America's future

Fareed Zakaria writes for Foreign Affairs: The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest. One paragraph stands out for me:

Learning from the rest is no longer a matter of morality or politics. Increasingly, it is about competitiveness. Consider the automobile industry. For more than a century after 1894, most of the cars manufactured in North America were made in Michigan. Since 2004, Michigan has been replaced by Ontario, Canada. The reason is simple: health care. In the United States, car manufacturers have to pay $6,500 in medical and insurance costs for every worker. If they move a plant to Canada, which has a government-run health-care system, the cost to them is around $800 per worker. This is not necessarily an advertisement for the Canadian health-care system, but it does make clear that the costs of the U.S. health-care system have risen to a point where there is a significant competitive disadvantage to hiring American workers. Jobs are going not to low-wage countries but to places where well-trained and educated workers can be found: it is smart benefits, not low wages, that employers are looking for.

Midwinter snippets

• Some weeks ago, during our family's evening prayer service, we read Luke 4:1-13, about Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. Afterwards our Theresa spoke up, noting that in Luke's account the last two temptations are in a different order than in Matthew's account. I guess nine years old is not too young to discover the Synoptic Problem.


• Today at evening prayer we continued our lectio continua reading through the gospel of Luke, reading the account of the Transfiguration in chapter 9:28-36. Coincidentally we read of this event in church this morning, as the Transfiguration is traditionally remembered in the western church on the last sunday before Lent.
  


• My wife broke her arm two weeks ago in an ice skating accident. Today was the first time all three of us were in church together since then. Her arm is in a sling, though not in a cast. Coincidences seemed to abound today, for as we were singing the final hymn, Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, we both chuckled when we came to these lines: "The arm of flesh will fail you,/ ye dare not trust your own."


• This afternoon the three of us watched Disney's High School Musical, mostly of course for Theresa's benefit. After this I am now inspired to write and score my own production, provisionally titled Graduate School Musical. It should be a big hit. In certain crowds, that is.


• I've recently learnt of a christian university located in, of all places, the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan. The King's College was founded in 1999, reviving an earlier institution located up the Hudson River in Briarcliff Manor prior to 1994. In 2005 a member of the New York State Board of Regents objected to its using Columbia University's original name. However, because Columbia relinquished this name in 1784, I doubt very much that anyone is still around who will confuse the two.


• Thanks are due to Steve Pypker, Willem de Ruijter and Matthew Vandervecht for digging us out from under the accumulation of friday's snow storm. May God bless them for their kind beneficence.


• It seems evangelicals are rediscovering monasticism: The unexpected monks. Could this be a case of trying to reinvent the wheel? I think others got there first.

Is it just coincidence. . .

. . . or is there a genuine medical reason why my shoes are considerably more comfortable since my appendectomy? Just curious.

Facing up to the inevitable

My experience of the past three weeks has reminded me in a vivid way of my own mortality, which coincided with the celebration of 52 years of life last friday. Three mondays ago I was working out on the cross-trainer in Redeemer's weight room. Not 12 hours later my appendix burst in the waiting room at emergency at McMaster University Medical Centre. One moment I felt healthy; scarcely a moment later I was battling a potentially serious illness. It all happened so quickly.

After I left hospital, I learned through an internet search that the famed magician, Harry Houdini, died at age 52 (!) of a burst appendix and peritonitis. In another pre-antibiotic age, that could have been me. My life might easily be over by now.

During Holy Week we are liturgically thrust into the drama of Jesus' suffering, death and resurrection. This is the climax of the church year, when everything comes together in the events leading up to the paschal celebration. All of us face the eventuality of death. Two and a half years ago I decided to embark on an exercise regimen and successfully lost 20 pounds. This was in an effort to remain as healthy as possible for the sake of our young daughter. But such efforts can come to naught suddenly and unexpectedly, as I am freshly aware. In such circumstances all we can do is to hold on to the promise that, in Jesus' sacrifice for our sins, death does not have the final word.