With cases of COVID-19 climbing to record highs, South Carolina’s health care leaders and Gov. Henry McMaster pleaded with residents to continually wear masks and socially distance this holiday season to stem the deaths of loved ones, noting help is on the way but still months off.

While South Carolina is expected to receive enough doses in the coming days to vaccinate at least 200,000 people, that won’t be enough for even everyone eligible in the highest-priority group, which includes front-line medical workers and nursing home residents, McMaster said.

“It appears many people have let their guard down. I know we have fatigue, but now is not the time for us to let up. Now is the time to redouble our efforts,” he said, cautioning that widespread vaccination “will be a slow process all over the country.”

But he reiterated he will not shut the state down again, as he did for roughly six weeks in the spring with one of the nation’s shortest stay-at-home orders.

Other states where Democratic governors ordered longer shutdowns and recently clamped down again have ruined their economy and killed hundreds of thousands of businesses, the Republican governor said, adding those actions did not ultimately stem the spread there.

“There’s a better way, and we all know what that is,” he said, indicating the mask in his hand.

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“It appears many people have let their guard down. I know we have fatigue, but now is not the time for us to let up,” @henrymcmaster said.https://t.co/MoPKuOnzSX

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) December 10, 2020

In March, the emergency room doctor was bedridden with the first case of the coronavirus among his colleagues at a hospital in Wales. Within weeks, he was back in scrubs, tending to a crush of ill, breathless patients.

On Tuesday, after having weathered each turn in Britain’s ravaging bout with the coronavirus, the doctor, Farbod Babolhavaeji, was given one of the world’s first shots of a clinically authorized, fully tested vaccine — a step in the long, painstaking campaign to knock back a disease that has killed more than 1.5 million people worldwide.

Images of the first people to be vaccinated were broadcast around the country, led by Margaret Keenan, 90, a former jewelry shop assistant in a “Merry Christmas” T-shirt, and an 81-year-old man with the improbable name of William Shakespeare. They quickly became emblems of the remarkable race to make a vaccine, and the world’s agonizing wait for relief from deaths now numbering 11,000 a day.

Never before has Britain undertaken such a fiendishly difficult mass vaccination program. Given pizza boxlike trays of 975 doses each, hospitals stored them in deep freezers, defrosted them and, on Tuesday, drew them up into individual syringes and jabbed them into the upper arms of variously jubilant and needle-shy Britons. Every minute mattered: Defrosted doses that were not given by Friday would be wasted.

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For Britain’s first recipients of the coronavirus vaccine, the shots offered a glimpse of hope at life after the pandemic. Some health care workers who had spent months treating Covid patients cried upon getting the shot. https://t.co/brhKLoI8ae

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 9, 2020

“The ’20s will be roaring, but with several months of hardship first,” according to the quarterly UCLA Anderson forecast. “These next few months will be dire, with rising COVID infections, continued social distancing, and the expiration of social assistance programs.”

The forecast, which assumes mass vaccination of Americans will take place by summer, predicts that annualized growth in the nation’s gross domestic product will accelerate from a weak 1.2% in the current quarter to 1.8% in the first quarter of next year, then to a booming 6% in next year’s second quarter and consistent 3% growth each quarter thereafter into 2023.

“With a vaccine and the release of pent-up demand, the next few years will be roaring as the economy accelerates and returns to previous growth trends,” wrote Leo Feler, a senior economist with the forecast. “We expect a surge in services consumption and continued strength in housing markets to propel the economy forward.”

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Get ready for another roaring '20s, UCLA economic forecast predicts https://t.co/7bwkHGuMdA

— L.A. Times Health (@latimeshealth) December 9, 2020

The French army has been given the go-ahead to develop bionic soldiers resistant to pain and stress and endowed with extra brain power thanks to microchip implants.

The approval came from the ethical committee of the armed forces ministry, which said in a report that France needed to keep up with countries that were already working to produce super-soldiers.

The committee gave details of some lines of research, including pills to keep troops awake for long periods and surgery to improve hearing. Other areas in the “field of study” involve implants which release anti-stress substances or “improve cerebral capacity”.

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Bourne ultimatum: France given green light for bionic soldiers- https://t.co/kmWY8YTLWY

— Tam Hussein (@tamhussein) December 9, 2020

In England, the original form of the evangelistic ministry of An­glicanism for Anglican parishes—the form it took in the sixteenth century when the Prayer Book was put together, and the form it was still taking in the seventeenth century—was catechetical. The vision was to promote the parishioner’s learning through an understanding of the substance of the children’s catechism (contained in the Prayer Book), and through taking part regularly in the worship of Morning and Evening Prayer and the Communion service. In all these, the themes of sin, grace, and responsive faith are embodied, embedded, and expressed; all of it would ideally have been properly explained by one’s clergyman. Thus parishioners would grow into a living faith in Christ.

That hasn’t always happened, however. And after the eighteenth century, people came to think of evangelistic ministry the way they still think of it today—as going out and reaching out and having special messages given at meetings or services specially designed to bring people to a firm, personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Already when George Whitefield and John Wesley were preaching by the end of the 1730s, they were making applications at the end of their services that we would call appeals, and the pattern of evangelism in the minds of evangelical people has been the same from that day to this.

That is bad because in our minds—both in the Anglican world and in other branches of the evangelical world—this image of evangelistic ministry has driven out the older thought of evangelism being con­ducted institutionally through a discipleship process that begins with catechism, that is, teaching young folk the faith.

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Having just heard about the home going of J. I. Packer, I am filled with mixed emotions: joy for him, sadness for us. I first met him when I was about 15. I can’t calculate how much I owe to him, not only his teaching and writing but his godly example. #jipacker pic.twitter.com/lt9HG0FeVQ

— Michael Horton (@MichaelHorton_) July 18, 2020

O Eternal God, who has taught us in thy holy Word that love is the fulfilling of the law: Pour into our hearts that best of all thy gifts, that loving our neighbour as ourselves we may live as children of the day and of the light; for the glory of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Good Morning Mt. Denali. Today it will be Mostly Cloudy with a temp of 0 . It's currently Partly Cloudy with a temp of -5 . Sunrise is on December 9, 2020 at 10:29AM and sunset is on December 9, 2020 at 03:24PM . pic.twitter.com/rXx7wzm94K

— Midwest Weather (@MidwestWeather3) December 9, 2020

In the year that King Uzzi′ah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth, and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven.” And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.”

–Isaiah 6:1-8

Holy Apostles exterior in Thessaloniki, Greecehttps://t.co/RC1lzKPl4v pic.twitter.com/b1tgmG14so

— Architecture Hub (@architecturehub) December 9, 2020