The Son of David & Abraham

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"A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham."

The first verse of the New Testament tells us the baby born in the manger is the son of David who's the son of Abraham.

Now, who exactly was David? From the Old Testament we know that David was an adulterer, murderer, a polygamist, bad father, his hands were so bloody that God wouldn’t let him build the temple. His son Solomon did that. Solomon was a polygamist, a man full of futility and focused on pleasure.

He’s the son of Abraham. From the Old Testament we know that Abraham was a liar who disbelieved God and committed adultery. His son was Issac - a liar and idolater.

David and Abraham. Two sinners who’s seed was the son of God. One fathered the nation of the Messiah. One fathered the royal line.

When people who've done terrible wrong allow themselves to be used by God and take part is His greater plan, amazing things can happen!

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The Brave Doctor

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Shortly after Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia, a doctor in William E. Wallner's parish was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. The doctor, a Jewish convert to Christianity, encouraged his fellow prisoners "to die bravely, with faith in their hearts." As a result, he became a target of Gestapo officers.

Although struck with an iron rod until one of his arms had to be amputated, the doctor would not be quieted. Finally, as DeMille's autobiography recounts, "one Gestapo officer beat the doctor's head against a stone wall until blood was streaming down his face." Holding a mirror before the doctor, the Gestapo officer sneered: "Take a look at yourself. Now you look like your Jewish Christ."

Lifting his remaining hand up, the doctor exclaimed, "Lord, never in my life have I received such honor—to resemble You." Those would be his last words on Earth.

Distraught by the doctor's proclamation, the Gestapo officer sought out Wallner that night. "Could Pastor Wallner help him, free him from the terrible burden of his guilt?"

After praying with him, Wallner advised, "Perhaps God let you kill that good man to bring you to the foot of the Cross, where you can help others." The Gestapo officer returned to the concentration camp. And through the aid of Wallner and the Czech underground, he worked to free many Jews over the years that followed.

John Murray writing in the Wall Street Journal

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Ditching Peer Review

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If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.

Adam Mastroianni writing in Experimental History

Spinning Activities to Avoid What We Fear

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When we’re scared, we might spin up a frantic list of activities to avoid confronting our fear. The more afraid we are, the more we retreat from what spooks us by believing we’re too busy to tackle it.

Instead, block 15 minutes on your calendar to shut down all messaging and busy work. Name the perceived nemesis you’re avoiding. Write down three columns: the worst-case scenario, the current situation, and the best possible outcome.

Writing specifics under each column, you might discover that your worst case is much more likely if you stick to your current choices than if you were to mobilize your team in another direction.

Sabina Nawaz writing for Harvard Business Review

The Day Pain Died

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The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine.

Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium. In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients' base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.

The "eureka moment" of anesthesia, like the seemingly sudden arrival of many new technologies, was not so much a moment of discovery as a moment of recognition: a tipping point when society decided that old attitudes needed to be overthrown. It was a social revolution as much as a medical one.

Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven

Leaders Make Wrong Assumptions about Toxic Work Culture

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In many organizations, bad news about toxic behaviors gets filtered out as it moves up the hierarchy. As a result, top leaders often think they’ve done a better job addressing toxic culture than they actually have. In a survey of 16,000 managers across nearly 500 companies, top executives were 24% more likely to say that they addressed unethical behavior quickly and consistently compared with how well middle managers thought the C-suite dealt with unethical actions. Top executives were 48% more likely to believe they dealt effectively with cutthroat managers. 

Donald Sull and Charles Sull writing for the MIT Sloan Management Review

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Observed Behavior is Changed Behavior

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When the lead singer at the concert asks you to scream as loud as you can, and then he asks again, going, “I can’t hear you! You can do better than that!” have you ever noticed that the second time is always louder?  Why wasn’t everyone yelling at the top of their lungs the first time?  Some really cool scientists actually tested this in 1979. (They) had people shout as loud as they could in a group and then alone, or vice-versa. Sure enough, the overall loudness of a small group of people was less than any one of them by themselves. You can even chart it on a graph. The more people you add, the less effort any one person does.

If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background. To prove this, psychologist Alan Ingram ruined tug-of-war forever. In 1974, he had people put on a blindfold and grab a rope. The rope was attached to a rather medieval-looking contraption that simulated the resistance of an opposing team. The subjects were told many other people were also holding the rope on their side, and he measured their efforts. Then, he told them they would be pulling alone, and again he measured. There were alone both times, but when they thought they were in a group, they pulled 18 percent less strenuously on average.

This behavior is more likely to show up when the task a hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your laziness can be seen, you try harder. You do this because of another behavior called evaluation apprehension, which is just a fancy way of saying you care more when you know you are being singled out. Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others’. You relax. You coast. 

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

Our Favorite Conclusions

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It would be unfair for teachers to give the students they like easier exams than those they dislike, for federal regulators to require that foreign products pass sticker safety tests than domestic products, or for judges to insist that the defense attorney make better arguments than the prosecutor.

And yet, this is just the sort of uneven treatment most of us give to facts that confirm and disconfirm our favored conclusions.

For example, volunteers in one study were told that they had performed very well or very poorly on a social-sensitivity test and were then asked to assess two scientific reports—one that suggested the test was valid and one that suggested it was not. Volunteers who had performed well on the test believed that the studies in the validating report used sounder scientific methods than did the studies in the invalidating report, but volunteers who performed poorly on the test believed precisely the opposite.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

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Study: The pandemic has aged the brains of teenagers

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The stress of living through the pandemic physically changed adolescents' brains and prematurely aged them by at least three or four years. That’s the finding of a new study out of Stanford University. If kids who experienced the pandemic show accelerated development in their brains, scientists say they will have to account for that abnormal rate of growth in any future research involving this generation. 

Study co-author Jonas Miller said, “Adolescence is already a period of rapid reorganization in the brain, and it’s already linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression, and risk-taking behavior. Now you have this global event that’s happening, where everyone is experiencing some kind of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines – so it might be the case that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable to those of their counterparts just a few years ago.”

Details are in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science

The Smooth Handle

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One of (Thomas) Jefferson’s rules was this, and I think it is priceless, "Always take hold of things by the smooth handle." That is, go at a job or at your difficulty by the use of a method that will encounter the least resistance. Resistance causes friction in mechanics, therefore it is necessary in mechanics to overcome or reduce friction.

The negative attitude is a friction approach. That is why negativism develops such great resistance. The positive approach is the "smooth handle" technique. It is in harmony with the flow of the universe. It not only encounters less resistance, but actually stimulates assistance forces. It is remarkable how from early life until the end of your earthly existence the application of this philosophy will enable you to attain successful results in areas where otherwise you would be defeated.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking