Wading through life

Like how to protect the world’s seeds from global catastrophe.

But somebody has. Somebody laid awake at night, wondering where one could stockpile seeds should the world fall into nuclear winter, or global warming took over, or aliens from Mars stormed the planet.

And so they blew a giant hole in mountainside permafrost and are going refrigerate it down to 0° F and rest easy that we’ll be able to grow wheat and barley after Planet Earth recovers from Armageddon.

Actually, I don’t know if someone laid awake at night or was worried about aliens from Mars destroying all our corn. But they are making a big cave in Norway to store seeds.

Read about it: Doomsday seed bank gears up for business.

Our Tigers just turned up the HEAT!: How blockbuster acquisitions of Willis, Cabrera will transform Tigers

Who would have thought to research the affects of divorce on global warming? MSU, I guess.

A few facts from this interesting article:

Divorced couples use up more space in their respective homes, which amounts to to 38 million more rooms worldwide to light, heat and cool, noted the report.

And people who divorced used 73 billion kilowatt-hours more of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water than they would otherwise in 2005.

See many more articles on the topic.

This story is awesome: “We’re twinseparable! Happy with his brother, the boy who refused to die“.

Doctors told a woman that one of her to-be-born twins wasn’t in good shape and that he should be aborted for the sake of the other twin. But Gabriel had other plans and among them was LIVING.

At Birmingham Women’s Hospital, when Mrs Jones was 25 weeks pregnant, doctors tried to sever Gabriel’s umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply and allow him to die.

But the cord was too thick, and they could not cut through it.

As a last resort they divided Mrs Jones’s placenta so that when Gabriel died, it would allow Ieuan to survive. Mrs Jones said: “I put my hands on my stomach thinking of Gabriel. It was devastating. I had said my goodbyes.”

But the next morning Mrs Jones felt Gabriel kicking. A scan showed his heart was still beating. She said: “No one could quite believe it.”

Gabriel hung on, and his enlarged heart started to reduce in size. He also gained weight.

Let’s start praying protection for all those babies the enemy is taking out before they even see their parents’ faces. Surely there can be more stories like this.

Read this article: Christianity Finds its Fulcrum in Asia.
Talk about being gripped and on-fire for the Lord… Chinese are radically converting to Christianity in hoards… 10,000 each day! South Korea, which is 30% Christian, sends more missionaries into the world than any other country besides the United States. There are an estimated 110 million Chinese Christians, 90% of which are pentecostal. And “evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in China a generation ago.”

That, my friends, is called an explosion.

But beyond the numbers, the article presents some fascinating ideas and reflections. For instance:

People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature, unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral. Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation. In China, communism leveled traditional society, and erased the great Confucian idea of society as an extension of the loyalties and responsibility of families. Children informing on their parents during the Cultural Revolution put paid to that.

Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves: “What is the purpose of my life?”

And this one really got me tingling!

As Aikman explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese evangelicals and Pentecostals believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it’s their turn to complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been preached to the entire world.

Uhhh… then what happens? Christ returns

Matthew 24:27:

For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.