This morning my mind woke up long before my body was ready to begin the day.
One of the things I learned yesterday was the term agonal breathing. It means a labored, gasping breathing that happens after the body is dead in terms of heart and brain function. Agonal breathing is a reflexive result of brain stem activity after all other cerebral function has ended.
The reason that came up had to do with the vet's use of potassium chloride as the drug for euthanizing these two horses. It was his first time to use this drug instead of the normal three-drug cocktail that is expensive, hard to get, and has its own problematic side effects. Potassium chloride can result in 8-10 minutes of agonal breathing which he said can be pretty brutal to watch if you don't understand that the animal is fully dead and it's only a spasm. So he said he will only use it if the owners aren't present (as they weren't yesterday) because their emotional attachment to their animal "behaving" like that would just be too distressing.
Not knowing that term I looked it up. Humans can do agonal breathing, too. Yeah, not something you'd want to see a loved one go through, animal or human.
OK, let's try something here and see if it makes sense and/or works.
I've been thinking about intelligence and how it's dispersed throughout the population. It's clearly not spread out equally; some people get more than others. Methinks it may be a bell curve. At the top end are the Einsteins, Carl Sagans, and Stephen Hawkings. At the other end is your brother-in-law. The closer you move to the middle the more people there are.
Note: we need to distinguish between intelligence, however we measure it, and wisdom. The latter, at least in the Hebrew is skill in living and has to do with understanding life. Intelligence and wisdom are as unrelated as hair color and shoe size. Anyone at any point on the intelligence bell curve can have a lot or a very little wisdom.
Where are you on that bell curve of intelligence? No false modesty, please. You've spent enough time in the world that you should have some idea how much smarts God gave you. Regardless of where you place, do you wish you had more intelligence?
This is NOT the same as education. Intelligence has to do with comprehending. As a teacher I had students who graduated and got the education but were closer to a sack of hammers than Albert Einstein. Someone who dropped out in 10th grade may be very, very bright (and wise) while being relatively uneducated.
If you're wondering what got me started on this mental rabbit trail...
I have some friends from way back who are brothers in Christ. Note my use of a present tense verb. I have every confidence in the eternal salvation offered freely by God and that they genuinely accepted that gift and are therefore his child. But they've abandoned the faith, at least the evangelical faith. While they accept the existence of God they are now much less convinced of the Deity of Christ, his substitutionary death, and a binary eternity based solely on someone's response to that atonement. Interestingly, each of these individuals is well to my left on the bell curve. These guys are really smart and leave me in the dust on a mental playing field.
This phenomenon is paralleled by some really smart people I know who still hold firmly to the fundamentals of the faith and consider themselves solidly evangelical, but who hold theological views that are at the fringe or maybe beyond.
In my conversations with guys from both of these groups they leave me with the impression that while they used to buy the standard views they eventually came to realize those positions were not consistent with careful reflection. Usually unspoken is the implicit suggestion that those who hold traditional views are just a bit too far to the right of the bell curve to engage in the kind of critical thinking that delivered them from that simplistic naïveté.
I *think* I have a pretty good sense of where I am on that intelligence bell curve. In addition to working with people pretty intimately over the course of 42 years in ministry my 10 years in education put me in the arena of thinking and thinkers. I know that there's a lot of room to my left, that I'm pretty near the top of that curve.
And I have NO desire to move to my left! See, I'm convinced there's something like being too smart for your own good. And that Christ had that in mind when he said, "Unless you become like children...." With a lot of intelligence comes a hubris that can't or won't accept what they can't understand, can't wrap their big brains around. Paul echoed Christ when he said the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God and visa versa.
Faith is childlike (not childish!) Faith requires a level of humility that too often eludes the very smart. This is NOT to say you can't be brilliant and have a great big faith. You're living proof of that! But this preacher would much rather declare God's grace, provision, and care to the center/right of that bell curve than the left end.
For that matter, those folk are just easier and more fun to be around, eh? Or is it just that we're literally like-minded?
Agree/Disagree??
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