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