The following post was originally written on December 11th, 2005.    Since then I have had one more very specific and special person to be thankful for.

------------------------------

I am very very thankful for -

Salvation.

Family.  Food.  Warm apartment.  Friends.  Church friends.  Distant friends who keep in touch.  The Bible.  Reading, in general.  Knowledge.  Education.  Physics.  Engineering.  The Internet.  People who love me and pray for me.  My specific current "situation" in terms of job, vocation, location, status, "exposure" (in the stock-market sense, or in the "leveraging" business sense) of my life to people who have not yet come to know God.  Women.  Music.  Acapella music.  Choral music.  Pianos (and the folks who invented them).  Organs.  Johann Sebastian Bach.  Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert.  Guitars.  Beautiful scenery/outdoors - waterfalls, mountains, little clefts in the mountains with waterfalls coming through them.  Children, and their innocent happiness and blithe playful interactions with the world around them.  Young Christians in whose lives God can be seen powerfully moving and shaping, and the astonishing potential that God could use me as a tool in these lives.  Computers.  The feeling that comes when one has just finished one's final exams.  The feeling of reaching for the alarm on Friday night, then realizing that one does not have to set it, because tomorrow is Saturday.  Movies.  Gripping and wholesome drama.  Late night conversations with certain people.  Brothers and sisters.  Parents.  Grandparents.  Spaghetti sauce.  Chlorine bleach.  Money.  Freedom.  Being born as a privileged white male in a rich and powerful country but also having the privilege to see poor countries firsthand.  The musical-resonance talents that God has given me.  Love among people.  Common-sense among people.  Self-sacrificial helpfulness of mankind for mankind.  Jobs, and the fact that God gives us work to do... even, complementary work to men and women.  Health, in general, and the fact that I seem to be healthy right now.  The varied stages of human development and relationship development, and the fact that I am not a child anymore, and that I will soon be old (and hopefully wise) and the potential for marriage etc, and the fact that this life is almost nothing compared to the awesome weight of eternity.  Tea and hot chocolate.  Languages, especially English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, French, Welch, and Farsi.  The ocean.  Governments that do a good job, and their armies.  Logic, and skepticism, and difficult questions, and thoughtful people, and the joy of hammering out truth.  Illustrations, parables, story-itself.  Philosophy.  Friendly families who adopt grad students who visit their church and invite them into their homes and into their lives and give them food fellowship prayer and advice.  Horses.  Cats.  (Ok dogs too...).  My particular heritage and ancestors, and their character and their choices.  Stars.  The fact that life is not absurd, that there is more to true fulfillment and happiness than the firing of neurons.  Sleep.  Colors in general.  Sunsets.  Root-beer-and-vanilla-icecream-floats.  Romantic love.

Eternal life.  Forgiveness of sins.  God.  The fact that God exists.  The fact that He loves me.  The fact that He is coming back to earth again and that I will be with Him forever.

 

 

In other news, I have two massive final exams coming up this week... one Monday morning and the other either Tuesday or Wednesday morning.  I am semi-scared and semi-trusting.  (analogy - child opening wide his mouth as the dentist picks up a monstrous buzzing tool...?  or a child getting on his bike without training wheels to try again after having fallen several times, because his dad is encouraging him to...)

 

 

Also, Isaiah 45:15 - "Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!"

Have you ever wondered in your life (and in the world at large) why God "hides Himself?"    What are your thoughts on this?

Romans 8:31-32:  "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?"
This is really quite amazing.  This is something that every Christian should be extremely familiar with.   "If God is for us..." ...if we have been saved through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ... and this is where faith comes in.... not 'blind trust', but 'actionable trust based on the evidence'.

Is God really for me?  If I have believed in Jesus and been saved, then yes.   If I have not believed, then no.

For me personally then, the answer is yes... God is actually for me... He is on my side... The Omnipotent King is my Adoptive Father, Friend, and Benefactor.

Well then.  Who is against me?   Who could possibly be against me?  Whose negative opinion could possibly affect me in any way?   My boss?  My neighbor?  My classmate?  My coworker?  My relative?  My enemy?

Nope...  they don't compare to God.

I saw and felt incredible beauty this morning, as I looked out over the congregation of a church this morning helping to lead worship with some other singers.

I felt sharp stabbing (delightful) throbs of something similar to what Christ must feel for His church.

It's really hard to describe.

I'll try though.

It's all in the details...  the individual lives and all their minutia and mundane moments...  the unspeakably awesome glory which "has not yet been revealed".

The wizened old man midway back, with hearing-aid headphones to help him hear the music, singing to the Lord.

The middle-aged contractor with white hair, visibly deliberately setting aside his week of intense personal stress, singing to the Lord.

The middle-aged salesman whose wife is dying with Alzheimers', leaning against the doorframe in the back and soaking in the music.  Why is he in church?  Simply because of habit?  I know that it's more than that for him.

The silver-haired giant basketball coach with two teenagers, dying of brain cancer.  Where will he be in just a few years?  Somewhere so wonderful it's impossible to begin to describe.  Does he deserve to be in that place?  No.  Neither do I.

The little boy with Down's syndrome smiling and waving at me in the middle of the song, oblivious to the grownups around him singing.

The three church staff members singing and playing instruments with the other singers around me, pressing on with perseverance and trust even though finances may take them away from their posts in less than a month.  Are they worried?  Probably.  Will God work it out for good?  Without a doubt.

The teenager in the balcony with clothes of fashion, shoulders tilted in just such a way that I know exactly what he's thinking as the music rolls through the room.  I used to think it too.   Standing with his friends.  The look of youth who don't know what to do with the 'uncool' Christ of Sunday School in a world that seems to threaten to flatten them every day if they don't come up with the requisite coolness.  My guts yearn for them, that they would come to see and to love the truth.  Does Christ feel for him/them too?  Way more than I do.

The old man with steely white hair dressed in an impeccable blue suit a few aisles away, visibly submitting himself to the younger generation's rhythmic music, learning and singing the songs (to the Lord) instead of getting upset that his preferences aren't being met.

 

But I saw someone else today as I was singing.   I should have recognized his presence immediately, but it took me a few minutes.  How stupid, how ironic, that I would be singing to him while only partially thinking about what I was saying.

The King came to my church this morning.

Not that I don't get to see him often.   And actually I didn't see him, rather I felt his presence.  I know all the arguments against what I felt.  Too well.  But I also know that I have reason to intellectually jump on board with what I felt today.  And to infuse all of my (rather inadequate) emotions into what I know.

Every time I literally feel God's presence (which is actually quite rare for me at present - a few times per year), I get a new excitement for What Comes Next.   As Lewis said, this whole universe, this whole lifetime, is merely an introduction... a title page for a book that will never end.

Wow.

Thank you God for saving a wretch like me, and calling me into eternal life with You.

The lines have fallen to me in exquisite places...  all thanks to You.

I'm extremely thankful for my family...

Thank you, God.

AHHHHHHH!

"This is a rough list of topics we
covered in this section and hence are fair game for exam. Some
students find this a helpful study aid.

Study Items for  Exam 2

DNA double helix structure and base
pairing

Nucleotide structure – 3 components

DNA replication – mechanism, leading
and lagging strand

Gene structure, transcription

Reading genetic code

Genotype vs phenotype

Types of mutations – insertion,
deletion, base change

Introns vs exons

Transcription factors – role, types

Understand lac and trp operons

pET inducible expression system

Enhancer elements, activators,
eukaryotic regulation

Other ways to regulate protein levels
besides transcription

DNA sequencing, dideoxy NTP (describe
sequencing reaction)

Steps for sequencing a genome

Isolating cDNA (describe steps to
making cDNA library)

Site directed mutagenesis – how do
you do it

Restriction enzymes and ligating DNA

Plasmids

Inducible promotors for expressing
genes in bacteria

Homologous recombination

Making, using, optimizing DNA
microarrays

What you learn from microarrays

Northern blot

RT PCR – how it works, what you learn

Molecular beacons

SNPs – importance, detecting

PCR to amplify DNA sequence – how it
works

Basics of DNA fingerprinting

mRNA processing

Gene knockins and knockouts – how to
you make them

Stem cells

Tissue specific knock outs

Ribosome fundamentals

tRNA structure and function

Protein translation cycle

Basic mechanism of protein targeting

Protein folding and misfolding"

God, thanks for making such an awesome and complex world... now please help me understand it...... before Thursday night......

Tim223/Xanga - Releasing poor souls from contralaterograminal hyperviridiantism since 2004

wow... I have a LOT to be thankful for...

(you probably do too...)