Easter Wonders

http://directors.tfionline.com/post/easter-wonders/
by Peter Amsterdam

At this time of year we celebrate the very heart of our faith—the resurrection of Jesus. It is the central theme of the gospel, the key component which proves the validity of everything Jesus taught. The resurrection tells us that Jesus is the Son of God; that as believers we have salvation and forgiveness, we are God’s children, and we’ll be with Him for eternity in heaven.

The apostle Paul said that if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead, then the message of Christianity would be without foundation, and the faith of those who believe would be worthless.1 But as the angel told the women who came to Jesus’ tomb, He has risen from the dead, just as He said He would. This fact validates our belief system and our faith. Jesus is alive! He lives! And because He does, so do we. Jesus said: I am the resurrection and the life.

Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.2

I love that we celebrate Easter and all that it means. I’d like to talk about three effects of the resurrection that are especially meaningful for me.
A sense of renewed awe and wonder

Jesus rising from the grave means that He conquered death, and in doing so, freed us from being bound only to this earth life. Though we presently live in a broken world, we have the promise of a perfect world to come. While we experience heartbreak and disappointment today, our tears and fears will be forever wiped away in our life after this life. He will make all things right. While we presently sometimes struggle with confusion, sadness, fear, and uncertainty, when we join Him and are in His presence, we will experience joy unspeakable.

This is possible because God, who so deeply loves us and wants us to be in relationship with Him, made a plan by which we could become His children. This plan required God entering this world through a miraculous birth and, after living among us, giving His life for us on the cross—and then rising from the dead. Through the completion of His plan, we can enter into the relationship with Him that we were created for—both now and forever.

That God has made it possible for us to have His presence in our lives now and to dwell in His presence eternally is awesome. The appropriate response on our part is one of eternal gratitude, praise, worship, and adoration, for we have been given the greatest gift possible.
Increased faith for life

I believe that if we think about, meditate on, and appreciate what Jesus’ resurrection meant, what it achieved, and how it has changed our lives forever, we can gain increased faith for every area of our lives. Jesus not only rose from the dead, but He’s in the business of helping us rise above the dead ends, deadwood, and deadweights in our lives.

Sometimes we resign ourselves to situations and circumstances because we feel there’s no hope for change, that things are what they are and that we simply have to endure them. However, God is in the business of changing things, of breathing new life into hearts, relationships, or situations that may be or seem “dead.” Perhaps you’re in a situation that seems out of your control or as if all hope is gone, but no situation is beyond Jesus’ control; His power is unlimited. When Jesus was on earth, He regularly did the impossible. He multiplied the loaves and fishes, walked on water, healed the paralyzed, and gave sight to the blind. Dead people were even raised to life.

Mark Batterson expressed this concept well:

If you read the Gospels, what you discover is this: Jesus routinely reversed the irreversible! He reversed weather systems, He reversed blindness. There were no nerves between the optic nerve and the visual cortex, nothing there, no one had ever heard of a man being born blind and then receiving sight, but Jesus reverses things that are irreversible. He reverses leprosy. 2,000 years ago, He reversed death itself. So what we celebrate is the fact that there is a God who is higher than, who is bigger than, the universal laws and the universe that He has created. What God accomplished on that resurrection morning is He defeated death, He reversed the irreversible. And I would suggest that that is exactly what He came to do in your life. He came to reverse the effects of sin. He came to reverse the effects of death. That’s who He is and what He does.3
Renewed commitment to spread the Good News

Jesus coming to earth, dying on the cross for us, and His subsequent resurrection forever changed the course of history. These actions allowed each of us the opportunity to accept Jesus and become part of God’s family. We should be impressed with how wonderful the gift of salvation is and be moved by the great need to share it with as many as we can. This is the most precious gift anyone can possibly receive, and we who have been blessed with it should feel compelled to share it with others.

It’s easy to get so busy with our responsibilities and daily commitments, and end up feeling that there’s no time left to be one of God’s ambassadors. But is that really the case? Or is it a matter of priorities? When we give careful thought to the magnitude and meaning of the priceless gift God has given us, it motivates us to regularly share it with others.

Receiving Jesus’ gift of salvation and reconciliation is the singularly most important thing that anyone can ever do. It’s a gift that will better their life, heal their heart, give them hope for the future, and enable them to help those that they love, not only here and now, but in the life to come.

Jesus telling His disciples to preach the gospel throughout the world to everyone informs us that He wants each man, woman, and child to have the opportunity to become a part of His family, to be saved from their sins, and to experience His forgiveness and reconciliation. Each of us who has already received His marvelous gift, who know what it is to live within God’s family, to be forgiven for our sins, to have God’s Spirit within us, should feel compelled to share the gospel with those who are searching.

We who believe in the resurrection, have been saved because of the resurrection, and will experience resurrection, should remind ourselves as we celebrate the resurrection of God the Son that we are proclaimers of the risen Christ to those who have not yet heard that God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.4

Happy Easter!

1 1 Corinthians 15:12–20 HCSB (Holman Christian Standard Bible).


2 John 11:25–26 ESV.


3 Mark Batterson, National Community Church, April 12, 2009 (Easter).


4 John 3:16 ESV.

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For Israeli teens, military is rite of passage

By Oded Balilty, AP, Mar 31, 2015

YAKUM, Israel (AP)—Israeli high school seniors have more on their minds than prom and final exams.

With a mandatory three-year military service looming after graduation, Jewish teenage boys, and increasingly girls too, are gearing up for the draft, getting into shape and trying to improve their chances of acceptance into elite combat units. Girls serve two years, but very few are placed in combat positions.

Military service has long been a national rite of passage in Israel, with high school students competing to get into the most prestigious combat units. Some train solo, others in groups, to be ready for the pre-draft workouts the military holds for those who want to become air force pilots, naval officers or infantry commandos.

The military is Israel’s most admired institution, and men serve in reserve units well into their 40s. Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs are largely exempt.

Among secular youth, it is customary to spend afternoons and weekends in military-style training preparations.

One such group of about 400 seniors from around the country has been doing strength and endurance training with a military veteran to prepare for the rigors of the army, including running through an obstacle course.

“The mandatory military service is one of the experiences that most shapes the lives of Israelis,” said Nir Cohen, 31, a former paratrooper who runs the “Excellent Training” program. “We try to prepare them both physically and mentally.”

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America suffers from too much democracy

By Richard Cohen, Washington Post, March 30, 2015

Whatever the eulogists of Lee Kuan Yew told you about the Singapore he created or the Asia that seems resurgent, the praise of him says just as much about America. In editorials, essays, television commentaries and just plain conversations, we appear to be suffering from an acute case of authoritarian envy.

Lee was a disciplinarian. He ran Singapore like a severe private school. He brooked no dissent, bad manners, corruption, recreational drugs, sloth, laziness or rambunctious teenagers. He was famous for using the cane to punish vandals and the death penalty for drug dealers. He knew his city-state had only one natural resource and that was the industriousness and discipline of its people. They were his students and he was the headmaster.

Lee ran a one-man state and he ran it, on occasion, repressively. But his administrative brilliance and his economic success are what earned him such adulation. He rose in stature not just on account of what he did but on account of what we could not. Lee, as they once said of Mussolini, made the trains run on time. America’s trains too often don’t run at all.

We suffer from an excess of democracy. We have a Congress that has been gridlocked for as long as anyone can remember. It is at the mercy of any extremist from anywhere in the country who can threaten a primary fight. Our infrastructure is eroding, yet we seem incapable of doing anything about it. Lee Kuan Yew knew what to do about it. If you need a bridge, build it.

Henry Kissinger eulogized that “Lee’s domestic methods fell short of the prescriptions of current U.S. constitutional theory. But so, in fairness, did the democracy of Thomas Jefferson’s time, with its limited franchise, property qualifications for voting and slavery.” It is deeply flattering to Lee that Kissinger’s admiration for him produced such an odd comparison. Lee was a man of the 20th and 21st centuries, Jefferson of the 18th and 19th centuries. Lee had little respect or tolerance for a free press; Jefferson said he could not live without one. (“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”)

Lee’s pragmatism is what commended him to so many thoughtful people. He believed in education, a rigorous meritocracy and, most critically, his own people. Singapore had nothing in the way of mineral wealth, but it did have a culture based on Confucian precepts. (Singapore may be ethnically mixed, but it is 75 percent Chinese.) This meant that hard work, discipline, family values and obedience were cherished.

In the United States it is considered highly offensive and deeply retrograde to value one culture over another and to search always for economic reasons for disparities. In Singapore, Lee knew he had a winner in the Chinese culture and promoted it. Indeed, he made it the national ethic. In this country, the national ethic is not to work too hard and to denigrate those who do. Self-esteem sometimes seems more important than attainment. We are, as we keep saying, No. 1—at self-delusion.

The veneration of Lee is not based on any one attribute. Among other things, he was personally charming, and I know of no one who met him who did not come away enamored. But the cult of Lee, which has been building for years, is partly in admiration of him and partly due to the rueful feeling that our own democracy has grown absurdly chaotic. (Shall we shut down the government one more time?) Lee got the job done. Too often, it’s more than we can say for ourselves.

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1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA

BBC, 30 March 2015

A 1,000-year-old treatment for eye infections could hold the key to killing antibiotic-resistant superbugs, experts have said.

Scientists recreated a 9th Century Anglo-Saxon remedy using onion, garlic and part of a cow’s stomach.

They were “astonished” to find it almost completely wiped out methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, otherwise known as MRSA.

Their findings will be presented at a national microbiology conference.

The remedy was found in Bald’s Leechbook—an old English manuscript containing instructions on various treatments held in the British Library.

Anglo-Saxon expert Dr Christina Lee, from the University of Nottingham, translated the recipe for an “eye salve”, which includes garlic, onion or leeks, wine and cow bile.

Experts from the university’s microbiology team recreated the remedy and then tested it on large cultures of MRSA.

The leechbook is one of the earliest examples of what might loosely be called a medical textbook

It seems Anglo-Saxon physicians may actually have practised something pretty close to the modern scientific method, with its emphasis on observation and experimentation.

Bald’s Leechbook could hold some important lessons for our modern day battle with anti-microbial resistance.

In each case, they tested the individual ingredients against the bacteria, as well as the remedy and a control solution.

They found the remedy killed up to 90% of MRSA bacteria and believe it is the effect of the recipe rather than one single ingredient.

Dr Freya Harrison said the team thought the eye salve might show a “small amount of antibiotic activity”.

“But we were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was,” she said.

Dr Lee said there are many similar medieval books with treatments for what appear to be bacterial infections.

She said this could suggest people were carrying out detailed scientific studies centuries before bacteria were discovered.

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We millennials lack a roadmap to adulthood

Zach Stafford, The Guardian, 30 March 2015

Life is often referred to as a “highway”, to borrow from Tom Cochrane, and for my generation that hasn’t changed.

“Adulthood today lacks a well-defined roadmap”, writes Steven Mintz, in his forthcoming book The Prime of Life. “Today, individuals must define or negotiate their roles and relationships without clear rules or precedents to follow”.

This is especially true for us millennials, who are the product of a terrible economy that has required us to hit the emergency button in our lives. But it’s becoming evident that we have been given a roadmap to a road that we are not even on and then are blamed for going in the wrong direction.

I recently turned 25 and I am failing at being an adult. I don’t see myself buying a house anytime soon or investing in property. I don’t want to have kids any time soon because I honestly don’t know how I afford to feed myself half the time, let alone a child. And the only person I want to marry is the barista at the cafe by my house, but I haven’t even told him my name.

Traditionally, by 25 we are expected to have accomplished, or at least gotten close to accomplishing, five pillars of “adulthood”: having children, graduating from college, getting married, finding a career and buying a home. It’s no wonder that, since turning 25, I find myself having daily anxieties about not being the kind of adult my parents or grandparents were.

The Great Recession made us boomerang back home or stay in school to remain afloat during the storm. While this situation seemed to make us too reliant on parents or other support systems, it isn’t like millennials weren’t trying. I mean, honestly, who wouldn’t want to be completely independent? We aren’t complete failures, we’re just delayed and it’s really not our fault.

On the surface, this new adulthood may seem selfish and narcissistic. While I agree that my generation may be a tad self-obsessed, primarily due to the advent of social media, this new adulthood will potentially create a better world.

According to the Pew Research Center series “Millennials, A portrait of generation next’, we are group that is confident, connected and open to change even in the face of much adversity. But delayed in maturing.

The same study found that we are more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal, and, even though 37% of us are unemployed, nine-in-ten report having enough money to eventually meet our financial goals.

The author Jeffrey Arnett wrote a book about “emerging adults”, a demographic aged between 18-29 years old, that is experiencing an extended adolescence. This extra time allows us to “develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives”.

While this new stage of development may have pushed us back, that’s not actually a terrible thing, he suggests. Due to more time to think and explore, we’ve become better people and know what we want and are able to create a better foundation for our futures.

Arnett told the New York Times Magazine in 2013 that emerging adulthood is a time where 20-somethings don’t see themselves as adults and go through: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.”

Due to this new stage of exploration, our deadline for getting our acts together is now around 30 or later, and not earlier, like in prior decades. And with longer life expectancies, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we are taking our time growing up, since we now have so much more life to live.

So no matter what your thoughts towards millennials are, adulthood is officially pushed delayed with no signs of it reverting back to 1960s standards. It’s just going to take some time for my generation to get where others were years before them.

So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. And as my mom would say while driving: We’ll get there when we get there.

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Nuts Are a Nutritional Powerhouse

By Jane E. Brody, NY Times, March 30, 2015

Sadly, for more than half my life, I had avoided some of nature’s most perfect and healthful foods: nuts and peanuts. I had been mistakenly told as a teenager that nuts were fattening and constipating, effects I certainly wanted to avoid.

But based on what I have learned to the contrary from recent studies, I now enjoy them daily as nuts or nut butters in my breakfasts, salads, sandwiches and snacks. A baggie of lightly salted peanuts accompanies me on excursions everywhere; I even keep a jar of peanuts in my car.

A series of large studies, including the Nurses’ Health Study of 76,464 women and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study of 42,498 men, found that the more nuts people consumed, the less likely they were to die at any given age, especially of cancer or heart disease. And a clinical trial conducted in Spain showed that death rates were lower among those consuming a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra nuts.

However, these studies were conducted almost entirely among relatively well-to-do, well educated, white individuals, and despite the researchers’ care in controlling for other factors that could have influenced the results, there remained the possibility that characteristics of the participants other than nut consumption could account for their reduced death rates.

Now, strong links between nuts and peanuts and better health have also been found in a major study of people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and varied ethnic groups—blacks, whites and Asians—many of whom had serious risk factors for premature death, like smoking, obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes.

The results were published in March in JAMA Internal Medicine by researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Their study, conducted among more than 200,000 men and women in the Southern United States and Shanghai, found that the more nuts people consumed, the lower their death rates from all causes and especially from heart disease and stroke.

And while it is true that more people today are allergic to nuts, and to peanuts in particular, than ever before, two recent studies have pointed to ways that may prevent children from developing a nut allergy. The first study, published last year in JAMA Pediatrics, found that women who consumed the most nuts or peanuts during their pregnancies were least likely to have children with this allergy. The reduction in risk was highest among children whose mothers ate nuts five or more times a month.

The second study, published in February in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that introducing peanuts into the diets of infants 4 to 11 months old who were considered at high risk of developing a peanut allergy actually greatly reduced their risk of being allergic at age 5. The researchers, from King’s College London, suggested that the common practice of withholding peanuts from babies may in fact account for the recent rise in peanut allergies.

Guidelines issued in 2000 by the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended withholding peanuts from children at risk of developing allergies until they were 3. The academy has since revised its position, suggesting that evidence that avoiding specific foods beyond 4 to 6 months of age prevented food allergies was lacking. Now a further revision by the academy may be in order, though to prevent choking, babies should not be given whole nuts—only ground nuts or nut butters.

Before returning to the relationship between nuts and better health, I want to reassure weight-conscious readers that, when consumed in reasonable quantities, nuts are not fattening and can even help people lose weight and maintain the loss.

Yes, relatively speaking, nuts are high in fat, and fat contains more calories per gram (9) than protein or sugar (4 grams), even more than alcohol (7 grams). But a review of studies of large populations here and abroad by Richard D. Mattes of Purdue University and co-authors most often found that adults who eat nuts weigh less than nut avoiders. And children who ate peanuts usually had a lower body mass index than those who did not.

Clinical trials found that adding lots of nuts to one’s diet had a limited effect on body weight. But more important, participants in studies that included nuts in a weight-loss regimen lost more weight and ended up with a smaller waist and less body fat than participants who did not eat nuts.

One explanation for the weight control benefit of nuts is the satiation provided by their high fat and protein content, which can reduce snacking on sweets and other carbohydrates. Another is that all the calories in nuts, especially whole nuts, may not be absorbed because they resist breakdown by body enzymes.

Finally, in a 2013 study in The British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Mattes and colleagues reported that consuming peanut butter or peanuts for breakfast helps to control hunger, stabilizing blood sugar and reducing the desire to eat for up to 8 to 12 hours. (My favorite breakfast: half a banana, sliced, with each slice topped by a half-teaspoon of crunchy peanut butter.)

As for their cardiovascular benefits, nuts are rich sources of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which prompted a health claim by the Food and Drug Administration that “Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease.” Two exceptions are macadamia nuts and cashews, which have too much saturated fat to qualify for this claim.

Nuts are also rich sources of dietary fiber, and almonds, Brazil nuts, peanuts and walnuts may actually help prevent constipation, countering my long-held concerns about their effects on digestion. Other beneficial substances in nuts include vitamins, antioxidants and other phytochemicals. All of which adds up to nuts as a nutritional powerhouse.

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https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

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Arab Nations to Form Military Force to Counter Iran and Islamist Extremists

By David D. Kirkpatrick, NY Times, March 29, 2015

CAIRO—The Arab states said on Sunday that they had agreed to form a combined military force to counter both Iranian influence and Islamist extremism, a gesture many analysts attributed in large part to their drive for more independence from Washington.

The agreement came as American and other Western diplomats in Lausanne, Switzerland, were racing to beat a self-imposed deadline of Tuesday to reach a deal with Iran that would restrict its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions. In response, Saudi Arabia and other American allies in the region have made clear that they are seeking to bolster independent regional security measures because they see the proposed accord as a betrayal of Washington’s commitment to their security.

Many of the Arab nations, including Egypt, Jordan and most of the Persian Gulf monarchies, have thrown their support behind a Saudi Arabia-led campaign of airstrikes to counter advances by the Iranian-backed Houthi movement in Yemen; Washington is providing only intelligence and logistical support, but Saudi Arabia is leading the bombing while Egypt, with the largest Arab army, has pledged to send ground troops “if necessary.”

How the agreement, announced at a meeting of the League of Arab States in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, will be implemented is not known. Arab military chiefs are expected to work out more of the details. Officials of the Arab League said the leadership of the combined forces, including the question of whether there might be a single command or a coalition of national units, was still under discussion. Each country’s participation is expected to be voluntary.

But the proposal gained credibility because it was announced in part by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former general who led the military takeover here in 2013.

“The challenges facing our national Arab security are grave, and we have succeeded in diagnosing the reasons behind it,” Mr. Sisi said, without specifying those reasons. The meeting, he added, was “pumping the blood of hope in the arteries of Arab cooperation.”

Egypt has long considered itself the shield and protector of the oil-rich but sparsely populated gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia. Yet Mr. Sisi has an especially close relationship with the Saudis and their gulf allies because they supported his ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013. The gulf monarchies have contributed tens of billions in financial assistance to Egypt since then, including new pledges of an additional $12 billion announced this month.

Last year, Mr. Sisi also allowed jets from the United Arab Emirates to take off from Egypt for airstrikes against an Islamist-allied political faction in Libya. This year, the Egyptian Air Force carried out a strike of its own in Darnah, in eastern Libya, in retaliation for the beheading of a group of Egyptian Christians by an arm of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Both Egypt and its gulf allies remain acutely concerned about Libya’s civil strife and the Islamist groups that have flourished as the government and other national institutions have crumbled.

The idea of a joint military force “has been there before but not so seriously,” said Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. He noted that Arab joint defense treaties date to 1950 and a joint military command was previously formed for a time in the mid-1960s. That was during the era of Pan-Arab nationalism, when Arab governments joined forces against Israel. That vision ended in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, with a humiliating defeat.

“It is the renewal of an old idea,” Mr. Soltan said, “but this time the level of seriousness looks higher, even if we do not know yet whether the outcome this time will be different than in the past.”

Speaking at the meeting in Sharm el Sheikh, Nabil el-Araby, the secretary general of the Arab League, vowed that the Saudi-led airstrikes against the Houthi movement would continue until the Houthis had surrendered, apparently leaving little hope for negotiating a prompt end to the violence.

The campaign “will continue until all Houthi militias retreat and disarm, and a strong unified Yemen returns,” he said, declaring that the intervention had saved Yemen from sliding into the abyss.

The Houthi movement, which originated in the north of Yemen and follows a strain of Shiite Islam, has seized control of the country’s capital, Sana, and other large cities in part by allying itself with military and security forces still loyal to Yemen’s former strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Mr. Saleh was removed in 2012, after an Arab Spring uprising, in a transitional deal brokered by Saudi Arabia and the other gulf countries. While the Houthis have received financial support from Tehran, the Iranians do not seem to exert a strong influence over the group as they do, for example, with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Houthis have previously fought as many as a half-dozen different civil conflicts against Yemen’s central government since 2004. None of the previous battles have succeeded in eliminating or fully disarming the movement.

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