Category: Reflections
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Magic versus Miracles
Consider this widely repeated and adapted sermon illustration: A Pastor once sat at his desk praying for a solution to the congregation’s financial problems: an erratic furnace, a leaky roof, too many years since the staff (including the pastor) had a pay raise, and wanting a commercial refrigerator for their food pantry. God heard that…
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Science Seeks to Understand Nature
Many theologians believe that God wrote two “books”: The book commonly called Creation, and the book commonly called sacred Scripture. Science seeks to understand the Book of Creation. Understanding this book is essential to understanding Scripture since Creation provides the basis for language and the place where theology is experienced and practiced. Science and Theology…
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Theology 2.0
“How do you reconcile science and theology?” People would ask me this question when they find out that I am either an engineer/physicist with a Masters of Divinity or a pastor with a degree in physics who once operated a submarine nuclear power plant and worked as a Systems Engineer for sonar and laser systems.…
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Where is God?
When things do not go well, then believing that one is not alone can help one maintain perspective. My favorite question to ask as such times was: “Where is God in all this?” But I have come to realize there is a fallacy in that question. How Big Is God? The fallacy is presuming that…
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Patriotic or Merely a Frill
Carefully folding a flag that had rested atop a friend’s casket and presenting that flag to his widow changed my respect for the flag of the United States of America. Some national holidays seem to draw an over abundance of flags and flag-like decorations; notably Memorial Day, Flag Day, and Independence Day. Some towns decorate…
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Causality versus Free Will
Modern life depends on causality. You stomp on your car’s brake pedal and through a series of mechanical, hydraulic and electrical links your car rapidly slows. The chain of events began long before your foot touches the brake pedal. Perhaps millions of years before.
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Where Is Home
“Don’t you ever go home?” a woman asked me after hearing about our nomadic lifestyle. After thinking about her question I decided I am home. See why my home needs an RV to experience its depth and its breadth.
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Rain, Rain, Go Away
When the rain threatened to spoil activities when I was a child we would chant: “Rain rain, go away! Come again another day!” Our hope was that the rain would go away. Now, as an RVer, that chant has a very different meaning.
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When to Start Taking Social Security
Various investment articles and advisers routinely advocate that retirees delay when they will start taking Social Security without any explanation of how they come to this conclusion. This means a retiree would need to draw more from his or her investments until he/she starts taking Social Security, decreasing income from investments to cover his expenses in…
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Book Review: The Martian by Andy Weir
Be careful opening this book. I opened it thinking I would read a few pages before going to sleep only to set it down nine hours later after reading all 369 pages. Andy Weir successfully strings together plausible solutions to plausible problems of surviving after being stranded on Mars. Each solution stresses a habitability system…