December 2015 8'OClock News

Glory to God In the Highest

The Eight O’Clock

December 2015

News

8 am Service, Christ Church, Kenilworth

Consumers or Producers ?

I have been given a lot of food for thought by the talks that we

had in the “Learning Zone” on the Saturday morning of our recent Green Fair. One area is the challenge to be intentionally countercultural in our consumer-driven urban context and find ways to replace consuming with producing; in other words, to make a deliberate choice, as far as possible, to make or grow, rather than to buy.

At the same time as I am pondering on the practicalities of this, we are once again in the frenetic commercial build-up to Christmas.

There is such a contrast between the simple and timeless pastoral scene of the stable and the shepherds depicted in the Nativity tableaus displayed in our shopping centres and the frantic consuming that is going on all around them.

Here is an unlikely text to focus on at Christmas, but one that I think has great relevance: Acts 9:36-39: In Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha (in Greek her name was Dorcas); she was always doing good and helping the poor.

About that time she became sick and died, and her body was washed and placed in an upstairs room. Lydda was near Joppa; so when the disciples heard that Peter was in Lydda, they sent two men to him and urged him, “Please come at once!” Peter went with them, and when he arrived he was taken upstairs to the room. All the widows stood around him, crying and showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them.

Acts 9 begins with the dramatic conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus; in Acts 10 the narrative moves on to the equally momentous conversion of Cornelius and the beginning of the Gentile mission. In between these great events, there is this personal, domestic account of a woman who used her skill and industry to make things and to do good for the poor and needy.

Of course the fact that this account goes on to tell of her being raised from the dead in the name of Jesus, is no small thing in itself! The thing is, I imagine she got up and continued to honour God by continuing to do what she had been doing. Tabitha was a producer, not a consumer; life, for her, was about what she could give, not what she could get.

I think this is a good text for us to carry into the Christmas season.

This is a very good time for us to adopt a counter-cultural stance December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

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and look to practical ways of substituting making for buying as much as we can. Children are on holiday, families are more together, and there are lots of older cultural traditions that give scope for baking, sewing, crafting, and all manner of domestic creativity and production. These are not just quaint but idle pursuits—I think we need to see them as representing something much deeper and healthier in contrast to the commercialism of our society, and choose to do them with that bigger perspective in mind.

In addition, many of the older, pre-commercial customs that have grown up around Christmas have a strong emphasis on the poor and on service. This poses a further challenge to the prevailing attitudes and preoccupations that tend to govern Christmas in our current context. As the account of Dorcas shows us, this is thoroughly Gospel stuff, alongside dramatic Damascus road conversions, raising the dead, and the Holy Spirit falling on a room full of Roman soldiers as on the original day of Pentecost.

In addition to what we choose to do in our homes and as families, Christ Church will offer us many opportunities to make, to give and to serve through this Christmas season. Again, let’s not view these as nice little feel-good activities, but as a much more significant counter-cultural and Gospel statement of intent.

To say “Yes” to Jesus with integrity, we need to think carefully about what we say “No” to.

How about this as a little (and actually quite mild) Christmas challenge: match every item that you buy for Christmas with one that you make; and match every item that you get for yourself, or give to your family, with one that you give to the poor.

May we all have a Christmas deeply enriched by the Spirit of Jesus.

- Rob Taylor

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From Silence to Chaos

[The following letter appeared in the Cape Times on 2 November.

It was the beginning of a much bigger story.]

‘It strikes me as ironic that a silent spiritual retreat should end in frantic shouts for help. On Thursday, October 29, while on my first visit to the Helderberg Nature Reserve, I fell down the mountain and was eventually rescued by the Wilderness Search and Rescue Team.

I am lucky to be alive today. I give thanks to God who, without doubt, protected me. I know I was given superhuman strength as I clung to a branch above my head for more than two hours to prevent myself from falling further. The Wilderness Search and Rescue Team, Metro Rescue and the Helderberg rangers deserve my public expression of gratitude for coming to my rescue and preventing what could have been a mountain tragedy.

They acted with extreme urgency from the moment they received the call and undertook the rescue with impressive competence and professionalism. I am grateful to Donny and Akko for their mountaineering skills in using ropes to get to me in an inaccessible gorge where I had fallen.

From here they were able to harness and abseil me down the cliffside to safety. They are indeed men of courage and selflessness.Thank you also to Bronwen and Cherylene for their care and calm reassurance on the ’phone. You prevented the rising panic from consuming me.

I would appeal to the serious mountaineers not to use forbidden routes as short cuts as these become widened so as to appear as the actua path, which happened in my case. All hikers, heed my warning. When you know you are in trouble, stay still and call for help instead of leaving the path and trying to get to safety. This is where the severe accidents happen.

I was almost one of those statistics.’

been switched off, but at 12 his 1 pm meeting was cancelled and it was now 1.15. Alex ’phoned Helderberg rescue and they were all in Cape Town for a meeting but they managed to ’phone other rescuers who told Alex they would be there in 15 minutes. Luckily, Sue is very fit.

Every 20 minutes Alex ’phoned Sue and all he could hear her saying was ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus Christ’. It took the rescue team TWO HOURS to get to Sue. She could hear them calling her name and she answered them but they couldn’t find her but eventually they did. Someone climbed down to her with ropes and they harnessed her and helped her to abseil down the gorge.

She said while she was hanging onto the tree, fighting for her life, she kept on thinking of Psalm 91:11-12 (I have written it out at the end). She said she felt as though she was being lifted up and her foot didn’t dare touch the rock so she kept on pulling it up. The man who rescued her couldn’t stop telling her how lucky she was because that sort of accident usually ends in death.

God was there with her every second of this ordeal because - Susan Mellows she doesn’t know where she got the strength to hold onto the [Diana Hoffa sent in this letter and further correspondence took tree for two hours. She is black and blue with bruises, her body place with Veronica Mellows, a 10-amer and mother of Susan. is in excruciating pain and she can’t sleep properly because the This is what Vee wrote.] whole thing flashes in front of her. BUT we are all giving thanks that God and His angels were protecting Sue. As a mother, every day, I pray for protection for every member of Psalm 91:11-12: our family by name and God heard my prayer.

For He will command His angels concerning you Our oldest daughter, Susan, is doing a Masters in Theology at To guard you in all your ways Stellenbosch University and there are about 10 people in her class, They will lift you up in their hands all men. On Thursday the professor told them to go individually into So that you will not strike your foot against a stone - Veronica Mellows the Helderberg mountains on a silent retreat.

Sue went on a trail up the mountain until the path she was on forked. There was no sign saying which road to take so she chose Great Hymns the wider path. She kept on climbing, pulling herself up by holding The Pastoral Care Group, onto grass patches, until she realised she couldn’t go up any St. Stephen's Church, further, so she decided to go down but when she looked back she saw she couldn’t do that either because it was a sheer drop. She Belvedere Road, Claremont says now that she should have stood still but she tried to go down are hosting and slipped and started sliding down on her bottom towards the "Great Hymns" edge of the cliff. As she was falling she managed to grab hold of a at 2.30 pm, tree but her body was over the edge and her arms were above her Thursday 3 December 2015. at an angle.

Organist Richard Haigh will present Somehow she managed to get her cell phone out of her back pack interesting information on the hymns chosen while hanging onto the tree. She didn’t have the phone number of the Helderberg Mountain rescue so she called her husband, Alex. and will then lead the congregation from the Alex should have been in a meeting and his ’phone should have historic tracker action Bevington organ December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

in singing together.

Tickets at the door : R40 [includes tea]

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Israel Tour 2015 Alec and I joined Christ Church in 2002 and soon got

to listen to and admire John Atkinson, who was then assistant minister to Duncan. We attended John’s Old Testament classes and were impressed by his erudition and his enthusiasm for his subject. Although Israel had never been high on our travel list, we were soon keen to join one of John’s Study Tours, but only in 2015 was the timing right for him and for us.

John’s 16-day tour left Cape Town on 25 April, but well before then we were meeting with others for weekly talks in which John told us about Israel’s history and its current situation, always setting his explanations in the context of Jewish beliefs and teaching. And this was really the whole point of the tour—to see how our Christian faith has its roots deep in Judaic beliefs, teaching and traditions. We learned to see Jesus as a great rabbi and prophet in the tradition of Moses, Elijah and Elisha; we learned about Israel and why and how it came into being.

The 22 Capetonians in our group, including John and his assistant Sue Penzhorn boarded Turkish airlines. We were joined by four more from Natal, two from Polokwane and, when we arrived bleary-eyed in Tel Aviv, by two more from London.

No sooner had our feet touched the ground than we were off down Route 6 to the Negev, a desert that makes the Kalahari look like a garden. The ancient deserts of Abraham and Moses are riven by craggy mountain ranges, pitted with vast craters and burned deepest red or bleached to palest yellow by the relentless sun. It is a completely unforgiving environment, but even so, some of it has been transformed into productive land, using water piped all the way from the Sea of Galilee in the north. We even visited a wine farm in a remote valley of the Wilderness of Zin and soon realised that nothing goes to waste in Israel. Every inch of land, every drop of water is conserved, improved and put to the best possible use. Fifty million trees have been planted in the country since 1948—mostly in the north and centre—to reverse previous deforestation.

We drove even deeper into the desert, due south to Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba, where we crossed on foot in blazing heat into Jordan for a couple of days in Petra, the Nabateans’ “rose red city, half as old as time”. John led some of the more energetic members of the tour all the way down the valley and up the 900 steps to the ‘monastery’ returning sweaty but triumphant long after the sun had set. On our way back into Israel, we visited Mount Nebo, where Moses died before entering the Promised Land and then descended many hundreds of feet to the lowest point on the earth’s surface, the Dead Sea, now strangely shrunken into two unequal salt lakes. The feeling of falling back on waters ten times more salty than ordinary sea and feeling your legs bob up in front of you is indescribable. Getting your legs down again is another matter!

We discovered that Herod the Great, villain of our Christmas story, was a great builder. Towering on a plateau overlooking the Dead Sea is his palace fortress of Masada, where we relived the Zealots’ last stand against Rome in AD 73. Later, we would visit Herod’s palace and port city of Caesarea, the strange folly called Herodian, a palace perched on an artificial mountain just outside Jerusalem. Not far from Masada is Qumran, home of the December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

mysterious Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. John explained the mission of John the Baptist, who lived here at a dark time in Jewish history, preaching to the pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem and proclaiming the coming of Jesus as the Messiah.

We stopped briefly in Jericho and for longer at the ruins of one of best-preserved of the ten Roman cities in the region, Beit Shean or Scythopolis and spent the next four days exploring the heartland of Christian history: Galilee, which the Israelis call Lake Kinneret. We stayed at Nof Ginosar, a kibbutz hotel on the very shores of the lake and were enchanted by the natural beauty of this region in the late Spring, with poppies, thistles and hollyhocks in bloom and roses of Sharon in the hedgerows. Descending the Mount of Beatitudes on a beautiful morning with the expanse of Galilee before us was a truly spiritual experience. So was meditating in the ruined synagogue at Capernaum where Jesus preached (Matthew 4) and gathered His most devoted disciples and so was our communion service on the very shores of Galilee. We visited Nazareth, now a sprawling and largely Arab city capped with a plethora of Christian churches and spent another day in the nervy and contested Golan region, where snow-capped Mount Hermon marks the current border with Syria.

We sampled Druse pancakes, tasted the wine of the famous Asaf winery, whose winemaker trained in Paarl and ventured into the mountainous region of the tribe of Dan, where the Jordan bursts forth from countless springs into a raging mountain torrent, eventually to lose itself in the saline wastes of the Dead Sea hundreds of kilometres away.

Finally, there was Jerusalem. The first sight of Jerusalem lodges in your memory forever; an ancient honey-gold limestone city spilling over rocky hills and valleys and topped, not by the Temple, as visitors would have seen it before AD70, but by the golden Dome of the Rock. We were lucky enough to spend five nights in Jerusalem, but it would take years even to begin to understand this beautiful

city, with its devastated past and uneasy present. We spent a full and exhausting day at the Temple Mount where, although the monuments on its summit are sacred to Islam, its vast subterranean chambers are witness to millennia of Jewish settlement and worship. The Garden of Gethsemane and its beautiful church and ancient olive trees was a welcome spiritual oasis as was the Garden Tomb, cared for by English Christians, where we took communion overlooked by what might be the cliffs of Golgotha. On other days we visited Ne’ot Kedumim botanical gardens where the ancient plant varieties of Israel are being reintroduced and Bethlehem, an ugly, nervy and fractured city with little to recall that peaceful, joyful and holy birth more than two millennia ago.

Our last Sunday morning was spent at Christ Church Jerusalem where we attended service and heard David Pilleggi preach powerfully to a large and multinational congregation and learned about the work of the Christian Mission to the Jews, which John Atkinson now heads. On our way to the airport the next day, we stopped at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust (Shoah) memorial which is, as it is meant to be, a disturbing and upsetting place, a place of memory, but also a place of hope. It is crowded with school parties and adult visitors and the main museum is designed so that once you enter it you cannot get out again other than by following a zigzag route which propels you mercilessly through the whole history of the Shoah. It is brilliantly designed and packed with information, using the latest media technology to display every imaginable kind of historical source. Having been to Auschwitz four times, I learned little that was new, but my understanding of the Shoah, of its impact on ordinary decent people and the sheer horror of what they went through was immeasurably deepened. For me the greatest impact came in the very last room, a vast cylindrical chamber which you enter about half way up and in the semi-darkness realise that the walls are filled from top to bottom with files, each containing the name and whatever else is known about one of the six million victims of the Holocaust. Breaking the deep silence, a voice unceasingly intones the name (yad vashem) of each known victim. Yad Vashem will ensure they are never forgotten and it will never rest until all names are recorded.

I imagine that for all of us, as for Alec and me, John’s tour was a life-changing experience. It was truly a study tour. As Christians we learned so much about our faith and about the Jewish faith onto which it is grafted in the person of our Lord and Messiah. As we travelled in the bus, John and our erudite guide Yehuda taught and quizzed us as we tried to wrap our minds, our tongues and our memories around the Shma’a—“Hear o Israel: the Lord our God is one; blessed be His glorious name!” We also learned the Lord’s prayer in Hebrew, as Jesus would have taught it and vast swathes of information of all kinds from the Shoresh “Reader” that each of us was given.

My mind has been captivated by Israel’s more Bethlehem recent history, in which is embedded the current and apparently insoluble quarrel between Israel and Palestine. It’s normal to oversimplify other people’s problems, as South Africans know all too well. So much of what we saw, the high security walls between Palestinian and Israeli territory, the provocative building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the militarisation of Israeli society with boys and girls armed and in uniform everywhere, the polarisation between impoverished Arab settlements and the December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

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staggering modernity and prosperity of Israel, all of these help, but do not in themselves explain, the conundrum. We were struck by the growing impact of ultra-Orthodox Jewry in all its various and sometimes picturesque forms on what was intended to be a largely secular state. We were concerned by the all too many signs that Islamic fundamentalism and Palestinian nationalism are becoming increasingly entrenched. What middle ground there ever was seems to be vanishing, yet we learned that hundreds of thousands of Arabs in Israel are Christians, like our lovely bus driver Beshara from Nazareth, and that some Jews like Yehuda, have also become Christians. Israel may be a land of paradoxes and heartbreak, but we left a little piece of our hearts there and our prayers go out for the land and all its people.

- Sara Pienaar

The Lost Ring God is a God of the

impossible! About five weeks ago I lost my engagement ring.

I had lost weight and my finger was narrower and suddenly one evening I noticed that my engagement ring was gone! The car was searched—nothing! I asked at the supermarket in which I’d been shopping—nothing. Last Thursday we took the car to a garage to repair an oil leak and the garage said they would work on it the next day. The problem was sorted and the car returned, having been cleaned and vacuumed. Two days later, while driving back from church Christopher heard a rattle. We looked down into a little cavity next to the gear lever and there shone the lost ring!

The men cleaning the car must have found it and put it into this space. I telephoned the garage and thanked them for their honesty. In the meantime we’d reported the loss to the insurance company who had already provided me with another ring. So we contacted them again to report the finding of the original ring.

As I thought the replacement ring was prettier, I decided to keep it and the original lost ring was given to the insurance company.

This event reminded me of God’s love and care and His faithful answers to prayer. ‘Thank You, Lord that we serve an Almighty, All-caring heavenly Father!’

Now to Him Who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3:20-1 NIV - Judy Jenkins

5

Touring Turkey Jane and I went on a coach-based organised tour of Turkey in September. The tour was the cheapest we could find, mainly because a number of activities were optional extras which were included by other operators. We still stayed in 4* hotels with breakfast and supper provided daily. The costs we encountered were not much different from South Africa's.

We found Turkey to be a modern, disciplined and apparently prosperous society, with flower planted highways and excellent intercity roads. Friends touring at the same time drove themselves successfully. Istanbul city has 21 million inhabitants and is worth avoiding at rush hour but has easy to use bus, tram and underground services.

The tourist “sights” occur in a cluster around the ancient Roman hippodrome (chariot racetrack). There is the gigantic and beautiful Blue Mosque, its giant dome roof supported by hollow pillars that were filled with water to cool the mosque and remain stable during earth tremors. The Aga Sofia was built as an orthodox cathedral, then became a mosque and is now a museum. The Muslims covered the Christian wall paintings and mosaics with plaster which cannot be removed because it is now a museum. However, wherever the ravages of time appear, that section can be restored and the Christian presence is slowly growing. The Topkapi Palace was less impressive than the Dolomabahce Palace, near our hotel, where the first two presidents of modern Turkey lived.

We drove to Ankara and the underground city of Sarhati, where the inhabitants hid as invaders criss-crossed the country. In Cappadacia people lived in caves in rock mounds (and some still do) and had churches, kitchens and living quarters hollowed out of the stone columns left by erosion. The calcium carbonate cascades at Pamukkale did not live up the to image created by post cards, as the blue water is now channelled off the white face.

Hierapolis is the remains of a Roman thermal resort, so we had a thermal swim at our hotel nearby.

We visited the 2000-year old asclepion or “health hydro” near Pergamom, with tanning areas, mud baths, herbal and enema treatments. Diagnosis was often based on dreams sent by the god of health, one of whose daughters was named Panacea.

On to Ephesus! All that remains at the site of the Temple of Artemis (or Diana) one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, is a single column! Here Paul's companions were assaulted by the rioting silversmiths, then rushed into the town to the 25000-seater open air theatre where Paul had to be prevented from addressing the crowd (Acts 19). We could imagine Paul preaching in front of the great library or chatting to his neighbour in the communal toilet.

(Eat your heart out “Forge”).

St John's grave is in Ephesus and the Virgin Mary's House, or site of where she lived, is outside the town. Two Popes have verified this so who am I to argue? One wonders what she made of Paul's stern teaching to Timothy about how the women of Ephesus should behave.

We then stopped at a tiny mountain village for lunch in a villager's home. No English and lots of hand waving over a delicious meal.

On to Troy. Which Troy? There have been 10 Troys. The wooden horse was Troy 7. Our guide showed us how he could not fit a coin into the cracks between the great foundation blocks of Troy 2 (2550-2250 BC) so accurately were they engineered. We were often reminded on this trip of how much unlimited labour, unlimited December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

money and a lot of time, can achieve.

Our visit to the ANZAC Gallipoli battle fields was a highlight.

What a hopeless venture: landing at the wrong spot and being unable to make any headway for eight months. Beautiful graveyards with many graves titled “Believed to be buried in this cemetery. name and rank'”. At one of the cemeteries there is a wall on which the following words attributed to Kemal Attaturk appear...

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side, here in this country of ours... You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.” Attaturk formed modern Turkey as a secular state, which although 90% Muslim, has no strife between Shias and Sunnis.

A vibrant, friendly country with a safe feel to it. The man who sold me a Turkish carpet was not a salesman but a friend helping me to solve the economic problems of the country. We flew on excellent Qatar Airlines and travelled with Neon Tours.

And a Magnum ice cream costs R 14!!!

- Peter Broster

Choir Recruitment This was in Lichfield

Cathedral. I thought we may have many more choir members if we were to go back to this practice?

- Jean Westwood

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Rosemary’s Reflection On Saturday, 7 November, I drove my Yellow Peril to Kenilworth

from Somerset West and arrived very early because the route had been hasslefree. As a result there was time to relax in the church while waiting for my long-time friend, Mary, to join me for the Roots and Shoots final meeting for the year.

As I sat there my mind went back to the first time I entered Christ Church in the early ‘70’s. Then it was still the old stone church with the organ near the front section on the right in front of the altar and the choir, with Mrs Jennings the organist, the well-respected trainer of the choir. My mind, like a butterfly, landed briefly on memories of a procession of ministers, some wonderful preachers, inspirational leaders and unforgettable people, like Chris Dare whom no one could ignore and who was involved with the orchestra, Parish Praise evenings and much more. I paused briefly to admire the spacious, light sanctuary that now surrounds one—an intermingling of old and new—with comfortable chairs having replaced the less comfortable pews. But, despite some brief flutters of brain waves about a really sad episode, I was overwhelmingly grateful for all the joy, the excellent teaching, and the fun at hilarious church concerts held in St Anne’s (now the Annex) that I had known as a church member. My mind then settled, momentarily, on the weddings of two of our daughters; on Thursday evening choir practices and on the amazing evening when Archbishop Tutu came to address the congregation and to answer any questions put to him. He certainly converted any doubters about his right to be the archbishop.

And then Mary arrived and my reverie was over. I was so glad that Mary was able to be there with me to experience Roots and Shoots together. We have been friends since our early teens when we were at school together and lived nearby. I was the eldest of six children and she was an only child so, in many ways she became almost like one of us, joining in our rumbustious, and often loud, home life.

Mary married and lived in Rhodesia—and then Zimbabwe—for 50 years while Bertil, my doctor husband and I spent only five years on a mission station in Rhodesia far away from Harare but our friendship has endured through times of separation and trial.

Now, since she lost her husband, she lives in Pinelands. There have been times of heartbreak for her as when she lost her only daughter, and all sorts of trials which come as one grows older but our faith has been like a rock and a life-raft to us as we’ve clung on together.

John Atkinson’s teaching on the Old Testament has always been something I wanted to attend but I was teaching myself and could never get there. Then, in 1998 when we retired, we moved to Pringle Bay and so my long-cherished desire was deferred until last year when I heard about Roots and Shoots to which I have December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

come whenever possible, and savoured each one. I feel sure that Mary will enjoy sharing in the knowledge and insights we are given and her work, as a prayer warrior in her own church, will be hugely enriched by what we learnt that day.

We’ll praise Him for all that is past and trust Him for all that’s to come.

- Rosemary Sundgren

I Didn’t Do My Stretching First!

I was outraged (a few weeks ago) when the young man ripped Joy’s gold necklace from her neck. I guess instinct took over as some minutes later I found myself lying prone on the tarmac in Castle Street in town with a numb right, torn clothing and deeply grazed knees and elbows.

After having recently passed my scriptural three score and ten, tearing off across town was perhaps foolhardy. Although I felt I was moving like the wind I was not gaining on the young man!

I came to my senses as Joy, together with a strong, complete stranger, helped me to my feet and correctly said, ‘They were just things, no need to put yourself at risk for them!’ Fortunately Joy was not hurt. I think the fright at seeing me lying on the road distracted her from her own shock. The bottom line was a torn Achilles tendon necessitating an operation and ultimately a moonboot until at least January next year.

The most notable features of this experience have been: * Joy’s loving, caring nursing and encouragement and she’s my driver and fabulous chef!; * The skill and care of the surgeon and his team together with all who attended to me during the operation and since; * The many calls, visits and prayers of so many of the 8 O’ Clock congregation. I am truly appreciative all your loving concern. My first return to the 8 am service was wonderful—even a mention in dispatches!

Thank you for all your prayers, especially those for patience!.

- Barrie Jack

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Avoid Alzheimer's - Dance ?

‘That seems to be the gist of a new study published in

the New England Journal of Medicine. The research, led by neurologist Dr. Joe Verghese at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, followed elderly subjects over an impressive 21-year period to determine which activities most improved their sharpness of mind, and thus staved off the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's disease.

The scientists, working under the assumption that the old saying "Use it or lose it" is extremely accurate when it comes to brain function, studied a number of activities that subjects engaged in to see which ones best improved their cognitive functions. These activities included reading books, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards, writing for pleasure, and playing a musical instrument.

They also included physical activities such as swimming, bicycling, playing tennis or golf, walking for exercise, doing

housework, and dancing.

Based on previous research, they expected doing crossword puzzles to score highly, and they did, producing a 47% lower risk of dementia. Reading produced a 35% reduced risk. To the researchers' surprise, forms of exercise such as playing golf, bicycling, and swimming produced a 0% lower risk of Alzheimer's—no effect at all. But an even bigger surprise was that regularly engaging in social dancing lowered the seniors' risk of dementia by a staggering 76%.’

[You may have missed the Barn Dance—don’t miss the next dance in 2016. ] - Extract from Article, The Best Means of Avoiding Alzheimers is Dance?

Science Then—and Now The Bible

Science Then

Science Now

* The Earth is a Sphere

* The Earth was a flat disc

* The Earth is a Sphere

* Only 1100 stars

* Innumerable stars

* Air is weightless

* Air has Weight

* All stars were the same

* Each star is different

* Light was fixed in place

* Light moves

* Earth sat on a large animal

* Free float of Earth in space

* Winds blew straight

* Winds blow in cyclones

* The ocean floor was flat

* Ocean floor contains deep valleys

Isaiah 40:22 * Innumerable Stars Jeremiah 33:22 * Air has Weight Job 28:25 * Each star is different 1 Corinthians 15:41 * Light moves Job 38:19-20 * Free float of Earth in space Job 26:7 * Winds blow in cyclones Ecclesiastes 1:6 * Ocean floor contains deep valleys and mountains 2 Samuel 22:16; Jonah 2:6 * Blood is the source of life and health Leviticus 17:11 * Creation made of invisible elements Hebrews 11:3 * Ocean floor contains springs Job 38:16 December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

and mountains

* Sick people must be bled

* Blood is the source of life and health

* Mostly ignorant on the subject

* Creation made of invisible elements

* Ocean fed only by rivers and rain

(atoms) * Ocean floor contains springs

- Website: The Bible and Science then and now

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… Genesis 1:1

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Encouraging Rob… John Rogers sent in a photograph of his tomato plant so that Rob Taylor could be inspired to grow his own.

- Origin unknown Sent in by Mary Thompson, East London

Jesus Christ, Son of God Jesus Christ, only begotten

Come let us adore Him

When the song of the angel is stilled When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The real work of Christmas begins…

To find the lost To heal the broken To feed the hungry To release the prisoner To rebuild the nations To bring peace among brothers and sisters To make music in the heart.

Son of God, Promised One, Name above all names, Alpha and Omega, The Way Truth and Life; an eastern star announced Your birth oh Bright Morning Start and Light of our world.

Dear Suffering Servant, precious Lamb of God, You were born in earth's dark stable to swallow and conquer our sin and death in order to be born again in our hearts, bringing Your Light of life, beginning now.

We celebrate and serve You with joy in the forever of our new todays.

Susan Lenzkes - From Every Day with Jesus, sent in by Judy Sewell

– Howard Thurman

Cheryl and Ev wish all our readers a blessed Christmas and a God-filled 2016.

Thank you for all your contributions and fellowship in Jesus.

December 2015 Eight O’Clock News

Editorial Team Tel. e-mail Ev Els

021 696 0336 emichael@iafrica.com

Cheryl Anderson

083 272 1530 canderson@beckman.com