Eating Spicy Food Linked to a Longer Life
Nicholas Bakalar:
After controlling for family medical history, age, education, diabetes, smoking and many other variables, the researchers found that compared with eating hot food, mainly chili peppers, less than once a week, having it once or twice a week resulted in a 10 percent reduced overall risk for death. Consuming spicy food six to seven times a week reduced the risk by 14 percent.
This is great news! I’m eating buffalo wings this week to celebrate.
(HT: David Chartier[1])
Todd, you came back!
Todd Bumgarner, lead pastor of 2 Pillars Church, on his return from sabbatical:
But do you want to know how the overwhelming majority of people have responded? They’ve said, “We didn’t think you would come back.” I’ve had—no exaggeration—over 15 people say something like that.
Fortunately, Todd did come back. But, as he explains, it isn’t always a bad thing if a pastor doesn’t return to “ministry as usual” following his sabbatical:
Pastoral sabbaticals (whether the pastor is paid or unpaid) are a regular, normal, and healthy thing for healthy churches.
And even when a pastor comes back from a sabbatical and quits… that’s still healthy because the sabbatical revealed the fact that that pastor wasn’t healthy. Something was off. Whether it was his health, his pace, his marriage, his walk with God, or his calling—something was off. And the healthiest thing for that pastor could be, to step back (and possibly down) in order to address that lack of health.
Glad to see you back in the saddle after a restful season away, Todd. Welcome back.
Missionary Family
Erik Raymond:
All Christians are sent people. God has given us new life by the gospel, so our lives should revolve around the gospel. And here’s what we need to grasp: believers in the church should see themselves as a missionary family—and the family business is making and training disciples.
Obstructions
John Stott on the closing verses of 2 Timothy:
Paul is fully alert to the difficulties, however, both internal and external. Timothy himself is inexperienced, infirm and shy. The world’s opposition is strong and subtle. And behind these things stands the devil, bent on ‘taking men alive’ and keeping them prisoner. For the devil hates the gospel and uses all his strength and cunning to obstruct its progress, now by perverting it in the mouths of those who preach it, now by frightening them into silence through persecution or ridicule, now by persuading them to advance beyond it into some fancy novelty, now by making them so busy with defending the gospel that they have no time to proclaim it.
Daily Email from OmniFocus
Ben Brooks:
This isn’t an email I work off of, or even keep in my inbox. It’s a one time overview of how much stuff I have to do today. It tells me if I need to say no a lot today, or if I have bandwidth for more.
Looks like a handy AppleScript. It’d be great to see something like this baked into OmniFocus.
Religious “Nones”
Twenty percent of Nebraskans are religious “nones” according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study.
Here’s how the numbers broke down for the 312 Nebraskans surveyed:
- Evangelical Protestant 25%
- Mainline Protestant 24%
- Historically Black Protestant 2%
- Catholic 23%
- Other Christian < 1%
- Orthodox Christian < 1%
- Mormon 1%
- Jehovah’s Witness < 1%
- Jewish < 1%
- Muslim < 1%
- Buddhist 1%
- Hindu 1%
- Other World Religions < 1%
- Other Faiths 1%
- Atheist 1%
- Agnostic 4%
- Nothing in particular 15%
- Don’t know 1%
The “Nothing in particular” group was further broken down into two additional groups:
- Nothing in particular (religion not important) 8%
- Nothing in particular (religion important) 7%
Some metro areas were highlighted in the study results, but unfortunately, no information specific to Lincoln or Omaha is given. I would love to see what these numbers—the religious “nones” in particular—would look like in Lincoln. I assume they would rise, but by how much?