Granted, it costs a lot more than a Skor, but I think it's worth it.

Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who's never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin.  A friend of mine says that when he meets a book he loves, he starts to shake involuntarily.  For me, the feeling comes in a rush: I'm reading along and suddenly a word or phrase or scene enlarges before my eyes and soon everything around me is just so much fuzzy background.  The phone can ring, the toast can burn, the child can call out, but to me, they're all in a distant dream.  The book - this beautiful creature in my hands!  -  is everything I've ever wanted, as unexpected and inevitable as love.  How did I live without it for so long?  I have to read and read and read, all the while knowing that the more agressively I pursue my passion, the sooner it will end and then I will be bereft.   A young boy I know felt that way about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; having finished it in a sixteen-hour marathon, he wandered his house in something approximating despair.  Book lovers have no choice: we can't tear ourselves away from the beloved.

 

I recently heard about a woman who instituted a weekly Soup Night because she figured out that she could stand at the stove all afternoon, stirring with one hand and turning pages of her latest book with the other.

The social problem created by television and other electronic media are their very existence and the way they dominate our lives.  Cut off as we are from our natural sources of intimacy, we turn to media instead of other people to cope.  We spend hours upon hours looking at screens instead of into faces.  Are we doing this because we are too alone?  Or are we so alone because we spend too many hours looking at screens?  It could be both.

 

Brandon Centerwall, a University of Washinton researcher, presented an exhaustive analysis that showed that the homicide rate in the United States doubled after the introduction of television.  The same thing happened in South Africa.  Perhaps this increase in homicides has less to do with any particular kind of content that viewers watch on TV, and more to do with the isolating and disconnecting effects of TV on our interpersonal relationships.

 

Curiously, instead of acting on our own desire for deeper connections to others, the media age allows us to invest hours watching these connections played out fictiously and two-dimensionally on television.  It is no small irony that many of us could more accuately describe the kitchen of sitcom characters than the kitchens of our neighbors.

 

...it's easier to begin the process of becoming emotionally connected through the anonymity of the Internet than to kick off a deeper relationship with the person next door or at the next desk.

 

We move away and lose our key relationships.  We cope by using television, radio, and the Internet to fill the void.  And these media habits, in turn, become an impediment to reconnecting with real people.  The media doesn't start the problem, mobility does. 

But the media present an unwitting yet overwhelming obstacle to remedying the isolation our moving around has caused us.  Taken together, geographical relocation - coupled with our desire for independent success - and the rise of electronic media represent huge forces that have had much to do with the tendency for our drifting away from each other.

Refrigerator Rights: Creating Connections and Restoring Relationships

by Dr. Will Miller and Glenn Sparks, Ph.D.

 

in the painful aftermath of the shootings, the Amish continued their witness to the love of Christ, reaching out to Roberts’s family, attending Roberts’s funeral, comforting his wife and children, and providing for them through a fund established for Roberts’s victims and their families. One victim’s family even invited the Roberts to their daughter’s funeral. In the most dramatic way, they forgave Roberts.

If you're new to the thrill of spreading evangelical truth, I must warn you, there are obstacles to being a daily witness of Christ's love.

...Christians everywhere are battling the culture, and at the same time, attempting also to endure the smelly religious droppings the fundamentalist Christians leave behind.

No matter where you live... you're going to come into contact with... ridiculous people of faith.

...in everything worth doing, there are obstacles.  We still have a responsibility to bear witness to the things Christ has done in our lives whenever we are called to do so.

...we as Christians have all been called to live the life of a missionary.  Your home, church, community, workplace, campus, or grocery store is your mission field.

As Christians, we are blessed to be holding truth in our hands.  We take this for granted.  Many of us hold on to God's truth like it's our own personal little treasure.  But the first step to launching into a life of everyday faith conversations is knowing that what you hold is the truth and then realizing your responsibility to share it with others.