The simplicity & spontaneity of ministry

When one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. (2 Corinthians 3:16,17).

Liberty from what? Well, if we turn to the Lord, and are occupied with Him in the way we have indicated, the Holy Spirit sets us free. It may be you are struggling, striving, fighting, wrestling, praying, pleading, longing, yearning, asking the Lord to set you free from condemnation, free from fear, from those paralysing bonds in which Israel was when the glory appeared. Do you want to be free from fear, from dread, from terror, from condemnation? What are you doing to get free? There is one simple, direct way, namely, to be occupied with the Lord, to turn to the Lord. Get Christ as God's satisfaction in your view, and cease trying to satisfy God yourself. Faith in Christ is all God's requirement. How deeply true were His words, "Apart from me ye can do nothing". "Abide in me. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me". That is only figurative language, which means, Be occupied with Him, set your mind on Him, dwell in Him, rest in Him, abide in Him; or, as Paul would say, Gaze on Him, behold Him, let Him be the object of your occupation, and the Spirit will make you free.

More than that, this beholding of Christ means that the Holy Spirit changes you into God's likeness: "Beholding... we are changed". It is not said, Beholding, we begin to change ourselves, we embark upon self-transformation with all its struggle, and conflict, and battle. We are changed by the Lord the Spirit. Be occupied with Christ, and the Spirit takes up the matter of transforming into His image. Be occupied with yourself, and you will see that the law of conformity to type operates. If you are the type, then you will conform to that type. If Christ is the type, then the Holy Spirit will conform you to His likeness. Then this being occupied with Christ means that the Holy Spirit makes us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant. I do not think that ministry is such an onerous thing after all. We need to come back to the simplicity, the spontaneity of ministry. Be occupied with Christ, and the Holy Spirit will show you more and more in Christ with which to be occupied, and as He makes that livingly real you will have something to give to others. Your ministry may not be a platform ministry, but it will be ministry, something for others. Who wants more than that? Oh, the snare of the platform idea that so often constitutes the whole conception of ministry, as though other people are not ministers at all. It is just as much your privilege to behold Christ as any man's in this universe, and, that being so, it is just as much your calling to minister what you see in Christ to others.

By T. Austin-Sparks from: Spiritual Ministry - Chapter 3

From "A Witness and A Testimony" magazines, 1937-1938

Why Chocolate Protects Against Heart Disease

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Numerous studies have shown that cocoa has a protective effect against cardiovascular diseases. The reason for this has now been uncovered by researchers at Linköping University in Sweden. When a group of volunteers devoured a good-sized piece of dark chocolate, it inhibited an enzyme in their bodies that is known to raise blood pressure.

The findings, now being published in Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, were revealed by a group of drug researchers headed by Ingrid Persson.

“We have previously shown that green tea inhibits the enzyme ACE, which is involved in the body’s fluid balance and blood pressure regulation. Now we wanted to study the effect of cocoa, since the active substances catechins and procyanidines are related,” says Ingrid Persson.

The researchers recruited 16 healthy volunteer subjects for the study.

They were not tobacco users and were not allowed to take any pharmaceuticals for two weeks. During the last two days they were not allowed to eat chocolate or anything containing similar compounds, including many kinds of berries and fruits, nor could they drink coffee, tea, or wine.

When the study took place, everyone in the group – ten men and six women between the ages of 20 and 45 – ate 75 grams of unsweetened chocolate with a cocoa content of 72 percent. To analyze what happened with the ACE enzyme, blood samples were taken in advance and then a half hour, one hour, and three hours afterward.

In the sample taken three hours afterward, there was a significant inhibition of ACE activity. The average was 18 percent lower activity than before the dose of cocoa, fully comparable to the effect of drugs that inhibit ACE and are used as a first-choice treatment for high blood pressure.

When the activities of the enzyme decline, the blood pressure goes down with time. As expected, no such effect was found in the subjects.

To show this, the study would have to continue over a longer period.

Even though Ingrid Persson is a drug researcher, the object of her studies is not to design new pharmaceuticals.

“Our findings indicate that changes in lifestyle with the help of foods that contain large concentrations of catechins and procyaninides prevent cardiovascular diseases,” she says.

Citation:

“Effects of cocoa extract and dark chocolate on angiotensin-converting enzyme and nitric oxide in human endothelial cells and healthy volunteers” by Ingrid A-L. Persson, Karin Persson, Staffan Hägg, and Rolf G.G. Andersson.

Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology Publish Ahead of Print, Nov. 2010.

Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, doi: 10.1097/FJC.0b013e3181fe62e3

http://journals.lww.com/cardiovascularpharm/Abstract/publishahead/Effects_of_Cocoa_Extract_and_Dark_Chocolate_on.99606.aspx

An illegal pregnancy and a legal abortion

Luo Yan Qua and Xiao Ai Ying do not know how their story got posted on the internet. They were too distraught and shocked to have even considered reaching out to media as an option.

There is the possibility that someone in the government, aware of their situation and sympathetic, quietly released information about them on a popular Chinese website which works in the same way Twitter does.

Their story is macabre. Family Planning officials decided Xiao Ai Ying, eight months into her pregnancy, had violated China's one-child policy and forced her to have an abortion.  

The couple already have a daughter and this second pregnancy was accidental, but when it was confirmed three months in, husband and wife both felt it was too late to have an abortion and assumed the most that could happen to them was a heavy fine.  

Instead, Xiao Ai Ying was dragged kicking and screaming out of her own home by authorities.

What we have posted here is eight minutes of the interview we had with her husband, Luo Yan Qua, recounting the events. While there was not enough time to broadcast this interview on the channel, we felt his words so compelling that they merited being heard in full and have made this a web exclusive.

When we met wife Xiao Ai Ying, she was in the hospital. They had given her womb an injection, and she was waiting for the operation in which doctors would remove the dead foetus. Our report as it aired on the channel, is below.

Meditation reduces depression, fatigue, anxiety in MS patients

October 15, 2010

By Randy Dotinga, HealthDay

A new Swiss study reports that a form of meditation known as mindfulness may help patients with multiple sclerosis.

Patients with MS — a nervous system disease that typically surfaces in early adulthood and can cause muscle weakness, coordination/balance problems and thinking and memory problems, among other symptoms — often suffer from depression and anxiety.

The study compared multiple sclerosis patients who meditated to MS patients who didn't. Dr. Moses Rodriguez, a professor of neurology and immunology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who's familiar with the study's findings, said meditation is safe and cheaper than the drugs that MS patients take.

"Patients should try it and see if it is helpful for them," Rodriguez added.

Previous research has suggested that half of MS patients suffer from depression during their lives and that anxiety disorders affect one in four. About two-thirds say they feel fatigued, with up to 50% saying fatigue is their most disabling symptom.

Researchers at University Hospital Basel randomly assigned 150 patients to either take part in an eight-week meditation program based on "mindfulness" or receive regular medical care. The study defined the meditation, which included yoga, as "nonjudgmental awareness of moment-to-moment experience."

The participants in the mindfulness meditation program reported lower levels of fatigue and depression for up to six months than those receiving standard care. And the meditation participants had better quality of life, according to the study findings, published late last month in the journalNeurology.

Those in the meditation program, in fact, improved in almost all the measures of fatigue, depression, anxiety and quality of life, while those who received usual medical care declined slightly on most of the measures. For instance, those who took mindfulness training saw their depressive symptoms drop by more than 30% than those study participants who took no training.

"The patients responded very positively to the program," said study author Paul Grossman. "There was a very small number of patients that did not complete the course (5 percent), and the attendance rate was extremely high: On average over 90% of all sessions were attended, although many patients traveled several hours to attend the weekly sessions and people with MS often have difficulties walking and other symptoms that make travel difficult."

"Also, patients reported a high degree of satisfaction in meeting personal goals that were individually stated before the intervention started," Grossman added.

In an accompanying commentary in the journal, two physicians from the Cleveland Clinic noted that the findings of the study, which they called "solidly designed," were limited because the researchers didn't compare meditation to another form of extra treatment. That makes it difficult to understand if meditation is uniquely beneficial, they wrote.

But neurologist Dr. Jinny Tavee, one of the commentary authors, said she has seen positive effects of mindfulness in her own practice. The problem with medications, she said, is that patients are told, " 'Here are some drugs that make you sad, tired and depressed, but nothing will effectively take away your disease.' They're left with no effective treatments."

Enter mindfulness meditation. "You learn to objectify what you're feeling, be it pain or anxiety or depression, and see it as a separate entity that's not part of yourself. It helps you let it go," said Tavee. "You're getting to the heart of the symptom rather than just covering it as you do with medications."

Tavee said she sometimes sees furrowed eyebrows when skeptical patients hear about this approach. "But the thing is that this is free," she said. "You can learn how to do it by yourself. There's no side effects, and if it doesn't work for you, you've lost nothing. It's one of those things that can help and won't hurt."http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/mind-soul/spirituality/2010-10-15-meditation-yoga_N.htm?csp=34news&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+usatoday-NewsTopStories+(News+-+Top+Stories)&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Love is a powerful painkiller, study finds

Researchers say just a photo of one's beloved activates the brain's reward centers something like a drug might. Learning how to harness this could help relieve pain without drug-induced side effects, scientists suggest.

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times


5:27 PM PDT, October 13, 2010


Sooner or later, love usually ends up hurting. But in its early, blissful throes, it actually lessens pain — at least of the physical kind. That's the finding, reported Wednesday, of a study by pain scientists and a psychologist who studies love.

The study, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, sprang from a meeting of minds between Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook, a longtime researcher of the science of love, and Dr. Sean Mackey, a pain scientist at Stanford University. The two shared a hotel room while attending a neuroscience conference a few years back. Their epiphany came one evening over drinks.

"I'd had a couple glasses of Zinfandel and was chatting about pain and the brain systems involved … and he was chatting about love and the brain systems involved," Mackey said. "And we realized, you know, they could be influencing each other."

They knew that a few earlier studies had suggested that love relieved pain, but they wanted to go further and find out just what was happening in the brain. They put out a call on the Stanford campus for people who were in the first nine months of a relationship and still in the throes of romantic passion.

"It was clearly the easiest study we've ever recruited for — within hours we had these students banging on our doors saying, 'We're in love! We're in love! Study us,' " Mackey said.

Jarred Younger, then a Stanford graduate student, and the team tested 15 subjects. All were asked to bring in six photos: three of their beloved and three of a comparably attractive person they knew. The researchers heated the palms of the subjects' left hands to a point that caused either a moderate or high degree of pain, at which point the subjects looked at a photo, either of their beloved or the acquaintance.

In a third round of experiments, the researchers tested the effects of mere distraction, which is known to reduce pain, by having the subjects perform mental tasks (such as thinking of all sports that didn't involve a ball) while their palms were heated.

The photo of the beloved and mental distraction appeared to reduce pain by about the same amount: 36% to 45% for moderate pain, and 12% to 13% for high pain. (The photo of the peer had no effect.) But when the scientists redid the experiment while scanning subjects' brains with a functional MRI, they saw that the photo and the mental-distraction task activated very different parts of the brain.

The distraction task engaged the higher, thinking parts of the brain. A photo of the beloved, on the other hand, engaged the more primitive, "reptilian" regions — reward centers related to urges and cravings that are also implicated in addictions.

Learning how to harness the power of a loved one could help relieve pain without drug-induced side effects — or perhaps help people quit smoking, the scientists suggested.

"Will I be going back to my patients and prescribing one passionate love affair every six months? I don't know if I'm going there," Mackey said. "But it tells us there's a lot more to the experience of pain than just the injury."

Bruce Naliboff, co-director of the UCLA Center for Neurovisceral Sciences & Women's Health, said that the next step could be to separate out how much, if any, of the pain reduction was related to sexual desire.

"It'd be interesting to do an experiment with not just an acquaintance, but someone you feel close to — just not a sexual attraction," said Naliboff, who was not involved in the study.

That might include budding platonic relationships. Recalling that first meeting of minds over drinks during the conference, Aron said, "Talk about novel, challenging, exhilarating.... That night, when we had our conversation, if you heated my arm I wouldn't have felt anything."

amina.khan@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Chilean Miners Emerge Changed Men after Rescue

Thursday, October 14, 2010

DALE HURD~CBN NEWS SR. REPORTER

An epic drama came to an end late Wednesday night when the last of the 33 trapped Chilean miners emerged from their captivity. They had spent more than two months underground and came out to a hero's welcome. For many of the men, it has been a life-changing experience.

The rescue exceeded expectations every step of the way. All 33 men were freed in just 23 hours.

"We 33 miners are walking hand in hand with God," said miner Mario Sepulveda.

Early on, the men said they set aside time to pray daily.

Christian groups converged on the site, ministering to families and sending mini-Bibles and magnifying glasses down to the miners.

An audio adaptation of the Jesus film was sent down on 33 MP3 players. Local ministers said two of the men gave their lives to Christ.

Others said they grew closer to God.

"There are actually 34 of us, because God has never left us down here," 19-year-old miner Jimmy Sanchez wrote in a letter.

They went into the mine as workers. Now they are not only national heroes, they are changed men. They are beginning to tell the stories of their difficult times -- and how they never lost hope.

The rescued men were all wearing similar t-shirts when they came out of the mine. They were sent down by a brother of one of the miners.

The shirt says on the front "Thank you Lord" and on the back it says "To Him be the glory and honor."

It's taken from the Book of Psalm 95 verse 4: "...in his hands are the depths of the earth."