like the Moken, Christians are people who can pay attention to the presence of danger and the presence of God.

Hungry patron Alex Bowen waited for 10 minutes to order during a visit to a Waffle House at 2am; then he took matters into his own hands.

Upon finding the lone employee asleep, Bowen went behind the kitchen counter and meticulously cooked the food he needed to craft his sandwich, a double Texas bacon cheesesteak melt. While doing so, he took a series of photos documenting his self-service episode—including him paying for the food—and even claimed to clean the grill afterward.

Representatives from Waffle House applauded Bowen's cooking skills, but cautioned against similar behavior, saying patrons should avoid going behind the counter for safety reasons.

No word was given as to why that Waffle House was so understaffed, or how the lone employee might be penalized for sleeping on the job. What is clear, however, is that a man or woman who really wants a double Texas bacon cheesesteak melt can be motivated to take action over and above the normal call of duty.

Potential preaching angles: Sometimes securing God's blessing requires persistence and pursuing the kingdom of God requires a sense of urgency. Hungering and thirsting after righteousness will motivate us to take action.

In their book Known, Dick and Ruth Foth tell a poignant story of devotion and loyalty:

Edinburgh, Scotland, is famous for a story of a dog and his owner that express devotion and tenacity in equal measure. The story began in 1850, when John Gray came to the city to be a gardener. Unable to find work, he joined the police force as a night watchmen. To keep him company through the long nights, he would take his small Skye terrier named Bobby with him on his rounds. They became part of the living landscape of the city night after night for years.

John later contracted tuberculosis and died in the winter of 1858; he was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. What happened next became legend in the city. Bobby, the Skye terrier, would not leave his master's grave. Except for accepting midday meals from the kind people in the area, Bobby stayed there day and night with his master. The caretaker tried on many occasions to evict the dog, but to no avail. Finally, he provided the little dog with a shelter by the grave.

When the city passed an ordinance that all unlicensed dogs would be destroyed, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, William Chambers, purchased a license for Bobby and had a collar engraved for the little dog. Until his death fourteen years later, the citizens cared for Bobby while he guarded his master's body. If you walk to Greyfriars Kirkyard today, you can't miss the statue that stands across the street. It is a sculpture of Bobby with these words inscribed on the base:

Greyfriars Bobby—died 14th January 1872—aged 16 years. Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.

Police academies are known to involve rigorous physical and mental tests in their curriculum to ensure that recruits are prepared for the harshness of life as an officer. A Facebook video posted by one Indiana academy, however, shows a less intimidating (but no less difficult) exercise used to gauge recruits' discipline of focus. The challenge was for recruits to stand at attention and not break their intent focus in the midst of a particularly strong distraction—a rubber chicken.

The Facebook video shows a series of tough-faced young men and women who are one by one tested by the abrupt and awkward noise of a rubber chicken being squeezed next to their ear or in front of their face. Some pass the test and are able to stare straight ahead without blinking, while a good number of others can't help themselves and crack a smile or even a laugh—earning them a round of pushups. The Facebook post titled the exercise: "The Chicken Test—Designed to test a cadet's demeanor, focus and sense of humor! Not bad …"

Potential Preaching Angles: Life is full of distractions that Satan will use to try to keep our hearts from focusing on God.

Race is the 2016 motion picture about African American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In one scene, the track team, both white and black athletes, are in the locker room just finishing getting dressed. Coach Larry Snyder is admonishing Owens for losing focus during practice as some of the football players shouted racial slurs. Coach Snyder tells Owens, "You can't get distracted, you understand?"

Then the football team's head coach and some players enter the locker room. The football coach tells Snyder: "All right, Larry. Finish this up now. I got boys who need to shower."

Snyder: "Yeah, one second coach. I'm not quite through yet."

The football coach tells him: "Larry, hustle these niggers out of here. You hear me?"

Snyder ignores him and continues to speak to his team: "If you get your head turned by a few gorillas in warm-up pads here at home, how are you going to hold up in Michigan?"

The football coach and players are offended: "Who's he calling gorillas?" But Snyder keeps ignoring the football team and focusing entirely on his athletes, who are watching the angry football players: "Hey, look at me! A lot of people show up for the Big Ten meet. Not all of them are going to be on our side. You understand? Do you?"

The football coach and his players start yelling louder. Owens and his teammates can't help having their attention switched from their coach to the angry football players and back. Coach Snyder continues, oblivious to the clamor: "You gotta learn to block it all out! It's just noise! That's all this is! All it is, is noise. You hear me? They will love you, or they will hate you. Does not matter. 'Cause either way, when you're out there, you're on your own." He looks directly at Owens. "Jesse! Do you hear me?"

The camera focuses on Owens. After a couple of long seconds the clamor is silenced (signifying the silence inside Owens's mind). Owens says: "Yeah, yeah, Coach. I hear you." A slight, knowing smile is formed on his lips.

"Good. All right, come on. Let's go. You heard (football) Coach. They need the locker room."

Chapter 5: 29 minutes 18 seconds - 30 minutes 23 seconds. (Alert: profanity exactly 5 seconds after end of clip.)

Have you ever watched a televised poker tournament? Cameras are embedded in the table, allowing you to see the cards held facedown by each player. Poker lingo is tossed around by TV commentators explaining the action. It is fascinating, at least until the novelty of it all wears off. These poker shows—coupled with the availability of various poker websites—have contributed greatly to the enormous popularity that this card game has enjoyed in recent years.

Join a game, and you'll quickly discover that success is not a matter of "being lucky.'' Successful players bring considerable skills to the table. They certainly have intimate knowledge of the various odds for different hands. They also notice numerous nuanced behaviors on the part of other players, such as facial expressions, nervous twitches, and other body language. These "tells'' increase their odds of guessing what kind of cards the other players hold. Such signs can be detected from various physical behaviors, especially subtle pattern changes in eye movement (stares, glances), eyebrow movement, lip movement (bites, licks, twists), breathing (sighs, grunts), sitting adjustments (back, forward, or to the side), hand and finger positioning, chip stacking practices, card-holding techniques, timing of bet placement, feigned attitudes, and myriad other details.

The very best players, those pros who consistently win tournaments, are highly skilled in such microscope looking. They scrutinize: competitors, studying the scene, detail after detail, looking all around.

Possible Preaching Angles: Bible; Meditation—We should bring the same high quality powers of observation into our study of Scripture and knowing God.

One of the greatest Christian leaders of the last century was John R. W. Stott, rector of All Souls Langham Place in London and a peerless preacher, Bible teacher, evangelist, author, global leader and friend to many. I knew him over many decades, but I will never forget my last visit to his bedside three weeks before he died.

After an unforgettable hour and more of sharing many memories over many years, I asked him how he would like me to pray for him. Lying weakly on his back and barely able to speak, he answered in a hoarse whisper, "Pray that I will be faithful to Jesus until my last breath." Would that such a prayer be the passion of our generation too.

In his book My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok's main character is an awakening artist, beginning to see the world with a different perspective. The author captures a simple moment at a family dinner from the emerging artist's point of view:

That was the night I began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. I could feel my eyes moving across the lines around his eyes and into and over the deep furrows on his forehead. He was thirty-five years old, and there were lines on his face and forehead. I could feel the lines with my eyes and feel, too, the long straight flat bridge of his nose and the clear darkness of his eyes and the strong thick curves of the red eyebrows and the thick red hair of his beard graying a little—I saw the stray gray strands in the tangle of hair below his lips. I could feel lines and points and planes. I could feel texture and color …. I felt myself flooded with the shapes and textures of the world around me. I closed my eyes. But I could still see that way inside my head. I was seeing with another pair of eyes that had suddenly come awake.

What if we changed the way we looked at people? What if we paid attention to people with a new set of eyes that "suddenly came awake"? Might we see the helpless and hopeless condition of people with whom we come into contact every day? Noticing may be the first step in bringing someone the good news about Jesus and the kingdom of God … We begin to see others, ourselves, and even God differently. People we never noticed before (because we never paid attention to them) quite suddenly matter to us in ways we can't explain.

None of the 40 runners who attempted to finish the 100-mile Barkley Marathons in the mountains of eastern Tennessee completed the race, the first time since 2007 that the endurance test had no finishers. "The mountains won," said Gary Cantrell, who created the event in 1986. "I was pleased with the outcome. It's a competition between the humans and the mountains."

In 30 years, 14 out of about 1,100 runners have completed the race. With a finisher rate of about one percent, the Barkley has been labeled by many as the world's hardest race.

Along with a handout that includes race directions, participants are only allowed to use a map and compass to find their way. There are no medical aid stations on the course, which covers more than twice the elevation gain of Mount Everest over the full 100 miles (or five 20-mile treks around the course).

Nicki Rehn, a 40-year-old Australian who is an assistant professor of education in Canada, completed 1½ out of the five 20-mile laps this year before succumbing. "You don't come here to be victorious, you come here to be humiliated," she said. "It's lonely out there. It's eerie. You have to be comfortable being inside your own head. Everyone comes back pretty broken."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) It takes perseverance to run the race that God has set before us; (2) To finish the race of life we need to fix our eyes on Jesus who successfully completed the course; (3) It is easy to get lost, confused, or weary in the Christian life—or just life in general— and the length of it can break us down.

One of today's most popular sports cheers was first chanted in 1999 during the fourth quarter of an Army-Navy football game. The six-word cheer—I believe that we will win!—has been called the "epitome of classic American optimism." But according to emerging research, for all of its sincerity, in real life this "I believe we will win" attitude tends to backfire.

For instance, a study found that overly optimistic grad students have a tougher time finding jobs. Researchers interviewed students in their last year of grad school, asking them to rate how likely they thought they were to land a good job shortly after leaving school. Two years later, those who had admitted to frequent positive fantasies about life after grad school were less likely to succeed in their job search. They sent out fewer résumés, and the daydreamers ultimately earned less than the students who had a more realistic take on their post-university lives.

In that same paper, researchers asked a different set of students about the person they currently, secretly, had feelings for. Five months later, the students who had spent the most time fantasizing about their future lives with their crushes were the least likely to have actually started relationships with them. Many of them hadn't even tried. The people with more moderate expectations, on the other hand, were more likely to approach the object of their affection and own up to their feelings.

Positive thinking has its place, but don't mistake the warm fuzzies that accompany daydreaming about achieving your goals for, you know, actually achieving those goals.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Hope; Faith; Belief—This is a great way to introduce the hearty, solid, more-than-just-optimistic nature of true biblical hope, or to show how "faith" is only as good as the object we place it in. (2) Diligence; Planning; Goals—It can also show the need to work for our goals rather than living like sluggards who never plan or work.

A worker at a German bank momentarily fell asleep on the job, while executing a minor funds transfer for a retired customer. The problem was that his power-nap happened to take place while his finger was on the "2" key, resulting in a 222,222,222.22 euro transaction ($268,459,417). The fallout from the mistake, which included his supervisor's firing, seems to have been mopped up fairly easily, though I suspect that there is a disappointed retiree in Germany looking at their banking history.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the spiritual realm, no wonder Jesus repeatedly warned us about the need for watchfulness and readiness.