Links to Your World, Thursday June 19

Woman calls the police because she didn’t get enough sprinkles on her ice cream—and the police published the call.

 

You’ve got smell! Apparently the “scent message” is now a thing.

 

At first I thought this was, like, an Onion headline: UT researchers find that people who say "like" are more thoughtful.

 

Bible verses that atheists love

 

How to talk like an Austinite in 90 seconds

 

“You will, without a doubt, have someone close to you in your family come out as gay or lesbian, if not already, then sometime in the future. How should a Christian parent or grandparent respond?” Russell Moore suggests an answer.

 

He said he aspired in his paintings to portray a world without the Fall; his own life was an exhibit of that Fall.

 

Venus and Mars in the workplace

 

“We have become so used to the way that rock sublimates our spiritual desires that it can be jolting to tune into [Christian] pop music that asks us to make plain what we seek. So much of rock is a spiritual fantasy, a sonic playground for highly secularized religious sentiment. And fantasy, in whatever form, can make the real thing look too real.” I’ve never heard anyone make this claim before, but it’s a tremendous insight into why fans of pop and rock music don’t tend to like overtly-Christian songs in the genre. In Stephen Webb’s First Things post, “In Praise of Praise Music.”

Links to Your World, Thursday June 5

 

D-Day anniversary is tomorrow. This is a cool series of interactive photos showing you several D-Day scenes then and now.

 

Hurricanes with female names don’t get taken as seriously—and end up taking more lives.

 

After the Bible, what is a Christian’s most important book? You will be surprised; I hope you will agree.

 

Regarding the woman the Sudanese government has condemned to die for converting to Christianity, Russell Moore writes “Mariam is a true daughter of Sarah, who does not ‘fear anything that is frightening’” (1 Pet. 3:7).

 

In a recent study, participants were asked to guess the age of women in photos. While the participants examined the photos, certain odors were piped into the room. “The way the participants visually perceived the women was strongly influenced by what odor they were smelling. When they smelled something pleasant, they rated the older looking faces as younger, and the younger faces as even younger. That was not the case with bad smells. Older and younger faces were perceived as similar in age.” (Time)

 

Why no one gets your sarcastic emails.

 

Sermon Illustration Alert: Google Gets 10,000 Requests A Day To Be ‘Forgotten’ in Europe

 

Twenty-five years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Chinese know anything about it, or attribute the reports to CIA propaganda.

 

“Law enforcement officers in Colorado and neighboring states, emergency room doctors and legalization opponents increasingly are highlighting a series of recent problems as cautionary lessons for other states flirting with loosening marijuana laws.”  NYT

 

What Myths Do We Most Commonly Realize Are False in Our 20s?

To Forbear Is Divine

When giving guidance on life with others, Paul said we should be busy -- as the King James puts it -- "forbearing one another and forgiving one another." (Colossians 3:13)

Between the two, you're going to have to forbear a lot more than forgive.

Across my years, I've heard a lot of sermons on forgiveness, I've read a lot of books on forgiveness, and I've been inspired by a lot of dramatic stories about forgiveness -- but it's forbearance that is demanded of us a lot more often. Think about it:

If you forgive your marriage partner for adultery, that may become the subject of a magazine article. But you won't have to struggle to forgive something like that near as much as you have to forbear your husband's irritating habit of using the remote to switch between three shows at a time!

Or, if you forgive your father's murderer, people will want to write a book about you, but you may never be faced with that. And yet every day you're called on to bear up under your roommate's inability to leave the kitchen as clean as you'd prefer it.

Both forgiveness and forbearance are required of Christians, but it's forbearance that is called for hundreds of times more often than forgiveness.

How can you increase your capacity for forbearance? You pay attention to four things.

Personality. Some are introverts, others are extroverts. In making decisions, some are rational and others are spontaneous. Not everyone thinks like us, reacts like us, or communicates like us. The more we are sensitive to this, the better we can forbear annoyances.

Perspective. As the old saying goes, "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes." The old proverb advises us to see things as others see them.

Progress. We can be more patient with people if we take into account where they are in their physical and emotional and spiritual progress.

Problems. So much of someone else's behavior that frustrates us is behavior that springs from the stuff they're dealing with.

This Sunday @ 10, join us for a deeper study into the power of forgiveness and forbearance.

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