Embattled Christian

Two weeks ago we spent a day hiking and boating at Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. We arrived on a Friday night and set up camp at Upper Skilak Lake Campground.  After dinner I hiked the Vista Trail with my sons, Dan and Mike.  The trail headed uphill pausing at well marked points for spectacular views of the lake. We took dozens of photos. As we hiked, we talked about books, authors, faith, philosophy, the politics of ideology and the politics of practicality. The most interesting thing we talked about was the value of stories. The stories we read, the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories God tells us.

Dan pointed out that we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives.  We are both experiencing our lives and observing them.  Most of us want our lives to have meaning and moral value.  The stories we tell ourselves reflect our lives and also create them. What we are becoming is based not only on the facts of our lives but the story we write with those facts.

We are in the process of creating ourselves every day. The stories that have emerged from my life are a collaboration between myself and God.  I am not alone in the creation of my story.  The stories I tell myself have spiritual underpinnings and are enlivened by my experiences with the word of God.

I cannot prove to anyone that God lives.  I can only prove it to myself as I act upon the truths taught in his word.  Every step I have made to more fully weave the principles of the gospel of Christ into my life’s experiences has led me to greater understanding of myself, greater patience with others, greater peace, and greater joy in my family.  In other words, born fruit that is both sweet and nourishing. My life is a great experiment upon the word of God.

As with all experiments,  I cannot have the results before the research, study, and acting upon what I have learned.  Does the scientist say, “Give me a sign that this hypothesis is true and then I will act”?

Like the precious oil in the lamps of the 10 virgins of the New Testament parable, the experiences with God that I have had as I have experimented upon His word cannot be given to others.  I try with all my might to appropriately share “my stories” with my family, friends, and especially my children. I want to share the insights and the fruits of my life’s great experiment.  I want to transfer to others the faith that has grown in me to the degree that I have been faithFUL.

But I can only illustrate a pattern, offer a possibility, hold up my light.  I cannot GIVE them the  “oil” of experience in Christ that will give them their own light.  They must purchase it for themselves by their own experiment. No debate, no argument, no eloquent expounding of some endeniable wisdom can transfer to others the “oil” that comes from life experiences enlivened by the revelation of God’s love.

Before the miracle of creation comes the work of faith. I hope and pray that what I have created and will continue to create, by the grace of God, is a good and true story.

Alma 32:27 But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words.

I spent much of Memorial Day weekend remembering. I didn’t go to any cemeteries or monuments to our fallen heroes. I took a tour of my closet full of photos, family histories, old letters, and crumbling albums.  I dredged up piles of neglected family debris and started making sense of it.

I found faded letters from my parents when we lived in North Pole and the long lost account of our 1991 move from Alaska to Utah in an old yellow school bus. There’s the photos of our 1998 ferry trip back to Alaska to move to Anchorage. There’s the story I wrote about a November family overnight at Bald Lake Public Use cabin. We had to lash all our gear (games, fuel, sleeping bags, and dutch ovens) onto sleds and trek nearly a mile through knee-deep snow because the Nancy Lake Parkway was gated off.  And their are boxes and boxes of unorganized photos.

I am not a scrap booker.  For some reason scrap booking is painful for me. Too many decisions about paper, and cut outs, and lettering, and color coordinating. I just haven’t got a mind for that. I look at a shelf full of scrapbooking materials or browse a catalog full of the same and I get queasy.

But I did have the where with all several years ago, before my year of cancer, to purchase a half dozen handsome leather photo albums at Costco.  And over the weekend, finally, I sorted the last ten years of family photos into chronological order and began neatly labeling and stuffing them into the slots in the photo albums. It has given me an enormous sense of accomplishment.  Tokens of my family memories grow safer every day.

Perhaps it is my brush with a fatal illness. Perhaps staring into my mortality so graphically has stirred in me the need to get my life in order, in order that it will make sense to those I will sooner or later leave behind. I want our family and friends to enjoy them in the hear and now. I want my loved ones to be able to open my closet full of memories and quickly be able to lay hold of the joy stored therein.

In a speech at University of Kentucky nine years ago, Judge Ilana Rovner, whose Jewish parents escaped the Holocaust, said the following:

“I think that if I could leave you with but one thought, it would be to keep alive your history, your memory, for in doing so, you give constant life to that which is best in us. And teaching others about that which is best in one’s own heritage and one’s own history is a form of pursuing justice and remembrance . . . Each one of you, in memorializing and keeping alive the flames of your ancestors,  your heritage, your history, you become rememberers. Each one of you will have a legacy to leave.  Hoepfully, that legacy will be one nurtured and furthered by your understanding of the law and justice. And perhaps you will reflect now and again on Anthony Hecht’s words which apply to each one of us: ‘Merely, to have survived is not an index of exxcellence.’”

She has experienced a life-long awareness that hundreds of her family members perished in the Holocaust and never had the opportunity to pursue their dreams, to create, to accomplish, to leave a legacy. So she has wanted:

.” . . to accomplish not only for ourselves but in memory of others. My thoughts are often with the family I have never known. These are the people who have been my inspiration and my guide–”

Holocaust survivors, all of us, are guardians of   “. . . the future of the past.”

Heritage, remembrance, ancestors, family history, pioneer stories, are deeply ingrained in my Mormon faith and upbringing.  I am deeply aware that my life, my privileges, my opportunities are gifts from those who went before to prepare the way.

I am sustained by the past, but I am dedicated to the sustenance of the future.  A slice of the future of the world has been raised within the walls of my home. There is nothing more important to me than my family. And there is little more important to the solidarity of family than preserving family memories. The future of the past will serve us well if we never forget.

As I remember, and keep in remembrance,  the hand of God in my life is revealed.

Prayer: another dimension of our spiritual fitness training.  We practice shots from the free throw line, we go to the driving range and practice our swing, we lift weights, and do much for the training of our bodies. But spiritual fitness is something that has suffered in our age of skepticism and self-indulgence.

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had absolutely no other place to go.” — Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was a very smart man: ambitious, compassionate, clever, wise,  an astute student of human nature. In spite of his personal intelligence and shrewdness,  his experiences in life and the great burdens of the presidency in a time of terrible crisis drove him from skepticism to prayer.

I vividly remember as a child being in a sunday school class where a story was told of a family picnicking at the beach and suddenly realizing that the keys to their car were missing. After a futile search for the keys one of the children suggests that they have a prayer and ask for help to find them. Quickly thereafter someone had a stroke of inspiration and the keys were located in an obscure spot no one had thought of.

This is a deceptively simple story of need, hope, and faith. Yet it outlines the elements so basic to the impulse to pray. We are in need. We have tried all we can.  All we alone have done has not produced results. In our extremity a humble heart seeks out God in prayer and acts upon the strokes of inspiration that follow.  That story has stuck with me because it is about those keys that have made prayer a key element of my life.

I cannot imagine, have no desire to imagine, living my life without prayer. A steady habit of prayer, worked at my whole life has made me more grateful, more hopeful, more compassionate,  and brought more of everything good and holy. The spiritual energy of my life is geared toward being able to approach God in prayer worthily, with faith, repentance, humility, and a desire to see his hand working in my life.  My prayers have been answered both quickly and after long months and years of patient waiting. My prayers have been ongoing from my heart all day and at my bedside on my knees. My prayers have been out-pourings of gratitude and joy as well as fervent groanings of pain and sorrow.

I used to pray as if God had a basket of blessings that was limited. That I should be careful what I asked for lest I be too greedy for a share of that restricted basket. After all I really was so blessed  in every respect, I had no right to ask for more. However, during a time of great emotional and spiritual extremity, I could no longer be so frugal in my petitions and it dawned on me that the only limit to the blessings God was willing to pour out in answer to my prayers was my own small capacity to express, see, feel, hear, act, and know.

God’s basket is infinite. The only thing that is narrow is our perspective and ability to sense His replies.  With that in mind, my first and most important petition is to know what I should pray for and to ask for God to sharpen my spiritual senses.

Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this – always obey such an impulse. –Martyn Lloyd-Jones

I have learned that when I feel the impulse to pray, I must pray. To ignore that impulse is to hand God a smaller basket with which to bless my life and the lives of those around me. In the face of all adversity, surprise, disappointment, temptation, set-back, and triumph; I pray that my first impulse will be to pray.

“. . . ye must pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness. Yea, and when you do not cry unto the Lord let your hearts be full, drawn out in prayer unto him continually for your welfare, and also for the welfare of those who are around you.” Alma 34:27

Prayer is some of the hardest work we will ever do.

“And he spake a parable to them to this end; that man ought always to pray and not faint;” Luke 18:1

Spring fever bit me and I haven’t felt like writing since the sun came out.

We have been shamelessly reveling in a week of gorgeous weather in the Anchorage area.  We take no sunny moment for granted. The Alaska weather Gods are not friendly and as soon as you make plans for the summer which include anything that requires good weather and speak those plans out loud; the weather Gods will cook up a dripping, drizzlie, gray mess of clouds that park indefinitely where they will drown your parade.  That can go on all week, all month, or even all summer long.

This week I out-smarted those vengeful deities who like to spoil all the fun. Well, the water company did. A broken water main flooded the parking lot at work, which required the water being shut off in the building where I work, which led to an unexpected day off, which absolutely required that a uniquely pleasant Wednesday in April not be spent indoors. I went golfing at Palmer Golf Course. The course was brown and soggy, and half the greens (browns) covered with tarps, but still I played my best golf game ever.  My score is unmentionable but still my best.  A few great drives and finesse putts have me wishing I could play everyday and have a score worthy of expressing out loud.

Several other landmark days came during April:  April 6, two years ago, I found swollen lymph nodes in my neck, on April 19 I had a P.E.T scan, on April 24th, I found out that I had cancer in my tongue.  Two years ago today I was preparing to fly to Salt Lake City to have the cancer surgically removed: surgery which never happened.  Instead I was treated with radiation and chemo therapy and now, two years later, there has been no recurrence of the cancer.  I can eat, taste, speak, and even sing again. I am deeply grateful for the amazing medical care, the doctors, nurses, and technicians, my incredible family, the support of friends, the prayers of innumerable people in my church and elsewhere that lead to the good health I now enjoy.  It is something I celebrate and give thanks for every single day.  I have a few well-earned scars but these will keep me in remembrance of how blessed I am, how much I’ve learned, how much more I want to do and be for myself and, more importantly, for those who count on me.

Today was a perfect day for the next landmark. Its been a wonderful Sabbath. I spent time studying scriptures before church and felt peace, inspiration, and comfort. The hymns in church cleared my mind of worries and opened my heart to an infusion of spiritual strength for the week to come. I taught Sunday school class and enjoyed the shared wisdom of class members as we discussed the blessings of the Sabbath Day: sacred time, sacred space, and holiness to the Lord. As I left the church building and began the pleasant walk home in the sunshine, my eyes swept the flanks of the mountain across the valley. And it hit me, “I lost the bet!” The trees are awash in the green mist of freshly opening leaf buds. I bet my husband it would be May 12th. My husband said May 9th.

This all brings me around to what I had planned to write about: habits of belief.  I’ve written several posts about belief in God, the process of belief, the desire to believe, the blessings of belief.  Belief must be nurtured, cultivated, and fed.  We all know that we must feed our bodies nutritious food to be physically healthy. This is an undeniable fact. We all know that we must exercise and practice to be physically proficient in sports or any talent or interest we want to be proficient at. This is unquestionable.

Yet as a society we are prone to spiritual neglect we see spiritual starvation everywhere. We particularly inflict spiritual laziness on our children leaving them vulnerable to spiritual atrophy, dismay, and despair.

Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in our poor use of the gift of the Sabbath Day.  It is truly a Sun-day: a day to soak up the light of the spirit, the light of healing, the light of growth, forgiveness, and repentance.  Grow-up in God. Attend church: not to be entertained, not just to be taught, but to give thanks, learn charity, and, most importantly, to worship the living God who is full of grace and truth.

One of the first habits of belief: sacrifice a bit of your time to worship God.  Not at the campground or the golf course or a sporting event.  Choose a sacred place dedicated to worship, where you can lay your broken heart on the altar, where you can learn the attributes of Christ, where you can be filled and refurbished with strength to live those principles in the coming week.

Habit number one: Make sacred space in your life. Accept the gift of the Sabbath.

I’ve avoided political commentary in my posts lately.  I’m trying to watch the unfolding of the administration with a more balanced, less partisan perspective. I’m trying to be less shrill in my opinions and more even tempered in my analysis. I’m deeply weary of the last eight years of Bush bashing and the psychosis of Bush hatred. So I think it only fair that, as a conservative who is having a really hard time watching the power grab by democrats,  I vigorously shun indulging in similar hysteria over the policies and person of President Obama, and give him a chance to impress me.

I’m still unmoved by his rhetoric.  I must have poor pitch, because I keep hearing how eloquent he is and I just don’t get it.  Perhaps, I’m too shallow to look up to a United States President who for the first time in my life is younger than I.  A president who, for the first time in his life, is actually governing.

Or perhaps I discern the jangle of politics not for the good of the nation but for the good of the political machine (no change there,) drowning out the well-crafted verbal flourishes. Last week President Obama made statements to the affect that he would not pursue the disastrous course and terrible precedent of plunging our country into investigating and prosecuting the previous administration over opinions rendered and decisions made regarding harsh interrogation practices in dealing with terrorists in custody. (My opinion on harsh interrogation is irrelevant for the purposes of this post.) Over the weekend some of his more hysterical cronies got to him and he spinelessly back-pedaled.  He knows we need to look forward, he knows that plunging congress into the divisive spectacle and waste of time such hearings would be is a bad idea.  He knows that it sets horrible precedent. He knows that congress has better things to do and that his justice department badly needs cleaning up after the Senator Stevens debacle.  But he blinked in the face of the fanatics who believe he owes them. And he must believe it too.  The only people Barak Obama owes anything to are the people of this country who desperately need him to focus on getting the country on a firm economic footing, encourage job creation and  ethical business practices, and foster confidence.

But if President Obama is going to continue to let his initial instincts be eroded by the hysterics in his party, why stop with second guessing and punishing the practices of  George W. Bush’s administration when there is a fruitful field for such an academic and vindictive exercise of benighted politics. After all, we are now so wise and just and true in our judgments of all circumstances, so all knowing, so superior in our moral sensibilities,  why not prosecute the whole panoply of American Presidential Administrations starting with President Obama’s personal favorites, Abraham Lincoln and FDR.

Investigate and prosecute each and every one of them because none were free of the taint of Presidential overreaching in the name of  the well-being of the country (including President Obama himself).

Lincoln:  suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus among other very creative (perhaps illegal) Presidential measures to save the Union.  Oh, and then there was the time he defied a decision of the Supreme Court.

FDR: for imprisoning Japaneses Americans in internment camps during WWII because of hysteria over their loyalties.  And then FDR had the audacity to ask those same Americans to serve in the military.  Or perhaps for antisemitism and aiding genocide because he would not raise immigration limits for Jews after WWII when they desperately needed places to settle. Why not blame him for the whole Palestinian refugee problem.

How about John Adams for signing the Alien and Sedition Act.  Now that’s a monument to Presidential thin-skinnedness trumping the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson:  for vastly overreaching Presidential powers to double the size of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase.  Also for being so blindly loyal to states rights that he stubbornly facilitated the disastrous continuation of slavery.

Andrew Jackson: for undermining and destroying the national bank thus setting off a domino affect of bank failures across the nation.

Truman: for authorizing dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No, even better for funding the research and development of the bomb.

Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson for entering into and escalating the Vietnam War and then prosecuting it in a manner that actually encouraged failure both morally and militarily.

Jimmy Carter for gross ineptitude and letting the entire American Embassy in Iran languish in captivity for over a year, oh and boycotting the Olympics to no good effect.

Ronald Reagan for toppling the Soviet Union ( and selling arms to Iran.)

Clinton: for actually lying up a storm under oath, nepotism in trying to give his wife power to revamp the health care system,  to name only a couple.

Given our modern proclivity for being all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-perfect in our moral sensibilities, we have a right to tear the country apart with not only second-guessing previous administrations but prosecuting them even though it may bankrupt the nation’s morale and pocketbook.

Remember Lots wife. She looked back and she turned to stone. Its called paralysis.

Assuming, now a belief in the existence of a powerful and eternal creator - a parent God who cares about His children’s lives and happiness in mortality and on into eternity, the next question is - so what?  Why should we care.  Human beings survive, they feed, clothe, house and reproduce whether they believe in this God or not. He is there and yet human beings can ignore him and sustain life.

Why should we trust God? What proof do we have that hitching our destiny to His plan and His will is the way to happiness?  Let’s not indulge in philosophical debate about the meaning of happiness.  Happiness is necessary. It is not a relative abstraction.  It is not a question of selfishly seeking our own interest but of generating the power to experience the kind of joy that spreads exponentially from within ourselves outward to our family, friends, community, and on and on eternally.  Enduring happiness is about a love so pure and exalting that it overcomes the worst that life can throw at us.

The shadows and types are everywhere in the world: the hero, the rescuer.  The archetype that transcends all cultural boundaries and barriers.  This ubiquitous symbol points the way to the true gift.  Nowhere in religion or myth do we see anything to compare with the reality of the life, the teachings, and sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus of Nazareth, born to a mortal mother with the capacity to be tempted and to die.  Jesus Christ the Son of  God, who lived a perfect life and overcame death because of his love for the human race.  A perfect being, the firstborn of God in this world, a soul so pure He could overcome the demands of justice and extend mercy to all who would accept his very generous offer of atonement. Atonement purchased through undeserved suffering.

Why should we trust God?  Because he gave us his SON.  He gave us concrete evidence. Through his Son he gives us the vision beyond pain, beyond suffering, beyond the dark veil of this world, and extends eternal happiness to those who can never by their own efforts obtain it. The Savior suffered for us the worst that life could inflict and then rose on resurrection morning.  He gives us “beauty for ashes the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” (Isaiah 61:3)

What is the proof of God’s love and trustworthiness?  Jesus Christ, the redeemer of the world.

What is the worth of a soul?  The life of God.

Where to start?  Which came first the chicken or the egg, the acorn or the oak? The choice or the consequence?   A particle or a wave?

Basic number two: When faced with doubt choose belief.

Don’t get into all the what ifs and whys. Don’t make it into a federal case. Don’t write a doctoral dissertation on the philosophical reasoning behind the existence of God.  Keep it simple.

“Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend.” Mosiah 4:9

Although I have many questions and observe heart-rending contradictions in the world around me; I fervently assert that belief in a loving God, whose children we human beings are, is the best, most constructive, most life-affirming position we can take in moving forward with our lives.  By choosing belief we allow this loving God (and I speak of the Judeo Christian God, the God of the Bible) to have an active influence in our life. We allow this loving God to reveal to us “here a little, and there a little” his purposes for us and for all creation.  We allow him to comfort us in the face of life’s inevitable pain. We allow him to transform our experiences to work for our good.

God will not force himself upon us. We must choose to have a relationship with him. Perhaps the first  choice is simply to believe enough to ask for a greater desire to believe. Then to believe enough to do some small thing we know is right that we keep procrastinating.  By laying some small sacrifice upon the altar, some action of goodness and rightness, we open a window for the breezes of heaven to blow through our lives and begin to refresh our souls.  Our eternal never-ending soul hungers to be revived by the breath of God and to return to some small degree of his presence.

Doubt is always an option.  It is a hungry beast that gives no comfort, no hope, no joy, no blessing, no renewal, no life, no faith, no knowledge, no healing. It devours and gives nothing in return.

I have never been disappointed by my choice to believe.  I have been tested, and tried, asked to be patient, and privileged to sacrifice.   My choice to believe has always been rewarded far exceeding my pitiful human perspective and my paltry sacrifice.

When faced with the dark devouring maw of doubt turn humbly and resolutely toward the light of belief. “. . . Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” Mark 9:24

It was a strange coincidence.  Almost too weird.  I was struck by the ominous nexus of the events: one imaginatively toying with humanity’s doom, and one quite literally overshadowing us with the fumes from Mt. Doom.

By yesterday,  Saturday, March 28; Mt. Redoubt had erupted a number of times. Each time the prevailing winds arranged for Anchorage area to escape the ash cloud.  From Thursday through Saturday morning the volcano was significantly active.  Here in Eagle River, we had become not really complacent but our constant attention to Redoubt’s activities and the subsequent non-ashfall had diluted our sense of urgency.

I spent Saturday morning scrubbing and vacuuming the house which after weeks of neglect was a great relief.  Saturday afternoon, I put the final touches on a series of notebooks that held my journal entries and writings for the last 9 years.  Via twitter and the National Weather Service website we monitored Redoubt’s rumblings.

Suddenly at about 5:00 we decided to head into Anchorage for a movie and, afterward, an event being held in honor of our friend’s anniversary.  As we drove toward town on the Glenn Highway, I fiddled with my husband’s iphone searching for the latest on Redoubt.  I really don’t understand what possessed us, but even though the latest alert indicated possible ashfall in Anchorage sometime in the evening, we proceeded to the theater.

We chose the movie, “Knowing”.  A warning: there are spoilers in the rest of my story.  About a third of the way through the movie, a theater employ called out above a lull in the soundtrack,.   It took a few seconds for the us to realize that the voice in the dark was not part of the movie, or to even have the words distill into coherence: “Just wanted to let you know there will be ash on your cars after the movie is over.”

We were momentarily stunned.  Several people gradually slipped down the aisles and out the door. However, it seemed to me that the best thing for us to do was to stay snug and sheltered in the theater and get our full $20.00 worth. It didn’t make any sense to rush out into the ash right then.  We returned to viewing the accelerating anxiety of Nicholas Cage as he frantically tried to decipher the meaning of a tightly scrawled page of numbers that pointed more and more to him, his son, and ultimate disaster.

As it turned out it was complete fiery annihilation of the human race, the planet, and everything on it. The final scenes were filled with blazing heat, fires, smoke and, of course, lots and lots of choking ash. Ultimately, everything spontaneously ignited and incinerated in a highly unlikely solar super flare.

We exited the theater into a world turned ashy gray, smelling of smoke, and feeling gritty to the eyes and throat.  The sky was filled with an ominously dark mass and everything was coated with a thin layer of powdered, burnt rock. And this was light ashfall.

It was surreal and disturbing given the visions of Armageddon that we had just seen. Our instinct was to hurry home, make sure it was sealed tight against the encroaching threat, and gather our family safely around us.  This we did.  It took some coaxing but we convinced our young adult children that it really was best to be home.  Home we have stayed, well stocked with food and water, church canceled, enjoying a pleasant suspension of our normal schedule as the darkness passed over and high winds over night scoured the air.

An unexpected little gift from Redoubt.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/29/tech/main4901089.shtml

I’ve had a number of big surprises in my life: life altering surprises. The good things in my life I almost always saw coming.  I planned for those good things, I worked for them, and sacrificed to bring them to pass, and hung on with tenacious faith and prayer until my efforts bore fruit.

But the challenges, especially the really big ones, I never saw coming.  My daughter’s hydrocephalus, the motor vehicle accident that took the life of four dear family members, my fight with tongue cancer.  These I never saw coming.  These difficult surprises brought both heartache and incredibly valuable lessons.  There have been less visible challenges that have been equally as troubling and instructive.  Life’s unexpected challenges are like rogue waves that come out of nowhere, knock us off our comfortable pleasure craft, and leave us gasping for breath and grasping for safety.

My habit when a rogue wave hits, after first sputtering breathlessly and casting about for a lifeline to hang onto, is to go back to basics.  The first of all faith basics is:  “Be still and know that I am God.” Psalms 46:10

I escape to a quiet place where I can sense the exalted presence of God. I ponder that loving being that I have prayed to since before I could say “amen.”

All of us have our physical senses, our intellectual logic which get stronger with use, study, and practice. And yet these are not infallible nor complete. We also have spiritual senses that if exercised will lead us from one basic truth to another.

The first of those spiritual basics:  God lives.

An interesting quirk of history came together on February 12th of this year:  the 200th anniversary of the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.  I was delightfully entertained by Lincoln in February and procrastinated addressing the worthy Mr. Charles Darwin.

Several years ago, while visiting The Museum of Natural History in New York City, I viewed a large and impressive display dedicated to the life and research of Charles Darwin.  I was then and am now little moved by what Darwin had to say about the creation of life on this earth.  Certainly, some of his observations have given biologists a fruitful field for studying the ways in which life on this earth adapts and changes. The widely accepted assertion is that without the framework of natural selection and evolution, biology would be a stunted science. This troubles me not at all.  Biology: dissecting critters, contemplating beaks, claws, and the evolution of fins, fingers and other appendages just doesn’t grab me.

The source of life interests me greatly.  I believe in God and that he is the creator of heaven and earth and all life therein.  I am not preoccupied with the gritty details of how he accomplished the creation. However, I am endlessly curious about the purpose of creation and the conundrums of consciousness.

Obviously, Darwin’s assumptions have provided, for a significant number of people,  a compelling and satisfying alternative to belief in creation by Divine action (I avoid the term “intelligent design” which has been so successfully maligned by the media spin machine and proselytizers of the government approved religion of scientific dogma - I have no problem with scientific truth).

After studying information on the subject by experts from Francis Collins to Richard Dawkins, I’ve boiled the problem down to one word:  FAITH.  Because no matter what is going on out there in the slippery, slimey world of “survival of the fittest”,  embracing the concept of life by fortuitous accident is as much an act of faith as belief in God.  Forgive me, I do not wish to cheapen the act of faith in God but for illustration’s sake, you get the idea.

The notion that life has steadily progressed from the accidental formulation of amino acids in a pond long, long, long, long, long, long, long (repeat that a few hundred times) ago, is so tight a stretch that logic snaps. The idea that first life was some accidental cohesion of amino acids into DNA that somehow formed a simple single-cell organism is insupportable.  Less supportable than belief in God.

Why?  BECAUSE there is NO SUCH THING AS A SIMPLE CELL.  The deeper scientists peer into the unseen microscopic world of the cell the more and more complex and confounding the mechanisms inside the cell appear.  And that is just the beginning. Never mind irreducible complexity, let’s move on to SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.

Logically speaking, it is far more likely that there is a God behind the marvels of creation that we humans are a part of, than that life happened by accident.  It has been proven time and again, SCIENTIFICALLY, that life never spontaneously generates from non-living materials. Every living thing has a parent or it does not come into being.  Never mind the spotty  book of the fossil record which has wide (to put it mildly) gaps and contradictions and move on to the nearly unfathomable complexity of the DNA molecule. Within every living cell is contained the message and messenger, which irresistibly suggests an AUTHOR.  Others, have spent a great deal of time analyzing all this and have written more eloquently and convincingly than I.  For example here.

That a single-celled animal came into being by accident is a statistical impossibility.  The circuitous reasoning is that we are here so the felicitous accident DID happen. But if you get into the REAL life probabilities, well, God is more probable.

Charles Darwin realized that within his philosophic “mental experiments” were some inconvenient gaps, and possibly, fatal flaws. He believed that over time the missing pieces of his theory would eventually come to light.  However, the glitches in his sketched out tale of the origins and progress of life have not gotten simpler but more mind bogglingly complex. Anyone who says otherwise is quite simply not being honest. There are no neatly wrapped packages to lay at the feet of Darwin for his 200th birthday.

It all comes down to FAITH.  God is a far better bet than accident.