More on dependency

Discipline seems to be a recurring subject in my recent weeks. On work terms, I tend to collapse into a more undisciplined self, opting for pre-made (McDonalds)/quick-to-make (instant noodles) foods instead of actually cooking out a meal. Leaving things a mess and say I'll clean it up later (my living room). Life converges into a state of rushing in and out of the house, meeting deadlines and trying to get work done. Especially since GS tends to pile alot of reading and projects on you. Yay.

Dependency on God
Several thoughts has dominated my thoughts lately. One was posed as a question.

Why is it that people feel okay depending on substance (ie coffee) or people (ie professors) or other such things (ie Wikipedia and...okay, just Wikipedia), and have no problem with it, but freak out when they are asked to depend on God?

I depend on people all day long. Uncle Mikey to feed me at Mikey's. The grocery store shelver to stack the groceries. Rogers workers to give me Internet and cell phone coverage. The janitor to take out the lab garbage. Jacky to lend me equipment from his lab cuz mine doesn't have much yet (lol. That's my shout-out for the day). I say thank you to all of them (or at least, my wallet does, if I forgot)

Yet I never give God a second thought, when I finally found the short in my circuit, avoided bad drivers on Westmount (Geez. How did some of these people pass their G?), getting my OGS application to Lisa just in time (with almost no line up!) or not getting sick from our Plaza adventures...but I digress.

Why is it more natural for one to depend what can be seen, yet breaks promises (we are depraved, after all)...but not on the One that doesn't?

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

- Hebrews 11.1

At the same time, we're not called to a blind faith. There is no love in blind faith. We're called to understand. It is quite difficult to love someone you don't know. In learning and thinking about such things, we become steps closer to 'loving your God with all your heart, soul and mind'

What is anime?

We live in a world full of distractions. If I don't want to study, there are many other things I can do to entertain myself. People watch movies, TV shows, video games. I read manga. To a lesser extent, I play video games. On several occasions, I've 'lented' this combination as it took me away from my studies and work. I found myself, upon all instances of frustration, to turn to things like that to get me through the day. However, it is important to recognize what that does...

Addictions

This word is thrown around fairly easily these days, but it is essentially something that one relies on to get through. Yet some addictions are deemed better than others. No one thinks too much about someone stuck on anime, drama or video games as ways to 'escape' from the blandness of normal life. I was once faced with the possibility of purchasing a Nintendo DS. Why not? Long commutes in Toronto. I can entertain myself while waiting for the bus. Why not?

But I was convinced to reconsider. If life is exciting all the time, where would real-life fit? You'd rather withdraw into your DS world (or MP3 player. or iTouch. etc). Isn't this why we watch movies? I commented briefly on this on an earlier post. But everyone else is doing it...movies and video games are huge industries these days. Why not?

Generally, society disapproves people who relies on alcohol and other substances to escape from the mundaneness, blah and the pain. So...what is the difference between drugs and anime? Of course, it is obvious that drugs have more of a health implication than anime does...but the bottom is...what do you depend on? What can you live without? As Christians, we're called to be dependent on Him only. But in our daily living, what else are we depending on? What something does to us is as important as what it is.

God of empty spaces

People should be aware of what they do and what they believe in. As a scientist (applied scientists are scientists too!), my profession requires me approach life with a critical eye (perhaps not critical enough)...I read a book by a Christian physician/biologist who talked about evolution and how many scientific concepts that we know today were once simply explained as "God". Or "because the Bible said so". I have here a very good example...

Example: Defeat of the geocentric model
People, at one point, sincerely believed that the Earth stood at the center of the universe. The "heavens" of the Bible was understood as physical sky and space and thus must be perfect. Perfection meant perfectly circular orbits. Earth has to be the center because God paid special attention to us. When the telescope became available to astronomers, they realized that their data doesn't quite fit...so instead of addressing their assumptions (ie Earth is at the centre, and all orbits are perfectly circular), they introduced "epicycles" (circles in circles) to explain orbital movement. Way to throw Occam's razor out the window...

...each planet had been provided with from 40 to 60 epicycles to represent after a fashion its complex movement among the stars. Amazed at the difficulty of the project, Alfonso is credited with the remark that had he been present at the Creation he might have given excellent advice.

- Wikipedia, from Encyclopaedia Britannica
supposedly of Alfonso, an European king
who commissioned the mapping of orbital bodies

Several big names in physics history colour our understanding of the world in this subject...

• Nicolaus Copernicus (heliocentric model)
  
• Tycho Brahe (empirical observations of astronomical movement)
  
• Johannes Kepler (laws of planetary motion)
  
• Galileo Galilei (Attempted to prove heliocentric model, with the publishing of 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems', 1632, which was the climax of the 'Galileo Affair').

Most of you would know that Galileo's works was not well accepted, and that he was under house arrest until his death. The Catholic church did not accept heliocentric theory until the 1700s.

The purpose of the Bible
It is stories like this that propels the belief that science and faith cannot coincide. However, I could also point to the inherent system of science as a point of issue. When photon was discovered to be quantized (thus disproving Newton's classical mechanics), scientists were skeptic.

My deeply held belief is that if a God, anything like the traditional sorts, exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of those gifts...if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.

- Carl Sagan
Agnostic, astronomer

I appreciate this quote. It's like the Parable of the Talents. I was handed curiosity to learn (though, I admit, I can only read so much on EMG...when will this KIN course end?!). Events like the Galileo Affair arises from a misunderstanding of the purpose of the Word.

It is important to remember that the Bible is not scientific textbook. It doesn't tell us how rainbows happen (light refraction in rain droplets). Why the Jews shouldn't eat pork (sanitation). How wind can blow the Red Sea apart but not the people that's walking through it (How could the wind stop the upstream water...and the downstream water doesn't drain away and form "wall of water on their right and on their left"?! Exodus 14, if you're interested).

Instead, the Bible is designed to reveal the character of God. It is to teach us morality. It gives us stories of the people before us. I'm pretty sure that most of us will not be building a stone wall around a city (Nehamiah). Or work 14 years to get a wife (Jacob). Or lead a 300-men charge (Gideon). These stories do not directly apply to us and must be read in context (actually, off the top of my head, Nehamiah's life is probably most similar to us in modern life).

It is important to be reminded that if God wants something done, it'll get done. There is no moral difference between a career profession as an engineer or as an physician (my advice to those people: what do you like more? Commitment counts a bit more here. Not saying callings doesn't exist, but that's another topic). The Bible talks about morality. Right and wrong. It was not designed to be a science text.

God of empty spaces
It's easy for us to attribute things we don't understand to God. Indeed, God is sovereign. Ultimately, all things happen because He allows it so. But whether or not I believe in the Big Bang or evolution does not change my belief that God stands behind it. Whether or not I believe that First and Second Timothy is actually written by Paul does not change my belief in the inerrancy of the written Word.

But what happens when our understanding of science furthers a bit? For instance, if I fell ill and was hospitalized. People came over and prayed and the illness left. I would probably be quick to say that it was God. But lets say they discovered that I was exposed to the illness before but the antibody is just slow acting. Would I say "It was the antibodies"? Or would I still say "It was God"? If I changed my mind and say it was only the antibodies (ie I would've recovered regardless of God's intervention), what have I just done? God no longer has a hand, and I've just lost a bit of reputation as a Christian, because I was so sure it was God...but now I'm not so sure...

There is nothing wrong with asking questions. If I was a Young-Earth Creationist and it turned out that Big Bang was actually the correct answer...the problem was with my understanding of the world, and has nothing to do with God. Thinking about these things are not trival. One must know what he or she believes in, before they can talk to anyone else about it, including themselves.

Reiteration

(There is like, 3-4 posts sitting on the backburner...I just need to find the time to pump them all out -_-)

I think about the mistakes I make sometimes, over the last 22 years (yes, I will count on the time I threw up on my grandma when I was little)...many of these were little things. These are things that I note and laugh about when I look back, like using strawberry milk for KD or when my car got towed from the [Calgary] Culture Centre parking lot because the licence plate expired. Some are a bit more serious, but thankfully wasn't...like that time I set the toaster oven on fire. Or got a concussion during hockey practice because I wasn't careful (or maybe I just suck at hockey...). Some are the really big things, and I wonder how I can make up for it. Like when I neglected friends and family. People I said are important to me. When I'm not there when I said I'd be.

One thing that I almost take for granted at times is the sheer amounts of second+ chances I get. From my friends (particularly the Calgarians reading this...=P) that I don't talk to much. From work (never experiment with the production database). From school (fail the midterm, ace the final. Sounds familiar?). From God (this list will run far too long).

What is the point of a second chance? Is it that my mistake was insignificant? My friends forgives me for ditching. We repaired that production database. I passed all my courses. Christ still died for me. The thing about forgiveness is...that although I got off for free, someone else didn't. Someone had to pay for my mistakes. Example? My (hypothetical) car gets T-boned. I can forgive the other driver for totaling my car, but I still have to pay for the repairs, at the end of the day.

Forgiveness. Mercy. Grace. These are big concepts that are really hard to understand, and even harder to explain. It is exactly because we don't deserve it that makes it such a big deal. It's hard to give, and hard to receive. It is in us, willing to set the big (and little) things aside, that we're able to learn and grow. I've hurt and been hurted. I forgave and been forgiven. You'd need to go through it to understand. It's a lesson that you learn and relearn again.

But that's what's so amazing about grace. Thank you.

First steps as a grad student

It's kind of weird, having to seriously worry about my GPA instead of just passing. About sitting beside a guy that was my TA two terms ago in a workshop. Emailing profs for advice for something non-academic. Having career-advice chats with profs. Having small-talk with profs (wow. haha) Walking into segments of the ECE office that I've never been to (got my keys and payroll). Having a discussion about using PubMed vs Google Scholar (peer-review journal archives ... if never heard, no worries. Journal reading gets tedious rather quickly. no one reads journal for fun -_-). It's all a bit surreal. And I'm technically not a grad student yet. Haha.

Don't take the easy courses. That's what undergrads do. In grad school, you really get some idea of how much more there is to know. If you don't know something, go take a course. Don't avoid it. You're not here just to get by anymore. You're here to learn how to learn.

Someone walked up to me earlier when I was standing just outside of DC library with a bunch of CCF people. "Do you know where the Davis Centre is...?" Um. you're in it, ma'am. Oh froshes. I'm officially old.