Thursday Night

I'm very tired but I just had to come back down to get some writing done. I can't believe it's already Friday tomorrow, or today actually now that it's past midnight. We went back to the observatory tonight. It was a fruitless night astronomically speaking, but the kids had a good time hanging out with each other under the starts. The middle of Missouri is really very beautiful. Robert Heinlein wrote a story called the Green Hills of Earth. He was speaking of this part of the country and the old man in the story was him. We're here at Central Methodist University with about 50 or so "Local Pastors." These are folks young and old, girl and boy, from the Midwest US who want to become pastors in the Methodist Church. We'd left one of our boards up with notes and discussion points from the day, today being Genesis and Creation. One of the questions asked "Did God create a 'Grown Up' Universe?" This was along side some other notes about the possibility of a "Day" being more than 24 hours. We all came back in from watching a movie and I noticed two of the Preachers playing on my chess board. I asked them if one of them would play me a game later on they didn't even answer me. Instead one of them looked at me as said, "we want to know what the answer is to number 4." I said, "Huh?" He pointed to the board and repeated, "What's the answer to number 4?" I looked over to the board and saw that it was number 4 was a question on 7 day creation. He asked again, "What are you telling those kids?" I replied, "We don't hand out answers here. We ask questions." The kids love these discussions. There's nothing more satisfying than seeing a light turn on inside a young person's mind. I'm lecturing on Darwin tomorrow morning, so I've got to get some sleep.

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