This was on my Sports Daily Calendar for 9/1/2013, and I am not sure I believe it, but it does show a good reason for having some training in the use of numbers:
A New Orleans Saints running back (name withheld here to protect the potentially innocent) when asked if he had any goals for the upcoming season, said, “I want to get to 1,500 or 2,000 yards, whichever comes first.”
This hymn was written by Will L Thompson and published in 1880. I learned to enjoy it since it was sung most of the weeks I attended the Friday morning Bible study in my Dad’s nursing home.
Verse 1 Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching,
watching for you and for me.
Refrain Come home, come home,
you who are weary, come home;
earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
calling, O sinner, come home!
Verse 2 Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading,
pleading for you and for me?
Why should we linger and heed not His mercies,
mercies for you and for me?
Verse 3 Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
passing from you and from me;
Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming,
coming for you and for me.
Verse 4 Oh, for the wonderful love He has promised,
promised for you and for me!
Though we have sinned, He has mercy and pardon,
pardon for you and for me.
The sentiments of “not tarrying or lingering” and “time that is fleeting” are very appropriate for nursing homes or funerals; the aged are usually closer to death. But anyone of any age who has not considered the call of Jesus Christ would do well to heed the content of the last verse. We have all sinned; we are all guilty before God. But Jesus has mercy and pardon, and He promises wonderful love for those who accept his call. Repent and believe.
I mentioned in the post of 7/8/13 that today, September 9, is our anniversary. We have now been married 41 years. This is the first prime number (41) anniversary since our famous 37th – 09/09/09.
Anniversary 35, in 2007, was one of the best celebrated. We decided that just like 25 is silver and 50 is gold, 35 is license plates.
Michigan was changing plates, meaning that Diane would have to give up her SAM 278 plate. She really liked SAM, as it was easy to spot in the parking lot. Who knows what you would get on a new, assigned plate, although Jesse has CAP and Amber BUG. With personalized plates, we could have something that started with SAM although we were denied just plain SAM because that was already taken, presumably by someone whose real name is Samuel.
We tried lots of options – SAM 2 (taken), SAM AGAIN (too long), SAM SAM (too repetitive), and SAM TWO (taken) – and finally found a winner: SAM TOO. It has a nice play on the idea of “also” and is easy to read.
For Allan, the new plate had to start from scratch. We thought of variations of ZOOMER, but they were all taken. One time last year Jesse and Amber saw the sports car with the ZOOMER plate, in the parking lot of Home Depot on Waverly Road. “Good on ya” to that guy.
The next choice was SYSTEMS, a shout-out to my now-defunct graduate school department at MSU. We were helped by getting a personalized Michigan State University fundraising plate, with the block S on the front. YSTEMS was, surprisingly, already taken, but YSTMS reads almost as well. So the gift for Allan was SYSTMS.
Unfortunately, Allan was in an accident and totaled the SYSTMS Buick. We purchased a new vehicle for Diane, Allan inherited Diane’s old car, and the world has turned upside down. Allan is now SAM TOO and Diane is SYSTMS. I think we are handling it alright; most days we know who we are, even if our license plates don’t.
Recall that last week had just one cool date. So it is with EVERY week this month – each week has exactly one cool date. So, even if there are few total cools, at least they are spaced nicely.
This week, 09/11/13 is a lovely sequence.
What do you call a man who spent all summer at the beach?
Tangent
What do you say when you see an empty parrot cage?
Polygon
What do you call a crushed angle?
A Rectangle
What did the Italian say when the witch doctor removed the curse?
Hexagon
What did the little acorn say when he grew up?
Geometry
2 Timothy 3.16 is often cited as a rock-solid defense for the authority of scripture – “scripture is breathed out by God”, so God is the ultimate author of the Bible. In the verses just prior, Paul is instructing Timothy to “continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (vs 3.14).
Paul gives a list of benefits provided by the “sacred writings” or “scripture,” which Timothy has learned and fully believed, knowing they are from God. Scripture is
– Able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ (wow!)
– Profitable for teaching
– Profitable for reproof
– Profitable for correction
– Profitable for training in righteousness
– Leading the man of God (to) be competent and equipped for every good work (righteous)
When Jesse was dating Amber last year, we were introduced to her energetic daughter Molly. Jesse and Amber are now married, Molly turned five years old, and she started Kindergarten this week. Diane and Linnea took her shopping for school clothes and supplies last Saturday, and evidently the “girls” had a wonderful time.
But a year ago, the big question for Jesse’s parents was “what will Molly call us?” Diane likes “Diane” and she stuck with it. But I chose “Zoomer,” which has also stuck nicely. I know this because for Christmas, Amber and Molly gave me a set of drinking glasses with Zoomer stenciled on the side.
Some have asked where in the world that name came from, so here is the story…
The summer after graduating from high school I worked in a steel shelving warehouse in St Louis, Missouri. The days were spent packaging orders and loading trucks. I learned how to drive a manual transmission vehicle while working the clutch on a forklift.
Part of processing every order was counting out the nuts and bolts and other pieces that were used to attach the shelves to the frame for the steel shelves. There were huge bins of nuts and bolts, and each order specified numbers of each. I think the reason there were not more complaints was because we were careful to over-count – customers were unlikely to bark if they ended up with more than they needed.
One of the regular “games” we played while counting was a result of assisting a fellow worker. When my friend Rollie would demand, “Hey, pass me a couple of those zoomers,” we would all throw multiples of each at him. Zoomer could refer to nuts, bolts, brackets or other shelving bits, so we might even throw extra at Rollie if we weren’t sure what he needed. We all added a new word to our vocabulary.
That fall, I went off to Michigan State University and made friends with Twelfth-Floor Rick. He was in the northwest penthouse corner room of Hubbard Hall, the tallest dormitory at MSU. His room was the one whose window had a giant search light that could be seen all over campus. Rick was the latest in a long line of the Fellowship of the Light, who passed along each year the solemn responsibility to protect and defend their prize possession from evil forces and campus administrators (or at least he was living in the room that year.) His favorite descriptor was “golden,” similar to “awesome” but more profound than “cool.” The phrase Golden Zoomer was born.
For several years afterward, softball and basketball teams in various intramural, YMCA, or city leagues in the Lansing area would be named the Golden Zoomers, mostly made up of University Reformed Church friends and relatives. I still have a Zoomers t-shirt (gold, of course), a framed Zoomer banner, and a craft bottle of Zoomer wheat ale that Gerry gave me (the label on the bottle is gold). When emails and aol came along in the 90’s, zoomer was already taken, so I used akzoom.
There’s the story. It might seem to be an odd name but please remember that Zoomer is golden.
The Middle School was having trouble with all the girls who would kiss the restroom mirror after applying lipstick. Warnings, announcements, occasional monitoring – nothing worked to break the habit, until the principal rounded up the likely offenders one day in the bathroom and explained that it took a great deal of work to clean the mirrors. “And to show you how much work it is, I have asked the custodian to demonstrate.” At which point the janitor grabbed a toilet bowl brush out of the nearest stall and began to scrub the mirror.
The school did not have any more lipstick trouble after that.
Our church is located in a Big Ten college town, and we have a large children and youth program, so there is a school-driven cycle of events each year. In the late summer our Tuesday morning prayer times focus on the campus and the children. For this post we will concentrate on prayer for the Youth.
We used two sets of verses to begin our prayer time:
Psalm 78.1-4, which includes “We will not hide them (what we have heard and known) from our children, but tell them to the coming generation.”
Deuteronomy 6.4-9, the passage after the Ten Commandments which tells us to “teach them diligently to your children.”
And then we used a list of people (teachers, assistants, youth leaders, parents, staff, and the children themselves) and events (trainings, special activities, Sunday schedule) to focus our prayers, asking (like the believers did in Acts 4.29-30) that God would continue to work and that all the people involved would speak the Word with boldness .
One of the first evangelists must have made a big impact just by showing up in the Gentile city where he ministered. In Luke 8.26-39 we meet the man in his previous state – a naked, demon-possessed, chain-breaking, desert tombs dweller.
Just as in the previous verses (Luke 8.22-25) where Jesus had shown mastery over nature (specifically a raging storm on Lake Galilee) here we see his ability to control other feared forces. After Jesus sent the demons into pigs who then charged into the lake to drown (thus combining three things the Jews knew to avoid: deep puddles, pigs, and poltergeists), the delivered man was “seated at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”
The townspeople saw the former demoniac and were afraid. The people from the surrounding country were so filled with fear that they asked Jesus to leave. The saved man begged to go with Jesus but the Master gave him a different mission, to “return to your home and declare how much God has done for you” – a version of the Great Commission!
The people to whom the Man of the Tombs witnessed were formerly afraid of his wild, uncontrollable nature. Then they were afraid of the one who could control the Wildman. And now, the calm, changed man was proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.” Just as it is today, some of the Saved with the roughest backgrounds make the best evangelists.
We can’t know for sure, but I suspect this man kept up with Jesus’ life, responded to the Gospel, and made disciples wherever he was.
A. Knapp for That 