Words 2.20

 Words Twice a Week       2.20

Some days from the church calendar -

Feb 22  Eric Liddell  The Chariots of Fire guy!  Born January 16, 1902, he was a Scottish sprinter, rugby player, and Christian missionary. Born in Qing China to Scottish missionary parents, he attended boarding school near London, spending time when possible with his family in Edinburgh, and afterwards attended the University of Edinburgh.  At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Liddell refused to run in the heats for his favored 100 meters because they were held on a Sunday. Instead he competed in the 400 meters held on a weekday, a race that he won. He returned to China in 1925 to serve as a missionary teacher. Aside from two furloughs in Scotland, he remained in China until his death in a Japanese civilian internment camp in 1945.

Feb 24  Saint Matthias  He was chosen to replace Judas.  According to Acts, he was with Jesus from his baptism through the resurrection, although he is never mentioned in any of the gospels.  It does make you wonder – how did he feel about the position, how did the others feel about him?  And this is kind of interesting – he is a patron saint of: alcoholics; carpenters; tailors; Gary, Indiana; Great Falls-Billings, Montana?

Also on Feb 24 Amanda Berry Smith    Born in slavery, she was a Methodist preacher and former slave who funded The Amanda Smith Orphanage and Industrial Home for Abandoned and Destitute Colored Children. She was a leader in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, preaching the doctrine of entire sanctification throughout Methodist camp meetings across the world.  She was referred to as "God's image carved in ebony". 

Feb 26    Emily Malbone Morgan   In 1883, Morgan's childhood friend, Adelyn Howard, fell ill with a hip disease, which made her a lonely invalid in a town in which she had no friends or family. The following year, Morgan, with Howard and Harriet Hastings of Wellesley, Massachusetts founded the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, to allow the shut-in Adelyn—and other religious women who valued thanksgiving, intercessory prayer, and simplicity of life—to pray and work for social justice. Morgan had a talent for providing hospitality, and considered her "greatest desire...has always been to make tired people rested and happy."  The group ministered to women working in the nearby textile mills, in part by establishing houses throughout the northeastern United States where such working-class women and their children could vacation.

Also on Feb 26  Photine – the Woman at the Well!  Like the woman at the well, I was seeking for things that could not satisfy….  Or Jesus met the woman at the well….

And some days from the earth/world calendar -

Feb 21

+ Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965.

+ Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848.  The New Yorker was first published in 1925.

+ W.H. Auden was born in 1907

Feb 22

+ it’s 2.22.22.  I don’t know what that means!

+ the first Woolworth store opened in 1879

Feb 23

+ Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land in 1940 in New York.

+ The Gutenberg Bible was published in 1455

+ Stan Laurel died in 1965.  We watched the recent Stan and Ollie film (I think it somehow just ended up in our Netflix queue) and it was touching.  The two guys at the end of their career and their lives.  The film takes a few liberties, but apparently the text at the end is accurate – that Stan refused all acting roles after Oliver died, but that the continued to write material for them until he died.  He lived his final years in a small flat in Santa Monica, CA. He continued to correspond with fans, and his phone number was listed in the local directory.  He influenced Jerry Lewis and Dick Van Dyke among others.  Minutes before his death, he told his nurse that he would not mind going skiing, and she replied that she was not aware that he was a skier. "I'm not," said Laurel, "I'd rather be doing that than this!"  A few minutes later he died quietly in his armchair.  At his funeral service Buster Keaton said, "Chaplin wasn't the funniest. I wasn't the funniest; this man was the funniest." Dick Van Dyke gave the eulogy and read The Clown's Prayer. Laurel had quipped, "If anyone at my funeral has a long face, I'll never speak to him again."

+ George Fredrick Handel died in 1685.  He wrote Messiah in 1741.  He also wrote four coronation anthems, one of which Zadok the Priest has been played/sung at every British Coronation since 1727.

+ The first mass inoculation for polio was held.

Feb 24

+ Gregorian calendar was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.  It is a reform of the Julien calendar, mainly having to do with the spacing of Leap days and years.  Quick now – what’s the rule for leap years?  The reform also advanced the date by 10 days: Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October 1582.

Feb 25

+ Muhammad Ali, still known as Cassius Clay, became World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, by beating -                 . in 1964.  That was later that year that he denounced his “slave name” and took the name Muhammad Ali.

Feb 26

+ It’s the birthday of John Harvey Kellogg – Corn Flakes for breakfast?

Feb 27

+ The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch "council communist", was the apparent culprit; however, Hitler attributed the fire to Communist agitators. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

That’s what I got for now…..

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