Saturday, February 8, 2014

Dear little sailboat,

I wrote this letter for a dear friend, but I think it's for you too...


Dear little sailboat,

            Listen to the song, "When I'm With You" be Ben Rector:

I go crazy sometimes,
can you believe it?
Yeah, I swear I'm fine, that I'm alright,
But I'm barely breathing.
 
Thought I could find my way back home,
But I get lost alone.
 
But when I'm with you, I know I'm wanted
And when I'm with you, I swear I can breathe
And when I'm with you,
I know who I am, and who I want to be
 
I'm not trying to be dramatic, no;
Most times, I'm pretty normal
Oh, let's be clear and honest here,
And do away with anything formal,
 
I can fake it on my own,
But I am lost alone
 
You're not crazy, or dramatic- you're a human with a heart. But not "just a heart." You have a chest in your chest that was made to be filled with beautiful things: love, friendships, peace, joy, Christ.
 
Longing for those things is like longing for the best Christ wants for you. So, I endorse it.
 
When you're satisfied, you don't step out of the box. When you're not hungry, food just isn't as good. When you're not crazy, the world isn't crazy either, and as scary and uncomfortable or as unsettling as "being crazy" is, there's something rather beautiful about it.
 
It's like when you were a kid, and you learned to color within the lines. Coloring in the lines was the goal, but instead, you colored all over the place, and you were happy doing it, too. And you used all of the "wrong" colors, but do you remember what happened when your craziness and doing it "all wrong," was finished? Your teacher hung in in the wall, and your mom or day taped it to the refrigerator like being crazy and wrong was beautiful. Like it was something worth keeping.
 
Do you remember when "doing it all wrong," was alright. 
 
I go crazy all the time. I'm really embarrassed about when it happens like when I get mustard or salad dressing on my shirt, in all the awkward places, or when I drop my calculator multiple times in the cashier line at work with a bunch of people behind me.
 
I try very hardtop keep my crazy under wraps, But -honestly- when I see other people's crazy. I get it.
 
yOu wanted to be Loved you miSs yOUr dad or your FRIiend you miss wHo you WerE whEn YOU were tWelVe you lOst your keys on the dAY of an intERview or worKk you yelled at your friend for eating your last piece of your mom's homemade cake SOMEONE LET YOU down or said the wrong thing or FORGOT and you reACTted you threw things...A mess, an absolute mess.
  
And you go crazy. You turn into one of those balls of yarn that's all tangled and weird and "no one wants to mess with." You say a lot of things, really crazy things. Your face turns red, and you get messy. Real messy. But you write me, you hug me with your words, you reach outside of your box. You go to a coffee shop to be alone, you gravitate to only the best books and music. You look for a hand to hold, another heart to trust, you say sorry, you try to make sense of how you went crazy, and what just happened.
 
And then, this happens:
 
You put the dots together and learn something you didn't know before. You overcome what you thought you didn't, you learn to be patient, to say "sorry", or "I love you too." You get under your friends' (who you let in to your crazy) skin.
 
You become this really crazy picture that I want to frame and hang on my refrigerator. 
 
If I'm honest, not being crazy makes me feel better about myself, but the times I've gone crazy are the times I actually remember, and the great things that came with "going there."
 
If I'm really honest, I'm not who I am right now because I had all, or even some, of the answers, or I had the best relationship with Jesus, or I stayed on the sidewalk.
 
I'm who I am now because I accidently went crazy and stepped off the sidewalk, and I asked too many questions, I found other crazy people, and I found who Jesus is versus who I imagined Him to be (I'm still doing that..all of the time). I was the sailboat in Ben Rector's song:
 
I feel just like a sailboat,
I don't know where I'm headed
But you can't make the wind blow from a sailboat
 
I have seen the sun,
Felt the rain on my skin
I've been lost and found, but mostly I've been waiting
 
Oh, I'm out in the waves
I'm hoping and praying, "Please let the wind blow me home,"
Night after night, there's an empty horizon,
And my God do I feel so alone
Sometimes life, most times, I feel like a sailboat
 
.....The only change I see
Lost or found, Let's see
The only difference is believing I'll make it in
  
We weren't made to sit safely on a shore, or tied to a pier. We go crazy because we were built with wild heart, not tamed ones. I think God has a wild heart too, I  mean have you been outside today?
 
And they need to search, to ask questions, and to feel lonely because only then will you become and change, and find love and friendships and family, and Jesus, and  most of all:
 
Who Jesus made you to be.
 
 So lovely, go crazy.
 
Go crazy, and write me all about the beautiful things you learn about forgiveness, sorrow, mercy, grace, and losing your temper. Tell me what you learn about your heart, and your soul: who you want to be, and about who you are. Write me about the terrible things you've done, and how Jesus forgave them. Tell me about the terrible things in this world, and all of the things you're looking forward to in the next. Tell me about being sanctified and redeemed. Tell me about the moment you realized you're really forgiven, and the realization of Him loving you that much was more than you could stand, but you let Him anyway. Tell me how you learned to love your body and all of the amazing things it can do. Tell me what it felt like when your broken heart was healed...
  
Tell me all about the great, big world you found out there you crazy, little sailboat
 
 
love you so much,
Martha Lee Anne





Thursday, February 6, 2014

...All I'm saying is, there was A LOT more to be Said

I can't help myself. I watched the debate like tons of other people on creationism vs. evolution.

But man, it was missing a lot. Like, a whole lot.

Bill Nye the science guy was supposed to try to explain how the universe could possibly exist without the existence of God.  And Ham was supposed to explain how the universe can only exist with the existence of God.

Instead, they argued about a flood, and layers of dirt at the Grand Canyon, and how old the earth is. But, they never really talked about how we got here. Not really. Ham said that dogs came from dogs, and that people came from people versus the textbook explanation where people evolved from monkeys.

But no one tried to prove or disprove the existence of a God which is the center argument for creationism and against macro evolution. Am I right, or am I right?

I am pro-creationism. But, I didn't become pro-creationism after reading Genesis.

When I heard the story of Genesis as a kid, I was like, "that's where it all came from," and then things got weird, and I thought, "But how did God do that? What if there isn't really a God? WHERE DID THE DINOSAURS GO!???"

 On a side note, dinosaurs have nothing to do with proving or disproving either creationism or evolution...but for the disbelievers out there...they really did exist. I know! There's fossils and everything!!

Anyway, the point is, I got curious and I started asking questions that I probably wasn't supposed" to ask. Except, I think God made me curious and inquisitive because He has a sense of humor, and He wanted to laugh at my attempts to figure Him out. That's our relationship. I ask "Hey God, I have a question," and He's like, "Alright, Martha Lee Anne, I have an answer...but you'll have to look for it because that's how you get to know me, and that's what you enjoy doing."

God wants to be pursued, you know. He wants to pursue you, but I think He likes being pursued too. But it's a relationship, right? That's how it works.

Anyway.

So, here is my one sided argument using science and logic of why I believe in God. I also believe in Jesus, but that's another set of arguments...another day, perchance.

What was the first puzzle piece that affirmed creationism for me? Well it was a puzzle pieces handed to me in my high school chemistry class when we were learning all about thermodynamics.

The existence of stars, planets, people, animals, plants, and rocks without the existence of God contradicts the first law of thermodynamics.

What does the first law of thermodynamics include?

 Energy can be converted from one form to another, but energy is neither created nor destroyed

Energy and "matter" are interchangeable terms here, as all matter has energy. What does the 2.nd law of ole Thermo mean?  It means that ice can become water, which can become vapor, and then vapor can condense back to form water, and so on and so forth. Plants and animals die and become oil or soil. Do you see where I'm getting at? It's basically "the circle of life" concept but explained in fancier words. Scientists..psh.

 So you see how matter can be converted? Well, matter also can't be created. Weird, I know.

Matter doesn't come from nothing. A rock can come from a bigger rock that broke, or clay packed together, but if you sat in an oxygen less, lightless, vacuumed room for millions of year, I bet a rock would never appear in that vacuum.  A rock could only appear in that room A) if a larger rock were in the room and the person went sledge hammer happy on it or 2) If God created one. Otherwise, the room would forever remain rock-less. Why? Because matter has to come from something. Here's another twist, matter can't come from just anything, it has to come from something either like it, or something that is smart enough to use matter to make it.

But you already know this. If you wanted food, you'd go to the grocery store to the produce section to get fruit that came form a fruit tree, or to the deli to get meat that came from an animal. You would never sit in your room and wait for your shoe to turn into broccoli. Because broccoli just doesn't come from shoes. Sorry (or not, because that'd be so weird) it's just the way it is. You also wouldn't buy a rock and wait for it to become a pizza.

Fruit comes from trees, trees come from trees. It's just like Ham was talking about with evolution. Yeah, Darwin's sparrows had adapted/evolved to have beaks that met the needs of their environment (to eat seeds vs. bugs, etc), but come on, the birds' beaks changed: It's not like they evolved into dogs, or cats, or people. Species adapt within their species, but they don't ever evolve into a new one...There's an order to these things.

On the other side, If a person takes a material (matter) that already exists, he or she can manipulate those materials and create a rock: If I put dirt, and water, and sand in the room with an intelligent being, aka a person, that person could choose to mix those materials to create a rock. So the only way a rock can be created without a rock already in the room? Something intelligent has to create it because we all know shoes are not going to start making mud pies when we walk out...

What's the really drawn out point of the metaphore here?

people come from people who came from people who came from...

If only the human species can come from a human species, where did we come from? And if people can't come from the evolution of microorganisms, then where did we come from? And since Lewis Pasture disproved the concept of spontaneous generation, and we know that horses aren't born from rocks, and that people aren't born out of thin air, then were did we come from? And if the law of thermodynamics states that energy can't be created or destroyed, but only converted...then how in the world did we get here??

Life doesn't explode out of oxygen-less, lightless, lifeless vacuums called space,UNLESS, life was already there. So, the only way rocks can exist without some timeless rock breaking off and making one is if there was something highly intelligent in the vacuum to create it (like the person example, only this time, the intelligence is God).

Sometimes science gets really complicated, so let me tell a fictional story: There once was a balloon that I picked up and pushed my breath into because I love balloons and I wanted one for myself to enjoy. Let's be weird and say that my breath molecules had a consciousness, and one day while floating around, they said, "Hey! where did we come from!" Some of the molecules created a theory that they had always been there. Others believed that they had evolved from small particles that made up the balloon rubber, and then the really crazy ones said things like, " I think there's a great, big intelligent thing our there, that was here before us, and we were created from it, and it put us here to enjoy us."

The existence of an intelligent, complicated, thoughtful God supports the law of thermodynamics, but a universe without Him is contradictory, because without life, there is nothing for life to come from...there'd be nothing at all. And it may sound crazy, but it isn't "that crazy."

The second piece of the puzzle came together for me in my graduate school biochemistry class when Dr. Mathews was throwing pieces of paper around, using a weird word called "entropy."

The existence of the universe without a God violates the law of entropy.

The law of entropy explained why, when Dr. Mathews threw a bunch of papers into the air, those papers went all over the place instead of landing in a nice stack. It also explains why kids marbles roll around everywhere, and leaves fall on your car and not just in the mulched areas.

It explains why mustard from packets splatter all over your shirt instead of in one neat spot. Entropy, you see, is the law of chaos.

Now, let me ask you something: does it look like the universe was created out of chaos?? When I was in chemistry lab and a gas line was left on at one of the stations, the whole room smelled like gas. Why? Because gas expanded throughout the room, evenly distributing itself between the oxygen molecules. Why then, when the universe was created, would hot gasses condense to form planets? That's not entropy, that's organization.

Why does our planet perfectly orbit the sun? You'd say, "Because there's this thing called gravity, Martha Lee Anne.." But here's the thing, gravity didn't exist until there were things for it to exist upon and between BECAUSE  gravity is the attraction based on the mass and the distance of two objects in relation to one another, aka, our planet and sun. So? SO!! That means planets existed before gravity. Which means planets were set in place before gravity ever held them there.

WHAT!!

I don't know if that blows your mind, but basically, this means that the perfectly organized, distanced, and ordered orbits of stars and planets were in place without any influence of gravity. How do things like planets and suns stay in place and in order without gravity there first? My guess would be a big God

 I don't accredit that kind of "random" ordered design to chaos. Design contradicted entropy in the creation of planets when  it caused gas to cool and form planets instead of letting it expand, formless. And intelligence did some crazy, weird things creating and positioning planets before gravity even existed. Or it was so intelligent that it drew some bad A blueprints of a design, and then let the design fall into place, like those people who do cool things with dominos...

 But the point is, the organization of orbits, of eco systems, and your army of an immune system is tattle tale of a creator. A really smart, creative, and intentional creator.

 It's kind of like the water in a river that creates a lake behind a dam. If the dam didn't interfere with the natural law of entropy, there would be no lake, only a running river. But there is a dam, and the dam allows the existence of that Lake. God is the thing that holds everything together (gravity or not), He is order.

I'll end with the last puzzle of the piece. It's called the "deductive argument from contingency." Look it up. I'm still absorbing this one.

It's for the philosopher. Be wary, it makes sense, but it might hurt your brain to make sense of the sense. Read at your own risk. And it says this:
  1. A contingent being (a being such that if it exists it could have not-existed or could cease to) exists.
  2. This contingent being has a cause of or explanation for its existence.
  3. The cause of or explanation for its existence is something other than the contingent being itself.
  4. What causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must either be solely other contingent beings or include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
  5. Contingent beings alone cannot provide an adequate causal account or explanation for the existence of a contingent being.
  6. Therefore, what causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
  7. Therefore, a necessary being (a being such that if it exists cannot not-exist) exists.