Saturday 12 November 2005

The Mystery of the Hole

I am a regular reader of Joe Kissel's column "Interesting Thing of the Day" -- I receive a daily email from him and the latest one is from his archive, a classic piece of historical "science" about donut holes found at http://itotd.com/articles/314 .

(If you want to know more about Joe go here: http://alt.cc/jk/about-joe-kissell and one of the interesting tidbits about his life you will find there is that while he does not consider himself a religious person, he can often be found attending the First Mennonite Church of San Francisco.)

Anyway, its so ironic that just a few days ago I shared a story about donuts called "The Mystery of the Hole" during the worship portion I happened to be leading for the every-other-month meeting of my local (Central Disrict Mennonite) pastor-peer group. The story I found offers quite humorous insight on the spiritual ramifications and life application to Joe's own historical and "scientific" experiment about donuts and their holes! I am boggled by how well these two pieces complement each other.

I found "The Mystery of the Hole" in an Amazon book review (excerpt) of a collection of stories from the early part of the 20th century written by one of the greatest preachers of the day, William Barton. Check it out at http://tinyurl.com/8af26 but you'll have to click on the photo of the book then click 6 times on the arrow to the right to get to that particular story to read the excerpt. It can't be printed or copied off these Amazon book excerpts. But its worth going there because the story truly is "priceless."

This should be worthy for your Saturday morning entertainment - and who knows, for some of you it might even provide a sermon starter for Sunday morning!

Clair