Fresnel Lenses and Grandpas

 Fresnel Lenses and Grandpas

By Bobby Neal Winters

For preachers, light is a metaphor for wisdom.  For scientists it is a phenomenon of physics made up of photons which are sometimes waves and sometimes particles, depending on what needs to be explained at the time.  I am fascinated by it.

I have a fresnel (it’s pronounced fre-nel, those darned Frenchmen) lens the size of a sheet of copy paper.  It focuses light down to a fine point like a magnifying glass.  I got it because I wanted to show  my grandchildren cool stuff.  Like most such things, my grandchildren liked it for 30 seconds or so and I am still playing with it.

I burned down the bulk of a stump with it one day.  This is to say, I used it to catch a stump on fire and the stump burned over the course of the day.  It’s not a death ray--at least not this one.

I was playing with it yesterday.  I am trying to make a frame for it that will hold it steady so I won’t go blind while staring at a focused image of the sun.  While doing this, I noticed--it was hard not to notice--that even at noon the sun is almost hugging the southern horizon. I say hugging the horizon, it is just over 30 degrees above the horizon. 

It is that time of year. The rays of the sun don’t get a very straight angle on us and what they do get doesn’t last very long.  

Anyhow, as the angle of the sun changes throughout the year, I got to thinking I need to make a frame for my fresnel lens that will adjust as well.

When I was a boy, I didn’t know about fresnel lenses.  We had magnifying glasses and I was never able to start a fire with one of those.  I burnt holes in leaves and pieces of paper; I put black spots on wood; I sent any number of pillbugs to their heavenly reward; but I never actually caught anything on fire.

So this fresnel lens represents progress.

My grandchildren are really still too young for this, and they live in a different world.  They are being raised by gentler people than I was, people who won’t tolerate insect abuse.  Because of this, it will take them longer to get into the arena of burning up stuff.  When they do, they will find their grandpa has some tools made.

As I write this, I look back at the paragraph and worry.  Are they being protected too much by their parents?  Are they having too many hills made smooth by their grandparents?  The young need the struggle.  I believe that is true.

But I think it is also true that we seek out and find the struggle.  If I smooth out a hill, that means they will simply find the next, higher hill that much more quickly.  We need struggle, and life gladly provides it.

Those of us who are grandparents, are lenses for our grandchildren.  We gather the light of our lifetime and focus it into a bright spot for them.  The trick, it seems to me, is to get the focus right on the right spot.  

But then it occurs to me, is that my decision to make?  I am the lens, but only they will know where they need the light.  With that being the case, my best choice is to offer them as much of myself as I can, so they can take from me what they need.  Being an old man who plays with children’s toys with childlike joy, might be something they need some day.

 Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

The End of the World

 The End of the World 

By Bobby Neal Winters

Advent is that Season of the Church when we prepare for the coming of Jesus as the Infant, but also as The King.  I learned all of this as an adult.

I grew up in a dispensationalist church. “Dispensationalist” is a long word and you might not know what it means even if you are one.  What it boils down to is that when the world ends, the faithful will be raptured away before the time of trial, the Great Tribulation.  

I remember we had one preacher--he was a young man at the time--where the world ended twice every Sunday and eight times a week during revivals.  I was waiting for the Last Trump to blow, and sometimes when one of the local bulls was feeling frisky, I heard it.

My thinking along these lines has changed over the years.  You think about things differently when you are fifty-eight than you do when you are eight, or even eighteen.  I am in a Zoom Bible Study, and we are going through Matthew.  Last week we did Matthew, Chapter 3, which is John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus.

John the Baptist was preaching that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand and the clear implication in that chapter was that Jesus would usher that Kingdom in.

My thoughts when I was a boy weren’t very well developed, but my expectations were very concrete.  I expected the End of the World to be, well, the End.  Everything would be over, and and we’d all be in Heaven.  I can’t say that is what the preacher preached, but that is what I walked away with.  Having preached myself and having heard some interpretations get back to me, let’s just say that every sermon is a Rorschach Test. 

But my thinking has changed since I was eight, since I was eighteen, since I was forty-eight.  I believe the Bible, I believe in the Word, but I’ve learned of the limitation of “words.”  Transmitting a message is difficult when not everyone has the same lexicon. The way an itinerant preacher might convey a message is going to be different than the way an electrical engineer would.

There will come a day when it will all be over.  In the meanwhile, there are times when, for lack of a more precise phrase, the human race presses the reset button.  When the old way of doing things stops, and a new way of doing things starts.  As a more modern prophet with the unlikely name of Bob put it,

“Come writers and critics /
Who prophesize with your pen /
And keep your eyes wide /
The chance won't come again /
And don't speak too soon /
For the wheel's still in spin /
And there's no tellin' who /
That it's namin' /
For the loser now /
Will be later to win /
For the times they are a-changin' ..”

In a way, we can think of these changing times as an “end of the world.”  An old way of doing things passes away, and a new way starts.  Our lives are filtered by fire.  The things that we do, the ways that we think that can survive the flame make it through and the rest are burned away: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  

John’s way of putting this carries a lot more rhetorical impact that my milquetoast way of putting it.  

We are being winnowed by this Pandemic, not so much in terms of lost lives but in terms of how things are done. We’ve learned new ways of doing. Things will change.  Hold close to you the things that you want to survive.  There will be another side to this, but all will be changed. 

Let us prepare.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

 How to use a shovel

By Bobby Neal Winters

My dad could use a shovel, and he taught me how to use one too.  He’d started work in the oilfield when he was a boy, when they were first starting oilfield production in Oklahoma. They used horses and mules before trucks and bulldozers came in.

Dad and his twin brother Dave worked as a pair.  A man with an ax chopped down the brush; Dad and Dave dragged it away.  They were still boys and hadn’t yet worked their way up the ladder to be allowed to use an ax.  

There is a hierarchy.

Once the brush is cleared, you start digging ditches.  You breach the ground and dig down.  Once you are deep enough, you need someone in the ditch to shovel the “crumbs” out.  There are different shovels that one uses to dig-down and to crumb-out.  Neither looked like the standard shovel we use in the garden, except in the way all shovels look alike.

There is a hierarchy here too, about who digs down and who crumbs out.  I am not sure which direction it goes, but I do know it is considered bad form to shovel into the ditch more than you have to.  You don’t want to make unnecessary work for the fellow who is crumbing.

Dad was a master.  I wouldn’t call him an artist, but he did care about the craft.  Would “artesan” be the right word? 

Our house had been built in an area subject to water run-off.  He spent his leisure time with a shovel, sculpting the land to direct the water away from our house.

He taught me (and my brother) this fine art by what the education theorists call “the Discovery Method.”  In his case, it was implemented as follows: “Boys, the sewer ditch has filled up.  Clean it out.”

It was June; it was Oklahoma; it was humid; we were in the sewer.  It wasn’t the nastiest thing I’ve ever had to do but I won’t say more.

This summer and fall I’ve thought about Dad and the shovel many times during my “Summer Stay-cation.”

As you know with the Pandemic and all, there has been much less travel.  I’d wanted to go to Paraguay; I’d wanted to go to Scotland.  Well, no.

But there is only so much sitting on my backside, watching Netflix that even I can stand.  Our beloved dog Charlie passed-away and I (against standing advice from my personal physician) buried him.  In doing so, I remembered I knew how to use a shovel.

After that, I found a paver sidewalk in my backyard that only went about as third as far as it needed to.  I redid it and redid it right while I was at it.  

It was at that point the trips to Home Despot started.  I started buying pavers, gravel, weed cloth, and sand to haul them home in the back of my CRV.  Jean, my better half, was there with me to do anything that required bending and to call 911 if necessary.

Then I finished it.  And like God did after he made the Seas, I looked at what I’d done and saw that it was good.

Having done that, Jean and I made a fire pit and had a Halloween weenie-roast with the grandkids.

Dad, I never thought I’d say this, and I am sure you never thought you’d hear it, but thanks for teaching me how to use a shovel.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Against the Grain

 Against the Grain

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am someone who actually cares about the Bible.  I like Genesis, in particular.  Genesis does a lot of things for us, but one of those is to offer us a lense on history from those who were living through it, or living a lot closer to it, at least.

They lived differently than we do.

Abram--before he’d earned the name Abraham--was from Ur of the Chaldeans, which was an ancient Sumerian city in Mesopotamia.  This was the cradle of civilization. God told Abram to leave his country, leave his extended family, and leave his daddy’s house and to go someplace else.  God promised he would show it to him.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because I’ve finished an audiobook called “Against the Grain.”  It is by a fellow named James C. Scott.

Scott is interested in how states formed, and he’s not talking about Kansas and Missouri.  He’s talking about the ancient civilizations. Sumer, Egypt, and all of the other ancient civilizations. The idea is that at one time we all lived “in the wild” making a living by hunting, fishing, and gathering like the indigenous tribes in America were when the Europeans arrived, but at some point things changed and we started having to pay taxes.

How did that happen?  Was it a good thing?

Scott takes the point of view that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.  He points out that the change from hunting and gathering to farming didn’t bring individuals a lot of benefits.  Early hunter gatherers were healthier than early farmers.  (Here I have to think of how the offering Abel, the hunter-gatherer, made to God was accepted but Cain’s was not.)  

Scott notes that a lot of the wars fought in those ancient days were not to capture land, but to capture people to use as slaves.  This was because a lot of people chose to leave the ancient city-states when given a chance.  People didn’t like paying taxes anymore back then than they do today.  They had to be forced into giving up their mobility to become a part of a nation state.

Here I think of the Bible again, but this time it is Joshua, Judges, and the Book of 1 Samuel.  Israel didn’t exist as a kingdom at first.  They lived as a group of tribes connected by kinship wherein disputes were settled by charismatic individuals known as Judges.  “There was no king in Israel and everyone did what was good in his own eyes.”

But the people wanted Samuel to give them a king.  Samuel warned them that a king would do all sorts of nasty things to them, but they wanted one anyway. In the end, they got what they asked for.

Ultimately, the kingdom they founded was conquered by a succession of empires.  It always makes me think of a picture of a queue of fish, each poised to be eaten by a bigger one.

The Bible does not picture these empires as fish.  In the Book of Daniel and other places, the word “Beast” is used.  They never felt they got as much out of being in a state as they put into it, and being part of a bigger state wasn’t necessarily better for them.

This hadn’t changed by the time of the New Testament.  They didn’t want to pay taxes to Caesar.

Jesus said to give to Caesar what was Caesar but to God what was God’s.  That was a nice way to not get caught in a pickle, but it also offers some practical advice.  We give to Caesar (the State, the Beast) through taxes. We give to God by helping his children: “to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

So you don’t like the way things are going?  It has never, NEVER, been any different.  But there is something you can do.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )