Yesterday’s blog was about the journey of faith of one of my heroes, TobyMac. I believe that he deserves encouragement for his strong faith and consistent ability to speak the truth of the Gospel in ways that have been heard throughout his 30 plus years in the Christian Music industry. I do not use the word hero lightly. I only have a few heroes and those who read this blog may know who some of my other heroes would be. Yes, sometimes heroes let us down, but TobyMac has kept his faith and a strong Christian ethic that continues to challenge me and many others.

His latest message is that doing things for people that they can’t do for themselves is a higher calling. I wonder how many of us could attest to this truth? Many of us may not have been put in the type of position Toby has recently been in. Caring for every need of a parent as the parent develops dementia and progresses toward death is a difficult thing. I suspect that we too would say, “this is harder than I thought it’d be.” But would we sincerely be able to say that, “empty never felt so full?” and “It’s worth everything you put in.” May each of us be able to say that we have done our best to pour ourselves out for others, just as our Saviour poured himself out for us.

TobyMac, one of the
founders of the Christian rock band, DC
Talk, has written and recorded songs that have changed the course of
Christian music (think “Jesus Freak,” “Luv is a Verb,” and “Colored People”). He
created his own record label (Gotee Records) and produced the albums of such
bands as Reliant K and Out of Eden. He has co-written books
with Michael Tait and Kevin Max and he has sold out stadium-sized concerts
around the world. In his solo career, he has released seven recordings and won
three Grammys, an American Music Award, and approximately twenty Dove Awards.

In a category all of
its own is an accomplishment for which TobyMac (Toby McKeehan; born Kevin
Michael McKeehan) will never win an award. In 2012 through 2015, Toby took care
of his father in the last three years of his father’s life and has spoken of
the nature of this process in several interviews.[1] Three
years of taking care of his father’s every need while his father regressed in
physical abilities and progressed in dementia has changed TobyMac in profound
ways. He has spoken of the slow-loss of his father, whom he says, “was really
not with us for a long time before he passed away.” He credits his father as
one who taught him the importance of living out his faith. He also says that
his father was a driven man who taught him to push himself to be the best he
could be. He went on to say that the three years of caring for his father
changed his life as he realized the deeper love that comes from doing things
for people that they can’t do for themselves. He calls this a “higher calling.”

He sings of this
higher calling, and of the struggle that comes with it, in a song entitled, “What
Love Feels Like.” You can hear it on his album, This Is Not A Test, and watch a live performance of the song, recorded at the 2016 Dove Awards, on YouTube. The song features
DC Talk and was a brief reunion for
the band.

Toby remarks that the
song is very much a DC Talk style of song that he wanted the other two
members to help him record. It has become a main feature in TobyMac
concerts, usually using video and audio recordings of Michael Tait and Kevin Max.
The hardest hitting lines in the song’s lyrics speak of the weariness that
comes with caring for others and remind us that such things are always “harder
than [we] thought” but “empty’s never felt so – – – full.”

Love Feels Like

I am tired, I am
drained
But the fight in me remains
I am weary, I am worn
Like I’ve never been before

This is harder than I
thought
Harder than I thought it’d be
Harder than I thought
Takin’ every part of me
Harder than I thought
So much harder than I thought it’d be 

But empty’s never felt so

full

This is what love
(this is what love)
This is what love
Feels like
This is what love (this is what love)
This is what love
Feels like 

Poured out, used up, still givin’
Stretching me out to the end of my limits
This is what love (this is what love)
This is what real love
Feels like
This is what love feels like poured out
Used up still willin’ to fight for it
This is what love feels like
Yeah, this is what it feels like

Like floating
confetti
The beautiful gets messy
When the fallout finds the floor
But in the depths of the trenches
Is the richest of riches
Love is calling us to more

This is harder than I
thought
Harder than I thought it’d be
Harder than I thought
Takin’ every part of me
Harder than I thought
So much harder than I thought it’d be

But empty’s never felt so

full

This is what love
(this is what love)
This is what love
Feels like
This is what love (this is what love)
This is what love
Feels like
Poured out, used up, still givin’
Stretching me out to the end of my limits
This is what love (this is what love)
This is what real love
Feels like

 This is what
love feels like poured out
Used up still willin’ to fight for it
This is what love feels like
Yeah, this is what it feels like

And now these three
remain
Faith, hope and love
But the greatest of these is love

It’s worth everything
you put in
Everything you put in
It’s worth everything you put in
Everything you put in
Everything you put in
Everything you put in
It’s worth everything you put in

Love 

This is what it feels like

Poured out, used up,
still givin’
Stretching me out to the end of my limits

This is what love
feels like
This is what love (feels like)
This is what love feels like
This is what love (feels like)
This is what love feels like
This is what love (feels like)
This is what love feels like
This is what love (feels like)

This is what love
This is what love (feels like)

Poured out, used up,
still givin’
Poured out, used up, still givin’
Poured out, used up, still givin’
Stretching me out to the end of my limits

Songwriters: Benjamin
Glover / David Arthur Garcia / Toby Mckeehan

Love Feels Like lyrics
© Capitol Christian Music Group

http://bit.ly/2jxSoVd

http://bit.ly/2emc8GH

Self-driving cars, without humans in the driver’s seat, are being
tested on the streets of some cities. I used to joke with my nieces that once
they were driving I would be turning in my driver’s license. Now, I am not sure
whether I should be filled with awe at this amazing autonomous technology or
fearing for my life. There are still many questions about how robots will make
critical choices (see Robotic Laws).
The tech companies readily admit that putting autonomous cars on the streets is a form of beta-testing and that there will
be accidents involving cars without human drivers. However, the rationale for
putting autonomous vehicles on the streets is that, ultimately, robot cars will
lead to fewer accidents and fewer traffic fatalities on our roads. This is the
argument in an article in Science News: “When it comes to self-driving cars, what’s safe enough?” by Maria Temming, November 21, 2017.

What kind of backlash against these autonomous cars can we
expect when an autonomous car collides with a car piloted by a private citizen
or professional driver? Temming gives us a possible scenario and asks, “What
happens when a 4-year-old in the back of a car that’s operated by her mother
gets killed by an autonomous car?” This is a real possibility. Will the public be quick to blame the robot or the human? How much will driving conditions factor into the investigation? How will Canadian winters affect autonomous cars? The title of
the article is indeed the pertinent question, “What’s safe enough?”

In Timothy Keller’s book, Every Good Endeavor, he writes about the
story of Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as told in Peter Shaffer’s
play, Amadeus. Keller recounts how
Antonio Salieri was a court composer to the Hapsburg emperor in Vienna and wrote
many successful operas. He had wealth and position but sensed that his music
was mediocre. When he met Mozart, his underlying suspicions were confirmed and Salieri
realized that compared to the work of Mozart, his own works were very inferior.
Salieri aspired to create extraordinary music but knew that he had only been
given modest talents. He asked God to give him the ability to write music like
Mozart but soon discovered that God would not give him the desired response to
that prayer. He became angry at God and jealous of Amadeus Mozart, and worked to
destroy this man whom he saw as God’s instrument of beauty.

Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon
reaction. I have known men and women who pray to God for something and when
they do not receive it are bitter and angry toward God. They covet what someone
else has and become enemies of God. They feel that God should have known their
great need and should have responded if he was indeed a loving father. They
begin to see God as unjust, unkind, and unfair. I have known some who have lost
all faith in God because they demanded an answer from God and felt that his
non-responsiveness was equivalent to his non-existence.

Such behaviour is actually unfair toward
God. If God is someone from whom we can demand an answer, then he would not be
a God of faith. I might say, “God, I am really struggling with believing in
you, please prove to me that you exist.” If God, out of his love for us, must
answer this prayer and show up in some form that proves he exists, then we will
forever know that he exists. If I know, without a doubt that there is a God who
created me and will be my ultimate judge, then I must live in the manner in
which he asks me to live or suffer the consequences. In this scenario, we would
be enslaved to this God and unable to live in any fashion other than what he
says. Instead, without an unequivocal knowledge that God exists, we must live
by faith, trusting that what he has revealed to us is sufficient to allow us to
trust that he is there and he is worthy of our trust.

There is one more lesson to be learned from
the life of Salieri and Mozart and that is that we can trust God with the
person he has made us to be. The gifts people receive from God, musical or
otherwise, do not seem to be evenly distributed into all the population of the
world. There are many examples of people as young as two years of age who show great musical prowess that is simply built into them at birth.
Indeed, such prodigies are often compared to the great Amadeus Mozart. Does
this make God unfair or does this make him creative? The world would be a much
poorer place if everyone was given the same personality, the same abilities,
and the same gifts. The key to success for each of us is largely connected with
a healthy self-knowledge of who we are and who we are not. The Peter Shaffer play
has highly fictionalized the two characters of Mozart and Salieri and it is
likely that the real Salieri was much more comfortable with his musical gifts
than his character in the play. He likely had a healthy respect for Mozart. The
reality is that each of us must spend a good portion of our lives seeking to
find our way in this world and finding the places in which we fit the best. It
is no good to try to be something we are not. Instead, we seek to find our
place in the grander scheme of things.

Astronomers
in Melbourne, Australia have detected a galaxy that is more ancient than any
galaxy ever seen. They have named the galaxy A1689B11 and have determined that the light now
reaching earth was emitted 11 billion years ago and has been travelling toward
us ever since. That means that this light started travelling toward the earth just 2.6
billion years after the creation of the universe at the Big Bang, and 6.5 billion years before the earth was formed.

By viewing
this galaxy, we are able to look further back in time than anyone has looked
before. It is like viewing an ancient fossil of the universe frozen at a particular
time. No one knows what this galaxy looks like at the present time. It has had
11 billion years to change and grow or shrink. Astronomers believe that this
may be one of the very first spiral galaxies that came to be.

Looking at
this from a theological perspective, we see that God is continually in the
creative mode: 11 billion years ago, as well as today. I say today because even
as you read these words lava is pouring out of a volcano in an ocean somewhere
and is adding mass to an island. Somewhere in the dusty nebulae of the
universe, giant orbs of rock and sand are slowly condensing into larger and larger
masses until they suddenly explode into new stars. The immensity of creating a universe is unfathomable to our minds. Yet God has left enough
clues to inspire awe in those who look for and trust in the Creator God.

Isaiah
40:12, 13, 22, 31 (NIV):

Who has measured the waters in the
hollow of his hand,
    or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
    or weighed the mountains on the scales
    and the hills in a balance?
Who can fathom the Spirit of the Lord,
    or instruct the Lord as his counselor?

… God sits above the circle of the
earth.
    The people below seem like grasshoppers to him!
He spreads out the heavens like a curtain
    and makes his tent from them.

… those who trust in the Lord will
find new strength.
    They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
    They will walk and not faint.

May we trust in the mighty Lord who creates galaxies and
islands, stars and eagles.

downhere is the
band I wish I had found sooner. I did not discover this band until their 2008
album, Ending is Beginning. The album
is brilliant and contains songs like “My Last Amen,” “Something Heavenly,”
“Coming Back Home,” “The Problem,” “The Beggar Who Gives Alms,” and “How Many
Kings.” “How Many Kings,” reprised on their Christmas album in 2009, may be
their best-known song, but the others are just as well-written. The melodies
are unique and catchy, the lyrics are meaningful, instrumentations great, and
the vocals are unbelievable. Lead vocalist, Marc Martel, has gone on to greater
fame with the Queen Extravaganza and his own solo project, The Impersonator,
but downhere is where he honed his chops and phenomenal vocal range. Much has been
made of him as a Freddie Mercury sound-alike, but on some of his vocals on
songs like “Last Amen,” I would argue that he sounds a lot like Kevin Max
(formerly of DC Talk). Notice also the Salvation Army-style trumpet in the
instrumentation of this song. “Hope is Rising” also demonstrates the “Kevin Max” sound of Martel’s vocal range.

I say that I wished I had discovered them sooner because in 2013 the band took a break (on hiatus) and still have not come back together for more than one or two songs. I hope they might one day start rehearsing and touring again.

I recently rediscovered the song “Something Heavenly” and
realized that it has a rather wide appeal, because whatever philosophy of life
we espouse, we all desire to be something heavenly, or simply a better person.
Yet, we really are “our own worst enemy” when it comes to being good. We need
to carefully read the lyrics to understand the solution this band recommends
for how we turn our earthly being into something heavenly. Take a listen to
this song and see what it stirs in your heart.

Something
Heavenly lyrics © Music Services, Inc

Governor General Julie Payette
generated a fire-storm of words when she asserted her belief in science and
effectively derided all other forms of knowledge or faith. For the record, she
is, of course, entitled to make such statements in this multi-cultural,
multi-faith country of Canada. What she said at a science conference is her own
opinion, even if it seems to carry more weight because of her position. Yet, if
I had the chance to become friends with this intelligent and politically influential
woman, I might give her a bit of advice and remind her of the position in which
we all find ourselves. It is advice I have given to other friends and advice by
which I try to live my own intellectual life. The advice I would give her is
that “we all need to abandon the notion of certainty.”

Standing on a stage and
proclaiming the absolute certainty of any science, philosophy, or religion is
not only politically dangerous, but also intellectual hubris. I may preach
several times a year at our church community in Calgary with trust in the Bible
and the mission of Jesus Christ of Palestine, but I do so by faith in that
Bible and in Jesus.

Let me draw upon the thoughts
of other writers and sharp thinkers to illustrate the point. Rex Murphy, in the
National Post, reminded us that “… our
finest sages, present and past, have always counselled against certitude, and
cautioned that when we are most certain of something is precisely the time we
should go over our sums.”[1] Considering
this statement, our Governor General would do well to “go over her sums,” yet,
this is also a reminder to all of us, Mr. Murphy included, to be considerably
more humble with what we “know” to be true.

John Stackhouse, in an
exceptional article on this topic, has said,

It is
commonplace in modern times to put faith over against knowledge, as if the
former is mere wishful thinking and the latter hard fact. Instead, however,
according to both Christian tradition and contemporary currents in
epistemology, all of our intellectual commitments – whether we call them “faith”
or “knowledge” – ride on a sea of non-certainty. As the eminent scientist and
theologian John Polkinghorne concludes, it’s all faith. Human thought is
nothing other than our best guesses on the basis of what we trust are helpful
avenues to knowledge. We can never be entirely sure that what we think we know
matches up precisely with the way things are. We can only trust what we think
has worked in the past, or what seems promising to work in the future, and make
our best guesses.

Thus it
is all faith, in the sense of faith as a commitment to act in the light of what
one believes one knows to be true with the recognition that one might be wrong –
and will act anyway.[2]

For all of us, in circumstances
such as these, this is perhaps the most important concept of which to be aware.
We all live by faith! We may know that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s,
but how many of us have tested that knowledge? We may believe that quarks and
leptons are the smallest particles in the universe, but who can prove that? We
may trust that there is a God who created the universe. Or conversely, we may
think that the universe came into being spontaneously by random chance. Despite
the furious rants of certain atheists and certain Christian apologists, we
cannot prove either of these cases. If we could, the argument would be over.
No, I say it again, we all live by faith!

Christianity and Science are
no more in conflict with one another than science and music, or baseball and
art (to refer to a previous blog in which Mary Doria Russell makes this point). Rex Murphy makes the same point (even if he shouts it)
when he says,

But more
profoundly, the observations on the origins of life and the religious
understandings of that most profound of subjects are not in contest, as
evidently she [Payette] thinks they are, with scientific understandings. They can, and in
fact often do, co-exist. There is physics, and there is also metaphysics; facts
are indeed truth, but truth is very often more than just facts. What we may
observe and measure is not all of life, nor will it ever be. A backhand
dismissal of the “truths” of religion, and the clear implication that they are
the products of credulousness and ignorance (“can you believe…?  Are we still debating…?”) is a sophomoric
indulgence.

What is it for which I am
arguing? I am asking all of us to recognize the limits of our knowledge. I am
suggesting that whether we are scientist, Christian apologist, philosophical
debater, astronaut, Governor General, Prime Minister, pastor, IT technologist,
carpenter, baker, gene-splicer, or newspaper editorialist, we all need a
healthy dose of humility. Regardless of our spiritual, philosophical, or
scientific discipline, let us all practice humble apologetics.

The pace with which scientific and technological advances are happening is astounding. In 2014/2015, researchers had just begun to grasp the potential of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to edit genomes (see my previous blog here). The technology allows scientists to cut out pieces of DNA and replace the displaced DNA with a novel strand. This can be used to stop a gene from working or to correct its function. Now, researchers report that they have modified the CRISPR/Cas 9 and Cas 13 systems such that DNA is not cut but changed one base-pair at a time.

The principle in this case is that CRISPR systems can be used to guide other molecular enzymes to a location within the genome. Researchers can remove the cutting mechanism of CRISPR systems and add an enzyme that can convert the base-pair mutations one at a time. The technology is still not perfect, as the journals report that the efficiency of such systems may be only as much as 50% in the targeted areas. However, the procedure is seen as potentially safer than DNA cutting technologies that occasionally cut in the wrong place, potentially disrupting other genes.

CRISPR technology is our best hope yet for successful gene therapy. Although specificity and efficiency issues need to be resolved, this technology has the potential to repair cancer-causing mutations, correct single-base mutations that cause genetic diseases, seek out and disable HIV viruses lying dormant in human cells, repair mitochondria that have lost function due to a deletion or mutation, and many more beneficial effects. CRISPR could also be used to change such fundamental characteristics as eye-colour, skin-tone, propensity for a certain height or weight, and even some hard-wired behavioural traits. On the one hand, if possible, why would we not want to correct a propensity toward Autism, Alzheimers, or Huntingtons Chorea? On the other hand, how will we feel about genetic tinkering that allows one to choose whether or not a child will be born with an epicanthic fold, blond hair, or a small nose? How might we respond to research that created oversized or undersized humans or animals?  (Just imagine how many mini-humans you could fit on a West Jet economy flight; or the economic value of low-fat pigs for CRISPR bacon.) (Insert smile and groan here.) Such research is being conducted in animal models, once again proving that our scientific capabilities are exceeding our philosophical and ethical conversations on these subjects.

CRISPR technology is a contemporary “genie in a bottle” much like the atomic research of the previous century. It has been released from the bottle in which it was contained for many millennia. We cannot put it back; nor do we wish to put it back into the bottle. We must consider how we will use this precious gift of God’s science as we seek to live out God’s image in humanity on this fragile lifeboat planet.

“Any
authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his
audience.”

– Rebecca
West

This
sentiment is one to which I want to pay close attention as I write a second
book. Since the author provides one half of the conversation and the reader
provides the second half, I would do well to create an interesting exchange.