He comes - thoughts from my holy hour last night

I sometimes think that I am the one coming to you here in adoration but in reality you come to me. You are always coming to me. You never are content to just wait for my heart to find you but instead you seek me out. I approach you like the centurion did when you came to his town of Capernaum when his servant was sick. Even at this point you tell him, "I will COME and cure him." Oh Lord I am not worthy to have you come to me the way you do. To care for me and love me the way you do. To come and dwell within me the way you do. Say the word and make me clean. I am not worthy that you should come to me. I should be the one coming to you. I should be the one giving my entire life and love to you. Still you come to me again and again. You always come closer even though I will never deserve your goodness. And you just ask that I approach you honestly and wholeheartedly in humble faith. Increase my faith Lord. Increase my love. Thank you for never giving up on me. Thank you to coming to me. 

Don't 'mind' me ... just a few deep thoughts

As my 5 year old daughter's soccer coach, I've found that trying to get 9 preschool aged kids to form two straight lines has to be one of the most difficult things I've ever done. The thought has crossed my mind that if I as an intelligent being cannot direct a handful of other intelligent beings to do such a simple task, the odds of it happening by mere chance are almost nonexistent. That got me thinking about how amazing our world is. The way it functions and even we function, is infinitely more complex then what I was trying to achieve on the soccer field. My experience with these kids may just be the best evidence I can point to showing that our world has a master designer behind it all.

The evidence is all around us from large complex things to the small smallest details. Take for instance our brain. Our parish priest recently shared this article on how our brains work and how misguided our understanding is on how they function. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend taking a few minutes with it. There are so many points that I found interesting but it all basically boils down to the fact that "your brain is not a computer," and in fact it isn't like anything that we can explain. Despite what we've been told and it is infinitely more complex than anyone could imagine. The author may suggest that that an intelligent god infusing us with its spirit is an outdated metaphor to explain human intelligence, but such complexity in my mind only further supports intelligent design just as the kids on my soccer team do.

I'll wrap up these 'mind' blowing thoughts with a little thought I had the other day. God could have made a perfect world with perfect people (that would be logical and the way I would have done it), but amazingly He accomplishes perfection with and through our imperfectness. That may be the greatest wonder of all.

First Experiences with my Unborn Son

I've always been pro-life but somehow experiencing my wife's pregnancy with our first child has made me a much more adamant defender of the unborn children's right to life. It was so amazing to see our baby's first ultrasound at only 6 weeks into the pregnancy. I wasn't expecting to see really anything much so early on but surprised that I could easily make out were the head was even though it wasn't fully developed. What really made me stop and marvel however, was seeing our baby's heart pulsating on the monitor clear as day. I just couldn't get over that the small beating heart was my child complete with my DNA. It was really one of the most amazing moments of my life.

Since then we've had multiple ultrasounds and found out that we are having a baby boy. Somehow it never ceases to amaze me as I see my son and hear his heart beating, what a little miracle he is. It's just an awesome feeling to know that this little person who is waving his tiny fingers and moving around will be such a large part of my life. I look at his face and wonder if he has my ears or my wife's eyes. Just recently I've started to feel him move. My wife has felt him move for probably over a month now and after many attempts with my hand on her tummy, I finally got to feel him as well. I was expecting the first time I felt him he would just feel like a little indigestion but instead I felt a really big kick almost like my wife had the hiccups; Just another incredible sign of the life inside her.

After all of these experiences with our unborn baby it's become even more clear to me that abortion kills innocent children. How can people say it is abuse to hurt a child after he or she is born but at the same time ok to kill that same child while in it's mother's womb? Where a person is located doesn't make that person any less of a person. Some argue that while in the womb the baby is relying on the mother for survival. To that I would say that a 3 year old child is just as reliant on his or her parents and home to survive so that doesn't change the fact that the unborn baby is a person. Other's will bring up that women should have a choice if they want a child and of course the truth of the matter is that they do. The choice should be made before the baby is even conceived and even if the parents aren't ready to have a child they still would always have the option to put their baby up for adoption.

This all seems so obvious to me now and yet apparently many people in our society see it quite differently. You simply cannot tell me that my son, still in the womb, is any less of person now then he will be when he is born. Believe me he moves when he hears loud sounds at sporting events and has capacity of all his senses. How can people say it would be ok to kill him? Mother Teresa often said that, "The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion," and thanks to my unborn son I now fully understand what she means. Nothing could be more wrong then if I as this baby's parent didn't allow him to live. I know many people face less then ideal circumstance when faced with unplanned pregnancy's but if you are considering an abortion as way out of a rough situation, make sure you stop and think about what the procedure actually does. Giving life to your child is one of the greatest gifts you could ever give. Choose life! Choose love!

My Baby Boy

Making More Time

One of my friends wrote me the other day saying that he has been crazy busy lately and everything seems like it is going in fast forward. “I need to slow down the time/space continuum,” he said and asked if I had any ideas. Of course he new better then to ask me for help but I think he new what he was getting into so I offered him the following “advice.”

“As for slowing down time, that might be a tall order. Of course in "my world" time doesn't exist (and it's hard to change something that doesn't exist). Actually this line of thinking might work in our favor...when you speak of time going too fast, you really mean that your perception of time is going too fast. What we need to do is alter your perception. If we could find a way to change the rate at which you perceive time to be passing we could trick your brain into thinking that more time had been processed and thus you would seem less busy. Let me explain:

Let's compare your busy day to a digital image. This image has a native resolution of 800x600 pixels. Now the monitor you’re looking at this image on is like your brain. If your monitor display resolution is also set to 800x600 then that picture is going to fill the entire screen and take up %100 of the pixel on it leaving no room for anything else. The effect is even worse if your screens resolution is smaller like say 640x480. Now the image, or your busy day if you will, doesn't even fully display on the screen. So what I'm saying is we need to increase your monitor/brain's resolution to 1024x768 and then you will not only be able to see the entire picture but you'll also perceive extra pixels around it thus making you feel like you have more time.

Well in reality I haven't found a way to naturally (without drugs) change my brain's resolution but I have found something else that seems to help. I have found that when I'm busy, forcing myself to take a few minutes of quite time to pray each day can really make a big difference in how busy I feel. It seems illogical that taking time to do nothing would help make my busy schedule less hectic but for some reason it really makes a difference. I think it helps me put everything in perspective and realize that there is meaning in my life beyond all the chaos. My theory on why this helps is that when you take time for something (in this case prayer) you're forcing yourself to not use all your
pixels on that picture that's making you feel so busy. In effect, instead of increasing your resolution as in my above example your shrinking the picture's resolution so that it's no longer consuming your whole monitor. Maybe I'm crazy but it definitely seems to help. Of course my hectic day is like a cake walk compared to even a slow day for my wife so what do I know (Obviously I've had time to rant here for quite while now).

Wow this got a little long. And to think I was trying to figure out how to give you more time when the answer is right in front of me...Don't read super long emails that go on and on about theories. To late for that I guess."