The inability to count

People I know...  I'm not naming names...

They don't seem to be able to count.  Simple math kind of count.  The electricity or water gets cut off every other month.  Some sort of crisis is always happening in that household.  And the funny thing... several years ago, I thought they were doing awesome. 

I know it's strange.  But 6 years ago, I knew several families like that.  All of them seemed to be going somewhere.  Everything was just awesome, and the world was rocking along great.  It was 2010, and the world was wonderful. 

Now, we're entering 2017 and I wonder what happened to those families.  I know what I did.  I started making a budget and following the thing.  It doesn't help if you make a budget and don't follow it.  I got my wife on board, and we look at the budget regularly.  We adjust as needed.  She tells me she needs things and I try to fit it into the budget.  We discuss everything.  The budget makes that possible. 

The other families?  They lurch from chaos to chaos, barely surviving what are normal and expected rocks of the ship.  See, emergencies happen.  So they aren't really emergencies.  Those "catastrophes" are normal occurrences.  You just have to plan for them.  And a stack of cash helps.  It's not a lot of cash.  Just $1000.  But that's a life changer.  It's just enough cushion to keep the big bad from beating down the from door.

But the people I know... they get payday loans. 

Six months ago, they said "payday loans are the devil". 

I guess that's the biggest trick of the devil.  He convinced the world he doesn't exist.

But then there is another side of the coin.  The part I don't understand.  I don't have to.  I just have to believe.  And I do.

See, I started going to church six years ago.  And it was a church that preached the new testament, and told me what the Bible said.  It wasn't about what someone thought.  You had to argue against the Bible.  Not against some random person.  Not against the thoughts of the world.  Against the word of God.  And there's a lot of parts in there that don't make a bit of sense to me.  But those parts are the ones that are the most important. 

As I heard someone say once... If you hear someone say "It doesn't make any sense" then that person has an invalid perspective of the world.  The world always makes sense.  It's not the world that doesn't make sense.  It's our view of the world. 

Now, the average person would tell me that the budget made all the difference.  But I know going to church and doing what the Bible said had an effect.  "Have faith and believe" it said.  I did.  That's all that was asked for. 

See, you really need to read the new testament.  It's a hard book to read.  Not for the words.  The words.  The words are easy.  They concepts are hard.  It's filled with a lot of differing and complicated stuff.  I don't pretend to be the greatest scholar of the Bible in the world.  What I do know is the main portion is so stupidly simple it's hard.  "Have faith in the living God and his son Jesus.".  That's the main thing.  

Because a lot of what people teach is flat out wrong.  Or at least contradicted by other parts of the new testament.  And if we're getting into a Paul vs Jesus interpretation, I'm taking Jesus any day of the week.  I think Paul is the problem with a lot of Christianity.  But that's an argument for another time.

I guess the biggest thing I want to leave with is this: Jesus is knowable.  I'm not saying you are going to understand it all.  But he is knowable.  And it's worth knowing him.

Corrective Action

I’ve been reading through Proverbs in my quest to finish the Bible this year.  So I’m using YouVersion and plan that has me read the entire thing in a year.  Technically, I started 2 years ago, and never finished.  But I picked up where I left off, and now I’ve been going steady since January 1. 

Anyways, I was thinking through the various parts about the correction of children.  I know correction has been simplified to “spare the rod, spoil the child”.  But that’s a hideous abbreviation of a collection of different proverbs.  Most of them say “don’t hesitate to discipline your child”.  But the comment is not often made on how to discipline. 

In other words, discipline should exist.  But I’m not going to tell you how to discipline.

If the Bible is the word of God, and God is smart, then what the Bible says should be smart.  I’ve got three kids.  The older kids (3 and 5) have completely different personalities.  Disciplining each child requires different actions and corrections.  Sometimes the reward is a positive reward, sometimes a negative reward.  But in the end, there is some sort of correction.

Throughout the parts of the Bible I’ve read, the correcting action changes.  God was not a one trick pony when it came to correcting the Jews, and as a parent we shouldn’t be either.  The old adage of “spare the rod, spoil the child” is the adage of a one trick pony. 

There is a second question that needs contemplated when talking about corrective actions.  Think back to the corrective actions your parents used.  And then answer the question: did it work?  I’m pretty sure most children will eventually parent the way their parents did.  They will use the same corrective actions.  I saw a lot of parents use corporal punishment.  I also saw a lot of kids who weren’t phased by corporal punishment.  Fifteen minutes after being paddled, they were back to their old ways.   In effect, the corrective action was not effective in solving the issue. 

The entire purpose of a corrective action is to get the person to correct their action.  It’s not for the parent to feel better.  It’s to correct the action that was wrong.  If the corrective action didn’t work, then new measures must be developed.

Simplification

Running late this morning.  Not even sure what to say.  Yesterday, some knucklehead decided to do a denial of service attack against one of our sights.  I was setting the site up for failover network capability.  The failover worked, so the entire denial of service attack was a big joke.  It was one of those perfect storms where an attack occurred, but the attack was completely mitigated without any harm to the site. 

 I’d like to say it was intentional that it happened this way, but it’s not.  It was just pure luck.  But I will take pure luck. 

Despite all this, I keep returning to a realization I had over the weekend.  In the Bible, Solomon is considered the second most intelligent person.  The first most intelligent being Jesus.  But back to Solomon.  For all his brilliance, after his reign the country of Israel goes down the tubes.  Solomon had hundreds of wives, and he allowed them to openly worship idols, leading the country towards idolatry.  I guess the main point here is all can screw up, even the most brilliant around us. 

The more I think about it, the more I believe excessive intelligence becomes a hindrance and not a help.  Excessive intelligence leads to more thought and less action.  Action is the catalyst of change in the world, not thought.  And really, most lives don’t need more thought.  They need more action. 

I was asked yesterday if I had been told I was smart.  I told the person I don’t think I believe them anymore.  For all the “intelligence” I supposedly have, simplistic truths have always confounded me.  And in the end, it’s always the simplification that yields the best and most accurate results.  Back when there was a geocentric model of the universe, a man created a map of the movement of the planets.  It was incredibly complex, but still did not explain everything.  Sometime later, the heliocentric model of the universe was developed.  Suddenly, the things that it took a mathematician to understand could be taught to children. 

It really makes me think… if the concept can’t be taught to a child, the concept needs revised. 

The Green Lantern Paradox

There is a DC comics character by the name of Green Lantern.  The title is an honorific, held by anyone who carries a ring.  During my childhood, it was Guy Gardner and Gnort.  I wasn’t the greatest DC comics reader, but that was pretty funny.  The main thing about being a Green Lantern is possession of a ring.  Whoever possess the ring is a Green Lantern with all sorts of powers.

Here’s the paradox.  The rest of Green Lantern Corps know that all the power is contained in the ring.  The person is just a container.  Should the ring pass to another person, that person would no longer have any power.  To the outsiders of the world, the man has all the power. 

The Green Lantern Paradox is a paradox of knowledge and perspective, but it is one that is very profound.  Take the argument between Stephen Colbert and Dr. Bart Ehrman.  During the argument Ehrman stated that the tone of Jesus was the same in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and changed in John.  Let me make something very simply clear.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke were disciples of Jesus Christ, and worked with him on a daily basis.  John was not.

Reexamine the question as presented in light of the Green Lantern Paradox.  The first three books (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) were written by other members of the Green Lantern Corps.  The fourth book was written by an outsider. 

Also note that the book following John (Acts) is written by an insider (Paul), and once again returns to the narrative portrayed by Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  So yes, the way Jesus is portrayed is different in John than in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  It’s simply because the perspective of the writer was different. 

So, to complete the Green Lantern Paradox, what in the world is the ring in this case?  That would be God.  Jesus came to Earth as a man, stripped of all his Heavenly power and authority. Jesus said God acted through him.  Remember, Jesus was a man with no power whatsoever.  All the power came from God.    

More questions I'd like to ask

These are questions I have to lay at the science minded people who happen to frequent this blog.

Disclaimer: 99% of the readership of this blog are bots.  

But, for those science minded people out there who stumble upon this hole in the web...   Then answer me this...

1)  The rules of science are resolute and repeatable.  Gravity works every single day of the week.  So do Newton's first, second, and third law.  But there are exceptions.  One of those exceptions is the Big Bang.

Science has spent a lot of time trying to explain this anomaly.  By anomaly, I mean events that only happened once.  The extinction of the dinosaurs doesn't count, as that is something that is unlikely but possible every single day of the week.  Several near-Earth misses have happened in the past 100 years.  I'm talking about things as absolutely weird as the Big Bang that have never happened before and have never happened since.

Events caused by human will are also invalid.  All human events stem from our intelligence and free will.  Combining those two things is a collective powder keg that can produce all sorts of anomalies.

I will count the development of human intelligence as one anomaly, as no other species has developed what humans have in terms of intelligence.

Name two other anomalies.   And if you count the one I've already given you, that means you have to come up with one.

Older questions that didn't have answers....
2) Given

1. The age of the universe is finite.
2. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only reformed.

Explain where matter came from.

3) Describe life 20 minutes before the Big Bang.  

So...  have at it.

The Questions I'd Ask

I heard of the Bill Nye and Ken Hamm debate, but I didn’t watch it.  For some reason, people think science and religion are incompatible.  And they consider those of us who believe in Christ to be somehow inadequate.  So there’s no point in debating people who don’t even believe you are human. 

But I do have questions of my own…

1)      What happened 20 minutes before the big bang?  

2)      FACT: The universe is not infinitely old.   FACT: Einstein’s theory states that matter can never be created nor destroyed, only reorganized.  Essentially, we’re dealing with all the matter we’ve ever dealt with before, just in different forms.   Given these two facts, where did matter come from?

See, to me you have to understand there are limitations to what you believe.  After a while, you push to a hard edge, the answer is “I don’t know, my system does not explain that”.  At that point, faith kicks in.  Whether it be faith in God or faith in science. 

Seems to me that both sides have people that don’t tell the truth and stick to old arguments.  Christianity really threw the world on its head, and provided a completely different way of looking at things.  It still does, though what most people teach is not what the Bible teaches.  What most teach is a disturbing combination of Old Testament and New Testament, with no real separation between the two. 

Science is much the same way.  Except there’s a lot of mystery and excitement, and many unknowns.  It’s a magical world where the rules start to make sense, except the ones that matter.  Because in the end, the answers to certain questions just don’t matter.

knowledge of the law

I keep thinking about how to fix the problems in our country.  One solution presented is that "kids should be taught right and wrong".  Or the coloary, "we don't teach kids right and wrong".  I'm going to start at the beginning and say teaching the right and wrong is a waste of time.

The Bible is my text for this thought experiment.  The Jewish people knew very well throughout the Old Testament the difference between right and wrong.  The law was given to Abraham on stone tablets so he could tell everyone else the law.  So it would be hard pressed to say that the Jewish people didn't know the law.  It would also be hard pressed to say the Jewish people didn't teach the law.  There was an entire tribe whose sole purpose was to act as priests. 

Based on all that knowledge, how many people followed the law?  Zero.  Not a single one.  So knowledge of the law didn't get a single person to follow the law in the entire Old Testament.  Which I would say is pretty telling.  Because if you have a period spanning several thousand years and not a single person can follow the law, then knowledge of the law is not what keeps people from breaking the law.

Another thought experiment.  Traffic law teaches that a driver should always signal before changing lanes.  Not signaling before changing lanes means you have broken the law.  Not signaling long enough causes you to break the law.  Everyone who drives is required to pass a school of traffic law.  Yet next time you drive, observe how many people use turn signals.  I would guess the ratio is three to one against.

So, will teaching "right and wrong" solve the problems we are having today?  No.  The Jewish people knew the law in the Old Testament and not a single one followed it throughout their entire lives.  Traffic law teaches that a driver should signal before changing lanes.  That law is followed infrequently. 

So if knowledge of the law doesn't get people to follow the law, then what does? 

Things I didn't know from years ago....

I’m going to take a step around and go towards some of the Biblical misconceptions I learned as a child.  Or maybe misconceptions I learned and have since corrected. 

So… first.  Jesus had no brothers. Secondary implication: Mary and Joseph had no other kids.  Our text for this is Matthew 12:46-50. 

⁴⁶ While He was still talking to the multitudes, behold, His mother and brothers stood outside, seeking to speak with Him. ⁴⁷ Then one said to Him, “Look, Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside, seeking to speak with You.”
⁴⁸ But He answered and said to the one who told Him, “Who is My mother and who are My brothers?” ⁴⁹ And He stretched out His hand toward His disciples and said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! ⁵⁰ For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother.”

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2012:46-50&version=NKJV

And the answer is simple.  Jesus had physical brothers.  Maybe he had sisters as well.  Daughters weren’t as important in the Bible.  But here, Jesus is saying that being a brother by birth is less important than being a brother of the works of God.  So I guess that one is solved.

The Marines got it right...

At church today, the sermon was about outreach.  One of the random things discussed was Isaiah 58:10.  It says...

If you extend your soul to the hungry

And satisfy the afflicted soul,

Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,

And your darkness shall be as the noonday.

And once again, I was thinking about why so many Marines I've met are successful in the Marines and not very successful in the rest of their lives. The key is turning what happened into the Marines into a successful future. 

During my time in the Marine Corps, there was never a time for my problems.  There was only the mission and the welfare of the group.  We were always taught "mission first, troop welfare second".  In many aspects, this idea is exactly what God was talking about in Isaiah 58:10.

Maybe I'm not that smart, but if I hunt down a section of the Bible and it tells me how to solve a problem, the best way to solve that problem is to follow what the Bible said.  And then it becomes easy. 

Now, how can we take this and translate it into success?  Simple: if you have a problem in your life, help others.  Quit worrying about your problems and help others.  If you are depressed, go help others in any method you can.   Serve others, and you will gain.

The pastor used an example.  The Sea of Galilee in Israel is a fresh water sea that is teaming with life.  The water flows southward, feeding crops and providing for the needs of those around.  Finally, the river reaches the Dead Sea.  Nothing grows in the Dead Sea, and entering into the Dead Sea leaves a greasy, nasty feeling.  But that's how people who are self-centered and do nothing but consume are.  They consume and consume, and nothing grows in them. 

So, to finish off this line of thought: Marines on active duty are much like the Sea of Galilee. They produce for others with no thoughts of themselves.  They grow, and grow, and grow.  Nothing can stop them.  But they then leave the Marines and become the Dead Sea.  They consume and consume, asking and demanding over things and forgetting that which caused them great success. And their lives stagnate and become bitter and resentful.

But Isaiah 58:10 tells why the Marine Corps is so successful.  Isaiah 58:10 is the life style and life of the Marine. 

If you want to succeed, continue implementing Isaiah58:10. 

Discipleship and Mentorship

After my last post, I began thinking about mentorship.  That's one part that I thought was generally missing from my life. 

Let's recap for a bit...  

Four Fishermen Called as Disciples

¹⁸ And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. ¹⁹ Then He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” ²⁰ They immediately left their nets and followed Him.
²¹ Going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them, ²² and immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.

Jesus Heals a Great Multitude

²³ And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people. ²⁴ Then His fame went throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all sick people who were afflicted with various diseases and torments, and those who were demon-possessed, epileptics, and paralytics; and He healed them. 

Now, what we've initially gathered from watching what Jesus teaches here is that we shouldn't take a lot of time learning every single bit of information before becoming active in a subject, or in any undertaking.

All you really need to do is come up with an idea, and start doing it.  Part of the action is "start now even if you don't have all the information".  The second part is mentorship.

Mentorship and discipleship are intrinsically tied together.  A disciple can be defined as "a person who is a pupil or an adherent fo the doctrines of another; follower."  And a mentor then, is the teacher.

Now, back to my main thought.  I've never really had a mentor.  Now I realize I've got several, and I picked them up when I wasn't even looking.  The first is the Bible.  It's probably the single greatest repository of truth there is.  It would be better if someone had come along and indexed everything, but the Bible is a document that speaks to each individual in different places and spaces.  No matter what I flip through, I find something that pertains to my life.  The only real question: am I tough enough to apply it?  Sound easy?

Proverbs 22:7

The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

So... how easy is it to follow the Bible?  Not very easy.