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Surprise Testimonials

On Sunday mornings this summer our church had a series of surprise testimonials during class time on Sunday mornings. It was partially modeled after something Lisa's church used to do on Wednesday nights when she was growing up. This is how I explained it when I asked people to participate:

Each Sunday a different member will give a surprise testimonial. The person will basically tell his/her life story...his background, how he grew up, what she does for a living, how he came to follow Christ, etc. Though not essential, the speaker is encouraged to highlight any spiritual insights/decision points/transitions that she has arrived at during her journey. If you're comfortable doing so, please also spend some time discussing any struggles that you consider to have been your toughest moments; for example, addictions, marriage difficulties, financial struggles, challenges in raising children, loss of loved ones, etc.. Since you're the world's leading expert on the subject of your talk (you and your life), it shouldn't require too much planning or preparation...maybe just a little thinking about what the main events and thoughts will be. If the audience is curious about anything, they can ask. You can answer or not. You'll have about 30 to 40 minutes. If you don't use all the available time, that's OK...the remainder will be spent as social time. This is intended to accomplish a couple things: 1) The more we know about each other and our backgrounds and struggles, the tighter our bond to each other will be. The more we'll be comfortable leaning on each other and depending on each other as together we follow Christ. The less likely we'll be to succumb to divisions when difficulties arise. A few of us may know everything about everybody, but most of us don't. Some of us are relatively new. Some of us have been here a while but still may not know some people as well as we'd like to know them. 2) To the extent that we can be more open and sharing about our struggles in the past, we make ourselves available to minister to someone else who is going through something similar now. Maybe someone is struggling in their relationship with God right now because she has a spouse that pulls her in a very different direction. Maybe you've been through the same thing in the past and could really minister to her effectively...but you don't know that she has that struggle and she doesn't know that you've been through a similar situation...so she doesn't know that you're the person she needs to talk to. Perhaps we can use this summer of surprise testimonials to make some of those connections.

It turned out pretty great. Folks seemed to really like it. I definitely did. I had I little trouble getting people to agree to do it. I'd say maybe a half to a third of the people I asked agreed to speak. I missed a couple of weeks on vacation, but all of the speakers I saw did a great job.

  • Someone told the church for the first time that he was/is suffering from prostate cancer.
  • Someone described his continuing struggle with OCD.
  • Someone described being in a mentally and physically abusive marriage
  • Someone described how she responded with hope when her son was shot and killed
  • Someone described how he felt on the day he participated in failed effort to rescue people on the Edmund Fitzgerald
  • Someone described how he felt awkward and out of place growing up until he finally found his niche in college.
  • Someone confessed to excessive drinking and to using drugs in college
  • Someone else confessed to using and selling drugs as a teenager
  • Someone described how she dealt with having a husband who suddenly began refusing to go to church and refusing to talk about it
  • More than one person mentioned his discomfort when he's having a beer at a restaurant and sees someone from church (since he doesn't know for sure what the "rules" are related to that).

It was exactly what I had in mind. I think I'll try to make it a recurring summertime series...if enough people will agree to speak.

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Superman Returns

SpmRetPos.jpgLast night we watched Superman Returns (2006,PG-13) (ScreenIt! Review). From the ScreenIt! review:

After a five-year absence, the Man of Steel returns to Metropolis and must contend with Lois now being an engaged mother, all while having to deal with Lex Luthor and his latest diabolical plan.

It was OK. It seemed like well-trodden ground. You know what to expect from the superhero genre and you get what you expect. It's not that exciting. I give it 3 out of 5.

Athletes and Their Dogs

From an article titled "The Horrors of Dogfighting" in The Week:

Michael Vick is hardly the first athlete connected to dogfighting. In fact, in the macho culture of professional sports, fighting dogs are a status symbol and dogfighting is widely considered a harmless pastime, says sports psychologist Harry Edwards. When Washington Redskins running back Clinton Portis learned that Vick faced charges for running a dogfighting operation, he said, "It's his property. It's his dogs. If that's what he wants to do, do it." In 2006, two fighting dogs owned by NFL linebacker Joey Porter escaped from his yard and mauled a neighbor's miniature pony to death. "The dog is going to be a reflection of the owner," Porter explained. "I don't too much care for a passive dog." One of former NBA player Latrell Sprewell's four pit bulls once attacked his 4-year-old daughter, tearing off one of her ears. Sprewell resisted having the dog euthanized. "Stuff happens," he said. That remark might seem callous, but it apparently reflects a mentality that attracts athletes to fighting dogs in the first place. "If you're looking to project a tough image," says Kelli Ferris, a veterinary science professor at North Carolina State, "a Pomeranian on a leash doesn't cut it-a snarling pit bull does."

I remember when Porter's dogs killed the pony, but I was too naive to realize that they were fighting dogs.

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Unintended Consequences

It's always kinda funny to learn that something people do in order to achieve a certain effect not only fails to do that but in fact turns out to have the opposite one. Here are a couple examples... From an article titled "Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach" by Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine." When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual. Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC. The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

The article suggests that this phenomenon may play a role in commonly-believed misinformation like Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning 9/11, that the destruction of the WTC was a controlled demolition and not the work of Arab terrorists; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day, that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane, etc. The explanation:

...repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

The experiments...illustrate another basic property of the mind -- it is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something. People are not good at keeping track of which information came from credible sources and which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true...

...for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time.

What to do?

...rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all. The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate -- issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes the only real options. So is silence the best way to deal with myths? Unfortunately, the answer to that question also seems to be no. Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true

The second example is from an article titled "'Baby Einstein': a bright idea?" by Amber Dance in the LA Times:

For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.

Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies. "I would rather babies watch 'American Idol' than these videos," Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them - which does have developmental benefits.

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