When I was in my twenties, I would take the opportunity to visit my paternal grandmother on a Friday night. During these special visits, my grandmother would feed me a delicious meal as we talked sitting at her dining room table. Through some gentle prodding from me, she would recount her life, her upbringing, her family, and her life with my grandfather.

I had never had the chance to get to know my grandfather very well before he died. Yet, she was always eager to open the pages of time and reveal the man behind the yellowing photos of her worn photo album.

A few weeks ago, a county official in California stopped at the home of a San Diego pastor and his wife, peppering them with questions about the Bible study that they conduct weekly in their home. Fifteen people generally attend this peaceful meeting.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," said Juliet in Shakespeare's famous work, Romeo and Juliet. The playwright makes the point that just changing the name of something doesn't change what it actually is.

It is true that communication is very important to all of us. Yet our language evolves and words or terms change in meaning from generation to generation, which can be confusing.

Scientists believe the world's largest garbage dump isn't on land – it is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a sprawling mass of waste estimated to be 90% plastic reaching a depth of 90 feet. It is a floating raft of debris that is now sprawling from the coast of California to the coast of Japan, and estimated to be twice the size of Texas!

The atheistic philosopher Karl Marx, an evolutionist and a contemporary of Charles Darwin, once called religion the "opium of the people."  In our day, however, Darwin's theories and their successors have become the "opium of the people"—dulling the mindset of the educated and uneducated alike.