Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
As you may know, I was at another church this past Saturday for the wedding of my now-nephew and already-niece.
In my wanderings there, I saw a poster. I photographed it. Today I found it online. Here’s the graphic I found online:
Apply some critical thinking to its message.
What’s true?
What isn’t?
What does the Bible say?
January 27 is the day established by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Amazingly, today is only the fifth observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day! What was the UN’s hurry?!
Anyway, here are excerpts from two stories I read/scanned a few minutes ago:
Survivors and world leaders gathered in the bitter chill at Auschwitz on Wednesday to remember the hundreds of thousands who perished in one of Nazi Germany’s infamous concentration camps, 65 years to the day since troops of the Red Army liberated the camp.
[…]
Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau of Tel Aviv, a holocaust survivor, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, and sirens wailed across the barracks and barbed wire where an estimated 1.1 million people died.
Source: Holocaust Memorial Day marked on Auschwitz liberation anniversary
Here’s one other article excerpt:
During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews and millions of others were systematically murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Yet many lived to tell their stories.
Arthur Berger, spokesman for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the first-hand accounts are important, especially in the Internet age when misinformation is easily spread. Those memories must be documented as much as possible, Berger said, in the hope that, by preserving the truth about what happened, future atrocities can be prevented.
Source: Victims, survivors honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day
According to Wikipedia, on this day in 1945, “The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.”
In case you forgot, I titled this post “Lest We Forget.” So I ask, Have the world’s powers that be forgotten Nazi Germany as Iran’s leaders make their anti-Israel, anti-Jew comments and threats? We shall see.
The Dalles couple describes how they survived Haiti quake
They wandered the ruined city for 10 hours before ending up at the U.S. embassy where their wounds were dressed. Joel received about 20 stitches to his head.
The couple were changing clothes when the earth started shaking so they were only wearing underwear.
Joel and Rachel wandered through a horrifying scene. They say the bloody streets were dark with people dying all around them. In the midst of it all, they said the battered Haitian people offered them food, water and even the clothes off their backs.
“Haitians just kept running up to us saying here have my shirt, have my sweatshirt, you’re cold,” said Colbourne.
They said the love they felt from the battered Haitian people was humbling.
HT: EGerig (who just a few minutes ago also pointed me to the Livesay Haiti blog)
Imagine this!
You’re not going to believe this one: We were out to dinner seated at a table adjacent to a family of five and not a one of them was working a Blackberry, e-mailing or texting. And they didn’t have ear buds jammed in their ears.
It was such a flashback of days gone by, we expected to see Norman Rockwell in the corner with an easel and canvas painting the scene for a cover of The Saturday Evening Post.
And now comes something even more unbelievable — they sat there like that for an hour and a half. That’s right, 90 minutes. Who knew families could still sit together that long and not be parked in front of a television?
But wait — there’s more.
(Might be good for you to read the rest of the article.)
Guard your family time from technology!
I’m prone to see the ominous dark clouds of the gathering storm. Storms, really — religious, societal, political, military, cultural, financial, spiritual.
I also notice the diminishing space as the dark tunnel’s walls close in at an alarming, hope-crushing rate.
Then yesterday morning I saw the January 6 entry on our day-by-day For the Love of a Friend flip calendar:
Oh my! 😳
I went back again and again to have another read.
And below the above quote, this from Psalm 39:7….
How easily I forget! 😥
Last night I read this comment by Crusoe:
(No, not that Crusoe; rather, the one in Flight of the Eagles
Oh, and another clarifier: tear above is the kind that comes out of our eyes.
So…I am thankful for all these reminders. And for the hope I have in Jesus Christ.
Well, not really a mechanical shepherd, but a shepherd who looks like a mechanic and a mechanic who acts like a shepherd. But makes a much-too-long title.
Every Christmas we trot out the crèche again. We peel off the newspaper wrappings and arrange the usual cast of characters—three wise men holding presents one kneeling; three shepherds one with lamb on shoulders; infant bearing adult’s demeanor, arms outstretched; Mary genuflecting by the straw crib; Joseph hovering over his wife.
We say the usual things about the shepherds: “See how God loves the humble. See how He revealed himself to those rough men and not to the wise and learned. Were there no great scribes and teachers in Jerusalem that God should pass them over to go to a field?” We say all that but we would drop dead with surprise if in our day God brought important news to Joe Homeless in South Philadelphia and gave him the assignment of delivering the message to the local accredited Bible schools. He wouldn’t get past the receptionist.
I met a real live “shepherd” last week in Bernville, Pa. His name is Andy Merrick and he looks a little rough, to tell you the truth. It’s because he spends a lot of time under cars and at car auctions, buying and repairing vehicles for missionaries. In high school his friends took bets that he wouldn’t live past 19. God had other plans. After he got saved, Andy thought part of that plan was Bible school. But when he tried to wrap his mind around Greek and Hebrew paradigms, he didn’t know why he was there, and he says the teachers didn’t either.
Andy went to Peru as a missionary for 18 months and noticed they were working with lousy equipment, so he came back home and started collecting and fixing cars for them, till his neighbors in South Jersey objected to the fleet on his lawn and he had to ask God for more land, which the Lord obliged him with.
Andrée Seu wrote that (and a bit more) over at WorldMagBlog: The shepherd thing.
What you’re about to read will take you in a direction different than you expected to go:
He sees her as we circle the parking lot a second time, an aimless, wandering circle, a time-killing circle while we wait for their mother to finish a bit of shopping. I have already seen the woman — a girl, really, with tangled dark hair and downturned gaze. She sits on a little concrete median between the entering and exiting traffic, and she holds a cardboard sign asking for money. Not even money, just anything. “Anything helps,” her sign says.
I have already seen her, and so, having nothing better to do, I am engaged in a lukewarm internal debate. Should I give her money? What will she do with the money? Should I drive across the street and get her McDonald’s? Don’t poor people eat badly enough as it is? What about teriyaki chicken from a nearby Japanese place? But will she turn her nose up at that? Will the drivers behind me hit their horns when I stop to give her the money or cheeseburger or chicken with rice? Will people look askance at a man stopping to talk to a young woman on the side of the road? There’s so much to be calculated, you see, in the doing of small good.
Then Caleb sees her. “Dad,” he says, “there’s a woman in the road holding a sign. What does it say?”
“She’s asking for money,” I tell him. We talk about the reasons why a person might be so poor that they take to begging in traffic. They mostly come down to bad choices and illnesses of the heart and mind.
“We should give her some money,” he says.
[…]
I am proud of my son and I want to be like him and I am afraid one day he will be like me, all of these thoughts in me at once, and so what I say is that I love him.
If you only read what I have excerpted above, you are cheating yourself. You really should read the full story over at Sand in the Gears.
Then clean out your gearbox.
And a joyous Christmas to you as well.
Update: Avoiding Eye Contact