Sunday, November 24, 2013

Unrealized Expectations


Sunday 11/24/2013 6:29 AM
A little over sixteen years ago I began teaching at Cerritos College.  Previous to that I taught twenty-one years at Valley Christian High School.  When I began teaching at Cerritos I envisioned being able to share my Christian faith with my students, allowing them to share in the great joy of living life in an intimate relationship with God and within a supportive, Christian community.  Many people in the world today, including many of my students, live their lives apart from God, rejected by their family and isolated from others.  I long for them to experience life the way that it is meant to be lived but I do not know how best to accomplish that in my role as a math teacher.
When I first began teaching at Cerritos I felt as if God told me to simply be the best math teacher that I could be.  I felt as if I needed to establish myself on the campus as respectable teacher and colleague to gain credibility with my students and peers.  My thought was that after a couple of years students and colleagues alike would see that I was different and become curious.  Well that never happened.
My devotional theme for the week has been charity, or in modern language, love.  The first characteristic of love that is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is patient.  I have been patient for sixteen years but I’m not sure how much longer I can afford to be so.  Next week I will celebrate my fifty-eighth birthday and, if the Lord is gracious, I will only be teaching for another eight to ten years.  If I am to have a positive effect on my student’s and on my colleague’s lives it has to be soon or it will be too late.
Today I read an excerpt from With Open Heart by Michael Quoist that I found quite convicting.  “There have been times when I have waited months, and even years, at someone’s door.  You can’t force your way into a house ­– it would be breaking and entering.  You must simply be there, like warm sunlight, so that seeing you through the window, the other will want to come out.  You must imitate God’s unwavering patience with his children, whom he loves.  … But if the other hesitates too long to come out of his fortress, perhaps it is because my light is weak, so weak that it cannot illuminate the way.”
I have spent the last sixteen years quietly waiting outside the house, hoping the light of my life would entice others to come out and join me.  This morning I am wondering if others view my life as a guttering candle rather than a roaring fire.  I need to make sure I am not quenching the fire that the Holy Spirit is trying to stoke.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

No One Ever Wins a Fight


Tuesday 11/19/2013 4:35 AM
The theme of my devotions this week is charity, or, to use non-King-James-Version-of-the-Bible-language, love.  Yesterday I saw a post on Facebook in which one of my Facebook friends posted a link to a website calling for the impeachment of President Obama on the grounds that he is aiding and abetting the enemy.  According to the article the US Defense Department is hiring contractors in Afghanistan that have links to terrorism.  As if that isn’t bad enough it says that the US military is training Libyan military forces in both conventional and special ops techniques with the fear being they will more than likely be training Islamic terrorists. The article merely highlights the tactics in which both conservative and liberal political factions engage to try to bolster their arguments.  Over the past few years this type of grandstanding has led to a climate in which opposing sides cannot even sit at the same table to discuss issues without being labeled traitorous by their supporters, which results in political gridlock.
Unfortunately this same type of adversarial climate has seeped into the Christian community, which, more and more, is being characterized as people that are against things instead of being for things.  Christians are against abortion, against homosexuality, against sexual promiscuity, against … you fill in the blank.  I regularly see Christian groups on campus with signs (that include graphic pictures of aborted fetuses) telling people abortion is murder, that God hates gays and lesbians, etc., and tells them they are going to hell unless they repent.  I have never seen anyone responding positively to the message they bring because their grandstanding cuts of any meaningful discussion.  Instead I hear students muttering about crazy Christians and wondering who in their right mind would become a part of such a hateful organization.
One of my devotional readings today was an excerpt from Deep Is the Hunger by Howard Thurman in which he describes a fight in which he participated as a child.  He came home bloodied and battered with clothes that were tattered and his grandmother simply said, “No one ever wins a fight.”  He goes on to explain that he didn’t understand what his grandmother meant until many years later when he had matured and discovered that there are other ways to fight and other weapons to use besides fists.  The excerpt ends with these convicting words, “Perhaps the authentic moral stature of a man is determined by his choice of weapons which he uses in his fight against the adversary.  Of all weapons, love is the most deadly and devastating, and few there be who dare trust their fate in its hands.”
Christ’s command to his disciples is for them to love God above all, to love their neighbor as they love themselves and to make disciples.  When he came to earth his weapon of choice was love, and he trusted his fate into its hands.  He associated with prostitutes and sinners so much that he was rejected by the religious leaders of his day for his actions, but the sinners found forgiveness and repentance.  He commands his disciples to engage in warfare using the same weapon.  I am not called to carry signs castigating those I perceive to be the sinners of my day, I am simply called to love them with the love I have received from God and to trust the Spirit of God to bring them to the point of repentance and faith, much like he did with me.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Celebration Continued


Sunday 11/17/2013 9:48 AM
Yesterday we celebrated Jaci’s birthday with an overnight trip to Newport Beach.  We went to the Balboa Peninsula, walked the pier and ate lunch.  Then we went to Roger’s Gardens, one of Jaci’s favorite places, to look at plants and to get ideas for decorating.  We checked into our hotel early in the afternoon, took a short nap and then went to Ruby’s Shake Shack along Pacific Coast Highway to watch the sun set over Catalina Island while sipping shakes.  We went back to Fashion Island and walked around the different stores before heading to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner.
This morning I went for a run along the Back Bay in Newport.  As I ran around the long sweeping turns of the road, I remembered that it was exactly thirty-three years ago today that I ran my marathon.  Andy was only three months old at the time so quite a bit has changed in the intervening years but the memories came flooding back as I smelled the distinctive smells of the bay and saw the egrets stalking their breakfast in the reeds.
The theme of my devotions this week has been celebration.  Yesterday we spent the day celebrating Jaci’s birthday and today I celebrated the great blessing she has been in my life over the past thirty-five years.  God has blessed me beyond my wildest imagination with the gift of a loving wife and family and health that still allows me to enjoy a four-mile run each morning.  What I really need to celebrate is my loving God who has walked with me the entire way.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Celebration


Tuesday 11/12/2013 4:45 AM
The theme for my devotions this week is celebration.  Part of my reading this morning included these words by M. Basil Pennington in A Place Apart, “We need to let all the beauty, all the reality of God’s creation enter into our hearts and then enfold it in our love so that it may ascend to him with that love.”
Yesterday I had the day off from school so Jaci and I went to Oak Glen or, as the locals here in Southern California call it, apple country.  We sampled different kinds of apples, apple butter, apple nut bread and apple pie with cinnamon sauce and ice cream, among other things.  We also spent some time hiking through a local conservation area, enjoying a bubbling stream, a couple of ponds that were home to ducks, coots and cattails, various types of oak trees, sycamores, conifers and even a California redwood and a sequoia.  As I hiked along the sides of ponds, down steep hillsides and along the streams I could see the level curves and gradient vectors my multivariable calculus book uses to illustrate such landscapes.  The gentle breeze that was blowing became a vector field with curl and divergence.  It was as if I was observing God’s world with x-ray vision, seeing the underlying structural beauty along with the aesthetic beauty of majestic mountains and falling leaves against the backdrop of a deep, azure sky.
Yesterday I celebrated my relationship with Jaci along with the sights, smells, and tastes of Oak Glen, including the underlying structure of it all.  Today I celebrate the great God who superintends it all.  And what a wonderful celebration it is!

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Credit to Whom Credit is Due


Sunday 11/3/2013 6:28 AM
I spent the last three days at a math conference learning better ways to teach and marveling at the way mathematics can describe and model the natural world.  In the time between sessions I read portions of the book Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, by Morris Kline.  It is a history of mathematics and explores the development of mathematics and its effect on the science, the art, and the philosophy of the time.  I just finished reading the section describing the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo and the switch from a geocentric view of things to a heliocentric view.  They had a way of thinking that went completely against the prevailing views of the time.  They saw things from a different perspective.  They looked for a simpler explanation for the movement of the planets around the sun than the circular motions with seventy-seven epicycles that the Ptolemaic system required and Kepler’s laws of elliptical orbits fit very well.  They believed that the universe was ordered and followed simple laws so they looked for such laws.
Since that time mathematicians and physicists have made further discoveries about the nature of the universe.  Relativity, quantum theory and string theory now dominate the landscape of mathematics and physics bringing with it new ideas about dark matter, dark energy and new dimensions in order to explain observed phenomena.
This morning I read Daniel 2:20-23, a prayer of Daniel after God had revealed Nebuchadnezzar’s dream to him.  “Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his.  He changes times and seasons; he deposes kings and raises up others.  He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning.  He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him.  I thank and praise you, God of my ancestors: You have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king.”  Modern science and mathematics have made great strides in explaining the nature of the universe but one seldom hears any credit being given to God.  God is explained away by the Higgs field and by the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle.”  I have a feeling that if Daniel were a modern day physicist or mathematician he would pray, “I thank and praise you, God of the universe; you reveal deep and hidden things.  He knows what lies in a Higgs field and the Higgs boson dwells with him.  You have given me wisdom and have made known to me the nature of the universe.”  That would be a refreshing voice to hear coming from the scientific community.