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Getting to the heart of the matter

Tips for Life

by Alan Bailey

When life seems a bit mundane, a bit ordinary, think about what is going on inside your body. One of the many things we take for granted is that wonderful pump, the heart. We don’t even feel its action most of the time but it is working away day and night keeping us alive.

It is amazingly efficient. Its job is to keep a river of life flowing through our blood vessels. There is no provision for a shut-down for repairs, or for a monthly service, it must just keep pumping, hour by hour, day by day and year by year. Muscles expand and contract, valves open and shut, all prompted by nerve impulses.

Sure, many folks have problems with diseases and disorders. This doesn’t reflect on the design and efficiency of the healthy organ. Very often it reflects on the way we treat our bodies and the things we ask them to do.

The other heart
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Stay close to your friend

Tips for Life

by Alan Bailey

One of the greatest things in life is to relate to a special person who is very near and dear. For some, it will be just one friend or loved one, for others, several of that kind. Whatever it is for us, we treasure them as people and cherish their closeness.

But all too often we hear of breakdown. Husband leaves wife, or wife leaves husband. Sons, daughters fall out with parents or in-laws. Relationships have soured. Surely it must be one of the most common personal traumas faced by people today.

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We can’t live without it

Tips for Life

by Alan Bailey

Every day of our lives we use it. In fact, we are mostly made of it. I believe elephants consist of 70% of it. Yes, we are talking about water. Where it’s plentiful, we wash everything including ourselves in it, drink it, and grow our crops with it. And you can think of many other uses we make of water.

Where it is not plentiful, life is made harder. In fact, as we all know, without water we die. Earth has plenty, considering the size of the oceans. Other planets that we know of don’t seem to have any.

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Judging ourselves truly

by Andrew Lansdown

Although my family’s interest in Australian Idol has increased over recent months, my own interest has lessened a little. For the truth is that my favourite part of the whole affair was the audition process.

I only caught two of the audition programs on television, but I very much enjoyed them. I liked watching how the judges dealt with the vastly different contestants who came before them. I soon realised that Mark Holden was sometimes sarcastic in his judgments, while Kyle Sandilands was often brutal and Marcia Hines was always kind.

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What we eat

by Andrew Lansdown

 

Some time ago I worked as a journalist on a country newspaper. One of the numerous articles I wrote was titled “A taste for rats!” It began:
In many schools they dissect rats, but at the X High School the students eat them! Indeed such is the students’ taste for the rodents that they consumed over 200 during one lunch period last week.

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The purpose of the Passion

by Andrew Lansdown

Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ opens with Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is here, the historical records agree, that Jesus suffered unspeakable anguish as He contemplated His imminent death.

In Mel’s version of events, Satan comes to taunt and test Jesus in the garden. Like many other scenes in the film, this scene has no historical basis. Such a thing could perhaps have happened, but the eyewitnesses make no mention of it. (From this scene onwards, viewers should be alert to the fact that they are watching not an historian’s account of the Passion, but a filmmaker’s account. While much of the film “is as it was”, much of it is as Mel imagines.)

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