Articles by Dr. David Jeremiah
The website “Ask a Manager” received a letter from a reader who lied during a job interview. Responding to a technical question, the applicant should have said, “I don’t know,” but instead improvised an answer and tried to bluff through the discussion. Afterward the person was anxious about the flub and wondered what to do. “Ask a Manager” replied: “This is not good, but you probably already know that.” The columnist pointed out that few people object when we say, “I don’t know. I’ll find out and get back to you.” But to be caught trying to make up an answer speaks to honesty, integrity, and judgment.[1] As Christians, there will be times when we’ll be asked a question for which we don’t have an answer. So what happens when none are forthcoming? [1] Ask a Manager, http://www.askamanager.org/2011/06/i-made-up-an-answer-in-a-job-interview-what-should-i-do-now.html (accessed June 3, 2014).
“Why are people malnourished in the richest country on Earth?” asks an article in an issue of National Geographic.1 It’s an interesting question, especially for people who probably don’t suffer from malnutrition. According to this article, the number of people who are hungry has grown dramatically in recent years—increasing to 48 million Americans in 2012. Statistics show that in 1980, there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country, and five years ago when the article was written, there were 50,000.[1] 1 Tracie McMillan, “The New Face of Hunger,” National Geographic, August 2014, pp. 66-89. [1] Ibid.
Henrietta Haas was born in Vienna in 1929. When the Nazi threat drove her family to America in 1939, Henrietta studied retailing in college and later earned a master’s degree in library science. She married her sweetheart, Monroe Milstein, who launched a clothing business after World War II. Henrietta worked as a librarian in a Long Island elementary school, and she used her $75,000 in savings to help her husband purchase a former factory outlet in Burlington, New Jersey, for his clothing store. Business boomed and Burlington Coat Factory soon opened a second location. The Milstein’s son, Lazer, agreed to run the second store on the condition it be closed on Saturday, his Sabbath. Consequently, the store reopened every Sunday morning, where hundreds of people came to shop on their day off. When the Milstein family sold Burlington Coat Factory in 2006, it was purchased for more than two billion dollars—the $75,000 investment paid great dividends! As it happens, the Christmas season marks the beginning of winter when people are shopping for outerwear or pulling sweaters out of their closet. Some of us have sweaters, coats, dresses, or ties we wear only at Christmas. Some of them are corny, some are classy; but all of them spur on the holiday spirit.
Dr. John Rosemond, who specializes in parenting issues, once received a letter from the exasperated mother of a three-year-old girl, whom the mom described as “constantly in motion, gets into everything, won’t stay in her bed at night, won’t accept ‘No’ for an answer,” and so on. In the middle of describing this little unsettling child, the mother added, “I know she’s well intentioned.” Dr. Rosemond wrote back, saying, “Well intentioned? No, your daughter is not well intentioned. She intends to have it her way, she intends to prove she can outlast you, and she intends to prove she runs the show. She is doing what she is doing with bad intention, and you will not be able to discipline her properly until you stop thinking she is innocent and making excuses for her.”[1] John Rosemond, The Well-Behaved Child (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 5.
On a flight from Phoenix, Arizona, a passenger was randomly selected to have her palms swabbed by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration). To her dismay, the test came back positive for explosives, and she was taken to a private room and questioned. The positive reading was a mistake—a false positive—the result of too much Lubriderm hand lotion, which contained small amounts of glycerin, a component of nitroglycerin, used in explosives.[1] If there’s anything worse than a “false positive,” it’s a “false negative.” That’s when your medical tests come back with good news but only because the results failed to discover a deadly disease, one that could have been cured if discovered in time. Experts around the world —in medicine, law enforcement, drug testing, and in a variety of fields—are working to minimize “false positives” and “false negatives.” Ellen Creager, “Hand Cream Can Set Off Airport Security,” Detroit Free Press, November 14, 2013. http://www.freep.com/article/20131110/COL21/311100139/creager-travel-q-a. (accessed November 22, 2013).
I remember when a whole generation exploded in the 1960s, rebelling against war, materialism, and institutions of all kinds. Colleges were bombed, schools closed by sit-ins, students shot, and America came unglued. The epicenter was in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (called “Hashbury” by the hippies), where disillusioned, long-haired youth adopted countercultural values, turned on to drugs, dropped out of society, and protested the “establishment.”