Marsha's Blog

  After my grandson’s comment last week about not wanting to be rich, since that would mean “too much stuff to put away”, I decided to look into the lives of a few folks who have typified that attitude by the way they lived. The first name that comes to mind is Rennie Sanderson Otani. She just passed away this last Valentines Day, so she’s been in my thoughts lately.   When we went to Japan in 1978, she’d already been there 18 years and was making a tremendous impression on Japanese mission work. Let me tell you about her. She was born into a Mississippi minister's little gaggle of girls in 1927, surrounded by music, church and the love of the Lord, all wrapped up in southern happiness.  But it wasn’t long before she left all that behind, headed first for Southwestern Seminary in Texas and then from there to Japan as an appointed missionary by the Southern Baptist Convention.  She arrived in Yokohama in the spring of 1961 and immersed herself into language school.  As soon as she g

  My youngest grandson was sent to give himself his nightly bath.  He’s just turned 5 and is very proud of this responsibility, but with all the excitement of older brother having a birthday and the cake being readied for the festivities, I guess he just gave himself that extra measure of autonomy and filled the bathtub right up to the top. Mother swung by in her rounds and ‘noticed’ the flagrant abuse of conservatism in a house where money spent on water is one of the things they govern quite carefully. She said to me, “Mae, would you go in there, I’m just too busy and since I’m a bit perturbed, I might be a bit too hard on him”. So I did. “Well well", I said casually, as I looked thru the bubbles and saw a very happy child. “I guess you’re just having a luxurious bath, aren’t you?” I continued. Then, seeing his puzzlement, I asked him if he knew what “luxurious" meant, and he clearly didn’t. So off the top of my head, I began to explain... “It’s like rich people, who have s

  Okay so maybe you’re thinking that this whole “properties of light” series is going on forever, and I’m glad you thought of that, since today is the fifth and last “enlightenment” I’m going to share with you. I mentioned already that light is (1) the source of all life, (2) the source of all power, (3) it’s everywhere, ie, omnipresent, and (4) it’s constant and unchanging. Now here’s #5: Light is infinite, which is to say, eternal. Think back: do you remember a time when you took a flashlight (“torch” to you Southern Hemispherers) and pointed it at the stars? That beam of light is still going, you know. It’s dispersing as it travels, the beam getting wider and wider, but it’s still going, constant speed, never stopping. Astronomers tell us that the universe, which as I said earlier is that area encompassed by light, is expanding. You get a big telescope, and every direction you look, you’ll see the light moving … and it’s moving away from us.     They can tell that by something calle

  And so today we’re talking about those five properties of light again. Remember the first three? Light is the source of all life, the source of all power, and it’s everywhere. Keep in mind that coincidentally (Not!), GOD is the source of all life, and power, and He is everywhere. Do we see a pattern? This time, I want us to think about the 4th property of light, which is that it’s CONSTANT. I hadn’t given much thought to this, but did you know that light is ALWAYS the same?  Light cannot be heated or cooled, sped up or slowed down.  Doing those things can result is MORE light, but the light itself will stay the same. Now here’s where it gets amazing: all material things, all matter, even time, changes in relation to the speed of light, not the other way around.  That may be hard to take on board, but Albert Einstein, back in 1938, demonstrated conclusively that every thing, even time, will change in relation to light.   The atomic clock, without dispute the most accurate time piece i