Vacuum and Lips

As a kid I was always fascinated with the “how and why” of things. Like, why are we opposite when we look into a mirror; and why when you hold a mirror to a mirror do we see hundreds of reflections ad infinitum? How does it do that? And is there an alternate universe back in all of those reflections somewhere? And then there is the universal question troubling all mankind, why does the water swirl down the drain in the same direction every time, Australia notwithstanding? These are some of the heady and weighty, philosophical and physical matters I pondered. Late at night, sometimes I still do.

We are told that where there is a vacuum something is always waiting in the wings to rush in. Apparently it can’t help itself. Being some sort of a law of physics or something, it has to happen that way. I am not even sure there is any effort made not to rush in. Though, there may be substantial effort to leave once in there. Such would be the case for me when “experimenting” with my mother’s floor model Hoover vacuum.

We never had the coveted Electrolux. But for my eight-year-old-mind experiment, the Hoover would do quite nicely. What would happen if I turned it on and put my lips on the hose? Of course I spent the necessary thirty or forty seconds gathering data needed to substantiate this in-depth analysis. With a flick of the switch I was enlightened beyond my wildest expectations. It seems that lips are subject to the same law of physics and vacuums as everything else. They rushed in. Interestingly, you can’t really wail for help when that law of physics is in play either; a result which I didn’t expect from this experiment. Fortunately for me, a vacuum can also suck sense into a very limited juvenile cranium. And it dawned on me that I might want to turn it back off and quash the law that had formed my lips into the shape of an elliptical inner tube.

Thus was another experiment flawlessly executed and the data properly documented and filed away for the good of mankind. It was a Nobel effort on my part though no prize would be forthcoming. Of course as an adult I now know there are plausible answers to all those queries of an eight year old self-pronounced scientist without giving my lips for the cause of science.

From the great mind of no less a scholar than St Augustine do we get perhaps the most succinct statement ever uttered; “All truth is God’s Truth”. Some may be terrified by this statement, almost as if we must hush-up anything said about new discoveries. Or as if there may be something uncovered that would clench the fact that there really is no God. But if we look with any deliberateness at all, we will see the hand of God in every dinosaur bone unearthed. Every layer of silt says, “God was here” with complete and unreserved shamelessness. In my view, the archeologist is doing the work of God by virtually uncovering His finger prints on the earth. Every newly discovered sea-going creature with all its unexpected anomalies audaciously speaks to the magnitude of a God without limits to His creative power. Every time there is natter of nanotechnology it announces the enormity of God, the Inventor of irreducible complexity.

More than “who is God to us”, the real issue here is who is God. When other beliefs and other entities rise to greatness in our world-view they displace God in His rightful situate, becoming a god defacto. This is of course out of alignment with God’s # 1Top Ten; “No other gods; only me” [The Message]. Since knowledge brings Truth then the absence of knowledge is undeniably a vacuum. That vacuous space begs the law of physics be satisfied. The French physicist Blaise Pascal said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God the Creator made known through Jesus Christ.” As I have learned; where there is a vacuum something will always rush in to fill it. It is a law of physics and it is a law of the Spirit. Our beliefs must be fixed in the Immutable, Ineffable. Now that we know, we must think before we flick the switch and unexpectedly get sucked in.

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Steven Blanton