#free-willconcupience

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

A Hairy Science Project (Post 123) 1-13-16

Nicholas had a science experiment while he was a student at Excelsior Middle School that is famous in our family.  Pam and I were always pretty hands off with respect to that type of assignment as we thought that parental domination of school activities can be pretty smothering and lead to dependent behavior that inhibits initiative and accountability.  The most extreme example of out of control parenting was something that a friend shared while we were midshipmen at the Naval Academy.  He was one of my classmates, and upon discovering that I was from the Akron, Ohio area my friend told me that he had participated in the famous Akron Soap Box Derby as a kid.  I remember seeing pictures of the homemade race-cars in the paper that I delivered each morning, but I never attended.

My classmate explained that the kids in his neighborhood of Annapolis all took turns either winning or doing very well in the annual competition because their fathers were on staff in the USNA Engineering Department and which gave them access to a wind tunnel to test their derby entry each year.  My head nearly exploded as the racket was described.  A cabal of fathers colluding to leverage their access to specialized government lab equipment for the purpose of manipulating a win in a kid’s competition repulsed me.  Teaching kids to cheat seems to be exactly what parents should never do.

More interested in allowing my kids to get hands on experience building stuff, I usually just acted as safety observer when Stephen and Nick put together Pinewood Derby cars and Gutter Regatta boats for scouts.  With Nicholas’ homework, I participated only when he had an assignment that mandated parental participation or when he brought a question to me on his own initiative. My parents had brought us up to be as independent as possible so I tried to do that for my children as well. Certainly that worked out well for Abby, but with Stephen and Nicholas there were plenty of bumps in the road.

One of the bumps in the road for Nicholas was his science project.  Always a procrastinator, Nick invaded my bedroom in the evening of one work night and announced that he needed help on a project. He had a guilty look on his face, which he didn’t understand was an open invitation to cross-examination.  In very short order, I established four very disturbing facts: the project was due the next day, the project had not been started, the assignment had been made approximately two months before, and Nicholas’ approved project proposal was on hair growth.   

Now because most households today have access to the internet and also have at least one blank folding poster board lying around, completing a project in one night is definitely doable.  Nostalgically, I recalled that a standard project in my day was a diorama requiring only cotton balls, a shoe box, construction paper, glue and some plastic figurines of some sort.  Everybody kept that stuff around and a Sunday night emergency project was definitely feasible back then too.

Unfortunately, an emergency science project on hair growth is a total non-starter. Nicholas learned a valuable lesson about procrastination that night – unfortunately, the lesson was not that procrastination was bad, but rather, that self-aware procrastinators should carefully avoid proposing projects that require painstaking, prolonged and detailed records of experimental data. Even Chia pets can’t grow their hair in one night.  Nicholas’s project was totally doomed.

 We came up with something, though.  I believe that I even clipped and donated a lock of head hair of some sort as a sample.  In my memory Abby succumbed to a giggle fit when she reviewed the final train wreck that Nick was carting off to school the next day.  A clump of hair, a graph with two data points, and some informational printouts all garnered from Wikipedia undoubtedly was all that was there.  

In my day an equivalent half-hearted last minute submission would have been a collage of pictures all from the stack of National Geographic magazines that were obligatory for any fully-equipped basement or attic in the 70’s.  It would have garnered a well-deserved F or D-.  Nicholas’s project didn’t receive a failing grade, though, because these days the only way to fail a project is to express a Christian viewpoint.  Still Nicholas project certainly tested all the teacher’s self-esteem protection fail-safes.  His hackneyed mess stood out in full regalia among the highly glossed projects many of which appeared to have been produced by marketing firms.

Nick’s last minute hair project does make me chuckle, but it also could serve as a metaphor for what it must be like for an atheist or agnostic to discover Jesus late in life and decide that they better get cooking. I understand that no one can earn their way into Heaven, but the parable of the servant burying gold certainly makes me self-conscious about whether I am accomplishing enough as a Christian. I wasted a good amount of my early years chasing worldly things, so my batting average with respect to living my faith has only truly improved over the last decade.  Luckily God loves us all very deeply.

A Christian understanding of God is that He loves us very much even to the extent of sacrificing His Only Son for our salvation. Implicit in His great love for us and consistent with my experience, God will do everything in His power to achieve our salvation except violate our free-will.  

Ostensibly, I sought God to some extent for many years, but I didn’t search very effectively and I question how motivated I was to encounter The Holy Spirit, a meeting that would have served to curb my worldliness.  In my view, once a person becomes truly convinced God exists, then sinfulness becomes really really problematic.  Up until God proved His existence definitively to me during my journey with Pam’s illness, I always rationalized my sins by the argument that because I wasn’t 100 percent sure that God existed, my sin was understandable and defensible under the subterfuge of my doubt.

My feigned ignorance and unsurety about God made my continued sinful ways explainable rationally.  I tried to live my life in a Christian fashion and tried to do what I could to earn by merit what we can never earn by our actions until it was time for a good bout of sinning.  In those cases, I would “extinguish my belief,”  flip the God light switch to the off position so that, in my mind, I became invisible to Him, my Guardian Angel and all the other souls in Heaven and Purgatory, for my sinfest.  Then after the sinning was done, in remorse, I could reenter the universe of God like the Millennium Falcon dropping to sub-light speed.  Then it was off to Reconciliation for a quick car wash and a return to my daily Christian hypocrisy.

In many ways I was a functional agnostic hedging my bets through many years of Christian seeming pantomime.  Then, one day, I needed God to be real.  In desperation and fear at Pam’s early diagnosis, I truly wanted to encounter Jesus in a way that would extinguish all my doubt because I needed for our lives to matter and for a merciful God to be running the whole show.  

So I skedaddled across Ignacio Valley Road from John Muir Hospital where a surgeon was operating on my Pam’s brain.  I needed to find an occupied Tabernacle and I was sure that one would be present in the sanctuary of St John Vianny Parish, arriving there in desperation, I fell down on my knees and met Him and knew that He was there, in the place that I needed Him to be - where He had always been all those times that I had been pretending to look for Him.  No ruby slippers needed to be clicked.

Here in this time between Christmas and Lent as I type away at the start of the week, I am thankful for having been assured about the existence of God.  That I 100% believe, is a great relief to me as uncertainly only leads only to unhappiness and fear.  Belief in the afterlife resolves all the anxiety for me.  God truly does set me free.

Anyway, the Donnelly family is happy to be through the holidays, but for a late believer like myself, each day seems a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas Day.  In this New Year, this 2016, I will have the opportunity to prove that I believe, strengthen my belief through participating in the Church and happily, like Ebenezer, I discover each day that I have still more time.  My Christian project can still be done properly.  While I cannot claim that I have or even can earn an “A” with regard to my Christian behavior, I can prove that I grasp the concept through acting as Christ instructed us to behave towards others.  Although I surely will sin, I can do so without pretending that God does not exist.  I will not mentally negate Him, but instead I will do my best to proclaim Him in this Jubilee Year of Mercy.  Thanks be to God.