Prata Potpourri: Sin of the verbose, the problem of beauty, hermit crab insights, Sinkhole Syndrome, more

I'm sensitive to too much noise, especially talking. Which is funny since I make my living talking, being an ex-teacher and now a teacher's aide teaching students in small groups. But speaking for my work is different than talking too much. I remember one of the first vocabulary words I looked up in a book I was reading in high school, The Great Gatsby. The word was was garrulous. I loved the word and I still do, though not so much the people who embody it. Garrulous means-

excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters.

This essay discusses the sin of talking too much. It is a sin to chatter incessantly. I'd already focused on the sin of gossip last week. Now we learn why just talking too much is also a sin. That old tongue, an enemy of holiness. A fool can be be recognized by his many words (Ecclesiastes 5:3). This essay delves into the sin of the verbose.


The Sin of Talking Too Much

The hard road is the application of wisdom in the restraint of the most powerful muscle in our body. That got me thinking about the dangers of talking too much. There are many and include the following

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Stephen J. Melniszyn muses on the appointment of death for all of us in his essay It Is Appointed.

Two gates. Two roads. One is described as being narrow and the way hard. The other way is wide and easy, and those that enter by it are many. There are no other roads that lead to God, it is through Jesus Christ and Him alone (John 14:6). Man will do all in his sinful nature to avoid such a truth but in the end, it can not be ignored.

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The problem of beauty is one that set me on the narrow road, to salvation. I traveling widely throughout my thirties, I saw the world in its most beautiful. From Everglades spoonbills roosting along the shoreline to Bahamian coral waving in azure sea to moonrise over the desert to towering mountains bouncing the sun of their glittering rough edges to wild waves of the north Atlantic, all slate grey foam and whirling ice...the obvious comes to mind. This didn't all just happen. It isn't all just an accident. No 'Bang' threw this into existence.

Here, Prof. Stuart Burgess muses on the witness of nature in its design, particularly, beauty. Evolution might be explained to the irrational mind through function. But it didn't have to be beautiful, too.

Beauty—The Undeniable Witness

How did all this come to be? Understanding creation isn’t just about explaining matter or the complex moving parts of living things, but "added beauty." Experience tells us that beauty doesn’t come by accident—it offers no obvious survival benefit, and many existing natural laws promote deterioration and decay. So what created and sustains the earth’s beauty?

And here is an example of that beauty, function, delicacy, and mystery. In this exciting 2-minute excerpt from the third season of Jonathan Bird's Blue World, Jonathan films a hermit crab changing shells and then also transferring its anemones from one shell to the other. This is extremely rare footage of a seldom-seen behavior! It is also fascinating and thrilling to see such handiwork from God!

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Melissa Kruger writes A Back To School Prayer, from a mom, for her kids, ... "I pray that their teachers would be wise and gentle."

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Here from Ligonier, we learn the danger of the mature Christian's erosion of spiritual disciplines, and the sinkhole that awaits him. A cautionary tale well worth reading. Spiritual Disciplines and the Sinkhole Syndrome

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I love fire and brimstone preaching. I do some fire and brimstone writing here at The End Time. Here is the story of a congregation that called for a fire-and-brimstone preacher again, and again, and again. The first two didn't work out, like, immediately. The third lasted thirty years. Why? What made the difference?

Without skipping a beat the man said, "You are right in saying that all three were fire and brimstone preachers, but the third was the only one who actually sounded like he didn’t want us to go there."

Find out more in the story of The Fire and Brimstone Preacher Who Succeeded

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With Labor Day behind us and a shorter week ahead of us, and (hopefully) cooler temperatures on the way, it's a refreshing time of year. Autumn leaves, school buses on their routes, pumpkins. The Lord is in control of the seasons, and their progression is a mark of His hand upholding all. The march of seasons, the migration of the geese, the constellations changing position. He created it for His good pleasure. And it is beautiful.