An Interesting Angle

I recently received a response from a good friend who had just read my blog about how the first chapter of Genesis was the foundational story that created the week. (Unappreciated Origins; Where did the week come from?) He called it an “interesting angle.”  He quickly went on to lay out reasons that I am missing the real joy of God as creator by not seeing in Genesis 1 the factual description of how God had created everything in 6 days some 6000 years ago. Moreover, I’m missing that everything that we see in geology is the result of a universal flood some 4000 years ago.

Now, the world is blessed by people who have many different points of view. It should be regarded as wonderful, not dismissive, that someone has their own “interesting angle” on something. The people in Franconia Notch in New Hampshire found an interesting angle from which to view the cliffs overlooking their village. That spot became famous as the place to stand and gaze up at the glaciated, rocky cliffs above and see “The Old Man of the Mountain.” From any other angle those rocks looked like, well, just a bunch of rocks. The presence of that interesting angle of view changed the whole culture for that town. And the world was notified, and appropriately horrified, by the collapse of those rocks on May 3, 2003. The Old Man is gone, collapsed into a heap of rubble in the valley. But I count is as a blessing, that before that tragic day, I was able to stand on that spot and see that Abe Lincoln-like man peering across the valley.

Or another example. There are literally billions – ok – trillions of stars in the sky. But there is only one that has served to change the shape of civilization on earth to a large extent. And I am not talking about our blessed sun. Of course, it makes civilization possible! But the second-place star that I am thinking about has its noble distinction only because of our “interesting angle” of view of it in the heavens. The North Star is just a common, ordinary star in every other fashion. But, the fact that it lies on the axis of the rotation of the earth has made it a reliable beacon for navigation for thousands of years. I’ve covered that intriguing topic in my blog, Christ at the Apex, so I won’t go into explaining its significance farther here.

But the point in this essay is explaining that interesting angles matter. If I had failed to walk 100 yards farther down the trail to gaze at the cliffs above Franconia Notch, I never would have been at the right angle to see that stately man of the mountain. If the sailor had fixed his sexton on some star other than the North Star, his ship may have ended up in Reykjavík rather than London.

So, to dismiss the observation that the week had its origins in the creation story as just an “interesting angle,” seems somewhat small minded. The week, with the Sabbath at its apex, is the unifying narrative of the whole Hebrew Bible. Violating the staid traditions of that Sabbath, after all,  it is one of the things that got Jesus in such hot water in Jerusalem. And going beyond just the Jewish nation, it has been an agreed upon time-marker for almost all nations since antiquity. It has civilized mankind in ways that we can’t totally appreciate by giving us a time of rest and contemplation upon our creator rather than a full-time existence with every day being a workday.  

I do have my own “interesting angle” on God. My God is that one Being that:

Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the skies of parchment made

Were every stalk on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Though stretched from sky to sky*

Bets are that every one of those scribes is going to be writing their praise of God from their own “interesting angle” and it will result in the most splendid of tapestries.

* Verse 3 of The Love of God- Frederick M. Lehman - poem by Meir Ben Issac Nehorai

Frederick Lehman tells us that verse 3 “had been found penciled on the wall of a patient’s room in an insane asylum after he had been carried to his grave.” While it is only supposition that he was the one who adapted the Jewish author’s poem to leave us these well-known lines, if the account is true it shows in any case that he highly esteemed the message.

Perhaps of interest for farther reading:

https://www.icr.org/article/157/

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-cant-we-get-rid-of-the-7day-week

How Air Pollution Saved China

I have said for years now that "the Chinese live in our future and we live in their past". My initial intent with that phrase was to express the everyday reality that they are always either 12 or 13 hours ahead of Pennsylvania, depending on the vagaries of Daylight Savings time. But recently, since the outbreak of the coronavirus this past January, this phrase has become even more significant. Rather than just 12 hours, they seemingly live 3 or 4 weeks ahead of us in the progression of this virus outbreak. They have had to deal with this on a scale that we are only beginning to appreciate. Now, as I write this two months later, they are finally finding some relief from the rapid, inexorable spread of the disease across their country. The jury is still out on how they were able to hopefully squash this plague before it ravished more of the country, but one explanation that I am offering is China's experience with air pollution. Anyone who has been to China is struck by the seriousness of the pollution problem. Because of it, the Chinese are therefore quite comfortable with being out in public with masks covering their faces. When this epidemic started to threaten their many population centers, their people with ready and willing to don any protective gear they could find when venturing out. Masks were not a stigma or a negative fashion statement for them. 

Did that willingness to adapt to masks in public save them as a nation? Obviously, not in totality. But it is hard to dismiss the positive evidence that something was working in their favor to slow the spread that has not been working in Italy -- or in the USA and Spain. When I told my one friend in Beijing that I could not get hold of masks here, she immediately, within an hour, had 80 of them packaged up and on the way to my doorstep. They arrived, miraculously, six days later. Does she believe in masks in public? The answer is obvious! Last night, when another friend in Beijing learned that my daughter in Florida was concerned that she might have contracted the illness, she had a package of masks on their way to Florida within 4 hours. She also seems convinced of their efficacy. China, as of today, is up and running with a capacity of 300 million masks a day. They were incensed with our sending empty airplanes into Wuhan to evacuate our citizens. "Could you at least have filled the empty planes with masks and medical supplies?" they asked plaintively. They had a gut-level feel that masks were a good thing. So, are they? Our gut-level revulsion to the use of them has certainly delayed our full-scale push to produce them on an industrial scale. Even Congress put their collective foot down on making masks readily available. There is, of course some wisdom in that position. Elevating the benefits of wearing masks to a level of a life and death concern, would have spawned violence on the streets and the kind of stockpiling that has become apparent with toilet paper! (That is why we had to shut down construction! All Job Johnnies have been robbed of their toilet paper!) 

What to do? I guess obey the rapidly formulated social distancing laws. But I think that restricting us from going out of our houses without masks at the beginning of March would have prevented some of this. But then, I live in the present and am only in touch with the future over WeChat!

The One-Armed Man vs. the CrossPuzzle

Our town has what they call "First Fridays" which is a street fair that happens the first Friday of each month. Our church participates by being there and selling refreshments. I take my CrossPuzzles. On one occasion, there were these two little kids, probably around 12-years-old, who came up to me. The one kid asked me, "Can I have a dollar?" I said, "Why should I give you a dollar?" to which he answered, "I just need a dollar."

I told him that I would give him a dollar if he could answer me a question. I asked him to tell me what the following is. "What is a multipath, expansible, amorphous, carbohydrate, absorption module, sensitive to differential molecular tension?" After no more than 10 seconds of contemplation he said, "It's not a sponge is it?"

I told him that indeed it was a sponge! And that for that answer I would give him two dollars! After commenting on his obvious brilliance, I told him that I had another puzzle for him. I gave him and his buddies a couple of my CrossPuzzles. Before long there were about 15 of the street kids gathered around, all trying to get these puzzles apart.

Earlier in the evening I had been talking with a man in a wheelchair. Not only was he paralyzed in both legs, but he only had one good, functioning arm. When I saw him sitting eating at a nearby table, I took a puzzle over to him. I had him read the instructions and clues and explained to him that most people can't unlock it by their own efforts. But everyone tries to anyway. In his case however, I said he could easily unlock the puzzle and do it with only his one good hand. He was quite amazed when he did just that!

So, latter, as the boys were trying to get their puzzles apart, this guy in the wheelchair goes rolling by. I hollered at him to come over and show these kids how to unlock the puzzle using only his one good hand. He picks up the puzzle, but before unlocking it, he goes through the whole object lesson about how this cross illustrates that we can't get to God by our own works. God needed to come to us in the form of Jesus so that we could have salvation and have a relationship with God. I don't know if the wheelchair man was even a Christian, but he sure was a quick learner. And when he unlocked the puzzle using only one hand, these kids were in awe. They all wanted to have a puzzle to take home and challenge and amaze their friends.

That is the kind of reception that I have found with this puzzle. It doesn't make me a lot of money, but it certainly lets me connect in places where I normally would be not be connected!

The Purple Balm

Cruising up and down the isles at the International Christian Retail Show, ICRS, I noticed a booth where a lady, all dressed in a lovely purple dress, was displaying her product called Heaven’s Healing Balm. “It’s Divine!” the pamphlet announced! Interested in understanding the divinity of her product and her attractive booth, I sidled over to get a better look. The little tins filled with the honey-colored stuff did look vaguely divine, but our conversation quickly veered off into the divinity of the purple color that graced her and the booth. I asked her if she knew that color had led to the discovery of America…rather indirectly to be sure. 

Indeed, purple was a very rare color back in the days of the Bible. It was the color of royalty. We see Lydia in the Bible being a “seller of purple.” It was a rare and expensive dye derived from a particular kind of seashell that was found in the Mediterranean Sea. All available shells had been hunted down and processed into this dye. With the shells becoming harder to find, the push was on to find new sources for them. The likely spot appeared to be in the huge body of water beyond the forbidding Straits of Gibraltar. But to go through them was to encounter the ravages of an endless ocean. Bigger ships and braver people were required to wander beyond the relative safety of the Mediterranean. So it was that the push to find more purple seashells drove the push for greater seafaring prowess. And these bigger, better boats, initially starting with the goal of finding shells, found much, much more! And one of those finds was the New World itself! So, indirectly, the color of her dress paved the way for her being there in the first place. Hmm!


Anyway, when we again turned attention to the product at hand, this lady said that she uses this stuff for headaches and migraines. So, I successfully made a deal that in exchange for all the information that I had been able to provide her relating to the color of her dress, she would give me a complimentary package of this nectar of the gods. I guess I have joined Lydia in being a trader in Purple!