Stream Splashes: September 22-28 in Review
Every week, The Stream rounds up some highlights from the recent news. We call these our “splashes”: everything from insightful commentary on the week’s big events to small inspiring stories you may have missed.
Watching the sad rant of a sixteen year old girl about climate change made me start thinking about the end of the world. Greta Thunberg was clearly very upset and genuinely alarmed at the prospect of a climate meltdown, the extinction of species and the end of life on earth.
What interests me about the end of the world scenario is that its not only Christians who believe in the end of life on earth. Non religious people also cling to apocalyptic world views. Greta Thunberg’s panicked tirade at the U.N. reveals a genuine fear of the end times.
One day on the job as a police sergeant, now-retired Mike McGrew got a call about a suicidal woman. When he arrived on the scene, he found her lifeless. She had hung herself. “We had cut her down and laid her down on the driveway and she was dead. Her eyes were open, fixed and dilated and her face was blue,” McGrew said. “So she was dead. But then the Holy Spirit said, ‘This one. You pray for this one.’ So I started to pray over her.”
As McGrew prayed, the woman gently closed her eyes. It was then that the paramedics found a pulse and blood pressure. They rushed her to the hospital. Later, McGrew heard cops in the locker room. They were praising Jesus. “They saw that it was a miracle from God,” said McGrew. “And that’s what God does with miracles, you know? He just really shakes things up and He shows people that He is real and He is here.”
I am constantly surprised at how much my Facebook friends know. More than I do about many things. With a great deal more conviction than I feel. And, as far as I can tell, without enough knowledge of the subject to have much of an opinion at all, much less the black-and-white all-in good-guys-bad-guys opinion so many have.
People get angry at each other over a question neither understands nor actually really cares about. They judge each other as people from their opinions about things, politics especially. They dig in when people argue with them. Eventually, they call someone Hitler.
In early July, Amazon quietly removed more than a dozen books from the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace. The titles, most by Christian authors, address issues of same-sex attraction and homosexuality from a faith-based perspective.
Ministry leader Anne Paulk authored one of the censored books, entitled Restoring Sexual Identity. “My publisher did not even get a notice from Amazon,” said Paulk in a phone interview. “They simply removed my book and disallowed anyone from selling it on their platform.”
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