The Balsam of God's Love

by Dennis Edwards:

Six years ago my twenty-seven year old son died suddenly from a swimming accident. On midnight the 17th of March, Saint Patrick’s Day, I received a call from my son’s roommate. My son was missing and his clothing had been found on a nearby beach.

My first reaction was to get down on my knees and cry out to the Lord in prayer. As I did, I had a vision of my son entering into Heaven to the joy of my parents and other departed loved ones. I immediately knew he would not be found alive. Five days later his body washed ashore and was found by some tourists.

What helped through those difficult days? What was the healing balm? Of course, having a relationship with the Lord and being able to hear His voice in prophecy was a great help and stabilizing affect at that time. The prophecies I received from others were also very strengthening. Reading His word to receive comfort from the written word was important, too. Crying out to him with all my heart in prayer was another important aspect of the healing and helped me in ways I probably do not consciously understand.

But perhaps the most important key to my healing in a tangible, physical way, that I remember most clearly above all the rest was the love and encouragement I received from others. For that to happen, I had to confess and share my heartache. The Bible says, “Confess your faults one to another. Pray one for another that you may be healed.” (James 5:16) Confessing to others what I was going through enabled me to receive the encouragement that I needed and was perhaps the key to victory and healing.

I remember my first day in Bermuda where my son had died. While asking for directions at a shop, I mentioned to the shop girl that I was the father of the young man who had recently drowned. “You poor thing,” she sighed. “Can I come around and give you a big hug.” On numerous occasions I received encouragement from strangers that I met in this way.

God promises to comfort us in our times of tribulation. Jesus said He would send the comforter, the Holy Spirit, to us. He wants us to be comforted. But if we keep our troubles locked inside, if we keep the pain in, we won’t receive the love and encouragement we need and our healing process will be longer and perhaps never complete.

Therefore, don’t keep those emotions hidden. Let the tears flow. Share your pain. In doing so, others will respond with the balm of love you need. Don’t suffer in silence. Share your hurt and others around you will help heal it. God works this way to draw us closer to one another and be His arms and His hands and His lips and His ears to one another.

When we receive the love and encouragement that we need in our time of anguish, we are able later to return that love and encouragement to other needy or suffering souls that pass our way. “Blessed be God…who comforts us in all our tribulation, so that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” (2Corinthians 1:3-4)

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Book Explores Ways Faith Is Kept, or Lost, Over Generations

By Mark Oppenheimer, NY Times, Jan. 31, 2014

Vern L. Bengtson came from a religious family—to put it mildly.

“My dad was a minister of the Evangelical Covenant Church,” Professor Bengtson, who teaches social work at the University of Southern California, said from his home in Santa Barbara this week. “He had nine brothers and sisters, and all were staunch Evangelical Covenant Church people. I had 33 cousins on my father’s side, all staunch Evangelical Covenant Church people.”

In 1963, after college at a school sponsored by his historically Swedish denomination, Professor Bengtson entered graduate school at the University of Chicago. There, he was an oddity in two ways. All of a sudden, most of his peers were irreligious. And while he happily took cues from his parents, his classmates didn’t trust anyone over 30.

To a graduate student, this state of being the odd man out suggested a research question: Why do some young people adopt their families’ views, while others strike out on their own?

In 1969, shortly after being hired at U.S.C., Professor Bengtson began a study of 350 families, whom he interviewed regularly until 2008. In some families, he interviewed four generations. In all, his respondents were born in years spanning 1878 to 1989.

Professor Bengtson’s project yielded more than 200 articles, many focused on aging and intergenerational conflict, topics on which he has become an expert. Now, at last, he is ready to draw some conclusions about religion, the issue that got him started.

In “Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down Across Generations” (Oxford; $29.95), written with two colleagues, Professor Bengtson argues that families do a pretty good job of passing religious faith to their children. More interesting, for those who fret about children leaving the fold—that is, clergy members and parents everywhere—Professor Bengtson has theories about why some children keep the faith while others leave.

According to Professor Bengtson, parents have as much hold as ever on children’s souls. “Parent-youth similarity in religiosity has not declined over 35 years,” from 1970 to 2005, he writes. Denominational loyalty is down—kids feel free to ditch the Baptists for the Presbyterians—but younger generations are no less likely to inherit core beliefs, like biblical literalism, the importance of church attendance or, for that matter, atheism.

As to why some children follow their parents, spiritually speaking, Professor Bengtson’s research confirmed some common-sense assumptions. For example, it helps if parents model religiosity: if you talk about church but never go, children sense hypocrisy. And intermarriage doesn’t help. If you’re Jewish (or Mormon, Catholic, etc.), and want your child to share your religion, it helps to marry someone of the same faith.

But Professor Bengtson’s major conclusion is that family bonds matter. Displays of parental piety, like “teaching the right beliefs and practices” and “keeping strictly to the law,” can be for naught if the children don’t feel close to the parents. “Without emotional bonding,” these other factors are “not sufficient for transmission,” he writes.

Professor Bengtson also found that one parent matters more than the other—and it’s Dad. “But what is really interesting,” he writes, “is that, for religious transmission, having a close bond with one’s father matters even more than a close relationship with one’s mother.”

There are some exceptions. In general, however, “fervent faith cannot compensate for a distant dad.” Over and over in interviews, Professor Bengtson said, he found that “a father who is an exemplar, a pillar of the church, but doesn’t provide warmth and affirmation to his kid does not have kids who follow him in his faith.”

Professor Bengtson’s own family hewed to the rule of the nurturing dad.

“I had this great big jovial grandfather, who just exuded warmth,” Professor Bengtson said. “All of his 10 kids followed him in the faith. And it was true of his father, going back to Sweden, and it was true of my father. There’s this pattern of paternal warmth that seems to characterize the Bengtson family. And that may be why there are so many evangelical Bengtsons.”

Professor Bengtson also found that grandparents have a strong influence on children’s religious development, and that freedom to leave can encourage children to stay. “Allowing children religious choice can encourage religious continuity,” he writes.

Then there is the conclusion that the professor now exemplifies himself: “Don’t give up on the Prodigals”—those who drift away—“because many do return.”

In graduate school and after, Professor Bengtson abandoned his faith. His despairing mother once wrote to him, “Vern, if I have to choose between you and my Jesus, I will choose Jesus.” Recently, however, too late for his mother to know, Professor Bengtson has found his way back to church.

“By golly, I had this religious experience when I was about 67 years old,” said Professor Bengtson, now 72. Easter morning of 2009, he woke up and decided to check out “this Gothic-looking church down on State Street” in Santa Barbara. He entered church a bit late, after the service had started.

“The organ was roaring,” he recalled, “the congregation was singing, the pillars were going up to heaven, the light was sifting down through the stained-glass windows. I was just overwhelmed. I found my way to a pew and started crying. … I haven’t been the same since.”

Professor Bengtson now sings in the church choir. His return—albeit to a progressive Episcopal church—has, he says, made him a better scholar. He now believes that some of his survey data are, while necessary, also “trivial—questionnaires asking, ‘Do you agree or disagree that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God?’ “

Parents aren’t just trying to pass on to their children a checklist of beliefs, he said. Better than ever, he grasps “the kind of passion these parents had for wanting their children to achieve the peace and the joy and the hope and the inspiration they had found for themselves.”

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We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer

By Rita F. Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman, NY Times, Jan. 30, 2014

DESPITE great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.

The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation—CT scans in particular—has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

Of course, early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans. There is, however, evidence of its harms.

The relationship between radiation and the development of cancer is well understood: A single CT scan exposes a patient to the amount of radiation that epidemiologic evidence shows can be cancer-causing. The risks have been demonstrated directly in two large clinical studies in Britain and Australia. In the British study, children exposed to multiple CT scans were found to be three times more likely to develop leukemia and brain cancer. In a 2011 report sponsored by Susan G. Komen, the Institute of Medicine concluded that radiation from medical imaging, and hormone therapy, the use of which has substantially declined in the last decade, were the leading environmental causes of breast cancer, and advised that women reduce their exposure to unnecessary CT scans.

CTs, once rare, are now routine. One in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan every year, and many of them get more than one. This growth is a result of multiple factors, including a desire for early diagnoses, higher quality imaging technology, direct-to-consumer advertising and the financial interests of doctors and imaging centers. CT scanners cost millions of dollars; having made that investment, purchasers are strongly incentivized to use them.

While it is difficult to know how many cancers will result from medical imaging, a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute estimates that CT scans conducted in 2007 will cause a projected 29,000 excess cancer cases and 14,500 excess deaths over the lifetime of those exposed. Given the many scans performed over the last several years, a reasonable estimate of excess lifetime cancers would be in the hundreds of thousands. According to our calculations, unless we change our current practices, 3 percent to 5 percent of all future cancers may result from exposure to medical imaging.

Before agreeing to a CT scan, patients should ask: Will it lead to a better treatment and outcome? Would they get that therapy without the test? Are there alternatives that don’t involve radiation, like ultrasound or M.R.I.? When a CT scan is necessary, how can radiation exposure be minimized?

Neither doctors nor patients want to return to the days before CT scans. But we need to find ways to use them without killing people in the process.

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Pressing times on streets of Egypt

Ruth Pollard, The Age, February 1, 2014

It doesn’t take long for a crowd to turn on you on the streets of Egypt these days.

A finger pointed, an accusation levelled, and you are literally running for your life.

For months now I have been hesitant to even pull my notebook from my bag when I am reporting from the street, such is the animosity against, and suspicion of, foreign journalists.

But I am lucky—I can usually move through a crowd, observe the mood, chat to a few people and leave quickly before drawing too much attention.

Not so photographers, whose cameras have become a magnet for angry crowds and security services who smash, grab and detain.

Two weeks ago I was a few blocks from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, interviewing stallholders and passers-by about the constitutional referendum due to begin the next day.

I had identified myself as an Australian newspaper journalist. As people began to speak, I took out my notebook.

A middle-aged man suddenly began paying close attention to my questions—little more than simple inquiries about what people thought of the constitution, was it better than the last one they had voted in a little over a year ago?

“You are from TV?” he asked. “No, a newspaper,” I replied, acutely alert to where the conversation was going.

“You are from Jazeera,” he shouted. “No,” I insisted. “A newspaper—look,” I said, gesturing around me: “I have no camera crew.”

“You are a spy,” he yelled, as people crowded around us and began repeating his accusations as if they were facts. And again: “You are from Jazeera.”

The mood darkened. There was no possibility of negotiation, no hope of discussion. It was time to run.

I dashed through the all-but-stationary traffic, turned down a side street to avoid police gathered on one corner in case they grabbed me, and in a few short minutes I came to a roundabout where the cars were moving, flagged a cab and went home.

It was an incident hardly worth mentioning. Unlike so many of my colleagues, I was not beaten by the crowd or detained by security forces.

It was just another day trying to report on the wave of revolution and crackdown, fledgling democracy and repression that Egyptians are riding.

And it was another reporting exercise cut short by an angry crowd, encouraged by an interim government, backed by a powerful security establishment and fuelled by the country’s media which are loudly feeding a tide of xenophobia that threatens to spill over at the slightest provocation. Like taking out a notebook, or interviewing the other side of politics.

The threat of arrest is ever-present. The detention of our journalist colleagues from al-Jazeera—Australian Peter Greste, dual Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, along with Egyptians Baher Mohamed, Abdullah al-Shami and Mohamed Bader—weighs heavily on our minds.

Greste, an award-winning journalist who grew up in Brisbane, was arrested with his colleagues at a Cairo hotel on December 29.

They are accused of broadcasting false news in the service of the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood.

The media have always had a difficult relationship with the powerful in Egypt. Repression was rife during president Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule and the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government of Mohamed Mursi sought to quash criticism of his short-lived, dysfunctional administration.

But the targeting of journalists from al-Jazeera English over the network’s alleged pro-Brotherhood stance—a charge denied by al-Jazeera executives—has spilt over to encompass all foreign media.

I will no longer answer “sahafia”—the feminine form of “journalist” in Arabic—when I am asked what I do. Not since a taxi driver took a journalist straight to a police station after he revealed his profession.

Soon after the incident downtown I travelled with a photographer to Fayoum, two hours from Cairo, to report on the second day of voting in the constitutional referendum.

Soldiers backed by local plain-clothes police armed with shotguns were in control of every polling booth. A judge oversaw the voting inside.

During the day our every move—interviewing voters, taking photos or seeking a judge’s permission to enter the room—was filmed by a soldier on his mobile phone.

Our driver was also filmed, his identity now inextricably linked to the foreign journalists he takes with extreme care from point A to point B.

Despite the lure of great pictures and interviews, we decided against getting out of the car in the local markets. The mood felt wrong, the threat of violence too great.

During an earlier visit to the site of a bomb blast in Cairo’s Nasr City, my colleague and I lasted just over seven minutes observing and photographing the wreckage before security police challenged our presence and it seemed the crowd could turn on us.

Only a month ago I worried that a quick visit to a protest or bomb blast site was not enough to do a decent reporting job. Now I wonder if I should go at all.

At least 12 journalists were detained and several were wounded as they tried to cover the third anniversary of the overthrow of Mubarak.

Almost every journalist and photographer I know has been detained, and those of us who haven’t have regularly run for cover, hiding in residential buildings, ducking into cafes, talking our way into the safety of a big hotel.

The threat of being detained, or a crowd turning on us, versus the need to cover the story, is a constant debate among those covering Egypt.

Every day we hope we have the right answer, because one wrong move can be devastating.

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Proof Of Vodka’s Grasp: Russian Men Still Dying Young

By Alice G. Walton, Forbes, Jan. 31, 2014

A quarter of Russian men die before the age of 55, according to a new study in The Lancet. If this sounds high, it is. In contrast, just 7% of men in the UK die before 55. The new large-scale study tracked Russian men over time, finding that much of the high death rate was due to alcohol and alcohol-related causes. And although the vodka-related mortality rate was always fairly high in Russia, some interesting patterns emerged—namely, that the death rate waxed and waned according to how government alcohol policies changed over the years.

The new study asked 151,000 living men about their alcohol use while they were still living. The men were followed for a decade, and researchers tracked how many died, and from what cause.

It turned out that the risk of death for 35-55 year old men consuming three or more half-liter bottles per week was 35%. This jumped to a whopping 64% for men between 55 and 74. The authors say that their “study strongly reinforces other evidence that vodka is a major cause of the high risk of premature death in Russian adults.”

For more moderate consumers between ages 35 and 55, the story was less grim. Men who drank less than a bottle per week had only a 16% chance of dying. Those who drank 1 to 2.9 bottles per week had a 20% risk of dying.

The causes of death? Most were due to alcohol poisoning, accidents, violence, suicide, and to another group of diseases, including throat cancer, liver cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, pancreatitis, liver disease, acute ischemic heart disease, and other unspecified medical conditions.

The big caveat is that just about all of the men were smokers; the authors say that in Russia heavy drinking and heavy smoking are almost inextricably linked, which makes the situation even more difficult to pull apart. But there’s also hope, the authors say.

What’s interesting is that alcohol-related deaths fluctuated with the times. After Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 alcohol restrictions, the authors point out, alcohol consumption—and deaths—fell by 25%. But after the fall of communism, both went way up. And after the alcohol policy reforms in 2006, consumption was reduced again by about a third.

“Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the past 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations in death was vodka,” said study author Sir Richard Peto. “This has been shown in retrospective studies, and now we’ve confirmed it in a big, reliable prospective study.”

And the study may have even underestimated the effect, according to the authors, since drinking habits likely shifted over time.

As study author David Zaridze told the BBC, much of the problem is due to the kind of drinking the men engage in. “They binge drink. That’s the main problem. It’s the pattern of drinking not the per-capita amount they are drinking… They sometimes say it’s because of the cold weather but this is just an excuse. This is the nation’s lifestyle that needs to change.”

Luckily, the trends suggest that change is possible, and it can happen relatively quickly. “The significant decline in Russian mortality rates following the introduction of moderate alcohol controls in 2006 demonstrates the reversibility of the health crisis from hazardous drinking,” said Zaridze. “People who drink spirits in hazardous ways greatly reduce their risk of premature death as soon as they stop.”

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