Archive | February, 2014

A friend of mine who helped with publicity for The Gospel-Centered Woman shared with me a few resources for kids, knowing that my son was on the autism spectrum. It’s interesting to have a resource created by those with direct experience geared toward children on the spectrum. The first is a children’s storybook series about a real-life aspie superhero’s quest to be “normal” and a family who wants him to be anything but. This is an interactive APP for iOS (iPhone, iPad), Android (phones/tablets), Kindle Fire, Nook, PC, and Mac by Geek Club Books.

This app has an interactive storybook based on the real JMan, Jonathan Murphy, and his real life adventures growing up on the autism spectrum. Written by his sister, Molly Murphy, and narrated by Jonathan, the story is told by someone who sees his world from a very unique perspective. It promotes self-acceptance, awareness, and understanding for others who are different. It’s geared toward kids ages 5-11. It has some cool features, especially that you can change the superhero, JMan, into super-heroine, Jaycee. There is a secret notebook throughout with age-appropriate information on Aspergers Syndrome, being different, and bullying. There are options to have narration with word highlighting if a child isn’t interested in reading it to themselves. Here’s a link to the website for the app. This seems like a good resource for families with kids on the spectrum.

Another resource I want to share is more general. It’s called The God Puzzle. This is a workbook that is a great resource for teaching our children the overarching story of Scripture. I like the order of the lessons, which you can read through here. My boys and I are finishing up another set of lessons from Scripture, but I plan to dive into this workbook with them once we are done.

For so long in my own life, I thought of the Bible as a disjointed series of moral lessons. I was well into adulthood before I came to personally understand the connected, coherent story of the whole of Scripture. I’m excited about a resource that helps me, much like The Jesus Storybook Bible, give my boys a stronger foundation of understanding Scripture. I think I will benefit personally as well.

“If you’re regularly willing to give a critique, but not willing to take one, you’re not a leader, you’re a cynic.” – @edstetzer 

Matthew 18:4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Cynicism is the ugly side of discernment. According to Merriam-Webster, a cynic is someone who is “contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives.” Compare that to something we all desire, discernment. This good trait is “the ability to see and understand people, things, or situations clearly and intelligently.” Do you see the fine line between the two definitions? Our greatest strengths tend to be our greatest weakness. Discernment and cynicism are two sides of the same coin, and any of us who consider ourselves discerning need to be on guard against the other.

How do we foster the good character trait of discernment while protecting ourselves from its ugly counterpart, cynicism? I think the key is found in the quote from Ed Stetzer. The discerning person must be willing to seriously consider criticism of themselves. Back in the day at my Christian college, they called this being teachable.

There is a simple, age old problem that faces a discerning person when they are faced with critique or correction. It is pride. A discerning person likely struggles with personal pride more than anyone else. That’s a strong statement, but remember that the central thing about being a discerning person is that you accurately evaluate situations and people. You’re good at seeing through others’ true motives or the unintended consequences of poorly thought out choices. Discerning people are good at evaluating others, but that can trick them into thinking they are best at evaluating themselves. When someone comes to them with concerns or encouragement, the discerning person assigns the worst motives to them instead of the best, picks apart the person bringing the critique, and then moves from the good side of discernment to the bad side of cynicism. They trust in their discernment more than they trust the one speaking to them. That is the heart of pride.

Humility is a hard trait to foster in ourselves if we feel we are a discerning person. But the ability to receive criticism of ourselves may be the most important character trait of all, especially for a person gifted in discernment. The discerning person has a choice to make in a moment of criticism. Does our discernment define us? If we find our identity in that noble character trait, we actually set ourselves up for failure. But if Christ defines us rather than our ability to discern, then Christ will still define us when we are critiqued. Our identity can stand up to the fact that our discernment of ourselves failed and that we needed someone else to speak into our lives.

As it does at many points of life, a robust understanding of the gospel and our subsequent identity in Christ is the thing that equips us to live as humble, discerning people rather than proud cynics.

pa·ri·ah 

1. an outcast. 

2. any person or animal that is generally despised or avoided. 

3. a member of a low caste in southern India and Burma. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pariah

A few years ago, a friend in the process of divorce encouraged me to write on the topic of pariahs in the church. These are the believing women around us whose life circumstances make us uncomfortable – the Ruths and Naomis in our culture. Maybe they lost a child to death or are estranged from one in rebellion. Maybe they could never get pregnant in the first place. Perhaps their husband left them for another woman, or maybe their husband died. Perhaps they never got married and are heavily involved in their career. Whatever their life story, the thing that makes them feel like a pariah to others is that they don’t want a pariah’s life circumstances as their own. Perhaps their story plays to our fears for our own, and therefore we reject or avoid them. Of course, few would use the phrase pariah to describe someone in circumstances that we don’t want for ourselves, yet the larger church often treats women like they are outcasts if their life story doesn’t match the norm. Unspoken fears play out in real ways.

“If we embrace this divorced woman in our church, won’t other young women think divorce is an option when their marriage gets hard?”

“If we embrace this single, working mom, won’t other young moms be tempted away from raising their children at home?”

“I don’t want to enter into this widow’s suffering, because I don’t want to consider the possibility that one day I might face my own similar loss.”

In contrast, I’ve found deep comfort watching the overcoming faith of my limping friends enduring seasons of brokenness or loss. And I admit that I too have circumstances in my life that others may find uncomfortable, causing them to want to distance themselves from me. Whatever the loss, these struggles are not denials of God’s good plan for women! Any of us in such circumstances did not fall off the bandwagon of Biblical womanhood. Instead, the purity of God’s good plan for women becomes clearer as we hold on to faith in the midst of our losses. The enduring faith of “pariahs” motivates me when my own fears become my reality, and I am faced with my own unique set of circumstances that test my own faith.

Our understanding of Biblical Womanhood has to include such women. The divorced. The widow. The single mom. The working single mom. The single woman with no kids. Ruth and Naomi were as much God’s daughters created for His purposes when they were widowed without children as when they were married with them, right? Carolyn McCulley says in her new book, The Measure of Success: Uncovering the Biblical Perspective on Women, Work, and the Home, concerning her view of herself as a single woman in the church, “… I had been deriving more identity from an adjective (“single”) than a noun (“woman”), which was not the emphasis I saw in the Bible” (Preface, p. IX). Carolyn Custis James in her book, Half the Church, reminds us that most women in Third World countries where the majority of modern Christians now live would find our American, evangelical stereotype of Biblical womanhood completely foreign and often simply physically impossible. Whatever the Bible says to women, it should be as relevant to the single mom in an African hut as to a middle class American woman with a spouse who provides for her and her kids.

All of Scripture speaks to women, right?! But it’s good to also think through specific parts of Scripture that speak particularly of women. Genesis 1 and 2 speak of the woman created in the image of God as a strong helper after His example. Proverbs 31 gives wisdom about a woman in a very different context from our First World American one. Ephesians 5 gives a vision of womanhood empowered by the gospel to reclaim the image of God as He intended in perfection. How do these apply to any woman with any adjective? Single woman. Married woman. Divorced woman. Widowed woman. Woman with kids. Woman without kids. Working woman. Stay at home woman. When we remove all of the adjectives, God says something about us made in His image that transcends all the specific things that define us individually. Some of those individual characteristics give us status. Some of those characteristics make us feel like outcasts. Yet, God’s image in us transcends all of those adjectives. I am thinking today that Biblical womanhood is best understood when we understand it in our worst case scenarios. When we boil it down to what God most wants any of us to reflect about Himself regardless of the adjective in front of “woman” and then expand that back out to the specific circumstances in which we find ourselves, we are much better equipped to endure the waves of life that come at us at each stage as a woman after God’s own heart.

Ken Ham and Bill Nye recently debated the question: Is creation a viable model for origin? The whole thing annoyed me, mostly

because Ham didn’t stay focused on the heart of the question – the viability of intelligent design – and instead focused on young earth creationism. If you want to have an intelligent discussion on this in a secular, scientific forum, there is a way to do it, and it is not to go into the details of the first few chapters of Genesis, in my humble opinion. Before you get into HOW He created, you need to first establish the evidence that He created at all. There is a boatload of evidence to that point, but that was not the focus of what could have been an incredible opportunity to get people to simply consider the possibility.

It’s the first five words of Scripture – “In the beginning, God created ….” I’m not talking about a literal six-day view of creation. I’m not interested in the young-earth debate or proving there was an ark. I want to step back a little further and discuss simply the evidence that there is a God – the simple concept that used to be the foundation of the discussion on Intelligent Design. Are there scientifically observed things about our world that point to intelligence behind their origins? THAT is the question I wish Ham had debated. Ham could have won that debate without question, because the evidence is everywhere.

“Math is the language with which God wrote the Universe.” Galileo

I shall now delve into a tutorial on Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry. I am not an expert, but a long time ago at a National Council of Teachers of Mathematics convention, someone presented this topic to me, and I realized right then that this was where the heart of the discussion on the existence of God could be mathematically and scientifically founded. I was hooked, and I started doing my own study of the topic. I decided to teach what I could to my algebra students at the time. Before I could do that, I had to teach a lot to myself first. What follows is a simple discussion of a complex subject. If you’ll hang with me for a bit, I promise to at least give you something to think about.

“Contrary to the connotations implied by its name, chaos theory does not eradicate the possibility of order. It does not serve to propagate notions of chaos. Chaos theory is really a science about finding organization in seemingly complex systems. It serves to find order in disorder.” Library.advanced.org/12170 Andrew Davenport, Shane Kraynak, Brian Timko

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that did not take off until the advent of computers, for it involves millions of calculations that were simply too hard to do by hand. The idea behind chaos theory is finding mathematical order and meaning in seemingly random events. The first real life issue studied involved global weather patterns.

There are several hallmarks to chaos theory.

1. It studies unstable systems. Consider weather patterns. While we may note general tendencies that repeat regionally year by year, there is much that is fundamentally unstable in weather, as evidenced in particular by this year’s multiple, unprecedented winter storms. 

2. These systems are sensitive to initial conditions. A meteorologist named Edward Lorentz first identified this in 1961 as he attempted to find mathematical equations that would predict weather patterns. In the midst of a long set of calculations, he re-entered a number in the middle, rounding it as he entered it. Instead of entering 123.0699212, for example, he entered just 123.0699. That tiny difference in the two numbers played out with drastically different final results. Lorentz called this the Butterfly Effect – the idea being that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa could result in a hurricane in the Caribbean.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. 

For want of a shoe the horse was lost. 

For want of a horse the rider was lost. 

For want of a rider the message was lost. 

For want of a message the battle was lost. 

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. 

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

3. These systems are aperiodic (meaning that they never repeat themselves). This is one of the fascinating things about a chaotic system, and it is the reason it appears chaotic. Can something that never repeats itself and doesn’t show a discernible pattern actually have mathematical underpinnings? Absolutely!

4. These systems are iterative (meaning that the next answer depends on the previous answer).

Now, I am faced with a dilemma. I could write out more mathematical explanations of the basics of chaos theory, but I think instead that I should skip the middle explanation and move straight to the implications for intelligent design. Normal Euclidean geometry involves points, lines, and planes. Most of us probably recognize the elements of Euclidean geometry from tortured memories of high school. The problem with high school geometry is that lines, planes, squares, and circles tend to be what we humans engineer in this world. But IF there is a God, His world doesn’t much fit with Euclidean geometry. Chaos theory gives us a new geometry, Fractal Geometry, that reflects the seemingly random, arbitrary parts of God’s vast creation.

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” Benoit Mandelbrot

Prior to Lorentz and Mandelbrot, there wasn’t a lot of discussion about the mathematical design behind our seemingly random world. About the ordered, predictable parts of our world, yes. But the random parts like coastlines, weather patterns, mountain shapes, and patterns of erosion? Not so much. The evolutionary mindset was “out of chaos, order.” In that view,  the Big Bang happened, and primordial soup formed. Eventually random stuff came together, and out of that soup, life began.  Chaos Theory and Fractals give us a new paradigm. Mathematical order, appearing chaotic, results in order – this is a foundational concept in Intelligent Design.

I’ll never forget the graph projected onto the screen at that NCTM meeting where I was first exposed to the concept. The speaker entered in an equation on the graphing calculator, gave it an initial seed value, and let it begin plotting its seemingly random points. After a few minutes, a very clear image began to emerge. It was a human face. I realized in that moment that math was indeed the language with which God had written His Universe. And my own personal face as well.

*For a basic demonstration of how mathematical order, appearing chaotic, results in order, check out this Chaos Game.

Fractal fern image found here.

See also Math and Theology.