Today I had the unexpected opportunity to hear Dr. John Lennox speak. Excuse my limited vocabulary, but he is, well, realllly smart. A professor of mathematics at Oxford (in England, not Mississippi). A world-respected scientist. A textbook writer. And above all these things, a believer.

The theme was the universe and God’s role in it. Now you tell me – what are the odds of me, Science Doofus of the Free World, a person who would never knowingly go into any lecture that involved scientific concepts, hearing two talks on science and God within five days? And being interested?

Anyway, I looked up Dr. Lennox after I heard him speak, and I happened to run across something from All Saints Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where the priest actually used some of Dr. Lennox’s remarks as a springboard for his sermon. I dig it, so I’ll share it (just an excerpt):

“When you ask the question of how will God come, you are told of the central expectation of Christianity, that Jesus Christ Himself will come, He who loved us, He who freed us from our sins. He is coming. Jesus Christ Himself will come.

And you say, ‘You’re a mathematician.’ That’s right. Or, ‘You’re a scientist from Oxford.’ That’s right. ‘Do you seriously mean to tell me that in the 21st Century that Jesus Christ will one day come?’ I do, ladies and gentlemen. I do.

After all, it stands to logic that if Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is risen from the dead, how is it that we think we have heard the last of him? The one who invented the atom, the human brain, who painted every color there is…how is it that we have heard the last of him? [emphasis mine because I love that]

There is another world and it’s real. This world is not the only world there is, and the issue that confronts us today is not which world do we live in. That’s obvious. We live in this one. The issue is which world do I live for?

…Imagine I were to come to your home for lunch and you put there a beautiful steak and I eat it and you try to talk to me and I don’t say a word. It would be difficult after awhile. I’m enjoying it, you’re talking and I’m eating. You go into the kitchen and you bring apple strudel (which I love by the way,) and then you put it on the plate and I eat it. You put on my favorite CD and I still don’t talk to you. Finally, at the end, angry, you say, ‘Don’t you see I’m here?’ and I turn to you and say, ‘The music is wonderful. The food is beautiful, but as for you, I’m not interested in you. In fact, it doesn’t matter to me whether you exist or not.’

There are millions of people in our world today who are exactly there. When it comes to God, He stands. He stands at the door and he knocks. The handle is on the inside, on my side. I can invite him in to eat with me and he with me, and enter the relationship of life that has sustained my life, my marriage, for the past 40 years. Or, I can live for the by-products of life and end up disastrously missing the goal. These are the biggest things in life.”

As Elise says…”if that don’t light your fire, your wood’s wet.”

The man who has arranged Dr. Lennox’s speaking tour said that when they were in the car this morning, Dr. Lennox mentioned off-handedly that C.S. Lewis was one of his professors in college. The guy nearly slammed on his brakes. Dr. Lennox looked at him and said, “Oh. Do you think that might be of some interest to the audience?”

And the guy said, “Um. Yeah. I think I’d mention that if I were you.”

Can y’all imagine?

(In the irony department, despite all my theological talk of the last few days, come 8:00 tonight BooMama will return – at least temporarily – to its All-Bachelor, All The Time format. I don’t want to beat the theological horse to death, after all.)

Remember the part of my post about Emma Kate when I said that she usually encourages me with examples from the Old Testament and I can hardly pronounce the names?

As proof, I give you a portion of today’s email from her:

“I believe that during college, and also now, you and I were like Aaron and Hur when they were helping Moses hold up his arms so the Amalekites would be defeated. Joshua was fighting hard, but the battle would only be won if Aaron and Hur helped Moses when he became fatigued. Our faith walks are full of wonderful ups and downs. It is during the latter that it is so important to lift one another up and bridge the gap.”

Now did I tell y’all the truth or what?

Broke the mold after He made her, He did.

Thanks, EK.

Alex seems to be taking in information at a rapid pace these days, and I find myself thinking, “WAIT – how in the world do you know THAT?” And please know that this is not one of those “oh, my child is so smart” write-ups, because I have no idea if Alex is smart or not, but if I had to wager a guess right now, I’d probably say, um, huh? I think he’ll be capable, and I think he’ll have some common sense, but smart? I just can’t tell. He’s TWO, you know?

I recognize that my friend NK’s older daughter is smart because she can pretty much factor algebraic equations at age 3 1/2, and I knew that Merritt’s little boy was smart when he quoted Astounding Facts About Dinosaurs when he was only 4, but Alex, not so much. It seems to me that what Alex is doing right now is taking the fast track around the Catch-Up Curve. I’m pretty low-key about Alex’s academic future, really, because I never want to be one of those parents with unrealistic expectations…I figure it’s better to expect average, and then anything above and beyond is a happy surprise.

Mother Of The Year, ladies and gentlemen! Spurring my child on to greatness!

So anyway, Alex is currently obsessed with five things. No, six: 1) trains 2) Blue’s Clues 3) Cheetos 4) planets 5) letters and 6) numbers.

I’ve talked about the train thing a little – nothing to tell, really, because as best I can figure it’s just watching a little car go around a track or pushing a little car around a track and I’m bored with it in, like, six seconds and looking around his room for a book or magazine or something. Alex and his daddy can watch / play for hours, however. I don’t get it.

As far as Blue’s Clues goes, he seems to prefer the ones with Joe, not Steve, and that’s fine with us, because Steve, especially in his later episodes, gives off a distinctive air of OH SWEET MERCY I HATE MY LIFE SOMEBODY PLEASE OH PLEASE GET ME OUT OF THIS ANIMATED NIGHTMARE. So probably better for Steve that he moved on to bigger pastures and a brighter future.

Cheetos – well, I don’t think I even have to explain that one, especially considering the sheer volume of Cheetos I ate when pregnant. They’re in the child’s DNA – he can’t escape his Cheetos-eating destiny.

The planets thing seems pretty routine. Once or twice a day he insists that we put this puzzle together:

And then he screams – SCREAMS, I tell you – the names of all the planets while he points at them and jumps up and down. This exercise usually results in my having to put the dogs outside because they get so disturbed by the high volume of the toddler voice. Sometimes I want to go outside, too, but I can’t really do that without the authorities getting involved – something about “abandonment” or “negligence” or some such nonsense. So I just cover my ears.

Which brings us to numbers and letters, and the part where he’s scaring me a little.

As far as letters go, we’re just now pioneering that frontier. Last week he got fascinated with this letter board that Janie gave him…it has pictures of objects on one side, and the first letter of the object on the other. And all the pieces spin, as an added bonus. He’s caught on pretty quickly, but now EVERY TIME he sees a word, we have to go through the whole thing: “That’s an A, Mama! That’s a P!” and by the time we get to the “E” in “apple” and I’ve encouraged appropriately after each letter discovery, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt why I am not an elementary school teacher. It IS a very sweet time, though, to see how excited he gets over an “H” or an “R” – especially since Clueless Wonder Mama here didn’t know that he’d be able to do that before he turned 7. As a result, my den usually has some assortment of these on the floor:

And trust me when I tell you that we cover every. single. letter. Every. single. day.

Then the numbers. A few weeks ago he started counting everything: lemons, pens, shirts, letters on shirts, candy, sippy cups, and I did encourage the counting by pulling out all the books that have to do with numbers so that he could count up a storm. He’s been saying his numbers up to 20 for about a year, I guess, and really, I thought that was all he would do until, I don’t know, kindergarten? Honestly, I never knew or expected that children could count objects until they were in some form of math class (did I mention that I’m up for Mother of the Year?). Best I can figure, his Mother’s Day Out teachers have taught him some counting tricks. So hoorah for them. Money well spent.

For the last couple of weeks he’s been recognizing numbers when they’re in print – “that’s a 2, Mama,” or “hey, that’s a 5,” and I thought that was a good developmental milestone. But Saturday, he ventured into unexpected territory. We were in the car, listening to a CD of Veggie Tales songs, and he said, “Hey, Mama, I wanna hear 6.”

I sort of shook my head a second – “What, baby? You want to hear what?”

“I want to hear 6.”

OKAY. Why did none of you “friend” people warn me about this day, this day when he would suddenly associate the number on the CD player display with an actual song? I didn’t know he could do such a thing, and I thought I had at least three more years of peace in this area (is it painfully obvious that I have no child development background whatsoever? Merritt, would you like to chime in about this?).

I guess I’ve been running the occasional scam, because while A. has been requesting specific songs for a year and a half, if I couldn’t bear to hear “God Is Bigger Than The Boogie Man” one more time, I could say, “Oh, it’s not on this CD. How about [fill in blank with name of something that won’t make me drive my car off the side of Double Oak Mountain]?”

But the jig, it is up. He gets the CD numbering system. Now he’ll ask for 8, then 15, then 4, then 7, and the requests, they will never stop. And I can’t get around them anymore because he can “read” the numbers – he can see them on the little LCD screen with his very own eyes, and I can’t say, “there’s not a 2,” because he understands how numbers work.

In conclusion, I would like to say that learning, it is overrated, and I will be emphasizing sports and social skills from this day forward.

And y’all know I’m kidding, but…help?!?!

What you can’t hear is Maggie going, “GRRRRR! GRRRRR!”

The picture may look sweet and all, but the love? Totally one-sided.

This morning Alex and I were sitting on the bed watching Blue’s Clues, and he tilted his head, looked me straight in the eyes, said, “Mama, you’re my favorite,” and then he threw his arms around my neck and buried his head beneath my chin.

And I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure that my heart exploded right there on the spot.

I should probably point out that he didn’t specify what kind of favorite I am – favorite mama? favorite friend? favorite co-watcher of Blue’s Clues? favorite person wearing a blue shirt? favorite person sitting on the bed? – but the whole thing is much sweeter if I pretend that he meant Favorite. Period.

Think he’s in the next room telling his daddy the same thing right now?

Probably. :-)

Yeah, whatever. But I did want to up the science ante a little bit today.

I’ve mentioned, oh, 647 times that D. and I saw a great concert this past Thursday night. Around the middle of the show, Louie Giglio talked for 45 minutes or so (I wasn’t timing him with my stopwatch or anything – that’s just a guess) about what “God of the universe” really means. He addressed how we tend to see God as just a wee bit larger than life, but if you look at the scope of the universe, the vastness of His creation, you can’t help but be awed. There is no way for simple-minded me to do his message justice…I just want to share one little part of it with y’all (and since the tour is over, odds are you won’t get to see him deliver the message in person).

Now I have NEVER been a fan of science. Physical science, biology, chemistry – didn’t like any of it. I liked physics a little bit more, but it was math, really – it actually made trigonometry seem useful, and I didn’t think, when I was in high school, that trig could EVER be useful.

But as Louie (Mr. Giglio? Dr. Giglio? LG? I don’t know what to call him, seeing as how we’re not, you know, buds) talked the other night, I was fascinated. It was so logical but so creative at the same time. He took us through various points of the universe and managed to put it all in perspective through some creative analogies (I didn’t feel like my head was going to explode or anything, which is to the great credit of my pal Louie’s teaching techniques).

Alex loves planets – loves to name them all, loves to see pictures of them, loves to talk about them. So that may be one reason why this topic resonated with me…because I knew that I could show these pictures to A. and talk to him about God’s creation. Even as I showed him some of the pics this morning, he was shouting, “It’s Uranus, Mama! Uranus!” and I hear y’all giggling, so just stop it right now. He’s TWO – he doesn’t get the joke quite yet.

ANYHOO, at the end of the sermon? talk? speech? (words are failing me today), we saw this example. It’s 28 million light years away from earth, which, as best as I could understand, is, um, really far away (he actually had an example to help us realize exactly how far away it is, but I can’t remember it right now). So here’s the Whirlpool Galaxy (photos courtesy of www.hubblesite.org/gallery/):

My homes Louie (really, I have no idea what to call him) said that scientists were blown away by the discovery of this galaxy, and while initially they thought it might consume the separate galaxy that you see to the right, they actually are millions of miles apart. So they’re pretty much huge. All those little red dots you see are stars waiting to be born (billions of them, in fact), and while there were all other sorts of nifty science factoids about this galaxy, I think you’ll be most interested in what’s at its core.

The Hubble telescope is apparently a pretty handy piece of machinery, because it was actually able to take photos of the very center of the whirlpool. Here’s what it found (and you can link directly to this photo here):

Pretty cool, huh?

Scientists call this discovery “The X Structure” – but, um, freaky, isn’t it? A friendly little reminder from God, maybe? Personally, I think it’s a big ole “HEY PEOPLE, I MADE ALL OF THIS!”

Just thought I’d share. Since Alex was interested, I figured some of y’all (and your young’uns) might be, too. If you have any questions, please direct them to, you know, a scientist, or to Louie Giglio, because I will be of no help at all.