election 2016

  
Dearest Liz and Chris

It is easy to become frustrated or even furious when we sense what we interpret as ignorance in our society, and especially when we perceive it in our friends. 

I want to remind you of something that we have tried to elevate in your lives above even knowledge and insight.  It is why we eagerly sent you to public schools, and why your grandparents invested in your college education at large public universities. 

It was to learn the concept of tolerance and the ability to make friends and communicate with all kinds of people, including people you may feel are uneducated, biased, or misled. 

In our civil society, our hope is in the ability to love and serve even (and especially) those with whom we disagree. We have no hope of dialog or change unless we have communication and mutual respect. Using insulting and dismissive language will not change our society. Unconditional love, and an ear to understand the concerns of others are necessary. 

While it may appear misguided to us, there are some who are much more influenced by what they believe to be the impact of a presidential candidate on the future supreme court, or national security, or the growing size of government, or the right to bear arms, or many other issues that might seem subordinate to us. 

Some act simply on an instinct for change because they feel unempowered. 

As an example, our faith community attracted us because we agree to love and serve each other and together build ministries to serve others and introduce them to Jesus Christ, even though we may disagree on politics. Our imperative to love and serve others and explain the love of Jesus to them does not depend on our politics or their politics or who ends up as president. 

For what it is worth, my approach is to build relationships that allow me to understand why another person might think differently about the world than me. Only then does it make sense to try to explore those feelings and discover if more information could lead to a different opinion. I also enjoy working with people who may have different politics by choosing projects where we can agree to serve together. This then earns a sense of trust and appreciation that might lead to dialog, eventually. 

Don’t be discouraged. I’m not. I love my friends not because of their politics or in spite of their politics, but because they are my friends.

Feynman

I received an amazing gift in the mail today.

I had wanted to be an architect…or maybe an archeologist…or a musician. As I started college in 1979 I told people I was pre-med and then began to imagine an MD-PhD trajectory. Truth be told, I think I gravitated toward that dual degree target mostly to impress other people during those early college years. I probably had the grades and the standardized test skills. I had a medical history so there was the needed curiosity. On the other hand, I had never asked myself whether I had the needed commitment to service and empathy, or to teamwork, or to joining the healthcare machine. By 1982 I knew my undergraduate BS honors degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison would be in molecular biology. It was time to decide if medicine or science or both were really in the cards for me.

The answer came through several scientists who served as role models. None was more important than Bill Dove. Bill was a remarkable scientist at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at Madison. With his wife, Alexandra, he led a genetics research lab with interests spanning bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold that shape-shifts), and the developmental genetics and cancer genetics of mice. Bill's example taught me that it was possible for scientific curiosity to take a research laboratory in multiple directions simultaneously. Bill's career taught me that physical chemical thinking could connect to genetics and to developmental biology and to cancer biology, and that a single scientist could make those connections. Bill's career also taught me that the history of molecular biology was amazingly brief, and that in the 1980's individual scientists could be connected with all of the founders of the discipline.

And Bill taught me about Caltech.

Actually, it wasn't Bill that taught me directly, it was the books on Bill's office shelves. Early in my internship with Bill at McArdle, I had a mix of labwork and office tasks. In those pre-computer days, the clerical work included filing of reprints and organizing books and papers. Bill's narrow office included a rudimentary bookshelf assembled from bricks and wood. On it was a treasure trove of textbooks and notebooks. Some were dusty, some were in frequent use. As my organizational assignments often took me to these shelves, I began to be familiar with the titles there. One red 3-volume hard-cover set of books often caught my eye. It was a collection called Lectures on Physics. The books embodied an unprecedented freshman physics curriculum developed at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at about the time I was born. The curriculum was the entirely unconventional product of the mind of the incomparable Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, shortly after the textbook collection had been written.

Feynman was a character.

Besides being willing to teach freshman physics and develop his own original 3-volume curriculum, he was an avid traveler, a frank speaker, a dabbler in hallucinogenic drugs, a man fascinated by languages, and a bongo player. I had heard of Feynman, but paging through these textbooks piqued my curiosity in new ways. What was Caltech like? Why were these books on Bill's shelf?

Bill Dove had done his PhD in the physical chemistry of DNA with Norman Davidson, a Caltech physicist who had been part of the Manhattan Project. Dove's PhD was granted in 1962, when Feynman was finishing his Lectures on Physics for Caltech undergraduates studying a few buildings away. Bill Dove had been part of the interdisciplinary academic and intellectual life at Caltech. I found myself daydreaming of that mystique. It occupied a place in the background of my thoughts.

It was in the Dove lab that I realized that the entrepreneurial independence of the career of a PhD scientist fit my personality. Though not a lover of risk, those that know me will affirm that I thrive when I'm in charge. I didn't want to be at the beck and call of a pager, or told what my patient schedule was going to be. I didn't want a boss. My experience in the Dove lab sealed my fate–I wanted to be a scientist like Bill Dove, or at least a weak impression of him.

After my transformation in the Dove laboratory, these aspirations led me to a PhD in molecular biology and a thesis project in the human oncology lab of Bruce Dolnick at the interface of chemistry and biology. In 1988, after considering postdoctoral opportunities in Cambridge England, Amsterdam, Montpellier France, and Boulder Colorado, I was drawn irresistibly to creative molecular biology and chemistry work being done independently by Peter Dervan and Barbara Wold at…Caltech.

In a sense, my professional dream came true when I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship there in 1988. It changed my life. The mystique was still present. Richard Feynman died just after Laura and I chose our apartment in Pasadena. His name was still spoken quietly and with reverence when I began my work in those hallowed halls that summer.

Now, 28 years later, I'm 55 and a professional molecular biologist. I will never attain the impact of Bill Dove, but I keep trying. At a retirement celebration for him a year ago we spoke about legacies and threads that link people and careers. As Bill planned the contraction of his office in retirement, he kindly asked me if there were any particular items that held special meaning for me. It was a profoundly generous question. I thought for just a moment and then replied.

A year later, Bill's office transformation in Madison is complete. How do I know? It is because of what I received in a heavy, lovingly packed cardboard box today.

There are only a few possessions in my life that I would truly describe as "cherished." That list just got a little longer.

9.1.2016

Rome

A friend of mine will be spending the fall in Rome. I wrote to wish him well:

Dear Peter-

Congratulations on your opportunity to spend this semester abroad, in particular, in Rome!  How exciting. I have no doubt that you will have a remarkable time with plenty of experiences that will change your life.

Enjoy every one of them!

I wanted to send you off with some thoughts that you may find a bit different from what others are saying. Because you have given your life to Jesus Christ, and depend on him for your identity and purpose, I wanted to reflect a minute on perhaps the most important letter recorded in the Bible. It is the letter of Saint Paul to the church in Rome. It was written by Paul from the city of Corinth, in Greece. The date of writing was approximately 56 AD, when Paul was about 60 years old. Since you will be living in Rome, I thought this was a good time to review why Paul's letter to the Romans is so amazing and important. Bear with me. If you are bored on your flight to Italy, maybe it would be a good time to read the whole letter. For now, just a few comments on some of the most amazing parts.

Paul was born in about 4 BC in Tarsus, a city in southern Turkey. We don't know too much about him, but it touches me to realize that he was about the same age as Jesus Christ, though they never met before Jesus was crucified in the early 30's AD. Paul's original name was Saul, and he was an orthodox Jew, a man of extreme integrity and determination to keep Judaism pure. As you will recall from the Book of Acts, Saul was miraculously converted from a persecutor of early Christians to the greatest missionary of the early church. His passion was to explain about Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, that is, to non-Jews. Without the life and ministry of Paul, the spread of Christianity might have largely been limited to Jewish communities. Paul changed the world. His ministry is why you and I heard a clear explanation of how God has pursued us, paying our own debts of evil through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us.

So what is so important about Paul's letter to the early church at Rome? It is a letter that clarified the central truths of Christianity in ways that have been helping change lives ever since. The letter is rich with Paul's theological teaching (after all, he was an expert in the Jewish scriptures so he could explain in detail how the life and death of Jesus fulfilled the Jewish story, while changing everything). Though the entire letter is worth detailed study, there is a selection of very famous verses (statements) from this letter that have been used for centuries to help explain Christianity to those seeking to understand it. These verses helped convince me to give my life to Jesus Christ in 1978. As you reflect on them, keep in mind that as you live and study in Rome, you carry the legacy of Saint Paul, whose love for the people of the early church in Rome led him to write this letter. Recall that he was writing to early Gentile believers who were confused and still trying to understand his message.  This was hundreds of years before Emperor Constantine made Christianity into an imperial religion. Recall that Paul was writing about 20 years after his conversion experience in 36 AD. Reflect also on the fact that Paul probably was killed about 10 years after writing this letter. We don't know, but he may also have died in Rome under Emperor Nero.

Here are some of the amazing verses in this letter, and what they mean to me. Remember that it is always risky to select individual Bible verses and read them out of context. That is why I encourage you to read the entire letter.


Rom 3:10 There is no one righteous, not even one.
Rom 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

These two verses remind me that all humans are in the same boat – we fall short of God's standard. We stumble when it comes to the ten commandments, and even if we manage to avoid doing bad things, we leave good things undone. Worse, Jesus taught that our thought lives count against us as much as our actions. We all stand before God in need of restoration and redemption, and we don't have the tools to restore or redeem ourselves.


Rom 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This amazing statement suggests that our rescue isn't about our goodness, but about his goodness. It also tells us that there is nothing we can do to merit God's love. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more than he already does. We don't have to improve ourselves or get clean in order to be forgiven. Jesus died to pay for us just as we are. Sure, there are plenty of things that we can do to love God more, and to imitate his great unconditional love for us. Those things show our appreciation and thanks, but they won't make God love us more. He can't love us more.


Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This verse reminds me how wonderful is God's free gift. I had separated myself from him through my selfishness and pride. He has not given me what I deserved, but offers a gift of forgiveness, and a chance to be redefined forever. If I accept this gift, I am forever new, not seen by God in terms of my sin, but seen by him as his own son, Jesus Christ. I need not constantly worry about this new status – I have been adopted forever. Even as I continue to struggle to imitate him, he has defined me as saved permanently.


Rom 10:9 If you declare with your mouth "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Here I learn that accepting God's gift of new life doesn't involve achieving anything or maintaining anything on my part. It is a single decision and statement of faith and surrender to a new Lord. God pays my penalty once and for all, not because I am good, but because he is good.



As you have a wonderful fall in Rome, I pray that you remember and are always prepared to share Paul's ancient message to the Romans.

8.29.16

Inhibition

I am truly so fascinated when I attend wedding dances. I'm especially fascinated by wedding dances after Christian weddings involving churchgoers who I know and love.

I went to one last night.

What fascinates me is comparing the behavior at a wedding dance to the behavior at a worship service.

The behavior is so different and I'm trying to nail down why!

Last night we all had so much fun dancing and singing! People showed practically no inhibitions, even relatively quiet and demure people who are respectable and conservative in church services.  Everyone was on the dance floor leaving nothing behind! 

Such passion! Such joy!

Why are wedding dances fun but the same people glower and look like deer in the headlights in a worship service?

The same people.

I have some theories.

1. Joy. The wedding celebration is fun and it brings people joy. Worship is not and does not. Gulp. OK – if this is true, where are we failing in our worship theology? Does a couple need to get married before every worship service to inspire a celebration?

2. Ethanol. Let's be honest – ethanol helps reduce inhibitions. Maybe that is part of it.  If so, I can only say that either we should have ethanol in worship or we should consider that the Holy Spirit is at least as powerful as ethanol. Inhibitions and self-consciousness are huge obstacles to passionate worship. We haven't figured out how to overcome them in worship, at least not in my church. I didn't detect many self-conscious inhibitions last night at the wedding dance!

3.  Ambience.  We try to make our worship ambience encouraging of passion and transcendence. At a wedding dance this is so easy. The room is dark and there are flashing lights everywhere. Nobody is watching the DJ. People are dancing with joy, clapping, singing, and stomping. They are doing it for hours on end. During worship in church…not so much. At the dance most people knew most of the songs. They were pop/rock classics from the past 40 years, shared deep in our culture. People belted out the lyrics in full voice, unable to hear themselves, sharing happy memories of the songs. Not in church.

4. Examples. At a wedding dance the kids hit the floor hard and immediately with joy and passion. They basically create role models for the wallflowers who soon follow. Who is setting this passionate example in worship, granting permission to shed inhibitions?

5. Volume.  This is the observation that most inspires me. I listened carefully to the music at the dance last night. It was well above 95 dB the whole night. More importantly, it was dance music with simple messages inspiring simple joy. The subwoofer blasted punchy bass lines and powerful backbeats all night long. The sound carried the power to hit us right in the gut where the rock experience belongs!  Even more importantly: nobody complained! No critical comment cards were submitted – there was just joy and smiles and passionate abandon. People came expecting powerful music in that style and they embraced it.

What is going on??

These joyful dancers are the same people trapped motionless in their seats at a church worship service the same weekend.

Why? 

Is it unfair to compare worship to a wedding dance? If so, why? Why is our culture confused about this?

Why should so many Christians settle for passive, inhibited worship when they really do know how to party?

I'm beginning to understand why Jesus launched his ministry by supplying supplemental wine for a wedding dance.


5.15.16

the most important machine in the world

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A version of this story was presented as a TED talk. 
Watch the video at TEDx Zumbro River

What is the most important machine in the world?

The printing press?

The car?

The airplane?

The personal computer?

How about the smartphone?

I am going to argue that the most important machine in the world is the machine with the greatest number of copies on planet earth – the most abundant machine.

So what machine is that?

Is it the smartphone?

Manufacturers started marketing smartphones around 2005 with about 3 billion phones produced since then!

That's about 10 smartphones produced per second every day, every week, every month, every year!

The machine I'm talking about is stunningly more abundant than the smartphone.

Let's think about it.

About ten septillion (that is one followed by 24 zeros) copies of the most important machine in the world are created every second, every day, every week, every month, every year.

Wow. How is that even possible?

It turns out the honor of most abundant machine in the world doesn't go to any of the things we discussed, but to a very tiny machine - in fact a NANOMACHINE.

Nanomachines are machines whose size can be measured in nanometers (billionths of a meter). We don't think about them very often, but the most amazing machines on the planet are nanomachines like this one.

The most important machine in the world is really small. In fact, 2 million of these machines lined up end-to-end would reach just one inch.

Here's another illustration.

If you came with a friend, or don't mind bothering a stranger, pluck a single hair from their head for this demonstration. Go ahead, do it!

If you're not that daring, take a look at an arm hair.

You would need 4,000 copies of the most important machine in the world sitting end-to-end to reach across the thickness of a human hair.

The most important machine in the world is a nanomachine not designed or made by humans and not even found in the human body.  It is a nanomachine that is crucial for the existence of humans, and with respect to life on earth, you could argue that this nanomachine is more important than humans! From the perspective of the ecology of the earth and our biosphere, the most important machine in the world is absolutely necessary, and humans are not.

Isn't that a humbling thought?

I'm not saying that humans don't have important purposes. After all, I'm a man of faith and I'm convinced about a beautiful and joyful human purpose. I'm just saying that life on earth isn't all about us.

Let me take a few minutes to describe the most important machine in the world to help you understand why it is so amazing, and why the world absolutely depends on it...and why WE absolutely depend on it.

Let's take a tour of this amazing machine.

You can think of this machine as being made from 4,000 tiny beads arranged in 16 strings: 8 long and 8 short.  There are 20 different kinds of beads used in the strings, so the machine is very fancy. Even more amazing, the 16 strings each automatically fold up into complicated shapes that automatically assemble together to form the machine itself.

If you are a biochemist like me, you would say that the most important machine in the world is a nanomachine called a protein enzyme made up of strings of amino acids. But we don't need those fancy words for this story.

We see the 8 short strings folded into 8 beautiful, identical shapes.

Next we see the 8 long strings folded into pairs and packed together.

Finally we see all 16 chains assembled, each shown in a different color. 

I think the ways the tiny chains automatically fold into spirals and zig-zags is breathtaking.

Even more amazing, this is a self-assembling nanomachine!

OK – I know you are now curious, what is this machine and why is it the most important machine in the world?

The machine is named ribulose-1,5-bis-phosphate carboxylase.  Say that with me once...

Luckily, the machine has a nickname: RuBisCO. If there is one thing I want you to remember from this story (besides that I let you pull your neighbor's hair) it is this funny name.

Let's say it together one more time: RuBisCO.

What does RubisCO do that is so awesome?

It does something no human can do: RuBisCO makes sugar from sunlight and air.

RuBisCO is an enzyme that dramatically increases the speed of the most important chemistry of life: taking rare carbon dioxide molecules from the air, and gluing them into a cluster of carbon atoms to make a sugar called glucose. This is really the only way that glucose is made from scratch, and glucose sugar is really important.

Why is RuBisCO's job so hard? Because it turns out there is almost no carbon dioxide in the air!  Remember that CO₂ even in trace amounts is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat.

Here is a demonstration to show what I mean. It is sometimes helpful to imagine the different components of the air we breathe as if they were liquids.

80% of air is nitrogen. About 19% of air is the oxygen we breathe. About 1% of air is argon. How much of the air is carbon dioxide that RuBisCO needs to capture? Less than 0.04% (4 hundredths of one percent)! Even if I use purple dye to represent the CO₂, you can hardly see it. Imagine poor RuBisCO needing to fish carbon dioxide, CO₂, out of the air. It turns out that this is a really hard job, and RuBisCO can barely get the job done. Many protein enzymes perform thousands of cycles of their job every second. RuBisCO struggles to even capture a few molecules of carbon dioxide every second. Worse, it gets easily confused and sometimes accidentally captures a more abundant oxygen molecule. It ruins the chance to make sugar whenever that happens. These facts explain why RuBisCO needs to be so abundant on earth. It is struggling to get the job done.

So that explains what RuBisCO is, and what it does. 

Why is RuBisCO so important for humans?

Well, RuBisCO makes everything we eat, both plants and the animals that eat plants, and it makes all our fuels...anything we can burn, including fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gasoline, and modern fuels like wood and cellulose and everything made of sugar.

In case you missed it, that about sums up everything needed for human life!

And RuBisCO does all this just by grabbing carbon dioxide from the air. It's just about the only machine that we know that can do this.

If RuBisCO is the most important machine in the world, how do we get more RuBisCO?

Simple. 

More plants.

I'll let you think about that.

So what is the take-home message from this story?

RuBisCO is the most important machine in the world, but it is not designed or made by humans, it is not part of humans, it is crucial for human life, and from the perspective of life on earth it is more important that humans.  

RuBisCO reminds us that humans are beautiful and important, but the story of life on this planet isn't really about us. RuBisCO uses light energy and air to make all our fuels, and it is the only machine that can undo what we humans are doing every time we convert fuel into CO₂.

What is the most important machine in the world?

RuBisCO !

5.5.16

humility

My wife, Laura, has many gifts. One of them is the determination not to allow her home to be cluttered. I think she is imagining a day that no longer seems so unimaginable, when we will be relocating someplace smaller, and asking ourselves how we ever accumulated so much stuff, and why we never thought about lightening the load along the way. I've been watching her apply this discipline to our home, while guarding my own secret hoard of questionable junk. My piles are packed into the closet of my basement office. It is a gold mine in there, or maybe a trash heap. It depends on your perspective. This past weekend I finally started to let my mind question the gold mine concept, and begin to consider if the closet is actually a trash heap. How many different kinds of adapters for obsolete computers and audio accessories are really necessary to keep for the coming apocalypse? How about reams of white paper and blank cards and empty 3-ring binders? What about four pairs of bookshelf speakers from a time that our home proudly sported an awesome central wired stereo system with independent sound in each room? What about boxes of memorabilia documenting twenty years of major church building projects and a name change for our congregation? Something got into me on Saturday morning.

I started dumping.

Kyle, our pet house rabbit who roams our finished basement, inspected every growing pile with fascination. Laura was amazed to see the loads that came up the stairs, forming stacks alternatively for recycling, trash, or charity. Even my bookshelves were lightened, with inspirational resources to be shared with the local re-entry ministry. At one point I found my 40-year-old high school athletic letter jacket. I just declared victory by moving it to a different closet where I'll have to confront it at some future time.

Then I found something that I had forgotten, and a lesson in humility that I had once learned and had never really been able to forget.

There in the back of my closet was an empty and beaten-up 1973 Fender bass guitar case. It was tattered and covered with the remnants of stickers. I brought it out into the light for examination and the memories came flooding back.

I was trained as a classical string bass player, but early in life I began to explore the bass guitar and all of its opportunities and promises. In high school my second bass guitar purchase was a beauty. It was a slightly used 1973 Fender Precision fretless bass with ebony fingerboard and sunburst finish. It was stunning and it served me well for many years and across many venues. As my bass guitar collection grew, the original 1973 Fender Precision fretless with ebony fingerboard and sunburst finish became an occasional loaner instrument. That's how I lost the bass forever. At a point of misplaced trust, I loaned the bass to an older player going through tough times, and, at a point of poor judgment, he pawned my 1973 Fender Precision fretless with ebony fingerboard and sunburst finish for cash and that was the end of that.

So now, years later, all I had was the empty case. Despite owning several more bass guitar cases, I had never been able to let go of the empty 1973 Fender bass case that used to contain the 1973 Fender Precision fretless bass with ebony fingerboard and sunburst finish…not that I'm still bitter about losing it.

Seeing the case in the back of the closet this past weekend did not inspire anger about the the loss of the instrument. I'm over it (mostly).

Instead I recalled a lesson in humility involving that case.

In 1988 Laura and I moved from our beloved Madison to Los Angeles for me to begin a three-year stint as a postdoctoral research fellow at Caltech in Pasadena. Elizabeth was born there in 1989, but 1988 was full of exploring and learning and all kinds of music. This in addition to science and new friends and serving in a new congregation. The music was delightful. I played in way too many different ensembles, from classical to rock to gospel.

At some point in the fall of 1988 I confronted the need for some kind of decent new bass amplifier.

It was on a quest for such an amp that I set out one Friday night for nearby Studio City California, where big west coast music stores were to be found. These big stores had huge supplies of the latest gear and were always full of aspiring and seasoned rock musicians looking to buy, sell or trade. I was intoxicated by the idea of hanging out in such a store, seeing and being seen, playing loudly and conspicuously through amazing amps and then maybe buying something impressive. Maybe. So, it was on that quest and with a sense of the excitement of a midwestern musician entering the promised land of a Hollywood-area music store that I set out. In the back of our maroon Ford Escort station wagon was my Fender Precision fretless bass with ebony fingerboard and sunburst finish in its road case. The bass was coming along so I could play it through various amps as I shopped with the big-time rockers. I secretly imagined myself laying down some tasty amplified riffs and the room maybe quieting a bit and long-haired, road-worn musicians taking notice and wandering over to hear the chops of this new skinny mystery bassist as he lay it down. I was on that page as I walked into the showroom. Appearances did not disappoint. The place was packed and long-haired tattooed rockers were everywhere. A huge stack of bass amps sat in the distance. I started to imagine how this was all going to go. I smiled to myself.

I strolled into the room carrying my bass in its 1973 Fender case, the same case excavated from my closet this past weekend, the same case in the photograph above. I felt good. This was going to be quite the night. Just then I caught the eye of a clerk heading in my direction and I began to plan my inquiry about setting up to play my personal 1973 Fender Precision fretless bass guitar with ebony fingerboard and sunburst finish through his beast bass amps so I could make the most awesome impression decision.

The clerk came right up to me, wide-eyed, and I swear he shook my hand and declared loudly, as if trying to get everyone's attention

"You are JIM MAHER!!"

I was speechless for a moment.

How could he know me? He didn't look familiar? Did I look familiar? Did he know me from my musical career back in Wisconsin? From some recording I had done? From friends that had talked about me and my great bass playing? This was so totally amazing! Here I was walking into a store near ground zero in the rock universe, thousands of miles from my original home, and the guy already knows me! My mind raced to consider which of my past exploits could account for my fame having already reached Los Angeles before me. After a pause I asked the clerk how it was that he knew my name.

He looked and me and smiled wryly.

"Dude, you've got your name stenciled in gold spray paint on your case."

Me:  silence.

I listened to a different guy play through some bass amps and slunk out after buying a small $100 unit. I had been 6'4" tall when I walked in. I had trouble seeing over the dashboard driving home.

If you look closely in the photo of the case from last weekend, you can still see the stenciled letters.

I never forgot that night.


2.23.16

Genesis

The Judeo-Christian worldview is rooted in the stories of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the beginning of the Christian Old Testament. Here we learn of a creative God and the story of his personal relationship with humanity, eventually revealed through his insertion into an obscure tribe roaming territory just east of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Bible account begins with "In the beginning," giving us the name of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. The story mentions the creation of the universe, but it is a story intended for the child-like minds of human hearers, so the story places focus on humans. This can be dangerous and misleading, because humans, being arrogant and self-centered, can mistake the story as implying that humanity lies at the center of God's purposes. We apparently occupy a meaningful part of God's story in the present era of life on this planet, but we should never be so deluded as to confuse the Bible story of God's concern for humanity with the broader story of God's creation and timeless purposes in this universe and countless universes beyond this. Those purposes and stories are simply unknowable. 

My point here is to remind us that the knowable story revealed to us is but an infinitesimal fraction of the true story of God's power and purposes in time and space. The real miracle is not that the Earth was created. It is that God attends to such an unfathomably trivial fraction of his creation.

The Judeo-Christian story misses the reality that the Earth is invisibly small relative to the scale of the universe.  I will make this point here in terms of both space and time. These arguments are intended to humble us and widen our awe in the face of a powerful, personal God.

The earth is beyond insignificant on the scale of the created universe. Its insignificance is far more extreme than what is suggested by the photograph of our planet as a tiny speck when viewed from beyond Saturn as seen from the NASA Cassini space probe. The insignificance of the earth is vastly more astounding.

The mass of the earth seems impressive at 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. That is 4 times ten to the 24th power kilograms. This makes the earth seem important until we risk calculation of the mass of the known universe. The mass of the known universe (never mind  dark matter) is estimated by scientists to be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms. That is 10 to the 53rd power kilograms.  The earth no longer seems important in any sense. It is beyond trivially unimportant on the scale of the entire creation. Just how unimportant? Let's calculate the fraction of the mass of the universe that corresponds to the earth. This ratio is about ten to the 29th power. It would take ten to the 29th power earths to equal the mass of the universe. Even this makes the physical insignificance of the earth difficult to comprehend.  Another analogy is perhaps helpful. A single grain of sand has a mass on the order of one milligram. This is one thousandth of a gram, or one millionth of a kilogram.

The mass of the earth is to the mass of the known universe as the mass of a grain of sand is to the mass of the earth.

The entire story of human existence and all that has been created from our perspective is like the story of a single grain of sand in the context of the entire planet earth. If we feel that the story of this earth is meaningful and important, that is all well and good. Let us remember that our story is equivalent to the story of one grain of sand in a planet made of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand. If we are important, how much more important is the whole story – the story that we don't know?

So our entire story is less than insignificant on the scale of created space. What about created time? This calculation turns out to be no more encouraging. The universe was created about 14 billion years ago. That is 14,000,000,000 years. The written history of human civilization dates back about ten thousand years. That is 10,0000 years. That means that the universe, God's entire story of created time, is more than a million times older than the human story – 1.4 million to be exact.  How do we come to terms with the insignificance of human history in this reality? An analogy is helpful. If the age of the universe were a month, the entirety of the human story – everything we know about God's interactions with humanity, would have taken place in the last two seconds of that month.

Before we imagine that we can define God as the being who is focused on humanity, let us be corrected and stand in awe that the entire human story is truly nothing on the scale of God's creation of time and space.  We are less that a speck of paint splashed on the edge of a vast canvas being painted by a master artist. It is worse than that. Physicists tell us there is reason to believe in the existence of a multiverse made up of countless universes coexistent with ours.

How unimaginably powerful and creative is our God. How vast and beautiful must be the stories of his purposes that do not include us at all. How thankful we must be that the incredible is true – that such a God loves us and seeks us and pays personally for us to win our redemption that we might share timelessness with him.

What is mankind that you are mindful of them?

Psalm 8:4