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Consider the Moth

Luke 12:22-30 (NIV)

22Then Jesus said to his disciples: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear.23For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes. 24Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 25Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life? 26Since you cannot do this very little thing, why do you worry about the rest?

27Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.28If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! 29And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. 30For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

In the 12th chapter of Luke, Jesus alternates between speaking to a large crowd and teaching his disciples privately in this very public setting. In verses 22 through 30, using two lessons from nature, Jesus attempts to teach his disciples the fruitlessness and folly of worry. He shares the secret to handling the paralyzing grip of worry and selfishness: All we need to do is to put our lives into the protective and comforting hands of God the Father.

In the first vignette, God cares for the birds of the field (ravens or crows depending upon which version of Scriptures you use). Ravens and crows are scavengers and generally considered nuisances and pests. However, God takes care of them. That should give all of us hope and comfort.

In the second vignette, wild flowers or lilies (depending upon the version of Scriptures you use) are favorably compared with the splendor of Solomon, his palace and its royal trappings. We all know that all flowers are very temporary. They eventually wither and die. The remains of the flowers are either left to decompose and become part of the ground for the next crop of flowers, or they are gathered up and burnt, with the ashes scattered to the winds. Finally, time erases the signs of their presence and they are remembered no more. However, God gives these temporary plants as much beauty and concern as the royal trappings with which Solomon surrounded himself. We don’t need to be overly-concerned with the way we look and dress. God will provide us with our basic needs. [Note: I believe the key word in the preceding sentence is “overly-concerned.” We do need to dress modestly and appropriately for the occasion. Other people may judge us by the way we look, but God judges us for what is in our hearts.]

In these two vignettes and in other scripture passages Christ, during his earthly ministry, used examples from nature to teach us practical lessons. Some of these include the parable of the sower, the lesson of the mustard seed, and the lesson of the size of the harvest. God, speaking through writers of Job and the Psalms, used examples from nature to teach us practical lessons.

In Christian higher education, we have often used the phrase “All truth is God’s truth.” Arthur Holmes, in his book by this same title, uses the creation or cultural mandate given to Adam as license to search for truth wherever we might find it. We do not need to be afraid of truth. However, we do need to circumspectly make judgments between God’s truth and Satan’s imitations of that truth.

In that vein, I want to thank Tom Bartlett, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He wrote an article that appeared in the August 17, 2012 edition of The Chronicle Review. Interestingly the article was labeled Salvaging God on the cover of the magazine section. Does God need salvaging? Do we think we can salvage him? When you get to the article inside the section, it is entitled, Dusting off God; Does Religion Really Poison Everything?

Bartlett begins this article with a parable about moths that Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist, introduced in his book, The God Delusion. Moths and bats are two nocturnal fliers. However, their evening flights are made possible because of two very different natural senses. Bats use the sense of sound. They use natural sonar to navigate around obstacles. Moths, on the other hand, use their very sensitive eyes and the light from the moon or stars to see the obstacles and navigate around them.

The fact that moths use light by which to navigate actually explains why they are susceptible to bug zappers. They are not attracted to the light of campfires, light bulbs or bug zappers. They are confused by that light.

Physics tell us that light is a chameleon in the physical world. Sometimes it behaves like waves of energy, and other times like particles with mass. Some physicists attempt to describe this aspect of light by saying that the particles resemble individual packets of matter that are pure energy. This seems to be a key to the complicated relationship between matter and energy. Recall Einstein’s formula, E = mc2.

Light radiates from a source in waves of ever expanding circles. Our eyes and other light sensors don’t “read” the wave. They are focusing on the individual packets of light. By the time light reaches the earth from the moon or stars, the waves of light are so large in diameter that the light sensors in our eyes are “reading” the light as if it was coming into our eyes as a series of parallel, straight lines.

If we look at a light bulb from a distance of three feet, the diameter of the light waves reaching our eyes is not very large. The light sensors in our eyes pick up multiple light packets, and not a straight, steady stream of packets. This can even make the light bulb seem to flicker. If you look at the light bulb through a very narrow slit, the flickering will be greatly reduced.

The great distances between the earth and the sun, moon and stars, fixes the position of these bodies in relationship to the earth. We and moths can then use those fixed positions to navigate successfully objects on the earth.

Since our eyes and sight receptors are so much larger than those in moths, the introduction of a much closer source of light such as a campfire, porch light or bug zapper doesn’t attract moths. It is actually confusing them. Therefore, they can’t navigate properly and tend to begin a death spiral into the source of the light. Self-immolation is not built into their instincts or DNA. It is the result of confusion. Dawkins explains that moths didn’t evolve to commit suicide. He claims that this is just “an unfortunate byproduct” of the evolutionary process.

Richard Dawkins suggests that religion is like a bug zapper for humans. It introduces another source of information that confuses people, distracting their attention from scientific truth. They behave like moths and seek patterns in religious texts. This begins people on a death spiral into the black hole of ignorance.

This is a very convenient and useful explanation for the confirmed atheist. It removes God from the equation. It eradicates any burden of personal obligation or responsibility for our choices. It then squarely places the blame for all of our problems on religion. Although the seemingly innate search for truth through religion and religious experiences appears to be a universal feature built into the soul of every human, it is nothing but “an unfortunate byproduct” of evolution.

Of course we could offer another explanation. However, this explanation is predicated on the existence of an omnipotent and just God who created the universe and everything in it. This God demands obedience and personal responsibility. However, this God is also a loving God. Through the sacrifice of Christ, this God has offered all people the opportunity for eternal salvation. Yet this scenario is unacceptable to many because man is no longer the center of the universe.

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Life Verse

Psalm 147:10 (NIV) “His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;”

 

It’s been 50 years since I have seriously considered the concept of a life verse. As a teenager growing up in what many would have called a fundamentalist church, we regularly heard in our Sunday school classes, youth group programs and from the pulpit, the importance of having a life verse. Two events within the past month brought this concept to the front of my mind. The first was seeing an advertisement for “The One Year Life Verse Devotional” by Jay K. Payleitner. The front cover of the book claims it contains 365 stories of remarkable people and the Scripture that changed their lives. In Payleitner’s Introduction, he defines a life verse as “a piece of scripture that God used to inspire, challenge or rescue you at a turning point in your life.” My concern as a teenager with picking out a life verse was that I knew there were would be many challenges and questions in front of me. However, I had no idea what they might be. How could I be sure that one verse would answer all my questions?  In high school, I was fairly confident that God was calling me to teach mathematics in a college setting. I couldn’t find any verse that specifically talked about teaching mathematics at the college level. So I never sat down and picked a life verse.

The second event of the past month that brought me face to face with the concept of a life verse was my reading of the verse Psalm 147:10.  I know I had seen it many times before. However, this time it hit me between the eyes. I read it and I said, “That’s me. That’s my life verse.”

What in the world am I talking about? How would the fact that God did not find pleasure in the strength of a horse nor delight in the legs of a warrior have anything to do with me? Why this verse struck me at this time has to deal with two items. The first is my given name Bayard. I will admit that “Bayard” is not the most common given name. I was aware of a few other individuals with the given name Bayard. Growing up in Delaware, I was also aware of a much larger number of people with the family name of Bayard.

As I researched the name Bayard, I found that there were 3 places where the name arose. The first was Danish mythology. Bayard was the name of a horse with magical powers. The second was from old English and French contractions of “bay of the yard” or roan colored farm horse. The third was from a gallant French knight who was named Sir Bayard, because of his bravery and his chestnut colored hair.

So here in one verse, the Psalmist speaks of strong horses and brave warriors. He is using my name.

But it goes even deeper. For 50 years I ran. I wasn’t running from God, but I was trying to outrun age. I played an hour of basketball each day for at least five days every week. I strengthened my legs. On my 50th birthday, I played in a Gus Macher 3-on-3 basketball tournament. My team made it to the semi-finals. Even at age 60, for pick-up games, I was the first one on the court and the last one to leave. I had the nick name of “Old Iron Legs.” But that was soon going to change. Due to all the pounding on the hard wood, my knees finally gave out and I couldn’t find a surgeon who would fix them. I had to switch to a stationary recumbent bike to get my exercise. In 2008, I pedaled at least 30 miles a day, at least 200 miles each week, and more than 10,000 miles for the year without moving an inch. My knees might have been shot, but my legs were strong. They looked like the legs of a young athlete, with huge, solid thighs and hard, firm well-defined calves.

Then in March 2009, all that changed. I had a blood vessel in a brain tumor burst. It technically wasn’t a stroke since no blood was cut off to the brain proper, but I had all the after effects of a stroke. It was several months of therapy before I could walk a hundred feet without wobbling. Since that event, I have had two other events that showed me that my legs were not my strength. In December 2009, I had 4 tonic-clonic seizures that left me unconscious in a hospital for 3 days. I was now battling epilepsy. In December 2010, I was diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson’s. It was back to therapy. In March 2011, I had a pacemaker implanted to try to help control an atrial-fibrillation condition that was starting to get out of control.

Four times in my lifetime, doctors have said that they have no medical or scientific reason that they can give me as to why I am still alive. They said my physical conditioning was a big help, but it couldn’t explain everything. Several of the doctors went so far as to say, I was a walking miracle. All I could say to that was: “Amen, I know it.”

My cardiologist has given me permission to get back on the bike as long as I monitor my heart while exercising. I am only doing six or seven miles a day on the bike, but now I know for sure that my strength comes from the Lord and not from my legs. It is not our bravery or the strength in our legs that pleases God. Psalm 147:11 tells us that:”the LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love. .” (NIV) Our bravery and our legs will fail us, but God’s love will not.

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Happy New Year!

The Year 2011 is over, and Year 2012 has begun.

         If you have read any of my previous postings, THANK YOU. I really do appreciate the time and effort you have spared from all the important things that you could be doing to read about the things that are dear and close to me. I pray that you will find a nugget now and then that you can use that in some small way will repay you for your time and effort.

If you are new to my posts, please allow me three paragraphs to let you know what you will find in my posts. The three things that I hold closest to my heart are my belief in God, my wife and family, and the enterprise of education. Since a traumatic brain incident (TBI) in March 2009 and several follow-up events, I have found myself facing a taxing mental battle, in addition to living daily with aphasia, epilepsy and Parkinson’s. After spending my entire adult life training, thinking and writing in an analytic, sequential and deductive world, I found that I was now exiled to the land of metaphors.

Living and thinking in terms of metaphors was a shock to someone who was brought up in and agreed with the teachings of John Locke when he said, “Metaphors are the worst abuse of language ever invented and need to be annihilated and expunged from our usage.”  As I have now studied metaphors, I have come to a very different conclusion than Locke. Learning theorists and brain scientists have found that we learn something new by tying it to something we already know, something that is already in our heads. This is precisely what a metaphor is. Thus metaphors were a way of thinking long before they were a way with words. Therefore I, the new feeble Don Quixote, am riding off on a pathetic horse on a new quest to restore metaphors to the high esteem with which Aristotle viewed them, when he said that the proper use of metaphors was the highest form of genius.

Returning to my New Year’s Greeting, as I wrote “the year 2011 is over and 2012 has begun”, I was reminded (metaphor attack) of two similar statements. The first is from Jean Valjean’s soliloquy in “Les Miserable,” when he steals the bishop’s silver and decides to skip out on his parole. He throws up his hands and says: “No more is Jean Valjean! Another story must begin! I must escape my life of sin.” I find it ironic that he is planning this escape financed by stolen silver. From scriptures, we know that the only way to escape a life of sin is through Christ. Paul wrote in II Corinthians 5:17 (KJV) “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.”

         Welcome to my world. The title “By’s Musings” comes from my Nick Name “By.”  Although my first name is spelled “Bayard,” it is pronounced “By’-ard.” Please call me “By.” All my friends do. Settle yourself down in your favorite easy chair, have a hot cup of real coffee (I wish I could, but the closest thing to real coffee that I am currently permitted to drink is decaf) and let’s talk, friend-to-friend.