Times Like These Make Me Want to Become Libertarian

When I was a junior in high school, my Sunday School teacher took me and my best friend on a weekend hunting trip. I remember two things from that trip. I shot a rabbit while walking back to the farm house to use the bathroom and my Sunday School teacher taught us how to play poker. At that time I was a very good Baptist, so we used .22 and 12 guage shells for chips and didnt play for real money. I had fun and from time to time would play, usually for no money or  maybe penny stakes.

I was re-introduced to poker through my brother-in-law and ESPN a few years ago and the very popular version of No-limt Texas Hold'em. I fell in love with the game. I love the strategy, the math, and the psychology of the game. I love what the game teaches about life. I love the history of game. Pick any topic and I can probably come up with a poker analogy.

Unfortunately, I am man of modest means and limited free time. I hope one day to have a place where I can host a regular game with good friends, but for now, its not in the cards I can't make a time or money commitment. Fortunately, through the magic of the internet, for the past several years, I have been able to feed my semi-addiction by playing poker online an hour or two a week.  I'm basically good enough to not lose money, so for the last 3 years the game has cost me one $25 deposit, which has flucutated in value anywhere from $250 to $2 (currently it sits at about $10).  Probably the greatest lesson I have learned from poker is the effect a positive or negative attitude has on the outcome of my efforts.

Friday, this simple little distraction was taken away from me by my tyrannical, freedom hating, nanny-state, individual-crushing government. In their overwhelming concern for the dangers of gambling addiction, Congress banned online-gambling (apparently online betting on horse races is not gambling) a few years ago. Yesterday, the New York U.S. attorney general indicted the heads of three poker site companies and seized their websites.

As a citizen of a democratic society founded on the principles of limited government, I become more and more frustrated every day with its intrusion into my life. I can't even trust a republican congress with a republican president to stay out of my business. I have a strong feeling a lot more people joined the Tea Party this weekend. I don't know what it's going to take, but I'm just about fed up.

I guess the positive side of this is that I will take those few hours a week I spent chasing a flush and get my house sold and my new house built, and the car-hole converted into a man cave with my own hand-made  poker table so I can have a real game among friends.

Debt and the Pending Government Shutdown

I was driving to work today listing to KFAQ1170 and Pat Campbell gave an excellent analogy to help the average guy understand the issues around the national debt, spending, and the looming government shutdown. All you have to do is reduce the scale and apply it to your own personal life. Begin with 1 Billion = 1 dollar, and 1 year = 1 month. Then:

You have a job that pays $2400 a month. Unfortunately, you are spending $3700 a month. You have done this long enough that if you keep borrowing $1300 a month, you realize you will be financially ruined possibly for life. So you and your wife decide you must cut back. But instead of cutting back $1300, you end up arguing over the difference between $33 and $66 dollars a month, and even over that amount, you are arguing over whether it is your Starbucks or her hair appointment.

And these are the people we thought were smart enough to run our country.

How Long Have Ya Been Here?

Okay, I know I have fallen off the blog band-wagon for about 6 months, but this is new to me, and to be honest, I really hate writing deep down inside. Blogging and becoming disciplined in it is more an exercise in learning patience and perseverance than anything else. So, here I am trying again. Actually, I got fired up a couple of weeks ago on a topic and decided I wanted to write about it, but when I got here, I realized I had not finished my last subject. Finishing things I start is another habit I need to work on.

When I last left off in October, I was attempting to illustrate the insignificance of the amount of physical space I take up. Trying to understand that God created and maintains the vastness of the Universe and is still a personal God who is uniquely interested in me and has a plan for my life is something so mind-boggling it actually hurts to attempt comprehension. But as if that was not enough, God is not only the Creator of  physical space, he is also the creator of time. So. how do I fit in the time part of the Space-Time Continuum (shout out to all my Trekkie friends).

Actually, when God created the Universe, time was the natural by-product. Time only exists because there was a beginning. We measure time by marking physical events. The earth's rotation, the moon's revolutions, our planet's path around the Sun, the frequency of atoms vibrations, the birth and death of an individual. All of these give us our sense of time, and, what is hopefully obvious by the examples I gave, time is very relative. It's conditional on what it's being measured against. It's so conditional that a pretty smart guy by the first name of Albert figured out time can be relatively slowed down or sped up by the influences of mass and speed.

How does all this relate to my insignificance in the Universe? Well let's go back to my last post. I stated that my best hope is to live around 80 years or  so, give or take 20 years,(hopefully give). The year will be 2035 when I turn 80. Our country will be almost 260 years old, so my life will be about 1/3 the age the United States, which when you put it that way, really makes our country seem pretty young, and it is. So, let's go a little further, to say, 10 times my life, or 800 years, 1235. This would have been the height of the Middle Ages, just a few decades from the beginning of the Renaissance. Now lets go back 100 times my life to around 6000 B.C. This would be the time of the beginning of civilization when hunters and gatherers, became farmers and ranchers and the first permanent cities were built. If we go back 1000 times my life span, then we reach the period when most scientists believe humans began there existence and began spreading out across the planet.(Yes I am taking an "old earth" view, but to any creationist readers, this does not mean I believe in evolution, that's another topic). One important fact to also note is that generations are typically measured in 20 year spans, so at this point we are talking about anywhere from 8000 to 16,000 generations of humanity have lived on earth.

At this point, we can skip from counting in hundreds and thousands to millions and billions of years. Most scientists place the explosion of life forms on our planet as beginning around 600 million years ago. Again at this point I would have to use scientific notation to explain how short my life is compared to that number. From there, the estimated age of the Earth is 4.5 billion or 4.5 thousand million years old. The universe then triples that to somewhere between 13 and 15 billion years old. And all that time, before humans ever walked and communed with God, the Scripture tells us the stars, the rocks, the hills, the trees, everything living and non-living were praising Him.

When I begin to reflect on the vastness of time and space, two questions arise which I will give my answer  best guess in my next post:
If I am so small, why is God interested in me?
If my life is so short, why did God make the consequences of my actions in this life so important for eternity?

How Big Are Ya?

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” So says the Preacher in the book of Ecclesiastes. Everything we do is pointless. Not exactly the most uplifting and positive message. Yet that seems to be the main point through much of this little book. No wonder most people know nothing about it except for the song “Turn, Turn, Turn”(60’s tune by The Birds if anyone under 25 is reading this).


Unexpectedly, however, this message seems to resonate with me at this point in my spiritual journey. Not in a practical immediate way. I’m not feeling life has no meaning or that there’s no point in trying. It’s much deeper. God has really been speaking to my heart about time and space, and the incredibly insignificant amount of either that my existence seems to take up. Still, God speaks through His word of my significance and importance so the question becomes, “Why is what I do in my life important and what is the most important thing I am supposed to do?”

Before I try answering that (No, I’m not sure I have the answer yet) I want to expound a bit on what it means to really understand our place in this world. Let’s begin with me. Currently I take up approximately 215lbs. of mass in the physical universe taking up approximately 6.75 cubic feet of space Based upon current averages, I can expect to live approximately 75-80 years (minus whatever the diabetes might subtract and plus the relatively good health I have experienced otherwise). We will round to 80 for mathematical simplicity.

As we look at this it is very important to understand how exponents work and how they can deceive the true scope and size of something. You see we use exponents every day without even realizing it. Everyone knows place value. We know Ten is 10 times bigger than one, and that One Hundred is 10 times bigger than Ten and that One Thousand is 10 times bigger than One Hundred. The deceptive part is that we don’t use a new term for place value until One Million, which is actually 1000 times bigger than One Thousand. The same goes for One Billion, which is 1000 times bigger than One Million, or 1000 x 1000 times bigger than One thousand. We completely lose scope and understanding of what these numbers mean, but let’s try. The earth has over 6.5 billion people currently living on the planet or 6.5 x 109 . Let’s say we are discussing a disease that kills 1 in 1000 every year or 1.0 x 10-3 or .001 of the population. The result of applying these numbers would be that 6.5 x 106 people or 650,000 people die from the disease every year which obviously sounds much more ominous than 1 in 1000.

Now back to me and my 6 feet of linear existence. The circumference of the earth is 24,901.55 miles or 2.5 x 104. I am .0002 miles tall or 2.0 x10-3. This makes me 1.25 x 107 times shorter than the earth. It would take 1,250,000 clones of me lying head to foot to circle the globe at the equator. But wait, there’s more. The diameter of our solar system is 5.54 x 109 miles which means it would take 2.8 x 1012 of me. I am almost 3 trillion times smaller than our solar system. But wait, there’s more. Once we leave the solar system, distance becomes so great that it is measured in light years, the distance light can travel in 365 days. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second so the length of one light year is 5.9 x 1012 miles or over 1000 times the diameter of our solar system. The next reference point most of us are familiar with is our galaxy the Milky Way. The Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years or 5.9 x 1017 miles, which means I am 2.9 x 1020 times smaller than our galaxy, or about 3 million trillion times smaller. Okay, let’s go one step further. The best estimates of astronomy scientists is that the physical universe is at least 2.7 x 109 light years or 1.6 x1025 miles in diameter making me 8 x 1026 times smaller than the universe. Or I am 800 trillion trillion times smaller than the universe that an Awesome and Holy God has created and holds together.

So tell me again. Why am I significant?

To be continued….

Eulogy to My Pancreas

I am here today to say goodbye to a faithful member of my body. Although he is not being removed, and I assume that the tissue is still alive, I must acknowledge that my pancreas has finally given up the ghost. He was a good pancreas and worked very hard for the 20+ years I have been diagnosed with Type II diabetes trying to produce enough insulin for the rest of my body which for some medical reason doesn't play well with insulin. Unfortunately, if he were here today, he probably wouldnt have very kind words to say to me, and I would deserve every criticism.

At the age of 25, living a very sedentary life, and eating things I shouldnt, and drinking Dr. Pepper like water, my weight ballooned to 260 lbs. Then suddenly it began to drop. Along with that was intense thirst and peeing like a race horse. I would sometimes drink a gallon of water through the night. This combined with a later reduced appetite due to personal issues led to me at one point only having 175 lbs on my 6'3" frame.

Since that time, it has been an ongoing, up and down journey, trying to keep my blood sugar under control. When I say up and down, I am referring to the different medications I have been taking. At no time did I ever get serious about monitoring my blood sugar or changing my diet.

That all changed last Wednesday. Kate and I met with a dietitian and a nurse for education on nutrition and use of my insulin injection pen. As my wife shared in her blog, it was a sobering experience. The dietitian went first and spent about an hour telling me not only what I should and should not eat, but how much. It was probably the most depressing part. Nobody wants to hear you can eat all the spinach you want if you are still hungry. It was also a little bit embarrassing when we had to talk about our large Freddy's frozen custards we had the night before.

The second hour was spent with the nurse who trained on use of the novalog pen and monitoring blood sugar levels. She began by asking a lot of lifestyle questions as well as medical information. And then she asked why I was there. What was my motivation for wanting to control my blood sugar and insulin. It caught both Kate and I off guard. We both knew the answer, but it wouldnt come out. The emotions were overwhelming. So we both sat there in silence for a good minute with the tears streaming. Finally the words came out. "There are three little girls we want to adopt, and I want to be around long enough to see them grow up."

And there it was. Suddenly I was so angry with myself. Why had I let it go on this long? Why had the slow build up of symptoms not been enough to make me get serious years ago. I didn't really have an answer. I still don't. But the why doesnt really matter. Why questions deal with the past. Now is time to work for the future.

And so Kate and I are on a new journey towards, diet, exercise, and careful monitoring of my blood sugar levels. Its only been 10 days, and I am sure there will be a lot of struggles with being disciplined. But we are committed to doing what it takes.

Diabetes is like the frog in the water boiled alive because the temperature is only raised slowly. I never felt bad from diabetes, at least not enough to say I noticed. So now, I am looking much closer at the rest of my life to see what else has crept in and may be poisoning me, not just physically, but spiritually as well.

So to my pancreas, thank you for your service, and I'm sorry for how I treated you.

Social Contract Theory, Part II

As I hope I established in Part I, the short definition of Social Contract Theory is that anytime two or more people agree to live in contact with each other, they also agree to give up some of their rights, or to respect the rights of the others they live with. These rights and limiting of rights are negotiated based on the belief that it is good or better for people to live together than alone in the long run. As a Christian, I believe God's design supports this basic principle. Again the opening pages of scripture make this clear when after several statements of "God saw that it was good...", we see "God saw that it was not good that man was alone."

God's original plan, of course, was that a sinless created human race designed for social living would naturally live out the goals of the Social Contract. When people are at their most holy, they are also at their most selfless. His intention was that we would always put others before ourselves. This is the definition of Agape love, the word Jesus used when He asked Peter, "Do you love Me?"

Sin, unfortunately is the exact opposite of selflessness. And so the Social Contract, just like every other aspect of life on earth became corrupted because of man's fallen nature. Instead of being based on trust and focusing on the good of others, it is used as a means of protecting one's own life, liberty, and property(the original intent of the Declaration of Independence before it was changed to "the pursuit of happiness") The focus is completely on self. Now before anyone jumps to any conclusions, I am not going to start bashing our founding fathers or documents. To the contrary, I hope to make a solid argument in support of those ideals. But it is important to understand that from a Christian perspective, Social Contract Theoryshould be viewed as a necessary evil to protect humanity from its worst behaviors. For the Social Contract is the foundation for that other necessary evil, Government.

I will continue with my next post on how Social Contract Theory informs the formation of governments and the rule of law, but for now I want to leave with an illustration I once heard that best describes the separation or difference between those with a right relationship with Jesus, and those without:

A man had a dream that his soul went to visit Hell and Heaven. When he arrived in Hell, he saw the masses of the damned all sitting at huge banquet tables filled with food. Unfortunately no one had elbows, so they could not bend their arms to feed themselves and were condemned to starvation while sitting before a bountiful spread. The man was then transported to Heaven where much to his suprise, he saw the multitude of saints in exactly the same situation as those in Hell. The difference? The saints were rejoicing and filling themselves to contentment as they reached across the tables and fed each other.

Since I've been gone...

Been a busy few weeks since my last post. Kate was in China for two weeks, then home for two weeks, then I left for the East Coast for 8 days. During that time, my wife started her own blog and is much more prolific in her writing. I've got some catching up to do. In the mean time, I would like to echo her thoughts that we are very excited about our new journey towards the prospect of adoption. Please keep us and the boys in your prayers as we go through this process. I will try to finish my discussion on Social Contract Theory tonight.