Mayor comes to Christ by way of an awful sermon

Fifteen years ago, Nathan Lewis, pastor of Evergreen Presbyterian Church in Beaverton OR, found himself preaching what he thought might be his "all-time worst" sermon to the newly established church plant. To make matters worse, the mayor of Beaverton happened to be visiting that Sunday. But when the service ended, Nathan was astonished to see that the mayor was deeply moved. "I finally understand what the Gospel means - I want to become a Christian," he said. Says Nathan, "I realized that the Holy Spirit had taken what I thought was a bad sermon and used it to make a change in the mayor's life."

(from "Multiply", the Mission to North America newsletter, Spring 2011)

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Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl

"With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.

"The containment structures appear to be working, and the latest reactor designs aren't vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here.

"The decay heat must be absorbed, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.

"If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing.

(excerpted from William Tucker, Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2011)

Please pray for the Japanese people who are suffering in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami!

Abraham Lincoln on the purposes of our Almighty God

"The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. . . . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay."

(in a letter written by Abraham Lincoln, September 1864, during the darkest days of the American Civil War)

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Bowling Green Ohio is 10% Muslim

Traveling along I-75 South about
six miles outside of Bowling Green

Please pray for Christar workers and their ministry to refugees in the Bowling Green, Ohio area - it is estimated that 10 percent of the city's people are Muslims. Pray the the Lord would raise up more workers to reach out to this people group.

(from Christar's prayer bulletin, February 2011)

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The Gospel according to NASA

The good news given to us in the Bible is that Jesus Christ has paid for the sins of those who trust in him, and will return to create a New Heavens and a New Earth. If you do not want to accept this gift from God, here is an alternative gospel, from NASA and other potential colonizers of the heavens, as reported by Ben Austen in the March 2011 issue of Popular Science.

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"Given the risks humans pose to the planet, we might someday leave Earth simply to conserve it." (Liberty Foundation)

"The dinosaurs died out because they were too stupid to build an adequate space faring civilization." (Tihamer Toth-Fejel, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems)

"After completing a $200-million study in 2000, NASA reported that a colony could be dug several feet beneath our own moon's surface or covered within an existing crater to protect residents from the constant bombardment of high-energy cosmic radiation." (NASA)

"The presence of life-sustaining ice on the moon is a precursur to permanent lunar bases, hotels, and even casinos." (National Space Society)

"Mars compares to the moon as North America compared to Greenland in the previous age of maritime exploration." (Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society)

"In 2002, NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft detected continent-size regions of water ice in the Martian ground, and in 2008, photographs from the Phoenix Mars lander confirmed the presence of ice there." (NASA)

According to Princeton University physicist, Gerard O'Neill, "a massive freestanding orbital habitat" could be designed consisting of large cylinders spinning along an axis at a rate of about one rotation per minute.... Populations on these ships would be kept well above 150 people to avoid the consequences of inbreeding, although ideally the rotating habitats would exist in socially interactive clusters. Residents could also use stored DNA whenever the gene pool needed more variety." (Al Globus, contractor at NASA Ames Research Center)

"If you get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." (Robert Heinlein)

"A massive centrifuge, called a 'slingatron', could be used to spin objects until they reach a velocity at which they can be flung out of our gravitational well." (physicist Derek Tidman)

"We should keep an open mind about the possibility of more advanced approaches, including wormhole teleportation and faster-than-light warp drive" (Marc Millis, Tau Zero Foundation)

"Self-replicating nanobots could one day be sent to an asteroid, where they would bore through the surface and begin the mining process, or they might be shuttled to the moon or a distant planet, where they would reproduce and spread and in time create an entire industrial civilization ready for people on their arrival. Human DNA might even be packed along with these civilization-building nanobots and used to spawn people when the time was right." (Mark Hopkins, National Space Society)

"There is no reason to think of human biological evolution as a passing phase; one day we all might be reengineered into sentient machines, our identities uploaded and transmitted into deep space, with scaled-down ships no longer having to provide radiation protection, closed-loop habitats or legroom." (Mark Hopkins, National Space Society) (author Ben Austen responded "your vision of the final frontier, sexless and bodiless as is, doesn't seem especially romantic". Hopkins acknowledged, "Well, maybe not, but you didn't ask me about romance.)

"A manned mission to Mars is already financially and technologically achievable, if only we drop the notion of a return flight." (Dirk Schulze-Makuch, astrobiologist at Washington State University)

"In 20 years, humans would have established a permanent Martian base." (Dirk Schulze-Makuch)

"In the weeks after Dirk Schulze-Makuch and his co-author published their article in the Journal of Cosmology, they received more than 100 emails, from 16-year olds and 65-year olds alike, each one announcing a readiness to leave for Mars immediately."

"Right now, most of the progress toward space settlement is being accomplished in the private sector."

(excerpts from After Earth: Why, Where, How, and When We Might Leave Our Home Planet, by Ben Austen, Popular Science, March 2011, p. 46ff)

(Marko's comment: I hope you live long enough to see this dream, and that you are one of the tiny elect number of people chosen by our leaders to embark on this odyssey, since there will be much less room than the 6 billion people that God currently accomodates on our planet Earth!)