Just today my mom was telling me they not only didn’t have car seats for kids but they didn’t even have seat-belts! She remembers her mom driving her and her sisters around in the backseat and taking a sharp turn. My aunt Cindy grabbed the door handle as the door swung open & Cindy clung to the door handle for life!

Weak rearing is only the tip of the iceberg. The general attitude of people from older generation seems like they were less entitled and endured great hardships with far more perseverance than most people today. I could easily write a book on the incredible life my mom has lived. She was born with one arm and that fact alone set her up for a life of hardship most of us cannot even comprehend. She could have opted out of the more difficult things in life, but my mom never even got a “handicap” sign for the stick shift car that she drove her baby boys around in. While my dad was away all day working a physically demanding job to support the family, mom was at home raising not one but two boys.

Mom was driving us on a little trip & I was upset about something. (1981)

When my brother & I were old enough to be shuffled off to school and give mom a break, her and my dad decided to home-school us. She took the new challenge head on until she couldn’t anymore; in the cold winter of 1984 she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Little did we know this was only the beginning of dealing with reoccurring cancers for the next 20+ years.

I remember having a conversation about skiing with a woman about 10 to 15 years younger than my mom. She said she never went because she was “too old”. I had to laugh at that one. My mom loved to ski and one year not long before had fallen and torn her ACL – an injury that would put a professional football player out for sometime. Mom was back on the slopes the next year!

One of the more moving things about all this is to see dad’s reaction to it all. My dad is a no-nonsense, “suck it up”, ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ type of guy and he’s so proud of her. As I write this, they are a few months into building their dream house- a log home. And when I say they’re building it, I mean THEY are building (not having a contractor build it). Mom could be excused from doing any of the physical work. We would completely understand if she would rather sit & watch the house be built, but no, she’s been helping dad every way she can: using the nail gun, hammering, screwing, painting, etc.

Today I was chatting with dad about welding – his job of 30 + years. I guess I was too selfish growing up to really care about the details of his job. I knew he worked hard & always told me to do well in school so I could get a job I enjoyed. What I realized today is that dad is a professional welder and that welding is very technical – there is a science and technique to it. All those years he was out there air-arcing, and welding in Craig’s sub-zero temperatures in a welding mask. I was sitting there listening to him talk about these hard conditions, not in the slightest complaining but in a very matter-of-fact way. I was thinking about how plush my life has been and especially my job.

Why did they have so much fortitude, so much more long-suffering than I do? I think, on a grand scale the world has been falling apart in every way since The Fall, it’s the old “frog in a pot of boiling water” illustration, that sins effects on the world are slowly unraveling all that is good.

Wall Mart – $800
Best Buy – $150
Target – $480
Sears 5%

Okay I’m bored of this.

I believe a world-view must take into account, on the one hand, many differing views on everything as well  as make clear sense of the pain and suffering in the world. Though the term “Theory of Everything” has been used in scientific circles to try and understand our origins, I think it can be applied to philosophy as well, but only if that philosophy is objectively true. So instead of jumping to a cute, comfortable or traditional world view, a methodical  person might layout a list (a list that may never be complete) of all the things that must be taken into account by a all encompassing Theory of Everything. Here are some things I would think that need to be explained by this Theory:

1. All that is right: beauty, love, laughter, joy, excitement, etc.

2. All that is wrong: pain,  ugliness, destruction, sorrow, disease, etc.

3. Morality (there is almost unanimously some kind of moral desire in everyone regardless of their religion or lack therof)

4. Origins & afterlife

5. Physical observable existence (this includes all sciences)

6. Purpose (why are we here & where are going?)

There are probably more but I don’t have a lot of time right now.

I confess I know very little about all the belief systems in the world. I do know that most of them deal in depth with many or most of the above mentioned items except one. There is one that seems to be sort of swept under the proverbial rug or insufficiently explained and that is #2 All that is wrong. Again & again I find Christianity as the religion/world view/system of belief that sufficiently deals with the ugly, broken, wrongness of life. When I concentrate on what is called in Christianity “sin”, I suddenly start to find the string that unravels the whole story.

Our gut reaction is to see pain or injustice and to have a righteous indignation (which reveals that morality built into all of us) but what’s harder is to admit that we’re all in some way a part of the problem. The older I get the more I see the necessity of justice, but I also see that the sword of justice must come down on me too if it is to be true. When I come to grips with this I begin to understand that there are too many points of view, too many differing understandings of what is right and wrong…rationality cries, yearns for an ultimate standard that all of must adhere to; a standard that will make murderers and cruel evil people pay. Humbly I start to understand that standard remains steadfast, even if it is my own head under the guillotine. And my head is under the guillotine, I deserve jail time, community service, the electric chair…I’m on death row. Maybe this seems likes a depressing realization, but this is where we must find ourselves if we are to have a fair assessment of evil, pain and suffering.

Enter mankind’s longing for a savior.

I can see only two ways to view these amazing systems in nature. One is to confound my brain with the hope that someday there will be a sort of magic bullet formula, a Theory of Everything, that can somehow explain how incomprehensibly countless systems and machines built up of matter that sort of just happened to come together have provided a habitable planet for me to sit and pointlessly observe. The other is to see the message woven through creation and accept that it was constructed by an artistic mechanic/story writer Who, by His very nature, sits outside of time and purposefully draws me to Him by these things I observe. The latter is far easier for me to believe.

Then I turned the page of the book I was reading and this verse, entirely unrelated to my line of thought, sat staring me in the face:

^“10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
¹¹ so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,”

~Isaiah 55:10&11

God, are you sending me a message?? Awesome!

The Brain Fart is a term you hear a lot, even though scientists have proven there is no “natural gasline” from the bowls to the cranial region. The closest approximation would be the the esophageal “throat pipe” which does carry gaseous air, but these are known as “burps” or “belches”. And no one’s ever heard of a “Brain Burp”.

The Brian FArt is a term used when people forget something important. There is a small “digestion” of a memory that happens and causes a bubble of gaseous air to form under the occipital lobes. The air pocket must escape and so it travels along the sulci until it finds escape through sinuses, the nasolacrimal duct or even through the ears.

Brain Farts usually come out of the eyes.

It is important to allow the “Fart” to happen. Trying to hold the air in has been known to rupture the Parietal Lobes and cause gas cramps (much like the “Brain Freeze”) in the Temporal Lobes. Once in 1946 a business man named Phineas Mauge tried to conceal his forgetfulness. The trapped air blew up his cerebral cortex like a balloon and fractured his scull from the inside. There is even a story, now relegated to myth, that a man in the early 20′s inadvertently held the Fart so hard that the resulting pressure on his Frontal Lobes caused his eyes to pop out.

The best way to avoid the Brain Fart is to keep your memory sharp! Fish oil is rumored to keep a memory sharp! So, remember, if you don’t want blow your brain to bits by stupidly forgetting things, eat a fish!

This story originally appeared here.