I'm building an airplane. It's not a model, and someday I hope to fly in it to far away places like Kansas City and Los Angeles. to see my kids and their kids, my grandkids.
It's been a huge learning process, this building an airplane, even for a builder/tinkerer like me.
Take the propeller, for example. My propeller weighs over 60 pounds and is 82" in diameter; it came off a Cessna 182 and new cost thousands of dollars although I found one that was a "deal". In order to spin correctly, without wobble or excessive vibration, it has to be VERY balanced. Balancing a prop is an extensive procedure, and even the tiniest difference in weight from one blade to the other is magnified exponentially when it is spinning 2500 times a minute. Props that are out of balance have been known to shake airplanes apart! Not good if you are 4000' feet above ground level when it happens.
They are like washing machines that get out of balance and wobble, worse and worse until the machine starts sliding across the floor or turns itself off while that annoying buzzer screams, except that washing machines have a one-third horsepower motor in them while my airplane will have 230 horsepower.
Airplane engines will literally tear themselves out of the airframe in a split second if a blade is lost from one side of the propeller or if a piece happened to be shot away like in World War II. Nobody survives when this stuff happens, it is instant and total destruction...one, second "all is well" and then it is "all over".
It struck me a few days ago just how fantastic it is that the EARTH, millions and millions of tons of dirt and rock and water spins on it's axis with the outside circumference spinning MILLIONS of times faster than that propeller, all the while travelling in an orbit around the sun, delicately balanced with all the other planets in our solar system, themselves spinning on their own axis......talk about precision! In the vastness of space, all of this is going on, with a predicatability that is literally unfathomable.
Now think of this: The largest thing we can see (the solar system) is the same model as the smallest thing we can conceive, the atom. Wow.
Inside of my daughter in law, RIGHT NOW, there are cells rapidly dividing at an inconceiveable (sorry, bad pun!), changing from essentially one into BILLIONS of cells...and at a speed of light rate, some are becoming skin cells, some are becoming cells of organs and eyes and some are multiplying making a tiny brain...all complete with jillions of other cells that are not only becoming nerves and blood vessels and capillaries BUT ALL OF THIS is networked together in a symphony that is breathtaking to consider!
All of that is going on RIGHT NOW.
But there is more! Somehow, programmed into those cells are vastly complex instructions about WHAT THEY ARE TO DO.....a pancreas, connected to the brain and wired through the digestive circuits will produce insulin which will do it's own VASTLY complex work when this child drinks it's milk, driving the very nutrition out of that milk into still growing cells AT THE ATOMIC LEVEL. Somehow, the simple and underated stomach and digestive system will be able to take milk and some crackers and Gerber Strained Carrots and remove (at the atomic level again) all sorts of minerals and other things and TURN THEM INTO ENERGY and more highly specific cells as needed, all of this working together. WOW. This child's body KNOWS how to take this stuff and turn some of it into fingernail cells, some of it into eyeball cells, and some of it into brain chemicals like norepinephrine and serotonin and BALANCE them in the proper quantities.
But there is more!
This child will be like her mother and father in many ways, and yet be her own self. She (well, maybe he) will have genetic programming that not only builds her body FROM ATOMS (!) but will contain programming in her brain that is beyond description. She will have INSTINCTS to be afraid of some things, she will be curious about others.....she will have emotions.....joys....sorrows.......all emanating from inside of atoms that were once milk, crackers, and Gerber Strained Carrots. She will have her mother's eyes, or maybe her father's....she will have bits and peices of their temperaments and personalities, their likes and dislikes and yet contain her own things as well, different from each of them. Incredible!
But there is still more!
She will be LOVED by her parents and grandparents, beyond words! She will nurtured and protected and taught; she will grow and learn and bring all of those who love her joys and pleasures that are the very essence of the human soul. She will be fragile and vulnerable, even when she is grown and seems sometimes to not be so.
Wow.
A few days ago, when we learned about this little miracle-in-the-making, when we watched her parents (my son and his wife) walk away after we said our goodbyes and began to travel back to our own cities, I was suddenly struck with a lump in the throat, tears in the eyes moment as my son turned to walk away....the love and fear I felt for him, the realization of his (and their) vulnerability in this world we live in hit me with words I can't express. And then, in the midst of that unspeakable love and concern, something else hit me. It was like, deep inside my mind, a very quiet voice said....."that is how I feel about you, my son". And the voice was from God.
It makes me tear up now to recall this. The "religion" I grew up with was really pretty much worthless, teaching things that were not right. I really didn't know about a truly loving God, even though those words were mixed in with the other mixed messages of a "religion" that contains more of human reasoning and folly than divine truth. But in this time of my life, having returned to God armed with some truth, I am learning all kinds of new lessons while learning to let go of many things that I will not understand on this side of Heaven.
I pray for these three several times each day, sometimes not knowing how or what to pray but God knows.
The Apostle Paul wrote in I Timothy 1:13 these words that apply to me if modified only slightly: "Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignoroance and unbelief". The very next verse says..."Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners".
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