The Odds

I just want all of you to know how lucky I am to know all of you. Literally.

Think about it. There are, what, 6 and a half or 7 billion people on earth.
We were born in the right spots on the planet that we ended up in exactly the right place to meet each other. We each can be in a relationship with around 500 people, and since you're reading my blog, I assume you're one of those people. That's just how big of a community that we try to be a part of naturally. So, that makes the odds that I know you about 500 in 6.5 billion, or reduced, 1 in 13 million.

Also, to take that farther, we exist in the same time period.
I could have been born in Siloam Springs, or whatever it was called, in 500 B.C. and we never would have met despite being in the same place. According to the Christian definition of the time that the earth has existed, there have been about 10,000 years of life on earth. With about 30 years between each generation of life, there have been VERY approximately 330 generations. That changes the odds to 1 in 4.3 billion.

Then there's the fact that we are the same age, which definitely impacts our relationship. There's also the same religion, same state of mental health, the same school for some of us, and countless other factors. The real odds are practically impossible.

But impossible things like this are commonplace in this crazy universe of ours.

So really, it is an honor to know all of you. We're a bunch of statistical freaks. Love you guys.

What.The.Heck.

They say that foreigners think we are just as strange as we think they are, but I seriously don't understand a culture that would come up with this commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfxSWIBvEYE&feature=related

In other news, my weekend was explosively stressful.
Now we'll see how the weekdays treat me.
It was good to see all my friends and Kristen's family, though.

Ah, the French

This is one of those rare blogs that actually has something to do with my life.
I've had insomnia lately. I tell you the truth, it sucks, because I wake up SO tired.
But, I think it's over.
Anyways.
Recently, I've felt like I've been seeing things around me that other people just ignore.

I was in the Cathedral on Wednesday afternoon, sitting in a chair, people watching. I had gotten out of Wellness early, so I had about 20 minutes to wait until my next class. There are some televisions (boy it's weird to spell that word out) in the hallway with the classrooms on the second floor, so I watched whatever was on. It was set to some French or perhaps Spanish (the volume was turned down) station, and it was midday, so of course it was soap opera time.

I counted literally 5 makeout sessions in one episode of this show.
I also counted at least 10 professors and 30 other people who walked by and did not even notice the people making out on a screen in our cathedral. It blew my mind.

This is kind of obvious, but I notice that people who are busy notice less of the odd things going on around them. We ignore reality for the sake of our preoccupations. We decide what is important for us to pay attention to and what is not. But, what if we're wrong?
I like to stop and think every now and then if the things which I focus on are important.
Is guitar important? Is school important? Is my family important?
We can only see from our limited, first-person perspective, so we can not possibly know the end result of our actions, thus we do not know what is important. Only God does. So, another duh thing, we should listen to Him and not ourselves.

Maybe it will all turn out that watching French people make out on TV is the most important part of life.
If so, I've got a head start.

Little People

I wonder how many useful, awesome inventions we could make if we had little people working for us. No, I don't mean midgets.
Okay, I read this book series, called Discworld by Terry Pratchett for the longest time. It has like 40 books in it, and he still writes them, you should check it out.

Most of the modern inventions he mimicked in the books had little demons in them doing all the work instead of actual science. Like cameras were actually demons who could just paint really fast that were trapped in this little box with a lens.

Ah, if only.

Potent Potential

Mmmm tastes like alliteration.

Well, this evening was quite interesting.
I didn't expect to enjoy it quite so much, but I went to a concert for the vocal performance majors here at school.
Oh.my.goodness.
You really don't realize what is possible with the human voice.
They were amazing.
But, leading off of that, it's impossible to say where the limits of human potential are.
I know that, historically, pride cometh before the fall and all that jazz, but we really can be quite fascinating.
By incredible exertion and effort, there are people who can jump 8 feet in the air, sing 4 octaves higher than I can even hear, and do all sorts of crazy stuff.

The reason I know we have limits, as amazing as we are, refers to the principle of diminishing returns, if you know what that is. As we work, the closer we get to our limits, the less we gain per amount of work.
There has to be a limit somewhere. Human achievement is peaked.
I just think that has a lot of implications for technology and morals that we don't really think about...
I'll have to ponder and finish this blog later.

In other news, this made me giggle:

Fox Comic

The Overdrive of Life

I got out of my Wellness class 30 minutes early. That class really is a total waste of my time.

Tonight is going to be awesome, because I get to mess around with a 'wah' pedal that I borrowed from Tim. If you don't know what a 'wah' pedal is, you're missing out. It's for electric guitar effects.
Music is so awesome for me, not because I get to perform, I mostly perform for other people's benefit instead of for mine. Music is fun because I'm good enough that I can entertain myself.
I worship on my own in my room all the time and play around and have fun.

I think that's why it's always been more of a hobby than a career pursuit. It's never been about what I can do with it, but what I get out of it.

I'd be completely embarrassed if you knew just how much I used to rock out wearing just my boxers to completely lame 90's rock music. That was most of my summers during high school.

I know, I'm so cool. You don't have to remind me.

Bless You

I just realized that I haven't sneezed in a very long time. That's kind of nice.
But, not the point.
Recently, I have begun teaching a Bible study for 6th and 7th graders at Crosspoint church along with a friend. I met the kids last week, and had the first get-together last night.
It was really exciting.
It's amazing the magnitude of the desire to be heard that God put in children. They aren't necessarily to the point where they understand the struggles in their lives, so they aren't complaining about politics, boyfriends and girlfriends, or career issues. They are just using their mouths to explore the world and share it. Every little thing that happens them, no matter how boring it is, seems like the most exciting story that they wan to share with someone, and I'm the one they want to listen. It's so cool.

This semester, I've decided to talk about blessings to them.
My prime example is Abraham, who blessed the world by fathering a nation.
It's interesting that, when we pray to ask God for something, we don't really think about how we're going to receive it. If I prayed for a new car, I wouldn't expect it to magically appear out of thin air. There wouldn't be a holy light from the clouds that would float this car down in front of me. If God were going to give me a car, someone would probably buy it for me, or one would go on sale and it would come to my attention.
In this way, God answers prayer by using people.
Sure, God is definitely the biggest blessing in the world. But he uses people to deliver his blessings.
So, this semester, we're going to talk about how they (the kids) can be blessings. I want it to culminate in a service project or something.
At this point, it's hard to even explain to them what a blessing is. We ask God to bless our food, and we bless people when they sneeze (a tradition which emerged during the plague), but what is a blessing? I want to go from this to showing them how God can use them, just as God used Abraham, to bless others.

We don't have to be perfect, or talented, but God will use us because we are designed exactly the way He intended. Abraham certainly wasn't either of those things. He was a pagan (I had to explain what a pagan is). He was 75 years old. He pretended his wife was his sister (and she was!! YUCK!)
We as the church are the body. We are the arms and legs of Christ.

It's cool to learn something and then share it, 10 years later, to kids who remind me a lot of myself.

The Trophy

I accomplished a goal today.
In Wellness, I ran 15.5 laps around a track measured for 1 mile per 10 laps, meaning I ran 1.5 miles in 12 minutes. This equates to an 8-minute mile.
To those of you who know anything about jogging, this isn't that great; but, for someone who doesn't work out all that often, being able to push myself like that and see results was nice.

But, now that I have met that goal, I'm going to keep jogging. I think that's important to recognize.
Goals are not ends, you do not stop doing something just because you have reached your goal.
If you completely mastered every single langauge in the world, and then decided you were done with them and didn't need to actually speak them, it would have been completely pointless. Once you reach a goal, it simply means that you are more skilled at the vessel through which you accomplished the goal, which was jogging in this case.
For example, the Superbowl.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have won the most prestigious American football trophy in the entire world. Does this mean that they are going to now stop playing football? Of course not. It means that everyone, including themselves, recognizes that they are the best football team right now. Thus playing football for them is now even more important, since they are even more capable of performing at it.

Trophies are not meant for the people who win them, but for the outside people who observe and recognize this victory. Goals are for individuals to mark their progress and their work, trophies are to mark their success at their progress and to compare it to other people.

When we set goals, and then accomplish them, we don't stop there. We set new, higher ones. So, the point of any activity is not to meet certain goals, the point of that activity is just to reach for those goals, and to work at them. Trophies are completely unnecessary in regards to the activity itself.

But, at the same time, The Steelers' victory would have been less important if it were just a scrimmage, and if it weren't an official game that everyone knew about.
I honeslty really want every single one of you to know that I am the best dang DDR player west of the Mississippi. I know it for myself and I see the results of (honestly) really hard work, but it is worthless without people to share it with.
We still need that recognition.

So, Aristotle had it wrong.
The greatest human need isn't to reach for our goals and constantly strive for them. It's to be validated and accepted and supported by others.

Thanks for reading about my accomplishment today. I worked hard.

Carpal Tunnel

Today, I have written 4,094 words. This includes a 2,100-word paper, 3 one-page assignments, and this blog. I blogged recently about how wasteful we are with our words.
Today, I'm thinking a little differently.

I think we have to be even more careful with what we write than with what we say.
Words are spoken once and disappear into the minds who heard them.
Writing can be seen by infinite future generations.

So, learning how to communicate with words, especially on paper, can be the most important skill you'll ever learn, because it will be the only way that people can learn about you after you pass away.
That or on random facebook videos that Evan films at 2 in the morning.

Anyways, it's not that I'm particularly going to care what people think when I'm dead and in heaven, two terms that I consider synonymous for Christians despite what some theologians think.
Writing is the only way that the vast quantity of human knowledge has been passed on from generation to generation.
If we didn't have a means of keeping track of what other humans have discovered, we'd have to reinvent the lightbulb every generation.

But, at the same time, it's fairly obvious that it hasn't helped anything but technology.
Society doesn't have any significantly smaller amount of violence, immorality, or foolishness than it did when Cain murdered Abel, yet we have this vast foundation of knowledge to base our societies and morality on.

I think this speaks of the power of Scripture.
It is highly unlikely that anything I ever write will change the way that someone acts or thinks 100 years from now.
But the Bible, portions of which were written 3500 years ago, change me every time I read them.
They affect me.

The Word who was with God in the beginning has real, tangible power.

God spoke the world into being, and the Holy Spirit is often referred to as his breath.
A book which has been copied millions of times from its original source still has that power.
No man can ever write that. The Bible proves itself.