ANOTHER LESSON LEARNED

You know how they say people never appreciate what's in their own back yard? For instance, here in southeast Idaho I am only a short and fairly pretty three hour drive from the most beautiful country on the face of the earth, Yellowstone National Park. Yet I talk to people all the time who live right here in the same town and who have either never been to the park or who might have only gone once or twice in a lifetime. What do I say to that? What a shame. And it is.
But it's a bigger shame to have my little sister living only forty minutes away, near my home town of Shelley, and to only see her two or three times a year. It took her moving to Missouri to have my eyes open to what I've missed.
Going back, WAY back, in time, I was eight years old, my older sister was twelve, when we got the phone call from the hospital telling us we had a little sister. I'll never forget that moment. My sister Kandy and I jumped up and down repeatedly, yelling in delight. A baby sister.
I adored that little girl. I remember cuddling her, nestling her in the plethora of pillows my mom had on our window seat, staring into those alert, watchful eyes, and knowing SHE WAS MINE. And nobody was ever going to hurt her, or they would have to go through me. Not that this was much of a threat, as an eight-year-old boy. But the point is I thought I would have protected her with my own life if I had to. I never dreamed back then that there would be a time we were separated.
But time passed, as time does, and we both moved on. My little sister, whom I should introduce by name as Marqueta (pronounced "Mar-KEE-tuh), grew and proved to be as beautiful as an adult as she had been as a child. Some would most likely compare her to Sandra Bullock, but I'm not an SB fan, and I say she's much prettier and more intelligent and talented. I know, I'm a little biased. Marqueta went on a mission to Philadelphia, came home and married a great guy by the name of Kenneth Graham, and so my little sister, whom at the age of eight I naturally assumed would always be a Jonas, was now Marqueta Graham, and she moved away.
The Grahams have lived off and on for many years within an hour and a half of me, yet, like those people who don't visit Yellowstone, I saw them but seldom. We kept in touch now and then through email, but even that was sparse.
And then, for reasons all her own, Marqueta decided she wanted to move to Missouri. And slowly our world fell apart. Not to say we are all lying depressed on the couch, taking medication and wishing our lives away. But over the many months we've had to think of Marqueta and her family being gone we have come to realize how many things we will miss, and it became harder and harder as the weeks passed.
Today was the last day before their departure. I took part of the day off work and went to Shelley to pick up some shelves from them...and to say goodbye. I thought I could be strong and not cry, but honestly, Missouri is a long ways away, and in my current state of economics and with current gas prices I don't travel much anymore, and it could be a long, long time before I lay eyes on that part of my family again.
I could go on and on about Marqueta's little girls and her boy. But I know it would only be interesting to family. My point is, I had my sister very close to me for many years, and it has only been in the last few months that I have realized how much it has meant. And even then, you guessed it, we STILL didn't visit any more than before!
As I said goodbye this afternoon, the tears filled my eyes, and I couldn't speak. I guess the sadness was as much for my failure to be a real brother as anything else. I know that now I will find a moment every other day when I want to see my little sister again, and there won't be any forty minute drive to accomplish that. Her beautiful little girls and the boy are going to grow and grow, and when I see them again I don't know if they will know me or even want to talk to me. That is the saddest part of all.
Don't let yourself be in the place I am this evening. If you have family who are close by, take the opportunity to visit them, because you never know when they will no longer be nearby. Yellowstone will always be in the same place.

Evolutionism v. Creationism

Doubtlessly, I am opening up a humongous can of worms with today's blog, but to be frank this has been on my mind for quite some time and really needs to be put out there, no matter the resulting explosion.

I just went online (the best place ever to do research, they say) to read up on evolution and the origins of life. Now first off let me say that I do believe in a certain amount of evolution. Most conspicuous because I've observed them for so long are the different kinds of dogs. No clear-thinking, intelligent individual could possibly look at all the various kinds of dogs and say dogs have not evolved. Arguably, all dogs came from one original dog, likely enough a wolf. Even if I didn't pay attention to all the new breeds of dogs that have appeared over the past 100 years due to man's creative breeding practicing (i.e., labradoodles, etc.) I would have a hard time believing that all dog species appeared at the same time through one almighty Creator. Can you picture a pack of Chihuahuas bringing down a mammoth? They aren't even fast enough to bring down a rabbit, unless it's a baby rabbit. So yes, evolution does exist. I bow to that fact.

However, evolution as an explanation for the existence of man and the many varied forms of life in the world today is another story altogether. I'm not going to go into trying to explain away all of the science fictional theories there are out there for how the earth first came to be. That's not my intent. Number one, it's a waste of time. Number two, I have only one real purpose in bringing all of this up, and this one purpose is to pose a question, which you will read at the end of this blog.

All right, let's get to the meat of this. If I understand one theory correctly, it proposes that life as we know it began as a one-celled organism. Through many millions of years and many strange natural occurrences, this ended up splitting into two-celled organisms, then eventually multi-celled organisms, and each and every one adapted to its own conditions and surroundings until today you have, voila, a multitude of living beings, from the germs living in your sewer to man himself--which often, I might add, don't seem too far separated, if you watch the news very often. But that's a side note I won't go into here.

So let's take mammals, for instance. Most mammals have varying amounts of hair on them to keep them warm. The amount of hair on different species can believably be explained by the theory of evolution. The original appearance of hair on a creature is another question that science can't satisfactory explain to me. And that seems a pretty simple thing.

Now let's move on to eyes. Wow. So we are supposed to believe those eyes just ... happened? Have you ever studied the eye? Or the ear? The brain? The tongue, the throat, the heart? Taste buds? The kidneys, liver, lungs? How all of the bones and the muscles fit together in their perfect order? If you haven't, and if you believe they all just came from the original one-celled organism and "happened" over hundreds of millions of years, then read on.

Let me look at a very humble house in the United States of America, for example. Let's say that this house is divided into five rooms. First there is a bathroom, replete with all the amenities: a shower, a toilet, a nice bathtub in which to soak, a sink, a garbage can, a mirror--you get the idea. There is a living room with couches, chairs, book shelves full of books, a TV, a stereo. Then there is the kitchen with its garbage disposal, dishwasher ... Okay, I'm not going to list every room. You get the idea. Now keep this house in mind.

Say I were to go outside now, take a simple grass seed from a nodding head of grass. Say I were to plant this seed of grass in a special, well-cared-for place in my yard. All right, now let's say at a hundred years of age I die and someone else buys my house and cares for my yard as I always did. Say it has all the best of care until the new owner also succumbs to age. And on and on for the next, say... 610 million years.

If my figuring is correct, then according to the evolution from the one-celled organism theory, that seed of grass should by then have evolved into that humble house spoken of above, with all the amenities, the TV, the computer, the garbage disposal--all of it. It seems highly unlikely that evolution, no matter how many millions of years it is given, could bring this change about in that blade of grass, doesn't it? It sure does. But no more unlikely than that one-celled organism eventually morphing into the highly specialized, diverse, and, I might say, well thought out organisms in the world today, things such as the elephant, the horse, the giraffe, the monkey, the mouse, and, not least of all, the human--all of which came from that same one-celled organism, I might add.

So that question I mentioned earlier is this: Assuming I were immortal, if I let my lawn evolve long enough, and all of the conditions were, as they must have been for that one-celled organism somewhere in that ancient ocean, how long until I would be the proud owner of whatever metropolis my lawn will have evolved into?