A Little Breakfast with My Science

As I took my breakfast from the refrigerator this morning I was thinking about my “disciplined” life – if it could happen. It just seems that with the unpredictability of the world, this is not possible. People come, you talk, and the whole schedule of the day (life) changes. You aren’t working, so work gets put off. As you talk, more work comes. You work on work at a later time because of the aforementioned conversation. You go to bed later than scheduled. Going to bed later makes it much harder to get up at the appointed time. You push snooze. Pushing snooze then makes you unable to shower AND work out AND have quiet time. And so, you must make a choice. Schedules shape life, life changes the schedule. Nothing in my schedule can be for sure, it would seem.

Life is unreliable because I don’t know it.

Maybe that’s (one reason) why tragedy is so shocking for us. Tragedy is unplanned and it messes up your schedule for the rest of your (day) life. It's the horrible, black, unknown that controls you suddenly, when you had other plans for your future and didn’t want to be controlled.

As I continued down this thought-path of nothing being for sure, not being able to count on anything, and why try when all plans get tossed out the window anyways, I realized that I was (and do) depend on something.

I was relying on the reality of the laws of physics. I was relying on the hope that the fridge will remain upright and will not crush me (as long as there is no earthquake and I don’t try to pull too hard to open the door).

The vegetable is held in its place by gravity and I can see it, reach out my hand, aim for the vegetable, move my fingers to grab it, pull it up, and bring it to my mouth. The position of the vegetable does not suddenly change, at this moment I can control my arm and hand muscles, and the location of my mouth remains the same.

Laws/attributes of physics, though they are subject to sudden change, are reliable. Even when physical changes suddenly occur, they happen within and according to the laws of physical/chemical/biological/geological/etc. possibilities.

We walk without worrying too much about bleeding-out on the ceiling.

Could these things be manifestations of the character of God? A cry to the world that there are laws, standards, constants?

Of course, the reality that we identify and live according to constants would seem to display the reality that they had to be organized and ordered -- by Something.

They can’t all be questioned and left forever in that “almost law because we can never be sure that something won’t change and so we can never actually know anything to be absolute.”

I don’t live that way.

I open my fridge (with the correct amount of force,) and I trust that it will not crush me. I don’t cringe in fear, worrying that this could be the moment when we discover that these laws, (which I don’t know,) aren’t actually laws after all.

Of course, physics is the great mystery – the mystical world of science. The developments of Einstein, the theory of relativity, the metaphysical world.

The physical world is beyond us.

 (Ironic, what we are is too much for us to be and know.)

The physical and the “outside of what we see and experience” have different dimensions.

Another testament?

God is reliable and does not change. He can be trusted. He can speak and we can believe His Words.

And yet, He is also far beyond our comprehension. Far beyond what we can comprehend, or even fully appreciate and worship. We cannot know Him fully nor predict what He will do or why He will do it, but we can rely on what He has revealed of Himself.

And He calls on us to know Him.

He wants to be known.

He has opened to us the mystery of knowing Him.

Mystery.

Must be solved.

Mystery with an answer.

Mystery with several layers.

Some reliable and told.

Some yet to be revealed and unpredictable.

The knowable, reliable, trustworthy, mysterious, and powerful I AM.

And so, though there is this mystery of the unknown and inability to comprehend, overall there is consistency in our world. Even if it is shocking, unplanned, and upsetting, we trust that the night will come, and then the sun will rise. The world continues to rotate and we (developed countries) continue to grab food from our fridges in order to feed our bodies.

The reliable within the ungraspable.