Acting on Principle

I had these two friends in college… I had other friends, but the three of us spent a lot of time together. We’ll call these two friends Lee and Karl. Lee got irritated at unusual things sometimes. Someone (usually me) would move his chair or leave something laying around, and it really got under his skin. So sometimes I would ask Lee what the big deal was, why these things bothered him so much, and he would say, “It’s the principle of the thing.”

One day, Karl pulled me aside and he said, “it drives me crazy when Lee says ‘it’s the principle of the thing.’” Honestly, at the time, I didn’t understand why. Principles are a good thing, so why shouldn’t Lee act on principles, but then I started wondering what principles Lee was acting on. What principle is it that applies to leaving a chair where you found it? Maybe there is a principle that relates to respecting property, but moving a chair doesn’t necessarily imply disrespecting property.

It made me start wondering whether my “principles” could truly be called principles. For example, I had my own issues with Lee. He tended to drown other people’s opinions out with his own. He was so clear about his preferences that some of our friends didn’t have a chance to voice their preferences. This started bugging me, so I began opposing Lee in all  kinds of things. I would argue with him not because I really disagreed with him, but because I was tired of him constantly getting his way. I decided to present the opinions of the silent majority who must have disagreed with him. Looking back, I can see that I got into those arguments because I was irritated by Lee. At the time, I would have told you that loud people shouldn’t always get their way. Somebody should stick up for the quiet people, but honestly what kind of a principle is that?

There’s something wrong with this picture. Lee and I both tried to veil our ignoble behavior behind a pleasant façade of “principles.” The issue here isn’t genuine principles. The issue is personal preferences masquerading as universal principles. Most (or maybe even all) bad behavior is justified somehow. I am an expert at rationalizing anything questionable that I do and papering over selfishness with flimsy morality. When the man who wanted to live forever asked Jesus what to do, Jesus told him to love. People seem to be better at recognizing the absence of love than the presence of bad moral reasoning. Which is easier, to only do what you can justify using ethical principles, or to devote your feelings, thoughts, being, and actions exclusively to love?

Memories

One of the bathroom sink faucets was dripping, so I crawled into the cabinets underneath today to try to see what was up.

One day when I came back from a VBS at church, I found the ceiling, floor, bed, books, and everything else in my bedroom were wet. Not only was everything wet, there was also a gaping hole in my ceiling where my dad had broken through to try to replace the leaky pipes. Apparently someone had taken a shower in the upstairs bathroom and the drainage had leaked through the ceiling into my bedroom. He couldn’t find the leak under the bathtub though, so for several years we went without the upstairs shower/bath and I had a section of poorly patched ceiling in my room. Finally, several years later, we opened up the ceiling again to figure out what was really going on. My dad watched as I ran the shower water upstairs and someone else stood on the stairs to relay messages like “start the water!” and “stop the water!” There was no leak when I ran the shower. I came down and we had a conference. I said it might be the overflow drain in the side of the tub that was leaky instead of the regular drain in the bottom. Everyone else said that couldn’t be because the original leak had been caused by a shower, so the bathtub wouldn’t have been full. The rest of the plumbing team humored me though, so I went and filled up the tub. And there it was. The water started pouring out of my bedroom ceiling! As it turns out, we didn’t need to open up my ceiling. The parts for the repair were only about $10 and we were able to fix it from the topside of the tub.

Yesterday, someone I know was trying to mess with me. First she was whispering to another girl and inserting my name loud enough for me to hear. I’ve done this to other people before. It’s funny because people are so quick to notice their own name, so you don’t have to say it very loudly to get their attention. Then after that as I was walking past her, she said “Wait where are you going!?” Apparently I had a look of surprise and horror on my face. Now it sounds ridiculous. She really used a tone like something terrible was going to happen if I kept going though.

I was in Spanish 102 with Doctora Jarvis. Some people don’t really like her. She can be kind of intense, but if you understand her sense of humor, her class is pretty fun. She would have us sing songs like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” en español and then say “The Tabernacle Choir you are not darlings.” Or if she was telling us about a mistake that she found particularly horrifying, she would threaten that students found in violation of her grammatical edict would be “shot in the parking lot at dawn.” Then sometimes, she would ask us a question about English grammar in order to compare it to Spanish grammar. When she found the classroom was filled with blank stares, she would point to herself and say “foreigner,” then point to us, “native speakers, it’s your language, not mine.” Anyway, one time she was trying to compare two different words that both translate to “full” in English I think. So she said to me, “hay siete mujeres en su coche. Una mujer muy, muy bonita dice, ‘¿hay espacio?’ ¿Que dices a ella?” This scenario of six beautiful women in my car is particularly funny because at the time I was driving the notorious Ghetto-mobile, a white ‘95 Dodge Caravan with six passenger seats. My face probably turned red at this point, which I’m sure was Doctora Jarvis’s purpose in choosing this scenario for me. “el coche está lleno.” I said, using our vocabulary word for full. She looked at me with a disappointed expression on her face and went on to the next example. I’m pretty sure I got the phrase correctly, but I think she expected a more charming response. She really like Hugh Jackman… I don’t think Hugh Jackman would turn away a pretty girl just because he ran out of seatbelts.

My dresser has too much stuff on it. I started moving some things around today to clear it off, without really thinking about the row of books which has too many books on it. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I caught three books just beginning to free fall, as the stone polar bear bookend tumbled into the soft carpet with a thud. In my head, I said to myself “nice reflexes.” Then I went to my computer to start writing a blog post that I knew I would title “memories.”

There’s a scene in Spider-Man where Peter Parker is sitting in a cafeteria. MJ walks past him and conveniently slips on a puddle of some kind of cafeteria goop. In a flash, Peter spins around, catches MJ, her tray and all her food without spilling anything. “Nice reflexes” she says and then walks away.
Once a glass fell off a table and I caught it before it hit the ground. Some girl said to me, “nice reflexes.” It made my day.

Broken Blood

Here at Wheaton we occasionally have an event called all-school communion. Basically it’s an evening worship service for anyone at the school. Of course, partaking in communion is a part of the service. Chaplain Kellough, who we like to call Chappy K, passes out the elements to pairs of servers who go throughout the chapel. The first server holds a basket of bread, and another holds a cup of wine (well, it’s actually juice). A line forms down an aisle in front of the first server and the person at the front of the line picks up a piece of bread as the server says, “the body of Christ, broken for you.” The person then dips the bread into the wine (this method is called intinction) as the second server says, “the blood of Christ, shed for you.”

A good friend of mine happens to be a student chaplain and for the last all-school he asked me if I would be willing to help serve communion. I agreed to be a part of it, so I showed up, listened to some basic instructions and took the glass of wine to one of the stations. In case you didn’t catch it, my job was to hold a glass and say repeatedly, “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” On average, I probably paused for about three seconds between repetitions and I may have said those word to about a hundred people. I’m mentioning the repetition because I expected it to become mundane or banal after the fifth or sixth repetition.

I confess I was a bit self-conscious. I knew some people heard me say the same thing several times, so I tried to change my vocal tone or inflections or pauses a bit to make my seven words more meaningful. It’s a good trick while practicing lines for a play to exaggerate different words to draw different emphases and variations in meaning to understand a sentence or phrase in a few different ways. “The blood of Christ, shed for you” means something slightly different from, “The blood of Christ, shed for you.” As I was saying this phrase repeatedly in different ways, my perspective on these words changed, not as much on their meaning but on their function.

As I held the cup, and offered it to people, I was telling them that Jesus’ blood had been shed for them. It was a greatly abridged version of the gospel. I started realizing what an honor it is to tell people that Jesus blood was shed for them. As I saw each face, I got to tell that person individually what the Son of God had done for them. What I felt was shockingly fulfilling and satisfactory. Of course, I wasn’t providing anything. I just stood in an aisle holding a cup. I just got to be the one who held  it out to them and see their faces and tell them that Christ had provided for them. I can’t think of anything I’ve done that’s more important than that.

Over spring break, I went to Denver with a group from Wheaton. We worked with some different ministries in the Denver area. One of them was called Christ’s Body. They opened their doors around 10 AM, served breakfast, had a Bible Study, served lunch, and closed up around 3:00 PM. A girl named Sarah and I stood behind a counter serving oatmeal for breakfast and stroganoff for lunch. I think the name of the place made me start thinking about my experience serving communion. It struck me that I was doing the same thing. I hadn’t provided the food, but I got to hold it out and see the faces of the people receiving it.

I’m not sure where Christ’s Body was. I mean the church is Christ’s Body, but the bread is, but then, when we serve the needy, we serve Christ… Do we offer Christ’s Body to Christ’s Body? Maybe. What I do know is that Christ is in it. When we serve other people we serve Christ. When we serve other people we do the work of Christ.

If Jesus was alive today, what would he be doing? Probably something pretty similar to what he did before. If Jesus was hungry would you give him your food? I sure hope so! If Jesus asked you to do him a favor, to do something he would have done anyway, but he knew you could do it, so he asked you to step in for him, would you do it? Serving the needy is incredible because you serve God in two different ways, in two different directions. You do his good work  from him and to him. This is profound.

Looking Forward

I’ve written about trajectories, which relate to human perspective of the future. And I’ve written about pain and healing, a perspective on the past. Now I’m thinking about a perspective on the present in light of the past and the future, specifically about decision making, or picking a trajectory after something painful. My dad’s advice for resolving disagreements usually included an obvious statement that always caught me off guard. He would tell me that I couldn’t control other people and what they did, but that I could only control what I did. It always caught me because I wanted justice. I did want to make someone else treat me the way I wanted to be treated. I was completely focused on what the other person should do to change, and the decisions they should have made. But that saying was undeniably true. My brain was wired into my body. I could control my own actions, but my wireless signal wasn’t strong enough to make someone else do what I wanted them too (thank God). Now it is ;) but that’s another story.

When I’m in a situation I don’t like, I still want to make someone else change. I want them to care about what I care about and want what I want (which is usually me having a nice day). Once I close down that option I become pretty sober. Of course all the best outcomes (the ones that make me have a nice day) sort of sizzle away. I’m left with this set of new decisions and outcomes that I don’t like as much.

1. Throw a tantrum: a good go-to option for people who like attention and don’t mind the appearance of absolute immaturity.

2. Get revenge: sneakier is better in this case. It usually works out best if I can convince myself that it was an accident, so I don’t have to deal with a guilty conscience.

3. Convince the other person they were wrong: Of course this doesn’t change the past, and it probably won’t change the future, but if I can convince that person I was in the right, then I can be vindicated and it can be shown that I was not at fault at least.

4. Blame myself: It’s best to find very small mistakes that no one would really blame me for. This way people are able to see that I really did everything pretty much right, but they can also see how admirably I can accept blame.

5. Decide this was really what I wanted to begin with: If dignity is important to you, there’s nothing worse than realizing that you are completely out of control. This move keeps me in the driver’s seat.

As I was writing these five options, I realized that these all are attempts to control other people or at least their view of me. You might not be surprised that I don’t actually recommend any of these. It really does take me a while to work all the way to an option that doesn’t try to control other people. When I finally get there, I still don’t like it, but it finally feels right, kind of like a vitamin C tablet or a plateful of kale. It takes wanting what’s best for the other person. It takes wanting what’s best for myself in a month or a year. It takes patience and self-forgetfulness. It requires the determination to give up. It takes the view that the next decision is more important than the last, and that the future that might be is more important than the present that could have been.

Quiescent Quintet

I

when i underestimate the wind,

my foot slips

earth slides

beneath my feet

the petal hits metal

rose against steel

II

anther everything

the stamen came

bud the stem was soiled

you can’t calyx it

or draw my pistils

forsaking style and stigma

III

smile like a simile

represent the happy ones

become a metaphor for the contented

surpass the middle distance

see past the hyperopiates

remember you were happier

IV

lemons sour the moment

i don’t want to smell it

only chew

never eat the grey

it will wake you up in autumn

snow weight

V

we burned the tables on them

rhythm drowned beneath the

beat and feet of shadows

outlined ruins

cramp little  toes

Keep my arms inside!

Trajectory

I’ve spent a good bit of time tutoring people in the last few years, mainly in physics.  Pretty much every student who takes physics comes across problems about projectile motion eventually, and pretty much everyone struggles at least a little. Here's how it usually goes. The guy I've been working with will come to me with a problem. Something like a rock or baseball, or ewok, that gets picked up and chucked into the air by a catapult, an arm, or a stormtrooper. Then eight seconds after the ewok is tossed into the air at just such a speed, the Death Star explodes. But if the Death Star blows up first, then the stormtrooper will be stunned and the ewok has time to sneak away. Also if the ewok is falling too fast when it hits the ground it will pop. The ewok only survives if it hits the ground in more than eight seconds and if it's going less than 12 m/s.

Usually people get annoyed at this part.  "How in the world am I supposed to know how fast the ewok fell, and how long it was in the air?" 
That's when I get to tell him the good news.  "This is a projectile motion problem"  I say. "What does that mean?"
  "It means I can use this equation" he says as he flips through a notebook filled with equations, diagrams, and sketches of pokémon, "Here it is."
"Great, now what does this equation tell us?"
  "It tells us that physics is stupid." I'm tempted to start a speech about symmetry, elegance, and the marvels of reliable physical laws, but I restrain myself.
"Well, that's not what I was thinking. What else does it tell us?" He moves his head to the side to see if the secrets of the equation will become visible if viewed from a slightly different angle.
"It tells us... that the time, speed and position are all related."
"Yeah, which times, speeds, and positions?" 
"Well, there's a term for the initial time and another for the final."
"So the final speed depends on the initial speed?"
"No" he says quickly, glances at my face, then the page and then "yes" he answers slowly.
“Alright, if we know everything about the way the ewok is thrown into the air, what can we figure out about the way it lands.”
“I don’t know. I guess we could figure out something, but I’m not sure what.” 
“Here’s the nice thing about projectiles. If we know everything about the ewok when it is thrown into the air, we can figure out everything about the ewok when it lands.”
”How is that possible? Anything could happen to the ewok in the air that might change the way it lands.”
”That’s true, but if everything happens normally, we can predict what will happen very precisely.”

Physicists like projectiles because they are predictable.  They assume that gravity will be the only thing affecting a projectile once it has been launched, so they know exactly where an object will land after it has left the ground.  Not only do they know where it will land, they also know where it will be and how fast it will be going. A single projectile follows a single trajectory. It doesn’t deviate. If it starts out the same way, it will follow the same exact path, every single time.

Vocabulary.com says that a “trajectory is the path of an object through space, or the path of life that a person chooses.”  Isn’t that interesting?  We use the same word for a predetermined path of a rock from a catapult, as a person’s choices about their job, car, family and home. What does this mean? Birth is just like being shot out of a cannon? We get fired out at high velocity, then we fall into a nice little net at the end if all the calculations are right? If this is the case, all we have to do is smile and try to make the audience think we aren’t scared to death as we fly, float, and fall through our careering existence.  This metaphor has been engrained for so long, that it made it into the dictionary.  It happens to be very convenient for me, because it makes the similarity easier to point out in a blog post, but at the same time it’s sort of shocking.  It’s a little bit dehumanizing.  And it’s kind of sad.  Our lives are like trajectories in some ways.  They can be predictable, and the past and present do help us to predict our own futures, but thankfully, that isn’t the whole story.

When a high school student chooses a college, that decision does affect her future.  There are consequences beyond the first four years.  She will have different skills, different career options, a different friend group, and different ideas about the way the world runs.  However, these outcomes will be highly unpredictable.  You might think that finishing college will put you on a path to making more money in the long run, and statistically, this isn’t unreasonable, but there are a lot of exceptions.  Bill Gates would have made less money if he had finished college for example.

Projectile motion may be predictable, but not all physical systems are. Chaotic systems are situations where the outcome is pretty impossible to predict. Even if we know a lot about the present and the past.  Think about weather. We are always surprised by weather. We have centuries of data to look at and we have great maps to show us the current state of things. Meteorologists are right a lot of the time. But I’ve worn a jacket on a day with a 80 degree high, and I’ve looked at a 0% precipitation forecast before encountering a downpour, our best predictions are not reliable in complicated, chaotic situations.

I was talking to a friend a couple months ago and he said to me something like, “I know I’ve made mistakes, but I’ve decided never to make those mistakes again, because I know God has a plan for me, and every time I make a mistake, I’m giving up part of that plan.”  This jumped out at me, because I’ve thought this before, and I’ve heard lots of people say it.  It’s like saying, “when I was born, I had the potential to have the political impact of Abraham Lincoln, the revival impact of Billy Graham and the social impact of MLK Jr., but ever since I’ve been slowly trading away all these opportunities and now all the “good plan material” God has to work with for my life is just enough to become a cardboard box assembly worker (no offence intended to box assemblers), and then if I make any more mistakes, I’ll probably have to become a panhandling hobo.” 

Here’s a fact: your decisions today impact your life tomorrow. 
Here’s another one: if you’re tone deaf, you aren’t going to be an opera singer.
One more: If you have a sex addiction you’re gonna have a really tough time as a pastor.

However, if you were betrayed by your family, sold as a slave in a foreign country, worked hard until you had earned some respect, were unjustly accused of a crime and then imprisoned, you wouldn’t expect that in a few years you would have a position of high authority, save a country, and restore good relationships with your family members.

That’s what happened to Joseph.  No one at the time would have predicted those things.  Along the way, anyone reasonable would have easily predicted that he would be worked to death and die lonely, forgotten, and unvalued.  The paths we take affect our lives in unpredictable ways.  I think we need a new metaphor.

In physics, we refer use the word chaotic to describe systems that are unpredictable.  There is an element of chaos in life, but it hasn’t dominated my experience.  I like the idea of narratives because they have rational connections between events, but they also have shocking twists. Of course, they are intended to imitate human experience, so the similarities shouldn’t be surprising.

In the end, life is a journey.  There’s no other way around it.  We make some decisions, but the paths we walk on leave just a few available options.  Sometimes things get dark, but sometimes light is most meaningful in small servings.  In a journey, you pick a destination.  You might select a course, but in a good journey, the first path you choose never works out so well.  You end up going places you hadn’t wanted to go and finding strength you hadn’t needed before.

Universal Details

Physics covers the biggest and smallest things in the universe.  The last physics class I took, "Particle Physics and Cosmology" literally covers the smallest things in the unverse that we know of: particles; and the biggest thing: the cosmos or the universe itself.  The difference between the scales of these is ridiculously enormous, and we people are smack dab in the middle between the unimaginably large galaxies and the unbelievably small molecules.  Just a few meters tall in a world of femtometers and parsecs.  It's a crazy picture to wrap your brain around, and it makes you wonder just how good our perspective is on what's really going on around us.  

It's amusing how we sometimes attach significance to physical size and sometimes we don't.  A distant planet or nebula may make an awesome desktop background, but if I could choose between letting the planet melt or a 4 cm bolt in my car's engine, I'd keep the bolt.  The earth is hardly even mentionable on a cosmic scale.  From any unbiased point of view, it shouldn't even be noticed.  BUT as far as we know (except for a few brief vacations into orbit or to the moon) it has been the location where every story of human life has taken place.  The earth used to seem so massive and all-encompassing and stable, but we're really living in a thin shell of compacted carbon that suspends us between a ball of burning magma and an infinite sphere of vacuous space.  Frightened?  Well just think how easy some kind of cosmic accident would be that could destroy all of human life.  When Jonathan Edwards said you were sustained above the reach of the fires of hell by a thread and God's grace, he didn't even know that two miles below your feet would be a big boiling boulder of liquid fire.  

I think that everyone should learn a little cosmology.  We know about the sun, the moon, the solar system, but there's some really incredible information out there about stars and nebulae and space itself that isn't hard to understand, but it's really amazing.  I might actually post on it again, just because it's so incredible and thought provoking.  If people did start learning more about the universe, I think it would have two effects (among other things).

First, I think it would increase the awe that we have in the world around us.  Christians should attribute that awe directly to God.  I think basking in the glory of God's creation is a first rate form of worship.  It's beautifully biblical.  Check out the 8th and 19th Psalms.  When I think about how big the universe is, it's so humbling (honestly I don't know why people always say they feel humbled when they get big awards, those are the kinds of times I feel least humble.  Knowing that you're smaller in the galaxy than a bacterium in a rhinoceros, that's humbling.  The great thing about science is that it makes the doctrine of creation an increasingly big deal.  We believe God made everything that exists.  That hasn't changed, but our definition of "everything" has changed enormously.  The more we know about what and how much God created, the more credit we can attribute to Him.

Second, I think cosmology undermines the humanist ideas that we have.  This isn't the normal definition of humanism, but I think of humanism as the belief that the universe exists solely for the purpose of humanity.  Even though humanity is important, I think the fact that God created an enormous universe and only gave us a teeny tiny corner for our playground should hint to us that God had other plans for the universe even beyond his incredible plans for the earth.  Maybe there are aliens, or maybe he just likes staring at nebulae and supernovae in his spare time, I don't know, but if anything stirs my imagination, it's wondering what in the cosmos God is doing with the rest of the universe.