expelled?

Funny thing showed up in the NY Times yesterday. An article about evolution vs. intelligent design. It originates from Ben Stein's movie, set for a February release, Expelled. What fascinates me is the stir this has caused in the scientific community, all about a movie from a man who claims to be undecided on the debate. Read the full article here.

So here is the deal. Why does the science community immediately react whenever God is thrown into the picture? What is their aversion to Him, after all? Suddenly everyone is denying that they said what they are on tape saying, that they have been misrepresented, etc. (I must point out here that they should know, since they continuously misrepresent and muddy the opposing side, exactly how such things are achieved). Seriously? They may have been. They may have been "tricked" into going on the record for a project that they weren't intending to comment on. And if so, that is wrong, whether or not they do that to others all the time or not.

But also, I think it fascinating that the word "God" sparks such action and reaction from the science community. There is no room in the science world for God or any other possible truth besides what they have convinced themselves (by faith) that they will believe. And anything that would seek to deny their belief system, or even question it, is suddenly attacked from all sides of their community. What do they have to hide? Whether it be under the mask of misrepresentation or not, the science community's reaction to such things is always predictable. There is no openness to other views, or even the consideration of other views, from the evolutionary standpoint at all. What makes it more humorous is that this movie, which is being so strongly contested, is about just that. It's not about supporting intelligent design in the classroom, but ironically it's about showing how the science community is closed to any other belief but their own. Ben Stein believes that the two beliefs should both be presented in the classroom as "alternatives" to each another... a thought which I must say I find not half bad, at all.

I'll close my opinionated ramblings with a quote from Dr Eugenie C. Scott in the NY Times article, who fears that the movie will portray the scientific community "as intolerant, as close-minded, and as persecuting those who disagree with them. And this is simply wrong." Is it, Dr Scott? Can anyone show me proof that the scientific community is open to alternatives to evolution? For a community who say that they rely entirely upon evidence and not faith to support their beliefs, I'm afraid there is very little supporting evidence to their open mindedness to the intelligent design belief system.

getting touchy about touching

Scott and I attended a marriage retreat this last weekend which covered the five love languages, as "discovered" by Gary Chapman. Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Giving of Gifts, and Physical Touch. As always, I of course came out screaming physical touch as the strongest of my love languages in our 35 question "diagnostic" test. It's been that way for as long as I can remember. Save your words and give me a hug. When I was a little girl I used to crawl up in my Daddy's lap and sit there for hours or just lean on him while he watched football. Or I'd go find Mom and tell her not to just give me a "hug," I need a "big hug."

However, in America this can be the curse of all curses to have for a love language. We are just not a touchy people. My first month of living alone in Dallas, attending classes at seminary and working in a brand new environment where I knew no one, proved to be one of the loneliest times of my entire life. It wasn't for lack of attention, people at work and school talked to me a lot. They even did things for me and gave me little welcome gifts. They took me out for lunch. But nobody hugged me. Nobody gave me a pat on the back. Nobody played with my hair as we sat in the floor and watched movies, or gave me a foot rub as my best friends and I used to always do. I didn't mind living alone, I enjoyed it even, but I missed coming home to my college roommate, Kara, and she would play with my hair as I talked about my day. In fact, the third week of my new life in Dallas I came home on a Friday night and wept until I had no more tears, because no one had touched me in weeks.

This is already making many of you uncomfortable. We're not supposed to need touch like that. Because somehow our culture has figured out a way to take something as loving and special and innocent as physical touch and dirty it with sexual connotation. I'm not talking about sexual touch. There is such a huge difference between the two. Yes, I'm serious. Those of us who have the love language of physical touch can explain it so clearly to you. Because having the love language of physical touch does not mean we have an insatiable hunger for sex. Instead, it means that we feel the most loved when someone physically says "I support you." or "I think you are special." It means that we can walk by a billboard that says "You are wonderful" and feel nothing, but we can walk into a room where a close friend puts their arm around your shoulders or fluffs your hair playfully and says nothing, and suddenly we feel loved, appreciated, and special.

All this to say, I've always loved the passages in Scripture that talk about touch. The Jewish people were a touchy people. I think I could have done well as a Jew. "Greet one another with a holy kiss." It's all over Scripture, whatever happened to that, anyway?

Jesus touched everybody. He touched little kids and held them in his lap. He touched his disciples (can't you just picture him putting his hand on Peter's shoulder to gently hold him back from saying the first thing that popped into his head, like he always did?), he touched his friends Mary and Martha, and he touched when he healed. So many accounts of him touching peoples eyes, faces, hands, while he's healing. Mark 1:40-45 records possibly one of my favorite accounts of Jesus' touch... when he healed the leper, but touched him before he healed him. Nobody touched lepers. They were unclean. But Jesus touched him, because he loved him. Can you imagine what it felt like to a leper who hadn't been touched in all of his diseased years to feel the warmth of Jesus' hand upon his withered skin?

I heard a story the other day about a young lady who was in the hospital in great pain, on morphine. A nurse came in to change her bandages, and the lady began to weep loudly. The nurse went to increase her morphine drip, but the lady just cried louder. Finally, the nurse asked her if she wanted some water or something for the pain. "Can you please hug me, instead?" the girl cried. The nurse put her arms around her, and began coming in and hugging her every day. In a matter of weeks, the young lady was off of morphine completely.

Yet with all of this, it is still hard for us as Americans to touch. This is bad. Christians, we need to be supporting each other with words, actions, and a firm hand on the shoulder, a hug, a pat on the back, a high-five. What could it hurt? The culture around us is crying out for touch... where do you think the sex obsession originates? (I know, it's more than touch, but that is also a central key!) Come on, we're the body of Christ. And bodies are created for touch.

I'll go ahead and speak up. I need touch. Not just from my hubby, but also from the body. I need that pat on the shoulder, that little supportive hug now and again. And if I need it, I know there are so many more out there who do, to, but are afraid to say because it has somehow become a sensitive issue in today's America. But we need to be touched, loved, appreciated. So let the touching commence, without shame, for we are all brothers and sisters in the bond of Christ, and he touched people. Isn't that reason enough?

So, someday I will have the privilege of walking into the arms of my Lord, my Savior will enfold me in his loving and merciful arms which bear the scars of the wounds he endured for my benefit, and I will receive the greatest hug I've ever known. Until that day, I will look to the Body to be the arms of Christ.

mortifying mortality

I feel very mortal today. Maybe it's the lack of sleep as I sat up until 3am watching HGTV and wishing on every star in the sky that I could fall into a deep sleep. Maybe it's the struggles I see in the faces of the people around me: the coworker who bears the marks on her body of the radiation for breast cancer that she is currently undergoing; maybe it's the two friends who have been trying to get pregnant for over a year and feel more discouraged with every false test; maybe it's the other coworker who is in Tennessee holding her non-Christian mother's hand as she slips from her current coma into the next life - one that my dear friend knows will bring her mom into eternal judgment for her stubborn determination to hold her own life away from her Savior's hands; or the friends of a friend that just lost their little baby boy completely unexpectedly when they went in for a routine C-Section; or maybe it's just because I feel my mortality in my aching, tired body today.

I was helping the girl that offices next to me prepare the church for a funeral today, and I realized how accustomed we all become with death. Until it directly affects us - the loss of a loved one or a diagnosis that suddenly brings our inevitable doom to light - we have a tendency to not think much of death, or meditate on it, at all. How many times have I heard - "Joe Somebody died last week. So sad." In the hallways or even from my own lips. But we all know we're headed in that direction, hopefully at an old age, but that is not promised to us at all and it would be presumptuous of us to suppose it.

So, should we meditate on death as I earlier mentioned? What is to be gained of it? I certainly don't think we should let our minds be preoccupied with our death or that of our loved ones to the point that we cling more tightly and live less freely under the bondage of our own mortality. But I also don't think we are ever meant to live our lives as though we are not mortal. Christians are especially bad about this. We're going to heaven, anyway, so why think about our end - or even - the end is just the beginning! True. But it must remain that we have only one earthly life. This is it. We may have eternal life, but we are not immortal. We'll never get this mortal one back. And nothing in Scripture ever says that God takes our mortal lives lightly in context of our eternal lives. If that were the case, then He would give us no instruction and show no concern for the sanctification of our mortal selves if He ever intended us to blithely slip our way through this life on earth. With Christ as our example, we have a responsibility to take this life very seriously.

I ramble for what purpose? Merely to re-route us to where we began. If we are to take our lives seriously, then it is necessary from time to time to understand and meditate on the mortal nature of this life. It occurs to me that, in a way, to live life in light of our eternity with God is also in part to live life in light of our impending death. This is all we have on this earth, these relationships that we make will be the only fallen relationships that we will experience. Let's get everything out of them that we can. Let's be the Body, encourage one another, cry with one another, be quick to confront sin, quick to forgive sin, and even quicker to love sinners. None of us are immortal before our death. It's one of life's best equalizers. And, most of all, let's teach and learn from each other how to be mortal Christians, because that's what we are.

I rambled on for a while... to get some thoughts out there, and to clear my head. But, as always, with the hope that possibly something that I'm going through and struggling with will have the benefit of touching someone else. My thoughts and struggles aren't private, because I know they're not new with my experience of them. We are all in this together, let's continue the conversation with each other as long as we're given breath.

I live today in light of my mortality, and yet, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

9/11 - forgotten

It's been six years since the day that I woke up at 8am in my dorm room, the clock radio blaring loudly, my roommate, Kara, stirring in the bunk above mine. On the radio was a calm sense of pandemonium, if such a thing can exist, as the announcers were trying to remain calm. "We're under attack, people, New York City is under attack!" I shot up, Kara said, "I think it's a commercial..." But I had already turned on the television. Every channel showed the same thing, a shot of the twin towers of the WTC, and smoke billowing from a large hole in the one on the left. Panic. Kara started crying, while I ran to the window in a brilliant move of selfish motivation to see if anything was going on in downtown Dallas. No, to the world outside our dorm it was a day like any other, but our television told a story of a world that would never again be quite the same as it once was.

Ya'll all know how that went down: the second tower was hit, we all sat glued to the television and watched as the building smoked and smoldered, people jumped to their death from 80 stories in the air, and, finally, the building collapsed under the weight and a white cloud of smoke, ash, and building fragments covered the city like a sheet being spread over a corpse after she drew her final breath. But it was all of our hearts that stopped. As I left the dorm that morning and stepped out onto the pavement in the Texas September heat wave, the first thing that hit me was the silence. Dallas Baptist University is on the direct flight path for DFW airport, and there was never a moment where the distant sounds of flights coming and going wasn't echoing through the sky. Yet this day would forever be known to the students of DBU not only as 9/11 but as the day without planes. It was the silence and stillness of death out there.

What followed was just like everybody else experienced on that day. Grief, stricken faces, students wandering around calling all the loved ones they knew to ascertain the impact of the attack in NYC. Special chapels, classes cancelled, etc, etc, etc.

But now, 6 years later, I woke this morning and stumbled groggily out of bed, clothed my body and kissed my sleeping husband goodbye as I headed off to work, and on the radio I heard a DJ mention the memory of 9/11 briefly while he's transitioning between songs. So it's just 6 years. How short our memories are, how quickly we return to living in confidence that the Lord has given us tomorrow, and that we and our loved ones will be safe.

I'm not advocating that we live in fear, I just wanted to spark thought. In this current time of politicians vying for next year's presidential election, the war in Iraq has become a hot topic. It's been proclaimed stale, we're not gaining anything from that war... etc. But who on the campaign trail this year is proclaiming, "I will avenge the lives lost and the humiliation to our country that was suffered on 9/11." Where is the leader who is willing to lead the people into a place of remembrance, and place where they are able to recognize what this country has been through, and how close we are, daily, to going through that again? Osama just sent us a tape. He's scoffing in our faces and spitting at us in disgust. But as long as he keeps it from directly affecting us, we're ok. If he attacks again, it will be "bring out the big guns and hunt him down, we'll kick his turban-headed ass." (pardon the language). But give it six years, and America will be shown, again, for what she truly is. A country full of selfish whiners who take interest only in what directly affects them and their loved ones.

Ok. I'm rambling now. But the truth here that I'm driving at is that we call the war a hot button issue and a huge topic for the next election, but we have forgotten. The war is not the issue; it's what started the war that should be the focal point of where we are desiring to go as a country. We were threatened, we were penetrated. And the guy that did it hasn't been caught, yet. That would never fly in next week's episode of CSI, would it? Let's just not be so quick to forget six years ago, because it holds the context for the decisions we make next year as we select the next leader of our country. Is the guy going to be concerned with pleasing a whining, forgetful people, or is he concerned with protecting their safety from a parasite who will not be finished sucking out our blood and resources until he is finally eradicated? Perhaps our next president should not be elected solely on the basis of his vision for the future of our country, but also for his memory of her past.