This Week's Recommendations

1.      Driverless Dilemma: The bearing down of driverless cars on us means that soon our transportation will have to make moral calculations. How should those calculations be made? This Radio Lab episodes explores these questions at the intersection of ethics and technology.

2.      Letter to a Church Member (and Myself): Melissa Edgington with a post that is jam-packed full of truth, " Your church is here, not to give you a good self-image, but to give you a true self-image. One that stands you up next to the holy God of the universe and shows you just how far you fall short. It is meant to give you a realistic understanding of how unremarkable you really are so that you can look to Jesus and you can look to the cross and you can see your salvation unfold before your very eyes, so that you realize how unworthy you are of God’s love. So you can grasp how great this love is that would reach out to you. So that you fall down in worship just thinking about it."

3.      Statistics on Girls' Self Esteem: Some of the sobering statistics: 98% of girls feel there is "an immense pressure from external sources to look a certain way." 53% of American girls age 13 are "unhappy with their bodies." 78% of American girls age 17 are "unhappy with their bodies."

4.      You Are Not Suffering Alone: Adrian Warnock presses the truth of 1 Peter simply into the heart of the one suffering in this two part post, "Knowing that you are part of a suffering community can be encouraging. But what is more encouraging still is knowing that you are still a child of God, and that he has made certain promises to you" (part I). And, in part II " When God restores a broken person, they are still marked in some way by that suffering. Those who have truly wrestled with God through pain, walk like Jacob with a limp. He comforts us so we can comfort others.  Don’t be afraid to let those you are trying to help see a glimpse of the pain that you have been through.

5.      Master Camouflager: Watch as this Cuttlefish pretends to be a hermit crab. Wild.

Photo credit: Tanja Heffner/Unsplash