Childhood Memories

It had been a while. You know those feelings we all had when we were a little kids. It's the feeling we got when we were at the peak of excitement doing the very thing we loved the most. For each of us, it was different. For some it was the wooden gun that had the like-real bolt action. For others it was teaching themselves to hit a volleyball against the side of their dad's garage. Well, this past month, I've been blessed to be reintroduced to two of my childhood loves.

As some of you know, my second job is working as a substitute teacher. This job allows me the opportunity to get caught up on fire department literature, practice my instructor capacities, and be home with my family at the very best hours of the day. Another thing that I get to witness is what the youth of today enjoy. Usually this depresses me--rap music, self-depressing poetry, cars to get away from cops, and drugs. Two incidents during the month of April gave me a little hope.

The first occurred at Bostic Elementary. I was subbing for a gifted class and it was time for them to begin silent sustained reading. Without hesitation, a little brown-haired girl pulled out a book that made my heart jump. Hank the Cowdog. For an instant I was taken back. Back to the days when our library first got this series and I spent hours reading about Hank and his sidekick Drover and the lame-brained escapades that occured on their Texas farm. Various parts of Dickerson's stories flooded my mind; taking a bath in the sewage lagoon, being convinced that he could capture the giant flying bird (air force bomber), and getting the crap beat out of him by many other dogs (I remember a boxer did him in quite well). Oh, the realities of growing up on my dad's farm began to come through and for a second I was back there out in the south pasture.

Once the brown-haired girl could get her book back from me, I realized I needed to return back to that time of innocence and adventure. I bought a lot of 10 Hank the Cowdog books that night on eBay!!!

The second memory-jumping experience occured this past Wednesday. I was subbing for a interrelated class for special needs students (elementary level). After looking through the lesson plans, the teacher wrote, 'If these don't work, just give them some crossword puzzles to do.' I laughed to myself and thought how this was a complete waste. But then I saw their subject. The very first puzzle made my heart jump even higher than seeing a Hank the Cowdog book. The crossword was entirely devoted to ... DINOSAURS.

Many of you will not understand the fascination, but as a kid I was infatuated with them. I even expected my kindgarden teacher to look up how to spell "paleontologist," because at age six all I wanted to do was dig up dinosaur bones. I had dinosaur books, posters, action figures, drawings, videos, computer games, and an imagination that convinced me every day that there was a Dienonychus constantly stalking me on the farm. It was one of the greatest periods of my life. I'm sad that it is not still a part of me.



But that sadness was soon removed. I grabbed an orange highlighter and within five minutes I had completed the crossword finding monsters such as Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Allosaurus. I kept that crossword. It is in the book I'm currently reading. I plan on keeping it as a reminder of the fun and dreams I had as a kid. Everytime I've seen it, I just get a big smile on my face and think to myself, 'Where is that Dienonychus now?'

I hope you, too, some day will run across the things that made your childhood come alive. There are few better feelings in this world.

Recommendation: Expelled

Last night, my wife, some friends, and I went to see the movie by Ben Stein, "Expelled." It was a fascinating movie that opens your eyes and would be well worth your money to see. It is even better if you have a couple VIP passes to get in the theatre, as we did. You just have to love seeing a movie for free!

The movie was a documentary in the same class as "Supersize Me" in that it takes on a large issue central to our society and tries to show the corruption and, in my opinion, cluelessness of that establishment. In SM, Morgan Spurlock takes on the fast food establishments. In "Expelled," Ben Stein takes on science, and more specifically evolutionary biology.

This movie had an amazing draw to myself because of my past as a geneticist at one of the premiere universities in the midwest. I was emmersed in the phylogeny charts that showed how one species came from another and how they diverged exactly at 6.4 millions years ago (not 7.2 million I guess). I had also seen the hostile separation between scientific thinking and religious thought. One instructor I begrudgingly worked under had actually told me that if we lined up all of the religious people in a row, he would personally 'shoot every one of them.' Needless to say, I didn't work there long. Although I didn't quit for these reasons, it didn't help. I soon realized that science wasn't going to bring me the answers that I needed for the questions I had.

Apparently Ben Stein thought the same thing. "Expelled" asks all of the scientific questions that I as a Christian have about evolutionary biology (EB). How did life begin? Where did the first cell come from if that is how life started? And it's amazing how the leading thinkers of EB answer--I remember three. One said that he didn't know, but he was sure that God was not part of the equation. That's a given for most scientists. Another said that we started as little proteins on the back of crystals. His theory had something to do with how crystals are imperfect so the piggy-backing protein would have an opportunity for mutation (and he said this as matter-of-factly as if I said 'I have brown hair.') The third one was from Richard Dawkins, author of the God delusion. He did give the idea of intelligent design a greater than 0% chance of occuring in the world. But he said--and I paraphrase--that if it did, it would likely take the form of a higher intelligence who gave our planet a seed to start the EB cycle. It was amazing to see him say this. One of the most intelligent scientists in the world and he's convinced that it is more likely for aliens to throw a seed out the window as they pass by in space than to say that there is a chance of something creating this for a purpose. Of course, this view isn't exclusive. Dr. Francis Crick, the discoverer of the DNA double helix, believes this occured and may be the founder of this movement.

In the movie, Stein also deals with the social implication of EB. He visits a Nazi concentration camp where those deemed "without purpose" were exterminated for the greater good. He speaks to those who agree that EB 1.) gets rid of God, 2.) gets rid of life after death, 3.) destroys free will, and 4.) destroys ethics. Now take all of this into account and you have what is happily going on in America today. Abortion, genocide (not here yet but closing in on us fast), removal of God from all institutions, relativism, freedom to perform any act of immorality that appeals to you, viewing criminals as victims rather than those who the crime was committed on, and the destruction of objective thought. Of course, those who would agree with me cooly refer to these things as natural selection and the advancement of the human race.

Anyways, I could write for hours about this. It was a great movie and my hat is off to Ben Stein.