January and February are finished and I couldn’t be happier.  They are such a down time for me.  Out of pure exhaustion from the previous year’s leg of the run, I take January “off.”  It’s more like checking out mentally then actually getting those few weeks off.  I go through the motions…but my heart isn’t in it. 

From the gray expression on the majority’s faces, it looks like I’m not the only one.  That’s o.k. though.  When it comes to the congregation here at First Baptist, it’s o.k. to take a break.  They deserve some time off.  We ran hard last year!      

As cabin fever reaches its peak, for me, February is a time of planning and regrouping.  I ask myself a few questions:  “How am I going to run my race this year” and, “What does God want to accomplish through me?”  I write down my thoughts.  Pray.  Put on my running shorts.  Do a few stretching exercises….and when the calendar strikes March 1^st:  Bam.  Its time to rock.

I pray for the congregation that God has led me to pastor.  I pray that He gives them strength and endurance….because if they think last year’s run was hard...oh, what’s the song?  “You aint seen nothing yet.”  I believe that He is going to push us to the point that we literally dry heave—now that’s the way to run!    

May we endure and may God be glorified.    

I took a class on death last semester and there were an unbelievable amount of people who were in favor of people committing suicide….Now, it wasn’t that they thought it was a good idea to go back to the days of Socrates, when the social norm was for the unproductive elderly to just walk away and die; but they were in favor of “assisted suicide” or “euthanasia.”

I remember thinking at the time, “what a strange thing to be promoting.”  In our debates, I uncovered that, for the most part, no one wanted to define when a person’s life was no longer valuable (much to dangerous to define a life that’s worthy to live, thank you very much Mr. Hitler), but, as they argued, we shouldn’t force a person to live a life that was without hope, full of pain, and of little value. 

Taking the atheistic perspective that humans are animals, I would have to agree.  “You wouldn’t let a dog suffer, now would you?” they (my fellow students) would shout.  Of course I wouldn’t let a dog wriggle in pain and if that’s all we are, I’m all for letting the hurting and hopeless die.  For that matter, I would have to support taking out the lame and worthless (worthless from an evolutionary standpoint of course).   

That doesn’t even sound right—does it?  Why?  Because of our altruistic nature?  Come on!  It would benefit humanity to remove certain humans from the gene pool.  Again, speaking in evolutionary terms, natural selection has served our ancestors well by being the amoral selective agent that has moved us from the swamp to the cave to the three story, two bath, town house.  Ironically, the “amoral” selective agent has created (sorry, gotta use the term) a creature that is moral.   

When you add our moral inner core with our rather large brains, you now have a creature that becomes natural selections worst enemy.  If there was ever a creature that could direct their evolutionary paths…it’s us!  But morals can’t make the necessary and hard decisions needed for our very own future survival.  Altruistically speaking, we must be willing to prevent some reproduction from occurring…or even euthanize those whose life is of no evolutionary value.  

But that doesn’t sound right!  It doesn’t sound right because our inner being, the moral agent is screaming that this is wrong:  We can’t just go around destroying life.  A question arises then, how is it even possible that we could have developed a moral core????  It seems illogical that an amoral selective agent could have even produced a moral byproduct that is bent on the self-destructing behavior of perverting its own gene pool.  This, my friends, we will have to continue another day….