Just like in the case of Jesus and Peter, when Peter was
rebuking the Lord about His talk of how He would pass through sufferings as the
Messiah... " And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer
many things, and be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the
scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again."(Mark 8:31) we should learn to handle the case like Jesus
who called Peter Satan at that instance because he tried to persuade Him out of
the purpose of His coming to earth..." And he spake the saying openly. And
Peter took him, and began to rebuke him."(Mark 8:32)... But he turning
about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me,
Satan; for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men…”(Mark
8:33). We as followers of Christ should not take lightly the persuasions from
men to abandon our life's purpose all because they feel we don't deserve to
pursue that or may be because they feel they have a better option for us.
Remember, such persuasions of diversion from divine purpose could come from
beloved brethren, little wonder Jesus got His from Peter (the most capable one
to take over from Him as leader of the apostles, per say). So, my dear, write
down the vision for your life as God gave it you, and you know what? Make sure
you stick to it even in the midst of storms of persuasions from more
"visionary" friends who feel they love you more than you love
yourself. You are blessed.
Sunday 9 September 2012
Saturday 8 September 2012
THE POWER OF VISION
I wish to start my exegesis by portraying vision in the context i want to dwell on.
Vision is a glimpse of the ultimate purpose of a person's life which in this case is as determined by the Supreme Being. Vision can also be seen as capturing the future in the present. Vision is important because it gives your life a focus. Also, Vision defines your scope and jurisdiction in life. Vision helps you understand that you are not everything and cannot be everything. You cannot do everything, you are only assigned to specific duties, functions and assignments in order to make real impact and achieve true success. Vision helps you to define life. Where there is no definition there will be deviations. And life is too short to allow too many deviations. Find your place in life and see how your life makes a lasting impart and impact. Life is too short to experiment with, therefore, go for vision.
Vision is a glimpse of the ultimate purpose of a person's life which in this case is as determined by the Supreme Being. Vision can also be seen as capturing the future in the present. Vision is important because it gives your life a focus. Also, Vision defines your scope and jurisdiction in life. Vision helps you understand that you are not everything and cannot be everything. You cannot do everything, you are only assigned to specific duties, functions and assignments in order to make real impact and achieve true success. Vision helps you to define life. Where there is no definition there will be deviations. And life is too short to allow too many deviations. Find your place in life and see how your life makes a lasting impart and impact. Life is too short to experiment with, therefore, go for vision.
Friday 7 September 2012
WEIRD THINGS HUMANS DO DAILY, AND WHY
Cry
How odd that sadness causes water to spill from our eyes! Among all animals, we alone cry tears of emotion.
Not only do they serve the purpose of communicating feelings of distress, scientists believe tears also carry certain undesirable hormones and other proteins that are produced during periods of stress out of the body, which may explain the cathartic effect of "a good cry."
Hiccup
Hiccups are involuntary spasms of the diaphragm — the muscular membrane in your chest that figures importantly in breathing. A spell of them ensues when that muscle gets irritated, often by the presence of too much food in the stomach, or too little.
Weirdly, though, hiccups are as useless as they are annoying; they serve no apparent purpose. One hypothesis suggests they may be a remnant of a primitive sucking reflex. Whatever the ancient function, they are little more than a nuisance now — something to be gotten rid of via a variety of creative folk remedies.
Sleep
We spend roughly one-third of our lives asleep. No human can go without it for more than a handful of days, and yet sleep may be the least understood of all our activities.
It certainly allows for a lot of body "maintenance work," from production of chemicals that get used during waking hours to the self-organization of neurons in the developing brain. REM sleep, with its high neuronal activity, occurs for longer each night during periods of brain growth.
Several theories point to sleep as a state vital to memory and learning. It may help ingrain episodic memories into long-term storage, and it also may simply give our mental waking activities a much-needed break.
Blush
Turns out, the cheek-reddening reaction is a universal human response to social attention. Everyone does it — some more than others. Common blushing triggers include meeting someone important, receiving a compliment and experiencing a strong emotion in a social situation.
Blush biology works like this: Veins in the face dilate, causing more blood to flow into your cheeks and producing a rosy complexion. However, scientists are stumped as to why all that happens, or what function it serves.
Kiss
It's weird, when you think about it, that swapping spit seems romantic. Turns out it's a biological instinct.
Kissing allows people to use smell and taste to assess each other as potential mates. People's breath and saliva carry chemical signals as to whether they are healthy or sick, and in the case of females, whether they're ovulating — all important messages for potential partners in reproduction.
Furthermore, the skin around peoples' noses and mouths is coated with oils that contain pheromones, chemicals that broadcast information about a person's biological makeup. When people pick up each other's pheromones during a sloppy kiss, they'll subconsciously become either more or less sexually attracted to each other depending on what they detect.
Alongside the chemosensory cues exchanged during kisses, psychologists also believe the actual physical act of kissing helps couples bond. This theory is supported by the fact that oxytocin — a hormone that increases most peoples' feelings of sociality, love and trust — floods brains when mouths kiss.
Fart
The answer may stink, but everything we eat or drink gives us gas. In fact, it's normal to fart up to half a gallon (1.9 liters), or about 15 to 20 toots worth of gas each day.
Particularly fragrant flatulence, however, comes from colonies of bacteria shacked up inside our lower intestinal tract. In the process of converting our meals into useful nutrients, these food-munching microbes produce a smelly by-product of hydrogen sulfide gas—the same stench that emanates from rotten eggs.
Just like the rest of us, the bacteria like munching on sugary foods best. The types of sugar naturally present in milk, fruit — and, of course, beans — produce the most farts .
Laugh
The punchline of a joke hits you, and with it comes a funny feeling: You're suddenly overcome by the urge to yell out spastically , over and over. Laughing is weird. Why do we do it?
Psychologists think this behavioral response serves as a signal to others by spreading positive emotions , decreasing stress and contributing to group cohesion. For those same reasons, chimps and orangutans smile and laugh during social play too.
In fact, many hypothesize that laughing evolved from panting. When our prehuman ancestors wrestled playfully with each other, they got all panty… and that eventually turned into getting laughy.
Blink
It's not that strange that we blink: The tenth-of-a-second-long activity clears away dust particles and spreads lubricating fluids across the eyeball. What is strange, though, is that we fail to notice the world plunging into darkness every two to 10 seconds!
Scientists have found that the human brain has a talent for ignoring the momentary blackout. The very act of blinking suppresses activity in several areas of the brain responsible for detecting environmental changes, so that you experience the world around you as continuous.
Zone out
No matter how hard we might try to stay focused on an everyday task, such as brushing our teeth or queuing for coffee, we simply can't stop our minds from wandering. Fortunately, those bizarre bouts of cognition sans awareness known as "zoning out" are actually a good thing. They’re vital to creativity and imaginative thought.
Instead of staying completely focused on a dull and familiar external stimulus, neuroscience research shows that our attention waxes and wanes, and we spend 13 percent of the time "zoned out." During this time, we are free to float along internal streams of consciousness, following wherever our minds randomly take us — perhaps arriving at a "eureka!" moment, or at the very least, a spontaneous and interesting idea.
See in 3-D
Hey, wait a second… how do two eyes produce 3-D vision?
It's actually a trick of the mind (or three tricks, to be exact). First, our brains utilize "binocular disparity" — the slight difference between the images seen by our left and right eyes. Our brains use the two skewed versions of a scene to reconstruct its depth.
For a close-up object, the brain registers the "convergence" of our eyes, or the angle they swing through to focus on the object, to decide how far away it is.
When glancing at things on the go, we subconsciously gauge distance by registering "parallax." That's the difference in speed at which closer and farther objects seem to move as you pass them.
Get pins & needles
Hitting your funny bone isn't very funny. Neither is crossing your legs for too long, or waking up at night with a dead-seeming hand that gradually tingles back to life. What causes that horrible "pins and needles" sensation?
It happens when you apply too much extra weight or pressure on a nerve, temporarily inhibiting its function, and then remove the pressure. As the nerve gradually returns to normal, our brain somehow interprets its activity as a tingling sensation — pins and needles.
Take risks
Risky endeavors can be deadly, as exemplified by the frequency of fatal sky-diving and mountain-climbing accidents. So, why don’t we all just stay home and watch Netflix? Why this urge to do dangerous things?
Psychologists say risk-taking stems from our need to impress potential mates. Men face more intra-intimate competition than women, and so they must advertise their intimate fitness — through daring exploits — more overtly. This explains why men tend to take even more risks when they’re in groups. Though women are generally more risk-averse, everyone strives to impress on occasion.
http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1307-10-weird-behaviors-humans-do-every-day-why.html
How odd that sadness causes water to spill from our eyes! Among all animals, we alone cry tears of emotion.
Not only do they serve the purpose of communicating feelings of distress, scientists believe tears also carry certain undesirable hormones and other proteins that are produced during periods of stress out of the body, which may explain the cathartic effect of "a good cry."
Hiccup
Hiccups are involuntary spasms of the diaphragm — the muscular membrane in your chest that figures importantly in breathing. A spell of them ensues when that muscle gets irritated, often by the presence of too much food in the stomach, or too little.
Weirdly, though, hiccups are as useless as they are annoying; they serve no apparent purpose. One hypothesis suggests they may be a remnant of a primitive sucking reflex. Whatever the ancient function, they are little more than a nuisance now — something to be gotten rid of via a variety of creative folk remedies.
Sleep
We spend roughly one-third of our lives asleep. No human can go without it for more than a handful of days, and yet sleep may be the least understood of all our activities.
It certainly allows for a lot of body "maintenance work," from production of chemicals that get used during waking hours to the self-organization of neurons in the developing brain. REM sleep, with its high neuronal activity, occurs for longer each night during periods of brain growth.
Several theories point to sleep as a state vital to memory and learning. It may help ingrain episodic memories into long-term storage, and it also may simply give our mental waking activities a much-needed break.
Blush
Turns out, the cheek-reddening reaction is a universal human response to social attention. Everyone does it — some more than others. Common blushing triggers include meeting someone important, receiving a compliment and experiencing a strong emotion in a social situation.
Blush biology works like this: Veins in the face dilate, causing more blood to flow into your cheeks and producing a rosy complexion. However, scientists are stumped as to why all that happens, or what function it serves.
Kiss
It's weird, when you think about it, that swapping spit seems romantic. Turns out it's a biological instinct.
Kissing allows people to use smell and taste to assess each other as potential mates. People's breath and saliva carry chemical signals as to whether they are healthy or sick, and in the case of females, whether they're ovulating — all important messages for potential partners in reproduction.
Furthermore, the skin around peoples' noses and mouths is coated with oils that contain pheromones, chemicals that broadcast information about a person's biological makeup. When people pick up each other's pheromones during a sloppy kiss, they'll subconsciously become either more or less sexually attracted to each other depending on what they detect.
Alongside the chemosensory cues exchanged during kisses, psychologists also believe the actual physical act of kissing helps couples bond. This theory is supported by the fact that oxytocin — a hormone that increases most peoples' feelings of sociality, love and trust — floods brains when mouths kiss.
Fart
The answer may stink, but everything we eat or drink gives us gas. In fact, it's normal to fart up to half a gallon (1.9 liters), or about 15 to 20 toots worth of gas each day.
Particularly fragrant flatulence, however, comes from colonies of bacteria shacked up inside our lower intestinal tract. In the process of converting our meals into useful nutrients, these food-munching microbes produce a smelly by-product of hydrogen sulfide gas—the same stench that emanates from rotten eggs.
Just like the rest of us, the bacteria like munching on sugary foods best. The types of sugar naturally present in milk, fruit — and, of course, beans — produce the most farts .
Laugh
The punchline of a joke hits you, and with it comes a funny feeling: You're suddenly overcome by the urge to yell out spastically , over and over. Laughing is weird. Why do we do it?
Psychologists think this behavioral response serves as a signal to others by spreading positive emotions , decreasing stress and contributing to group cohesion. For those same reasons, chimps and orangutans smile and laugh during social play too.
In fact, many hypothesize that laughing evolved from panting. When our prehuman ancestors wrestled playfully with each other, they got all panty… and that eventually turned into getting laughy.
Blink
It's not that strange that we blink: The tenth-of-a-second-long activity clears away dust particles and spreads lubricating fluids across the eyeball. What is strange, though, is that we fail to notice the world plunging into darkness every two to 10 seconds!
Scientists have found that the human brain has a talent for ignoring the momentary blackout. The very act of blinking suppresses activity in several areas of the brain responsible for detecting environmental changes, so that you experience the world around you as continuous.
Zone out
No matter how hard we might try to stay focused on an everyday task, such as brushing our teeth or queuing for coffee, we simply can't stop our minds from wandering. Fortunately, those bizarre bouts of cognition sans awareness known as "zoning out" are actually a good thing. They’re vital to creativity and imaginative thought.
Instead of staying completely focused on a dull and familiar external stimulus, neuroscience research shows that our attention waxes and wanes, and we spend 13 percent of the time "zoned out." During this time, we are free to float along internal streams of consciousness, following wherever our minds randomly take us — perhaps arriving at a "eureka!" moment, or at the very least, a spontaneous and interesting idea.
See in 3-D
Hey, wait a second… how do two eyes produce 3-D vision?
It's actually a trick of the mind (or three tricks, to be exact). First, our brains utilize "binocular disparity" — the slight difference between the images seen by our left and right eyes. Our brains use the two skewed versions of a scene to reconstruct its depth.
For a close-up object, the brain registers the "convergence" of our eyes, or the angle they swing through to focus on the object, to decide how far away it is.
When glancing at things on the go, we subconsciously gauge distance by registering "parallax." That's the difference in speed at which closer and farther objects seem to move as you pass them.
Get pins & needles
Hitting your funny bone isn't very funny. Neither is crossing your legs for too long, or waking up at night with a dead-seeming hand that gradually tingles back to life. What causes that horrible "pins and needles" sensation?
It happens when you apply too much extra weight or pressure on a nerve, temporarily inhibiting its function, and then remove the pressure. As the nerve gradually returns to normal, our brain somehow interprets its activity as a tingling sensation — pins and needles.
Take risks
Risky endeavors can be deadly, as exemplified by the frequency of fatal sky-diving and mountain-climbing accidents. So, why don’t we all just stay home and watch Netflix? Why this urge to do dangerous things?
Psychologists say risk-taking stems from our need to impress potential mates. Men face more intra-intimate competition than women, and so they must advertise their intimate fitness — through daring exploits — more overtly. This explains why men tend to take even more risks when they’re in groups. Though women are generally more risk-averse, everyone strives to impress on occasion.
http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1307-10-weird-behaviors-humans-do-every-day-why.html
Adapted from Nairaland.
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