Helping the helpless

Imagine this - you are a tailor in a village in rural Ghana, you have little income, just enough to scrape a living. As you reach the ripe old age of 35 your eyes deteriorate and you can no longer see to thread the needle on your sewing machine. You are forced to retire.

The problem - a pair of glasses would solve the poor sight but there's no optician anywhere nearby and even if there was, you couldn't afford to pay him.

This is a true story. The man in the photo is African, a Zulu, his life has perhaps been transformed by the glasses he's wearing. The Ghanaian tailor's life was transformed in the same way. Perhaps it's not quite true to claim that 'they were blind, but now they see' but it's no exaggeration to say they were short sighted but now they see clearly, clearly enough to be able to read, and work, and earn an income.

The availabilty of cheap but effective glasses can transform individual lives and even entire communities. But there's a serious snag. Glasses are expensive for two reasons, first you must obtain a prescription to suit your eyes, and then you have to pay for bespoke lenses made to match the prescription. Opticians and optical labs are expensive, far too expensive for an African or Indian villager.

The solution - enter Josh Silver, an Oxford physicist. Thinking about this problem he hit on the idea of creating special glasses that each person can adjust to suit their own eyes. Now he's getting help to roll them out on a larger and larger scale.

An article in last month's Guardian (Inventor's 2020 vision) explains how the invention was made, how it works, and how it's being scaled up to help millions, hopefully even billions. It needs powerful sponsors in industry and government but that support is beginning to appear. The future looks promising; not least for the world's short-sighted poor.

Prophetic Word - Same old?

If you're involved in church in any way this may sound pretty familiar.
It's the start of a new year, 2009. It's time for resolutions, plans, and... prophecy? Same old prophecies you heard last year? Hmm... Read this from Steve Hill.

Steve and Marilyn are missionaries and church planters working in Central Asia. They know what it means to struggle against the powers of darkness. They know the meaning of praying without giving up.

No kidding!

Steve writes...

The flood of prophecies for 2009 have begun to come in. They sound remarkably similar to most I have been hearing for the past 15 years! "This is the year of revival! This is the year of His power. This is the year of increase! This is the year of harvest." You mean it really, really, really is going to happen this time?

Read the whole of his message 'A Prophetic Word for 2009' at his 'Harvest Now' website.

Great Doddington - Forks in the road

After reading Genesis 42 we thought about forks in the road. Joseph had a great future given to him through his dreams, but his road forked and he unexpectedly ended up in Egypt.

Joseph's brothers were not favoured sons, but they were nonetheless sons of Jacob - wealthy, and special. And there was a fork in their road too.

We listened to a Glen Campbell song. Then we considered how we have to come to a point of surrender in our lives. We really do need to 'let go and let God' as they say.

Like Joseph, our present circumstances don't matter, the Lord's grace is sufficient for us. He told us, 'Your life and mine are like two strands being spun into one yarn that can never be undone'.

The Drew Marshall Show

Drew Marshall presents a Christian chat show in Canada. He has the most amazing guests and some truly extraordinary conversations.
And most of them are available online, not only live but as a library of MP3 files for download.

I encourage you to go and listen.

As a starter you might like to try one or more of these...

• Tommy Emmanuel - wonderful guitar music and an interesting life
• Paul Young, Wayne Jacobsen, Bruxy Cavey - three guys who live for Christ
• Mormonism - A conversation with a Mormon scholar
• William P Young - author of 'The Shack'

Drew has such a wonderful, relaxed, jokey yet serious manner. He puts everyone at ease and his guests just settle down and talk openly and easily. Despite his chilled manner, Drew asks some very direct questions and expects straightforward answers. This is radio interviewing at its best.

But to see the full breadth of the interviews you need to go to the show's website and browse around a bit. Once there, click the 'Listen' button just below the banner and you'll find a page for each year. Each of these pages is filled with interview notes and links to MP3s, you'll need to scroll and scroll to see it all.

The files are added to the website once a week, six or seven days after each show goes out.

Hint: Do you have to drive to work every weekday? Many of us do. Download some of the MP3s, load them onto an MP3 player or cut them to CD and listen as you drive. The journey will fly by, I guarantee it.

The Antikythera Mechanism

The heavily corroded remains of an intricate and strange looking mechanism were found in 1901 in a Mediterranean shipwreck. Sixty years later after painstaking cleaning and study, it emerged that the device was a mechanical analogue computer for predicting the movements of the sun and moon in the sky. Various replicas have been built based on the known features of the mechanism.

The Antikythera mechanism makes it abundantly clear that the Greeks were advanced, not only in their scientific knowledge, but also in their mechanical technology. Reports from ancient writers like the Roman author, Cicero, describe mechanisms such as Antikythera. But until the corroded remains were recovered and studied these written accounts seemed fanciful. Surely the ancient world had nothing this advanced?

More recent studies have used high resolution X-ray tomography, and better reconstructions have become possible.

One of the later reconstructions can be seen working in the video below. If you view the video from You Tube you can switch to a higher resolution.



The X-ray tomography data has opened up a new window into the workings of the device. But it has also enabled historians to read a considerable amount of Greek text from the metal surfaces. This text consists partly of labels on the various scales and displays the mechanism used to present the positions of planets, calendar dates and so forth. The remainder of the text is a guide on how to use the device.

A great deal can be learned from the inscribed text. The names of the months varied from place to place in the ancient Greek world and this means we can determine its place of manufacture or intended use to be the central Mediterranean, not as originally supposed the eastern Aegean.

A longer and more technical video is presented on the Nature website (select the high resolution version and watch it in full-screen for the best view). There are also links to the Nature paper by Freeth, Jones, Steele, and Bitsakis, and a Nature news story (though there's a fee for the full text of these).

Wikipedia's article on the mechanism provides more detail for the average reader and has an excellent list of references, links, and suggested additional reading. One of the links is an article from New Scientist giving a good deal of background.

Links

• In search of lost time - Nature article, Nov 2006

Jesus' early years

Bill Heroman has suggested a group blog where verses from the gospels are taken and questions asked about 'the hidden years', the period of Jesus' childhood and adolescence before he appeared before John for baptism.

I think this is a great idea!

Bill provides a first example on his blog. Here another one from me.

Scripture: Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart (Luke 2:51).

Spark/questions: What things did she 'treasure in her heart'? (Luke 2:22-52) Did she sometimes talk about these things to the young Jesus? If so, how would it have affected him as a young child, as an older child, as a young adult? To what degree would the knowledge she held affect his upbringing? How did it alter the way she thought about her young son? Was this a factor in her appeal to him when the wine ran out in Cana? (John 2:1-5)