BreakPoint

We recently began the season of Lent. One of the practices most associated with this season is giving up something as an act of sacrificial discipline.

America is getting older. In 1950, near the beginning of the Baby Boom era, the average life expectancy of Americans was 68. Today, it is 79. By the year 2040, one in five Americans will be over the traditional retirement age of 65.

In Deuteronomy 25, Moses commanded that if a man dies childless, his brother should marry the widow and that “the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel.”

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty-day period in the church calendar known as Lent, a time of preparation leading up to Holy Week and Resurrection Sunday.

I became convinced, after watching my wife endure a 31-hour labor, that women have a kind of strength men don’t have. There’s no question in my mind that after less than five of those full-on labor contractions, we’d be crying like a baby instead of delivering one.

Fifty years ago, when he was a student at Cambridge, John Lennox found himself seated next to a Nobel Prize winner at a formal dinner. Lennox decided to make the most of the opportunity and so he asked the Nobel Laureate if and how his scientific work had shaped his worldview, including his opinion on the existence of God.

Last September on BreakPoint, we told you about the constitutional challenge to a World War I memorial in Bladensburg, Maryland, known as the “Peace Cross.” The Cross was erected on private land in 1925 by the American Legion. It was to be a memorial to 49 men from that area who died in the Great War. Their names are listed on the plaque at the base of the monument.

For generations, U.S. churches sent missionaries around the world, preaching the Gospel and planting churches in places such as Africa, South America, and Asia. Today, many of the millions of Christians and churches that resulted from those missionary efforts are more biblically faithful than their American forebears. This is especially true of certain denominations and certain issues.

Martina Navratilova is one of the greatest woman tennis players of all time. During her career, she won an astounding 59 Grand Slam titles. She’s in the Hall of Fame, but if there were a tennis Mt. Rushmore, she’d be on it.

I still find it hard to shake that image of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York legislators ghoulishly celebrating the signing of a bill that could allow the killing of babies right up to the point of birth for any reason.