What is That Contraption?

June 10, 2006

Quite a few years ago, I was the Sunday School teacher for an exception bunch of fourth and fifth graders. I have always liked to teach using analogies to develop truths. One Sunday I put the breathing system from the anesthesia machine that I was designing at Draeger Medical into a cardboard box and took it to class. I told them that the night before I had witnessed the most amazing sight! This streak of light, like a meteor approached the house from the east. Something bright and shiny landed in the field across from my house. The machine, whatever it was, settled onto the ground and soon a door opened in the front surface. A ramp pivoted downward onto the grass and two creatures that looked like little, glowing, green men descended the ramp. In their arms they carried this funny shaped object. They carefully placed it on the ground, looked around for a moment and then returned to their machine. The ramp lifted with a slight whirring sound, the craft lifted off the ground, hovered there for a moment, and then with a whoosh, streaked away into the eastern sky from whence it had come.

Shaken, but curious, I slipped into my shoes and eased out of the front door of the house. I cautiously snuck up to the area where the machine had alighted and saw the object that they had deposited still sitting there on the ground. Rather than risk contamination, I left it sitting there and ran back to the house and grabbed a box and some gloves. Returning, I carefully picked up the contraption and placed it into the box. It was not overly heavy, so I was able to carry it back to the garage and keep it there until morning. I was excited to bring it to class with me and see if they could help me figure out what it was!

With their curiosity thoroughly aroused, I undid the top of the box and lifted the odd contraption from its resting place. It was all a tangle of hoses and valves with a large translucent canister attached to its underside. The black of the base contrasted with the shiny silver of the metal parts. A rubber balloon dangled from the longest hose. What could be the purpose of such a device?

The kids started to squeeze the balloon and blow into the hoses. They twisted the knobs and flipped the switches. They turned it over and poked around in the recesses. Suggestions were made that the canister could be filled with water or soda. Perhaps it was a portable fish bowel. Or an alien breath analyzer or a galactic telephone.

Of course, they quickly realized that my story about it being dropped off by some aliens was an elaborate ruse, but what  was it really? I told them that in fact it was a device that allows patients to breath and keeps them alive during surgery. Not only did I know the purpose of the device, but I was friends with the person who had designed it. His name was Jan Sievertsen and he lived in Germany. If they wanted to know anything more about it I could give them his phone number and they could call and talk with him. Better yet, he had written an entire operators manual on the unit so that every doctor would understand its design and the correct way to use it.

By now the light was slowly dawning on them about where this little demonstration was going. They, the young boys and girls marveling at this breathing system, were analogous to that complicated devise with all its dangling hoses and mysterious valving. And it was God, the one who created them, that they could get in contact with via prayer. And the operators manual was the Holy Bible that our loving Creator had so graciously provided us. Mr. Sievertsen would never have designed his breathing system and placed it out there in the hospitals without any way for doctors to understand it and its purposes. Neither would God have created them, such wonderful boys and girls, and left them without an instruction book and a way to contact him as they attempt to find their purposes in life.

But just in case I had made my story too vivid, I told them that there was no need to pressure their parents to stop and let them look for spaceship tracks in the field across from my house! God could be trusted to be there for them everyday, very unlike those fickle aliens!

The Path to True Worship

"No Agenda" Moments

Many years ago, I had a Honda Civic, a wife and two daughters who took afternoon naps, and an inspiration. I would use those several hours of sleep-time on Sundays to throw my toolbox into the back of the Honda and spend the time cruising the highway on a lookout for people who were having car problems. This was in the era before cellphones, so anyone with a set of wheels could be a big help to someone stranded along the road. 

As I set out on these afternoon jaunts, I would pull to the end of the driveway and offer a prayer. “God, the next several hours are yours. I have no agenda. Just lead me wherever I’m needed to meet with whoever you wish.”

From there I would head down the road in whatever direction seemed appropriate. I would keep on the lookout for cars stranded along the road: flat tires, blown radiators, and cars out of gas. I found all those and more on these excursions. And always I found thankful spirits from those I was privileged to help.

I clearly remember the one recipient of my aid. I saw a large gouge leading down the road and ending underneath a disabled car on the side of the road. The owner of the car was still behind the wheel, tightly surrounded by all his earthly possessions. He was documenting his predicament in neat, little, scrawled writing on a slip of paper when I knocked on the window. He said something – he wasn’t sure what – had gone, Bang! He had barely been able to get the car off the road.

I peeked under the car. He was right about the bang thing! The whole support structure of this overworked Oldsmobile had broken out from under the transmission! The driveshaft had dropped to the ground and had created that long groove in the pavement.

I walked up the side of the road and found a broken-off piece of a road sign. I dug it out of the underbrush and lugged it back to the Olds. It was just the right length so that I could wedge the one side under the frame and lever the transmission up off the ground. I managed to tuck the other end on top of the opposite frame member. The car was mobile again – barely. The man with the mini-scrawl writing was ecstatic that he could again drive. He thanked me profusely and then asked whether I thought it could pass inspection that way! I thought not!

I don’t know how many people I helped on those occasions. But it doesn’t matter. The one person I know benefited the most from those times was me. I still look back on those “no agenda” moments as times when I really experienced true worship. Those were times that I could truly see God working in the “fragrant muck and misery” of the roadside.

A Lesson in Duplication

On one of my frequent trips to Lübeck, Germany while working for Draeger Medical, I got to talking with a German physicist I met in the gate area. He lived in Hamburg and worked for Philips Electric. During the conversation, he told me about the fact that Philips held the joint patent on the CD disc technology. That caught my attention and I told him that I had a question.

“Suppose that one were to take a CD disc full of information and copy it to another disc. Then they were to copy the copy to a third disc and then copy the copy of the copy to yet another disc and so on, always copying the latest copy to the successive disc. Now, after 1000 copies, if they were to compare the information on the first disc with that on disc number 1000, would they find that all the information was still perfectly intact?”

“Yes!” he told me emphatically. “Philips has developed a very robust copying routine and had built in lots of safeguards and error checking to assure that the data is copied properly.”

“OK,” I said. “Now suppose that you are God, and that you have just put the first human genome onto earth. Your expectation is that this genome will be copied and the copy copied and the copy of the copy copied and so on until here you and I are, many generations later talking together and looking very much like most of the original information has been preserved. Do you think, that if you were God, that you would have built a careful set of rules around that copying process, such as morality, sexual purity, loving parenting, and nurturing family values? Wouldn’t following such guidelines be important for the successful transmittal of our humanness from generation to generation? Wouldn’t they be just as important as all those rules that Philips developed for governing the duplication of data from one disc to another?”

“You’re right,” he said. “I never thought about reproduction in those terms before!”

We often lose sight of the fact that our sexuality is one God's greatest gift to mankind and that we should not use it as some plaything. How often people forget that the rules God places around us are not to make us miserable, but to make us viable!

The Homeless Muslim Girl

The Homeless Muslim Girl
June 26, 2017

One of the many benefits that life has provided me is the joy of accompanying my wife to her many video conferences around the world. This has given me the chance to visit many interesting places in Europe and America and to meet scores of people and explore fascinating cities. But one of the more interesting people that I ran into first appeared to me as a ruffled blanket and stuffed garbage bag lying against the wall of a building in Cincinnati, Ohio. If it hadn’t been for the protruding shoe, I likely would have walked on by. But my momentary interests evoked a rustle from under the blanket and the face of young girl appeared with her head wrapped in a head scarf. She seemed uninterested in pursuing a conversation, so I moved on. But when I returned later, she was sitting up and I was able to talk with her.

It turned our she had been in a bad marriage, had been thrown out by an abusive husband and had lived here on this spot for many years. All she wanted out of life was a bus ticket so she could move to Washington D.C. She had heard that living on the streets there was much more satisfactory. “Could you please give me enough money to buy a bus ticket?” was her plea.

I told her I could give her something much better! I could get her off the streets entirely in a short amount of time. I pulled one of my CrossPuzzles from my knapsack. I told her that I would be willing to give her as many of these puzzles for free as she wanted and she could hand them out to any passers-by. Within a week, her picture would be in the local paper if not on the national news!

But when I tried to hand the cross to her she drew back in disgust. “That is an instrument of execution!” she hissed.

“Yes!” I said, “But is also the instrument of salvation!”

It was obvious that she was not getting the connection between the two concepts. So, I proposed an analogy to help her understand. I asked her to imagine that she was in jail, accused of some heinous crime. She was to be executed the next day. But today, her identical twin sister had come to the jail to visit her. The two of them had snuck into the ladies’ room and had switched clothing. She had emerged, wearing her sister’s business suit, and her sister had been returned to her cell in the prison garb. The next day it was her sister who died at the hands of the executioner. She was on the street, a free woman. Her crime had been paid for by her sister!

I told her that we all have an identical twin. His name is Jesus! And he has paid for our sins so that we can be free.

The light of understanding seemed to come on in her eyes. She had never heard the story framed in that manner. But the years of abuse and indoctrination were stronger than my analogies. She continued to cling to her lineage as a Muslim for her assurances. I told her that one of the best thing Jesus had ever done was to die without having children. There is no bloodline of Jesus. We can not evaluate our worthiness by examining how much of Jesus blood flows in our veins. For the descendants Islam, the attempt to trace bloodlines back to the proper son of Muhammad has been the root of generations of struggle since his death. With Jesus, he ended the bloodline. His blood does not flow in our veins. His blood covers us! We can all be his children; no restrictions from genealogy!

But in the end, all I can claim is that I had planted the seeds. Hopefully, someone else can secure the harvest. I saw her one more time, months later. It was on Google Earth as I panned the camera up that street. There she was, still lying under the purple blanket on the sidewalk. But a week later, when I again searched for her on Google, she had been painted out of the picture. Only a bottle, leaning against the wall, remained. A friend of mine, who was visiting the city, stopped across the street at the church and asked after her. They remembered her, but said when last they had heard about her, someone had given her a bus ticket to Washington D.C. Her dream had come true. But my dream for her, most likely, may never to be realized.

New Excitement for the Taste Buds

New Excitement for the Taste Buds

The Microsoft welcome screen on my Surface laptop this Saturday morning suggested that one should seek out new excitement for the taste buds. Hah! I had already gone there, even without their prompting! I had gotten out of bed before 6am and put on the pot of coffee to brew. I then set about the task of cooking myself some “Eggs in a Basket.” This is not an onerous task; else I would have left it undone. But given the proper level of creativity, it can evoke a true explosion for the taste buds. Let me detail some of steps of that creativity for you!

1.     Find a slice of high-quality bread. Then cut a hole out of the center of it using your wife’s favorite cup, much like your kids did with their playdough. Clean the any crumbs from the lip of the cup so that your wife is not displeased with your having borrowed it! Now spread a thin layer of butter onto the bread and its inner disc.

2.     Get out your best, non-stick skillet and put it on the stove at medium heat. Melt a tab of butter onto its bottom.

3.     Separate the disc from the bread and place both, butter side down, into the skillet.

4.     Crack two eggs into the confines of the slice of bread. It is ok if some of the egg white cascades over the side and spreads out into the pan but limit its expanse if possible. I typically break the yokes and stir them up slightly at this point, but that is a matter of preference for how much yellow goo you want to deal with when eating them later.

5.     Now the good part! Sprinkle the top of the eggs with Garlic Pepper. If you do not have any of that, I will be happy supply your need from my storehouse of the substance, uniquely available for my Mennonite friends in Missouri.

6.     Then, to really engage your taste buds in their exciting mission of delivering delight to your palate, sprinkle a healthy coating of crushed red pepper on top!

7.     You are now ready for the next creative step. Cover the cooking egg with a lid and pour a few tablespoons of water around the brim so that it runs down under the lid and fills the area around the egg with steam. This allows the egg to cook quickly from both sides and causes the top to skin over, vastly improving the results when attempting the next step.

8.     Slide a spatula under the contents of the pan, and in one intense act of concentration, flip the whole thing over without allowing it to leave the confines of the pan or landing inside the pan but all crumbled up. Even crumbled up results are still edible, but lack the high-quality appearance seen in fine restaurants.

9.      Now sprinkle some grated, sharp cheddar cheese on top of the eggs and recover for a moment and allow the cheese to melt. When it is satisfactorily gooey, flip the now toasted disc and any of the errant egg white up on top of the egg.

10.  And one more idiosyncratic flare can now be added. Spread a thin coating of peach jam on top! Strawberry also works, but I grew up raising eggs and do not like to see red intermingled with my eggs!

11.  Enjoy, with loud groanings!

12.  It is now time to go back over to the stove and turn off the burner! Leave the dirty dishes for your wife so she is impressed at your industry so early on a Saturday morning!

I wonder if that was what Microsoft had in mind with their welcome screen?

The Freedom of the Autobahn

The Freedom of the Autobahn

October 29, 2011

The other Sunday I taught the youth on the passage Romans 14. This is a passage that could be taken a lot of ways. It is all about how we are to exercise our spiritual liberty within the framework of caring for and understanding those around us. About how we can remain teachable and sensitive to the feelings of the weaker brother, or even the stronger brother. But the point I decided I would try to drive home to the youth was the contrasting message in verse 10. It stands there in the center of the chapter and tersely states that “we shall all stand before God’s judgment seat.”

I told the class about my recent trip to Germany and the thrills of driving on the autobahn at over 200 KPH. The freedom of knowing I did not have to worry about getting pulled over for going too fast was exhilarating. It gave the act of driving a whole new thrill. I didn’t even bother to follow the speed limits in those areas where it was posted because I was enjoying the freedom of the open road so much. Or at least I was until I came home and was talking with a friend who had recently traveled in Germany. He had been receiving a string of very expensive tickets after being photographed in his rental car barreling through various speed zones at high rates of speed. A sense of deep foreboding came over me. I had been driving in complete ignorance of the roadside cameras. How many tickets were being processed in my name? I tried to take comfort in the thought that surely they would not hold me responsible if I was ignorant of the fact that I was being watched. Was the German government even powerful enough to hunt me down and enforce the penalty? But in the end I just came to dread the mailbox. Maybe I could unregister my address from the postal service!

But then I had a marvelous discovery. On the bottom of the Visa contract, buried in the fine print, it said not to worry about traffic fines levied against people that rented cars using their Visa cards. Visa would pay all such penalties. They would do this just because they liked me!

Ok, it didn’t really say that! That was just wishful thinking! Visa was not going to pull me out of my troubles! But that idea did illustrate for me, and hopefully for the youth, that we are not just going through this life without someone who is watching over us. “For it is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment,” it ominously states in Hebrews 9:27. When I asked the kids if they wanted to live forever, the kids all raised their hands. But none of them seemed to have a realistic plan of how to achieve that goal. None of them had a working plan for escaping the judgment of God upon their lives and behavior. At least they didn’t if they hadn’t accepted the very real plan of salvation offered in the Bible. And this plan was not one of wish fulfillment. It was a tried and true plan that has been experienced and used throughout the last 2000 years –“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” Romans 10:13 . And in this case, the one backing up this marvelous, grace-filled offering is doing it for love. It is not because they are obligated to do so. It is just for the love of it. Something Visa would never be caught dead doing.

But it is worthwhile to reflect a bit more upon the freedom of the autobahn. Yes, there is freedom. But it comes at a steep price. To drive in Germany requires a very extensive and expensive time of training. All who drive on the autobahn obey very strict codes of behavior. One must never pass on the right. One must always yield the lane to a faster car coming up behind them. The Audi that flashes its headlights at you as it approaches from the rear at a closing speed of over 120 KPH must not be ignored! Text messaging at 200 KPH is not tolerated. And speed limits, when they are posted, must be obeyed. Yes, there is freedom, but it is a tightly controlled and ordered freedom. This is no free-for-all. Nor is the freedom in Christ that is so passionately spoken of in Romans 14 a freedom from all constraints. It is a freedom that places us under the loving constraints of God himself.