Just a head's up: A few people have mentioned they tried to send me a message and thought I was ignoring them because there was not a response... Of the people who brought it to my attention, I never received their message in my inbox... so, please don't be offended... I hear this is a problem for others as well. The messages are not all being delivered for some reason. Please try again and I will message back if I get it. ****************************** ****************************** ****************************** *************** I think I'll edit this bad boy down... "Contentment is a decision of your will followed by a process. You have to continually choose to be content, meaning it may not be the natural response to your circumstances. Contentment is being OK with something (or a lot of things) you are not OK with. It's being satisfied with what you have, no matter the circumstance." ****************************** ****************************** ******** I grew up in Texas where having faith was easy and it was rare to meet anyone who was an atheist or agnostic. Christianity just seemed to be a natural part of life. I moved to Boston to pursue my higher education and couldn't have picked a more perfect place to continue my intellectual growth. The diversity and the knowledge abound in Boston. Many of my thoughts and beliefs were challenged and in searching for the answers I gained more insight than I would have found had I not been challenged. I met more atheists and agnostics than I did Christians and began reading literature by apologists defending Creationism. I took a course on Cosmology - the origin and fate of the universe and took courses that looked at the sacred journeys of other religions. All of this was extracurricular to my studies for my Doctorate of Physical Therapy. While all the apologists arguments and scientific fact and theory enhanced my faith and steadfastness, nothing "closed the deal" on the arguments quite like the intricate workings of the human body. One day while studying the spine in my second year of graduate work, I was fascinated by the exactness in which our lumbar vertebrae have to be alligned to allow the optimal tension in our back muscles so that the muscles support the vertebrae and prevent then from shearing forwards/backwards... as your flex or extend your spine outside of this alignment, the pull of the muscles changes and will instead enhance the shearing effect! So simplistic... the alignment of a joint changes the direction of pull of the muscle... only, this isn't so simple. By changing the pull of the muscle, you change the support structure of the spinal column, which may either enhance the stability of the spine or break down the system allowing compressive and shearing loads to place excessive amounts of pressure on the facets joints or intervertebral discs... over time, this can lead to stress/overuse injury which is so common in society. The point... if a single joint in my back is so complexly constructed that a simple change in the angle of bend can cause such a chain reaction.... what of the rest of the body? Don't even get me started on your nervous system. There is just NO WAY we came into existence by a RANDOM combination of the elements following catastrophic events in the universe. Apologists have figured the probability to be 1/10 to the 23rd power... that's the probability that after the Big Bang, the elements present recombined at just the right temperature and pressure and in just the right time to allow the chain of events to lead to human life forms in the number of years there have been since the Big Bang. Now, I believe in the scientific facts that we do have and I believe in evolution to an extent but I also believe it was all a process conducted by An Intelligent Designer... A Creator. It just could not have happened randomly. Anyways, I'm not nearly as poetic and well versed as I should be, to be included in the ranks of other apologists. I'm just saying... Going to school in Boston was the greatest challenge to my faith and resulted in greater growth than I could have dreamed elsewhere. ****************************** ****************************** *********************8 I have since moved to Nashville. I thought I'd find a place in between the extreme conservative of Texas and extreme liberal of Boston (I know this is a gross generalization, please forgive it). I am currently Church shopping... I tend towards Presbyterian because that was how I was raised, but I'm open to most denominations. I'm excited to be done with school and have been working at a rehabilitation hospital for a year now. I work with neurological diagnoses, such as: stroke, multiple sclerosis, parkinsons, ALS, traumatic brian injury and spinal cord injury. I love it. I One of my favorite quotes is as follows. I unfortunately did not catch the name of the speaker when I heard it... I was so busy trying to get it down on paper... "It's the concept that we're all students; we're all in this together. We're all the same. We're all competant at what we do, but we're all striving to learn something new; and so, I think, there is this joy in the hunt [for knowledge]"
