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We have a variety of wildlife in our yard, mainly squirrels and chipmunks and a lot of birds. My favorite are the wild turkeys, then cranes and herons (can’t tell them apart), ducks, then cardinals and woodpeckers, then robins and others. Not so favorite are bluejays (I like their coloring but they are not friendly to the other birds) and Canada geese (messy and noisy and mean, no redeeming qualities).

I’ve noticed that birds have 3 main ways of walking. They either waddle or hop or strut. And by strut I mean they can’t walk without moving their head fore and aft.

Good examples of these categories of bird walking are these:
Waddle – duck
Strut – chicken
Hop – any of those little birds that hang around the food court at the amusement park

I pointed this out to my son, that birds have 3 ways of walking. And as we paid attention to birds walking for the next day or two, oddly enough we found one bird that seemed to walk like any other biped. Except he didn’t swing his arms when walking. But his gait was just one step in front of the other.

We didn’t figure out what kind of bird it was – it was a smallish bird, which I was expecting to hop everywhere, but it just walked. Since then, I looked up other birds, and a good example of a bird that walks normally is a flamingo.

I haven’t figured out what goes into making a bird need to walk one way versus the others. If a biology major needs a research topic, feel free to use this.

As we discussed last week, the phrase “made in His image” refers to our having a body, soul, and mind.

There are numerous example in the Bible how things apply to all three parts of body, soul, and mind. I won’t go into those here, but I’ll go into something that should apply but doesn’t.

First of all, a reminder that God has favorite numbers, like 3 and 7 and some others.

A number that is not a main number in the Bible is 2. It’s not an uncomon number in general, so it does appear in the Bible, but I wouldn’t classify it as significant.

Today’s topic is the trees in the garden of Eden. Everyone knows the “bad” tree – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There was also a “good” tree – the Tree of Life. And those were the two specific trees.

Why only two trees?

That bothered me at first, because there should be three trees. We have the Tree of Life – affecting the body. And we have the Tree of Knowledge – affecting the mind. Where is the tree affecting the soul?

What I think is going on is that the soul just is. The body can be improved – it grows, it changes, it withers. The mind can be improved – it grows, it changes, it withers. But this is how God shows us that the soul isn’t like that. I don’t have a good answer for what the soul can do, but I did think it was interesting that the soul was left out of the tree test.

Many years ago, thanks to a book by Watchman Nee, I came to the understanding of what the phrase “made in His image” in Genesis means.

I will give the disclaimer that could be applied to a lot of theological topics: that my understanding or interpretation of it is by no means the right or only one. But I do think it is the best one, or at least the one that makes the most sense to me.

When the Bible says that God made man in His own image, there are a lot of different explanations out there. Just for fun, I looked up what the internet had to say, and to me they were either too deep or too shallow. The shallow answers just glossed over the concept and said something like “it means we represent God”. And the deep answers talked about a lot of things but didn’t give a definitive answer.

That’s why I’ve gravitated toward the Watchman Nee school of thought on this topic – because it’s a concrete answer and it makes sense.

God is a Trinity, and what He said is “make man in Our image”. Not images, but image. And likeness. So it has to be representative of the multiple persons of God.

What are those? The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And what attributes do we give to those parts of the Trinity?

I’ll answer that by referring to another verse, where we are instructed to love God with “all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

Based on that, and some other verses, we see that the Trinity can be thought of as the mind, the body, and the soul. More or less correlating with the jobs of the three parts of the Trinity.

So humans reflect God’s image by having a triune nature.

And I would also argue that’s what makes people different from other animals – they have mind and body, but they are not made in God’s image so they do not have the soul.

I’m sure there are many varieties of movie plots you could do this with, but I recently watched one of these movies for the first time so I just personally made the connection.

Here is the movie plot:

An idealist, assisted by a ragtag group of misfits, takes on a German officer who is leading his troops to harness the power of a super weapon in order to turn the world war in his favor.

Please choose which movie the plot describes:
A. Wonder Woman (2017)
B. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
C. [Indiana Jones and the] Raiders of the Lost Ark (1984)

And if you’re ever tasked with making a movie and need a plot, consider this one as a generally successful plot.

With the spork being ubiquitous, I was wondering about the name “spork”. It is the easiest name if you’re combining “spoon” and “fork”, but there are other combinations too.

Spork
Fpoon
Foon
Forn

Not as popular, but you could also have a combination fork and knife.

Knirk
Knork
Fofe
Forfe

And least popular is spoon and knife.

Spofe
Spoofe
Spife
Knoon

With some hot temperatures around here recently, I got to thinking about what people think is hot compared to what a car thinks is hot.

Actually the thought process started years ago during a trip to the Badlands. As the temperature was well over 100 (note all temperatures here will be in F not C), I was worried about the car. I knew I would be unhappy being in the sun (no shade in sight, and you can see a long way in that area of the country) with the temp being 105. And I wondered if the minivan was equally unhappy.

It’s easy to tell in general, because cars have a temperature gauge. As long as the needle stays in the middle of the gauge, everything is happy. But I have also learned that if the needle starts leaving the good zone, something is bad and it’s too late to do much about it other than turn off the engine.

But I’ve since realized that what we think are hot temperatures are not hot to the car. It was replacing a thermostat and radiator that helped me understand that. The thermostat was rated for 195 – that’s the normal operating temperature of the engine coolant.

My body’s thermostat, however, is around 98.6 degrees, about half that of the car. So although I’m in danger of overheating in 105 degree weather, the car is not. Going from 80 to 100 degrees is significant to people, but to a car that would feel like going from 40 to 50 degrees to us.

It’s like dog years – a car degree is half a people degree.

Recalling my thermodynamics class back in college: heat moves from the hotter object to the cooler object, like water flowing from a higher point to a lower point. Once the air gets above 98.6-ish, I’m not longer giving off heat, I’m absorbing it. But for a vehicle, that point is 195. And if the air temperature is even close to that we have bigger problems.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• There are two phases to Jackie Chan’s career – the good old days and the not-so-good newer days. If his movie was produced by Golden Harvest, it’s from the good phase. Once he started making movies with Hollywood, it was all downhill from there.
• Isn’t all food ethnic food? Or when people say “ethnic food” they mean anything other than their ethnicity?
• It’s summer, but it’s August so football is back on the radar. This year, I’m going to keep track of which announcers know the difference between a reverse and an end-around.
• If you take a laundry bag on vacation and bring it home full of dirty laundry, make sure that it contains only dirty laundry. This last vacation, someone packed the shaving kit in the laundry bag because it was easier to carry that way. We didn’t find it until we moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer, because laundry bags just get dumped into the washer.
• Tip for husbands: if the wife ever references TOH, she’s probably talking about Taste of Home, not This Old House.