Good Morning!
We are now in our last week of summer, if you consider the Labor Day Weekend the last blast. I’m kind of sad to see it go. I have a lot of good memories including one of this weekend’s 50-mile bike ride.
As many of you know, I used to be a newspaper junkie. Not anymore. I haven’t read any newspaper for years now. I discovered that being a good citizen, in the end, is not how well you know current events but rather how well one knows the bible. You may agree or disagree, but I find little evidence of being able to change the world with my vote. Furthermore, knowing what is important means virtually nothing when politicians say one thing and do another. So, I find it a great waste of time to read the newspaper.
However, I did notice the paper at the hotel this weekend and one article quickly caught my eye. It was on the front page of the August 26, 2018 StarTribune. “Healthiest amount of alcohol may be none.” http://www.startribune.com/safest-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-none-study-finds/491668701/
I think God is so amazing in that this fits perfectly with my blog last week. The odds of me seeing this article are virtually zero, but now I’m going to write about it! How cool is that?
Here’s the nutshell. A huge, international study was conducted to look at the risks associated with alcohol over a twenty-six year period. 512 researchers and 243 institutions were involved. You know what they found? The safest amount of alcohol is zero. Yup. Zero. That’s exactly what this former alcoholic has concluded as well. Check this out.
‘“What has been underappreciated, what’s surprising, is that no amount of drinking is good for you,” said Emmanuela Gakidou, the senior author of the report.’
‘”People should no longer think that a drink or two a day is good for you. What’s best for you is to not drink at all,” she said.”’
In fact, the often-referred to health benefits of red wine, for example, were smoked when they “found that many other health risks offset and overwhelm the health benefits.” Imagine that.
Just to give you an idea of how ingrained alcohol is in our society, the author of the newspaper article (Joel Achenback of the Washington Post) offered his assurances. Get this:
“Drinkers may take some reassurance from the fact that the new…report focuses not on individuals but on populations.”
Yeah, buddy, that’s what statistics are all about. That’s this guy’s way of fooling himself that it won’t harm him. He then goes on to add this:
“U.S. dietary guidelines define low-risk drinking as one drink a day for women and two a day for men. Robert Brewer, who directs the alcohol program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that if people stick to the guidelines, “the risk of harms across the board is going to be low. It’s not going to be zero. But it’s going to be low.”
For the record, one drink is one beer (5%), five ounces of wine (12%), OR 1.5 ounces of 80-proof alcohol. This doesn’t mean you can bank the alcohol and drink it all at once. Nope. Do that, and you are binge drinking (4 or more drinks in one day per month). Remember, heavy alcohol use is 5 or more days of binge drinking per month. Think about that. That’s not much. Furthermore, I guarantee if you start drinking even the maximum daily (1 for women, 2 for men), you will sooner or later find yourself in trouble.
Back to my point, even the author of the article couldn’t fully grasp the importance of the study in that the best amount to drink is none. He still found himself justifying booze. That’s the type of behavior that we see when someone has a problem, or at least the beginnings of a problem.
Folks, God made wine. It’s a good thing. However, can we see that Satan has taken this good gift and bastardized it? Just like everything else he touches. The problem is we can’t see it.
2 Corinthians 4:4 In their case, the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
Make no mistake, the eyes of believers may be blind as well.
Think about this.
Father, I am always amazed at your timing. Let these messages sink home and change some lives. Amen.