Love, even for the Hypocrites

You will rarely catch me discussing religion in public, let alone online, but there comes a time for everything and this being the week after Easter, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the people around me. It actually started when a rude bicyclist with a "share the road, be considerate to cyclists" sign cut off a car and illegally run a red light in oncoming traffic. So with that inspiration for the title, here goes.

There was a time when I was known for getting into arguments with people about the Bible. Well-known among all my friends as the guy who read through the whole Bible and practically memorized half of it by age 13, I was a strong Christian who refused to believe anything in the world that couldn't be proven by science or wasn't written in the good book. Of course, as time went on, I began to see the polarizing effect that this attitude can have on other friends and Christians, about the same time that I began to really see the big picture that is life and to go through Luther's writings which focused on the big things in Christianity: "solo scripturo, solo venia, and solo fides". The combination of these things helped open my eyes to God's all-encompassing love for us and the importance of his sacrifice to save us from ourselves.

I hate to see the Bible misquoted as much as I hate hearing the Lord's name used in vain (entirely different than cussing like a sailor), and there is nothing that angers me more than people who preach hatred to the sinner, claiming that their own righteousness is provided by God's forgiveness and their continued works on his behalf. God loves everyone equally and nothing could be further from the truth than to speculate that he hates some and is planning to send them to hell because they have sinned. Bear with me here and I will show you my Lutheran perspective on the issue.

My first encounter with said people was on MSU's campus. The irate preacher swung his Bible at passing students, calling down punishment from the sky on those who did not turn from their sinful ways of anger, sex (because he thought everyone who went to college fornicated regularly), drinking, drugs (he was probably more right about the percentage of occurrence in this crowd than he knew) and smoking. It was only a few days of this before I couldn't put up with it any longer and so I stopped to debate with him. He began waving the Bible around in my face, refusing to let me use it myself to show him verses, but citing every bit of anger God had ever poured out in the old testament. But my efforts were not to prove in vain because once one person took the time to stop, more students began to do the same and soon there were a half dozen of us standing there and another guy with a Bible was able to take some of the heat off of me. We continued to try and reason with this man but knew it to be pointless because he was unwilling to stop shouting long enough to listen. So I pulled everyone back (at this point we'd drawn a decent crowd) and I led a prayer for God to help the preacher to better share His true love with the students. Looking back at that day, I was pretty shocked with myself and from there a group of dedicated students created a group that went every day and prayed for this preacher until he was finally won over.

But things don't always go over that smoothly and some people just don't listen to reason; case in point, the Westboro Baptist Church. I bring them up because they recently got more than they were bargaining for in Mississippi. Originally I was just going to post that story and avoid detailed criticism of the group but it's unavoidable now that I've read their website which I will not quote here. So I looked up Leviticus 20:23 and God obviously references abhorring the despicable people that lived in the country before. But you have to take this all in context. These people were trying to intermarry with the Israelites and God needed to separate them out somehow. He needed to promote morals and laws in a nation for which he planned someday to sacrifice His son to save. So he told them to drive the enemy out. And the laws He put into place then are superseded by the loving covenant He established with His son.

God is not a God of hate though, he has always been a God of love and it has always been His plan to send His son to die for us (John 3:16). And it's a good thing too, because if not, everything that we did would always end us up in the same place: condemnation (James 2:10). Of course, there are some people who argue there are some sins that lead to death (1 John 5:16-17) but again if you look at a larger sequence of the verses, God is clearly talking about sins where he kills you, the proverbial lightning from the sky. But if he does that, it's his prerogative and not our job to judge someone else. No sin is greater than another and even if it was, it's our responsibility to spread the good news that nobody is being judged by the old deal between God and the Israelites; that's the whole point of Easter! It's our job to do His service, helping those around us, and to not worry about the reward or what place we have in heaven.

So share the love and have a great week!

Picasa Album!

I just wanted to share with you all that I've added one more thing to the side of this blog. I was realizing recently just how many pictures I've taken over the years and some of them are actually pretty good. It's a shame to have good pictures and keep them all to myself, so I'm gonna post them onto a public Picasa album (program I definitely recommend!). Check out the photos and enjoy my work as I upload them semi-chronologically from when I first got a digital camera. I'm totally all about sharing these around, but please be respectful of my work/fun. I hope you enjoy how beautiful nature looks through my eyes. You'll find the link on the sidebar.

Messing with SASquatch

For those of you unfamiliar with the beef jerky commercials, I've included a couple embedded videos. The basic direction of these ads is that people get up the courage to do something which seems stupid to normal people and then get payback from the beast similar to Bigfoot that they are trying to do these things too. (As a side note, Bigfoot's apparently dead).





Now for the greater amount of you who don't know, SAS is a computer program that I am beginning to become acquaintances with. An acronym for Statistical Analysis Software (or something similar), it is a huge program that over the years has evolved from just simple statistical work to a broad data management system. It pretty much dictates the value of your research to the world. An amazing little bit of trivia, but here as students at a contributing university to the SAS project in the beginning, we still get it for dirt cheap rather than the thousands that corporations pay for it.

So in an effort to understand this significant program which will be vital to any scientific acceptance of my labor in graduate school, I've started taking a class to try and learn how to speak the language. And I'm not making that up, we're really learning to speak a new language by learning how to type in programs and commands. SAS takes commands in its own type of sentences, phrases and word codings and a puzzle piece to using it correctly is speaking that language. If only there were a Rosetta Stone for it.

I don't know how many of my readers recall anything about typing in programs or commands, but before the days of what we have now and clicking to get what we want like lab rats in a light bulb experiment, we used to have to type in the commands we wanted just to get the games we wanted to play. Letters on the keyboard meant commands in the games and we were pretty happy with all of that. Well, it's kinda like that experience all over again and from that standpoint, I really enjoy being able to type in commands again and see the result on the output as if I really knew what was going on in the computer program's "mind". What I don't enjoy is that every time I start messing with SAS it turns around and slaps me in the face.

Example. Our professor encourages groups to do homework together so I make a pilgrimage to the other Animal Science grad office every day or two to discuss their homework. As part of our homework we have to submit the coding that we used to get the answers. While I've noticed that everyone else submits their proposed codes, I'm one of the only that submits my actual output from running the codes. And it lists the days total lines from the work alongside the code in output. Of course, nothing goes very smoothly and my professor thought it was pretty funny to see that on the very first homework I went through nearly 1000 lines of coding for only 8 problems! That's how many errors I had.

And then there's the simple fact that sometimes it just doesn't work. I get a little ambitious and try to punch in a few of the extras or label my graphics and all the sudden my functional programming went hormonal up the wazoo and I get a baker's dozen of error messages written in a language that might as well be Swahili to me. And even the online help software doesn't help that much since most of is for the cheap method of data analysis with button clicks, etc., rather than just punching in code like I'm doing. I often am reminded as I type code of the old "punctuation substitution" concept born a few years back.

So I have to do it in little bits at a time. It takes me about 45 minutes to get burned out on it and I juggle in and out of the homework all the time. If you haven't noticed, my blog posts have risen dramatically since Spring break ended and I started up with this class and its related homework. Just a little peek into my day at the desk.

First Visit to the National Zoo

I thought it'd be fun to take a short break from my studies and elaborate on one of the new things I saw this year when I went to DC with Amanda. The National Zoo is quite different from the Columbus Zoo in a number of ways, and yet I think that I would put both of them on a comparable level as far as quality of zoo.


For starters, the Columbus Zoo is a much bigger zoo, spread out with more walking and bigger exhibits. But the National Zoo does a great job of utilizing the space they have with exhibits that maximize viewing area and allow the animal to behave in many ways it would normally. As an example, I include pictures of the lions and tigers who are housed inside (undoubtedly in small pens) but are rotated on exhibit outside so that they get the opportunity to exercise and do their own thing.

They also used the hill to shape their zoo and put multiple levels into it. The whole idea was very similar to the things I see on Amanda's now mass-recorded House Hunter's show on TV. Many of these shows highlight the methods that people use such as coloring, lighting and multiple levels to turn small houses into places that feel and function big. The pandas were tucked back into a cove, and the elephants even had a bridge over them which I thought was pretty sweet. There seemed to be a real focus on animal enrichment even though the facilities were smaller and the habitat development was really impressive. Of course, this is the national zoo after all.

The best thing a zoo can do for impressions though is to be visited on a beautiful day. A bit breezy and chilly, but the sun was a welcome change to dreary Ohio, and all the animals seemed to agree. In fact, the red pandas were apparently having too much fun for children, but that didn't stop people from crowding around and trying to see in the exhibit anyhow. I thought the sign was pretty straightforward and Amanda and I headed straightaway to the real Pandas anyhow. All in all, the zoo was a great experience and it was a fun place to visit for the first time with an old friend and Amanda. I swear I could go to zoos all the time.

Soap Cartel

I was browsing the news today for the first time in a couple of weeks and sifting through the wars overseas and the budget that isn't even conceivable anymore, I found an article on Proctor and Gamble which quickly caught my attention. It's not that I have anything against the company, any more than I have something against ivy league universities, but the elitist experience is hard to shake off and P and G is sadly intertwined in my memory in this way and it will take a long time to clear that up.

When I lived in Europe there was a general trend to wash everything in one load, or more often not even to wash clothes that often in the first place. At first I thought it was laziness until I went to the store and couldn't find detergent in any type of affordable price range. I couldn't believe the cost of detergent and quickly converted to this one load fits all mentality. Reading about P and G being fined hundreds of millions for a soap cartel helps me picture just how screwed up the soap industry is over there.

Conference on USDA Blog (duplicate post)

This is just a brief note to send you to the USDA blog in order to read more about the secretaries' visit to the National 4-H Conference. My apologies for being tardy to share this but there's a lot I'm still catching up on.

Two comments: 1) If you look at the picture, you can see Lindsey, Lauren and myself right in the center. Since I was triggering the questions during the Q & A, I'm right on the aisle. 2) If you look at the first comment on the blog below, you probably question the motive of the commenter just as much as I did. 4-H encompasses all ethnicities and there was a very diverse group there as alwayshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif. But this is because it reflects the population of youth involved in 4-H and the welcoming community that is 4-H. If the commenter wanted to increase the number of Latinos in 4-H, he would need to actively encourage youth to join 4-H. However, what he really seemed to be saying to me was that he wished they could have been there to promote their organization to the USDA.

Back from National 4-H Conference (duplicate post)

One of the first things that I did when I got back from conference was to summarize in a word document all of the thoughts swarming my head. It's funny that until I sat back and read this document afterwards, I never had realized the amount of emotional investment I've made not just into 4-H but even into just one facet of the organization like the National 4-H Conference. I've now been there 5 times in the last 6 years in a progression of roles. Every conference has its high points and its deepest frustrations, but truth be told, I wouldn't trade one minute of any of it for something else (even as much as I missed being home with Amanda, who had a really rough week without me).

I know I've posted before how proud I am of the young people (at least younger than me) that I work with in 4-H, but once again I just want to applaud these exceptional youth who volunteered a week off of work, a week without classes, knowing the sacrifice, the lack of rest, the hard work they would put in, and the harder work they would put in trying to catch back up on their lives after conference. But knowing all of this, they dove into the conference with zeal and exceeded all of my expectations. I'm proud of you guys, just like I was proud in the past to be one of you. You are all going to go great places and if I can ever help you get there, just call.

This was also a learning experience and a new challenge for me. I've never been responsible for that much education and training for someone else. In less than a week, I learned much more about material delivery (what worked AND what didn't) and advising without answering questions. I also got to see how our pre-conference planning could have been improved to allow for more sleep among the facilitators. It had never occurred to me that lack of sleep could be a problem, but not everyone's into that, I suppose, so I learned to broaden my viewpoint once again. National 4-H was very kind in providing Lauren and I this opportunity and for engaging us in discussions afterwards as well. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that working with Lauren was great as well. Throughout this whole process we were often seemingly telepathically connected and we provided a good balance of leadership styles. It was a pleasure.

The only other thing I wanted to comment on was the increased professionalism that surrounded the conference this year. This started with the Sec. of Ag and the Sec. of Ed both giving a short talk and doing a short Q & A session with the delegates. Unlike many of these opportunities, the secretaries didn't shy away from the tough questions or use the answer time to elaborate on other issues not addressed in the question. Instead they spoke directly and openly with the delegates. I was really impressed by both secretaries and they helped set the tone for the conference of getting down to business. This carried over into the stakeholder presentations which were new this year. All of the delegates put a lot of hard work into these presentations of possible solutions to critical youth issues, which were then presented by the delegates to different government entities. It put a professional face on the youth within 4-H and I know that it really blew away the office that I was at during the presentations. Great things came out of the conference this year and I can only hope that this progress continues to future conferences.

Rear-ended

I knew it was an inevitability; statistics taught me that much. And I'm thankful to have gotten off so easily, but still the fact that it happened was a little frustrating. I remember when I first hit a car on the road, sliding a good 25 ft. on ice at an agonizing 5 mph before colliding with the man in front of me. He got out and was all pissy with me, telling me he didn't want to report it (probably didn't have insurance), but then at the stoplight he got back out and took pictures of my license plate, "in case he came down with whiplash". Remembering my gratitude for not being written up for a silly mistake and yet hoping not to be as much of a jerk as him, I maintained my composure pretty well today.

It was obvious he was going to hit me and in retrospect, I should've known better than to imagine he wouldn't. On the SB widening of Rt. 23 into 3, then 4 lanes, he zig-zagged back and forth, unsure of what lane would be fastest and never achieving getting ahead of anyone in any of them. He seemed to think that his brand-new Chevy was a Corvette, but it was definitely just a cheap, American car like most of the rest of us. After trying to cut around me on the left - unsuccessfully since there was never any space for him in the first place - he pulled back in behind me again, visually aggravated and tailing me like none other.

Then I got over into the right lane, pleased with how smoothly it had gone. Usually I have to cut someone off, but I had all the space in the world and he tried again to zoom up ahead of me but realized that as he ran out of room before Campus View, he needed to get in behind me where there was room. But as he accelerated over into the right lane, traffic stopped in front of me. It does this pretty often, so you have to be on your toes watching for impending disaster. Needless to say, the guy behind me failed to do that.

In a flash, my mind made a million observations and decisions I probably wouldn't have been able to list if given the scenario ahead of time. I braked to not hit the car in front of me, saw that the guy behind me had gunned it in severe over-zealousness, knew that I would be hit and resigned myself to it. Then I braked enough that I wouldn't be hit into the car in front of me, watched the guy behind me try to stop in time, and then released my brakes at the last moment so that I wouldn't be hit with my wheels locked. I rolled forward, didn't hit the car in front of me and made my way over the side of the road, just after the intersection.

If you've ever been where I'm talking about, you would know that this is a severely unpleasant place to be for very long. No way was waiting for a cop a good idea - lest we get hit by someone else - especially as I observed no damage to my own car. I reached up underneath, saw where he had hit and matched it to minor scratches on my car. He seemed resigned to the damage, offered to give me his insurance info and I asked him to sign a sheet I wrote up saying that it was all his fault. This being only my second ever traffic incident, I didn't know what else to do about it. I'm sure I could've held him there until he was cited for it, but remembering how I felt on that end of the bargain and hoping that I could just get out of there without being tagged by a passing semi, I decided to leave well enough alone. And that's how my morning went today.