What is true about our life or meaning?

By Dan Barber

The other day I had a conversation about faith with one of my granddaughters when she asked me what I believed… Did I believe in God or Science?

I explained that I believed in both because I feel that science cannot exist without God, and maybe God can’t exist without science. 

In the news recently a story was broadcast about some physicists working on trying to recreate the Higgs Boson also known as the “God particle”… or the spark that science claims created the universe in a “Big Bang.”  The scientists stated that they discovered the particle… but couldn’t really see the spark because it was rediscovered in a mathematical formula… we just had to believe they were right, in other words we just had to have “faith” that their discovery was real.

The other night on one of my favorite TV programs, one of the physicist characters told his physicist roommate that his mathematical formula only worked because he had to create several other universes to make it work.

“Faith,” another word or belief in something, or maybe the hope, that something exists without physical proof. I was told in my Sunday school class when I was a child that no one could see God, but we know that He exists, we just have to accept Him and have faith.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a conversation with God everyday. I thank Him for allowing me to wake each morning so I can have another day of doing what I really enjoy.  I thank Him for the beauty of the Universe that he created from the wonderful “God Particle.”  I thank Him for creating this great planet for all his earthly creatures to live on. I thank Him for the conversations that I can have with my grandchildren who have the faith that their grandfather is mostly right in what he says. I thank God for the laughter of my grandchildren when they laugh at grandpa’s stories and jokes. I thank God that I can still learn from the wisdom of my family and friends.

Science says that we carry our ancestor genes, but I also believe that we carry on genetic memories. When my oldest granddaughter was a toddler I would take her out for a walk and observed when she would spot a pretty little pebble. She would stoop over pick it up, spit on it to see if it was shiny then if collectable put it in her pocket. When I was a child and my grandfather would take me on walks I remember seeing that same process, but then it was my grandfather, the avid rock-hound, doing the collecting.

Yes, I believe that God and Science are inseparable.

What is time, and how is time defined?

By Dan Barber

I just watched another one of those TV programs that tries to educate us in 60 minutes… no, not that program that has the stop watch running in the opening credits…

The program’s premise was, “Is time for real?” I don’t know if it is real or not, I do know that time is ‘relative’… old relatives think I’m young and young relatives think I’m old. My brain still thinks that I can do the same things I did as a kid, like throw a ball across a baseball field from right field to the left side of home plate on a straight line. I tried that once and only once because my arm didn’t cooperate and took about two weeks to stop aching. I tell my wife that if she tried to do that martial arts sweep kick to my face that she used to show off with, her leg would fly off from her body.

Time has a way of putting things into perspective for us. As we get older, it tells us that we have to put the brakes on to our youthful miss-adventures, for example we can’t jump off the roof of a house anymore without causing serious damage to our bodies.

Time also speeds up or slows down depending on our age. When I was 8-years old, it took the darn clock above the chalk board in my class room forever to reach the end of the school day. Also, it took forever for the school year to reach summer vacation. Then when class was dismissed for summer vacation it was a time for great celebration for us kids and Summer seemed to last forever for both kids and parents… then when school starts back in the Fall it was and is a great celebration time for the stay-at-home parents and a time of dread for the kids.

Fast forward 30 years and it is now time for the grandkids to be out of school and at home for the summer. When my daughter tells me that her kids are driving her crazy with their fighting, I just smile and say “payback is hell,” she replies by sending her fighting kids to my house for a time-out! My son also sends his kids to my house for a ‘vacation’… I’m not sure who’s on ‘vacation.’ I guess parenting is a life-long commitment.

I am now facing a dilemma. Next year I can choose to retire or continue working. My short-term memory is starting to affect my work, I can no longer multi-task like I used to. I have always made a practice of doing routine tasks immediately so I don’t have to worry about them later… the problem now is I forget that I did the routine task five minutes after I completed it… this goes on in a cycle 3 or 4 times each morning until I write a note to myself to stop!… it’s done!

I look forward to going to work every morning because the work I do I still find very interesting, I fear that I will become very bored if I stay at home everyday. Diane, my wife wants us to travel. She plans for us to buy a motor home and hit the road like Gypsies… I worry that we will get lost somewhere in Death Valley in the heat of summer and the motor home will break down. The grandkids worry that they will no longer have a place to spend their ‘time outs’ or Summer ‘vacations.’

Another worry that I have is that we won’t be able to afford to travel and we will sit around home every day getting really bored until the grandkids show up… time really slows down where there is nothing to do and there is too much to do.