All posts tagged: Suffering

Nepal: Do they have COVID too?

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Do you believe something? Are you religious in any way? How are you holding on to your faith in this COVID time? Most religions do not fit with COVID restrictions. We have a neighbor who goes to church more than us. I go to church online, and I have been watching services on the Internet for a long time now. We have COVID restrictions, where we live, and they make it hard to attend church services. I miss those services, and the other people in the church. Our neighbor is a lady who goes to a church, somewhere. I don’t know the church, but she is a friend. I was embarrassed sometimes, when I talked to her because she kept going to her church, on Sundays. A few days ago I asked her about her church, and she told me she couldn’t go there anymore. She hadn’t gone to church for three weeks because of a COVID outbreak in the congregation. We are struggling here, but imagine living in a country like Nepal, in Asia. …

This Hurts Too Much

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Did you ever try to focus on something that was or is just too painful? That’s what happened to me these past few weeks. I wanted to really dig into the tragedy of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada but I found myself holding back. There are a few reasons for this. One might be my own experiences of being marginalized. Another might be that the injustice and lack of public outcry anger me. I have written previously about how poverty and prejudice impacted my life. While I am in a place now in which prejudice and out-casting no longer affect me, I am still hurting for those for whom it does affect. And in these days of double racism, a dangerous idea in which people of color accuse white people of racism with racist chants and slogans of their own, there is so much division and hatred.  Violent elements have taken advantage of this and have burned and destroyed businesses and lives under the umbrella of social justice. It feels like they are …

Auschwitz II, Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland. Credit: Ian Mackenzier/Flickr/Creative Commons

Study: Holocaust survivors lived longer because they were resilient

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According to a report in the Daily Mail, a study conducted by researchers with Maccabi Healthcare Services (MHS) based in Tel Aviv, Israel came to a startling conclusion that Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, lived on average seven years longer than Jews who did not go through the Holocaust. MSH is an Israeli healthcare insurer with over two million members. The researchers studied 83,000 Jews, both male and female, born between 1911 and 1945 who were insured by the Maccabi. This included 38,000 European Jews now living in Israel who survived the Holocaust and 35,000 Jews also living in Israel who had not directly experienced the Nazi genocide. The study revealed that those who survived the Nazi death camps lived to an average age of 84.8 years compared to an average of 77.7 for those who did not directly experience the Nazi genocide. In effect, the mortality rate of those who suffered was 16% lower than those who didn’t. Ironically, the Jews who survived the holocaust tended to have more …

Hope: Why Justin Bieber, actress Ashley Benson and model Hailey Baldwin have a “G” tattoo

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A remarkable article on theBlaze explains why these three stars have a “G” tattoo. The story begins in 2010, when Pastor Chad Veach and his wife Julia discovered their four-year old daughter, Georgia, had lissencephaly — an incurable genetic disorder that affects the brain. Instead of having the normal folds, the brain is smooth. Depending on the severity, the disease renders a person unable to speak or walk. It causes seizures, vomiting, muscle spasms and swallowing difficulty. In an interview with theBlaze, Veach, who pastors Zoe Church in Los Angeles, California, said like any father he had hopes for his daughter. He envisioned her graduating from high school and even becoming a missionary. He even prayed for his daughter while she was in her mother’s womb believing God would use her to impact the world. However, that all changed as he watched this disorder slowly take control of his daughter. Veach admitted that this was the first time he understood true suffering. But a father’s prayers and purposes of God can still be fulfilled in …