So my mind was no help in knowing you.
Conveniently hobbled I excused myself
from the work of understanding.
Now I see you were in no way slow but
full of crushing frustration, confined by your moat
at the center of your island inarticulate
to the point of slamming your head with a palm
to jar loose what you could not say,
not tongue-tied but mind-tied,
kept by genetic leash from joining
our world of connection, striving to snap it
so that you might join in our jokes
………………,…join in our sadness
or have us join with you in yours
The articular release of the metacarpophalangeal joint produces a typical cracking sound, resulting in what is commonly referred to as the cracking of knuckles. Despite over sixty years of research, the source of the knuckle cracking sound continues to be debated due to inconclusive experimental evidence as a result of limitations in the temporal resolution of non-invasive physiological imaging techniques. To support the available experimental data and shed light onto the source of the cracking sound, we have developed a mathematical model of the events leading to the generation of the sound. The model resolves the dynamics of a collapsing cavitation bubble in the synovial fluid inside a metacarpophalangeal joint during an articular release.
Heavenly Father, it’d be awesome not to have to perpetually relearn the same lesson, especially this one: Your grace is all we need, and Christ’s power is most fully released through our weakness. This way of life is counterintuitive, paradoxical, and humbling. But it is also stress-relieving and peace-giving. The pressure is off. We can leave being awesome to you.
We all look forward to the Day when we’ll never again crave competency and control, self-sufficiency or self-anything. We know that Day is coming, Father, but well before then, please free us to boast in (not bemoan) our weaknesses. Grant us faith (and joy) to accept our limitations and quirks; our body pains and heart wounds; the story you gave us and the grace you offer us.
Though we’d rather be swaggering vessels of togetherness and impressiveness, giftedness and smartness, help us delight in being fragile jars of clay—releasing the aroma of grace, the wonders of your love, and the beauty of your heart. Free us from comparing ourselves to anybody, and from envying some other story than our own. May Jesus increasingly be our treasure, the gospel our delight, and grace our sufficiency.
No preacher can afford to be wrong at this point, as though the gospel can ever be adapted. To be wrong about the gospel is to be wrong everywhere else that truly matters. To be wrong here is to stand in opposition to the saving mission and sin-bearing death of Jesus Christ. To be wrong here is to contradict the meaning of the substitutionary death and bodily resurrection of Christ. To be wrong here is to divert souls away from the only way that leads to God and to usher them onto the broad path that leads to destruction.
The very essence of the gospel itself demands that every pulpit guard its exclusivity. When the message of the cross is rightly defined, the singularity of the saving purposes of God is automatically established. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone—period, end of paragraph, end of discussion. To this truth, the Bible has a “zero tolerance” policy for any equivocation outside of its borders.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.
In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate aggregator; every morsel from every source you care about, fed directly to you. Or, more commonly, fed to you through an intermediary known as an RSS feed reader, software that helps you wrangle all of those disparate headlines into something remotely manageable.
