This is an excerpt from a talk by Pastor Gary Sinclair of Grace Church in Mahomet, IL. He was talking about the value of providing hope to people and cited this scientific experiment. This is interesting!
People need to sense hope. Because everybody lives with ’stuff.’ With baggage that we carry through life, right? I mean, some of our baggage is really devastating. It’s overwhelming, even debilitating. Again, maybe you came this morning carrying some of that stuff. People today are looking for some hope in the midst of all that, as much as anything. And given the 9/11’s of the world, the wars we’re facing, the natural disasters and just the struggles of life, hope is huge!
A group of behavioral scientists put some wharf rats in a tank of water and observed them to see how long they would survive before drowning. The average time was 17 minutes. But then they repeated the experiment, but this time they rescued the rats just before they drowned. They dried them off and returned them to their cages. They fed them. They let them play for a few days, and then they repeated the experiment. Hey, it’s science, OK? So, I know it sounds a little wierd. This time, the average survival rate for the rats increased from … get this … 17 minutes to 36 hours! One time.
What did they do differently? The scientists explained the phenomenon by saying that the second time around the rats has hope. They believed that they could survive this because they had done it once before!
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By Siamang
Christmas is coming up. Many readers here know that I have a three-year-old daughter, and neither my wife or I observe any religious beliefs.
But religious subject matter is coming up, and we’re in the process of explaining it all to a three-year-old.
A bit about our lives. Though we aren’t religious, we celebrate Christmas. We don’t attempt to steer it into a non-religious holiday either. The Nativity scene is on the bookshelf. We have nativity ornaments. Religious and non-religious carols play on the shuffle play.
We don’t have a big “Happy Birthday, Jesus” banner, but we don’t expunge him either. It’s our home, and a holiday, for cryin’ out loud, not a communist state.
My daughter attends preschool at the local Methodist church, and she’ll be singing in the Church for a show for the parents, as well as joining the churchmembers for a caroling trip.
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