Month: June 2023

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Billy Graham – God’s Ambassador 

I’ll never forget the time years ago that I met Billy Graham in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Billy’s sister-in-law, Rosa Montgomery, and her husband, Don, lived in Los Alamos and we visited them often. Rosa had been my wife’s Bible Teacher back in the 1950s, and Don worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

One day Don called me and said, “Billy’s here in Los Alamos and will be speaking in the Lab’s main auditorium tomorrow. I want you to sit with me and meet him after his talk.”

“He can’t preach at the Lab – what’s he going to talk about?”

“His topic is ‘One Man’s View of the World’s Situation Today’, and I’ll pick you up at 8:15 in the morning.”

“I’ll be ready” I responded.

For fifty minutes Billy Graham spelled out the problems that the world – not just the US – was facing, and he made it clear that there appeared to be no resolution. But then, not allowed to preach, he ended with two statements that wrapped it all up: “Of course, the answers to these problems are found in a relationship with the Lord, Jesus Christ. God bless you.”

The 800 plus people in the auditorium gave him a thunderous, standing ovation, and began gathering around him. Everyone wanted to shake hands with the famous Dr. Billy Graham. “Great talk, Dr. Graham.” “Thank you for coming sir.” “It is an honor to hear you, Mr. Graham.” And the accolades continued.

“Come up with me and meet my brother.” Don said. So we got in line.

“Billy, this is Gene Linzey, my good friend who also works here at the Lab.”

I looked up at this big man, standing six feet, six inches tall. I am only 5’8”. What could I say that hadn’t already been articulated? So I simply said, “Bless you, Doc.”

I’ll never forget it: He smiled, wrapped his arms around me, and gave me a bear hug. “Bless you, too, son.”

Billy probably didn’t remember me later, and that’s okay. He didn’t have time to remember everyone he met; he had a much broader vision of life. As Vice President Mike Pence said, “Billy Graham’s ministry for the gospel of Jesus Christ and his matchless voice changed the lives of millions.”

Throughout history, God called various people to proclaim the message of repentance, salvation, reconciliation, security, and peace. You might remember several of those names: Noah, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John (the Baptist), the Apostle Paul, Luther, Charles Finney, D.L. Moody, and Smith Wigglesworth. And God called William (Billy) Franklin Graham, Jr. to join that elite group.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention said, “Billy Graham was, in my view, the most important evangelist since the Apostle Paul. He preached Christ: not himself, not politics, not prosperity.”

However, God used Billy in the social fabric of the world. In spite of powerful opposition in the 1960s, he decided not to preach to segregated audiences any longer. And surprisingly, President Johnson awarded Billy and Ruth the Congressional Gold Medal in 1966. Billy also wrote 33 books to help people understand life with Christ and life in heaven.

Russell Moore continued, “What Billy Graham taught us is all summed up in the invitation hymn … ‘Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me.’”

Admitting that “I am just a sinner, saved by grace,” Billy Graham said, “My one purpose in life is to help people find a personal relationship with God, which, I believe, comes through knowing Christ.”

But he did more than that. As God’s ambassador, Billy dynamically lived for Jesus Christ. Robert Morris, founding pastor of Gateway Church in Dallas said after Billy died, “Rev. Billy Graham was one of the most faithful followers of Jesus. He made a huge impact in my life, and even led my wife, Debbie, to the Lord. This world will miss him, but we celebrate that he is now with the One he loved so much.”

The love of his life on the human level was his beloved Ruth. Married for 64 years, Ruth died in 2007. I suppose we can say: Billy and Ruth are together again. And I am sure he will not be sitting on a cloud playing a harp; for I believe God has more for Billy Graham to do in heaven. Leaving this life is merely the transition for what’s to come.

Bless you, Doc.

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Starting From Scratch ……

I read that Carl Sagan, American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences, once said, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”

That sums up much of Carl’s worldview. And, indeed, he did believe in a lot of what is only imaginary. Nevertheless, God gifted Carl with a great scientific mind. If you knew Carl and me, you would know that he and I disagree on some major issues, but I admired him.

Another of his statements was, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” That’s quite insightful, and I agree with Carl on that one. But that statement seems to differ with his overall understanding of life – his understanding of the cosmos. Why? Keep reading.

As I said, I agree with the “start-from-scratch” statement, because without the universe, we would have no apples, therefore, no pies.

However, he believed in the hypothetical Big Bang – the concept that all of the cosmos, billions of galaxies and any and all life in them, spontaneously self-created out of an infinitesimally small speck of matter, which, in turn, was created out of nothing – or which might have been a residue of a previous big bang cycle. One scientist in New Mexico told me we might be in the 4th or 5th big bang cycle, but don’t believe it.

Back to Sagan’s apple pie comment.

To make an apple pie, we have to have apples, which requires a tree, which requires a seed. Someone would need to create the seed with life in it, and program into the seed what the tree needed to look like, and how to make both leaves and fruit. We need dirt to plant it in, we need nutrients in the dirt, water to help tree roots dissolve the dirt and absorb the nutrients. It would take a book to describe what the seed had to do, and the impossibility of it happening spontaneously.

We need an atmosphere with the right mix of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, and other gases. Someone had to make the gases.

We need a star that emits the correct spectrum of light. The planet needs to be the correct distance from the star. We need a home, called a galaxy, where our star can reside. But we have a problem here. Without a star with gravity to cause gas to condense into a solid ball, the gas from the bang would continue to expand and never condense into a solid. The laws of physics would prevent expanding gas from turning on itself and becoming a solid. Even the astrophysicists don’t know how the first stars formed from expanding gas. Anyone can guess, but hypothetical (unproven) guesses are not scientific.

Oh, yes, we need someone to make a glass or metal container to make the pie in because the big bang couldn’t make them. We need someone to invent and plant all the other ingredients so we can mix them with the apples in the pie and make the crust. So people had to be invented. Someone had to figure out how to design and put together chromosomes and genes, and create deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), ribonucleic acid (RNA) … all at the same time.

But we have to go deeper.

Someone had to figure out how to transform the dissolved rocks into 382,000 kinds of plant life. Someone also had to teach the dissolved rocks how to morph into living gelatinous amoebas, and teach them to eat other dissolved rocks. And someone had to teach the amoebas how to mutate and grow into 2.13 million species of animals.

And all of this had to happen in an exceedingly short period of time. Tossing in a few more million or billion years is imaginative, but it is not scientific and it accomplishes nothing. Organic life forms – whether they evolved or were created – had to happen fully functional within a day.

 I helped build the Boeing 727s, 747s, 757s, and the B-1B. I worked on the space shuttle program. The parts to these machines cannot self-materialize even with all the basic materials – iron, aluminum, titanium, plastic, glass, etc. – already created. And these machines cannot spontaneously self-assemble no matter how many millions of years we tumble their parts together. And the concept of all matter – from an electron to multi-billions of galaxies – self-materializing out of nothing and self-assembling into well-developed solar systems and galaxies, is non-scientific. Believe it you want to, but it is not a matter of science. It is a non-verifiable belief system.

God, the eternal I Am, the eternal Master Mind of the cosmos, created everything from scratch. He’s the only one who can do that. What I mean is, God, who lives outside time and space, is the only one who could create anything and everything out of absolutely nothing.

Back to Carl Sagan’s apple pie comment.

I thank God every time my precious wife makes apple pies (my favorite), pumpkin pies, cookies, Thanksgiving Day meals, and anything else we want to eat. God created life and the universe, and we use and enjoy what God has created.

Keep studying, but understand that God is not only the engineering, creative force in the universe, but He also came in the form of Jesus to rescue us from our sin nature.

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Sleep is Natural Medicine

British writer Aldous Huxley once said, “That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.”

Huxley died in 1963, and had no idea what would deprive us of sleep in the digital age. According to a report of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), about 1/3 of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep a night, and the CDC says that isn’t enough. Many folks either can’t get to sleep, or think of sleep as wasted time. What actually goes on while we’re lying there? Why are we designed to do nothing for a third of our lifetimes?

The answer: Our bodies are doing housekeeping and neurological work that’s needed to keep us operating properly when we’re awake.

In 1951, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Eugene Aserinsky, wired Armond, his 8-year-old son to a device that tracked eye movements and brain waves. After Armond fell asleep, his father noticed that the eye-tracking “pens” were swinging back and forth. Aserinsky checked on him and found the boy sound asleep. His paper on sleep, published in 1953, was the first time REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep had been described. Before that, scientists believed that the sleeping brain was more or less turned off.

When I read that, I was surprised because at 5 years old, I thought everyone knew the human brain never sleeps.  

Humans and all land mammals experience spells of REM in sleep. In those events, the heart rate speeds up, breathing becomes irregular, and brain waves are more variable. However, major muscles that we normally control cannot move.

REM sleep normally first occurs about 60 to 90 minutes after falling asleep. As people age, we get less REM sleep, and REM’s function is still not entirely clear. Some specialists say it’s related to memory formation, but people who take antidepressants spend far less time in REM sleep, and that doesn’t seem to consistently affect their memory. Also, it’s a myth that we only dream during REM sleep. Our most vivid dreams may occur during REM sleep, but dreaming can occur in all sleep stages. In fact, sometimes I drop off to sleep and wake up within a minute with a fully-developed dream still in my mind.

We’ve all heard people boasting that they’re perfectly functional on five hours of sleep or less. Adults do vary in their sleep needs, but I’m told that the number of who are at their best with such little sleep is very small. Long-term sleep deprivation can be linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and traffic accidents.

So why do people say they’re fine with less than an average of 7 hours of sleep? A rush of cortisol, the hormone that revs us up to manage stress, can create the sensation of alertness. We’re told it’s an illusion; the sleep-deprived still do poorly on objective tests of their short-term memory and motor skills.

But since childhood, I’ve operated day-in-and-day-out the best at 5-6 hours of sleep a night. Once every other week, I might sleep 8-9 hours. But when I make myself consistently sleep 8 hours a night, I am usually groggy the next day. I found that my internal clock determines my best sleep time and wakeup time.

 We all go through various sleep cycles, or stages. Although there is an “average” that sleep specialists talk about, everyone is different, and we are wrong to force the average on people. We need to find what works best for ourselves, and go with it.

I read that, on the average, seniors usually need 7 to 8 hours, and other adults need 7 to 9. Some teens need 8 to 10 hours and younger children need even more. People who are getting enough sleep usually take at least 15 minutes to fall asleep when they get into bed. However, Carol & I get enough sleep and are usually out in less than two minutes.

Before there were glowing smartphones and bedside lamps, people lived by sunlight, not by clocks. Families blew out a candle and retreated to bed. After about four hours of sleep, adults awoke for a brief period, then dozed off for another 4-5 hours. That’s apparently a natural rhythm. My wife has that type of sleep pattern, as did her mother and grandmother (an immigrant from Sweden).

When people get proper sleep – be it 8-10 hours or 5-6 hours – they are normally much healthier than those who are sleep deprived. They are happier, think more clearly, make fewer mistakes, and are more productive. Psalm 139:13-14 in the Bible (NCV) says, “You [God] made my whole being; you formed me in my mother’s body. I praise you because you made me in an amazing and wonderful way. What you have done is wonderful.”