Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Engineering and the soul

We can engineer many things in this world. We can plan and design our home, office building and structures of many kinds. We can engineer our roadways, bridge great divides between roads and design vehicles to travel on those roads. Some vehicles are huge and can go anywhere on or off the highways. Other vehicles are small and designed to get along on very little fuel. We have developed ways to move people around the world in a matter of hours. Airplanes that people have designed, planned and build can now fly several times the speed of sound.

We have a medical industry that is in the business of engineering health. We can send a camera and clippers into the human body and remove many different ailments. This week, I'll spend thousands of dollars to pay and engineer to perfect my daughter's smile. Other engineers develop medication to wipe out all kinds of illnesses, eradicating many of them so they may never infect another human.

We can engineer so many things, but as our engineers succeed, there is not thing that they cannot redesign. That is the human soul, the spirit of a person.

This as so frustrated so many scientists and engineers that many have concluded that the soul must not exist. If it can be measure, seen or touched with an human hand or man-made instrument, it must be a fantasy. Yet it does exist.

People are trying to engineer it. They have developed a whole field to study and try to manipulate the soul. They call that field psychology. Counseling is a great growing field. But in the end, it proves to be inadequate at engineering they perfect human soul. Most counseling techniques leave their subject with a large dependency on crutches. "Six sessions may not be adequate for you. You will need to continue your counseling indefinitely," says a common psychological school.

We can't engineer the perfect human soul, but there is an engineer that can prefect it. That is the Lord Jesus. Through the work the Holy Spirit our souls will be prefect. Let God mold your soul and it will work. Human attempts may offer some relief to temporal problems, but God alone has the ability to truly fix the soul.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Life as a Children's Pastor

It's a somewhat typical day in the church, except today I have a visiting group of Japanese youth coming to speak to my 1st to 4th grade class. In addition to that change, the child's choir was singing in the service so we held our program up for about 15 minutes waiting for their return.

Just as the children flocked into the room, I saw a mother in the door way trying to get my attention. She had noticed the Kindergarten teacher in some stress and came to solicit my help. Because my children were settling in for a few minutes of music (and I'm not musical), I took the opportunity to check on this teacher's need.

It turns out that she was overwhelmed by the extra students that the children's choir had drawn to her class. I made my way down to the junior high class room to call on a last-minute assistant. No problem. As I introduced the assistant to the teach a child ran into my leg with muffled cries.

I looked down. What do you suppose I saw. A boy who had been in the class for less than 3 minutes had a bucket stuck to his head. Not sure what was up, I grabbed the bucket and gave it a tug. It wasn't budging. He, I'm sure with the help of some companions, had wedged the bucket on good. The job took some patience. and a tight grip on his ears, but the bucket did pop off.

Please pray for Kindergarten teachers. If the children don't drive them crazy, the teachers will surely die laughing at their attempts.

Attitude

I've just begun coaching a 7th and 8th grade girls lacrosse team. I don't know anything about the sport, but my daughter asked me to volunteer as an assistant. Of course, in reality, that means I volunteered to be the coach.

Not knowing lacrosse is only a minor problem. Most of the girls on the team have an idea what they are doing and my job is to motivate them to do it right. The problem is, it's a junior high girl's team. After two practices of facing every thing from defiant attitudes, lack of desire, comments about the weather, and cliquish behavior, I asked my 12 year old daughter, "Do all junior high girls have an attitude?"

Her response came without hesitation. "Duh!"

The good news is, I can laugh my way through most of that.