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 stars. The middle of Missouri is really very beautiful. Robert Heilein 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 is 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 be pastors in the Methodist Church. We'd left one of our boards up with notes and discussion points from one of Lee's lectures. This one was on Genesis and Creation. One of the questions asked something like "Did God create a 'grown-up' universe?" This was along side some other notes about maybe a "day" was meant to more than 24 hours, like in "back in the day." We all came back in from wathcing 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 and they didn't even answer me. Instead one of them looked at me and said, "we want to know what the answer to number 4 is." I said, "Huh?" He pointed at our questions and repeated, "what's the answer to number 4?" I looked over at our board and saw that it was the one about the 7 day creation. "What are you telling those kids?" I told him we don't hand out answers here. We ask questions. I'm making a slide show for us with all the pictures we've been taking and I've come up with a motto: Science Camp - We want to know how everthing works and what it's all about. There's nothing more satisfying than seeing a light turn on inside a young person's mind. A bunch of our pictures are up already - though not organized or formatted. Take a look. Good night Irene.