The Missionary Imposition

When you work in a national park, especially one that involves prehistory or any type of discussion about dinosaurs or the age of the Earth, occasionally you’ll get the visitors who are convinced that you’re all Godless atheists.  They seem to have one purpose for visiting the park…to loudly announce that you’re leading people to hell for teaching evolution.

If you have children, think back to the first time one of them asked you, “how was I born?’ or ‘how did the baby get into Mommy’s tummy.”  My mom’s official story when I first asked was that she went to the hospital to have me and when she woke up, there I was and because she had a C-section, every word of it was true.  She just omitted a few details, mainly because I was about four-years old at the time.  Fifth grade was the Year of The Talk.  This is when all the boys went to one classroom and all the girls went to another and we watched puberty education movies that were made sometime in the 70s.  When my mom found out this was going to occur, she wanted to beat them to the punch with the whole baby-making discussion.  When I got in the car after school one day, both my parents were in the front seat.  My mom handed me two age-appropriate books and said, “Here you go.  Read these.”  Then I opened the books and commenced reading.  I was speechless.  I was horrified.  Not only did my parents do this, but they did it TWICE!  And this was my reaction at the age of 10.

But think about it.  What did you tell your children?  Or what will you tell them?  If your child is four-years old, are you going to give them the fulsome, scurvy truth?  Maybe you’ll tell them just enough to satisfy their curiosity.  Or maybe you’ll tell them something metaphorical, like a seed growing in Mommy’s tummy.  If you tell them something metaphorical, do you feel that you’re lying to them?  Obviously not.  You’re explaining it to them in a way they can understand and process the information.  In the end it really doesn’t matter if they hatched from an egg or were picked from the cabbage patch.  The point is that they are here now and they have God-given purpose.

The Genesis story was not intended to be a science textbook.  The point of the Creation story was to set the God of Israel apart from the gods in other contemporary creation myths, particularly the Babylonian creation story.  There are common threads that run through creation stories across disparate cultures.  They feature a pantheon of gods, born by various means, all jockeying for power.  The creation of Earth and humankind is incidental.  Not so in Genesis.  God almighty, the uncreated I AM, spoke a word and creation happened.  He spoke a word and humankind came into being and man was created Imago Dei.  We were not an afterthought or something that just happened.  We were created with a purpose.

How did God do it?  I don’t know, I wasn’t there.  I think the evidence points to the fact that the process itself took a lot longer than seven 24-hour days, more like billions of years.  It doesn’t make the Creation story less true.  The division between day and night wasn’t even created until the fourth day, so how long were the first few days?  Christians who insist that any deviation from a literal seven day creation is heresy and create junk science to fit the seven day mold create a stumbling block for those who might otherwise believe.  It’s also not science.  Real scientific inquiry seeks the truth, not to validate one’s own agenda.

We’ve actually had people visit parks and insist that dinosaur bones were placed by Satan to deceive humans.  There are also people who believe that dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth together and that man hunted the dinosaurs.  And they breathed fire, by the way.  Did you know that?

Maybe God created dinosaurs because dinosaurs are just AWESOME!  I mean seriously, what’s not to love about dinosaurs?  Think about it.  What else can capture the imagination of a three-year old boy like the idea of a T-Rex?  That’s because the T-Rex is the most awesome, bitchin’ dinosaur ever.  But if man and T-Rex had roamed the Earth at the same time, well, survival of the fittest and all.  Asteroid, enter stage right.  Goodbye Age of Dinosaurs, hello Age of Mammals.

That whole tidbit in the above photo about Darwin renouncing evolution on his deathbed is pure horse crap.  It’s revisionist born-again history at its finest.  At the time he wrote On the Origin of the Species, Darwin still believed in a Creator that allowed the world to develop through natural processes.  While I don’t agree with every aspect of Darwin’s theory, his contributions to our knowledge about the natural world are significant.

The above visitor comment was written by some kid in 1994.  Hopefully by now he’s indulged in some of that fancy book learnin’ and discovered that science and faith aren’t mutually exclusive.

 

 

http://townhall.com/columnists/gabriellahoffman/2014/01/14/young-women-should-take-fewer-selfies-and-spend-more-time-outdoors-n1778178/page/full

http://townhall.com/columnists/gabriellahoffman/2014/01/14/young-women-should-take-fewer-selfies-and-spend-more-time-outdoors-n1778178/page/full

As much as I love being a park ranger and getting to live in great places, my personal productivity went straight down the crapper when I finally got my iPhone.  My weakness is photo applications, particularly Oggl.  I can’t get enough.  I’m not that addicted to taking selfies.  I’m nearly 40 years old and at that age, too many selfies just makes one look like a raging narcissist.  However, I was reading somewhere that the more time we spend taking pictures, the less likely we are to actually remember something.  So I remind myself to put the phone down and enjoy the view.

 

There was no internet when I was in high school.  Well, actually there probably was, but it probably took up an entire building somewhere, like mainframe computers used to.  Up through junior high, the computers we used were the Apple II.  (Oregon Trail, anyone)?  One of my friends had a Commodore 64 and I was totally blown away.  It was in color.

 

Cell phones weren’t all that common back in the late 80s and early 90s.  They were large and unwieldily and looked like something you could use to contact the space shuttle.  People that did have them were the type of people that had a buttload of money and wanted to show it off.  If I needed to make a call from someplace other than home on my parents’ rotary phone, I used a payphone.  Now everybody has a cell phone.

 

This article totally right on.  It does seem to lean heavily on the hunting/shooting/fishing activities.  Hunting isn’t everybody’s game (heh, see what I did there), but there are lots of other things to engage in.  Kayaking, swimming, hiking, snowshoeing, skating, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Posting a steady stream of selfies on Facebook doesn’t give confidence, although it may feed narcissism.  However, girls who play sports or have other physical hobbies tend to not only have higher levels of confidence and of course better health, girls who are physically active are less likely to be sexually active.

 

And when a girl is out surfing, skating, hiking, paddling, and having an all around good time, that means she has less time to make herself miserable online.  She can have real confidence and not just the illusion of it.

Western Meadowlark Announces Claim to Bush for Three Straight Hours

JENSEN, UT  A Western Meadowlark perched on a bush 20 feet away from the fee collection booth at Dinosaur National Monument has spent the last three hours announcing his claim to the bush with a high-pitched, ear drum-piercing call.

Fee collector Dylan Jones, still nursing a massive hangover from the previous evening, expressed his frustration at the bird’s perseverance in staking his claim.

“He’s been at it since 8:00 this morning.  In fact, he’s been here every damn day for the last month.  Holy crap.  I knew I should have eaten something before having those five Jaeger bombs” said the 5’5″, 125 lb Jones, a recent University of Texas graduate.

Jones confessed to throwing up in the shower that morning, as well as the bathroom sink, the laundry hamper, and in the front yard on his way to work.  He further expressed his anger at the ticking of the clock, radio traffic, his supervisor, diesel powered engines, and the sun.  He excused himself to assist a customer who was loudly complaining that his VA eligibility card should get him into the park for free.

The Western Meadowlark left his post at noon, but is expected to return tomorrow morning for his scheduled shift.

 

 

Park Ranger Sees Bear Outside of Zoo for First Time Ever

BAYFIELD, WI  Park ranger and Omaha native Jill Novak has just seen a bear outside of the zoo for the first time in her life.

“I knew when I came to Wisconsin that the environment would be completely different, like, there would be trees and the weather would be a little chillier than back home,” said Novak who was wearing her winter coat and fleece hat on a balmy 45 degree day in mid-June.

“I mean, academically I knew that there were bears here, but seeing one so close, it just freaked me out.  My coworkers were so cavalier about it.  They gave me that song and dance about the bear being more scared of me than I was of him.  Of course they’ve all been here for years, so I guess seeing bears is old hat for them.”

Novak admitted to having several brushes with dangerous wildlife while growing up in suburban Omaha, including having a garter snake waved in her face by a mean neighborhood boy, being stung by a sweat bee while at summer camp, and finding a bat sleeping on her front porch in the middle of the day.  Prior to working with the park service, Novak spent ten years in the Air Force stationed in Oklahoma, Kansas, and North Dakota.

The American black bear was reportedly 200 yards away from where Novak was standing and fled for the woods like a bat out of hell when a blue Kia Rio drove past.

 

Local Woman Completely Outraged that Brand New Fee Collector Did Not Recognize Her on Sight

CEDAR CITY, UT  Local resident, Mrs. LaFern Cunningham, expressed her outrage that a brand new park ranger, who had worked in the fee collection booth at Zion National Park for all of one week, failed to recognize Cunningham on sight as she drove up to the entrance station, instead shamelessly asking Cunningham to show her driver’s license with her senior pass.

“Oh my heck!  Where is the park service getting these people?  I’ve been coming here twice a year for the last 45 years, not to mention the fact that my husband worked with the contractor that installed the new phone system 10 years ago”, said Cunningham.

When questioned about her effrontery, park ranger and government tool Lily Townsend simply stated that it was a requirement to show proof of identification when presenting an official park pass.

“I mean, it’s written right there on the back of the flippin’ pass.  It’s kind of hard to miss.  I just requested to see her driver’s license and you’d think I asked her to cut off her right arm.  She said she didn’t have it with her since she didn’t think she’d need it.  She was driving without her license.  Turns out it wasn’t even her pass.”

Cunningham later admitted that the pass belonged to her late husband, Arlando.  She was last seen being pulled over by law enforcement for exceeding the posted limit and had been previously cited for feeding squirrels in the park on several occasions.

Boids!

You know you work for the park service when you open the freezer in the break room and find a dead bird in a plastic baggie.  I think it might have been a Common Poorwill, but I can’t be sure.  I’m not much of a birder.

But we have lots of birders visit the parks and they’re a special breed (Heh.  I made a funny).  I had one supervisor who was really awesome at identifying birds, like, he was all Audubon Society and everything.  He could see a bird 5,000 feet overhead and say, “Why, look!  It’s a Golden-Crested Eye Gouger.”

I was pleased with myself when I could identify a loon.

I had one guy who actually came in to ask me what kind of bird crap he saw on a rock.  Based on the description all I could say was, “Uh, maybe a turkey vulture..or a Peregrine falcon?  Well, it sounds like it was something pretty big.”

One day, we had a visitor who said he heard that there was an American Woodcock in someone’s yard in park housing and he wanted to see it.  I informed him that we didn’t allow park guests to invade employee privacy by going into people’s yards to look for birds.

Speaking of woodcocks, I’m starting to realize that I spent way too much time working in male dominated professions.  It took everything I had to stifle my laughter as someone repeatedly talked about bushtits at the front counter one afternoon.

Top Five Reasons Why Conservatives Should Care About the Environment

5. Four words: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

4. Just a few degrees increase in sea surface temperatures can lead to coral reef bleaching events.  This in turn impacts the self-sufficiency and economies of individuals and nations that depend on coral reef biodiversity.

3. Who really likes to see a dirty beach or breathe polluted air?

2. If you happen to believe in a deity, especially if you claim to be a Christian, then you should feel a sense of stewardship towards Creation.

1. By ceding the conservation issue to the leftists, we allow Al Gore and others of his ilk to hijack the environmentalist cause and drive environmental policy.  This should not be.

Ottawa National Forest

If there’s a forest in the hereafter, I’m convinced that it will look like Ottawa National Forest on the Upper Peninsula.

Do You Have Fries for Me?

When I worked as a fee collector, I had to stand in the booth at the entrance to the park.  When people would arrive with their dogs and I had to open the sliding window, the dogs would get really excited.  I always like to think that it was because they knew instinctively that I was a dog person, but really I think they just expected me to hand a bag of cheeseburgers and French fries out the window.

CURL: Irony alert: Global warmists get stuck in ice – Washington Times

The climate has gone through warming and cooling periods in the past and will continue to do so. A thousand years ago we had the Medieval Climate Optimum. Then we moved into the Little Ice Age. The Earth is how many billions of years old? And we have how many years of climate data compared to that?

CURL: Irony alert: Global warmists get stuck in ice – Washington Times.

I think we should do everything we can to reduce carbon emissions, but I’m not convinced that human activity can override Earth’s natural processes. Whenever people start screeching that there’s a consensus and that the time for debate is over, you can be sure there’s another agenda at stake. The Catholic Church insisted that there was a consensus too, but as it turns out the Earth really does revolve around the sun.

In fact, Al Gore, et al. now follow the Gospel of Global Warming and we’re seeing that it’s just like any other discredited apocalyptic religion. The sky is falling! Jesus is coming back in 2008! Well, maybe now it’s 2011. Okay, 2014. That will be the year for sure…right?