Archive for May, 2010
Hard To Love
May 5th
I have a teenage daughter who is going through that phase where everything I do is interpreted by her as ruining her life. Whether it’s waking her up for school, asking her to get off the computer, asking her to pick up some of her mess, telling her to get out of the shower – whatever it is, apparently I’m doing it to ruin her life. She can often be quite aggressive, and her mood and language is often venomous.
This has been going on and off for years now, and one of the most difficult parts I find is that because I’m her dad, I still need to be there for her. So even though she spits in my face every day (not literally), as the adult I need to rise above that and still love her, still be there for her, and protect her. I admit I don’t always meet that challenge.
This reminds me of the Jewish prophet called Hosea, in around 750BC, where it’s recorded that God instructed him to marry “an adulterous wife”. The idea seemed to be that God wanted to illustrate to the Jewish people how much he loved them, even though they rejected him. Hosea married a woman called Gomer who indeed was unfaithful to him time and time again, leaving him to sleep and live with other men. But Hosea loved her, and although she would break his heart, God would ask him to take her back. As you read through the story you can sense the pain Hosea goes through each time, yet he loves her so much that he cannot let her go, and continues to fight for her even though she has thrown his love back in his face and humiliated him.
The life of Hosea was meant to represent how we can often reject God, yet he continues to chase after us because of his great love and compassion for us. For me what is most amazing is that he doesn’t love us because we love him first, or because we’re good or deserving, but he loves us even while we are his enemy, even while we hate him. In my own life, even after I spat in his face and rejected him and hated him for years and years, he still loved me, and wouldn’t let me go. He patiently waited for me. And I need to do the same with my daughter.
Bye Bye Big Bang
May 2nd
Growing up in today’s modern society, like most people I just accepted the big bang theory as fact, without really looking into it closely.
But when I did look into the facts of this theory, I was shocked to find it was held together by a number of invented elements that scientists have never seen or measured. For example, for the big bang theory to work there has to be things such as dark matter, dark energy, and population III stars (just to name a few examples), but these things have never been found.
Perhaps that’s why in 2004 an open letter to the scientific community was published in the New Scientist and signed by 33 scientists (now signed by over 200 scientists), saying that the big bang theory was no longer defensible and had serious problems. In part the letter said:
The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed—inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory…
and
In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory…
For me this is another reminder that although man sometimes confidently struts around like he knows it all, in fact we know very little. We’re taking guesses at what has happened in the past, using flawed methods, and there are in fact many things the world tells us are true which just aren’t.
“But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being…”
The Apostle Paul, ~57AD
