experiment

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My Great Experiment Is Built On Faith

Tomorrow I’m going to try an experiment, and I am hoping the results will prove my point. I’m not totally sure that they will and that makes me a little nervous. 

my great experiment

I am going to conduct this experiment in front of about fifty people. If I don’t get the results I am hoping for, well, the conclusion or the point that I am going to be making will be wrong. 

In fact, I won’t have a point to make! 

I sure hope my plan will work out, but I have no way of knowing beforehand if it will or not. 

This will not be a controlled environment at all … unlike, say, the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). 

WWE fans watch their favourite wrestler go up against an opponent whom they hope will be defeated. As they watch the ebb and flow of the match, they don’t have any idea who is going to win. Sometimes it looks like their wrestler is going to lose because he’s in a choke hold or he’s been hit so hard he can’t stand up. But then the tables turn and he starts to get the better of his opponent.  

It just goes back and forth until the final bell and the winner is revealed. 

In actuality, the wrestlers know from the start who will win. All their holds and hits are just to create tension and excitement; everything’s been choreographed before the match begins.

It’s all rigged to give the fans as much hype and emotion as possible.

I used to do this very thing with my kids when they were young. We would play football in our family room and it would alway be Karlie and Michael against me … and it was tackle. 

In reality, I could tackle them but, of course, they couldn’t tackle me, so I had to fake like they did. 

I would decide in my mind what the final score would be. I would let them get a big lead and then slowly make a comeback. They would get so frantic that I might beat them. 

When I could see they were getting too frantic, I’d let them get a touchdown to give them some hope. Then I would create some tension for them, that they could hardly stand, before letting them win in the end. 

… And, wow, were they ever excited when they won! 

I would just chuckle inside at their joy in defeating Dad in such dramatic fashion. … But I knew the results before we even started. 

Well, I can’t do that with this experiment tomorrow. It has to play out the way it will go. 

I think it will go my way. I hope it will go my way. But if it doesn’t, I will not have a point to make to the fifty people who will be listening to my talk. 

I can hardly wait.

Here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure that my experiment will work; I only have faith to go on. In this world you can try to figure out your future, your eternity. But when it comes down to the day you cross over from life to death, there is only faith that you believe the results will prove you right. God has given us so much help, beauty, wonder, a precise ordered world, a guide book (the Bible) and his Son, Jesus – all to give us confidence in Him. But it will all come down to your faith. Do you believe Him? It’s your big experiment. … My faith is firmly placed in Jesus Christ. 

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What have you put your faith in? Leave your comments and questions below.

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I Experimented This Christmas

My Christmas experiment is over – well, sort of.

Christmas experiment

Every year I put something fun in our Christmas stockings. Often times it is some kind of gun that fires foam bullets or flying discs … and for a few minutes early on Christmas morning a war breaks out.

But some years I have put other things in the stockings. There was the year that we all got tattoo sleeves. I wore mine all Christmas Day and felt like I was a biker or something.

But probably the best was the year I got us all hand grenades. I thought they were a great idea, but my wife, Lily, didn’t like them at all.

She didn’t like them even before we tossed one. But after we did, she tried desperately to negotiate a cease fire, even going as far as threatening sanctions (to stop cooking).

But there was no stopping us. By mid-morning there was shrapnel (exploded baking powder and water residue) on the hardwood in the living room, on the walls, and into the kitchen.

That may have been my best year.

This year was tougher, perhaps because I started looking late and all the good stuff was gone … or maybe it was the Liberal government’s fault.

With making our armed forces more of a peace-keeping military than a fighting one, maybe the whole nation is going passive.

Anyway, what I came up with this year was eggs. That’s right, everybody got eggs this year – not Easter eggs but dinosaur eggs.

These were eggs you had to put in water in order for them to hatch. They contained dehydrated animals that expand in the water until they break through their shell and “hatch”.

The only problem was that this was a very slow process. No wonder some scientists think that the dinosaurs lived millions and millions of years ago. It took that long for one of these things to hatch!

In other years we opened the gift and started firing. Not this year! We sunk those things in water and watched and watched, and pretty soon ignored them.

It was supposed to take 24 – 48 hours for them to work, but our guys were pretty shy and it took a week for them to fully come out of their shells.

It wasn’t the gift that keeps on giving; it was more like the gift that keeps you looking.

Well, they’re out of their shells and have reached their full size … I’m not sure what the scientists would say about that.

Our kids have both gone back to their homes so we took pictures for them to see what happened.

But now Lily is ready to throw them out. These guys have just spent one day out in the wild and Lil’s ready to chuck them.

I prefer to let them shrink back to their original size, and then maybe watch them grow again.

… Lil’s giving me opposition, but hopefully I can save them from extinction for a week or two.

Here’s the thing: We like things that are ready to go; we want things to be instant. When it comes to our relationship with Christ, it’s the same. But growth takes time and we have to keep at it and be patient. Take time to grow closer to Christ this year. One suggestion is to read through the Bible this year. Yes, it will take a year and about twenty minutes every day, but you will grow and that takes time. In the end, it’s worth it.

That’s Life,

Paul

Question: How are you going to grow this year? Leave your comments below.