Guest-blogger Kim Shippey has worked as a broadcast journalist in many countries. He is now a full-time writer and editor with the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly print and online publication.
At this time of year, American baseball players are coming back to the plate; in Europe, cricketers and tennis pros are loosening their shoulders; and top golfers from many countries are assembling for the first Major of the season, the US Masters, to be played from April 11 to 14 among the azaleas and songbirds that abound on the fairways of the National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.
Golf, of course, teaches many life-lessons, and has spawned hundreds of jokes, including
the one about the little white ball that has a whim to hit a tree or take a swim.
As a reporter on several sports, who always worked weekends, I was never free enough to learn to play golf–a game I suspect I would have loved.
But I was privileged to work on many sports programs with the man who for 20 years was BBC Television’s senior golf commentator, Henry Longhurst. He wrote 12 books on golf in a prose style that his colleagues insisted was “as effortless as falling out of bed.” Also, his “on air” quips were legendary. “They say ‘practice makes perfect,’” he once observed. “Of course, it doesn’t. For the vast majority of golfers it merely consolidates imperfection.”
Longhurst loved the Masters, as does a good friend of mine who knows the Augusta course quite well. My friend played on the European and US golf circuits, and tells me that Continue reading →
“I believed when the brain dies, that’s the end of consciousness. I know now that’s not true. I have a far grander view of science today than I ever did before my coma.”
That’s how neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, opened his remarks to a packed audience of at least 400 people (many turned away at the doors) at the New Bedford, MA First Unitarian Church on May 16. I couldn’t help but notice the largely female audience. The man next to me said he came with his wife and had only read about the event in the New Bedford news. He was unfamiliar with the book, but said he was curious to hear the doctor’s message: “I know a few neurosurgeons and they’re all the same. Very precise…like engineers.”
Dr. Alexander was there to talk about his best-selling book, “Proof of
Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife” (Simon and Schuster) that recounts his meningitis-induced coma and near-death experience, which (according to his doctors) virtually destroyed his neocortex (the part of the brain that makes us human) and brought him to a 1% rate of survival without a normal life.
But to the surprise of his doctors and family he opened his eyes on the seventh day, just before they were making the difficult decision to cut off the antibiotics and take him off life support. “It was prayer that brought me back and gave me the same feeling of being in that heavenly realm right here on earth,” he claims.
Today he tells his story two or three times a week to audiences around the world. Continue reading
