Prof Alvin Plantinga on Reasons for God
Friday, March 30, 2012
Vem ai o novo livro de Alvin Plantinga: "Where the Conflict Really Lies- Science, Religion and Naturalism"
Posted by Snowball | Posted in Geral | Posted on 30-06-2011
5
http://teismo.net/quebrandoneoateismo/tag/alvin-plantinga/
Alvin Plantinga já está com uma idade avançada e também se aposentou oficialmente da Universidade de Notre Dame (EUA) há alguns anos. No entanto, isso não impediu um dos maiores filósofos analÃticos de nosso tempo de continuar trabalhando e realizando publicações. Desde sua aposentadoria, já tivemos editado um debate com Daniel Dennett sobre ciência e religião (no qual Dennett foi um verdadeiro palhaço, diga-se de passagem) e um debate sobre epistemologia e conhecimento de Deus com Michel Tooley.
Eis que Plantinga agora está em vias de lançar uma nova obra, dessa vez de autoria própria e única. O tÃtulo do novo livro será “Where the Conflict Really Lies – Science, Religion and Naturalism” e, segundo as informações que coletei na internet, estará destinado a provar dois pontos.
Em primeiro lugar, que há uma discordância superficial entre a Evolução e o Cristianismo, mas que, no fundo, não há nenhum conflito sério nessa conjunção. Nessa seção, ele deve comentar argumentar que as alegações de pessoas como Dawkins, Dennett e Philipp Kitcher são, no melhor dos casos, inconclusivas. A crença no “Mero Cristianismo” (para usar um termo de C. S. Lewis) pode coexistir tranquilamente com a crença na Teoria da Evolução.
Em seguida, vem idéia é a contrária: o senso comum nos diz que há uma concordância superficial do naturalismo com a Evolução. No entanto, as coisas não seriam bem assim. Por baixo dessa concordância superficial, há profundo conflito entre aceitar o naturalismo e aceitar a evolução. Provavelmente essa parte do livro será destinada a desenvolver o Argumento Evolucionário contra o Naturalismo (“EAAN”), originalmente posto no livro Warrant and Proper Function (capÃtulo 13, se bem me lembro). Segundo o EAAN, o naturalista que acredita na evolução natural não-guiada tem um “rebuting” ou “undercutting” defeater (um pouco sobre defeaters aqui) para a crença que nossas faculdades cognitivas são confiáveis, uma vez que a Evolução se interessa por comportamento adaptativo, não por crenças verdadeiras. (*)
Esse é um argumento muito interessante, sobre o qual pretendo comentar um dia ainda. Lembrando que tal argumento é um argumento epistemológico e não de caráter metafÃsico (seria o tipo de objeção de jure da qual eu falei aqui). Não se trata da veracidade do naturalismo, mas da sua aceitação racional.
Os resumos que li também falavam de que o livro iria fazer comentários sobre Argumentos como o Fine Tuning. Para alguém que já leu “God and Other Minds” ou mesmo “God, Freedom and Evil” – nos quais ele é bastante crÃtico de argumentos teÃstas – não acho que ele vá fazer uma defesa do argumento (embora ele sempre se mostre simpático a esse argumento especÃfico em entrevistas e textos). Creio que será algo mais como: “Veja, esse dado é totalmente coerente com a crença em Deus”, etc.
Não sei se esse vai ser um livro de maior rigor acadêmico (como o considerado clássico sobre modalidade “Nature of Necessity”) ou com uma linguagem mais acessÃvel (como o próprio God and Other Minds ou Warranted Christian Belief, de 2000). Mas sei que já tendo lido vários papers e textos de Plantinga, sempre é bom prestar atenção no que esse filósofo fala.
O livro sai em novembro desse ano, com quase 350 páginas.
E, bem… o meu dinheiro já está guardado.
(*) Gostaria que os leitores ficassem atentos que esse post NÃO é para discutir o EAAN, mas sim para falar do lançamento do livro. Por isso, não façam comentários fora de escopo. Se eu chegar a lançar um post sobre o argumento, aà sim poderÃamos discuti-lo tranquilamente.
5
http://teismo.net/quebrandoneoateismo/tag/alvin-plantinga/
Alvin Plantinga já está com uma idade avançada e também se aposentou oficialmente da Universidade de Notre Dame (EUA) há alguns anos. No entanto, isso não impediu um dos maiores filósofos analÃticos de nosso tempo de continuar trabalhando e realizando publicações. Desde sua aposentadoria, já tivemos editado um debate com Daniel Dennett sobre ciência e religião (no qual Dennett foi um verdadeiro palhaço, diga-se de passagem) e um debate sobre epistemologia e conhecimento de Deus com Michel Tooley.
Eis que Plantinga agora está em vias de lançar uma nova obra, dessa vez de autoria própria e única. O tÃtulo do novo livro será “Where the Conflict Really Lies – Science, Religion and Naturalism” e, segundo as informações que coletei na internet, estará destinado a provar dois pontos.
Em primeiro lugar, que há uma discordância superficial entre a Evolução e o Cristianismo, mas que, no fundo, não há nenhum conflito sério nessa conjunção. Nessa seção, ele deve comentar argumentar que as alegações de pessoas como Dawkins, Dennett e Philipp Kitcher são, no melhor dos casos, inconclusivas. A crença no “Mero Cristianismo” (para usar um termo de C. S. Lewis) pode coexistir tranquilamente com a crença na Teoria da Evolução.
Em seguida, vem idéia é a contrária: o senso comum nos diz que há uma concordância superficial do naturalismo com a Evolução. No entanto, as coisas não seriam bem assim. Por baixo dessa concordância superficial, há profundo conflito entre aceitar o naturalismo e aceitar a evolução. Provavelmente essa parte do livro será destinada a desenvolver o Argumento Evolucionário contra o Naturalismo (“EAAN”), originalmente posto no livro Warrant and Proper Function (capÃtulo 13, se bem me lembro). Segundo o EAAN, o naturalista que acredita na evolução natural não-guiada tem um “rebuting” ou “undercutting” defeater (um pouco sobre defeaters aqui) para a crença que nossas faculdades cognitivas são confiáveis, uma vez que a Evolução se interessa por comportamento adaptativo, não por crenças verdadeiras. (*)
Esse é um argumento muito interessante, sobre o qual pretendo comentar um dia ainda. Lembrando que tal argumento é um argumento epistemológico e não de caráter metafÃsico (seria o tipo de objeção de jure da qual eu falei aqui). Não se trata da veracidade do naturalismo, mas da sua aceitação racional.
Os resumos que li também falavam de que o livro iria fazer comentários sobre Argumentos como o Fine Tuning. Para alguém que já leu “God and Other Minds” ou mesmo “God, Freedom and Evil” – nos quais ele é bastante crÃtico de argumentos teÃstas – não acho que ele vá fazer uma defesa do argumento (embora ele sempre se mostre simpático a esse argumento especÃfico em entrevistas e textos). Creio que será algo mais como: “Veja, esse dado é totalmente coerente com a crença em Deus”, etc.
Não sei se esse vai ser um livro de maior rigor acadêmico (como o considerado clássico sobre modalidade “Nature of Necessity”) ou com uma linguagem mais acessÃvel (como o próprio God and Other Minds ou Warranted Christian Belief, de 2000). Mas sei que já tendo lido vários papers e textos de Plantinga, sempre é bom prestar atenção no que esse filósofo fala.
O livro sai em novembro desse ano, com quase 350 páginas.
E, bem… o meu dinheiro já está guardado.
(*) Gostaria que os leitores ficassem atentos que esse post NÃO é para discutir o EAAN, mas sim para falar do lançamento do livro. Por isso, não façam comentários fora de escopo. Se eu chegar a lançar um post sobre o argumento, aà sim poderÃamos discuti-lo tranquilamente.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Divine Healing: Process of Healing
By Peter Amsterdam
March 27, 2012
Chapter 5
It Takes Persistence When One Begins Praying for the Sick
Another point that those in the healing ministry wrote about had to do with persistence. They expressed the need to keep praying for the sick even if you don’t see a lot of results at first. From their experience, there is a “learning curve,” or at least a “persistence curve,” when people incorporate healing as part of their ministry. If you feel called to a healing ministry, a key component is to keep taking advantage of opportunities that come up to pray for people, even if you don’t have much success in the beginning.
Curry Blake says:
When you start to push a car, when you first start, there’s a whole lot of effort with very little result. But once you get it rolling, it will gain speed and it actually gets easier, or it feels easier anyway, to actually keep the car moving or even to gain speed once you get it rolling. That’s what it is. See, the enemy does not want you to get those first few battles. He doesn’t want you to get those first few victories, because once you get those first few victories, even if you have defeats after that, you’ll keep going. But if he can keep you from getting the first few victories, then there will always be that little doubt in your mind of, “Is this for me? Is this right? Is this for today?”[1]
So you may start with absolutely no results, but it is the incorruptible seed of the Word of God. If you do not grow weary in well-doing, you shall reap in due season. So that means, there can be a time when you don’t really see the result. So whenever you start to do this, you have to realize that as you start out in this, it may start small.[2]
When telling the story of how he started in his healing ministry, John Decker said:
It was there [in a healing meeting in Seattle] I began praying with conviction for the sick. I did not see too much happen, but I continued to minister to the sick like the other men I had been watching the past months.[3]
Start with something easy. In learning how to heal the sick, we sometimes have to start with something that does not seem to require much faith. Headaches, high fevers, pains in the neck, or sore backs may be easier to tackle than praying for someone dying of terminal cancer. All healing is easy for God. However, for the Christian who has never prayed for the sick, start with something similar to the next passage.
When Jesus entered Peter’s house, He saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve Him (Matthew 8:14–15 ESV). [4]
Not All Healings Are Instant
Another point of agreement among those who minister healing is that not all healings are instantaneous healings. Sometimes healings happen immediately; sometimes it’s a process, a progressive healing that takes time.
Curry Blake says:
All of Jesus’ healings weren’t instant. Over and over again, it says, “the child began to amend from that hour.” So healing can be a process.
There are some diseases that we see [healed] instantly more than others. There are some that we see progressive more than others. I don’t like progressive, nobody does. I will take it any way I can get it, but as we say in Texas, “If I have my druthers,” I’d rather not have it progressive. I would rather have it instant.
We saw a young boy who had Down Syndrome. He had all the characteristics of Down Syndrome, and over a period of 1½ to 2 years, even the structure of his head changed, to where now you look at him and you can’t tell he ever had Down Syndrome. He went from a 5-year-old mentality up to his rightful age.[5]
John Decker writes:
I teamed up with Ken and began ministering with him. We would pray for anyone who needed healing. Pains were leaving people as we prayed. Some people never received anything, others did. Headaches would leave, casts from broken bones would come off early, sore backs would become normal, and sinuses would clear up. Some of the healings would take a while. Other healings were instant.[6]
Dunkerley states:
Nor were all of Jesus’ healings instantaneous: The blind man at Bethsaida was first healed partially, later completely.[7] The timeframe was short but not instantaneous. The lepers in Luke 17:11–19 were not healed until after they left the presence of Jesus.[8] The man in John 9:6–7 was blind when he left Jesus’ presence.[9] He was not healed until after he washed.
What, based on the experience and teaching of Jesus Himself, should we expect and teach with regard to healing evangelism? First, we should not assume that every prayer will lead to instant success, nor should we teach that everyone will be healed instantly who truly believes.[10]
More Than One Method
One thing I was glad to see among the healing evangelists was that while they all use somewhat different methods and even believe some different things regarding healing, they make a point of not being dogmatic regarding how healing is done, what methods are used. They realize that Christians with fruitful healing ministries use different methods and have good results, which shows that the promises regarding healing in the Bible are the standard, and yet the methods used can be different.
This is important, as some of the healers vary quite a bit from one another in belief and practice. In his videos and audios, Curry Blake often makes a point of saying that you don’t need to do this or that, referring to some of the methods others use, but even he makes the point that the actual methods used aren’t the most important thing and that people shouldn’t get dogmatic about it. He says:
People ask me, “What’s the best method for healing or best method for this or that?” Now, it’s very simple. The method that you believe in is the method that will work for you. There’s no one method that Jesus gave. The closest He gave was in Mark 16 where He said, “Lay hands on the sick and they will recover.” That’s the standard.[11]
The message [the Bible] is sacred; our methods are not. Our methods change with the generations. That’s why our music changes; that’s a method. The way you do certain things will change, but the message has to be sacred, it has to be kept pure.[12]
What I’m trying to get you to do first is to understand the principles of it, so that when I teach you the specifics and the methods, you won’t get hung up on the method and you’ll realize that the method I show you is not the end-all method. It’s a method to get you started.[13]
When we will start to minister I will take you through several different ways to pray for people and you will know what to do. So we will be specific. Now just don’t take that for a formula and think that you have to mimic word for word every time. But essentially it comes down to this: Tell the spirit, the sickness, or the body what you want it to do. That’s it.[14]
John and Sonja Decker make the point about different methods in this way:
Jesus grants more grace toward us than we do to each other. Just because a minister displays an unusual style in healing the sick, we need not discount him because he is unorthodox. Jesus reminds us to examine the fruit of their presentation. Are people genuinely healed? Do they give God all the credit? Are people being saved? We shall know them by their fruit. Remain on the side of Jesus by following His examples from the written Word.[15]
Don Dunkerley, who is from a Presbyterian background, wrote about his previous skepticism toward some with evangelical healing ministries, especially flamboyant ones who use certain gifts of the Spirit in their ministries, such as the word of knowledge. He gives three stories in his book about mass evangelism and healing that helped him overcome some of his skepticism. He wrote about a Ugandan preacher who ministered healing and who had more faith in divine intervention and miracles than Dunkerley did. Upon getting to know the man and seeing his sincerity in preaching the Gospel and his love for souls, he realized that there are those with large healing ministries who use rather flamboyant methods who truly are concerned with salvation of souls and not just healing of bodies, or in promoting themselves.
He tells another story about working with Richard Roberts, the son of Oral Roberts, a famous Pentecostal healing evangelist. It was at an interdenominational crusade with many different churches working together. He was one of the few non-Pentecostals on the team and his job was teaching training seminars for pastors. He wrote the following regarding the nightly evangelistic rallies:
[During the rallies] I had no function except to sit on the platform—which gave me an opportunity to observe carefully. I also had the opportunity to observe the team members behind the scenes, including at dinner after the crusade each night in the dining room of our hotel.
One evening a team member from ORU [Oral Roberts University] had a word of knowledge describing a woman who was being healed at that moment. The team member pointed to the section of the crusade grounds where she was seated. He mentioned her age and described the illness from which she was being healed. Almost immediately a woman from where he had pointed came to the platform and said she was the person. Her age, she said, had been given exactly. She indeed had the very illness he had described, but could feel that she had been immediately healed.
A few years before, if I had seen such a thing on TV or even from the audience, I would have been sure the woman was a “plant.” But at dinner that evening after the service there was amazement and rejoicing over the precise accuracy of the word of knowledge. Clearly if the woman was a plant, it was unknown to any of the team members, including Richard himself.
I am sure it was a miracle. Everything I saw and heard during that week seemed genuine.[16]
Dunkerley watched people get saved and healed by those using methods which he didn’t employ and which he, in times past, considered fake. The method was different but the results were the same, because those preaching and praying for the sick applied God’s Word, were sincere, and were motivated by the love of God to lead others to salvation.
Different people use different methods in healing ministries. Some put emphasis on using different gifts of the Holy Spirit; others on fasting and praying beforehand; some insist on anointing with oil; others don’t do any of these things. Yet there are successful healing ministries using all of these methods and techniques.
The simple fact of the matter is that God heals. He uses Christians who have the faith to pray for others as a conduit of His healing power. The actual methods that are used, the technicalities and details, are secondary to the fact that He wants to show His power, love, and compassion to others through healing them and bringing them to Him. I believe He is looking for those who will take up the challenge to use healing as part of their witnessing ministry.
(Next in this series: Where Healing Evangelists Disagree)
[1] DHT Audio 8.
[2] DHT Video 1.
[3] DWJD 3.
[4] DWJD 3.
[5] DHT Video 9.
[6] DWJD 3.
[7] And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to Him a blind man and begged Him to touch him. And He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when He had spit on his eyes and laid His hands on him, He asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see men, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid His hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. And He sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village” (Mark 8:22–26 ESV).
[8] On the way to Jerusalem He was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as He entered a village, He was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When He saw them He said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving Him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” (Luke 17:11–18 ESV).
[9] Having said these things, He spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then He anointed the man's eyes with the mud and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing (John 9:6–7 ESV).
[10] HE 52, 54.
[11] DHT Audio 11.
[12] DHT Audio 11.
[13] DHT Audio 11.
[14] DHT Audio 12.
[15] DWJD 3.
[16] HE 191.
Copyright © 2012 The Family International.
March 27, 2012
Chapter 5
It Takes Persistence When One Begins Praying for the Sick
Another point that those in the healing ministry wrote about had to do with persistence. They expressed the need to keep praying for the sick even if you don’t see a lot of results at first. From their experience, there is a “learning curve,” or at least a “persistence curve,” when people incorporate healing as part of their ministry. If you feel called to a healing ministry, a key component is to keep taking advantage of opportunities that come up to pray for people, even if you don’t have much success in the beginning.
Curry Blake says:
When you start to push a car, when you first start, there’s a whole lot of effort with very little result. But once you get it rolling, it will gain speed and it actually gets easier, or it feels easier anyway, to actually keep the car moving or even to gain speed once you get it rolling. That’s what it is. See, the enemy does not want you to get those first few battles. He doesn’t want you to get those first few victories, because once you get those first few victories, even if you have defeats after that, you’ll keep going. But if he can keep you from getting the first few victories, then there will always be that little doubt in your mind of, “Is this for me? Is this right? Is this for today?”[1]
So you may start with absolutely no results, but it is the incorruptible seed of the Word of God. If you do not grow weary in well-doing, you shall reap in due season. So that means, there can be a time when you don’t really see the result. So whenever you start to do this, you have to realize that as you start out in this, it may start small.[2]
When telling the story of how he started in his healing ministry, John Decker said:
It was there [in a healing meeting in Seattle] I began praying with conviction for the sick. I did not see too much happen, but I continued to minister to the sick like the other men I had been watching the past months.[3]
Start with something easy. In learning how to heal the sick, we sometimes have to start with something that does not seem to require much faith. Headaches, high fevers, pains in the neck, or sore backs may be easier to tackle than praying for someone dying of terminal cancer. All healing is easy for God. However, for the Christian who has never prayed for the sick, start with something similar to the next passage.
When Jesus entered Peter’s house, He saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve Him (Matthew 8:14–15 ESV). [4]
Not All Healings Are Instant
Another point of agreement among those who minister healing is that not all healings are instantaneous healings. Sometimes healings happen immediately; sometimes it’s a process, a progressive healing that takes time.
Curry Blake says:
All of Jesus’ healings weren’t instant. Over and over again, it says, “the child began to amend from that hour.” So healing can be a process.
There are some diseases that we see [healed] instantly more than others. There are some that we see progressive more than others. I don’t like progressive, nobody does. I will take it any way I can get it, but as we say in Texas, “If I have my druthers,” I’d rather not have it progressive. I would rather have it instant.
We saw a young boy who had Down Syndrome. He had all the characteristics of Down Syndrome, and over a period of 1½ to 2 years, even the structure of his head changed, to where now you look at him and you can’t tell he ever had Down Syndrome. He went from a 5-year-old mentality up to his rightful age.[5]
John Decker writes:
I teamed up with Ken and began ministering with him. We would pray for anyone who needed healing. Pains were leaving people as we prayed. Some people never received anything, others did. Headaches would leave, casts from broken bones would come off early, sore backs would become normal, and sinuses would clear up. Some of the healings would take a while. Other healings were instant.[6]
Dunkerley states:
Nor were all of Jesus’ healings instantaneous: The blind man at Bethsaida was first healed partially, later completely.[7] The timeframe was short but not instantaneous. The lepers in Luke 17:11–19 were not healed until after they left the presence of Jesus.[8] The man in John 9:6–7 was blind when he left Jesus’ presence.[9] He was not healed until after he washed.
What, based on the experience and teaching of Jesus Himself, should we expect and teach with regard to healing evangelism? First, we should not assume that every prayer will lead to instant success, nor should we teach that everyone will be healed instantly who truly believes.[10]
More Than One Method
One thing I was glad to see among the healing evangelists was that while they all use somewhat different methods and even believe some different things regarding healing, they make a point of not being dogmatic regarding how healing is done, what methods are used. They realize that Christians with fruitful healing ministries use different methods and have good results, which shows that the promises regarding healing in the Bible are the standard, and yet the methods used can be different.
This is important, as some of the healers vary quite a bit from one another in belief and practice. In his videos and audios, Curry Blake often makes a point of saying that you don’t need to do this or that, referring to some of the methods others use, but even he makes the point that the actual methods used aren’t the most important thing and that people shouldn’t get dogmatic about it. He says:
People ask me, “What’s the best method for healing or best method for this or that?” Now, it’s very simple. The method that you believe in is the method that will work for you. There’s no one method that Jesus gave. The closest He gave was in Mark 16 where He said, “Lay hands on the sick and they will recover.” That’s the standard.[11]
The message [the Bible] is sacred; our methods are not. Our methods change with the generations. That’s why our music changes; that’s a method. The way you do certain things will change, but the message has to be sacred, it has to be kept pure.[12]
What I’m trying to get you to do first is to understand the principles of it, so that when I teach you the specifics and the methods, you won’t get hung up on the method and you’ll realize that the method I show you is not the end-all method. It’s a method to get you started.[13]
When we will start to minister I will take you through several different ways to pray for people and you will know what to do. So we will be specific. Now just don’t take that for a formula and think that you have to mimic word for word every time. But essentially it comes down to this: Tell the spirit, the sickness, or the body what you want it to do. That’s it.[14]
John and Sonja Decker make the point about different methods in this way:
Jesus grants more grace toward us than we do to each other. Just because a minister displays an unusual style in healing the sick, we need not discount him because he is unorthodox. Jesus reminds us to examine the fruit of their presentation. Are people genuinely healed? Do they give God all the credit? Are people being saved? We shall know them by their fruit. Remain on the side of Jesus by following His examples from the written Word.[15]
Don Dunkerley, who is from a Presbyterian background, wrote about his previous skepticism toward some with evangelical healing ministries, especially flamboyant ones who use certain gifts of the Spirit in their ministries, such as the word of knowledge. He gives three stories in his book about mass evangelism and healing that helped him overcome some of his skepticism. He wrote about a Ugandan preacher who ministered healing and who had more faith in divine intervention and miracles than Dunkerley did. Upon getting to know the man and seeing his sincerity in preaching the Gospel and his love for souls, he realized that there are those with large healing ministries who use rather flamboyant methods who truly are concerned with salvation of souls and not just healing of bodies, or in promoting themselves.
He tells another story about working with Richard Roberts, the son of Oral Roberts, a famous Pentecostal healing evangelist. It was at an interdenominational crusade with many different churches working together. He was one of the few non-Pentecostals on the team and his job was teaching training seminars for pastors. He wrote the following regarding the nightly evangelistic rallies:
[During the rallies] I had no function except to sit on the platform—which gave me an opportunity to observe carefully. I also had the opportunity to observe the team members behind the scenes, including at dinner after the crusade each night in the dining room of our hotel.
One evening a team member from ORU [Oral Roberts University] had a word of knowledge describing a woman who was being healed at that moment. The team member pointed to the section of the crusade grounds where she was seated. He mentioned her age and described the illness from which she was being healed. Almost immediately a woman from where he had pointed came to the platform and said she was the person. Her age, she said, had been given exactly. She indeed had the very illness he had described, but could feel that she had been immediately healed.
A few years before, if I had seen such a thing on TV or even from the audience, I would have been sure the woman was a “plant.” But at dinner that evening after the service there was amazement and rejoicing over the precise accuracy of the word of knowledge. Clearly if the woman was a plant, it was unknown to any of the team members, including Richard himself.
I am sure it was a miracle. Everything I saw and heard during that week seemed genuine.[16]
Dunkerley watched people get saved and healed by those using methods which he didn’t employ and which he, in times past, considered fake. The method was different but the results were the same, because those preaching and praying for the sick applied God’s Word, were sincere, and were motivated by the love of God to lead others to salvation.
Different people use different methods in healing ministries. Some put emphasis on using different gifts of the Holy Spirit; others on fasting and praying beforehand; some insist on anointing with oil; others don’t do any of these things. Yet there are successful healing ministries using all of these methods and techniques.
The simple fact of the matter is that God heals. He uses Christians who have the faith to pray for others as a conduit of His healing power. The actual methods that are used, the technicalities and details, are secondary to the fact that He wants to show His power, love, and compassion to others through healing them and bringing them to Him. I believe He is looking for those who will take up the challenge to use healing as part of their witnessing ministry.
(Next in this series: Where Healing Evangelists Disagree)
[1] DHT Audio 8.
[2] DHT Video 1.
[3] DWJD 3.
[4] DWJD 3.
[5] DHT Video 9.
[6] DWJD 3.
[7] And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to Him a blind man and begged Him to touch him. And He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when He had spit on his eyes and laid His hands on him, He asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see men, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid His hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. And He sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village” (Mark 8:22–26 ESV).
[8] On the way to Jerusalem He was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as He entered a village, He was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When He saw them He said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving Him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” (Luke 17:11–18 ESV).
[9] Having said these things, He spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then He anointed the man's eyes with the mud and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing (John 9:6–7 ESV).
[10] HE 52, 54.
[11] DHT Audio 11.
[12] DHT Audio 11.
[13] DHT Audio 11.
[14] DHT Audio 12.
[15] DWJD 3.
[16] HE 191.
Copyright © 2012 The Family International.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
The Dangerous Mess In Syria Grows Murkier!
By Eric Margolis, Information Clearing House, March 25, 2012
Syria’s murky, multi-level conflict continues to grow worse. So does public confusion here in the west as the US, British and some European media keep depicting Syria’s civil war as a simple passion play pitting the evil Assad regime in Damascus against mostly unarmed democratic protestors.
We saw this same one-dimensional, deceptive reporting recently in Libya that was designed to support foreign intervention. It’s as incomplete today about Syria as it was in Libya which, by the way, is turning into a dangerous mess.
My assessment based on reliable primary sources in Washington, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon:
Support for the Assad family’s Ba’ath regime, now in power for 41 years, is clearly slipping. But important sections of the armed forces, the 17 intelligence and security agencies, the powerful Alawai minority, most Syrian Christians, tribal elements and much of the commercial middle and upper class still back the Assad’s. In spite of intense western efforts to overthrow him, Bashar Assad, a mild-mannered former eye specialist, is still hanging on.
The US, Britain, France, and some conservative Arab allies have funded and armed the Syrian rebellion from its start a year ago. In fact, the US has been funding anti-Assad groups since the mid 1990’s. Arms and munitions are said to be flowing to Syria’s rebels through Jordan and Lebanon. Extreme rightwing groups in Lebanon, funded by western and Arab powers and Israel, are playing a key role in infiltrating gunmen and arms into northern Syria.
The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood has once again risen against the Alawi-dominated regime in Damascus. In 1982, this writer was outside the Syrian city of Hama when government forces crushed a Brotherhood uprising, killing an estimated 10,000 people and razing part of the city with heavy artillery.
Enter the jihadis. Recently, small numbers of al- Qaida veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have entered Syria and are using car bombs to try to destabilize the government. Current al-Qaida leader, Dr Ayman al- Zawahiri, has called for all-out war against the Assad regime.
Interestingly, the US, France and Britain now find themselves in bed with the very jihadist forces they profess to abhor—but, of course, whom they used in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and, lately, in Libya.
Add to this dangerous mix growing numbers of local militias in Syria who are battling one another and committing many of the atrocities against civilians, recalling Iraq and Lebanon’s bloody civil wars.
Washington’s key objective in Syria is to overthrow the Assad regime in order to injure its closest ally, Iran. There is so much anti-Iranian hysteria now in the US, that any blow against the Islamic republic is seen as good. Former US fears of a chaotic, post-Assad Syria are now forgotten in the rush to undermine Iran, by destabilizing Syria. Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain, are baying for war against Syria as President Barak Obama tries to hold back the war hawks.
Israel, whose influence in Washington in this election year is unprecedented, is stoking war fever against Syria and Iran. Israel is delighted that the crises with both nations have eclipsed the issue of Palestine and of Syria’s Golan Heights, which were illegally annexed by Israel in 1981. Golan supplies one third of Israel’s total water. Israel’s objective is to see Syria splintered into feuding cantons like today’s Iraq.
France’s right wing, led by President Nicholas Sarkozy’s UMP party, has long desired to re-establish France’s former colonial influence in Lebanon and Syria. The Assad regime in Syria has been a thorn in France’ side for four decades, particularly so in Lebanon, which Syria still insists is a historical part of Syria. France hopes to duplicate in Syria its success in stirring up and profiting from the uprising in Libya.
Russia has been defending the Assad regime and is determined not to be outfoxed in Syria by a false “humanitarian” intervention as it was in Libya. China is similarly cautious. But both are slowly lessening their former staunch support of Damascus as seen by last week’s UN Security Council call for a new peace plan in Syria.
A cease fire is urgently needed. Syria must stop using heavy weapons in urban areas. But outside powers must also stop supporting violent armed groups that Damascus calls “terrorists.” There are no clean hands in Syria.
Syria’s murky, multi-level conflict continues to grow worse. So does public confusion here in the west as the US, British and some European media keep depicting Syria’s civil war as a simple passion play pitting the evil Assad regime in Damascus against mostly unarmed democratic protestors.
We saw this same one-dimensional, deceptive reporting recently in Libya that was designed to support foreign intervention. It’s as incomplete today about Syria as it was in Libya which, by the way, is turning into a dangerous mess.
My assessment based on reliable primary sources in Washington, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon:
Support for the Assad family’s Ba’ath regime, now in power for 41 years, is clearly slipping. But important sections of the armed forces, the 17 intelligence and security agencies, the powerful Alawai minority, most Syrian Christians, tribal elements and much of the commercial middle and upper class still back the Assad’s. In spite of intense western efforts to overthrow him, Bashar Assad, a mild-mannered former eye specialist, is still hanging on.
The US, Britain, France, and some conservative Arab allies have funded and armed the Syrian rebellion from its start a year ago. In fact, the US has been funding anti-Assad groups since the mid 1990’s. Arms and munitions are said to be flowing to Syria’s rebels through Jordan and Lebanon. Extreme rightwing groups in Lebanon, funded by western and Arab powers and Israel, are playing a key role in infiltrating gunmen and arms into northern Syria.
The Sunni Muslim Brotherhood has once again risen against the Alawi-dominated regime in Damascus. In 1982, this writer was outside the Syrian city of Hama when government forces crushed a Brotherhood uprising, killing an estimated 10,000 people and razing part of the city with heavy artillery.
Enter the jihadis. Recently, small numbers of al- Qaida veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have entered Syria and are using car bombs to try to destabilize the government. Current al-Qaida leader, Dr Ayman al- Zawahiri, has called for all-out war against the Assad regime.
Interestingly, the US, France and Britain now find themselves in bed with the very jihadist forces they profess to abhor—but, of course, whom they used in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and, lately, in Libya.
Add to this dangerous mix growing numbers of local militias in Syria who are battling one another and committing many of the atrocities against civilians, recalling Iraq and Lebanon’s bloody civil wars.
Washington’s key objective in Syria is to overthrow the Assad regime in order to injure its closest ally, Iran. There is so much anti-Iranian hysteria now in the US, that any blow against the Islamic republic is seen as good. Former US fears of a chaotic, post-Assad Syria are now forgotten in the rush to undermine Iran, by destabilizing Syria. Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain, are baying for war against Syria as President Barak Obama tries to hold back the war hawks.
Israel, whose influence in Washington in this election year is unprecedented, is stoking war fever against Syria and Iran. Israel is delighted that the crises with both nations have eclipsed the issue of Palestine and of Syria’s Golan Heights, which were illegally annexed by Israel in 1981. Golan supplies one third of Israel’s total water. Israel’s objective is to see Syria splintered into feuding cantons like today’s Iraq.
France’s right wing, led by President Nicholas Sarkozy’s UMP party, has long desired to re-establish France’s former colonial influence in Lebanon and Syria. The Assad regime in Syria has been a thorn in France’ side for four decades, particularly so in Lebanon, which Syria still insists is a historical part of Syria. France hopes to duplicate in Syria its success in stirring up and profiting from the uprising in Libya.
Russia has been defending the Assad regime and is determined not to be outfoxed in Syria by a false “humanitarian” intervention as it was in Libya. China is similarly cautious. But both are slowly lessening their former staunch support of Damascus as seen by last week’s UN Security Council call for a new peace plan in Syria.
A cease fire is urgently needed. Syria must stop using heavy weapons in urban areas. But outside powers must also stop supporting violent armed groups that Damascus calls “terrorists.” There are no clean hands in Syria.
Christians Attacked in Syrian City of Homs
Anugrah Kumar, Christian Post, Mar. 24, 2012
While the world is raising concerns over rights abuses by anti-government forces in Syria’s ongoing violent conflict, few would even know that militant Islamists have expelled the majority of Christians from the western city of Homs, according to the country’s largest church.
The Catholic news agency Fides says it has received a note from the Syrian Orthodox Church, which represents 60 percent of the Christians in Syria, about “an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Christians” by members of the a militant Islamist outfit, Brigade Faruq, which has links with al-Qaida.
The militants have expelled 90 percent of Christians in Homs, which has faced the brunt of violence related to the uprising, and grabbed their homes, it said. They went door to door in the neighborhoods of Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan forcing Christians to flee without giving them the chance to take their belongings, it added.
Syria has witnessed protests against the government as part of the wider Arab Spring since last January.
About 10 percent of Syria’s 23 million people are estimated to be Christians, who have generally supported President Bashar Assad, a Muslim from a Shiite offshoot who is autocratic but protects religious minorities. On the other hand, the majority of the Muslims in Syria are Sunni.
Homs had a large population of Christians, and Muslims from the Alawite sect to which the president belongs.
The Christian minority is being targeted in other cities as well. Last Sunday, Giuseppe Nazzaro, the Vicar Apostolic of Syria’s largest city of Aleppo, said a car bomb exploded in the vicinity of the school of the Franciscan fathers in Aleppo. “By a miracle a massacre of children was avoided, at the Center of catechesis of the Church of St. Bonaventure: only because the Franciscan, sensing danger, made the children leave 15 minutes before the usual time.”
There were also explosions in Damascus. “These are bad signs for religious minorities,” the Vicar said. However, he added, “I am confident that peace can return: for this we Christians count on constant praying.”
Some Jesuits who have decided to stay in the city are giving a “heroic witness,” promising to bring comfort and humanitarian aid to people in need, the agency said.
While the world is raising concerns over rights abuses by anti-government forces in Syria’s ongoing violent conflict, few would even know that militant Islamists have expelled the majority of Christians from the western city of Homs, according to the country’s largest church.
The Catholic news agency Fides says it has received a note from the Syrian Orthodox Church, which represents 60 percent of the Christians in Syria, about “an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Christians” by members of the a militant Islamist outfit, Brigade Faruq, which has links with al-Qaida.
The militants have expelled 90 percent of Christians in Homs, which has faced the brunt of violence related to the uprising, and grabbed their homes, it said. They went door to door in the neighborhoods of Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan forcing Christians to flee without giving them the chance to take their belongings, it added.
Syria has witnessed protests against the government as part of the wider Arab Spring since last January.
About 10 percent of Syria’s 23 million people are estimated to be Christians, who have generally supported President Bashar Assad, a Muslim from a Shiite offshoot who is autocratic but protects religious minorities. On the other hand, the majority of the Muslims in Syria are Sunni.
Homs had a large population of Christians, and Muslims from the Alawite sect to which the president belongs.
The Christian minority is being targeted in other cities as well. Last Sunday, Giuseppe Nazzaro, the Vicar Apostolic of Syria’s largest city of Aleppo, said a car bomb exploded in the vicinity of the school of the Franciscan fathers in Aleppo. “By a miracle a massacre of children was avoided, at the Center of catechesis of the Church of St. Bonaventure: only because the Franciscan, sensing danger, made the children leave 15 minutes before the usual time.”
There were also explosions in Damascus. “These are bad signs for religious minorities,” the Vicar said. However, he added, “I am confident that peace can return: for this we Christians count on constant praying.”
Some Jesuits who have decided to stay in the city are giving a “heroic witness,” promising to bring comfort and humanitarian aid to people in need, the agency said.
Feet of Faith
By David Brandt Berg
When I was three years old, my foot was run over by an automobile, and the doctor said I would never walk again. But my parents believed God and prayed, and I’ve been walking ever since, although the doctor said that many of my bones were completely crushed and my foot was just a mass of pulp!
On the other hand, I also once worked for one of the greatest saints of God I have ever known, Dr. A. U. Michelson, a converted Jewish judge, and founder of the world’s first Hebrew-Christian Synagogue and a Gospel program for Jews—a man undoubtedly with thousands of souls to his credit and a glorious reward! I never knew a humbler, sweeter, more compassionate, more loving, more hardworking man. And yet he was pitifully clubfooted and hobbled around all his life on crutches, in constant suffering. Maybe this is one reason he had so much pity on others. We comfort others with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted!1 How can we be more than conquerors? By being good losers, and even praising God in our affliction. Dear old Dr. Michelson had miraculous faith for souls and finances, supporting missionaries around the world!
So who knows the will of God? All we can do is believe His promises and pray, and expect some kind of an answer. Sometimes these things happen to draw us closer to the Lord—to keep us humble or more dependent on Him, or as chastenings from the Lord! But He says in Hebrews 12, “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth,” and “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed!”2
Expect a miracle! Search the Scriptures and see what that means: “The lame take the prey.” “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart.”3 And Jesus said that He caused the lame to walk, as one of the proofs of His Messiahship! And remember that it was the healing of the lame man which resulted in the conversion of 5,000 in a single day and launched the early church on paths of glory!4 So expect a miracle for the glory of God!
In some cases, it took years of patient waiting before Jesus or the disciples came along to bring them healing. “But unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His wings.”5 Remember that He says, “I am the Lord that healeth thee,” ... “Who healeth all thy diseases and forgiveth all thy iniquities.”6 There are no exceptions: God can heal anything!
Some years ago, we prayed for a girl who had been eight years in bed. Her feet were deformed by lack of use and the weight of the covers, so that they looked like hands rather than feet. She’d gotten so sick that she could not even hold water in her stomach, and so thin that she looked like a skeleton! But we received for her the scripture Hebrews 2:14,15: “That through death He might destroy him who had the power of death; that is, the Devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”
So as we laid hands upon her for healing, we were also inspired to cast out her spirit of fear, and to command her to arise and walk. She said she hadn’t walked for years, and couldn’t walk—but again we rebuked the Enemy and her doubts and commanded her to arise and walk, as the Lord had instructed us—and she obeyed, and was instantly and totally healed; and walked the floor that day, her feet restored to normal!
When we saw her a few months later, she was absolutely beautiful, and had gained all the weight necessary to make her so, and was radiantly happy in the service of the Lord, giving her testimony everywhere she went, praise the Lord!
So the day of miracles is not past! Our God is still a God of miracles. Our emphasis in recent years has been more on the miracles of salvation—on the miracle of service and witnessing, the miracle of following Jesus, the miracle of the transformation of human lives—but God is still in the business of transforming the bodies that need it, as well as the heart, the mind, and the spirit.
I am a witness to His healing power, having been given up for dead nearly thirty years ago. My heart was so bad, the doctors said that if I’d stay in bed, I might live a year. But I promised to serve the Lord if He healed me—and I’ve been busy for Him ever since! And I’m in better health today than ever. Praise the Lord!
Jesus never fails! God cannot only do it, but He wants to do it! He’s more willing to give than we are to receive! Therefore “cast not away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward. For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.”7 Believe God! He never fails!—Even when we are faithless!8 Hold Him to His Word!
Demand and expect an answer! He has promised it! And remember that “all things work together for good to them that love the Lord.”9 And that this, too, has befallen you for the glory of God! Love and trust and praise Him more than ever—and I know He’ll not fail! He cannot deny Himself!
He is bound by His Word! Remind Him of it, cling to His promises, memorize and quote them continually, and never doubt for a moment that God is going to answer—and He will! He has to! He wants to! Trust Him! And thank Him for the answer—even if you don’t see it immediately! For behold, the trying of your faith is much more precious than gold!10
Originally published August 1971. Updated and republished March 2012.
1 2 Corinthians 1:4.
2 Hebrews 12:6, 11–13.
3 Isaiah 33:23; Isaiah 35:6.
4 Acts 3–4:4.
5 Malachi 4:2.
6 Exodus 15:26; Psalm 103:3.
7 Hebrews 10:35, 36.
8 2 Timothy 2:13.
9 Romans 8:28.
10 1 Peter 1:7.
Posted in: Audio, David Brandt Berg, Faith, Healing, Miracle
When I was three years old, my foot was run over by an automobile, and the doctor said I would never walk again. But my parents believed God and prayed, and I’ve been walking ever since, although the doctor said that many of my bones were completely crushed and my foot was just a mass of pulp!
On the other hand, I also once worked for one of the greatest saints of God I have ever known, Dr. A. U. Michelson, a converted Jewish judge, and founder of the world’s first Hebrew-Christian Synagogue and a Gospel program for Jews—a man undoubtedly with thousands of souls to his credit and a glorious reward! I never knew a humbler, sweeter, more compassionate, more loving, more hardworking man. And yet he was pitifully clubfooted and hobbled around all his life on crutches, in constant suffering. Maybe this is one reason he had so much pity on others. We comfort others with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted!1 How can we be more than conquerors? By being good losers, and even praising God in our affliction. Dear old Dr. Michelson had miraculous faith for souls and finances, supporting missionaries around the world!
So who knows the will of God? All we can do is believe His promises and pray, and expect some kind of an answer. Sometimes these things happen to draw us closer to the Lord—to keep us humble or more dependent on Him, or as chastenings from the Lord! But He says in Hebrews 12, “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth,” and “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed!”2
Expect a miracle! Search the Scriptures and see what that means: “The lame take the prey.” “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart.”3 And Jesus said that He caused the lame to walk, as one of the proofs of His Messiahship! And remember that it was the healing of the lame man which resulted in the conversion of 5,000 in a single day and launched the early church on paths of glory!4 So expect a miracle for the glory of God!
In some cases, it took years of patient waiting before Jesus or the disciples came along to bring them healing. “But unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His wings.”5 Remember that He says, “I am the Lord that healeth thee,” ... “Who healeth all thy diseases and forgiveth all thy iniquities.”6 There are no exceptions: God can heal anything!
Some years ago, we prayed for a girl who had been eight years in bed. Her feet were deformed by lack of use and the weight of the covers, so that they looked like hands rather than feet. She’d gotten so sick that she could not even hold water in her stomach, and so thin that she looked like a skeleton! But we received for her the scripture Hebrews 2:14,15: “That through death He might destroy him who had the power of death; that is, the Devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”
So as we laid hands upon her for healing, we were also inspired to cast out her spirit of fear, and to command her to arise and walk. She said she hadn’t walked for years, and couldn’t walk—but again we rebuked the Enemy and her doubts and commanded her to arise and walk, as the Lord had instructed us—and she obeyed, and was instantly and totally healed; and walked the floor that day, her feet restored to normal!
When we saw her a few months later, she was absolutely beautiful, and had gained all the weight necessary to make her so, and was radiantly happy in the service of the Lord, giving her testimony everywhere she went, praise the Lord!
So the day of miracles is not past! Our God is still a God of miracles. Our emphasis in recent years has been more on the miracles of salvation—on the miracle of service and witnessing, the miracle of following Jesus, the miracle of the transformation of human lives—but God is still in the business of transforming the bodies that need it, as well as the heart, the mind, and the spirit.
I am a witness to His healing power, having been given up for dead nearly thirty years ago. My heart was so bad, the doctors said that if I’d stay in bed, I might live a year. But I promised to serve the Lord if He healed me—and I’ve been busy for Him ever since! And I’m in better health today than ever. Praise the Lord!
Jesus never fails! God cannot only do it, but He wants to do it! He’s more willing to give than we are to receive! Therefore “cast not away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward. For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.”7 Believe God! He never fails!—Even when we are faithless!8 Hold Him to His Word!
Demand and expect an answer! He has promised it! And remember that “all things work together for good to them that love the Lord.”9 And that this, too, has befallen you for the glory of God! Love and trust and praise Him more than ever—and I know He’ll not fail! He cannot deny Himself!
He is bound by His Word! Remind Him of it, cling to His promises, memorize and quote them continually, and never doubt for a moment that God is going to answer—and He will! He has to! He wants to! Trust Him! And thank Him for the answer—even if you don’t see it immediately! For behold, the trying of your faith is much more precious than gold!10
Originally published August 1971. Updated and republished March 2012.
1 2 Corinthians 1:4.
2 Hebrews 12:6, 11–13.
3 Isaiah 33:23; Isaiah 35:6.
4 Acts 3–4:4.
5 Malachi 4:2.
6 Exodus 15:26; Psalm 103:3.
7 Hebrews 10:35, 36.
8 2 Timothy 2:13.
9 Romans 8:28.
10 1 Peter 1:7.
Posted in: Audio, David Brandt Berg, Faith, Healing, Miracle
Monday, March 26, 2012
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Divine Healing: Healing Is in the Atonement!
Chapter 4 By Peter Amsterdam
A significant principle that those whose material I studied agree on, and that has been in our Statement of Faith for decades, is that divine healing is in the atonement—that Jesus not only died for our sins so that we could be saved, but He also suffered so that we could receive physical healing.
The concept of healing fitting within the atonement is based on Isaiah 53:4–5 and Matthew 8:16–17:
Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.[1]
The word translated as infirmities (griefs in the KJV) is the Hebrew word choliy, meaning sickness.
Donald Dunkerley comments:
So what can we conclude about healing and the atonement?
When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to Him, and He drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases” (Matthew 8:16–17).
Matthew was telling us that when Jesus healed the sick, He was setting them free from illness in direct fulfillment of Isaiah 53. That beloved Old Testament prophecy cannot be spiritualized to mean that Jesus would take on Himself only our spiritual problems. Matthew saw it fulfilled in the healing of physical illness. And when Isaiah said, “By His wounds we are healed,” physical healing was very much a part of what he had in mind.
Christ died to deliver us from sin and all its consequences, including disease and death. He died to provide holiness for us in this life and resurrection and glory in the life to come. He did not, in His earthly ministry, tell people to wait for heaven before they could be healed. He healed many of them right then.[2]
Our founder David also taught that healing was part of the atonement.
He didn’t have to suffer for our sins, He only had to shed His blood and die for our sins. But His body suffered stripes, wounds, beatings, pain and agony so that through this He could also atone for our sicknesses: “By His stripes we are healed!” (Isaiah 53:5)[3]
Lord, You suffered in Your body for our sicknesses and our illnesses as well as for our sins. You took our infirmities in Your own body, by Your stripes we are healed. You didn’t have to do all that, Lord, but You did that for our health, to show by Your vicarious suffering that You atone for our physical bodies as well as our spiritual souls.[4]
It’s Jesus’ body that heals them, which is what we teach. Why else was He beaten? Why else did He suffer stripes? Why else did He suffer physically without dying? If it was only His blood that was necessary to save us, why didn’t He just die and why did the Lord let Him go through all that suffering? “By His stripes we are healed.” “This is My body which is broken for you!”—Not to save us, but to heal us! (Isaiah 53:5; 1 Corinthians 11:24) It’s in the atonement, praise God! Hallelujah![5]
So as you partake of this [bread in communion], it’s a symbol of our faith that His body was broken for us and it is for our healing and we can claim it through the sacrifice of Christ. It’s a part of His atonement, the whole salvation for the whole man—body, soul and spirit.[6]
While the fact that healing is part of the atonement is generally believed by those who teach healing evangelism, there is a variance in the way it is interpreted. Some believe that while physical healing is contained within the atonement and “by His stripes we are healed,” this doesn’t mean all sickness will be healed immediately or even in this lifetime. Others believe that because healing is in the atonement, this means God will heal all diseases now.
David expressed that while we can and do get healed in this life, it’s only a touch of the full healing we will experience eternally.
This little ceremony [communion] today, Lord, symbolizes our message, that You’re the whole Christ for the whole man! You meet every need, physical and spiritual. You not only save souls, but You heal bodies too. And You’re going to redeem our body completely one of these days, and give us a whole brand new one. We have experienced a little touch of it in healing. Thy healing is a little touch of resurrection life, a little bit of Heaven, it’s a little bit of redemption, a little bit of redemption of the body.
We already have the salvation of our souls by faith, but Lord, even our spirits are not yet made perfect. If we receive Thee by faith, Thy Spirit by faith and Thy healing by faith, we already have the Kingdom of God within us. We have this all by faith. We have everything, a little bit of Heaven in our bodies and in our hearts as a result of taking this by faith here and now. And yet, Lord, it’s not going to be really completely fulfilled until we receive our new Heavenly bodies and “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23)[7]
In his book Healing Evangelism, Don Dunkerley writes about his wife, Eileen, who was told she would not have any more children, yet had a miracle pregnancy and delivered a baby girl, Joy Anne. After her birth, the doctors found a congenital defect from which only one in ten survive. His church and others were praying for and expecting healing. Don says:
But the Lord took Joy Anne to heaven when she was just a half-hour short of one week old. This was a great blow to many who had prayed in faith. One member of our congregation told me recently that her prayer life was disturbed for years because she was so angry at God that Joy Anne had died when virtually the whole city of Pensacola was praying for her healing. Eileen and I were established enough in our understanding of God’s sovereignty that her death did not shake our faith or disturb our prayer lives.
On my first Sunday back in the pulpit, I preached a sermon to reassure the congregation (and Eileen and me) that God had not failed to keep His promises. My text was Ephesians 1:5, and the sermon title, “His Kind Intention.” Healing is in the atonement, I told them, but heaven is in the atonement, too. When we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are instantly forgiven but we do not instantly go to heaven. Some of the blessings of the atonement we have in a partial sense now, and some we will have in a complete sense in the future, when we get to heaven. One day we shall all be perfectly healed of our diseases when we stand before the throne of the Lamb and sing His praises. It is God’s will ultimately that all His people be healed. Sometimes it is His will that we be healed instantly, but sometimes He has something better for us, because our illnesses and infirmities can be part of His wonderful work for our sanctification.
God did not heal Joy Anne in the way we were praying for, I said. He healed her by taking her to heaven.[8]
In his book When God Doesn’t Heal Now, Larry Keefauver tells a story of two situations, one in which a woman is hospitalized with an unknown condition which put her into a coma. The doctors had no idea what the problem was. Over the months, specialists were brought in from the top U.S. hospitals to attempt various procedures, but to no avail. The doctors told the husband his wife was brain dead. The husband believed God for his wife’s healing and continued to pray for her. He took her home and cared for her for months on end. In time, she began to regain consciousness, and after many more months she was completely healed.
He relates another account of a Christian couple who were serving the Lord for twenty years when the wife was diagnosed with cancer. After much prayer, over a period of time she improved, but not for long, and eventually she died of the cancer.
After sharing these two accounts, the author says:
Both couples walked by faith. In one instance, God healed physically in a miraculous way in time and space. In the other instance, God healed eternally.[9]
Keefauver makes the case that God always heals. Some He heals “in time”—that is, in this life, and others He heals “in eternity”—meaning that He heals them through delivering them from this life and taking them into eternity, where they are healed forever.
Healing evangelist Curry Blake teaches that healing is in the atonement, yet he takes a different stance regarding what results should be expected because of it. He makes the case that since healing is in the atonement, when someone is prayed for, their healing in this life is just as sure as salvation. He teaches that healing in this life is always God’s will. That if someone is prayed for and they aren’t healed, or at least the process of healing doesn’t start, then there is some failure on the part of the person praying. His premise is that because healing is in the atonement, it is always God’s will to heal, so healing in this lifetime is guaranteed. While the other healing evangelists believe that healing is in the atonement and is God’s will, they also believe that while many people will be healed in this lifetime, others will be healed in eternity.
I’m including Curry Blake’s point of view, though I must add that David’s teachings, as well as those of the other healing evangelists I’ve read, and the theologians I’ve studied, don’t agree with his point of view. Maria and I also differ from Curry Blake on this point. We don’t feel you can insist that everyone prayed for should be healed in this lifetime and that if they aren’t, there is something wrong.
Curry says:
All you need to know is that healing is in the atonement. It’s always God’s will.[10]
If God will never turn away a person who comes to Him for salvation and healing … and healing was paid for at the same time and to the same degree that sins were paid for, then the same rules apply to healing as apply to salvation.[11]
There’s only two things you need to know about healing: it is God’s will and it is in the atonement. If it is in the atonement, then it’s God’s will. Once you figure out it’s in the atonement and therefore is God’s will and therefore it’s always God’s will, then that means it can never not be God’s will. [12]
And let me tell you, if you think now that you know this, it’s not gonna hurt any more if somebody dies, let me tell you, it hurts more because now you know absolutely without a shadow of a doubt and with no excuses, they shouldn’t have died. I take away all your excuses, so now you know it was usually a failure somewhere in something that you didn’t do.[13]
You say that they had faith and the person who’s praying has faith, but if they didn’t get healed, then no. The Bible says if you pray the prayer of faith they will get healed. You’re saying that these people prayed the prayer of faith and they didn’t get healed. I can’t go with what you said. I have to go with what the Bible says.[14]
No spiritual-minded Christian ever died of sickness or disease. If a person dies of sickness or disease it is because they are carnally minded. Why? Because to be carnally minded is death. To be spiritually minded is life and peace.[15]
When discussing God’s will regarding healing, John and Sonja Decker quote Mark 1:40–42 to build their argument that it is God’s will to heal. They make reference to the two other times this story is told in the Gospels: in Matthew 8:2–3, and Luke 5:12–13.
A leper came to Him, imploring Him, and kneeling said to Him, “If You will, You can make me clean.” Moved with pity, He stretched out His hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.[16]
Their explanation is as follows:
The above Scriptures reveal God’s will concerning healing. His will is plainly revealed in these three passages. They all say the same thing: He is willing to heal us! He is willing not only to heal leprosy, He is willing to heal all manner of sickness and disease. Jesus has revealed His eternal compassion and mercy to heal the sick.
Most believe that God is able to do anything He wants. These passages proclaim that God is not only able, He is also willing to heal those who come to Him in faith. Therefore, we can preach with confidence that divine healing is now available through the mighty name of Jesus Christ.
Sick people (like this leper) who are serious and determined to get healed, demonstrate the kind of faith that will set the stage for healing.
The timing of when the healing will actually manifest is always left in the hands of the Lord. Even though He is willing to heal now, the full, physical manifestation may be instant or may take hours, days, or weeks.
Our confession remains: “God is willing to heal you now. Your healing starts today. We will continue to thank Him until the physical manifestation comes to pass.”
Only God knows those sicknesses that will end in death (see John 11:4).[17] This is why we need revelation knowledge from the Lord about how to pray in these kinds of situations. We contend for healing until the Lord reveals otherwise.[18]
Since John and Sonja Decker emphasize the use of revelation in healing, they seek for the guidance of the Holy Spirit regarding whom they minister to and for how long they should pray for physical healing for someone who is ill. This is why they say they fight for people’s healing until the Lord reveals otherwise. While they believe it’s God’s will to heal, they also understand that sometimes God chooses not to heal someone in time, but rather to take the person to Him and heal them in eternity.
When writing about God’s will in regard to healing, Don Dunkerley expresses it this way:
Sickness is no more God’s will than sin and unbelief are His will. God is always on the side of healing, just as He is always on the side of righteousness and faith. And ultimate healing for His people is always God's will. But there are mysteries about God’s plan. We know He allows and uses things of which He does not approve, and His plan for human history includes sin, unbelief, sickness, even death. God used Joseph’s slavery in Egypt to deliver many people, though He did not approve of Joseph’s being sold as a slave (Genesis 45:7–8; 50:20). God used the murder of Christ as the center of His plan of redemption, although that murder was wickedness (Acts 2:23).
The mystery here is that God does not approve of sickness any more than He approves of slavery and murder. But that does not mean He always heals. In fact, sometimes He actually uses sickness for our sanctification. So instead of praying, “If it be Thy will,” we should pray for healing “according to Your will.” Healing is His will; it’s just that His timing is not always immediate.[19]
Healing is part of the atonement. When Jesus was resurrected and then ascended into heaven, it wasn’t only His spirit that rose from the dead and ascended into heaven—His physical body did as well. When Jesus returns at the Rapture, we will meet Him in the air, and not just our spirits but our bodies too. We will have supernatural bodies like Jesus does, and those bodies will be fully healed for eternity. That’s the ultimate fulfillment of the atonement.
While there may be differences of opinion on whether healing in the atonement means everyone who is prayed for must be healed now, or that some will be healed now and others only in eternity, one thing we can count on is that because of Jesus’ suffering and death we will live forever, with resurrected bodies which will suffer no pain and will never be sick.
We can also know that healing is available to us and others while we live on earth, through Jesus’ atonement. We can bring that healing to many, if we have the faith to believe what Jesus said, and to step out and pray for those in need, thus bringing them the opportunity to receive healing at God’s hand.
(Next in this series: Process of Healing)
[1] Isaiah 53:4–5 NIV.
[2] HE 63.
[3] David Brandt Berg, "The Real Meaning of the Lord’s Supper," October 1978, 781:48.
[4] David Brandt Berg, "The Message of the Crucifixion," April 1984, 1768:90.
[5] David Brandt Berg, "What If? Part 3," June 1986, 2211-3:104.
[6] David Brandt Berg, "Sunday Communion and Prayer for Joseph," January 1982, 1315:4.
[7] David Brandt Berg, "I Am a Stranger Here," March 1982, 1533:4–5.
[8] HE 61.
[9] Larry Keefauver, When God Doesn’t Heal Now, chapter 2 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000).
[10] DHT Video 9.
[11] DHT Video 7.
[12] CB Video 8.
[13] DHT Video 7.
[14] DHT Video 7.
[15] DHT Video 7.
[16] Mark 1:40–42 ESV.
[17] When Jesus heard it He said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4 ESV).
[18] DWJD 3.
[19] HE 69–70.
A significant principle that those whose material I studied agree on, and that has been in our Statement of Faith for decades, is that divine healing is in the atonement—that Jesus not only died for our sins so that we could be saved, but He also suffered so that we could receive physical healing.
The concept of healing fitting within the atonement is based on Isaiah 53:4–5 and Matthew 8:16–17:
Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by Him, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.[1]
The word translated as infirmities (griefs in the KJV) is the Hebrew word choliy, meaning sickness.
Donald Dunkerley comments:
So what can we conclude about healing and the atonement?
When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to Him, and He drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases” (Matthew 8:16–17).
Matthew was telling us that when Jesus healed the sick, He was setting them free from illness in direct fulfillment of Isaiah 53. That beloved Old Testament prophecy cannot be spiritualized to mean that Jesus would take on Himself only our spiritual problems. Matthew saw it fulfilled in the healing of physical illness. And when Isaiah said, “By His wounds we are healed,” physical healing was very much a part of what he had in mind.
Christ died to deliver us from sin and all its consequences, including disease and death. He died to provide holiness for us in this life and resurrection and glory in the life to come. He did not, in His earthly ministry, tell people to wait for heaven before they could be healed. He healed many of them right then.[2]
Our founder David also taught that healing was part of the atonement.
He didn’t have to suffer for our sins, He only had to shed His blood and die for our sins. But His body suffered stripes, wounds, beatings, pain and agony so that through this He could also atone for our sicknesses: “By His stripes we are healed!” (Isaiah 53:5)[3]
Lord, You suffered in Your body for our sicknesses and our illnesses as well as for our sins. You took our infirmities in Your own body, by Your stripes we are healed. You didn’t have to do all that, Lord, but You did that for our health, to show by Your vicarious suffering that You atone for our physical bodies as well as our spiritual souls.[4]
It’s Jesus’ body that heals them, which is what we teach. Why else was He beaten? Why else did He suffer stripes? Why else did He suffer physically without dying? If it was only His blood that was necessary to save us, why didn’t He just die and why did the Lord let Him go through all that suffering? “By His stripes we are healed.” “This is My body which is broken for you!”—Not to save us, but to heal us! (Isaiah 53:5; 1 Corinthians 11:24) It’s in the atonement, praise God! Hallelujah![5]
So as you partake of this [bread in communion], it’s a symbol of our faith that His body was broken for us and it is for our healing and we can claim it through the sacrifice of Christ. It’s a part of His atonement, the whole salvation for the whole man—body, soul and spirit.[6]
While the fact that healing is part of the atonement is generally believed by those who teach healing evangelism, there is a variance in the way it is interpreted. Some believe that while physical healing is contained within the atonement and “by His stripes we are healed,” this doesn’t mean all sickness will be healed immediately or even in this lifetime. Others believe that because healing is in the atonement, this means God will heal all diseases now.
David expressed that while we can and do get healed in this life, it’s only a touch of the full healing we will experience eternally.
This little ceremony [communion] today, Lord, symbolizes our message, that You’re the whole Christ for the whole man! You meet every need, physical and spiritual. You not only save souls, but You heal bodies too. And You’re going to redeem our body completely one of these days, and give us a whole brand new one. We have experienced a little touch of it in healing. Thy healing is a little touch of resurrection life, a little bit of Heaven, it’s a little bit of redemption, a little bit of redemption of the body.
We already have the salvation of our souls by faith, but Lord, even our spirits are not yet made perfect. If we receive Thee by faith, Thy Spirit by faith and Thy healing by faith, we already have the Kingdom of God within us. We have this all by faith. We have everything, a little bit of Heaven in our bodies and in our hearts as a result of taking this by faith here and now. And yet, Lord, it’s not going to be really completely fulfilled until we receive our new Heavenly bodies and “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23)[7]
In his book Healing Evangelism, Don Dunkerley writes about his wife, Eileen, who was told she would not have any more children, yet had a miracle pregnancy and delivered a baby girl, Joy Anne. After her birth, the doctors found a congenital defect from which only one in ten survive. His church and others were praying for and expecting healing. Don says:
But the Lord took Joy Anne to heaven when she was just a half-hour short of one week old. This was a great blow to many who had prayed in faith. One member of our congregation told me recently that her prayer life was disturbed for years because she was so angry at God that Joy Anne had died when virtually the whole city of Pensacola was praying for her healing. Eileen and I were established enough in our understanding of God’s sovereignty that her death did not shake our faith or disturb our prayer lives.
On my first Sunday back in the pulpit, I preached a sermon to reassure the congregation (and Eileen and me) that God had not failed to keep His promises. My text was Ephesians 1:5, and the sermon title, “His Kind Intention.” Healing is in the atonement, I told them, but heaven is in the atonement, too. When we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are instantly forgiven but we do not instantly go to heaven. Some of the blessings of the atonement we have in a partial sense now, and some we will have in a complete sense in the future, when we get to heaven. One day we shall all be perfectly healed of our diseases when we stand before the throne of the Lamb and sing His praises. It is God’s will ultimately that all His people be healed. Sometimes it is His will that we be healed instantly, but sometimes He has something better for us, because our illnesses and infirmities can be part of His wonderful work for our sanctification.
God did not heal Joy Anne in the way we were praying for, I said. He healed her by taking her to heaven.[8]
In his book When God Doesn’t Heal Now, Larry Keefauver tells a story of two situations, one in which a woman is hospitalized with an unknown condition which put her into a coma. The doctors had no idea what the problem was. Over the months, specialists were brought in from the top U.S. hospitals to attempt various procedures, but to no avail. The doctors told the husband his wife was brain dead. The husband believed God for his wife’s healing and continued to pray for her. He took her home and cared for her for months on end. In time, she began to regain consciousness, and after many more months she was completely healed.
He relates another account of a Christian couple who were serving the Lord for twenty years when the wife was diagnosed with cancer. After much prayer, over a period of time she improved, but not for long, and eventually she died of the cancer.
After sharing these two accounts, the author says:
Both couples walked by faith. In one instance, God healed physically in a miraculous way in time and space. In the other instance, God healed eternally.[9]
Keefauver makes the case that God always heals. Some He heals “in time”—that is, in this life, and others He heals “in eternity”—meaning that He heals them through delivering them from this life and taking them into eternity, where they are healed forever.
Healing evangelist Curry Blake teaches that healing is in the atonement, yet he takes a different stance regarding what results should be expected because of it. He makes the case that since healing is in the atonement, when someone is prayed for, their healing in this life is just as sure as salvation. He teaches that healing in this life is always God’s will. That if someone is prayed for and they aren’t healed, or at least the process of healing doesn’t start, then there is some failure on the part of the person praying. His premise is that because healing is in the atonement, it is always God’s will to heal, so healing in this lifetime is guaranteed. While the other healing evangelists believe that healing is in the atonement and is God’s will, they also believe that while many people will be healed in this lifetime, others will be healed in eternity.
I’m including Curry Blake’s point of view, though I must add that David’s teachings, as well as those of the other healing evangelists I’ve read, and the theologians I’ve studied, don’t agree with his point of view. Maria and I also differ from Curry Blake on this point. We don’t feel you can insist that everyone prayed for should be healed in this lifetime and that if they aren’t, there is something wrong.
Curry says:
All you need to know is that healing is in the atonement. It’s always God’s will.[10]
If God will never turn away a person who comes to Him for salvation and healing … and healing was paid for at the same time and to the same degree that sins were paid for, then the same rules apply to healing as apply to salvation.[11]
There’s only two things you need to know about healing: it is God’s will and it is in the atonement. If it is in the atonement, then it’s God’s will. Once you figure out it’s in the atonement and therefore is God’s will and therefore it’s always God’s will, then that means it can never not be God’s will. [12]
And let me tell you, if you think now that you know this, it’s not gonna hurt any more if somebody dies, let me tell you, it hurts more because now you know absolutely without a shadow of a doubt and with no excuses, they shouldn’t have died. I take away all your excuses, so now you know it was usually a failure somewhere in something that you didn’t do.[13]
You say that they had faith and the person who’s praying has faith, but if they didn’t get healed, then no. The Bible says if you pray the prayer of faith they will get healed. You’re saying that these people prayed the prayer of faith and they didn’t get healed. I can’t go with what you said. I have to go with what the Bible says.[14]
No spiritual-minded Christian ever died of sickness or disease. If a person dies of sickness or disease it is because they are carnally minded. Why? Because to be carnally minded is death. To be spiritually minded is life and peace.[15]
When discussing God’s will regarding healing, John and Sonja Decker quote Mark 1:40–42 to build their argument that it is God’s will to heal. They make reference to the two other times this story is told in the Gospels: in Matthew 8:2–3, and Luke 5:12–13.
A leper came to Him, imploring Him, and kneeling said to Him, “If You will, You can make me clean.” Moved with pity, He stretched out His hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.[16]
Their explanation is as follows:
The above Scriptures reveal God’s will concerning healing. His will is plainly revealed in these three passages. They all say the same thing: He is willing to heal us! He is willing not only to heal leprosy, He is willing to heal all manner of sickness and disease. Jesus has revealed His eternal compassion and mercy to heal the sick.
Most believe that God is able to do anything He wants. These passages proclaim that God is not only able, He is also willing to heal those who come to Him in faith. Therefore, we can preach with confidence that divine healing is now available through the mighty name of Jesus Christ.
Sick people (like this leper) who are serious and determined to get healed, demonstrate the kind of faith that will set the stage for healing.
The timing of when the healing will actually manifest is always left in the hands of the Lord. Even though He is willing to heal now, the full, physical manifestation may be instant or may take hours, days, or weeks.
Our confession remains: “God is willing to heal you now. Your healing starts today. We will continue to thank Him until the physical manifestation comes to pass.”
Only God knows those sicknesses that will end in death (see John 11:4).[17] This is why we need revelation knowledge from the Lord about how to pray in these kinds of situations. We contend for healing until the Lord reveals otherwise.[18]
Since John and Sonja Decker emphasize the use of revelation in healing, they seek for the guidance of the Holy Spirit regarding whom they minister to and for how long they should pray for physical healing for someone who is ill. This is why they say they fight for people’s healing until the Lord reveals otherwise. While they believe it’s God’s will to heal, they also understand that sometimes God chooses not to heal someone in time, but rather to take the person to Him and heal them in eternity.
When writing about God’s will in regard to healing, Don Dunkerley expresses it this way:
Sickness is no more God’s will than sin and unbelief are His will. God is always on the side of healing, just as He is always on the side of righteousness and faith. And ultimate healing for His people is always God's will. But there are mysteries about God’s plan. We know He allows and uses things of which He does not approve, and His plan for human history includes sin, unbelief, sickness, even death. God used Joseph’s slavery in Egypt to deliver many people, though He did not approve of Joseph’s being sold as a slave (Genesis 45:7–8; 50:20). God used the murder of Christ as the center of His plan of redemption, although that murder was wickedness (Acts 2:23).
The mystery here is that God does not approve of sickness any more than He approves of slavery and murder. But that does not mean He always heals. In fact, sometimes He actually uses sickness for our sanctification. So instead of praying, “If it be Thy will,” we should pray for healing “according to Your will.” Healing is His will; it’s just that His timing is not always immediate.[19]
Healing is part of the atonement. When Jesus was resurrected and then ascended into heaven, it wasn’t only His spirit that rose from the dead and ascended into heaven—His physical body did as well. When Jesus returns at the Rapture, we will meet Him in the air, and not just our spirits but our bodies too. We will have supernatural bodies like Jesus does, and those bodies will be fully healed for eternity. That’s the ultimate fulfillment of the atonement.
While there may be differences of opinion on whether healing in the atonement means everyone who is prayed for must be healed now, or that some will be healed now and others only in eternity, one thing we can count on is that because of Jesus’ suffering and death we will live forever, with resurrected bodies which will suffer no pain and will never be sick.
We can also know that healing is available to us and others while we live on earth, through Jesus’ atonement. We can bring that healing to many, if we have the faith to believe what Jesus said, and to step out and pray for those in need, thus bringing them the opportunity to receive healing at God’s hand.
(Next in this series: Process of Healing)
[1] Isaiah 53:4–5 NIV.
[2] HE 63.
[3] David Brandt Berg, "The Real Meaning of the Lord’s Supper," October 1978, 781:48.
[4] David Brandt Berg, "The Message of the Crucifixion," April 1984, 1768:90.
[5] David Brandt Berg, "What If? Part 3," June 1986, 2211-3:104.
[6] David Brandt Berg, "Sunday Communion and Prayer for Joseph," January 1982, 1315:4.
[7] David Brandt Berg, "I Am a Stranger Here," March 1982, 1533:4–5.
[8] HE 61.
[9] Larry Keefauver, When God Doesn’t Heal Now, chapter 2 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000).
[10] DHT Video 9.
[11] DHT Video 7.
[12] CB Video 8.
[13] DHT Video 7.
[14] DHT Video 7.
[15] DHT Video 7.
[16] Mark 1:40–42 ESV.
[17] When Jesus heard it He said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4 ESV).
[18] DWJD 3.
[19] HE 69–70.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
How to be Creative!
By Jonah Lehrer, WSJ, March 12, 2012
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not.
But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. (“Inspiration” literally means “breathed upon.”) Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use “creativity” as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
It isn’t a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed on us by the angels. It’s a skill that anyone can learn and work to improve.
The new research also suggests how best to approach the thorniest problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.
Let’s start with the hardest problems, those challenges that at first blush seem impossible. Such problems are typically solved (if they are solved at all) in a moment of insight.
Consider the case of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a presentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good, after all, is a glue that doesn’t stick?
On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr. Fry’s thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to mark the songs he was supposed to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the service frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It seemed like an unfixable problem, one of those ordinary hassles that we’re forced to live with.
But then, during a particularly tedious sermon, Mr. Fry had an epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make use of that weak glue: It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Because the adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn’t tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually result in one of the most widely used office products in the world: the Post-it Note.
Mr. Fry’s invention was a classic moment of insight. Though such events seem to spring from nowhere, as if the cortex is surprising us with a breakthrough, scientists have begun studying how they occur. They do this by giving people “insight” puzzles, like the one that follows, and watching what happens in the brain:
A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of the women are still alive, and none of them is divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man?
If you solved the question, the solution probably came to you in an incandescent flash: The man is a priest. Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what’s needed when working on a hard creative problem.
Interestingly, Mr. Beeman and his colleagues have found that certain factors make people much more likely to have an insight, better able to detect the answers generated by the aSTG. For instance, exposing subjects to a short, humorous video—the scientists use a clip of Robin Williams doing stand-up—boosts the average success rate by about 20%.
Alcohol also works. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and intoxicated students. The scientists gave the subjects a battery of word problems known as remote associates, in which people have to find one additional word that goes with a triad of words. Drunk students solved nearly 30% more of these word problems than their sober peers.
What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we’re probably focused on the wrong answer.
And this is why relaxation helps: It isn’t until we’re soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we’re able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain’s right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.
This research also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it’s Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”
Of course, not every creative challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won’t solve every problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the temptation of a beer-fueled nap.
There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It’s the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the “rejecting process,” noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. “All great artists and thinkers are great workers,” he wrote.
This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who engraved the slogan “Art is Work” above his office door. Mr. Glaser’s most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling apart.
Mr. Glaser began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the tourist slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming design, with “I Love New York” in cursive, set against a plain white background. His proposal was quickly approved. “Everybody liked it,” Mr. Glaser says. “And if I were a normal person, I’d stop thinking about the project. But I can’t. Something about it just doesn’t feel right.”
So Mr. Glaser continued to ruminate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished. And then, after another few days of work, he was sitting in a taxi, stuck in midtown traffic. “I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw,” he remembers. “And I’m thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typeface and the big round red heart smack dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go.”
The logo that Mr. Glaser imagined in traffic has since become one of the most widely imitated works of graphic art in the world. And he only discovered the design because he refused to stop thinking about it.
But this raises an obvious question: If different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking, how can we ensure that we’re thinking in the right way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with possibilities?
The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we’re getting “warmer” or not, without knowing the solution.
This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don’t feel that we’re getting closer to the answer—we’ve hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we’re getting close, we need to keep on struggling.
Of course, both moment-of-insight problems and nose-to-the-grindstone problems assume that we have the answers to the creative problems we’re trying to solve somewhere in our heads. They’re both just a matter of getting those answers out. Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don’t have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you’re trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Steve Jobs famously declared that “creativity is just connecting things.” Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs’s leadership, for instance, Apple didn’t invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category.
And it isn’t just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs’s theory. The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.
How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out “diverse experiences,” collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don’t know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.
Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs’s wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts.
Many of the most innovative companies encourage their employees to develop these sorts of diverse networks, interacting with colleagues in totally unrelated fields. Google hosts an internal conference called Crazy Search Ideas—a sort of grown-up science fair with hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient.
Such solutions are known as “mental restructurings,” since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What’s interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That’s why it’s important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.
This principle is at work daily on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing website for difficult scientific questions. The structure of the site is simple: Companies post their hardest R&D problems, attaching a monetary reward to each “challenge.” The site features problems from hundreds of organization in eight different scientific categories, from agricultural science to mathematics. The challenges on the site are incredibly varied and include everything from a multinational food company looking for a “Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating” to an electronics firm trying to design a solar-powered computer.
The most impressive thing about InnoCentive, however, is its effectiveness. In 2007, Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School, began analyzing hundreds of challenges posted on the site. According to Mr. Lakhani’s data, nearly 30% of the difficult problems posted on InnoCentive were solved within six months. Sometimes, the problems were solved within days of being posted online. The secret was outsider thinking: The problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective at the margins of their own fields. Chemists didn’t solve chemistry problems; they solved molecular biology problems. And vice versa. While these people were close enough to understand the challenge, they weren’t so close that their knowledge held them back, causing them to run into the same stumbling blocks that held back their more expert peers.
It’s this ability to attack problems as a beginner, to let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure, that’s the key to creativity.
The composer Bruce Adolphe first met Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1970. Mr. Ma was just 15 years old at the time (though he’d already played for J.F.K. at the White House). Mr. Adolphe had just written his first cello piece. “Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing,” Mr. Adolphe remembers. “I’d never written for the instrument before.”
Mr. Adolphe had shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who informed him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Mr. Adolphe could correct the music, however, Mr. Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. “Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing,” Mr. Adolphe says. “And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it.”
Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled “Stop!” They looked at Mr. Ma’s left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was nearly impossible to hold. “You’re right,” said Mr. Ma, “you really can’t play that!” Yet, somehow, he did.
When Mr. Ma plays today, he still strives for that state of the beginner. “One needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello,” Mr. Ma says. “Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure.”
Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we’re rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.
For the first time in human history, it’s becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest: The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the serendipity of brain cells making a new connection.
Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It’s almost like magic.
Adapted from “Imagine: How Creativity Works” by Jonah Lehrer, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 19. Copyright © 2012 by Jonah Lehrer.
10 Quick Creativity Hacks
1. Color Me Blue. A 2009 study found that subjects solved twice as many insight puzzles when surrounded by the color blue, since it leads to more relaxed and associative thinking. Red, on other hand, makes people more alert and aware, so it is a better backdrop for solving analytic problems.
2. Get Groggy. According to a study published last month, people at their least alert time of day—think of a night person early in the morning—performed far better on various creative puzzles, sometimes improving their success rate by 50%. Grogginess has creative perks.
3. Daydream Away. Research led by Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that people who daydream more score higher on various tests of creativity.
4. Think Like A Child. When subjects are told to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds, they score significantly higher on tests of divergent thinking, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire.
5. Laugh It Up. When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.
6. Imagine That You Are Far Away. Research conducted at Indiana University found that people were much better at solving insight puzzles when they were told that the puzzles came from Greece or California, and not from a local lab.
7. Keep It Generic. One way to increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe the problem. When the verbs are extremely specific, people think in narrow terms. In contrast, the use of more generic verbs—say, “moving” instead of “driving”—can lead to dramatic increases in the number of problems solved.
8. Work Outside the Box. According to new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-foot-square workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.
9. See the World. According to research led by Adam Galinsky, students who have lived abroad were much more likely to solve a classic insight puzzle. Their experience of another culture endowed them with a valuable open-mindedness. This effect also applies to professionals: Fashion-house directors who have lived in many countries produce clothing that their peers rate as far more creative.
10. Move to a Metropolis. Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute have found that moving from a small city to one that is twice as large leads inventors to produce, on average, about 15% more patents.
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not.
But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. (“Inspiration” literally means “breathed upon.”) Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use “creativity” as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
It isn’t a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed on us by the angels. It’s a skill that anyone can learn and work to improve.
The new research also suggests how best to approach the thorniest problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.
Let’s start with the hardest problems, those challenges that at first blush seem impossible. Such problems are typically solved (if they are solved at all) in a moment of insight.
Consider the case of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a presentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good, after all, is a glue that doesn’t stick?
On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr. Fry’s thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to mark the songs he was supposed to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the service frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It seemed like an unfixable problem, one of those ordinary hassles that we’re forced to live with.
But then, during a particularly tedious sermon, Mr. Fry had an epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make use of that weak glue: It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Because the adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn’t tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually result in one of the most widely used office products in the world: the Post-it Note.
Mr. Fry’s invention was a classic moment of insight. Though such events seem to spring from nowhere, as if the cortex is surprising us with a breakthrough, scientists have begun studying how they occur. They do this by giving people “insight” puzzles, like the one that follows, and watching what happens in the brain:
A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of the women are still alive, and none of them is divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man?
If you solved the question, the solution probably came to you in an incandescent flash: The man is a priest. Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what’s needed when working on a hard creative problem.
Interestingly, Mr. Beeman and his colleagues have found that certain factors make people much more likely to have an insight, better able to detect the answers generated by the aSTG. For instance, exposing subjects to a short, humorous video—the scientists use a clip of Robin Williams doing stand-up—boosts the average success rate by about 20%.
Alcohol also works. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and intoxicated students. The scientists gave the subjects a battery of word problems known as remote associates, in which people have to find one additional word that goes with a triad of words. Drunk students solved nearly 30% more of these word problems than their sober peers.
What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we’re probably focused on the wrong answer.
And this is why relaxation helps: It isn’t until we’re soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we’re able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain’s right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.
This research also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it’s Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”
Of course, not every creative challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won’t solve every problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the temptation of a beer-fueled nap.
There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It’s the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the “rejecting process,” noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. “All great artists and thinkers are great workers,” he wrote.
This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who engraved the slogan “Art is Work” above his office door. Mr. Glaser’s most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling apart.
Mr. Glaser began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the tourist slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming design, with “I Love New York” in cursive, set against a plain white background. His proposal was quickly approved. “Everybody liked it,” Mr. Glaser says. “And if I were a normal person, I’d stop thinking about the project. But I can’t. Something about it just doesn’t feel right.”
So Mr. Glaser continued to ruminate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished. And then, after another few days of work, he was sitting in a taxi, stuck in midtown traffic. “I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw,” he remembers. “And I’m thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typeface and the big round red heart smack dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go.”
The logo that Mr. Glaser imagined in traffic has since become one of the most widely imitated works of graphic art in the world. And he only discovered the design because he refused to stop thinking about it.
But this raises an obvious question: If different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking, how can we ensure that we’re thinking in the right way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with possibilities?
The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we’re getting “warmer” or not, without knowing the solution.
This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don’t feel that we’re getting closer to the answer—we’ve hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we’re getting close, we need to keep on struggling.
Of course, both moment-of-insight problems and nose-to-the-grindstone problems assume that we have the answers to the creative problems we’re trying to solve somewhere in our heads. They’re both just a matter of getting those answers out. Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don’t have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you’re trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Steve Jobs famously declared that “creativity is just connecting things.” Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs’s leadership, for instance, Apple didn’t invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category.
And it isn’t just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs’s theory. The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.
How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out “diverse experiences,” collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don’t know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.
Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs’s wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts.
Many of the most innovative companies encourage their employees to develop these sorts of diverse networks, interacting with colleagues in totally unrelated fields. Google hosts an internal conference called Crazy Search Ideas—a sort of grown-up science fair with hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient.
Such solutions are known as “mental restructurings,” since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What’s interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That’s why it’s important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.
This principle is at work daily on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing website for difficult scientific questions. The structure of the site is simple: Companies post their hardest R&D problems, attaching a monetary reward to each “challenge.” The site features problems from hundreds of organization in eight different scientific categories, from agricultural science to mathematics. The challenges on the site are incredibly varied and include everything from a multinational food company looking for a “Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating” to an electronics firm trying to design a solar-powered computer.
The most impressive thing about InnoCentive, however, is its effectiveness. In 2007, Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School, began analyzing hundreds of challenges posted on the site. According to Mr. Lakhani’s data, nearly 30% of the difficult problems posted on InnoCentive were solved within six months. Sometimes, the problems were solved within days of being posted online. The secret was outsider thinking: The problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective at the margins of their own fields. Chemists didn’t solve chemistry problems; they solved molecular biology problems. And vice versa. While these people were close enough to understand the challenge, they weren’t so close that their knowledge held them back, causing them to run into the same stumbling blocks that held back their more expert peers.
It’s this ability to attack problems as a beginner, to let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure, that’s the key to creativity.
The composer Bruce Adolphe first met Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1970. Mr. Ma was just 15 years old at the time (though he’d already played for J.F.K. at the White House). Mr. Adolphe had just written his first cello piece. “Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing,” Mr. Adolphe remembers. “I’d never written for the instrument before.”
Mr. Adolphe had shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who informed him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Mr. Adolphe could correct the music, however, Mr. Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. “Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing,” Mr. Adolphe says. “And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it.”
Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled “Stop!” They looked at Mr. Ma’s left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was nearly impossible to hold. “You’re right,” said Mr. Ma, “you really can’t play that!” Yet, somehow, he did.
When Mr. Ma plays today, he still strives for that state of the beginner. “One needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello,” Mr. Ma says. “Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure.”
Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we’re rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.
For the first time in human history, it’s becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest: The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the serendipity of brain cells making a new connection.
Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It’s almost like magic.
Adapted from “Imagine: How Creativity Works” by Jonah Lehrer, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 19. Copyright © 2012 by Jonah Lehrer.
10 Quick Creativity Hacks
1. Color Me Blue. A 2009 study found that subjects solved twice as many insight puzzles when surrounded by the color blue, since it leads to more relaxed and associative thinking. Red, on other hand, makes people more alert and aware, so it is a better backdrop for solving analytic problems.
2. Get Groggy. According to a study published last month, people at their least alert time of day—think of a night person early in the morning—performed far better on various creative puzzles, sometimes improving their success rate by 50%. Grogginess has creative perks.
3. Daydream Away. Research led by Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that people who daydream more score higher on various tests of creativity.
4. Think Like A Child. When subjects are told to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds, they score significantly higher on tests of divergent thinking, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire.
5. Laugh It Up. When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.
6. Imagine That You Are Far Away. Research conducted at Indiana University found that people were much better at solving insight puzzles when they were told that the puzzles came from Greece or California, and not from a local lab.
7. Keep It Generic. One way to increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe the problem. When the verbs are extremely specific, people think in narrow terms. In contrast, the use of more generic verbs—say, “moving” instead of “driving”—can lead to dramatic increases in the number of problems solved.
8. Work Outside the Box. According to new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-foot-square workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.
9. See the World. According to research led by Adam Galinsky, students who have lived abroad were much more likely to solve a classic insight puzzle. Their experience of another culture endowed them with a valuable open-mindedness. This effect also applies to professionals: Fashion-house directors who have lived in many countries produce clothing that their peers rate as far more creative.
10. Move to a Metropolis. Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute have found that moving from a small city to one that is twice as large leads inventors to produce, on average, about 15% more patents.
U.S. War Games Sees Perils if Israel Strikes Iran!
By Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, NY Times, March 19, 2012
WASHINGTON—A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.
The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action—and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.
But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.
The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.
The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years. However, other Pentagon planners have said that America’s arsenal of long-range bombers, refueling aircraft and precision missiles could do far more damage to the Iranian nuclear program—if President Obama were to decide on a full-scale retaliation.
The exercise was designed specifically to test internal military communications and coordination among battle staffs in the Pentagon, Tampa, Fla., where the headquarters of the Central Command is located, and in the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of an Israeli strike. But the exercise was written to assess a pressing, potential, real-world situation.
In the end, the war game reinforced to military officials the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of a strike by Israel, and a counterstrike by Iran, the officials said.
WASHINGTON—A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead, according to American officials.
The officials said the so-called war game was not designed as a rehearsal for American military action—and they emphasized that the exercise’s results were not the only possible outcome of a real-world conflict.
But the game has raised fears among top American planners that it may be impossible to preclude American involvement in any escalating confrontation with Iran, the officials said. In the debate among policy makers over the consequences of any Israeli attack, that reaction may give stronger voice to those in the White House, Pentagon and intelligence community who have warned that a strike could prove perilous for the United States.
The results of the war game were particularly troubling to Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands all American forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, according to officials who either participated in the Central Command exercise or who were briefed on the results and spoke on condition of anonymity because of its classified nature. When the exercise had concluded earlier this month, according to the officials, General Mattis told aides that an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.
The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years. However, other Pentagon planners have said that America’s arsenal of long-range bombers, refueling aircraft and precision missiles could do far more damage to the Iranian nuclear program—if President Obama were to decide on a full-scale retaliation.
The exercise was designed specifically to test internal military communications and coordination among battle staffs in the Pentagon, Tampa, Fla., where the headquarters of the Central Command is located, and in the Persian Gulf in the aftermath of an Israeli strike. But the exercise was written to assess a pressing, potential, real-world situation.
In the end, the war game reinforced to military officials the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of a strike by Israel, and a counterstrike by Iran, the officials said.
Poland-embracing Europe but not the Euro!
By Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, March 19, 2012
WARSAW—Here in Poland, where dreary communist-style apartment blocks still dominate the landscape, the euro was once hailed as a fast-track ticket to the economic big league.
Now, after years of problems in the euro zone, Poles have realized that the big league ticket was in their pockets all along. Their own currency, the zloty, has buffered Poland from the turbulence surrounding it, and few here are in any rush to adopt the euro, even though Poland agreed to do so when it joined the European Union in 2004.
The euro, currently shared by 17 of the 27 E.U. countries, used to be a status symbol of economic success, endowing those who gave up their pesetas and lire with cheap borrowing and quick growth. Today it’s a burden, and Europe’s debt crisis has turned upside down old assumptions about the benefits of wider integration.
In Greece, whose weakness is at the heart of Europe’s troubles, policymakers privately say they never should have adopted the euro but are now trapped, with the economic consequences of leaving the currency more perilous than the pain of staying on. Other euro members rue having to contribute to the bailouts that are propping up Portugal and Ireland as well as Greece, and resent that giant Germany is calling many of the shots.
Newer E.U. members that have not yet adopted the euro, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, are no longer lining up to do so. In 2008, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk trumpeted that his country would join the euro zone in 2011; now the diminishing enthusiasm for the idea makes the prospect so remote that few policymakers will hazard a guess about when it might happen.
“It’s not a simple decision, and for the time being in Poland, it’s not under discussion,” said Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, the prime minister’s top economic adviser. “We Poles are now maybe a little more pragmatic than before. We were historically very romantic.”
With 38 million people, Poland is the largest E.U. country besides Britain not to use the euro. Boosted by the strength of the zloty, its economy is the fastest-growing among the E.U.’s 27 countries, with robust exports and a burgeoning consumer sector. It is on track to continue on that path, with growth forecast at 2.5 percent this year, even as its peers on the euro sink into yet another recession.
Poles who are wary about joining the euro see lessons in others’ misfortune. They say that Greece’s economic struggles are compounded by being locked into the euro zone, because it can’t devalue its currency in a way that would draw investors and tourists. They look especially cautiously at Slovakia and Estonia, two other former communist countries that did adopt the euro—and now have to chip in for the bailouts of richer countries.
And some Poles say they just prefer their pastel-hued zloty bank notes, which are reminiscent of Poland’s finely engraved Easter eggs, to the bland, generic feel of euros, whose designers slapped fictional bridges and buildings on them to avoid favoring any one country.
In Warsaw’s hardscrabble Praga neighborhood, Artur and Elzbieta Zawadzki have run a clothing store and gallery for 33 years. From their stoop they watched Poland’s debt crisis in 1981, the hyperinflation that came with the market economy at the end of communism and the gyrations of the zloty since. They prefer what they have now to what the euro might bring.
“The euro would make prices go up,” said Artur Zawadzki, 58. “And it would hurt little firms” such as his, he said, where three small storefronts are packed full of ceramics, quirky sculptures and clothing, all made in Poland. Staying on the zloty keeps the products cheap for tourists and brings in money for the artisans who make them. If Poland went on the euro and prices rose, business wouldn’t be as good, Zawadzki said.
“The Czech Republic doesn’t have the euro, but Slovakia does,” he said. “And it has problems. It’s a poor country. Poland will wait and watch.”
WARSAW—Here in Poland, where dreary communist-style apartment blocks still dominate the landscape, the euro was once hailed as a fast-track ticket to the economic big league.
Now, after years of problems in the euro zone, Poles have realized that the big league ticket was in their pockets all along. Their own currency, the zloty, has buffered Poland from the turbulence surrounding it, and few here are in any rush to adopt the euro, even though Poland agreed to do so when it joined the European Union in 2004.
The euro, currently shared by 17 of the 27 E.U. countries, used to be a status symbol of economic success, endowing those who gave up their pesetas and lire with cheap borrowing and quick growth. Today it’s a burden, and Europe’s debt crisis has turned upside down old assumptions about the benefits of wider integration.
In Greece, whose weakness is at the heart of Europe’s troubles, policymakers privately say they never should have adopted the euro but are now trapped, with the economic consequences of leaving the currency more perilous than the pain of staying on. Other euro members rue having to contribute to the bailouts that are propping up Portugal and Ireland as well as Greece, and resent that giant Germany is calling many of the shots.
Newer E.U. members that have not yet adopted the euro, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, are no longer lining up to do so. In 2008, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk trumpeted that his country would join the euro zone in 2011; now the diminishing enthusiasm for the idea makes the prospect so remote that few policymakers will hazard a guess about when it might happen.
“It’s not a simple decision, and for the time being in Poland, it’s not under discussion,” said Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, the prime minister’s top economic adviser. “We Poles are now maybe a little more pragmatic than before. We were historically very romantic.”
With 38 million people, Poland is the largest E.U. country besides Britain not to use the euro. Boosted by the strength of the zloty, its economy is the fastest-growing among the E.U.’s 27 countries, with robust exports and a burgeoning consumer sector. It is on track to continue on that path, with growth forecast at 2.5 percent this year, even as its peers on the euro sink into yet another recession.
Poles who are wary about joining the euro see lessons in others’ misfortune. They say that Greece’s economic struggles are compounded by being locked into the euro zone, because it can’t devalue its currency in a way that would draw investors and tourists. They look especially cautiously at Slovakia and Estonia, two other former communist countries that did adopt the euro—and now have to chip in for the bailouts of richer countries.
And some Poles say they just prefer their pastel-hued zloty bank notes, which are reminiscent of Poland’s finely engraved Easter eggs, to the bland, generic feel of euros, whose designers slapped fictional bridges and buildings on them to avoid favoring any one country.
In Warsaw’s hardscrabble Praga neighborhood, Artur and Elzbieta Zawadzki have run a clothing store and gallery for 33 years. From their stoop they watched Poland’s debt crisis in 1981, the hyperinflation that came with the market economy at the end of communism and the gyrations of the zloty since. They prefer what they have now to what the euro might bring.
“The euro would make prices go up,” said Artur Zawadzki, 58. “And it would hurt little firms” such as his, he said, where three small storefronts are packed full of ceramics, quirky sculptures and clothing, all made in Poland. Staying on the zloty keeps the products cheap for tourists and brings in money for the artisans who make them. If Poland went on the euro and prices rose, business wouldn’t be as good, Zawadzki said.
“The Czech Republic doesn’t have the euro, but Slovakia does,” he said. “And it has problems. It’s a poor country. Poland will wait and watch.”
The Death of Cash--Sweden Leads the Way!
By Malin Rising, Associated Press, Mar 17, 2012
Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.
“I can’t see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore,” says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970’s pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.
The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.
In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices—which make money on electronic transactions—have stopped handling cash altogether.
“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.
He says that’s a problem for elderly people in rural areas who don’t have credit cards or don’t know how to use them to withdraw cash.
The decline of cash is noticeable even in houses of worship, like the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, where Vicar Johan Tyrberg recently installed a card reader to make it easier for worshippers to make offerings.
“People came up to me several times and said they didn’t have cash but would still like to donate money,” Tyrberg says.
Bills and coins represent only 3 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared to an average of 9 percent in the eurozone and 7 percent in the U.S., according to the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks.
Three percent is still too much if you ask Ulvaeus. A cashless society may seem like an odd cause for someone who made a fortune on “Money, Money, Money” and other ABBA hits, but for Ulvaeus it’s a matter of security.
After his son was robbed for the third time he started advocating a faster transition to a fully digital economy, if only to make life harder for thieves.
“If there were no cash, what would they do?” says Ulvaeus, 66.
The Swedish Bankers’ Association says the shrinkage of the cash economy is already making an impact in crime statistics.
The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011—the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.
“Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.
The prevalence of electronic transactions—and the digital trail they generate—also helps explain why Sweden has less of a problem with graft than countries with a stronger cash culture, such as Italy or Greece, says economics professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.
“If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities,” says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.
In Italy—where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman—Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under €1,000 ($1,300), down from €2,500 before.
The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.
Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden’s first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
“One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time,” he says.
Most experts don’t expect cash to disappear anytime soon, but that its proportion of the economy will continue to decline as such payment options become available. Before retiring as deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank, Lars Nyberg said last year that cash will survive “like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back.”
Andrea Wramfelt, whose bowling alley in the southern city of Landskrona stopped accepting cash in 2010, makes a bolder prediction: She believes coins and notes will cease to exist in Sweden within 20 years.
“Personally I think this is what people should expect in the future,” she says.
But there are pockets of resistance. Hanna Celik, whose family owns a newspaper kiosk in a Stockholm shopping mall, says the digital economy is all about banks seeking bigger earnings.
Celik says he gets charged about 5 Swedish kronor ($0.80) for every credit card transaction, and a law passed by the Swedish Parliament prevents him from passing on that charge to consumers.
“That stinks,” he says. “For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that’s what it’s all about. They make huge profits.”
Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.
“I can’t see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore,” says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970’s pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.
The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.
In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices—which make money on electronic transactions—have stopped handling cash altogether.
“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.
He says that’s a problem for elderly people in rural areas who don’t have credit cards or don’t know how to use them to withdraw cash.
The decline of cash is noticeable even in houses of worship, like the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, where Vicar Johan Tyrberg recently installed a card reader to make it easier for worshippers to make offerings.
“People came up to me several times and said they didn’t have cash but would still like to donate money,” Tyrberg says.
Bills and coins represent only 3 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared to an average of 9 percent in the eurozone and 7 percent in the U.S., according to the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks.
Three percent is still too much if you ask Ulvaeus. A cashless society may seem like an odd cause for someone who made a fortune on “Money, Money, Money” and other ABBA hits, but for Ulvaeus it’s a matter of security.
After his son was robbed for the third time he started advocating a faster transition to a fully digital economy, if only to make life harder for thieves.
“If there were no cash, what would they do?” says Ulvaeus, 66.
The Swedish Bankers’ Association says the shrinkage of the cash economy is already making an impact in crime statistics.
The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011—the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.
“Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.
The prevalence of electronic transactions—and the digital trail they generate—also helps explain why Sweden has less of a problem with graft than countries with a stronger cash culture, such as Italy or Greece, says economics professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.
“If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities,” says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.
In Italy—where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman—Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under €1,000 ($1,300), down from €2,500 before.
The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.
Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden’s first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
“One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time,” he says.
Most experts don’t expect cash to disappear anytime soon, but that its proportion of the economy will continue to decline as such payment options become available. Before retiring as deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank, Lars Nyberg said last year that cash will survive “like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back.”
Andrea Wramfelt, whose bowling alley in the southern city of Landskrona stopped accepting cash in 2010, makes a bolder prediction: She believes coins and notes will cease to exist in Sweden within 20 years.
“Personally I think this is what people should expect in the future,” she says.
But there are pockets of resistance. Hanna Celik, whose family owns a newspaper kiosk in a Stockholm shopping mall, says the digital economy is all about banks seeking bigger earnings.
Celik says he gets charged about 5 Swedish kronor ($0.80) for every credit card transaction, and a law passed by the Swedish Parliament prevents him from passing on that charge to consumers.
“That stinks,” he says. “For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that’s what it’s all about. They make huge profits.”
Youth Turned Off by Religion and Politics!
Napp Nazworth, Christian Post, Mar. 19, 2012
Young people are turning away from churches because they associate Christianity with Republican politics, a study reveals.
Political science Professors David Campbell (University of Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard University) published their findings, “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics Is Bad for Both,” in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs. Campbell and Putnam also wrote American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), which was recently released in paperback.
One of the most surprising findings from the data they collected, Campbell said in a March 13 interview with The Christian Post, was that people are driven away or toward religious involvement because of their political leanings. In particular, those who are politically conservative, or Republican, are more likely to become churchgoers and those that are politically liberal, or Democratic, are more likely to turn away from religion.
This is the opposite of previous understandings of the interaction of religion and politics. Social scientists believed that people first got involved in a particular religion, which then influenced their politics in some way. Increasingly, more studies like Campbell and Putnam’s are finding, though, that politics is more likely to determine religion than religion determine politics.
Campbell likes to use the image of a “brand” from marketing. The Republican brand has been increasingly associated with religion and social conservatism due to the influence of the Christian Right, a social movement which has been a part of the Republican coalition since the 1980s. Moderates and Democrats are uncomfortable with that brand and seek to not be identified with it.
“A lot of what goes on in politics is not so much people thinking through political positions but it’s sort of a visceral reaction you have to a brand, whether it be Republicans or Democrats,” Campbell said.
Political conservatives and Republicans, who identify positively with the brand, have been more likely to attend church regularly. Campbell suspects that is due to conservatives being more likely to associate with other churchgoers in their social networks.
“You’re a conservative, you’re around people who are churchgoing, so you begin to adopt the idea that, well, this is what it means to be someone who is conservative, I ought to attend church regularly, I also think of myself as religious,” Campbell explained.
While these trends were found in the general population, Campbell and Putnam found them to be much stronger among young adults, those under 30, and especially those under 25.
“Anything you might say about the general population, double it or square it when you talk about the young,” Campbell said.
Since young voters are more likely to be politically liberal, especially on the issue of gay rights, they have been driven away from the church by the perception of a close association between religion and Republican politics.
To young adults, Campbell and Putnam write, “‘religion’ means ‘Republican,’ ‘intolerant,’ and ‘homophobic.’ Since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves—or wish to be seen by their peers—as religious.”
Campbell and Putnam report that between 2006 and 2011, the proportion of the population that reported having no religion rose modestly, from 17 percent to 19 percent, but among young Americans rose five times as much.
While it has been true that young people of previous generations have been less interested in religion, then become more religious as they become older, today’s generation of young adults are more likely than previous generations of young adults to be without a religious affiliation. About one-third of 20-somethings were without religion in 2011 compared to about one-fourth of 20-somethings in 2006.
Campbell noted that the trends he and Putnam identified are mostly among those who can be described as “nominally” religious. Those who are the least committed to a church or denomination are the ones who are most likely to drop out. When they do drop out, they are not likely to become atheists. Formerly churchgoing young adults remain comfortable with a belief in God but uncomfortable with organized religion.
“The reason this is important for clergy is these are not people who are lost completely to religion. It’s almost like they’re an untapped constituency, or untapped market, that could be brought back to a different kind of religion, or a religion that they thought was stripped of politics,” Campbell argued.
Young people are turning away from churches because they associate Christianity with Republican politics, a study reveals.
Political science Professors David Campbell (University of Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard University) published their findings, “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics Is Bad for Both,” in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs. Campbell and Putnam also wrote American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010), which was recently released in paperback.
One of the most surprising findings from the data they collected, Campbell said in a March 13 interview with The Christian Post, was that people are driven away or toward religious involvement because of their political leanings. In particular, those who are politically conservative, or Republican, are more likely to become churchgoers and those that are politically liberal, or Democratic, are more likely to turn away from religion.
This is the opposite of previous understandings of the interaction of religion and politics. Social scientists believed that people first got involved in a particular religion, which then influenced their politics in some way. Increasingly, more studies like Campbell and Putnam’s are finding, though, that politics is more likely to determine religion than religion determine politics.
Campbell likes to use the image of a “brand” from marketing. The Republican brand has been increasingly associated with religion and social conservatism due to the influence of the Christian Right, a social movement which has been a part of the Republican coalition since the 1980s. Moderates and Democrats are uncomfortable with that brand and seek to not be identified with it.
“A lot of what goes on in politics is not so much people thinking through political positions but it’s sort of a visceral reaction you have to a brand, whether it be Republicans or Democrats,” Campbell said.
Political conservatives and Republicans, who identify positively with the brand, have been more likely to attend church regularly. Campbell suspects that is due to conservatives being more likely to associate with other churchgoers in their social networks.
“You’re a conservative, you’re around people who are churchgoing, so you begin to adopt the idea that, well, this is what it means to be someone who is conservative, I ought to attend church regularly, I also think of myself as religious,” Campbell explained.
While these trends were found in the general population, Campbell and Putnam found them to be much stronger among young adults, those under 30, and especially those under 25.
“Anything you might say about the general population, double it or square it when you talk about the young,” Campbell said.
Since young voters are more likely to be politically liberal, especially on the issue of gay rights, they have been driven away from the church by the perception of a close association between religion and Republican politics.
To young adults, Campbell and Putnam write, “‘religion’ means ‘Republican,’ ‘intolerant,’ and ‘homophobic.’ Since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves—or wish to be seen by their peers—as religious.”
Campbell and Putnam report that between 2006 and 2011, the proportion of the population that reported having no religion rose modestly, from 17 percent to 19 percent, but among young Americans rose five times as much.
While it has been true that young people of previous generations have been less interested in religion, then become more religious as they become older, today’s generation of young adults are more likely than previous generations of young adults to be without a religious affiliation. About one-third of 20-somethings were without religion in 2011 compared to about one-fourth of 20-somethings in 2006.
Campbell noted that the trends he and Putnam identified are mostly among those who can be described as “nominally” religious. Those who are the least committed to a church or denomination are the ones who are most likely to drop out. When they do drop out, they are not likely to become atheists. Formerly churchgoing young adults remain comfortable with a belief in God but uncomfortable with organized religion.
“The reason this is important for clergy is these are not people who are lost completely to religion. It’s almost like they’re an untapped constituency, or untapped market, that could be brought back to a different kind of religion, or a religion that they thought was stripped of politics,” Campbell argued.
How to find photos you can use legally!- Flickr
By Dave Johnson, CBS MoneyWatch, March 19, 2012
No matter what you publish—a blog, updates to the company website, project reports, or even the venerable tri-fold—you no doubt need artwork to complement it. Most people run to the Internet in search of photos and clip art, since those images are free and easily accessed. But a lot of those resources are copyrighted. That’s easy to avoid, though, if you know how and where to look for the right kind of images.
In a nutshell, you should look for photos and other images which have a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is the name of a non-profit organization that has developed a number of licenses, all available for free, to help artists share their work.
Here’s the most important take-away: In general, a Creative Commons license allows you to re-use the image in your own work.
There are actually a handful of conditions that can be attached to a Creative Commons license. The artist can choose to allow or prohibit commercial use of their work, allow it to be modified, and they might impose a “share alike” condition. Essentially, that means that anyone who re-modifies the image must also publish that new work under the same Creative Common license.
So, how do you find these photos that have Creative Commons licenses?
Well, thankfully, the Internet is awash in photos with Creative Commons licenses, but the single best place to look is the photo-sharing site Flickr, which makes it easy for people to license their photos as Creative Commons. For example, when I need to finds a photo online for this blog, I always head directly to Flickr’s search page and select both “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and “Find content to use commercially.”
Another powerful alternative is the excellent CCFinder. This free program is a Creative Commons-licensed photo search engine that you can use to find any sort of photo by keyword, and then visit the web page it lives on or download the image directly.
No matter what you publish—a blog, updates to the company website, project reports, or even the venerable tri-fold—you no doubt need artwork to complement it. Most people run to the Internet in search of photos and clip art, since those images are free and easily accessed. But a lot of those resources are copyrighted. That’s easy to avoid, though, if you know how and where to look for the right kind of images.
In a nutshell, you should look for photos and other images which have a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is the name of a non-profit organization that has developed a number of licenses, all available for free, to help artists share their work.
Here’s the most important take-away: In general, a Creative Commons license allows you to re-use the image in your own work.
There are actually a handful of conditions that can be attached to a Creative Commons license. The artist can choose to allow or prohibit commercial use of their work, allow it to be modified, and they might impose a “share alike” condition. Essentially, that means that anyone who re-modifies the image must also publish that new work under the same Creative Common license.
So, how do you find these photos that have Creative Commons licenses?
Well, thankfully, the Internet is awash in photos with Creative Commons licenses, but the single best place to look is the photo-sharing site Flickr, which makes it easy for people to license their photos as Creative Commons. For example, when I need to finds a photo online for this blog, I always head directly to Flickr’s search page and select both “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” and “Find content to use commercially.”
Another powerful alternative is the excellent CCFinder. This free program is a Creative Commons-licensed photo search engine that you can use to find any sort of photo by keyword, and then visit the web page it lives on or download the image directly.
Streams that Never Run Dry!
By Virginia Brandt Berg
How sweet the memory as a child, when disappointments came
My mother’s faith and courage sweet, that put my own to shame.
For in the time of trouble deep, my faith would weaken sore,
While hers just seemed to thrive on trials and only grow the more.
And then it was I’d hear her say as my doubts took to wings,
“Why, God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.”
But, after years, I wandered from the shrine at mother’s knee:
For seeming wise and learned men had clearly shown to me
That such a simple, childlike faith was now quite obsolete,
Belonging just to ages past; today, for fools ’twas meet.
“All this,” they said, “is only myth, and from gross ignorance springs,
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.”
Their way seemed well in weather fair, but Oh! when troubles came
It didn’t meet the need at all; ’twas such a futile game.
“Now just hold on,” the scoffer said. “There’s nothing else to do.”
But that was just the trouble when there was naught to hold on to.
For I had lost the simple faith that such assurance brings,
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.
So I turned back with eager heart to the old-fashioned way;
And now I know that God is real, no matter what they say.
For better proof could not be had than truly answered prayer,
And answered too in such a way as to know God is there.
And where is greater happiness than the peace that this truth brings
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.
I can never forget the day when it dawned upon my consciousness as a reality, a fact, that the promises of the Bible were practical and could actually be applied to my everyday needs. It was a revelation to me. I had been taught the Bible since earliest childhood, but never had I realized that God meant exactly what He said in the numerous promises given in His Word, and that He would fulfill them to the very letter if faith would reach out and claim them in a definite manner.
God’s Word says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.”1
So it is a very serious matter to either overlook or look lightly at the promises of God, because by these we become “partakers of the divine nature.” I would never have dared to take a promise and step out on it, expecting God to really meet me, for to my limited faith they were only beautiful scripture language, never meant to be taken seriously or for practical application. I fear I was like the woman who was asked, “Well, why do you think God put all these promises in His Word? What are they for?”
“Why, just to fill up space,” I suppose.
I believe, however, if I had thought about it at all, I was more like the very ignorant Scottish woman who had lived most of her life way back in the hill country of Scotland, who was so poor she was unable to pay her rent and so had to depend upon her church to take care of it for her.
One day when her pastor, a very kind-hearted man, brought the rent to her, he said, “Mrs. McKintrick, you will pardon me if I speak very plainly to you about something, and I am sure you will understand. Your friends who are helping you with the rent cannot understand why it is that your boy does not support you. I understand he has a very good position in Australia, and that he is a good boy and loves you dearly. Is this not the case?”
“Oh yes,” said the mother, “and he never forgets me, for every week he writes me the most loving letter. I would like for you to see one of his letters.” Curious to know more of such a son, who could so love a mother and yet leave her without support, the pastor instantly signified that he would be glad to hear some of the letters. Soon the woman returned with two packages, one of which she put in the pastor’s hands and said, “These are his letters.” The pastor was untying the faded string about them when she said, “With every letter he always sends me a pretty picture. They aren’t very big, and just fit nicely in the letter, but it shows he thinks about me.”
The pastor lifted his head, interested at once. “A picture in every letter.” He was more curious than ever. “May I see them also?”
“Oh, surely,” she answered, “some are of a man’s head, some of a man sitting on a horse, and a number of them have the king’s picture on them. See, this one here has the King of England; long live the king!”
“Long live your son,” said the astonished pastor. “My dear friend, do you know that you are a rich woman? These are banknotes. This is money. Why, you have wealth here; and to think of how you have suffered and done without, when right here in the house all the time you had riches and thought they were just pretty pictures.”
This was surely my trouble when it came to the promises in God’s Word. I thought they were just pretty pictures, just beautiful language. For instance, Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.” To me this was just beautiful poetry, a picture story. I never dreamed for a moment that it had a literal application—that Jesus would be to us just such a shepherd and fulfill every verse of that Psalm, if we really trusted Him.
What a pity that so many today look upon the hundreds of promises in God’s Word in the same manner. How few there are who are like the other dear saint of God in whose home the minister was taking tea. While she was in the kitchen, he picked up her much-worn Bible and rather absently began to turn the leaves, when he noticed here and there along the margin these two letters: T.P. When she came back with the tea he said, “Auntie, I was enjoying looking at your Bible, but what do these letters mean that you have written here in so many places? T.P., and here it is again, T.P.”
“Oh, brother,” she said, her face lighting with joy. “That means tried and proven. In the time of some great need I have taken those promises and claimed them as my very own. They are the ones that I have tried and proven true.”
How precious, indeed, and that’s exactly the way the Lord intends us to use them. He wants us to prove His Word, to use it in our time of need. “Prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord,”2 until with strength, faith, and sweet confidence we can write on the margin beside many a verse, “tried and proven.”
God’s Word says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises,” and there are hundreds of them. Abundant supply! Limitless resources! “Streams that never run dry.” “Let us go in and possess the land,” or we will be like the thick-headed Israelites for whom God had made such large provision, and yet they never inherited the promise because of their unbelief.
“This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.”
How sweet the memory as a child, when disappointments came
My mother’s faith and courage sweet, that put my own to shame.
For in the time of trouble deep, my faith would weaken sore,
While hers just seemed to thrive on trials and only grow the more.
And then it was I’d hear her say as my doubts took to wings,
“Why, God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.”
But, after years, I wandered from the shrine at mother’s knee:
For seeming wise and learned men had clearly shown to me
That such a simple, childlike faith was now quite obsolete,
Belonging just to ages past; today, for fools ’twas meet.
“All this,” they said, “is only myth, and from gross ignorance springs,
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.”
Their way seemed well in weather fair, but Oh! when troubles came
It didn’t meet the need at all; ’twas such a futile game.
“Now just hold on,” the scoffer said. “There’s nothing else to do.”
But that was just the trouble when there was naught to hold on to.
For I had lost the simple faith that such assurance brings,
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.
So I turned back with eager heart to the old-fashioned way;
And now I know that God is real, no matter what they say.
For better proof could not be had than truly answered prayer,
And answered too in such a way as to know God is there.
And where is greater happiness than the peace that this truth brings
That God is still upon the throne, and prayer changes things.
I can never forget the day when it dawned upon my consciousness as a reality, a fact, that the promises of the Bible were practical and could actually be applied to my everyday needs. It was a revelation to me. I had been taught the Bible since earliest childhood, but never had I realized that God meant exactly what He said in the numerous promises given in His Word, and that He would fulfill them to the very letter if faith would reach out and claim them in a definite manner.
God’s Word says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.”1
So it is a very serious matter to either overlook or look lightly at the promises of God, because by these we become “partakers of the divine nature.” I would never have dared to take a promise and step out on it, expecting God to really meet me, for to my limited faith they were only beautiful scripture language, never meant to be taken seriously or for practical application. I fear I was like the woman who was asked, “Well, why do you think God put all these promises in His Word? What are they for?”
“Why, just to fill up space,” I suppose.
I believe, however, if I had thought about it at all, I was more like the very ignorant Scottish woman who had lived most of her life way back in the hill country of Scotland, who was so poor she was unable to pay her rent and so had to depend upon her church to take care of it for her.
One day when her pastor, a very kind-hearted man, brought the rent to her, he said, “Mrs. McKintrick, you will pardon me if I speak very plainly to you about something, and I am sure you will understand. Your friends who are helping you with the rent cannot understand why it is that your boy does not support you. I understand he has a very good position in Australia, and that he is a good boy and loves you dearly. Is this not the case?”
“Oh yes,” said the mother, “and he never forgets me, for every week he writes me the most loving letter. I would like for you to see one of his letters.” Curious to know more of such a son, who could so love a mother and yet leave her without support, the pastor instantly signified that he would be glad to hear some of the letters. Soon the woman returned with two packages, one of which she put in the pastor’s hands and said, “These are his letters.” The pastor was untying the faded string about them when she said, “With every letter he always sends me a pretty picture. They aren’t very big, and just fit nicely in the letter, but it shows he thinks about me.”
The pastor lifted his head, interested at once. “A picture in every letter.” He was more curious than ever. “May I see them also?”
“Oh, surely,” she answered, “some are of a man’s head, some of a man sitting on a horse, and a number of them have the king’s picture on them. See, this one here has the King of England; long live the king!”
“Long live your son,” said the astonished pastor. “My dear friend, do you know that you are a rich woman? These are banknotes. This is money. Why, you have wealth here; and to think of how you have suffered and done without, when right here in the house all the time you had riches and thought they were just pretty pictures.”
This was surely my trouble when it came to the promises in God’s Word. I thought they were just pretty pictures, just beautiful language. For instance, Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.” To me this was just beautiful poetry, a picture story. I never dreamed for a moment that it had a literal application—that Jesus would be to us just such a shepherd and fulfill every verse of that Psalm, if we really trusted Him.
What a pity that so many today look upon the hundreds of promises in God’s Word in the same manner. How few there are who are like the other dear saint of God in whose home the minister was taking tea. While she was in the kitchen, he picked up her much-worn Bible and rather absently began to turn the leaves, when he noticed here and there along the margin these two letters: T.P. When she came back with the tea he said, “Auntie, I was enjoying looking at your Bible, but what do these letters mean that you have written here in so many places? T.P., and here it is again, T.P.”
“Oh, brother,” she said, her face lighting with joy. “That means tried and proven. In the time of some great need I have taken those promises and claimed them as my very own. They are the ones that I have tried and proven true.”
How precious, indeed, and that’s exactly the way the Lord intends us to use them. He wants us to prove His Word, to use it in our time of need. “Prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord,”2 until with strength, faith, and sweet confidence we can write on the margin beside many a verse, “tried and proven.”
God’s Word says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises,” and there are hundreds of them. Abundant supply! Limitless resources! “Streams that never run dry.” “Let us go in and possess the land,” or we will be like the thick-headed Israelites for whom God had made such large provision, and yet they never inherited the promise because of their unbelief.
“This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.”
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
My Son Martin!
March 17th, 2010 was a shocking day for me as it was the day I received the phone call late at night that my nearly 27 year-old son Martin had gone missing. He died as the result of a swimming accident in Bermuda where he had gone to work as a carpenter six months earlier.
Martin was the fifth child of my first marriage. Born on May 14th, 1983, he was a Taurus. He was a good carpenter and won various awards for his workmanship while he was at college in Darlington, England. He was also a good photographer, a good artist and had the possibility of studying architecture. In the end, he decided instead to go to the Bermudas and work first, as he didn't want to take out a student loan and be in debt. He was a hard worker, conscientious and diligent. He was kind and generous. Like his brother Andrew said, “He made us proud.”
Martin was the fifth child of my first marriage. Born on May 14th, 1983, he was a Taurus. He was a good carpenter and won various awards for his workmanship while he was at college in Darlington, England. He was also a good photographer, a good artist and had the possibility of studying architecture. In the end, he decided instead to go to the Bermudas and work first, as he didn't want to take out a student loan and be in debt. He was a hard worker, conscientious and diligent. He was kind and generous. Like his brother Andrew said, “He made us proud.”
What can I say after six years? Yes, the pain has subsided. But, I still want to say 'I love you.' I want to say 'I am sorry.' I am sorry I wasn't a better father. I am sorry I wasn't able to help you when you needed me. I am sorry your life ended so tragically. But, Martin, we have a big God. He is love. He's name is Jesus and He has promised to prepare a place for us in the spiritual realm, that where He is, we will be, also. He has said, that eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has it entered in our minds the marvelous wonders God has prepared for those that love Him. I am sure you must have experienced some of those wonders already, so you know what I am talking about.
I love you, Martin. Thank you for being a wonderful son. You've taught me a lot. I am waiting for the day when we will hug one another again in that eternal now and thank our wonderful Father together for all His love for us! Keep me in your prayers. You have already helped me to become a better father, but it's an on-going task. I love you, son. May God bless and keep you in His loving arms. Amen
I love you, Martin. Thank you for being a wonderful son. You've taught me a lot. I am waiting for the day when we will hug one another again in that eternal now and thank our wonderful Father together for all His love for us! Keep me in your prayers. You have already helped me to become a better father, but it's an on-going task. I love you, son. May God bless and keep you in His loving arms. Amen
