Closed doors.

When God closes a door, He means for it to be truly closed.

I keep reminding myself of this, and sometimes God reminds me Himself. You see, my school can't afford to keep three teachers, so I as the junior of the three gets cut. It's totally understandable, but the unfortunate fact is that I will no longer be teaching at this school.

(insert sound of door shutting here)

The school board was gracious to let me know with plenty of advance notice so that I could job-hunt. In my search, I found what seemed to be the PERFECT job for me. I applied, I had 4 interviews, from the HR director all the way up to the president. It seemed I was golden. In like Flynn. Counting chickens before they hatched....

Then, a few days after the last interview, the question came: would I have a problem teaching evolution? I told the the truth, of course.

(insert sound of door shutting loudly here)

I think it's clear that I would have been tempted to compromise on my principles had I worked there. Would I have actually compromised? I don't think so, but now it's a moot point: the temptation will not arise.

I'm reminded of the Lord's prayer:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
- Matthew 6:9b-13

He certainly led me away from a possible temptation. Perhaps He even led me away from a snare that the evil one has laid for me. Who knows? At this point, only God.

And that is why we should always trust Him.

Out of the Mouths of babes...

This last week we observed the 200th birthday of two very important historical figures. In fact, before last week, I never even envisioned these two as contemporaries. The first is the man known as the Great Emancipator, none other than Abraham Lincoln. The second…well, he has done little to emancipate anyone.

I’m talking about Charles Darwin, author of Origin of Species. Many scientists since Darwin’s time have embraced his theories in the hope that someday there will be hard evidence to support them. Despite their best intentions, the evidence has done little to support evolutionary theory, and has even swung many scientists to the opposing viewpoint.

Still, this doesn’t keep people from treating evolutionary theory as proven fact. After all, it’s taught that way in our public schools and kids’ textbooks, so how is the general public to know the difference?

I’ll tell you how: education. This brings me to the main point of this post.

See, today my young son found a nice little book in the library about horses. He loves learning and has many interests ranging from dogs to bugs to all things sports. So today he read something in his book about how horses evolved. Then, he asked me what evolution was.

Loaded question out of the mouths of babes, eh? Really, I'm glad he asked...

Here’s my best recollection of the conversation:

Boy: “What’s evolution?”

Dad: “Well, let me explain it like this: What do you need to make a toy car?”

Boy: “Well….metal, bolts, tires…rims…(long silence)…”

Dad: “What else does it need?”

Boy: “Um…plastic, paint…and instructions!”

Dad: “O.K…So imagine you had all those parts in the box, but you don’t have the instructions. Imagine you shake them up for a REALLY long time.”

Boy: “O.K.”

Dad: “So if you shake this box up for a long time, and you have no idea what the instructions are, will you someday get a toy car?”

Boy: “No.”

Dad: “Will you figure out the instruction book?”

Boy: “No.”

Dad: “Well, people who believe in evolution don’t think God made anything. They think that life came from pond scum and there was just a lot of “shaking” going on and then animals formed and turned into other things over millions of years AND they wrote their own instruction books.”

Boy: “That’s silly.”

Out of the mouths of babes indeed.