“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)

I was recently meditating on this verse when it suddenly hit me: How many American cities and towns have streets named Broadway?

I couldn't find a count online, but I've known some Broadways personally over the years. 

Growing up in Green Bay, Wis., Broadway featured tavern after tavern. Legend had it that bars were not allowed west of this north-south street paralleling the Fox River, so it was the thirsty man's last oasis before heading out into the booming west side of the city. My gang didn't know if that was true or not; all we knew for sure was that Broadway was easy street for any underage drinker armed with a fake ID and a powerful thirst for the forbidden.

Then there's the most famous Broadway, in New York city. I haven't been there since I was a kid, but just glanced at what's running right now. Among the biggest hits: Wicked, The Book of Mormon, Kinky Boots, and Rock of Ages (no, it's not about THE Rock of Ages; it's a "rock musical set in Hollywood in the 1980s, when it was all about big chords, big dreams and big hair!" Sounds hilarious, doesn't it?) So many ways to be amused, entertained and distracted from life's most important questions. 

I google-mapped "Broadway" in a random assortment of cities and found every last one to be run down and dotted with taverns. Precisely what you'd expect from "the way that leads to destruction." 

I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions, but still -- it makes me wonder what the biblically literate city planners of 19th century America were thinking when they named so many of our nation's streets "Broadway." 

I'm just eternally grateful that the Creator of the universe did what He had to do to persuade me to seek the narrow way "which leads to life." I hope that you and your loved ones have all done so, too.

I recently came across a fabulous website by ex-atheist A.S.A. Jones, now a born-again Christian, who has written at length about her conversion and the logical case for Christ. 
 
In an article entitled “Learning To Think Spiritually,” she showed a stereogram, a piece of abstract art that looks like a bunch of squiggly designs in brown, white, gray and black. But there’s more here than meets the untrained eye, she pointed out: A 3D galloping horse is actually embedded in the image.  

This horse remains invisible, however, to anyone who focuses his vision on the readily apparent plane of the picture, or looks at it with only one eye. It can only be seen by those focusing both eyes on a plane behind this image, she explained.

 There is a lesson to be learned here. 

“Like many others,” she wrote, referring to her atheist days when she read the Bible only to tear it down, “I saw the gospel as a bunch of scribbles; I thought it was just a bunch of nonsense until my focus changed.” 

Describing the Bible as a spiritual stereogram, Jones wrote, “You need two aspects of the intellect to see the reality of God in its pages; you need to utilize both the logical and spiritual (or poetic) component of your thinking to see Him. If you use only one in the absence of the other, you will lose the effect. It's like covering one eye.”

Jones pointed out that depth is key to seeing the truth in the Bible just as it is in stereograms. “I think the reason a lot of people aren't seeing its truth today,” she said, “is that we have become a nation of shallow thinkers.”

I think A.S.A. Jones is brilliant. And I think she has it exactly right.
 
--From Heaven Without Her (Thomas Nelson, 2008), pp 159-160. A. S. A. Jones article is available at http://archive.is/Hayc2.  

I watched Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed once again this weekend. What a phenomenally important (and extremely well done) documentary this is. If you've never seen it, you won't regret carving out some time to watch it just as soon as possible. 

Yes, its focus is Intelligent Design and not Creationism, but in my own journey from atheism to Christianity, it was Intelligent Design that led me to the no-brainer conclusion that there is indeed a God. I'm glad the Lord did not leave me there, but I might never have set out to determine "which God?" if it hadn't been for ID.

Besides, what Ben exposes in this documentary is mainstream science's refusal to even consider an Intelligent Designer, and its attempt to destroy anyone who even glances in ID's direction. And there are a number of surprises along the way – surprises that are sure to rattle any committed Darwinist’s cage. Highly recommended! 

In the 1980s and ‘90s, gardening was my life.

Throughout the growing season, I spent every spare moment on my garden – shopping, planting, weeding, fertilizing and watering deeply as the summer droughts began. I kept painstaking notes, recording weekly precipitation and temperatures and even forecasts, tracking what was blooming and what wasn’t, making copious notes about what days and weeks weren’t awash in quite enough color and would therefore require careful attention during the off-season. 

Perpetual bloom was my goal, and a feature in a gardening magazine would be my ultimate reward.

Once the ground was frozen, I would head for the nearest used book store to stock up on back issues of gardening magazines and the most luscious new volumes by the leading garden designers of the day. I’d then spend the winter poring over this material, consulting my mud-spattered journal to identify the worst gaps, turning to resources such as the AHS Horticultural Encyclopedia and Botanica’s Encyclopedia of Roses and – by the end of January – the flurry of plant catalogues that had found their way to our mailbox.

My designs were breathtaking, IMHO, and when I was young enough I actually executed a few of them. Roses have been my favorites since I bought my first Olympiad a quarter century ago; at one point, I had over 150 hybrid teas, floribundas, grandifloras, David Austins and old garden roses gracing our modest lot. (This was long before the Japanese beetles arrived here in the Midwest to make post-June rose care largely a matter of executing the nasty little critters en masse.)

I wrote a bit about this obsession in Heaven Without Her (Thomas Nelson, 2008), describing my reaction to my mother’s annoying reminders about her God:  

“I refused to dwell on [the subject]. Instead, I would shift the focus to what I thought of as my religion – horticulture. My favorite garden writer, Allen Lacy, summed it up beautifully, in my not-so-humble opinion:

“'I do believe that there is such a thing as a gardener’s eye and that it is a gift of what Christians call grace – a gift that comes from outside, that is apart from one’s own intentions, and that can never be entirely fathomed. Gardening is, in other words, something religious. And its religion involves a point in time, a moment of conversion that separates things into before and after … One was not a gardener … Then the gift comes, and one knows that one had been living in darkness, but that now there is suddenly a new world to see, a world whose beauties and wonders many lifetimes would not be sufficient to encompass.' (Allen Lacy, The Gardener’s Eye. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992, 3.)

“I can remember reading that passage to Mom one day in my kitchen, barely able to suppress my tears of joy over its beauty and power. Although I didn’t say it, my thoughts were running something like this: My religion – which is what it is, since Allen Lacy has said so – is so beautiful and life-affirming that it brings tears to one’s eyes. Whereas your religion is mean-spirited and discriminatory and altogether unfair. Besides, I have soil and a shovel and a credit card good at any nursery in town; you have this imaginary friend named God.

“Confused as I was in those days, I was quite sure that I was the winner in this little match up."

My life has changed radically since then. That’s partly because of the creakiness of age (what was I thinking when I converted all that land into flower beds?). But it’s mainly because of my realization that biblical Christianity is true, that this life is but a vapor, a preparation for an eternity in heaven or hell.

Ironically, my garden ended up getting that once-coveted feature treatment in a local magazine. But by that time, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to help my writer girlfriend add to her portfolio of articles, and to share the gospel with the garden photographer the magazine sent over.

I don’t spend too much time on my garden anymore. It’s overgrown with perennials begging for division and aggressive self-seeders like phlox and sweet autumn clematis.  The weeping pine has outgrown its allotted space and that cute dwarf chamaecyparis pisifera is now taller than I am. The doublefile viburnum have croaked, along with about a third of the more tender roses (although that first Olympiad lives on). I don’t hang out at my favorite nurseries too much anymore, and when new plants do find their way into a bed, I just toss the tags into a drawer; their CVs rarely make it into my dusty old journal.  

I now rejoice over the first hard frost.  

It’s amazing how, once one starts worshipping the Creator, almost every aspect of His creation takes on a new beauty – even the wild violets and ground ivy, which once sent me running for the Roundup, look pretty nice to me now (and the little dears eliminate the need for all that troublous mulching). So far, only the Japanese beetles and bindweed still alarm me, and I imagine that they, too, will one day become just another metaphor for His eternal power.

I do hope this lack of earthly energy and interest won’t impact my heavenly prospects. I’ve already applied for a rose-tending post in Eden restored. 

Since becoming a Christian at the turn of the millennium, I have been repeatedly overwhelmed at how blind I had been for my entire adult life. How could I have looked at the world around me and missed the hand of the Creator? How in particular could I have failed to see Him, and His supreme sense of beauty, design and humor, in critters such as the puffin -- like the one shown here, from a spectacular portfolio of Farne Island photos published online yesterday by The Atlantic.

I have no excuse. I was raised on puffins by a mother who often recited this little poem:

There Once Was a Puffin
by Florence Page Jaques
 
Oh, there once was a Puffin
Just the shape of a muffin,
And he lived on an island
In the bright blue sea!
 
He ate little fishes,
That were most delicious,
And he had them for supper
And he had  them for tea.

But this poor little Puffin,
He couldn't play nothin',
For he hadn't anybody
To play with at  all.
 
So he sat on his island,
And he cried for awhile, and
He felt very lonely,
And he felt very small.
 
Then along came the  fishes,
And they said, "If you wishes,
You can have us for playmates,
Instead of for tea!"
 
So they now play together,
In all sorts of weather,
And the Puffin eats pancakes,
Like you and like me.

My mother was famous for reciting this little poem, at least in our family. So perhaps it was no surprise when we found that she'd left an audio tape on her bedside table, just before she went Home to the Lord -- and that on it, she had recorded herself reciting this very poem just days earlier. Her goal in doing so, she said, was to always remind us that in death as in life, "your mother was the font of all wisdom."

When He formed her, her Creator had obviously given her more than a smattering of His sense of humor.  How could I have missed that, too?

A friend and client sent me this video, I suppose as evidence that Dr. Michio Kaku is one brilliant guy and that "science" is hot on the trail of the ultimate in survival techniques.

And indeed, I have heard many discussions of string theory in the past, but never before have I been so totally blown away by the absurdity of these ideas -- perhaps because Dr. Michio Kaku does such a great job of simplifying them, so that one can focus not on the "huh?!?" but on the sheer nonsense of it all.

This theorizing about multiverses, for instance -- looking "beyond the big bang." It's just one more way of evading the most fundamental question: where did everything come from? If time, space and matter created themselves (an absurdity from the get-go), how'd it happen? (Never mind that no one has ever proven the big bang, except in the "it must have happened this way" sense, which no reasonable observer would consider proof of anything except an active imagination. But let's pretend it's true, shall we, so we can now venture beyond it?)

Dr. Kaku also does a great job of explaining these theoretical worm holes between theoretical universes. Trouble is, we don't know (and cannot know) if any of these fantasies even exist, which makes his query about the ease of travel between universes via worm holes especially bizarre.

He actually -- really, you can't make this stuff up! – Dr. Kaku invokes Alice in Wonderland and The Time Machine, as if Carroll and Wells were really on to something worthy of serious study. It reminds me of my favorite quote from my atheist days: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," said the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass.

And the idea that our universe must burn out and die (as opposed to all those other universes?) -- well, that would be true enough if it were left to its own devices, I suppose. And indeed, in this scenario, jumping into a fast worm hole to the next universe might be the only way to escape such an event if you just happen to be alive "trillions of years from now" when our universe breathes its last.

But the fact is, no matter what universe you occupy, real or imaginary, no human being escapes physical death. In truth, only one "theory" provides mankind with an everlasting escape from it, and that's the Gospel of Jesus Christ -- detailed in the eminently provable Bible. 

One is tempted to find the ideas of "science so-called" mere comedy. But in truth, it's nothing less than eternal tragedy for those who trust in it. It is in fact heartbreaking to see all this time and energy and money wasted on a search for life and truth apart from the Creator and His word. 

"Death is swallowed up in victory" wrote the apostle Paul in the Bible's great resurrection chapter, 1 Corinthians 15. "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" 

Now that's a quote worthy of serious study.