Okay, so I flunked Physics my Junior year in High School.

Not a good thing, especially at the moment in your academic career when you need to start applying to colleges. A big red “F” on your academic record doesn’t exactly endear you to college admission departments.

Why I failed the class was simple. The teacher and I just didn’t speak the same language. I didn’t understand him and he didn’t understand me. And then there was the fact that I spent most of my waking hours obsessing about this really hot freshman girl I’d started dating that winter. Talking on the phone with her every night seemed so much more important than doing Physics homework. Years later she and I ended up getting married, but Physics and I were divorced by the end of that school year.

So I got an “F.”

And I had to go to Summer School.

I didn’t want to spend my summer going to class to study a subject I hated, but had no choice. The only way to expunge that failing grade from my academic record was to swallow the bitter summer school pill. So off to class at a local Junior College I reluctantly trudged every sunny morning while my friends went off to the beach. I was not a happy boy.

But…

Turns out the guy teaching the Summer School Physics class was a very down-to-earth old salt who’d flown B-29 bombers during World War II. Being of the generation of kids born in the immediate aftermath of the war, I was fascinated by stories he spun about dodging both flak and fighters on hair-raising missions over Germany. And he had a way of applying the principles of Physics to aviation in general and B-29’s in particular. From a young age I’ve been gripped with a love for flying and I found myself soaking in all the ways Physics applies to flight. Gravity. Lift. Thrust. Drag. Coefficients of friction. Bernoulli’s Principle. I was hooked!

By the end of class I was a B+ student.

And I LOVED Physics!

But it wasn’t until years later that this newfound respect for Physics impacted my life in a practical way. A friend passed along a little book of essays by the late Richard Feynman whose work in Quantum Electrodynamics earned him the 1965 Nobel Prize. After receiving the award, Feynman was asked if he felt gratified to have his life work recognized by such an esteemed authority. The physicist replied, “I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that the work is noble enough to receive a prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out…”

The pleasure of finding the thing out!

feynmanThis wonderful thought inspired the title of Feynman’s book of essays and it kindled in me a way to understand why I had come to love Physics. I am definitely not the “scientific” type who, Sheldon Cooper-like, loves to spend hours pondering string theory. But I do love exploration – finding things out. I’m one who wonders what will happen if you push that red button or turn over that big flat rock. But even more, I am one who is fascinated by the universe-at-large – by life itself.

As a Christian, this explorer theme has taken over the heart of my faith pilgrimage. My theology is constantly evolving, daring me to open doors once forbidden or hidden – just to see what’s there. In fact, the biblical definition of faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” is really just another way of saying that faith is the pleasure of finding things out!

 

And if that is so then the heart and soul of faith has little to do with holding onto the past.

But it has everything to do with living toward the future.

In other words, faith is all about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I’ll explain why in the next post.