Psycho you bet!
I kind of like my psychology course this semester ’cause it’s the one I should have had before the one I got last semester, thus everything is more simple. What I also like about the course is the fact that I am the only person from my cohort taking it, that means that I’m the only fourth year student in a sea of unknown faces in a big auditorium. It never happens. Some of you know that I’ve got issues with psychology, even when it’s taught by Christians, so it’s obvious that I got major issues with psychology taught by university professors and most specifically when you spend three hours learning and discussing “Evolutionist Psychology”. That’s what we did this afternoon.
I simply couldn’t believe a thing I heard in class today. I just couldn’t. I don’t usually swear but that class made me feel so strongly upset that I kept replying “Bulls**t!” to most things I heard (well in my head). Sorry for my bad language. So here’s just an example of what I heard:
So, we know that our society is dealing with the problem of obesity. People are overweight. Do you know why people are overweight? It’s because they eat too much sugar. Do you know why we tend to love sugar so much? Well, we don’t know exactly when, but probably hundreds of millions of years ago, human beings found themselves in a time and place where food was scarce and they realized that when they got to eat food that was sweet, it sustained them longer (because of a greater amount of calories). So our “ancestors” developed this need and hunger for sweet food because sweet food was highly valued in such a context.
I just wanted to raise my hand and ask the prof what he meant by “sweet food”, hundreds of millions of years ago, what kind of “sweet food” was there? He wasn’t talking about carbs here. But that’s kind of a trivial question. What I really wanted to ask the prof was: “So… does that mean that we are not to be held responsible for over-eating?” Because that’s what this theory is teaching. We are what we are today because of what happened in the past and how we learned to adapt to certain conditions at that time and those “adaptations” are still with us today. I couldn’t believe it.
Another things the prof said that really shocked me was the following:
Genes that are different compete against each other. The more similar our genes are and the more friendly we are toward each other. For example, genes that are most similar are found in families. That’s why parents would be willing to put themselves in pretty dangerous situations to save their child and the same goes for brothers and sisters but less with cousins and even less with strangers. A parent will want to protect his/her genes that are in their child, there is little to no gene competition here. But when it comes to strangers, genes are so very different that strangers won’t care or won’t help or won’t be compassionate toward other strangers because they have genes that are so different, thus are in competition for the fittest and the strongest.
He also talked about a “help others gene” that some of us possess, which allows an individual to be readier to help and care for people outside of his family. Isn’t that just crazy? Again, my interpretation of Evolutionist Psychology says that we are not responsible for our behavior because it is programmed by our genes. It’s all our genes’ fault.
That’s what I learn at university. Fun eh? What saddened me the most is to look around and see how students seemed to drink in the prof’s words and asking questions and realizing all sorts of stuff about why we act the way we do in certain context: Our genes! Ah man, where is this world going.
“For although they knew God, they did not honor Hims as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” (Rom. 1:21-22)
“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” (Gen. 4:7)
Love never fails.
So I’ve been listening to Brandon Heath lately and more specifically to a song entitled, “Love never fails”. You can hear it here. The song is based on I Corinthians 13, here are the lyrics:
Love is not proud // Love does not boast // Love after all matters the most // Love does not run // Love does not hide // Love does not keep locked inside // Love is the river that flows through //Love never fails you //
Love will sustain // Love will provide // Love will not cease at the end of time // Love will protect // Love always hopes // Love still believes when you don’t // Love is the arms that are holding you // Love never fails you //
When my heart won’t make a sound // When I can’t turn back around // When the sky’s falling down // Nothing is greater than this // Greater than this //
Love is right here // Love is alive // Love is the way // The truth // The life // Love is the river that flows through // Love is the arms that are holding you // Love is the place you will fly to // Love never fails you //
My university’s buildings are all over downtown and I was walking to one that’s quite far away from the others. I was listening to this song and something struck me. I usually think of I Corinthians 13 as the love Christians should have toward one another and unbelievers and probably rightly so. But this morning I realized that this love that we are to have for one another is the love God has for us and more specifically, I was struck by “love never fails you” I know that I Corinthians 13 doesn’t say, “Love never fails you”, but rather, “Love never fails” but still, I just realized that God’s love does not fail and won’t fail me. All of the sudden I had this big smile on my face. What comfort, what peace it is for us to know that God’s love for us won’t fail, won’t ever fail! We are secure for ever in His love, this love that we can’t be seperated from.
Contradiction
My fourth year of university just started today with two classes. One was in the evening and was terribly painful. Even though the teacher is to blame to a certain extent, he was not the only one making these three hours painful. The fact that I have a cold didn’t help ’cause it’s getting up in my brain (really). There’s also the fact that the room was packed full. There was no empty seat left, serious. I had never seen that. And because the room was so full, well it was pretty, pretty hot in the room. On top of that, the content of what was taught was not interesting, it was more an overview of some grammar terminology long forgotten (well, to a great extent anyways… I personally have issues with grammar terminology, I simply don’t see the point of it all, but anyways).
But I remembered one thing the teacher said. I don’t know why but he was talking about language and how it must have taken so long for human beings to create language, maybe millions of years and how extraordinary an exploit that was and how language allowed us to think in time, that is how at the beginning we only thought in small terms about time, mostly about the present and the very near future (the next seconds) and how slowly we were able to think about the future in greater extents, and then the past and finally relaizing that we can think about the future going on forever and also understand our past, our origins and how we now know that the earth is six billion years old and such. As he was talking, he drew a timeline on the board, the earth’s timeline. On the “future” side, he drew the infinity sign to show that we now were going forever in the future and he als, to my surprise, drew an infinity sign on the leftside, our past. That was a mistake. On the one hand he was saying that the earth had a beginning and on the other hand he drew a sign that was saying that earth had no beginning. I thought it was interesting. I thought his picture was a great picture of our humanity’s timeline actually.
Back to the basics
“… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.” Romans 3:23-25
I do get confused and unsure about what the Bible reports and teaches. Sometimes I’m just really at lost when it comes to thinking about the Gospel, not that I don’t know what the Gospel is, but rather how we can back it up since verses sometimes can seem to contradict one another and I wonder, “Man, how do we know what’s really true?”. I do have a little faith crisis here and there but it is at those times that straight forward verses such as Romans 3:23-25 hit me hard.
It’s easy for me to know and believe that I’m a sinner, that my redemption was bought by Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross and that is all a free gift from God. But the part that I keep forgetting is that it is “to be received by faith”. I got to remind myself of that every single day, otherwise I forget it and then get confused down the road. Yes God’s grace doesn’t make sense to me and it actually frustrates me at times, but I got to remember that it is by faith that God justifies me, through Jesus Christ and he does it freely. Faith’s got to be active and it’s tough to just believe, to just accept God’s grace in light of my sins and rebellion, but I got to repent and receive God’s grace by faith, daily.
Ramadan
I had my tuque on. My Bible was open somewhere on the table. There was a huge dessert sitting in between my friend and I, both our stomacks were full. We were at Mike’s. It was a goodbye supper.
My friend told me she was going to do Ramadan this year. She’s no Muslim. She’s Christian. I liked the idea. Fasting during daylight for a month. That’s my kind of thing to do. I guess I’m not the type to get excited about doing crazy stuff, I’m more the type to get excited by the idea of working overtime til 11pm with a friend, or not using peanut butter or jam or whatnot on my toasts for two months or getting up at 5am to go fishing with my little sister when we don’t have too. I don’t know that’s just me. So when my friend told me that she was doing Ramadan, to fast and pray for Muslims, then I figured that it’d be something I’d like to do, not for any spiritual reasons, but just for the challenge. Does it sound bad? I don’t know, I don’t really care. I kind of compare doing Ramadan like doing lent. When I don’t eat chocolate or fast on some specific thing during lent, I don’t do it for any spiritual reason, I just do it for a challenge, to train myself to exercice more self-control. Doing Ramadan for me is just like that, I’m just taking the opportunity to exercice self-control and enjoy getting up before dawn to eat and spend some quality time with God that’ll get me out of my routine. Crazy? Well, that’s just me being Gab, that’s all.
None of us lives to himself
“For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.” Romans 14:7-9
“Foolishness!” Isn’t it what most people in our Western society would exclaim after reading that small passage? Most probably. Our society advertises for something that’s standing on the opposite side of what that passage teaches. Society pushes us all to become successful, independent, distinct individuals who don’t need a thing outside of themselves. We are evaluated by what we accomplish, our worth is in our abilities.
The reality though is that we are foolish for believing that we can do it all by ourselves without any outside help. For sure we can all be cool people on earth, but when it comes to meeting God, our abilities amount to nothing. As Philip Yancey writes, “The height of Mount Everest and the troughs of the Pacific Ocean are very impressive to those of us who live on this planet. But from the view of Andromeda, or even Mars, those differences matter not at all. That is how I now see the petty behavioural differences between one Christian group and another. Compared to a holy God, the loftiest Everest of rules amounts to a molehill. You cannot earn God’s acceptance by climbing; you must receive it as a gift.”
Society says to live for ourselves, to be our own master, to belong to nobody. The Word of God says we, as Christians, must live and die to the Lord and that we belong to Him. It’s hard to have this perspective but it seems to me that the more we understand who God is the less we feel the need to feel good about ourselves and to be of any importance or distinction.
Let’s just live to the Lord.
Grace
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly … God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:6,8)
You know, sometimes I’m prone to complain. Complain about things, situations, people, but especially this summer, about my kids at camp. Some days some of them just don’t want to cooprate and act in such an immature way in comparison with their peers. On those days I’m quick to be frustrated and complain in my heart about those kids. Why can’t they just listen when I speak? Why can’t he just participate as everybody else does? Why do I always need to remind her not to mock people? Ah man, I get tired of their attitudes sometimes. But then I think of Jesus and how God in Christ died, (DIED!) to receive the condemnation that was mine, to clothe me, a sinner, with His righteousness, to reconcile me to my Creator and bless me with blessing without number. I meditate on Christ and how He died for me, (ME!) even when I was still not born, even when He knew I would reject, mock, hate and despise Him until the day He would bring me to Christ. Jesus rained down grace upon me even when I was still a sinner and is now still blessing me in amazing ways day-by-day in spite of my foolishness and lack of love for Him.
So when I have those tougher hours with my kids, I try to remember Christ and how in fact, I am not more righteous than any kid I have no matter how much they disobey. I don’t have any reason to complain about the slightest thing because I used to be a “son of disobedience” myself until God freely gave me Christ.
It seems that all there is left for me to do is rejoice in God’s grace.
Gab’s Jesus
So I’ve been in Sherby for a few days now. I did the usual stuff like empting a dresser to put my stuff in it, getting some simple groceries, putting air in Do’s pink bike’s tires, getting my fingers greasy from putting the bike’s chain back on in the middle of a hill, having the cat eat my headphones halfway through and finally assist to their final breaking on that same hill.
The headphones story is kind of a funny one. The cat ate one of the wires only haflway, so I put tape around it. When Iwas biking uphill after my work meeting on Wednesday, I was listening to some music with my iPod sitting in a pocket of my backpack. I changed gears just to realize that the bike couldn’t take it and the next thing I knew was that the chain wasn’t on anymore, trying to pedal was useless. I could either stop or start going backwards. I stopped. Then I got my backpack off and threw it on this person’s lawn by the street so I could fix the chain. I sort of forgot I still had headphones in my ears. So the iPod in the bag left with the bag on the ground. The headphones were obviously pluged in the iPod, so they followed the backpack too. It hurt my ears a little, but then I realized that I still had one headphone in my right ear, while the other was on the grass. Nice. I looked kind of silly, as you can see on the picture I took afterwards.
Another, but small story… the camp head monitor is a Christian (the camp is a language camp, not a Christian one). So after our meeting on Wednesday morning, the head monitor was talking with a returning monitor (that is, this monitor was working, like me, at camp last summer and is back this year). They happened to be talking about me and the returning monitor said to the head monitor: “Gab loves Jesus. Whatever you do, don’t offend her Jesus.” How interesting this is! This guy, with whom I only had a few small conversations about God last summer felt that the head monitor should be careful not to offend my Jesus. I’m glad that’s one of the things he remembers about me, but I wonder why this particular thing.
Alright. I’m officially starting work on June 25th. In the meantime I’ll be planning, getting my criminal reccord thing and hanging out with my sister and her kids in a Bible school’s camp cabin.
The cat is now eating the remains of my headphones.
Ethical debate in my head.
Let’s say your name is on some papers that say that if person X has an accident and gets into a vegetative state, you are to enforce person’s X desire to not be kept alive and unplug person X. Do you feel comfortable with that or not, why?
Leavin’
Departure from Montréal will be on Tuesday June 16 and arrival in Sherbrooke will be… on June 16, just two hours later. It’s kind of nice to think that I’llget to spend my summer again in Sherbrooke, away from the city. I would spend my life away from the city actually but it seems that it’s where universities are so I guess I have to live in the city.
Talking about university. I finally finished my winter semester on June 9. Sounds funny? Yes it does. I started my summer course (distance learning) on June 9 and I’m glad to say that I’ve already started my first assignment, not even a week after starting the course! I’m putting in a lot of my time so I can get as much as possible done before I really start working at day camp on June 25. So if you wonder what I do in the evenings and weekends this summer, don’t be mistaken, I’ll be reading and writing for that course all the time, ah and I’ll be planning my daily English lessons for camp too.
I don’t know how much I’ll be writing here this summer. Hopefully you won’t read the same kind of stuff I wrote last summer. I remember writing about flat tires a lot… I hope this time I won’t have trouble with that.
Ok, I’m a bit too random now. Take care.
