Christmas Lights

This year, November 30^th ushers in the Advent Season, a time when we focus on the traditions of Christmas and the “reason for the season,” the birth of Jesus Christ.  Counting down the days until Christmas we often get distracted from its real meaning by the frenzied pace of Christmas preparation; parties to attend, shopping for presents and even church activities can dilute our focus from the true meaning.  So in my pre-Christmas rambling thoughts, the lights of Christmas got me to thinking and here is what fell out of my head this week.

Attempting to describe God is always a struggle with the limitations of language.  One of the most powerful word descriptors for God is found in the Bible.  In these scriptures, God and Christ are often referred to as “light.”  Maybe that is why Christmas lights have become such a big part of our religious as well as our secular Christmas traditions.

Glenmore Mansion in Jefferson City, TN (Dec 2013)

Considering God and Light

·         You cannot see light with your eyes, but only see objects as light reflects off of them.
o       Just as we’ve never seen light,  we have never seen God, but
o       God’s indwelling spirit allows us to reflect Him so that others might see God through us, or that we may see God in others.
·         In the absence of light, darkness surrounds us.
o       People, who live without God, essentially “live in darkness” and are “blind” to life’s real meaning.
o       Even when our faith is weak, somewhat like a small candle in a large dark room, God’s presence pushes the darkness away, creating a circle of light around us.
·         Light is multi-faceted, composed of different wavelengths which when separated by a prism displays the many different colors of the light spectrum.
o       God is like that.  He is multi-faceted and touches each life in a unique way.  He is not limited to any social status, race, color or creed of humanity.
·         Light can only pass through things that are transparent.  Opaque substances block all light.   Depending on the substance, light may transmit as translucent or transparent.
o       Like light, God’s spirit can shine through us as well.
o       Ask yourself, “Does God reveal himself to others through me?”
§         Am I transparent (transmitting a clear image of God),
§         Am I translucent (transmitting a fuzzy image of God), or
§         Am I opaque (transmitting no image of God)?

I John 1:  5-7 (21^st Century King James Version)

5)  This then is the message which we have heard from Him and declare unto you:  that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.  6)  If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.  7)  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

II Corinthians 4:4 (New Living Translation)

4)      Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe.  They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News.  They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.

 

Grand staircase of Glenmore Mansion (Nov 29, 2014)

The season of lights has begun and I am enjoying the lights of Christmas again this year as we decorate our own home and as we drive around our community.  Here’s hoping that the lights of Christmas remind us of Jesus Christ, God’s true light.  Jesus is truly the light of the world.  He can illuminate a dark world or a dark heart, but only if we seek him.

Tree in front room at Glenmore Mansion (Nov. 29, 2014)

Now, let's ramble and enjoy the Christmas Season!

DIY Time Warp

For some reason I’ve always been a DIY type of person.  Raised by my grandmother Johnson, I was taught to be independent and take care of things around the house.  The primary motivator back in those days was economics, not HGTV.  As an adult, the DIY complex has almost been a curse at times when I should’ve called a “fix-it guy” rather than doing it myself.  I’ve always tried to “build things” or “remodel things” or use “wire and bailing twine” to keep something operational.

During all of my projects, many a time I’ve dropped a screw, nut, or nail as I worked on a widget.  I’ve most always searched for those dropped objects, but many times those nuts, nails or screws simply vanished…never to be found.

Over the years I’ve often thought about where those objects disappeared to.  Now I know most of you are saying, they just fell in a crack, a hole, or bounced under a board.  But I’m not so sure the answer is that simple.  Most of you are probably aware of one of the universal laws a DIY person encounters regularly, the Law of Gravity:  Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.  Well, this certainly happens, but this law only accounts for those objects that I look for and find.  The ones that simply vanish call for a much deeper analysis.

I’ve been building my theory since the original Star Trek series premiered on TV back in 1966.  That show certainly gave me some things to ponder.  Remember how the crew members would step into the “transporter room” and be “beamed” to another location, or “beamed back aboard” the Starship when they got in a tight fix on the planet below?  Moving objects through space…..could it be possible?  Then the “Back to the Future” movies and others such sci-fi stories planted the seeds of “slipping through a crack in today’s reality to another point in time.”

Then there are other times when I forget science and ponder the mysteries of my faith.  The Biblical concept of a physical body that also has an invisible soul provides even additional fodder for consideration.  Do body and soul reside in parallel universes, one physical and visible, the other spiritual and invisible?  

All these thoughts came full circle this past week as I began another DIY project in our sun room.  Plans were to put some bead board on the ceiling, so I began the prep work of moving furniture and taking down all the decorative elements in the room.  One step involved removing the ceiling fan before I began nailing the bead board strips to the ceiling.  This small mechanical exercise involved removing a few screws that held the fan blades to the fan motor and then removing the motor and electrical connections.  Pretty simple stuff, but boy did it help me solve my life-long wondering about what sometimes happens to screws when they are dropped and simply vanish.

 



Here I'm putting the fan back up after installing the bead board,
but this is about the same process as when I took screws out and one vanished.

The floor of the sun room is vinyl tile with an oval area rug in the center.  The fan hangs directly above the oval rug and a wicker coffee table is beneath the fan.  I’d removed two fan blades successful and captured all screws.  On the third blade I removed screw number one and had screw number two on the way out when I dropped it.  I looked down from my perch on the step ladder just in time to see the screw hit the oval rug and take a bounce under the coffee table.  No doubt about where this screw had landed I thought, so I stepped down from the ladder and looked under the coffee table.  No screw in sight.  I broadened my search, feeling with my hands and looking at every conceivable place the screw could have bounced and hidden.  No luck.    I picked up the oval carpet and shook it to see if I could dislodge a screw hiding some place in the weave.  No luck!  That shiny steel screw had completely vanished and was not to be found in that 12’ x 16’ sunroom space. 

 

It seemed impossible that the screw had simply vanished, but suddenly it hit me.  “I know what happened,” I said to my wife, “It fell through a time warp, you know, a crack in time.”  She laughed heartily, but didn’t offer any better explanation.  “You’ll find it sometime,” she said.  No chance of that I thought, it's in another time dimension and invisible from our time perspective.

After all these years of dropping screws, nuts and bolts, I finally saw this one hit the floor and bounce under the coffee table.  It made no sound as it hit the carpet, it simply bounced into a 'crack in time' and vanished.   Finally, after all these years, I'd seen one of these disappearing events with my own eyes; positive proof that physical objects can totally vanish and slip from real time into an invisible dimension.  I know, you are probably chuckling to yourself or even laughing out loud by now, but I doubt you’ve got a better analysis. 



About half way putting up the bead board, still no screw found.

My wife thought we'd find it as we worked, but after about a week's work in the sunroom; removing all the furniture, vaccuming, mopping, and checking all the baseboards and cracks, the fan screw is still missing.  It vanished!

So, laugh if you want, but I’ll rest in the belief that the proof will come someday.  When the time comes for me to slip through life’s time warp and step into a great new dimension of eternal time and space I’m sure I’ll find the evidence.  No doubt, one of the first things I’ll see in that new universe will be a vast room full of nuts, bolts, nails and screws. No doubt about it, I'll find the fan blade screw there among the many others in a giant pile of screws, nuts and nails that were dropped by a bunch of Do-It-Yourselfers when they were working on their projects.

 

Now if by chance you slip through the time warp before I do, the screw you need to look for looks like the one in the photo below.  See if you can figure how to slip it back through the time warp and I'll put it back in the fan.

 

 

Here is what it looks like.

It fits in a bracket like this one.



Now while we still have time on this side...…….let’s ramble!

Hidden Colors

View of Mt. Cammer from Foothills Parkway, Cosby, TN

It has been a beautiful fall here in East Tennessee.  It seems it took a bit longer for the trees to come into their full colors, but for the past several weeks they have been providing vivid and dynamic colors.  Here it is the second week of November and there is still much color in the neighborhood.  One day this past week as I drove home from town admiring the yellows, oranges and reds of maples, hickories, gums and sumac, I decided once again that the fall is my favorite season……at least until spring.

At my core I love nature and I still carry some of my life science curiosity, questioning and training from my college years as a biology/forestry major.  Each fall as I observe the leaves changing from their many shades of green to their many shades of color I can’t help but remember the science behind the transformation from green to a rainbow color pallet.



Our "Tree House" Maple

                                        

 

My daughter-in-law, Mimi, and I were talking a few weeks back as the color transformations began.  She was speculating about how weather or climatic factors influence the quality of the annual foliage display.  At that point, my old plant physiology factoids merged into our conversation when I said, “You know those colors are there in the leaves all summer, you just can’t see them due to the chlorophyll; and it’s the change in shorter days and longer nights that triggers the appearance of colors.”

Later when I had some second thoughts about the accuracy of my comment, I did a quick fact check with the National Arboretum website and found that my memory of plant physiology was almost correct. 

 

Here is the scoop.  The green of the chlorophyll normally masks the yellow pigments known as xanthophylls and the orange pigments called carotenoids — both become visible when the green chlorophyll is gone. These colors are present in the leaf throughout the growing season. Got that part right.  The red and purple pigments come from anthocyanins. In the fall anthocyanins are manufactured from the sugars that are trapped in the leaf. In most plants anthocyanins are typically not present during the growing season. I'd forgotten about how the reds get there. 

Eventually all the color pigments break down in light or when they are frozen. The only pigments that remain are tannins, which are brown.

Along the Foothills Parkway near Cosby, TN

Well, three out of four ain’t too bad I guess. At any rate, the colors begin appearing when triggered by the seasonal transition to shorter days, longer nights and cooling temperatures.  In short, it’s the “change” that brings out the colors.

So, as I drove home that day and admired the colors again I thought about the “hidden colors” of the trees.  The hidden pigments of yellow, orange and brown are there during the green summer season and reds appear later due to the sugars trapped in the leaf. It is only when the green pigments of chlorophyll begin to breakdown, photosynthesis ceases and sugar content increases; that the brilliant colors of autumn are able to show through the greens of summer.

The thought occurred to me that people are like deciduous trees in some respects.  I’ve heard it said that there is a bit of good and bad, beauty and ugliness in every one of us.  When life is generally good and we are active, productive and growing there is a dominate personality that is apparent to those around us.  They see our predominate color.  But sometimes, if we get “shook up” or there is a time of stress, change or transition, our other personality “colors” may show through.

Fortunately for us, living in the hills and mountains of Appalachia, the transition of seasons triggers some of the best and most enjoyable colors of the year in our deciduous trees. Those seasonal changes seem to bring out the brightest and most pleasant colors of the year in our native trees.

 

Another colorful view along a six mile stretch of the
Foothills Parkway connecting Cosby, Tn with I-40.

As I experience my own transition times in the seasons of life; when my days grow shorter and the nights are cooler, so to speak, here’s hoping that I will display some of my best and most pleasant colors in the autumn of life. 

May we all hope to show the colors of love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control and long-suffering.  May they be visible to those around us, adding some color to the day.

Sumac

Now, let’s ramble and enjoy what’s left of this fall season!