It’s been something of a quiet week here.
Thursday a week ago, Youngest Daughter got some horrific news about a camp friend of hers, a young man she’s known for several years. As she was grieving, she was talking to her boyfriend who lives in Tulsa, about 45 minutes away. He asked her if she wanted him to come down, but she said she’d be fine.
He came down anyway.
I think I like this kid.
She went to the funeral last Monday. I told her I’d happily accompany her if she wanted, but she met several camp friends in Tulsa and drove to Arkansas with them.
I’m stupid proud of her. She’s dealt with death before. But this is the closest she’s been to a self-inflicted death. It’s never an easy thing to deal with. But she’s managing.
More Genealogy
I’m continuing to work on my family tree to get the most out of my Ancestry membership. This last week or so I’ve been working on my mom’s line, the Baldingers. The U. S. branch of the tree descends from Andrew Baldinger, who immigrated from Switzerland in about 1831, and Anna Catherine Wild, whose immigration date I haven’t yet located.
My dad developed about twenty pages of research about Andrew and Anna over the years, including most of the descendants to the mid-to-late 80s. When I first bought some genealogy software, I got a good chunk of them entered, but stopped before everyone was done. I got to work last week on entering the last of them, then started updating their information.
Much of what I had from my dad was “begats.” Mary married James and they had Hettie and George. That kind of thing. This list was last edited in 1988, too, so I had a lot of revising ahead of me.
Andrew and Anna had eight children who survived infancy. Mary H. Baldinger was the second, and she had three kids. The oldest, Henrietta “Hettie” McKee, my first cousin twice removed, married a guy named Charles A. J. Krausse, and that’s where things got interesting.
At that point, the tree kind of exploded into a series of marriages, divorces, World War II casualties, and name changes that had me tearing my hair out. One wife changed her first name after the divorce, and her kids used the new husband’s name almost at random.
She married at least twice after that first marriage, and her third husband died less than a year after they were married.
Then again, they were both in their 70s at the time. But still…
I’ve been fortunate to find several trees on Ancestry that are decently documented. It’s the ones that aren’t documented that make things intriguing.
Reading
A pastor friend shared this the other day.
“Jesus is God spelling himself out in language humanity could understand.” S. D. Gordon.
That’s the opening line of one of Gordon’s Quiet Talks works, called Quiet Talks About Jesus.
I’ve never been nor will I ever be a theologian. But I disagree with Gordon’s words here. He says in the first paragraph, “…one day man went away from God. And then he went farther away. He left home. He left his native land, Eden, where he lived with God. He emigrated from God. And through going away he lost his mother-tongue.”
If you believe the creation story(s) and think they’re factual, Gordon can’t be right here. Leaving wasn’t Adam’s choice and it’s wrong to suggest it was. Man didn’t voluntarily leave the Garden. God forced him out and left angels to guard the place, keeping everyone away forever.
Gordon goes on to say that “man lost his native speech” because he went away from his native land. Again, not Adam’s choice. It was God’s decision to send Adam away, so don’t blame him for the loss of language.
I think this is a well-meaning but very poor metaphor and it illustrates some of the problems I have with the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent god. It’s just not true. If it is, God failed miserably.
If it were true—if this really was language humanity could understand, then why are there some 1,400 Christian denominations?
Why are there so many bible translations? I’m not talking about languages. I get that part. But Christians can’t even agree on which translation is correct. King James? New Revised Standard Version? New International Version? The Message?
How many verses are supposed to be in Mark 16?
What about the woman caught in adultery in the Book of John?
How can this be “language humanity could understand” if we can’t even agree on the things Jesus supposedly said or did?
If God really wanted us to understand everything about Jesus, why didn’t he do a better job of presenting and preserving Jesus’ teachings? An omniscient god should have known how we’d butcher the translations of his words. An omnipotent god should have been able to preserve those teachings in a form people could still understand without years of study.
Yet here we are, a few hundred years later, still trying to figure out what the first verse of the Bible actually says.
You’d think an omniscient, omnipotent being could have done a better job preparing for something like this.
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