Thursday, February 24, 2022
That’s Not Winter Temperatures
Nor Desert Temperatures
That Bring Death Close
And
Fear Closer
Isaiah 25:8
He will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.
Luke 1:73-74
This is the oath that God swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear.
Words of Grace For Today
If you have ever served God in the midst of being attacked by your enemies, who have your death planned for you, then you know fear …
fear that drips with acrid sweat and foul tastes and smells …
and knowing fear you know there is a temperature to it, a temperature that you’d just as soon not be able to measure ever again.
Yet, always curious in our desperate drive to make order out of the chaos of life, we still try to put that temperature in the records, maybe so that we can ignore it or try to avoid it for the rest of our lives. The first challenge is to find the correct scale on which to measure this temperature. Maybe Fahrenheit, used in the US, the enemy of so many people, even it’s own people, and an enemy that creates so much fear around the world, sometimes without doing anything at all. History does the job for it.
How did Fahrenheit come to be?
Celsius uses the points for freezing (0⁰) and boiling of water (100⁰) … water being so basic and an ubiquitous substance needed for life.
But Fahrenheit uses 32⁰ for water freezing and 212⁰ for water boiling. That’s nuts.
It seems that Fahrenheit, in order to set the first standardized scale for temperatures, uses fickle human feelings, conglomerations of past experiences skewed by complex and unpredictable chemical and electric storage mediums (brains), filtering and skewing present experiences which are easily skewed by raw emotions, false and destructive beliefs, and diseases that disturb the uptake of reality.
So on the Fahrenheit scale it turns out that:
It feels real cold at zero degrees and it feels real hot at 100⁰!
Wikipedia puts it out there that Mr. Fahrenheit’s (who created the F scale) “original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt). The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F.”
Wikipedia goes on to put it right. Today temperature “is now formally defined using the Kelvin scale and hence ultimately by the Boltzmann constant, the Planck constant, and the unperturbed ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom.”
I can read the words … and not much more, and I still know the temperature of fear has little to do with F, C, K, Boltzmann, Planck or caesium 133. It has to do with the drive to stay alive, and not succumb to one’s enemies that would have one dead, lately by leaving a brake job unfinished when I had a 4 hour trip ahead of me … and charging me 1/3 of my annual income for the privilege of being forced to learn to drive without brakes in an automatic transmission vehicle. (Another plus for manual transmissions.)
God never leaves us in the lurch … that our enemies (sometimes we are our own worst enemies) try to put us into.
God promises that God will swallow up death.
And
God has long since granted to us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear.
Temperature for fear on a scale is no longer needed.
For everything else Celsius will do.