life. faithful.

  Thousands of years ago, centuries before the brilliant minds of Galileo, Newton, Schrodinger, and Einstein helped to reveal hidden aspects of the universe, the men God used to write the Scriptures tucked physics into the pages. Have you ever noticed it? We'll start at the smallest level, with subatomic particles. There are people who study these and have named all sorts of particles out there, but we'll just focus on the main 3: protons, neutrons, and electrons. For all practical purposes, these 3 particles in different combinations make up everything in our universe, from the sun to the flowers to you. So these tiny, invisible particles? They are talked about in Hebrews 11:3 "By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command, so that what was seen was made of what was unseen." So these tiny particles can be thought of as tiny little one-sided magnets. Neutrons are neutral, so we'll ignore them right now, but protons and electrons are lik...

 I'm revisiting something I haven't written about in a while--education. I've been involved in education in one way or another throughout my entire life. My dad was a teacher and coach when I was born, I was in college for what seemed like an eternity (it encompassed my years from 2002 until 2015, with a small break when Nathan and I moved to Oregon for his time in the Coast Guard), I spent a few years in high school classrooms, and I've worked in higher education since 2019. Recently, UCSD released the results of a study on their math remediation course. Besides a massive increase in the number of students required to take remedial math, their study showed that a majority of students in that course couldn't solve middle school math problems. While so much of the world was shocked by the results, I just nodded...because I (and probably anyone teaching math or physics) have known that was true for years. To be honest, the decline started a long time ago. I would argu...

 My oldest daughter is an artist. She has a sketchbook with her at pretty much all times, and she has the kind of skill that is unimaginable to me. She studies the techniques of others all the time, and right now she's teaching herself animation. Her goal is to one day make children's television programs, shows that parents will know are safe for their kids and teach traditional values. She's graduating next month, so she's being asked all the time what her plans are for college. I've listened to her tell people many times, and it makes me sad. I finally asked her to do me a favor the other day: "Please stop apologizing when you tell people what you're going to study." I think it caught her a little off guard, but her response? It was something along the lines of, "But Mom, I'm going to be an art major . That's who all the jokes are about." I asked her what I thought of at the time: "Are you making the decision that you think God...

Every once in a while, I read a verse of Scripture and think, "I wonder when that got put in there..." because it catches me as something I've never noticed before. As we are nearing the remembrance of Easter, one of those verses caught my attention: " When Jesus was on the earth, a man of flesh and blood, He offered up prayers and pleas, groans and tears to the One who could save Him from death. He was heard because He approached God with reverence. Although He was a Son, Jesus learned obedience through the things He suffered   And once He was perfected through that suffering He became the way of eternal salvation for all those who hear and follow Him" (Hebrews 5:7-9) As they prepared to enter Jerusalem, Jesus knew what He was about to face. He even pulled His disciples aside to tell them plainly (because He had already told them a couple different times and the just didn't get it) that He was about to be mocked, tortured, executed, and raised from the d...

I've written about what I believe --we were challenged to do so many years ago at a church we had started attending. It was something I had never been challenged to do before, and I would encourage you to do the same. I've also written my testimony, probably more times than I can count (I grew up in a Baptist church, after all). It's been updated time and again, which should always be the case if you ask me because I should always be learning more about God and realizing what He has done for me (which is somewhere I very much fall short). Today, though, I realized that I've never sat down and thought about why I believe. Honestly, that's not a simple task. It seems like why is always the most complex question to answer. My first why comes from something most of us use as a basis for belief--it's what I've been taught, and the people I learned from were/are trustworthy. As Paul wrote to Timothy: "So surely you ought to stick to what you know is c...

There's a big emphasis lately on the wedge that's constantly being driven between faith and science. It seems like people think you can only have one or the other ( I've written about it a few times ), and somehow if you cling to one you have to push the other away by default. I hear people talk about science in such strange ways, and it comes from people on both sides of the conversation-- "I don't trust science because it's just trying to take the place of God." "It doesn't matter what you think, it's science and you have to trust science." If you ask me, both statements are equally ignorant. I'm a huge fan of science--I've spent a huge chunk of my life so far learning as much about it as I could (and cried way too many tears over the parts I didn't understand), and I'm one of those nerds who lights up when somebody asks me a question about it. Honestly, I get lost enough in answering that it usually takes me a w...

Throwing pottery is something I thought I wanted to try once. Once is the key word there--Raiden got a kid's pottery wheel, and I tried to use it. I can't even begin to tell you the mess I made. Wet clay spinning around in a circle seems to have a mind of its own. I tried to make a simple pot; nothing fancy, just something small that actually looked like a bowl or something recognizable. What I ended up with was nothing more than a mess, and I'm pretty sure I had more clay on myself than actually stayed on the wheel. Left to me, the clay was less useful than it would have been if I had left if as a lump. At least then it could have been a paperweight or something. In the hands of a Master Potter, though, clay can become some pretty magnificent things. "The Lord gave another message to Jeremiah.   He said, 'Go down to the potter’s shop, and I will speak to you there.'   So I did as he told me and found the potter working at his wheel.   But th...

"Before time itself was measured, the Voice was speaking. The Voice was and is God. This celestial Word remained ever present with the Creator; His speech shaped the entire cosmos. Immersed in the practice of creating, all things that exist were birthed in Him. His breath filled all things with a living, breathing light-- A light that thrives in the depths of darkness, blazes through murky bottoms. It cannot and will not be quenched." ~John 1: 1-5 Unbelievable, indescribable power is displayed in God speaking all of creation into existence. This power, above and outside of everything we can imagine, simply had to breathe for life to begin teeming across the surface of the earth. Besides that, this Voice whispered the cosmos into being. Think about that for a second. Taking a line from Star Trek (because I'm a nerd): "Space: the final frontier..." I'm not sure what the purpose of my physics degrees is or will be, but I'm tha...