Sermon Illustrations
BOGGLES the Mind
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BOGGLES AND BAGELS
By PAUL A. CORCORAN
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My mind is boggled so often these days that it no longer knows a boggle from a bagel. People do such things that I simply fall into a state of mental floundering when I try to comprehend.
I look at a tall, gleaming, new hotel and convention center and try to think how one person can design all those millions of angles and corners and joinings and stress curves and then be so sure that he can say, “Go ahead; build it. It’ll stand up.” The mind boggles.
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People put out such numbers that the brain is stunned. Forty-five billion, for instance. Can you picture 45 billion somethings? Anythings? I had to look up billion and discovered that Webster’s Collegiate doesn’t even try to define it, but refers the reader to “the numbers table” on Page 479, where they run it out in digits — words failing, I suppose. A billion is 1,000,000,000.
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And what’s the 45,000,000,000? That is the number of paper and plastic cups we throw into the trash every year! The brain reels. That’s along with 21 billion other plastic dishes and bowls, 15 billion paper plates and 18 billion plastic lids. We’re building our own “tower with its top in the heavens” — not in Babel, but out of the debris of what must be one big, year-long picnic going on somewhere. We also bury, bundle or burn 16 billion disposable diapers and scatter across the earth 2 billion razors and razor blades. I’ll never go barefoot again.
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MAYBE I JUST HAVE an easily boggled mind. I even have trouble understanding how my camera knows the difference between 1/10 and 1/100 of a second. I know that if a second has hundredth, it must have a hundred of them, but how can that little piece of Japanese plastic, glass and springs separate one from the other 99?
How can a stop watch tell that Mary Decker Slaney ran the mile just 2/100 of a second faster than the last time? The material in her track shirt would make more difference than that. Such things dazzle my razzle.
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I’m hearing something else, like a message from somewhere familiar, something about boggle and dazzle and God. It’s that old psalmist friend of mine saying, When I look at the stars, the sun and moon which thou hast made,
what is man, that thou art mindful of him?
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I join his boggle. Six million stars in just one corner of a galaxy and a million galaxies so far away it’ll take a million
years for the light from one of them to show up in my evening sky some winter night.
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And God who made all this cares more for us than about all that! There’s boggle for you — God, the great boggier of man’s mind!
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And he doesn’t quit with that. Here’s where it really hits me. My mind falters and staggers and can hardly go on when I try to think how men could make themselves take a mallet and drive nails through the gristle and bone of men’s hands and feet and then hang them up on crosses along the roads of their empire and that 2,000 years after my life is affected profoundly by one of those crosses, the one with the young rabbi from Nazareth on it. And he’s called by all people the Prince of Pax!
It boggles the mind. Thank God, it also saves my soul.
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PRESBYTERIAN OUTLOOK, page 9, OCTOBER 14, 1985