Funny labels

This really has nothing to do with anything, but I happened to notice something amusing this morning that had to do with my labels. Maybe not amusing, but... sad?

I have mentioned Neverland and Nancy Pelosi the same number of times at some point during the last 75 posts on here. (Cars, creation, and insurance are on par with Nancy and the Neverland gang, apparently, though that doesn't seem quite as amusing.)

So this is just a note to say that I'm glad I started labeling my posts. If nothing else, it provides temporary amusement.

I just realized that I think I've mentioned death more than I've mentioned Heaven. I'm not sure how that discrepancy happened... Ipes.

Give me words to speak

I fall so short. All the time. In every area.

But one area in which I've been feeling particularly short recently is the whole evangelizing thing. Sometimes I just don't open my mouth for the Lord. If someone wants to make the first move and ask me, then I'll talk, but otherwise? I just don't. Which is terrible, I fully recognize this.

For instance, as my brother and I were walking home from meeting one evening recently, we saw a guy wondering around some bushes with a flashlight. So, naturally, we stopped and asked him if we could be of any assistance. Turns out he'd lost the battery for his cell phone, and his wife was quite upset, so he was looking for it in the dark. So, we helped him look for it for a while, and when we all came up empty-handed, he said to just forget it, he'd look tomorrow.

So I told him I really hoped he found it, and I was sorry that he'd lost it. At which point, the guy called over his shoulder (he was walking away from us in rather a huff), "What's the point, this whole life is miserable and nothing goes right anyhow and she's going to kill me and nothing good happens..." His rather run-on sentence went on for a while, at least until my brother and I could no longer hear him, and that was that.

But I remember standing there thinking: should I be running after him? Because I know that there are good things in life, I know it's not all miserable! I have Jesus living in my heart! I apparently know something this guy doesn't know!

But I stood there and watched him go. I didn't even holler a "JESUS SAVES!" after him or anything.

I could justify my way out of that one, since he'd been walking away and everything, but recently I had another experience where I just didn't open my mouth, and really could have.

I was walking home from meeting on a Sunday afternoon, and in one of the parking lots I cut across (I believe in efficiency) I came across a group of old people, just sitting around in lawn chairs. So they asked me how my day was, what I'd accomplished, what I did for work, all that stuff. I told them a little about me, and one of the things I mentioned was that I taught Sunday School.

So one old dude told this story that went something as follows, "I taught Sunday School to high school students, and they were wondering how God could have made man after the cave men were already around, and so I explained that man wasn't really man until God put a soul in him."

I remember standing there looking at this guy thinking, "Wh-huh?" And I was still trying to work out his logic when some other guy started talking to me about job stuff and another old guy started asking me how I felt about Obama.

But again, that's no excuse! I shouldn't have let him tell such a completely weird thing and get away with it. Sure, he was old, but he's talking about my Saviour, here. I should be able to jump in and be like, "Oh, actually, I was just reading His letter the other day and I'm pretty sure you got it all wrong."

Ack. Like I said, I fall so short it's depressing.

Speaking of...

I whined about evolution a lot yesterday, and with fairly good reason. This will be quick, but there's one thing that bothers me. And it has to do with evolution and the environment.

First: we humans (I say "we" loosely, please understand) are constantly worrying about the state of the environment. "Our children will live in a terrible world" we cry, "and in fact, everyone will have to use masks to breathe." "The atmosphere is being burned up by our stupidity, what shall become of us?"

Simple thought, people. We evolved, right? Well, I personally know I didn't evolve, but a lot of people out there sure think I did. So the whole point of evolving (as far as I can understand, though we've just recently proved that I don't understand much about evolution) is that we adapt to our circumstances, right? We grow longer beaks so we can eat those pesky bugs, grow more or less fur depending on whether or not our place of residence is warmer or cooler, and generally fix ourselves to fit in with our climates. Following?

So here's the thing I don't understand. If we're evolving with our environments, then won't we evolve with the global warming and pollution and everything? If I believed in evolution I'd figure, what's the difference? my children will be able to breath gasoline and still survive. Right?

Maybe that doesn't make sense, but best I can figure, the one goes with the other. I'm not exactly suggesting that we go out and burn gasoline just to speed up the "process" or anything, but I'm just saying.

But like I said yesterday, I am so glad I'm created by the Lord! What a lot of trouble it saves me! And as for environmentalism, I'm thankful that the Bible talks about being a good steward. I intend to live for the Lord, taking care of the body He gave me (it being a temple and all, good times), and the place He put me (Earth, in case nobody got where I was going with that).

But I'm not going to make a religion of the whole Earth thing. I'll leave that for those same confused people who think great-great-grandma Harriet looked the way she did because she came straight from a family of apes.

On the same note: has anyone noticed that Ken Ham looks an awful lot like a monkey himself? Sometimes I wonder how he can preach against evolution with a straight face. Though I love his work, regardless of the dubious looks. And for anyone who hasn't been to his Creation Museum, you should really go. It's amazing. Seriously.

Say what?

Sometimes I think I flunked out of Evolution one too many times. Last night at dinner, we were having a lively discussion of evolution (we have lively discussions regarding just about every subject, truth be told) and it turns out, I'm not smart enough to understand evolution after all. It all started when my brother brought up wolves, and how they're getting more dog-like as the years pass (darker fur, I guess), and little ol' me says something about evolution and breeding, and next thing I know, my dad's educating me about evolution, and how it "really" is just a series of complicated breeding patterns, after all.

I'd never really given it much thought, actually, about the process in and of itself. I usually get hung up at the very beginning of this totally nonsensical process, somewhere between the "big bang" and "protein soup" that we somehow all came out of.

But we weren't discussing that. My dad was trying to get through my thick skull the concept of advantages. As I currently understand it, evolution goes something like this: one generation gets the gene capable of creating a mutation, and a following generation gets the actual mutation, and if that sticks, then further generations get the actual change implemented within them.

But where I got hung up was the whole "if it sticks" part. I guess for the mutation to be passed along it has to have an advantage.

Here's where I asked such questions as "How does the body decide if it's an advantage or not? How does it know what to pass on?" And I'm pretty sure my parents decided right then and there that I must have flunked out of comprehensive thinking, as well.

Anyhow, I guess the advantage causes the newly mutated creature to live long enough to pass along their genes to the next generation. Oh. How was I supposed to know?

I guess that doesn't sound like a very big discovery, but it took about an hour and a half for me to understand all of that.

Well, most of our suppers take an hour and a half (eating, talking, and Bible reading all combined), but this one seemed extra long, due to the high level of confusion on my part. The only parts I understood for the first hour or so was our discussion of bacterial flagellum, thanks to some science-y video I saw that was somewhere along the lines of this.

When all was said and done, all I could do was thank the Lord that I know I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I was created by the Lord, and His handiwork is all over me. I'm not the product of some random mutation, I am a work of art.

Now, isn't that a whole lot better?

PS, I'm not saying that mutations don't happen in people (I mean, we've got all those hereditary diseases that the Lord sure didn't program into us), I'm just saying that we're not the product of cells mutating into frogs, and frogs into raccoons, and raccoons to monkeys, and monkeys into humans. I come from a long line (6,000 years or so) of humans. We started out this way, people, and we're messed up only because of sin. We're not upgrading as we go along. Seriously.