Why Jesus?

There is an old story about a professor who gave his class a pop quiz.  He wrote on the blackboard the word 'Why?' and asked the class to answer the question.  He got a lot of different answers; some short and some very long.  The answer he was looking for was 'Why Not?'  So, why Jesus?  That is always the question, isn't it?

How does one get to know Jesus?  There are many ways but in my case it was from the teachings that I received from my Grandmother.  I lived a good number of the first ten years of my life with my Grandmother in Northern California.  There are a lot of things that I would like to say about Grandma but I will save that for another time.  For now, suffice it to say that my first memories of church were with my Grandmother, my first Bible, which I still have, was given to me by my Grandmother, my first Bible teachings came from my Grandmother, and it was Grandma who led me to Christ.

I was nine years old when when Grandma set down with me one night and explained the plan of salvation to me.  I had been going to her church, Grace Baptist Church of Chico, CA, off and on for some years  and knew who Jesus was and had a pretty good idea of what was required to make Him part of my life, but it was Grandma who helped me take that final step.  I remember sitting in her living room as she brought out her Bible, read to me several verses, and would then explain to me what they meant and how they would change me.  I accepted Christ that night and was baptized in her church a few months later.

I wish that I could say that I spent the rest of my life following Jesus according to the plan as laid out in God's Word, but I can not.  Eventually I ended back with my mother and a year or so later I went to live with my Aunt and Uncle on a ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills.  Living 40 some miles away from the church that we enjoyed meant that regular attendance was virtually impossible.  But it was when I went to college,  a christian college by the way, that I become so very disillusioned about God and I decided to go off and do my own thing.

During the next 25 years I considered myself an atheist, then a deist, and then an agnostic.  Finally, through a series of events that I can only attribute to the works of God, I came to realize that the God I came to know in my childhood really did exist.  The first big event that occurred was the sudden death of my wife.  And secondly, I made into a hobby a lifelong interest in astronomy.

The loss of my wife left me alone and with a lot of time on my hands.  I countered this by taking some college classes in astronomy, joining an astronomy club, investing a bunch of money into telescopes, cameras, lens, and other related accessories.  I was using astronomy in an effort to understand the heavens, and in that process, found God.  It was not a sudden realization but more of a gradual understanding that it was not possible that the universe I was looking into could have come into existence by accident.  Now, did I drop everything that I was doing and run into church and embrace our Lord Jesus?  Unfortunately, I did not.  God was calling me but I still was not listening.  So He got my attention in a way that I now call 'being smacked in the head by a 2x4'.

And what a smack it was.  When I came to I found that all the things that I held dear to me was gone.  And I mean everything.  I lost my job, my house, my family, my boat, and a whole bunch of 'things' that I thought was important in my life at that time.  All of this took place in California during the late 80's when the California economy took a huge nose dive.  Jobs then, like now, became almost impossible to find.  In effect, for the first time in my adult life, I found myself flat broke and literally did not have a penny to my name nor could I find a way to earn one.  I started working at any job that I could find while still looking to get back into the job market in the profession in which I used to be engaged.  Close to a year later I landed a very good job with a very good organization.  This job became available completely out of the blue.  An engineer from a competitor of a couple of years earlier mentioned my name to his boss and I got called in for an interview.  So what do you call this?  Fate?  Luck?  Being in the right place at the right time?  God?

You can call it anything you want but to me I came to realize and believe that it was a 'God thing' as it occurred at the very lowest point of my life.  Bottom line.  I started going back to church.  I started reading my Bible.  I started talking to God but, most importantly, I started listening to Him.  I gave up trying to run my own life and gave in and surrendered to God and let Him run it.  And you know what?  Over time He restored to me all the things I lost.  I now have a wonderful wife, a nice home, and a job that provides for my needs.  To Him I give all the glory.

Am I perfect?  Not by a long shot but I do know that through the shed blood of Jesus I am forgiven.  And that, for me, answers the 'why Jesus' question.

Proverbs 3:5-6 -- "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make straight your paths."

Slide rules and calculators

Does anyone else remember the slide rule?  I hate to say it, because it is telling my age, but the slide rule was an important part of my life.  I was given an aluminum slide rule when I was a junior in high school by an uncle when he found out that it was my desire to study electrical engineering in college.

For those of you who are not familiar with a slide rule or what it does, it is a non electronic device used to do certain mathematical functions such as multiplication, division, logarithms, root functions, etc.

A new K&E bamboo slide rule got me my first 'A' in college.  I self taught myself, with the help of a book, how to use the slide rule in high school.  When I got to college one of my classes dealt with learning the slide rule.  The instructor asked if any of us knew how to use the slide rule and a couple of us raised our hands.  He than gave us a short test which I passed.  He told me that there wasn't anything more that he could teach me and excused me from class the rest of the semester.  Unfortunately though, the rest of my classes weren't quite so easy.

The electronic calculator arrived in the late 60's and ended up replacing the slide rule by the early 70's.  The calculator, even though it was more expensive, could make calculations with greater accuracy than what the slide rule could.  One would think that it would be faster but that was not necessarily the case, at least not with the early calculators.  A person who knew how to use a slide rule could be as fast, or faster, than a person using an electronic calculator.  The big difference, however, is that the slide rule was only accurate to only 3, maybe 4 digits whereas the calculator was very accurate up to 8 or 10 digits.  Big advantage.

I bought my first hand held calculator in 1972 and paid around $130 dollars for it.  It was a LED device (red numbers), had 1 memory location, and was capable of the four basic mathematical functions plus it had a square root function.  It was unable, however, to accomplish any scientific functions.  For that I would go back to using the slide rule.

There were scientific calculators available by the early 70's.  One was produced by Texas Instruments and the other by Hewett Packard.  Both cost close to $1000.00.  The Texas Instrument (TI-59) calculator had 960 memory locations and you could program it to calculate many different types of formulas/programs.  These formulas/programs could be saved on little magnetic tape strips about 2 inches long.  This would allow you to load your program back in for future use.  This was probably the best programmable hand held calculator ever built, at least it was for its time.  I bought one of these calculators for less than half price from a friend who had gotten 2 of them as gifts from his family.  I used this calculator for several years as an engineer for Sperry Univac.  Scientific calculators like this can now be bought at about any store for less than $20.00.  With the constant changes in technology, today's computer programs and laptop computers are replacing the hand held calculators.  I expect that it won't be very many years before the hand held calculator will disappear like the slide rule did back in the early to mid seventies.

I still have several hand held calculators which I seldom use because the same functions are so readily available on Windows computers or even on my iPhone.  Actually, these hand held calculators are most likely in dire need of batteries.  I do, however, have tabletop calculators that I use frequently.  And I still have my old slide rule and occasionally I bring it out and play with it, if nothing more than just for the sake of nostalgia.  I have to think my way through things and I do not remember how to use all of its functionality and, although my slide rule ability today is a far cry from when I used it to get through calculus and electronics, I can still do basic calculations on the thing.

The calculator replaced the slide rule.  The PC is replacing calculators.  So now I am wondering?  What is going to replace the PC?

Family Reunions

A few days ago an acquaintance of mine created and posted on Facebook a memorial of photos and music for his recently deceased grandfather.  While watching this I became fascinated with the family pictures that he was using as it started reminding me of my family and the gettogethers that we would have years ago.  They were called family reunions.  Now I am wondering -- what ever became of family reunions?

I grew up on a ranch in the Sandhills country of West Central Nebraska. The nearest city was North Platte 40 miles to the south.  I went to school in a small town of 350 people some 15 miles from the ranch.  The ranch house was positioned about 1 miles south of the nearest road and our nearest neighbor was about 2 miles by road (1 mile cross country).  I tell you this to give you an idea how isolated people were who lived in the Sandhills country.

Most of our family members were scattered all across the state of Nebraska.  We would, on occasion and usually on holidays, get together with some of them who lived close by.  However, the only times that the majority of the family would ever get together would be at weddings (seldom), funerals (more often), and our yearly family reunion.

I always looked forward to each spring when the family would gather in a park located in Kearney, Nebraska.  It was a time of fun, food, and relaxation.  Often it was the only time throughout the whole year that I would get to see some of my cousins, aunts and uncles. Of course it wasn't always all fun as we all had to put up with the embarrassment of having the elders fawn over us and exclaim how much we have grown/changed over the past year.  Although secretly, we all enjoyed the attention, at least a little bit.  However, after the initial introductions we were free for the remainder of the day to do as we wished.  It was always with a great deal of sadness when the day ended and we had to say our goodbyes and head back to our respective homes.  Even yet today I think back and remember these events with great fondness. 

Unfortunately we all grew up and moved on in different directions.  For me, after I graduated from high school, I left to go to college and then joined the Navy.  Others moved on for reasons of their own.  Those of my generation did not stay in state as much as our parents did and it became much more difficult to have these gettogethers.  The elders started to die off and the reunions continued to shrink until a time was reached when they were no more.  It is a shame because our children and grandchildren have lost that family connection I grew up with.  Today I have lost track with almost all of the cousins that I used to play with growing up.  Even though it was only a day or two a year, it was a special time.

As I mentioned, I really miss those times, and I feel that I have been deprived of the opportunity that my elders had of being able, each year, to embarrass my nieces and nephews by telling them how much they have grown and changed.