Top Three

Since I haven't posted in a few days, I'll just give the highlights of the last week. Here are my top three.

3) Working Out/Eating Better: This was week two of my and Katie's diet. It's still early on, but we're doing the best we've done in a long while. We feel better, and we feel better about ourselves. That little cloud is not hanging over my spiritual life anymore. It's great. I started working out with the P90X program. It kicked my tail last week (the X stood for eXtremely sore). This week, however, has still been difficult but much better.

2) Gracie's Question: Gracie asked me a good question this morning that had occurred to her the day before in chapel. The question was "We say that Jesus gives us eternal life, but don't we already have eternal life either in heaven or in hell?" My answer: In one sense we do all have eternal life already. This is true if by eternal life you mean eternal existence from here on out. But we are saying something more than this when we speak of Jesus giving eternal life. Here, "eternal" is a quality of life, not endless longevity of life. Eternal life is a quality of life that is characterized by love, joy, peace, goodness, beauty, trust, etc. This is why only Jesus can give it. On the other hand, life without Jesus will ultimately be marked by selfishness, hatred, pride, loneliness, fear, etc. When you really look at it, who would really call this "life" at all? So there is an eternal existence that is really a kind of death. This is what Jesus saves us from.

1) Seeing Back in Time: I learned in my Stars and Galaxies class that we can actually see back into time. Sound unbelievable? Check this out. When the Hubble telescope takes pictures of other galaxies, it is taking pictures of objects millions of light-years away. A light-year is the measurement for distance based on how far light can travel in one year. (For a frame of reference, light can circle around the entire earth eight times in one second.) To say that an object is millions of light-years away is to say that the light by which we see the object had to travel millions of years in order to reach us. This means that whenever we look at such a galaxy or distant star, we are actually seeing the galaxy or star as it appeared millions of years ago. Thus, we are essentially seeing back in time. This also applies on a lesser scale to the stars that we see in the sky with our naked eyes. Any star that you can point out, theoretically may not even exist anymore in the current moment. It could have exploded a thousand years ago. We would not know it, however, until the light from that explosion travels through space and eventually reaches us.