December 20, 2020

Yesterday, Nancy's house burnt, it's a total loss. Nancy is one of my wife's customers, she walks and grooms her dog and they have become friends. We just left the neighborhood to pick up boxes of food at Wea School, thank you Ivanka Trump and farmers! As we pulled through the school parking lot a gentleman approached our car and asked if anyone needed prayer today. I'm not usually a spiritual man, but my wife asked him to pray for me, and so he did. He complimented my name and asked Jesus to come into my life and for me to feel his presence. I don't know about all that, but it did feel good to have a complete stranger take a minute out of his life to care about my problems for no reason at all.

If you know me very well, you may not believe this, but I've always
believed there is something spiritual about the human condition. However, I have never believed organized religion was anything more than people helping people, which is fine, but I just don't have blind faith in the bible or the "word". I've always felt like the American Indian was closer to the truth with the idea of mother earth and the interconnected conscious of all of mankind.

The engineer in me feels that life itself just about has to be a transition of energy from a higher ordered state to a lower ordered state following the laws of entropy. Assuming this is the case, then life probably exists all over the universe, processing those higher ordered energy states into lower ordered energy states. Consciousness though, holds a special place in the order of life. A single celled life form is likely driven purely by instinct to gather energy and process that down with no real thought, driven by a conglomeration of proteins that react in ordered ways because of their physical structure. Once an animal is forced to reproduce via another animal, then all the wonders of consciousness start to appear. The ritual dances and shows of power or grace to make oneself more attractive, these are all clear signs of purpose with actual conscious thought involved. This begins to drive everything else that this animal does and suddenly nothing is random anymore. We live in this world, where there are uncanny instances of what feels like communication even without words, sometimes across long distances, and are very difficult to explain through current science. In fact, they are so difficult to explain or accept in scientific terms that they are often dismissed as pure coincidence. If you live long enough, the idea that these are all pure coincidence starts to become difficult to accept.  It is in these times and areas of our lives that consciousness feels spiritual in some way, as if we are all connected by it somehow.

I don't want to dive into a deep conversation about life and spirituality, so back to my story about Nancy's house. Immediately following the prayer, we pulled up to receive the food boxes that we came here for and immediately received a phone call from Judy, another customer of my wife's, to tell us that Nancy's house was on fire and that Boots, the dog, and Nancy were ok and across the street at Judy's house safe and sound. We rushed home and managed to arrive just moments before the fire trucks arrived. We needed to check on Laura's house, her son Calvin, and their dog Samson who live right next door to the house that was on fire.  Laura was out of town, and my wife found Calvin sleeping on the couch and Sampson pacing back and forth, clearly aware something wasn't right. Ultimately, Laura's house wasn't harmed and nobody was hurt but I'm so glad we were able to help secure everyone's safety. It was quite an experience with thick black out level smoke, hard to see and hard to breath, an experience leaving me questioning the gentleman who prayed for me....