S T U G R A Y

Living the STUpendous Life ✝️ Husband | Dad | Bald & Bearded | Connection • Correction • Direction

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

When I spend too much time online, I become convinced that humanity is cooked. Then I go outside and everything is fine.

And my feed is relatively positive compared to many others. It's no wonder there are so many doomers.

[Adam | Faithful Messenger @Adam_FaithfulM]

Everyone reads the Prodigal Son as a story about a rebellious boy who came home.

It isn't.

Jesus told this parable to show us what God is actually like.

And the portrait He paints of the father is so scandalous, so undignified, that it offended every person in His audience.

It should offend us, too.

A thread on the father nobody talks about. 🧵

[S T U G R A Y @stugray]

Fascinating.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Bob Golen @BobGolen]

Due to inflation, Dollar Tree is changing it's name to Tree Fidty.

[Princess A @cessadelove1]

The most terrifying detail about Noah's Ark isn't the size of the flood. It is the design of the boat. If you look closely at the blueprints God gave Noah in Genesis 6, He was extremely specific. He gave the exact length, width, and height. He specified the type of wood and the pitch to seal it. But God left out one crucial component: no steering wheel, no sail, and no engine.

Think about how scary that is. Noah built a massive vessel to survive a global storm, but he had zero control over it or where it went. He couldn't steer away from rocks, turn into the waves, or aim for dry land. He was completely at the mercy of the water. The Ark was designed for floating, not navigation. Noah's job was to be the passenger, not the captain. God was the Captain.

This is your life right now. You are trying to put a steering wheel on a situation that God wants you to simply float on and allow Him to lead and take control.
This blessed me. I hope it blesses you too. 🙏🏾

[mariana Z @mariana057]

AGE 12: Fell off of bike at high velocity onto gravel road, biked 5 miles home.

AGE 45: Used wrong pillow, back was nonfunctional for two days.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Words to your mother.

[Lloyd Legalist @LloydLegalist]

Specializes in helping people stay alive.

[Dustin Nickerson @DustinNickerson]

Raising teens is fun if you want someone to think you’re the dumbest human alive while simultaneously needing your help to do anything

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

The earth is just spinning through infinite darkness at 67,000 miles per hour and somehow it also made blueberries?? And laughing?? And the feeling of sun on your face?? What is this place. What a an absolute gift.

[RedAlways @PATRIOT2117]

A pastor asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the morning breakfast.

"Lord, I hate buttermilk", the farmer began. The visiting pastor opened one eye to glance at the farmer and wonder where this was going.

The farmer loudly proclaimed, "Lord, I hate lard." Now the pastor was growing concerned.
Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, "And Lord, you know I don't much care for raw white flour". The pastor once again opened an eye to glance around the room and saw that he wasn't the only one to feel uncomfortable.

Then the farmer added, "But Lord, when you mix them all together and bake them, I do love warm fresh biscuits. So Lord, when things come up that we don't like, when life gets hard, when we don't understand what you're saying to us, help us to just relax and wait until you are done mixing. It will probably be even better than biscuits. Amen."

Within that prayer there is great wisdom for all when it comes to complicated situations like we are experiencing in the world today.

Stay strong, my friends, because our LORD is mixing several things that we don't really care for, but something even better is going to come when HE is done with it. AMEN!

[Roro ☃ @RoRoFli]

Me reading the Bible & realizing I have a lot in common with this fool it keeps mentioning

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

A psychologist explained:

"Travel breaks the illusion that your current life is the only one possible."

[MJ👑 @iam__Jezreel]

Satan got Adam and Eve to focus on one fruit when God had given them a whole garden. That's how he works. He gets you to focus on that one thing you don't have. Instead of all the blessings you do have.

Trust that God knows what you need, and will supply it when you need it.

[S T U G R A Y @stugray]

🤣

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Man Daydreaming During Wife’s Long Story Praying It Doesn’t End With A Question https://t.co/pYo11Sdje5

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Man Daydreaming During Wife’s Long Story Praying It Doesn’t End With A Question https://t.co/pYo11Sdje5

[Immortal Tessy @TheresaArueyin1]

I’m starting to see that the gospel isn’t about forcing yourself to stop sinning, but about loving God so deeply that sin loses its appeal.

[BrooksGibbs @BrooksGibbs]

Tragic. The solution to eliminating violence has been (and always will be) “Curing students of their tendency to take offense”. Kids want something, they don’t get it, then they get offended and want to retaliate against the one that is not giving them what they want.

It’s a mental health, emotional regulation, and conflict resolution solution.

We need to help students give up their rigid demands and high expectations and learn how to practically get along.

That’s what I’ve been doing since Columbine and will continue to reach as many kids as possible in hopes to avoid these tragic events from taking place. Once school at a time.

https://t.co/dLJP056Zj4

James 4:1-3
“Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war.”

[DJB @Skinwalker5110]

Went to the Oreo website and hit accept all cookies. Now we wait.

[1000 Life Hacks @1000lifehacks]

Everyone thinks a small action in the past could change everything, but almost no one realizes a small action now can do the exact same thing.