Month: July 2004

On my web site, I posted a link to an outfit called truecatholic.org, which features the real pope, who lives not in Rome, but in Springdale, Washington. Well, I now find that I only scratched the surface. Here’s a site that lists seventeen claimants to the papal chair. And there are a number of others who intend to be pope sometime in the future. :doze:

I haven’t been blogging much of late. My spare time has been taken up with writing on the Catholic Answers Forums. If you have any interest in seeing what I’ve written there, this link will take you to a list of my posts.

These debates are a world all their own. The contestants exhibit a wide range of emotions. They accuse one another of the very errors they, themselves, are committing in logic, research, fairness, and every other topic. They misquote one another and misconstrue perfectly clear sentences. They make authoritative statements about things they’re totally ignorant of. They’re blinded by self-interest.

And that’s just the ones who agree with me! 😛

I’m happy to report that, after about fifteen hours of labor and many trips to and fro, I completed the repainting of the flooded ceiling from last week. It was the most difficult painting I’ve ever done: large room (400 sq. ft.) with gobs of stuff in it and against the walls. It was hard to make the entire surface smooth so that looking at the ceiling from an acute angle didn’t reveal irregularities in the texture of the paint.

Plumbing is easier. If something doesn’t cooperate, you can slam it upside the head with a hammer or pipe wrench. If it looks ugly, you can cover it with drywall or bury it underground or hide it in a cabinet.

But if an attic gets flooded, you can’t hide it, bury it, or beat it into submission. It holds the high ground and you’re at its mercy.

I just read the Associated Press report about the Cassini spacecraft’s cavortings around Saturn’s rings. It’s amazing, just like they say. The engineers who pulled this off are some of the most amazing people on the planet.

One quote from the story really got my attention. The writer said “Saturn and its rings resemble the early solar system, when the sun was surrounded by a disk of dust and gas that eventually formed the planets and turned into scientists and engineers.”

Well, I added that last part. The original quotation stopped at the word “planets.” I just added the last part because it is precisely what atheistic evolutionists teach in college classrooms, although they’re careful not to make it quite that clear. :laugh:

Today’s my birthday. On May 25th I wrote about my spiritual birth in 1969 when God gave me a new heart via faith in Christ. But today is my physical birthday.

I was adopted as a newborn by Evan and Juanita Barley. As I heard the story, the arrangements were made before my birth. Presumably some girl in Houston was carrying an unwanted fetus. At that time, it was illegal for women to hire abortionists to kill their children. I have no idea whether or not my natural mother would have done such a thing if it had been an option. Certainly a “girl in trouble” would experience many conflicting emotions, including fear, and could at least feel a strong temptation to do whatever was necessary to address the situation. This is especially true if older counselors assure her that the baby is not a baby and the beating heart is not beating and that little Kevan would be better off dead–if he were alive, but he really isn’t, so it’s okay to kill him, uh, it. But, I thank God, that’s not how it was in those days, before the slaughter of the forty million began in 1973.

My adoptive parents are both deceased now. They were somewhat older than the average couple that has babies. On the other hand, I assume that my natural mother was somewhat younger than average–perhaps seventeen. That would put her in her mid-to-late sixties now.

I’ve never felt a desire to “connect” with my natural parents. My adoptive parents are my parents, and they’re all the parents I’ll ever need. But I’ve sometimes felt sorry for my natural mother. If she’s still living, this is the 49th time she’s looked out the window, or off into the sky, or maybe back toward downtown Houston, and remembered the Friday night when she passed through the valley of the shadow of death in order to bring me into the world, and wondered what her boy is doing on his birthday. She doesn’t know that he looks just like his “father,” has an IQ in the genius range, earned two masters degrees and a Ph.D., works in six languages, has played in a symphony orchestra, acted in plays, sung in choirs, pastored churches, and repaired toilets. She wonders about his wife and kids. She wonders if it turned out okay.

All she knows is that she’s glad, too, that she gave me life instead of death. She hopes that I know that she’s never missed my birthday. She hopes I understand why she gave me up.

And she probably sings a quiet little “Happy Birthday dear Kevan” when nobody is around.

Thanks, Mom.